American Patrol

MCCAIN/ PALIN, TOGETHER AGAIN: It was hard to see the look on John McCain’s face during his Friday campaign event with Sarah Palin and not feel, all politics aside, a bit of sympathy for the man. Standing behind the poorly vetted and ill-considered Vice Presidential nominee who helped sink his last-chance Presidential bid as she tied him to a political agenda that goes against much of what he has stood for in his public career, McCain face betrayed a mixture of pain, embarrassment and dread as he was visited, Scrooge-like, with a ghostly tableau of every bad political decision he’s made in the last two years. McCain, whose independent nature had formerly earned him a maverick reputation, a measure of respect from moderates in both parties, and his party’s Presidential nomination, was reduced to mugging in the background as a walking political inanity of his own devising helped him pander to a segment of his party that has never liked him and whom he has told to go to hell both literally and figuratively many times in the past.

Palin, dressed in a tight Emma Peel Does Sturgis biker jacket that suggested that her next television project might cast her as a motorcycle-riding bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic future, was there to deliver the blessing of the Tea Party movement and drive up both crowd numbers and media interest, and accomplished one out of three. While the media was there in force, whole sections of seating were roped off to make the crowd appear less sparse to them, and many of those in attendance made no bones about the fact that they were there for Palin and were likely to vote for McCain’s opponent J.D. Hayworth in the primary. As for the Tea Party benediction, it is simply not Palin’s to give, her mercenary attitude and constant exhortation for the movement to align itself with the Republican Party having already alienated large segments of the movement for which she is supposedly speaking. Her appearance on behalf of McCain, who is roundly considered a RINO by the Tea Party hard core, probably alienated more.

Meanwhile, the political program McCain is now yoked to-- “zero cooperation,” the statistically impossible fund raising scam that is health care repeal, and the “Party of Hell No”-- all but has this candidate, who has successfully run on independence and political effectiveness for decades, running on a program of enforced political irrelevance, and only running seven points ahead of his primary challenger. The irrelevance part was duly noted by the crowd and media his former running mate had attracted to the event, both of which departed in droves after her speech and before his.

REPUBLICANS ARE VICTIMS TOO: Of course, if Sarah Palin had been 100% successful in bestowing the Tea Party blessing on McCain, she would have been tying him to a movement that in recent days has become associated with vandalism, intimidation, and threats of violence. Palin, whose “Don’t Retreat, instead--RELOAD!” Twitter comment and rifle crosshairs graphic for “targeted” Democratic Congressional candidates served as examples of the form, denounced the mass shock inspired by opposition behavior as a “ginned up” controversy from the “lamestream media.”

Her comments were but a milder version of those of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-MD), who parlayed a random bullet that landed a few inches into a disused part of his unmarked campaign office and the millennia of oppression of his people into a denunciation of Democrats for “fanning the flames” and using threats of violence for political advantage, presumably by reporting them to the authorities. While it’s true that threats are a routine part of public life-- hell, I used to get them as a small market newspaper columnist-- and probably equally true that Cantor receives some from time to time, the sheer volume of threats in the last week and the boost to their credibility given them by the accompanying property crime are hardly routine. Cantor’s willingness to include himself among its victims, albeit through completely specious evidence, only lends it further credence even while trying to denounce it.

Those who see the falseness of Cantor’s evidence and the ridiculousness of his arguments as the point of the story are missing the point Cantor very successfully addressed. Something bigger than the lives of politicians and the windows of their offices was threatened by this story-- the false moral equivalence without which the Republican party and the controversy-exploiting mainstream media could not operate. With Eric Cantor numbering himself among the victims, however falsely, it has been restored, and the narrative grinds on.

" What is it that these Evolutionaries want?"
-- Glenn Beck, 3/24/10

To evolve, you pathetic piece of coke trash. To evolve.

A New School KGO to our most esteemed Publican for not only recognizing domestic terrorism when he sees it, but for recognizing that America might stand a chance to regain its ideals. Selah, old friend. As usual, the man speaks for himself...

“If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.--Senator Jim Demint (R-SC)

“So how could I ever refuse?
I feel like I win when I lose...”
--Abba

As diverting a spectacle as the historic passage of what a rather timid majority party thought it could get away with in terms of health care reform has been, there’s been another and somewhat more interesting show on the other side of the aisle. The Republicans, having failed utterly in their campaign to “kill the bill” through bad faith, fear mongering, disinformation, and the riling of the yahoos, are taking an odd kind of victory lap, are insisting that this passage will start of a wave of resurgent conservative Republicanism that they will gleefully surf back to the sweet revenge of a congressional majority in 2010 and the White House in 2012. Luckily enough, a bigger collection of hodads you’ve never seen....

The bill, they insist, is deeply unpopular, and was arrogantly passed by the Democrats in the face of widespread public opposition. "Shame on each and every one of you who substitute your will and your desires for those of your constituents," yelled House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), during an angry rant on the House floor that ignored both the tenets of congressional decorum and a few terribly inconvenient facts. It is demonstrably true that the bill as passed completely ignored the will of a majority of Americans--specifically, the large majority who wanted a Republican blocked public option included. It is also true that a majority of those polled opposed passage. A breakdown of the numbers, though, indicates strong support for most elements of the bill when they were presented individually, and that a large enough chunk of that majority opposed the bill on the grounds that it was not sufficiently liberal to leave the Republicans with the same forty odd percent support that cost them the last couple of elections. One also has to wonder how many Americans opposed the bill because they were just fucking sick to death of it.

Still, Republicans have always favored anecdotes over statistics, and were lucky enough to have several thousand walking anecdotes in opposition to the bill in the Capitol and on the grounds during this last set of votes in the form of Tea Party protestors. Unfortunately for them, these “real Americans” mostly presented anecdotal evidence that they were against the bill because it was supported by niggers and faggots. Cue the banjos...

Having failed to keep the bill from passing, Republicans will now concentrate their efforts on its repeal-- a Club for Growth repeal pledge has already gained the signature of over 200 2010 Republican congressional candidates. So seriously do they take this effort that it is being spearheaded by... Representatives Michelle Bachman (R-MN) and Steve King (R-IA), a team that brings to mind the Children’s Crusade.

For the moment, at least, the Republican agenda for 2010 was best summed up this weekend by Senator and former Republican ticket head John McCain (R-AZ), who pledged an immediate repeal effort and a program of “no cooperation” from congressional Republicans for the rest of the year. Even given the statistical impossibility of a veto-proof repeal and the utter lack of congressional cooperation on the part of Republicans since Obama’s inauguration, this was still considered news-- mostly by Republicans.

The obvious problem with this agenda, along with the problems described above, is that it constitutes a major bet on the attention span of the American electorate. With the health care reform effort no longer sucking all the oxygen out of the political culture, it is inevitable that a number of issues that have been smoldering for the last year will burst into flame-- like it or not, the subject will be changed. Still, as a concerned American, I can’t help but wish the Republicans luck and express the fervent hope that they are every bit as successful in this year’s election cycle as they were in the last two. Catch that wave, y’all, and wave bye-bye...

"FOX....KIDS...
ROCKS KIDS!"
-- Fox Network Saturday morning cartoon promo

"FOX...NEWS...
FUCKS NEWS!"
-- Me

When President Obama agreed to be interviewed on Fox News, much was made of the distinction between Fox’s news division, which would be handling the interview, and their opinion division, which has accused the President of treason and worse on a regular basis since the ’08 campaign. It was largely a distinction without a difference-- the “news division” also includes the whacky morning news combo of Carlson, Doocy, and Kilmeade-- and after tonight a distinction not even the staunchest defender of Fox’s status as a legitimate news organization will be able to make in sane company. It was presumed that what the news division would deliver would be an interview with the President of the United States. What it delivered instead was the most egregious display of disrespect visited on any public figure in recent memory.

Which, of course, dovetails nicely with the opinion division’s mission of delegitimizing President Obama by any means necessary. Fox’s Bret Baier interrupted the President in the middle of most of his answers, and while this would not be an inappropriate interview style if the interruptions genuinely framed the question or attempted to draw out more information on a point glossed over, Baier’s were dismissive (Fox News’ 18,000 solicited emails were from “real people,” while the 40,000 Obama gets a day were “Washington pundintry(sic)”), condescending (“This is one sixth of the US economy, though, sir...one sixth...”), and impertinent (“I know you don’t like to filibuster...”), and, as Baier admitted when he interrupted the President one last time to apologize for interrupting him so often, designed to elicit gotchas and sound bites (“I was trying to get the most for our buck, here...”).

While I am not one to stand on ceremony, Baier’s treatment of Obama didn’t merely fail to accord him deference and respect-- it failed to accord him common courtesy, with the implication that it really didn’t have to.

Tomorrow, of course, the media will breathlessly report the “controversy” (there’s already a You Tube clip entitled “Obama’s Contentious Fox News Interview”), Baier’s attempted sound bites will hit heavy rotation, and the narrative will grind on.

"Some are fancy on the outside,
Some are fancy on the inside
Every body's fancy, every body's fine
You're body's fancy
And so is mine."
-- Fred Rogers

"In any case, this is an inadequate description of the sweetmeat."
-- Monty Python, "Crunchy Frog" sketch

"LADY PARTS": What’s with the cutesy shit? This silly and infantilising euphamism for female genitalia has lately been taken up by people in the media who seem otherwise neither silly nor infantile, including, oddly enough, Rachel Maddow. Back in the Golden Age of PC, referring to women as ladies could get you a good public scolding-- even the spell checker on this laptop advises me against it--so it’s a little weird to hear the term used however ironically by otherwise stalwart feminists. While it’s an improvement on the Oprah Winfrey coined “vajayjay,” it seems to be some weird linguistic headblend of baby talk and Victorian English, somewhere on the spectrum between “tinky” and “waterworks” with a strong undertone of “ooh, ick.” The Curmudgeon suggests that it represents a kind of social breakthrough that we’re acknowledging the existence of vaginae in the first place, and I have to agree--let a thousand vaginae bloom--but its difficult to handle such topics in an adult manner using a term that connotes such embarrassment and concealment.

Americans, of course, have an almost unique inability to deal with the realities of sex and sexuality in an adult manner in the first place-- embarrassment and concealment are what we do well instead--and this inability shows in our public health statistics, our crime rates, our social interactions, and our politics, as well as our garden variety sexism and homophobia. There are dozens of terms, both Latinate and Anglo-Saxon, to choose from. Could we please pick a different one?

"THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKETPLACE": Would that be the invisible hand that kept the banks from failing? No? How about the one that keeps insurance rates low? No, wait--they're sky high and climbing, that can’t be it. The invisible hand that’s bringing unemployment down to acceptable levels? Help me, here...

Listen--please don’t ask me to trust in a supernatural anything, or in the honesty of its practitioners, in situations involving humanitarian crises. Ever.

"BIPARTISANSHIP": See also Centrist and Moderate. From the obscure Beltway dialect of American English, see also Russertese. The bane of the American politics and political commentary, meaning, for the last year at least, pretending that elections mean nothing.

Listen--it is not important that our elected officials reach across the aisle. It is important that they govern, honestly, fairly, decently, and in good faith. The less time they spend thinking about the former, the more they can spend on the latter.

“...So all I can say is, keep some sunshine on yo’ face.”
-- Richard Pryor

“Life is short and life is shit and soon it will be over.”
-- The Kids in the Hall

It’s a good morning to be on the porch, the first in many a wintery moon, with temperatures edging into the fifties and hardly any snow in sight. Too good to last, most likely-- freezing precipitation is a fact of life here in the north country as late as April-- but as long as it’s here, another cup of coffee sounds like a very good idea.

The first passably decent day in the fifties, however ephemeral it proves to be, sets something palpably loose in the Minnesota metabolism, the first indications of life without winter coats and extra blankets and the windows closed relaxing the muscles we’ve been clenching against the cold for so long. Any decent society would be planning a bacchanal under the circumstances. Up here, it might’ve been a good day for beer sales if they sold beer on Sunday.

When I lived in Iowa City there was a similar sort of time, usually a few weeks earlier in the year, when the ice broke up on the Iowa River and started heading for the spillways, a time I always thought of as the Breaking Days. Whether anyone else ever thought of it that way or not is almost irrelevant. Like so many things in Iowa City, the Breaking Days was a spontaneous occurrence free from sanction and its trappings, the magnetic pull of the suddenly flowing river pulling us down to the banks and bridges with our coats loose to watch the winter end. Each year, some poor schmuck would spontaneously elect himself the unofficial fool of the celebration, riding an ice floe helplessly down the river like some apocryphal Eskimo exile. They were good days, everyone smiling except for that guy.

There are too few days like that. Days ahead will certainly be warmer, longer, sweeter, but today is the first day in far too many that we’ve had any evidence of that and can actually allow ourselves to believe that it’s even possible, and maybe even allow ourselves another cup of coffee on the porch.

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.

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.