Dark Steer

Wouldn't you think...

2009-05-26T18:16:00.001-04:00

...given the demographic trends and their acknowledged-by-all need to attract non-whites to the party, the Republicans would know better than to instinctively pile on a latina nominee?

There's a Future for You, Willie Pete...

2009-05-13T20:44:00.004-04:00

...on yet another topsy-turvy day in the Obama administration, I'm thinking of white phosphorus, what it does, what it means, what it makes us do.

In response to local outrage over recent civilian casualties, among which are wounds inflicted by white phosphorus shells, on May 10 we issued a flat denial with a suggestion that it must have been somebody else burning little children, not us. Next day the Pentagon released summaries of incidents in which Taliban/Al Qaeda forces used white phosphorus against NATO/ISAF, rolling with the previous day's hypothesis. The release consists of one-line Pentagon accounts, without a timeline, eyewitnesses, photos, video or local Afghan government corroboration. Human Rights Watch isn't buying it.

This response is interesting to me: the pattern of denial is craven, where the Bush pattern was merely brazen. When confronted about WP use in Fallujah, the Bush DoD said first that it didn't happen, contradicting soldiers' accounts, then acknowledged use of white phosphorus but stressed that such use was legal. Sure we fired incendiary devices into civilian areas, devices whose contents chemically bind to adipose and burn until fuel or oxygen is removed, and it was legal.

The deny-and-shrug was also used in last winter's war in Gaza. The IDF's first response to charges that it had fired white phosphorus into densely populated areas in Gaza was a flat denial, followed by a promise of investigation. When the investigation concluded, Israel determined that any such use was legal.

The NYT piece covering the investigation's release called the dispute over the use of white phosphorus a "proxy" for larger discussions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, Israeli fears about Iran, usw.

Which is funny because civilian casualties are the whole ballgame. The "larger issues" boil down to civilian casualties. Israel's vision of itself as a willing partner in peace is put into question by its own perpetration of war crimes. (And that's not me, that's HRW again.) The threat that Hamas-Iran pose is mooted by white phosphorus. White phosphorus is a battlefield illuminator. What interested parties then need is their own paper trail, a counterargument, any counterargument.

Debate, no matter how absurd, excuses the main issue from our concern. As soon as two sides can set up camp -- HRW vs. NATO, UN vs. IDF -- the issue is up for grabs. It is only at the level of debate that discussion of things like war on innocents can be taken up neutrally. No one can be pro the execution of civilians; there has to be some other thing to talk about. Only then can writers point to "the broader picture," revealing brutally burned children to be part of a "proxy argument."

SO, congratulations to the Obama administration -- the "blame the other guy" response creates a much more interesting debate than the Bush administration's "when we do it it's not illegal" response. Now, instead of asking Is Hamid Karzai governing anything?, or Can we begin finally to distinguish friend from foe?, or How do we get reconstruction aid / hearts-and-minds work going?, or Why are we making Afghanistan safe for a bunch of opium barons?, or What the Christ are we doing in a place that crippled Alexander the Great?, we're busy figuring out whose WP shells those were, what size the Russians used thirty fucking years ago, etc., etc. And there's definitely a future in that...
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The Plan Cannot Fail!

2009-05-08T09:54:00.006-04:00

Are those men at an Olive Garden?

Mitt, to praise the android, gave off the odor of introspection in that interview: Republicans lost because they behaved like Washington insiders, spending heedlessly. It was an answer that absorbed Jeb Bush's point of attack and had the added benefit of steering the conversation back to taxes and spending, away from culture, ideology and region.

Does the current crisis of American conservatism run deeper than being the by-product of rampant success? Doesn't this look a lot like the Althusserians-vs-Student-Radicals of Les Evenements? Rush Limbaugh is calling for a "teaching tour"? That's pure Althusser, just from another political pole! The people have been duped, bamboozled! Educate the ignorant masses so that they can take control of / comprehend the means of their subjection! Then, depending on your political cup of tea, the newly-enlightened former plebes will take control of the means of production / reduce marginal tax rates and capital gains to zero. Same paternalism, different face.

My concern, dude, is that Democrats need the same kind of introspection. Sure, their nominal adversaries appear doomed to become a regional party; now would seem to be the time to gloat. But the gloating disguises how the Party made its gains. It's funny to bust out GOP Survivor and imagine Cantor and Steele fighting over the party's corpse. But Democrats don't have anything to say about Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter, Jim Webb (Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, thanks), Tim Kaine (pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, pro-business), Rick Boucher (pro-coal for the love of God)...when, really, was the last time a liberal democrat won a close race?

Yeah, Mitt is funny, but he's smiling because he won: he purged the yellowbellies from his party and watched as his enemies bit off more identities than they could chew; watched while this incoherent behemoth staggered from crisis to crisis, inarticulately blathering about fiscal restraint one day and limitless bailouts the next; watched the liberal wing bank on massive turnout in black and brown precincts countrywide...in short, banking on massive turnout _forever_ from groups of Americans who vote at 3/5 the rate of white voters -- the political equivalent of subprime lending. The conservative wing of the party, of course, thinks that pandering to "downscale whites" will preserve its majority, when all it constitutes is further rightstreaming...

Either way, the Android wins. Perhaps it's time for a teaching tour for Democrats. A lesson from that famous android fighter, John Connor...wherever you are, you are the resistance...
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If this is the republican repair steering committee...

2009-05-03T12:38:00.002-04:00

...these guys are dead in the water. I don't know what it is about Mittens, but he continues to hold onto some godforsaken idea that he can be president. That this sort of thing is not just possible in a just world, but likely within the next eight years. It's the sort of lunacy one usually sees reserved to the guy on the National Mall yammering on about how JFK steals water from his bathtub. And Cantor's no better. If these guys can't admit in the media that they screwed up, if they just shift the blame onto the economy/big spending/neutrinos, then they've got no shot for a -long- time.

...again... if a major American political party was mortally wounded or dead, would we recognize it?

Still Baffled...

2009-04-29T07:56:00.002-04:00

If, like David Brooks said, Arlen Specter got Ed Rendell to clear a seat for him at the PA-Dem table, basically by showing up at Congresspeople's homes and saying, "Y'know, I'm term-limited. Gonna have no job in 2010. Looking for something to do,"...

...then that means he also got Rendell, Biden and Casey to own up to lobbying Specter to flip; Specter not only got himself a seat at the table, he got people to make it look like it wasn't his idea, and...

...IF, as HuffPo thought out loud once when running down all possible candidates for PA Senate, a GOP crackup makes it worth PA Dems' while to nominate the most liberal candidate possible, why would PA-Dems go along with Specter?

Does Ed Rendell owe the man money? Is Specter really going to vote for cloture on health care reform, a giant energy package, and nationalization of the banks, and is he going to do it this Congress? Why take his word for it when in 2010 we've got Judd Gregg's seat, George Voinovich...and, until the other day, Ed Rendell? Why, o why?

Little Arlen Wants to Run...

2009-04-28T12:30:00.003-04:00

...and knows that in 2010, if he survives the GOP primary, he will be destroyed in the general election. The brand he's associated with is tarnished, and he's the least disciplined brand rep. Q: What you're selling is no good, and you're bad at selling it; what to do?

A: Hop on the Dem bandwagon.

This should not happen. I beg of you, Pennsylvania Democrats, end this man's career. Do you need one more Senator in favor of limitless wiretapping, unfettered use of national security letters, coercive interrogations? Do you want a man so paranoid that when the NFL commissioner's office refused him Giants-Pats Super Bowl tickets, he held hearings into Bill Belichik's spying and Roger Goodell's complicity in same?

Do you want the guy who stonewalled the stimulus package, flummoxed every attempt to start a withdrawal from Iraq from 2006 to present and who talks like Nixon? Have you seen film of this man? He authored the single bullet theory. He's still telling Polak jokes, in public, at luncheons. Plus, God cannot kill him, so there you are...an apparently-immortal paranoid powertripping underachiever as the new face of the party...Seriously, look at that face...look at the pictures of him with Walnuts and Palin...that will be your party.

60 votes isn't worth it people...

Young Adjunct Friction

2009-04-27T16:42:00.004-04:00

Cloning himself a new mathematician, no doubt.

Bousquet in the Chronicle is dead on in his riposte to Mark Taylor in the NYT. Taylor's estimate of adjunct pay at "5000 a class" has to be a typo. He means 5000 a year, right? How did this pass the copy-editor?

The two men seem to be arguing at cross purposes. Both lament the graduate student / young adjunct condition. Taylor's 1990s-esque call for "cross-disciplinarity" is actually something the University has long implemented in order to clear some space for its young professors. More such would actually provide the jobs for young docs that Bousquet so pines for. Clearly everyone can get along.

Apart from that, Taylor sounds like he needs a transfer out of the Religion dept.. If you think a "dissertation on Duns Scotus' use of citations" is inane, I entreat you to see what graduate programs in Fine Art are capable of. Every year we disgorge a new lot of self-absorbed, disengaged careerists bent on deskilling everything they touch, showing on the cheap, or visually fellating their professors, right?

And my argument is that's OK. Graduate school is supposed to be tangent to the world. It is an outburst of free time that we pay for with debt, in order to clear some space for our minds to work. Because Lord knows you can't get that kind of time working on the line. We detach from the world, loose our moorings a little, and plummet back to earth.

How did Duns Scotus cite prior writers, and what does that mean? I have no idea. Maybe someone should spend a couple years looking into that. No one really gives a rat's ass about the specifics of an overly-specific dissertation or journal article because we will use it for our own (larger, philosophical?) ends. Taylor sounds like he's pissed that Foucault got to spend all those years having graduate students write about punishment in early modern Europe, as though advances in one path of research were inherently reflexive, as though research were its own end. As though we didn't cull material from divers sources already, nor speak in tongues...

This Is What I Get for Reading Georgie Anne Geyer

2009-04-25T07:48:00.002-04:00

Pakistan is doomed because some bearded men want to run madrassas and cut off the hands of thieves? Note to Geyer and the people who clean up her first drafts: our nominal friends cut off the hands of thieves, keep women off the road, even get cops to beat the shit out of people who owe them money. It's evil; we tolerate it because we benefit. There was an open insurrection in Swat, with de facto rule by the Pakistani Taliban, before the cease-fire -- there were beheadings before the cease-fire. There is calm now. What do you want?

That said, Pakistan is not going to fall. Anywhere but the Pakistani equivalent of Winnetka there is civil society and the rule of law. (It's funny how the right loves the American outback, is all about self-rule, and can't stomach the sight of Islamic self-rule.) Pakistanis themselves are pissed about the truce, because they, like you and I, Georgie, have television. Also, the Pakistani army is going to pick its battles -- they won't let the bomb walk into the hands of bearded men.

Calm down. Swat was not destroyed by the February cease-fire. The Taliban cannot convert by force a nation of 200 million people...this would be like a violent insurgency of Jehovah's Witnesses getting self-rule in South Dakota and suddenly, within six months, taking over New York. Sufi Muhammad knows he'd be laughed out of town...

Parsin Parsons

2009-04-24T16:34:00.002-04:00

Updates to the Parsons situation at The Notion and at Runnin Scared. Updates, but no real news. We still don't know, beyond taking New York mag at its word, how many adjuncts were non-tendered, because we don't have names. Or, we have one: Dale Emmart, a 22-year veteran. Who are the other eleven?

If Parsons makes good on its assertion that half of the newly-displaced profs will be tendered offers in other departments, then we're dealing with six fired teachers. If it is true that Parsons' bottom line is OK -- and that seems unlikely, given the New School's run of acquisitions and infrastructure improvements this decade -- then to fire people just because there's a recession going on is not ethically sound. Businesses across the board are taking advantage of the recession to take cost-cutting measures that would otherwise be unpalatable. It's bullshit; it's also happening on a massive scale in government, non-profits, and the private sector.

This makes the logic of protest difficult to grasp. Adjuncts are fired for any number of reasons. This is the nature of adjunct employment, union or no union. Parsons' only mistake seems to be sending out a form letter that implies that the recipient is one of many; that there was a mass firing. Their current PR gambit is exactly this, and it might be a winner: Firings are just another day in the life of adjunct professors, and to protest them is like protesting rain.

So, this is a protest with a material end-point -- unlike the student occupation -- only it's possible that it lacks a prime mover. It is a protest against everyday conditions, not against extraordinary abuses. Violation is here understood to be intrinsic to adjunct employment.

This is difficult for me to parse. Is this a protest built on survivor's guilt? Is this not that big a deal for the people who got canned? I've been non-tendered before. It was okay; I had other plans. Not good plans or anything. No money in those plans...so inform me Parsonsites! I need information...

New New School Brou-Ha-Ha

2009-04-23T12:15:00.004-04:00

Never thought I would root for "occupiers," but this New School crew changed all that. A protest at Parsons W. 12th St entrance is scheduled for more or less right now, in solidarity with the dismissed Parsons adjuncts.

You'll remember that I asked more than a week ago "Where are the Parsons adjuncts?" Presumably here. What I meant, in sum, was that it's not enough to agitate for the dismissal of people you simply don't like very much, a la the "occupation" against Bob Kerrey. A protest with a material end, I'm postulating, has a better chance at success.

And the Parsons press release seems to prove it, chalking up the pink slips to failed communication, in the manner of: We didn't fire more than a dozen adjuncts, it was six, and we offered them teaching posts in other areas. Already the institution is running damage control, rather than just calling the NYPD.

It still amazes me how little real information has come out about the Parsons firings. Has anyone been non-tendered for next year? Really and officially? Who and how many? One-third of faculty? One-half? 20? Six? What does teaching another area mean? What saith ye, Parsons Pink Slips?

Also, how come Lawrence Hegarty and Peter Drake are the only two dudes willing to be photographed for the cause? Viz.,this in the NYT and this on the Parsons blog:
Has the university -- to concoct an example, since none exists -- offered printmakers jobs in 3-D digital rendering or suchlike, knowing full-well that the current crop of printmakers lacks that skillset, and that shifting a current instructor's area is tantamount to reopening the position to outside applicants, i.e. firing?

Finally, as an example to us all, Columbia faculty are meeting to support academic freedom in Palestine; this is a protest without fashionable accessories, built to redress tangible grievances, namely, Israel will not let Palestinian academics attend conferences in their fields. A simple thing like the right to a comp'ed lunch calls into question borders, sovereignty, rights of movement and return, usw, all the giant problems in miniature...
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Modestly...

2009-04-20T12:33:00.007-04:00

You need each other, gentlemen.

David Carr's best line in his NYT piece is the last line: cable anchors trying to harness teabagger rage sound like candidates, but all they're running for is "first place in the demo."

With that in mind, a modest proposal to teabaggers: do you really want to throw off the yoke of government bailouts and corporate welfare, only to remain slave to the bottom line at NewsCorp? Trade a banking devil for a media devil?

Aren't you concerned that maybe other Americans actually like the "Kenyan Who's Destroying America"? That you might be alone?

You need an ally, Dear Teabagger. You need to broaden the demo. Allow me to introduce to you the Iranian Street! Back in October, when Mahmoud tried to enforce a sales tax on bazaar dealers, they called a general strike. When he delayed the sales tax, they expanded the strike! These are people you want on your side, Teabagger!

And the Iranian Street has a long history of restiveness. Every time the government reduces the gas subsidy, like in 1991 and 1999, blood is shed. Happened summer 2007, too.

What's more, every time there are price or tax riots in Teheran, we 'Merkins get all breathless about a coup. And it never happens. More often, the reaction is stronger than the protest. But with an army of kindred souls in relaxed fit jeans, egging them on across the ocean, perhaps real revolution can come to ~~Persia~~ Iran. Did I say that out loud?
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Watch Out: I Can Always Bring This Back to Stanley Fish

2009-04-19T09:54:00.006-04:00

[Photo: Jay Bybee and family / Meridian]

NYT editorializes for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, torture memo author, current federal appeals court judge, on the grounds of a warped understanding of the President's constitutional powers. All this re: his writing torture into the law.

NYT linked to the new documents, which cover warrantless wiretapping, use of the US military to pursue terrorists domestically, pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, detention of American citizens charged with terrorism, and extraordinary rendition. They skip the torture memo because it's long been released, Bybee has long been on the bench, and John Yoo is the only person out there vociferously defending his crimes.

We'll leave aside the contradiction inherent NYT's romantic prose and pragmatic posture, suing for Bybee's dismissal six years after his nomination and at a time of Democratic ascendancy. In 2004, he was a footnote to an opinion denouncing Thomas Griffith; NYT hasn't always demanded his impeachment/resignation. They just got on the boat today.

Again, leaving all that aside, the real problem is in the perceived boundary between academic behavior and political behavior. Bybee is a judge and can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. John Yoo is a professor and is, apparently, exempt from such calumny. Both men issued legal opinions that rationalized all manner of weirdo executive branch usurpations of power. One is in the Academy, so he's clear. It's as if Stanley Fish were on the editorial board, and you can say and do whatever wack shit you feel (Ward Churchill) so long as you don't try to problematize the Academy itself (Denis Rancourt).

Conspiracy theorists, people who want Iran bombed yesterday, people who want Israel pushed into the sea, war criminals and ordinary street freaks -- all their actions are OK so long as they 1) stay in the Academy 2) keep the Academy away from "ordinary life". This is how we get into Bybee-not-Yoo, Rancourt-not-Churchill hair-splitting.

Just come out and tell us which sorts of academic freedom are legitimate and which are not, and stop pussyfooting...by which I mean Fish's position on Columbia's bringing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak: the University administrator is beyond politics.

This is a total fallacy. Academic positions are already constructed as political, whether you like it or not. Teach engineering? To what end? To build more and better highway off-ramps? OK, or statistics -- you know how much blood has been shed over sampling methods and the census? What about the relationship of calculus to ballistic missiles? Or the complicity of art in legitimating a culture of ~~plunder~~ consumption? See how quickly we hit the "minefield" of ethical decision-making -- which is, in a democracy, politics itself?

See also, and I'm speaking to you Stanley, how deferring the ethical point of contact onto the decision to act ethically in opposition to academic standards negates the difference between good and bad acts? If the standard for a person's actions is not "Does this promote the good life?" but "Is this covered in the provost's integrity manual?" one can act inethically and legally at the same time.

Impeach Bybee, but fire John Yoo too.
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Ain't Skeert of Rick Perry...

2009-04-17T17:51:00.005-04:00

...nickel's worth for the Governor of Texas: don't listen to the voice of reason. Tea parties are the way of the future; stick with it! Nothing says "capable of governing" like a mob of rusticated yuppies frothing at the mouth, overusing the word "fascist," painting signs, demanding to pay zero taxes for their sewer system, their electrical grid, their roads and highways and their overseas adventures (for the record, I'm essentially in agreement with the teabaggers: I'd like the 40 cents out of every dollar of my taxes that goes to Defense cut in half. And since DoD has been operating at or near 739 billion the past two years, halving that is easy to do). I want more! Perry-Palin 2012!

There is no plan. There is no Prop 13. This is self-entitled bourgeois nonsense. Laughable. I entreat every Republican running for anything, dog-catcher, in 2010 to hew ever closer to the fringe. Jefferson Davis was talking about "States' Rights, States Rights', States Rights'" and did it better ("That we transmit unshorn to our posterity..."), and lost a war over these artificial rights, possessed by no one, asserted by everyone.

Please, everyone, tell me more. I want to hear more. Because every time some exurban arriviste starts complaining about rights and responsibilities, I get all tingly, anticipating the huge left-wing majorities in America's explosively-growing, majority brown cities we're going to rack up in the next decade. Bring it on, cornpone.

Notes On Teabagging. Really.

2009-04-15T16:05:00.006-04:00

[Photo: Teabagging in Charlottesville VA, 15 April 2009]

Who gave this tax revolt the catchy name? Is she demanding royalties? Is she paying them to John Waters?

Where were the teabaggers when the last guy in office was bloating defense spending beyond reason or proportion and initiating the most expensive entitlement program in American history?

Teabagger is not an epithet I would self-apply. Anything-bagger is generally derogatory, e.g. "carpetbagger". Note to teabaggers: I vote for "Sons of Liberty," or "Mohawks".

Capitalism, like the sign says, is supposed to rock. If you believe that, you may console your bruised ego with the knowledge that you, and all of us, now own huge chunks of the American financial sector, theoretically valuable chunks, and that we bought them at closeout prices. If capitalism works, these chunks will, at some point in the future, be worth much more than 3 dollars a share. At that time, Treasury will be able to unload its stakes in the banks at a profit. Parti-nationalization would be good capitalism. Something any conservative worth his salt would applaud; buy low, sell high. This frisson between "defense of capitalism" and hatred of Tim Geithner's faith in that same "capitalism" is really the most interesting thing about teabagging, beyond the ballskin.

Of course, we don't have nearly enough nationalization, or the right kind, to recoup, much less profit from our national investment. Per the Geithner Put, the FDIC guarantees a profit for anyone who bids on bundles of troubled assets; barring unnatural occurrences -- such as every homeowner tied to a subprime mortgage suddenly winning the lottery -- the FDIC has no opportunity to profit. We are -- all together now -- privatizing profit and socializing loss.

I like the teabaggers' equation of fiscal dumbfuckery with treason. I especially like to see the advocates of less-to-no government espousing a penal ethic that would punish spendthrifts with beheading. I like the contradiction inherent therein.

I like the idea that Newt Gingrich will run in 2012. I see the teabaggers as his plutonium: there lieth power and radiation poisoning. I can see a future wherein the Republican Party boots its (presumed) Pawlenty-Steele-Romney wing, its paleo-conservative technocrats, in favor of sexier, wildfire hillbilly demi-movements. After all, Limp Bizkit is getting back together, so impotent white male rage might actually be a thing.

Pretty sure we'll all be speaking Chinese before we learn Teabagger.
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Leaders of the New School Count the Receipts

2009-04-13T16:10:00.007-04:00

Reading about the occupation of a disused building at the New School by a group demanding the resignation of the president and some trustees, some questions about politics and representation:

After the protest, why is the most interesting dispute about the authenticity and meaning of the video of NYPD "spraying" inside the building? Nearly everyone in the building was dressed to get maced. Say the protest ended without any pepper spray or tear gas fired in anger; scarves, keffiyehs etc. become fashion accessories rather than real-world precautions. With spray, we can continue discussions about the relationship of free speech to security, civil liberties and civil rights within the University usw. Without spray, there's less to talk about.

Doesn't this defer the meaning of the protest onto its means? Clearly, this is not a direct form of communication, as in "Meet our demands, or we will not leave." The occupation didn't last long enough to have been conducted on those terms. It appears, rather, to be an attempt to bait the University and the police into committing violence, thereby delegitimizing their power, and broadening the base for future protests.

Even the original meaning of the protests (the first in December) is hazily concocted. Kerrey and James Murtha are, respectively, a proponent of the Iraq War and a man related to a war profiteer. This is the least charitable view. Probably, by temperament, they should not be running the New School. Is this like Paul Wolfowitz running Oberlin? No, not really. But I understand and share the desire to punish absolutely everyone who thought it might be a good idea to chase down Saddam Hussein. Fair or not. The University is a place where the unsettled debts of history come to roost. If you don't like it, you can walk right back into the corporate world.

So pushing these men out for one political choice I see as legitimate. Why then combine the issue with some vague allegations of academic malfeasance? Is Kerrey failing to "safeguard the values" of the New School just by being square? Hasn't the New School been on a corporate tear in the past decade, expanding into business and fashion, veering from its foundation in pure soft sciences? Isn't Kerrey the culmination of a long-running corporatization of the school? So where was senior faculty outrage ten or fifteen years ago? Too busy getting tenure to get arrested?

Why occupy an unused building? In what way does that disrupt the functioning of the School? What happened to shutting down classes? Where are the Parsons adjuncts? (Forget Bob Kerrey's job, let's compromise: Kerrey gets to keep his job as long as Parsons adjuncts get to keep theirs.) Why does the iconic photo in the Times show a banner that says "Occupy," in a classy font, with a demure black star? Why do photos of the actors look like an Urban Outfitters spread? The more we look at the images of the April protest, the more purely performative it appears.

Back to fashion: More frequently mentioned than his Iraq stance or his assumption of the Provost position is Kerrey's pure "incompatibility" with the New School's "radical character". As if to prove this character, students wave the red-and-black flag and demand the president's ouster. Of course, it's the radicalism of the School that drives enrollment. Showy, cop-baiting demonstrations serve to ratify the thing they profess to vilify: counting the day's receipts.
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Here's How to Lose in Iraq...

2009-04-07T12:42:00.003-04:00

As if we hadn't figured it out, Nouri shows us how to lose in Iraq.

First, raid the offices of your political enemies. It worked on Sadr, ha? In 2004 and 2008, ha? Awakening Councils acting up, ha? Shut em down. The resultant street riot will, you know, give Americans an opportunity to earn the Bronze Star. Can't get that sitting on a base. Besides this, raiding your nominal allies has the added bonus of confusing the hell out of the Sun Young Moon falange. "A new boldness" among the armed groups is okay, right? We paid them to be bold...

All good, until someone starts blowing up children in Shiite neighborhoods. Then we're back to square one, only with fewer boots on the ground.
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Future Star, Dead Giant

2009-03-30T16:45:00.003-04:00

On the GOP Nova tip: today's NYT has a piece on a massive rise in viewership for Glenn Beck. This would be scary, if it mattered. NYT paints Beck as a Utah cryptofascist, hyping his talk of "surrounding" his "enemies," usw, which is not even the scariest genre of Beckism. That would go to his cri-de-coeur to the Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 2007: "God stalked me! He had a baptismal rifle!"

Q: What's a baptismal rifle?

Anyway, NYT quotes David Frum on Beck's success: "a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

This is nice and succinct. It's not news. Check David Foster Wallace's Host for a chronicle of the rise of "cultural" conservatism on the radio. Beck is one in a never-ending stream of, put kindly, popularizers of the Goldwater movement. If I were a movement conservative, I'd be pissed too.

This officially conceded difference between "cultural" and "ideological" conservatism is phony, to my mind. Reagan was never so ideological as to totally sacrifice the welfare of the country: right after his tax cuts, he issued the largest tax increase in American history. The need to draw votes, or eyeballs, thereby cultivating a "sensibility," is just another way of saying "democracy."

So Q: How does Mitt Romney deal with it? What star emerges from the current cloud of gas and dust?

Ghost in the TV

2009-03-25T07:14:00.002-04:00

My TV turns on of its own accord overnight, unless I cut it off at the source. Not a metaphor. This happens. So I walked downstairs to see Eric Cantor on the Today show. And I only caught a bit of it, but it sounded like he was striking a tone of Reason Without a Plan, that is, "We're all for lower health care costs, but we're for fiscal responsibility first." This is a nice thought, but it doesn't mean anything. I'll get a transcript later in order to see the next ten words.

So he sounded anodyne. He also sounded gay. Perhaps I've been away from the Old Dominion for too long, but he sounded real gay. And I think that could be a coup. If his party becomes about governing government rather than about governing identities, he wins. BHO beat him to this idea. And I don't remember Cantor as being Log Cabin Friendly, shit, even LC-Curious...but he's putting those kids (are those his? Larger question, Do I Know Anything?) conspicuously front-and-center on his YouTube channel...

Quick pause to note the jabs at Mary Jo Kilroy and Chris Carney, and why them you might ask? They're vulnerable. Arguably the two most vulnerable Dem seats in the House. Carney won in 2006 on the heels of an incumbent Republican's sex scandal, and Kilroy I can hardly believe made it to DC at all, after a never-ending court battle with GOP bank lobbyist Steve Stivers. NE PA is going to be too far gone by 2010 for Cantor to hope to reclaim it...boy, unless Scranton no longer appeals to people working in the City. Columbus could be taken. This is fascist country...

Point being, Cantor is a tactics man, not a strategy man. So he probably found a way to turn on my TV; he didn't say anything that made me watch.
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More Quad Panic

2009-03-06T16:25:00.002-05:00

The only thing college professors and professor-wanna-bes (is professors-in-waiting the preferred nomenclature?) have to fear is one another. It wasn't the cruel vicissitudes of market funding for education that sacked Denis Rancourt for instance. I suspect it is the stultifying effect of tenure that increases unemployment in the Academy. Same way the UAW kills Detroit.

Anyway, prompted by a recent NYT piece on the impending doom of the humanities, I've grown more interested in market effects on academic employment. For one thing, I suspect (I keep saying this because I want to stress that I have no statistics for these theories) that the target of a manufactured panic about the future of the humanities is not the Provost, but the Department Chair.

I ignored this last time, but the Times' headline said it all. Disciplines must make themselves useful, say the disciples. The point is not to concoct a panic in order to force the Provost to pay attention to humanities when the budget ax falls; the point is to cram a utilitarian model onto disciplines that are ethical, in the sense that they help us determine what the good life is. Whether this is wise or pernicious depends I suppose on the degree to which a department is removed from the currents of History, and you'll pardon the archae-Marxist flavor there.

I suspect this, in part, because the crisis in academic hiring and promotion seems to have been ever thus. This is a 1977 American Philosophical Society statement on how to get young Philosophy grads into the Academy on a provisional, unpaid basis. The salient line, I think, is the first one: "The academic community has a responsibility to do what it can to help scholars who are suffering a period of academic unemployment because of the continuing academic job crisis."

Or, we could take for example the panic that created the Mellon Fellows program, without which, declining humanities enrollment would make, "entire academic departments an endangered species in 10 years." That was 1982. Clearly, there are complex threads here, and I don't know a lot about the 1977-1982 academic jobs panic. But I think I see a pattern.

It is possible to construct a story; in this story, humanities people expand their empire by threatening its demise, repeat, its utter nonexistence. As a good-faith gesture, Deans and Provosts give departments permission for new concentrations, then majors, then whole new departments. The exchange, I think, for this expansion/dilution of talent is a diminution of the importance of so-called pure study.

New departments -- like Cultural Studies, begat of English; or American Studies, begat of History -- then face a pressure to demonstrate the dollar-value of wealth created by their degrees; since there is no apparent academic justification for their existence, Why not major in English?, there must be a market-based one.

Tieing the existence of a department to the market is a mistake. When enrollments in your major decline, the budget declines and jobs disappear. Saying you need therefore to make your major more attractive is supply-side; it merely reinforces the justification-by-demand that doomed your major in the first place.

That's a thought anyway. Much much more to discover here, though. Peace
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We Are a Bunch of Rubes

2009-03-05T20:54:00.005-05:00

Make no mistake. I am pleased that the American people saw fit to elect President the only responsible actor still running for office. I like BHO. I'm a fan. But I have principles that were operative during Bush, and to suspend their operation for a guy I like can only be done for so long before it is unjustified. So, you know, put that in your Situation Ethics and smoke it.

I'm tired of getting played for a fairy; I hope the left does boot Democrat moderates out of the party. There deserves to be an all-do-nothing party, an American Kadima, the USA Patriot Waterheads. Or the Know-Nothings.

And I understand why BHO's situation in Afghanistan is different from GWB's in Iraq. A surge is necessary to stop the bloodletting. We cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan. Unfriendly regional powers, read Iran, will be emboldened by our failure, which I repeat is imminent without the surge. It's going to be hairy.

Wait, those are all the same rationalizations for Bush's surge...my mistake. Will the Afghan Surge work? In Afghanistan, the other key elements of quelling civil war -- paying off militants to form US-legitimized gangs, and the major militant group's discovery that politics is more lucrative than assassination -- are absent.

So let's repeat, 15,000 more US troops are moving into the world's worst country, with an illiterate population of poppy growers, entirely cowed by terror, to hunt an entrenched guerrilla force with a cross-border safe zone, no natural enemies, and no interest in the political process?

Got it. This sort of thing was not OK in 2006. And it's OK now. I totally understand. It's called triangulatin', and I did not just fall off the turnip truck.

But the idea doesn't look ripe for success, and it may not be necessary. 2200 Afghan civilians died in violence last year. That's a bad month in Iraq ca. 2006. Die-hard Al Qaeda members might number 300. We have drones in Pakistan that are both wasting dudes who need to be wasted (let's bracket the why-questions, shall we) and killing some innocents. How does this add up to imperative?

Pakistan thinks enough of itself that it can sign peace deals with militants and pay attention to real threats, you know, like India, or Baluch separatists. I haven't bought the "bomb slips out of Pakistan's hands" theory, largely because I think the Pakistani military establishment sees its long term, existential struggle as being with India. And India has the bomb. You think career men are gonna let some dudes with beards walk off with nuculur weapons? Nope. Then why do we have to shore up Pakistan, crumbling Pakistan? And even if we did need to do so, what good are 15,000 soldiers going to do for a nation of, holy shit, 200 million people?

What good will 52,000 Americans do for an Afghanistan still ruled by Hamid Karzai? Same amount of good 37,000 did.

But I'm not trying to player-hate. BHO is right to have different opinions about different surges. This surge is, it turns out, different from Bush's: it's even worse.
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First, a Note from the Future President

2009-03-05T20:45:00.002-05:00

On 28 December 2006, Barry Hussein wrote:

Escalation Is Not The Answer

As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.

This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.

In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences." I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.

Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out.

Today, nearly three thousand brave young Americans are dead, and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Rather than welcomed "liberators," our troops have become targets of the exploding sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military has been strained to the limits. The cost to American taxpayers is approaching $400 billion.

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm's way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

In escalating this war with a so-called "surge" of troops, the President would be overriding the expressed concerns of Generals on the ground, Secretary Powell, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the American people. Colin Powell has said that placing more troops in the crossfire of a civil war simply will not work. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East, said just last month that, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future." Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed concern, saying that a surge in troop levels "could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda" and "provide more targets for Sunni insurgents." Once again, the President is defying good counsel and common sense.

As I said more than a month ago, while some have proposed escalating this war by adding thousands of more troops, there is little reason to believe that this will achieve these results either. It's not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country - that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up. The status quo cannot hold.

In November, the American people sent a resounding message of change to the President. But apparently that message wasn't clear enough.

I urge all Americans who share my grave concerns over this looming decision to call, write or email the President, and make your voices heard. I urge you to tell them that our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country. Our men and women in uniform are doing a terrific job under extremely difficult conditions. But our government has failed them so many times over the last few years, and we simply cannot afford to do it again. We must not multiply the mistakes of yesterday, we must end them today.

May this New Year bring a turn in our policy away from the stubborn repetition of our mistakes, so we can begin to chart a conclusion to this painful chapter in our history and bring our troops home.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senator Barack Obama

Quick Thoughts...

2009-03-04T10:27:00.002-05:00

...hammer the message home in the media: install Rush as the Pope of the Republican Party.
...count on Rush relishing this and continuing to press his advantage as Repub politico after politico slips up, says something non-canon, and has to kiss Rush's oxycontin-dusted ring.
...count on the moderates being absolutely sick of this and edging closer to the Democrats as a result.
...pick up extra seats in 2010 as the Repubs have retreated further into the echo hall of chamber mirrors.

But what don't they count on?

I still say the moderates join the Dems, as is planned. The Repubs continue to become a regionalized party geared toward disaffected whites and the rich. Fine. But the moderates won't like the Left wing of the Dem party too terribly much either. They form like Voltron with the more middlish Dems... split before you know it.

...and America has three parties in a two-party system. Then the fun begins.

Peu Biship, Tim.

2009-03-02T15:31:00.003-05:00

Tim Noah, in a piece otherwise devoted to realism vis-a-vis Terrism, passes along the DoJ shibboleth about Aafia Siddiqui, the Bostonian neuroscientist accused of working with Al Qaeda, who was picked up delirious somewhere in Afghanistan with vials of goo in her purse, even when a really quick search brings up evidence that the government's accusations against Siddiqui are "surprising" and "vague."

Noah's calm, measured paragraphs, it turns out, are where hyperbolic media distortions become settled facts.

This has been biship since August, when her face ran on page 1 of the the NY tabloids: Terror Queen! 5 August 2008, DoJ announced the capture of a Pakistani neuroscientist wanted for questioning since 2004. She had been found wandering around the provincial governor's house in Ghazni, Afghanistan. When detained, she just happened to be carrying "liquids and gels" and instructions from the "Anarchist's Arsenal." She then grabbed an M-4, shouted some shit, and was in turn shot.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'd like to make clear: Aafia Siddiqui was picked up by ISI in 2003 and handed over to us. She was accused of being "ready to strike in the next few months," in May 2004. She has now, therefore, in two separate presidential elections, been bandied about as an emblem of the Threat We All Face. She is also married to the guy we're really interested in; she is therefore, a hostage.

My services as a research aide are available, Mr. Noah.
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Panic on the quad?

2009-02-28T12:07:00.004-05:00

What panic? The NYT has just revealed that people who teach in the humanities are concerned that no one wants to major in the humanities. And this is more than one more round of paranoid academic turf-war: it is an existential crisis. The fields are "irrelevant," fears Delbanco of Columbia. The NYT itself says, "the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents."

I would love more insight into the threats facing the humanities, but I'm not going to get it from one paranoid academic and one reporter making things up. Is it possible that the humanities appear so easy to ax because the fruits of our labor are impossible to describe to our audience? What is it that you get from the Creative Writing MFA? Isn't cultural studies just an alloy of low-grade lit crit, art theory and 20th c. French philosophy? Seriously, these dudes look like Early Christianity.

It's not time for the humanities to rethink their relationship to the job sphere: that's my task. Employers clearly want excellent written and oral communication skills, which every English major had better have. Employers want an ability to reason, a capacity for drudgery, the ability to summarize discoveries, powers of analysis, etc. The humanities is where you get that.

What the disciplines have to reassess is whether what they're doing actually qualifies as humanities-work. Students in the humanities are leaving with no frame of reference beyond their own lifespans, no history of Europe, horrific, genuinely hilarious "communication skills." I've sat in on art classes that boiled down to nothing more than "I think that idea, it's interesting." We're at the dead end of interest; no accountant cares what you're interested in, unless you make it important to him that he be interested.

Or, you know, in other words, if you play the shit that they like, then the people would come, simple as that.
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First Art Post Ever. Beware.

2009-02-25T11:02:00.005-05:00

A quick hit, Kevin, and I'll try to make you aware of how totally fucked up the appearance in town of Christian Tomaszewski was. He's a Pole who works in video and installation. His main body of work is cardboard constructions derived from scenes in cult movies. Devoid of human actors, spare and clean, they are meant to delineate the "cold space" of film, said the man himself.

CT is tall and blond, in typical gear, black pleather jacket, black pants, etc., with an annoying habit of sucking on his face as he watches his own work. I couldn't tell from a distance if this was a smile or an uncontrollable tic. His English is probably as good as mine, and the proof lay in that in his answers to questions he always took the last two words of what you said and just riffed on them, without regard for the meaning of the rest of the sentence. It's possible that that was a coping mechanism for not having functional English, but selah. In either case, it made getting an answer a labrynthine process, full of hedges and diversions.

The work is about the space of film made real; except by CT's own admission, the particularities of the films don't matter, the filmic qualities might as well come from YouTube, and I'm pretty sure he's never seen all of Blue Velvet because his "clip representative of his working material" was an iMovie-edited montage of song sequences from BV.

In the original release, that we all saw in high school, we don't flashback to the scene at "Pussy Heaven," we just watch Hopper beat the crap out of McLachlan. CT was like, "I watched this film 138 times when I was making this." Really. I'm confused: is there a cult investment here, or does he just pick shit up off of YouTube and install it somewhere? Will we soon see a Christian Tomaszewski "Nora, the Piano Playing Cat"?

So that's just one beef: laziness masquerading as intellectual investment. It's bad enough when you do all this work and yet have nothing to say. It's worse when you front like you did all this work, and still have nothing to say.

To continue, in Tomaszewski's words, the work is a lot of effort for no purpose (except the filmic purpose stated above). It is practically about narrative (except no one knows what you mean when you say that; it's a scare phrase). There are no humans in the work (except that there are always humans in the work). There is just nothing at the center of this whirlwind.

So for all you other rubes out there who, like me, heard the words "European" and "Design" and saw visions of an upper-middle-class future and a subscription to Dwell, there's always the very classy Indianapolis Museum of Art...with a fantastically bad flash animation...

Also, check out CT at the Sculpture Center. This was to a word what he said last night in Columbus.

How is the title "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" anything other than kitsch? This could be some meta-joke about the vaingloriousness of art-making, its empty pomposity, but I fear Tomaszewski is serious, and that "Erotic Misery" is an actual, meaningful phrase for him, not something plucked from a random text generator.

The most telling thing last night was when CT alluded to "different narratives" in the US and Eastern Europe. He couldn't or wouldn't clarify, though he made certain to say he wasn't judging. (Seriously, my people are killing Pakistanis with space robots, and you think I care what you think about American narratology? Please.) But clearly, the things he finds serious (footage of contortionists, cut with drip torture, cut with a guy screwing in a light-bulb, like first year film school) other people have found hilarious.

I'm pretty sure this rules out the meta-joke possibility. Which means he's essentially remaking another montage of pilfered classics, "L'artiste est morte" by Jay Sherman...

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Revenge Via GoogleEarth

2009-02-16T14:48:00.008-05:00

(photo: Wally Herger (R-CA) with a local beauty, as it were.) All blessings upon GoogleEarth's Congressional Districts layer for making sweet the meet assignation of blame...

Here are all the House Republicans whose districts contain MSAs with unemployment higher than 10 percent. Note the multiple nominations for California's Herger and Radanovich, and for New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo:

Connie Mack IV, FL-14, Fort Myers FL, 10% unemployment

Fred Upton, MI-6, Benton Harbor MI, 10.1%

Cliff Stearns, FL-6, Ocala FL, 10.1%

Ken Calvert, CA-44, Riverside-San Bernardino CA, 10.1%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Chico CA, 10.3%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, Vineland NJ, 10.4%

Adam Putnam, FL-12, Bradley FL, 10.5%

Thaddeus McCotter, MI-11, Livonia MI, 10.6%

Patrick T. McHenry, NC-10, Lenoir NC, 10.9%

Nathan Deal, GA-9, Dalton GA, 11.2

Greg Walden, OR-2, Bend OR, 11.3

Peter Hoekstra, MI-2, Muskegon MI, 11.5%

Harry Brown, SC-1, Myrtle Beach SC, 11.5%

Jon Mica, FL-7, Palm Coast FL, 11.7%

Kevin McCarthy, CA-22, Bakersfield CA, 11.8%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Madera CA, 11.9%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Redding CA, 12.2%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, OCean City NJ, 12.4%

Don Manzullo, IL-16, Rockford IL, 12.5%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Fresno CA, 13.2%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Modesto CA, 13.9%

Devin Nunes, CA-21, Visalia CA, 14.3%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Yuba City CA, 14.9%

You may, dear reader, assign asterisks, forgiving those Congressmen whose districts are historically depressed (Bakersfield), or which are beachfront communities during winter (Vineland, Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers), or which are economically OK until they get lumped into the MSA of a big derelict city (Livonia-Detroit-Warren).

I of course choose not to issue exceptions. The MSA is a great indicator of city fabric. To isolate statistically Narberth from Philadelphia would be to ignore the real economic ties between the poor city and its rich suburb. Also, as to beaches and other exceptionally depressed zones, you'd think apathy toward his constituents' employment prospects would get a guy fired, period.

Make the dream real...
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No Title, Just Revenge Via Mathematics

2009-02-16T13:24:00.003-05:00

Quick backfill: the other day I wondered how Eric Cantor got House Republicans, some of whom must come from depressed districts, to vote in lockstep against the stimulus. I wondered, specifically, whose would be the heads to roll in 2010.

An Ohio blogger has a list of local 'Pubs who voted nay, along with the December 2008 county figures for each. So the Ohio Up Against the Wall List runs as follows, with a national average unemployment rate of 7.1, the winners are:

Robert Latta, 9.8

Steven LaTourette, 9.4

Jean Schmidt, 9.0

Jim Jordan, 8.5

...with special mention to the most outspoken Ohioan, Minority Leader John Boehner, whose district sports a national-average-beating 7.7 percent unemployment rate. Congratulations, Mr. Leader!

I'm slowly processing names and numbers for the National Up Against the Wall list, using the available numbers from BLS, broken down by MSA instead of county. By and large, it appears safe for Republicans to oppose the stimulus. Think for a second about the states conservative Republicans come from now. Utah, Idaho, Wyoming -- these places all have terrific employment rates, 97 or 98 percent.

But the numbers don't lie. And I don't care what your Cook PVI rating is. Come 2010, we will ice you. That means you:

Wally Herger, California-2, 14.9% unemployment.

Devin Nunes, California-21, 14.2%

George Radanovich, California-19, 13.6%,

et alia. You are Republicans from districts with higher unemployment than Detroit. You have something like 21 percent underemployment. To sit about like the Pasha in grand decline, while your people agitate, this is the peak of foolishness...

Just a warning. Republicans, don't be a statistic...

Hang on to Your Tenure, Stanley

2009-02-16T12:18:00.006-05:00

Stanley Fish channels Brian Wilson in today's NYT, hanging on to his ego in the face of reason, public disapprobation and I can only presume his own conscience.

His original target was a University of Ottawa professor who is alleged to have turned his physics class into a primer on political activism. Apart from the usual complaints, which Fish caricatures but never really addresses (Fish takes one example of excess to damn a group; Fish doesn't believe in freedom of thought; Academics don't have normal, mortals' jobs), let's remind everyone first that this is Canada, where the whole point of going to college is to become politically active. Insisting that academics act in line with "professional norms and standards," is not only repressive, but totally beside the point. Whose norms? Applied how? Where will we hold the conclave, Stanley?

More to the point, it turns out there are no "academic excesses" present for Fish to complain about, nor any for proto-Romantic critics of Fish to defend. There is no titanic struggle between liberal idealists and revanchist conservatives. Freedom, it turns out, is about careful, diligent, daily work.

Denis Rancourt, tenured professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, and avowed gadfly to the Institution, asked to change one of his classes from A-F grading to Pass/Fail. There are entire universities that do this in the states, in part to treat the perceived ill of grade inflation, but also to disassemble the edifice of classification/tracking in education, whereby, as Jacques Ranciere has explained, everyone has someone to look down on, A thru F. "We are creating obedient employees, but not people who think," says the prof.

The University denied the request, whereupon Rancourt gave out straight A's. The University then banned him from campus. He broke the ban to host a film screening on campus about political organizing tactics (forgive me if this is an oversimplification) and was arrested. Here he is, in a show of solidarity with one of his students, arrested for trying to film the University Senate.

So, in short answer to Stanley Fish, the facts you start with greatly influence the conclusions you draw. Surely Mr. Pop-PoMo knows this. Denis Rancourt does not see his freedom as anything other than, and certainly not better than, ours. Grading is a form of stultification. Even the idea that professors exist to "create" better thinkers -- a phrase Rancourt, I hope, was using as shorthand -- is pretty orthodox. Rancourt's whole point is to guarantee that the University is a functioning democracy, which is what the University itself avows. Academic freedom is a misnomer. Freedom is indivisible; we all have it by nature.

Now can we talk about responsibility? Fish argues that employees of the University are duty-bound to adhere to its rules and regulations. Let's leave aside the frequently proffered saw about "higher obligations." All Rancourt has done is throw UofO's regulations back at it.

Professors, to take one example, have to be permitted to grade independently; for the institution to lean on a professor, for instance, by banning him from issuing all A's, to "grade appropriately" renders grading meaningless. The institution could just as easily pick out students in advance, look at the normal curve, and parcel out grades irrespective of coursework. This is, again, to say nothing of the rank hypocrisy of an institution devoted to creativity, independent thought, etc., enforcing outcomes from above.

Rancourt goes to speak to his union rep. Having done that UofO police escort him off campus. This, in the States, would be a violation of NLRA; you can't punish workers for any speech related to collective agreements. Rancourt merely links to the standards and norms ratified 50 years ago by the American Association of University Professors. Police escort is to protect professors from possible violence, not to protect the University from its professors.

Rancourt self-evidently respects the responsibility he owes the University better than the University does. Academe is a calling, as all the proto-Romantics on Stanley's blog have said; it is also, for most of us, contract work. Rancourt is the only person in this whole debacle upholding the terms of his contract.

Finally, it's easy for Fish to paint Rancourt as some Bolshevik banging down the gates of the University, bent on nationalizing the "A-plus." Fish is at the pinnacle of a system that distributes greater rewards for seniority than for brilliance; that forces young professors into a period of indentured servitude known as tenure-track; that forces everyone else into a frantic competition for wage-slave adjunct jobs; that reinforces the stultification we all receive from our decade-plus of grade school, bringing the dictatorial power of the Great Master that we've all internalized back out into the open.

The inequity of the system is in-built. Young ones know this. You can either be for us, or against us. Hang on to your tenure, Stanley...
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Cantor / Gingrich

2009-02-15T11:08:00.002-05:00

NYT today has a profile of new minority whip Eric Cantor, flush from his first victory, i.e. convincing House Republicans in tight districts not to vote for middle-class tax cuts, rebuilding schools, refubishing dilapidated bridges, etc.

Leaving aside the false comparison (clearly meant to keep us liberals cautiously optimistic about Democratic power, ergo, to keep the dollars flowing next election cycle) of Cantor to Gingrich, in which no one but the NYT believes, since Cantor is "more demure," "an ideas man without ADD," etc., Cantor has a harder row to hoe that Newt did. BHO has 66% approval. More white people voted for him than did for Kerry, Gore, or Clinton. Newt, contrary to his automythopoesis, was never in the "extreme minority." Cantor is. And his solution is to lead the party further into the desert.

In 2010, we'll find out if that makes any sense, electorally. Politically, there's no reason why it shouldn't work, and this is what gives me the fear. Politics is not about meeting in the middle to get short-term work accomplished; it is about staking out the position you want, and drawing mainstream thought thither. The right has mastered the art, they've done it all my life. The tighter the quasar spins, the more gravity is gains, until it collapses on itself and starts sucking in everything...

Meanwhile, can we get a list of Republicans who voted nay on stimulus, ranked by the unemployment rate in each's district?
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Hand What Over, Exactly?

2009-02-11T20:13:00.002-05:00

Gershom Gorenberg at Foreign Policy appeals for an end to new settlement construction in the West Bank, and an eventual evacuation. He theorizes a tipping point for the West Bank, where longtime failure to swiftly deal with the settlers dooms any future attempt.

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

I appreciate the irony of creating Palestine in order to save Israel, but Gorenberg's piece, to me, only reiterates the impossibility of a two-state solution. How much of the West Bank are Israelis to evacuate? Having -- presumably -- moved the radicals behind the wall, but still over the Green Line, and therefore having risked and overcome civil war, what are the odds of moving these same people again, this time into Israel proper?

More to the point, what exactly will Israel hand over, and to whom? If two states were mandated today, they would be Israel-behind-the-fence and a West Bank run by the PA. Gaza would be a "protectorate." Would this new Palestine have a port? Free air space? Access to water and to the ground beneath it? Without water and a port, it's a shit country.

Given that, wouldn't Palestinians do well to nix nationhood and instead to agitate for Israeli citizenship? You want to dissolve the checkpoints, the dual roadways, the fence, the settlers' compounds? Take Avigdor Lieberman up on his offer: loyalty oaths for all!

And I'm sure the hero of the Russian Street would oblige, so long as the Arab vote was, say 3/5 of the Jewish vote, and so long as Arab demands for work were confined to date-picking and goat-milking. This is the RSA. This is Muammar's One-and-a-Half-State Solution.

Still, agitating for Israeli citizenship sounds like a far better deal than trying to obtain a doomed-from-the-start nation-state. What Palestinians get at the end of any peace process is de facto rule by Israel, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid, and the final entrenchment of the corrupt political caste that got them there in the first place: in other words, the best case scenario is The Now, minus a few roadblocks and checkpoints.

And this is the parallax gap in Israel//Palestine: the only way for Palestinians to have a state is to give up on having a Palestinian state.

Mad King George

2009-02-08T10:34:00.004-05:00

I find this weird. George Voinovich voted against the stimulus in committee, then dropped feelers like he could get on board, at the same time as he was huffing out of the negotiating room.

He's not running in 2010, he has nothing to lose for being this sort of ~~heedless obstructionist~~ ~~semi-literate revanchist~~ principled pol...well, he could lose lobbying dollars.

(Also, his need for "shovel-ready" projects? Funny. Once again, dollars spent on anything but those guys with the orange signs evidently just vanish through a wormhole. We need a way to talk about research and design in "shovel-ready" terms. Or just start calling things like first human trials of Parkinson's drugs, exercises in new math, green design, etc. all "shovel-ready." "This here is a shovel-ready algorithm, Mr. Senator.")

So who is Voinovich going to work for after his waiting period? Firms change with the tide, and, in case no one told you, Mr. Senator, being a Democrat is in. A willingness to compromise for the General Welfare would probably get you a job. Being a cantankerous old prick, not so much.
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The Shocking Toolness of Ben Nelson

2009-02-07T11:17:00.004-05:00

Conservative Democrats have misinterpreted Barry Hussein's call to post-partisanship as surrender to the right. They do so at their peril.

Particularly the 8 or 9 Senators who hijacked the stimulus package this week, stripped 40 billion in education funding out of it, and then crowed on the floor of the Senate, with Ben Nelson (D-NE): "We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows."

Memo: this is not 1992. Big government is not over; really really big government has hardly begun. Ben Nelson will get on board now, or he will watch the unemployment lines grow.

Here's Ben on C-SPAN no longer really crowing. I can only pray that Rahm Emmanuel beat his ass with a big staff, right there in the Oval. Seriously, any money spent is money spent. Doesn't matter if you pay highway construction workers or MD's. This is Steven Pearlstein talking to Nebraska's freshman Senator, Mike Johanns:

Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus.

Democrats, we're watching you. The less you sound like Steven Pearlstein, and the more you sound like Herbert Hoover, the more shock and awe you can expect come the next election cycle.

A nation of fourteen-year-old Obama-heads will all be 18 by 2012, when Ben Nelson is up for reelection. So enjoy your breakfast, Ben, because the kids who went to the shitty public schools you vouchsafed them are going to steal your lunch.
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I Don't Need Your Sympathy

2009-02-04T13:42:00.003-05:00

...says Bilal Khbeiz in e-flux. His points, in sum and therefore in caricature, are:

Westerners sympathize with victims in Gaza and Beirut at a mediated remove; this depersonalizes the conflict, and occludes, for example, the feelings of superiority that survivors of the shelling feel;

Sorrow, like Nietzsche says, is the crocodile tears of the mighty thanking their stars that they were not born weak. Removed from the conflict, the Western Left's compassion is worthless.

The various forms of "courage" displayed in the conflict are something the victims of the conflict never asked for. Ditto the sympathy.

Offhand, this strikes me as the kind of abstract, hair-splitting, namby-pamby, criticality-for-its-own-sake that is bound to land you a spot curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But that's not really fair, and I like the piece...

To begin, false consciousness / white left guilt / "catastrophe tourism" is the least of Gaza's concerns, isn't it? In America, as Khbeiz surely knows, sympathizers -- even we false-hearted colonialist sympathizers -- are hard to come by. Would he prefer to deal with bloodthirsty backwoods reactionaries? Perhaps; perhaps he's on a "radical honesty" therapy regimen. So, imagine a world without Left guilt checking, via the media, America's insane preoccupation with the preservation of Israel. Imagine the New York Times rooting Israel on. Would we have had Nicolas Sarkozy in country negotiating a cease-fire? Would we see George Mitchell as special envoy? I hate to sound like these measures are cure-alls; I know they're not. But imagine nothing at all happening. You don't need white guilt; fine, we'll just spend our time and money liberating something else. Zimbabwe, for instance. Or Sri Lanka.

Also, I'm waiting to see what benefit "survivor's glee" has brought to Palestinians. What is the political role of selfishness and opportunism? The man who happily clears the rubble of his neighbor's house is the one to be bombed next. What stops that? Show me the next ten words, beginning with Selfishness and Opportunism.

The false-hearted Western sorrow that Khbeiz so laments -- and which is so omnipresent in the States, or plain ubiquitous outside of Paris -- is you know a problem insofar as it exists. Khbeiz' problem here is that he caricatures the entire West as a (what, slightly more muscular, and frumpier?) version of the international art-fair jet-set. This is the same kind of myopia that obscures real people's suffering/joy from our Western eyes, and that Khbeiz is so eager to denounce. The West does not sit in committee at Art Basel Miami Beach. A joke/sham version of it does perhaps.

Returning to the point above, there are plenty of different kinds of Westerners, and lots of them would permit a completion of the Palestinian naqba as surely as the sun rises in the East.

Again, I'd like to stress that I find it hard to argue with a man who is in theater right now (I assume; maybe he's in Geneva and has mooted his own argument thereby). And the "catastrophe tourism" of the West, our occluded understanding, the scandals (in the Greek sense, lit. "a stumbling block") to our intellect, the glee of survivors, the pompous "courage" of Hamas' leadership chilling in Syria...all true, too true.

But people asked for this. Palestinians put Hamas in charge via free and fair elections. Hamas withstood Fatah storm troopers busting down people's doors in the night and regrouped in Gaza, only to find all trade blockaded, fuel held to a trickle, etc. Someone asked for an end to the siege: Hamas built tunnels; Hamas opened the border with Egypt via sledgehammers; Hamas got itself some human bargaining chips. All these things demand temerity at least. American politicians in the same circumstances would get themselves a sweet bribe from Israel and haul ass to Marseilles, on some shit like "Stopping those missiles. That's worth a lot of fuckin' money." You know, like Arafat did.

Hamas is responding to its constituents' needs, as any political party must. Their constituents need not to be bombed -- thank you Mr. Khbeiz for stating the obvious as if it were a revelation; what I've heard called "flipping the script" -- this is true. But their constituents also need not to live in a permanent penal servitude, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's Isaac Babel, describing, obliquely, what it's like to be a Jew under the Czar.
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When the Whig Party was dying...

2009-01-31T16:55:00.003-05:00

...did people say that they "needed to retool" or "find themselves" or... well, of course they wouldn't have said "reboot". But to what extent can we draw parallels between the Whigs and the Republicans of late? I've been on record for the better part of three years as thinking the Republicans were dead standing up, are we seeing the corpse begin to tilt groundward?

Back to Basics

2009-01-30T21:05:00.003-05:00

Watching right now the McLaughlin Group: would like to read the results of Monica's push poll that shows a mere 42 percent of Americans approving of this stimulus bill, or her Fox News poll that shows that "Americans prefer tax cuts to new spending." They also disapprove of handouts for the perverted arts, I hear.

And Johnny Mac is wishing a little too hard, methinks, when he calls House passage of any Obama bill a failure. BHO reached out, people know he reached out and all GOP soundbites make them sound like petulant prep school ninnies -- I'm looking at you, Paul Ryan. So who had the better PR week? The stimulus will come back, amended in conference, and everybody can get on board, or else lose in 2010. And we will get you Mike Pence.

But the GOP "rediscovered its manhood" and "got its groove back"? Not this week. Not after a "bruising five-way fight" for the RNC chairmanship gets you a doctrinaire laissez-faire conservative who warns his enemies that they will be "toppled." Policy matters. The face you put on it matters less. Americans will look at this Hoover-retread fiscal conservatism and turn up their noses. So much for the Tim-Pawlenty-big-tent theory of a return to dominance...and back to the drawing board...
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Who's Got the One-and-a-Half?

2009-01-22T12:03:00.003-05:00

Muammar's got the one-and-a-half state solution. Now, when the unelected leader of Libya promotes this, it doesn't have the same aura as when Eyal Weizman does. If Muammar had actually been able to say something like "Shoah and Naqba are flip sides of the same coin...there are not two catastrophes, but one shared catastrophe," then we might have believed him.

Quick read: it sounds like Qaddafi is out to sugarcoat the idea of a Palestinian majority in Israel by explaining that, don't worry folks, Arab Israelis will still be in the fields picking dates. The implicit trade for a one-state solution is some kind of political second-class citizenship, and this is because Muammar is obsessed with right-of-return. Right-of-return means Palestine becomes minority-Jewish; with voting rights for all, that puts Hamas in the Knesset, that makes the IDF defunct. Now, without voting rights for all, we're talking about a minority-rule state with an all-minority police force, like the RSA. And that's one and a half states, not one.
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...Swallowed a Bug...

2009-01-20T20:36:00.005-05:00

NYT gets down on the kibbutz, where folks is scared:

Out in the fields abutting the Gaza border fence, Mr. Katzir, the potato grower, predicted that within two years, the Hamas rockets "will get to Tel Aviv."

Now this interested me. I understand that farmers' opinions may not be indicative of the populace at large, but this is at least one member of the populace expressing his concerns, and what politician would not listen?

It's clear that this war wasn't a response to a credible threat; it was a panic attack. The Israeli populace doesn't trust Kadima to run shit; Kadima reinforces their ~~bloodthirst~~ trustworthiness by means of a small war. Ehud Barak and senior Israeli military officials get to think up cool metaphors -- latest: "cutting the grass"! -- and generally do the Brando

and all is well, except that Mr. Katzir, the potato farmer is not appeased. He thinks Hamas will be able to hit Tel Aviv in two years. Is he right?

To hit Tel Aviv, 75 kilometers from Gaza, you need an Iranian Fajr-5 rocket or better, Cf. this 2006 piece on aerospaceweb.org. No one has offered more than speculation as to whether Hamas has the Fajr-5, has asked Iran for the Fajr-5, etc.

Thing is, evidence would be easy to find. See, the Fajr-5 is 2 by 3 by 10 meters long. It's mounted on a Mercedes chassis two-thirds the size of a semi-trailer, and probably comes with friends, as it started life as an MRLS. This is not the sort of thing that 6 dudes shove through a tunnel. Saying Hamas has this is like saying Osama's going to bomb our lunar colony.

Now, if by "Hamas will hit Tel Aviv" our friend on the farm meant "Palestinians will hit Tel Aviv from the West Bank," that's a whole other kettle of fish. From right across the wall, you can hit Tel Aviv with a katyusha. Of course, this hasn't happened for some time, as Palestinians in the West Bank have Fatah sturmers busting down doors in order to defend Israel. West Bankers haven't allowed upstart terrorists to shoot so much as a spitball in a couple years. And they're divided now.

So the question becomes, what happens when you give the people of the West Bank a reason?
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The Boss Has Lost It

2009-01-19T12:49:00.005-05:00

WHEREAS we have no real notion of what the Gaza campaign has wrought in any terms other than the purely humanitarian, and since newspapers anyway are in the business of refusing to speculate on geopolitical motives for barbarity, choosing instead to project a humanitarianism-beyond-politics, with no system of beliefs beyond the overriding imperative of the lower body count,

Clearly it's time for the Process Story, whereby our crack team of researchers gets the inside story from the architects of the operation. And don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the tidbits:

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

Couple things: this is clearly a retread of Nixon's "Mad Bomber." Retribution should be feared; fear deters aggression; everyone goes back to the bargaining table. It's just not a very good retread. "Mad Bomber" threats arguably did less to maintain the balance of terror than did rapprochement with China, crumbling Soviet infrastructure, aging bureaucracy on both sides; the miracle is not that the Soviet Union ever fell, it's that it stuck around so long. Detente did not emerge fully formed from the head of "Mad Bomber" tactics.

But even if we accept that the model worked in that case, there is no analogy here. US:CCCP::Israel:Palestine does not fly. The US and USSR were fighting for spheres of influence. Neither populace was in the condition of Gaza's. Israel might see itself as fighting for influence -- thus the pompous military attache comparing the IDF to Nixon -- but it's fighting for soil. And its presumptive partner at the bargaining table is no Brezhnev: two governments, no contiguous territory, no economy, no transport, nothing that Israel wants and also nothing to lose.

"The Boss Has Lost It," in another Nixonian echo, casts foreign policy as work for a failing used-car salesman. Probably this is the kind of thing to fall on deaf ears, as, you know, there are not that many retail opportunities in the Strip.

These are, for the record, the best military metaphors I've heard in a long time. Cribbed from common folks' usage, full of connotative spurs and branches, and utterly accurate. "Cast lead" is for toys and bombs, presumably like the cluster munitions dumped on South Beirut last time around. "Crazy Boss" covers all the bases: we are your Boss, first of all, and this is the last time you'll see these prices, and you never know what's next.

But the kicker for me is that in the haste to gloat about the IDF's clever language, their spokesperson led the NYT reporter to "It is a calculated rage," which, you know, is what we said here on Day One. Forget "this is not a proportionate response," it wasn't even a response. The long Gaza blockade was not -- as the unfortunately-isolated Brian Eno would have us believe, our hearts bleeding -- an "experiment in provocation," since the assault appeared on 27 Dec 2008 to be all but unprovoked. Gazans did not respond to the bait that Eno thinks was laid. And now it's all clear, the rage was calculated.

Now what that means is anyone's guess. If the IDF has to concoct from thin air a passion for fighting, whereas Hamas has blood on the ground to motivate it, what does that mean for Israel's chances the next time around? And if the IDF knows that this is the last time in a generation that it might see deep support for actions against the Palestinians, mightn't that mean it's time to strip the Strip totally? That Gaza Redevelopment Authority is gonna need some room, after all. Doesn't a pullout at this point mean that Ehud Barak is more concerned about keeping Bibi Netanyahu out of power than he is with ~~cleansing~~ redeveloping Gaza? And if it turns out that the motivation for this exercise in terror was provincial Israeli politics, then the boss has lost it for real...
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Die Cast

2009-01-17T21:30:00.002-05:00

Oferet Yetzuka, named for a Hanukkah gift, a cast-lead dreidel, has paused its gift-giving.

Perhaps only part of the strip will now become Gaza Beach Redevelopment District / Business-Opportunity Zone.

And if Abbas/Fatah have any balls at all, they will listen to Dion Nissenbaum at Foreign Policy: Abbas can't walk back into Gaza as its Israeli-appointed viceroy. We've known this since June 2007. He is a politician without constituents.

If Abu Mazen is more than a Vichy turd, he will resign rather than reign over a broken Gaza. Dissolve the PA's fake parliament, call new elections, and demand the release of Marwan Barghouti.

He can, in effect, become the most popular man in Palestine only if he no longer wants to be its most powerful.

Burn This MF Down

2009-01-16T11:29:00.004-05:00

Paul Ging and Christopher Gunness have called the IDF and Ehud Olmert liars. Ging, who, it turns out, was in contact with the Israeli Army up until the moment his warehouse was bombed,

questioned why Israeli liaison officers had never mentioned Hamas activity in the area[...]

which is sort of begging the question. If I tell you there's Hamas in your building, and you flee, does not the Hamas also flee? Ging's point, of course, is that there were no militants in the building, thus no need for either the bombing or the forewarning of a bombing. And since he was in "constant contact" with IDF before the bombing, Ging has another problem: he has Israeli bomb-spotters working for him. He has a mole.

Gunness backs up Ging, saying that Israeli Army officers had "privately admitted" bombing the wrong site. That accounts for yesterday's confusion. Then Gunness ups the ante, saying three white phosphorus shells hit the UN warehouse. And that accounts for why the whole place, hit with three shells, is on fire in all the photos.

Just a refresher: we used white phosphorus on civilians in Iraq. Fine as a flare, but as an anti-personnel weapon, white phosphorus use will get you a date in the Hague. This is largely because it's such an effective anti-personnel weapon:

White phosphorus results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn typically appears as a necrotic area with a yellowish color and characteristic garliclike odor. White phosphorus is highly lipid soluble and as such, is believed to have rapid dermal penetration once particles are embedded under the skin.

I think it's part of our shared humanity to kill things, to kill them personally, on a human scale, with what weapons we can wield. The thing about WP is its indiscriminate nature: it binds to lipids, anybody's lipids; it seeks out fat and turns it into light. Humans, to Willy Pete, are so much candle wax. So, my point is that anyone who says eradication of most of the population of Gaza for the dual goals of security and leisure is not Israel's goal here is taking you for a ride.
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Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

2009-01-15T10:26:00.004-05:00

Olmert has given Ban Ki-Moon the explanation for today's bombing he so gravely demanded: Hamas was in your compound. We know this, because that's where our bombs landed. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Probably this rhetorical device came out in the Iraq lessons-learned briefings. The US's real problem was not that there were no mobile bio-chem weapons labs, no centrifuges, just a bunch of yellow pigment in a baby-food plant, no no, our problem was that we kept trying to find evidence. Every overturned semi-trailer was inspected for anthrax; every general's lawn was cut up in the hunt for radiation.

Why not just say the bombs got it? It worked with the phantom Syrian nuclear program, right? "Trust us, it was there. Of course, there's no evidence of that now. But it surely was there because that's where our bombs went."

Also, for the record, Hosni, if you're listening, Fatah is dead. Don't wait for the return of Fatah. And also, anyone watching this knew in advance -- in advance of the New York Times' crack news analysis staff, anyway -- that Fatah was dead.

On second glance, this part was news to me. Possibly it is real news, as opposed to analysis:

Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders.

A Palestinian pro calls Fatah's involvement "silly" and "naive."

Odds are he called it worse than that, you know, something like "a royal fist-fucking of the Palestinians by a bunch of Vichy turds in BMWs"

But the interesting part is that Israel floated the idea to Fatah at all. I mean, if you're going to pull some Robert Moses shit on a million and a half people, which come to think of it is Moses' scale, you need obstacles cleared. Israel needs to make sure that Fatah sees its chances of survival as related to Israel's chances of success. What's really being said is, "We're going to make Gaza into prime beachfront property, you can get on board or get out of the way."

There isn't going to be a role for Fatah beyond "shut the fuck up." A truce still hinges on commercial traffic into and out of Gaza being restored. And Israel has no intention of allowing that. After all, why stop now? From a PR standpoint, there is no difference between "a little bit monstrous" and "monstrous." It is a binary condition. Since a truce is going to cost something, namely opening Rafah, or else it won't hold, why not choose annihilation?
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Denial, Anger, Acceptance, Cash!

2009-01-13T11:33:00.004-05:00

No doubt the craving of 66 percent of the American populace for a contrite Bush has colored the coverage of the President's final news conference. "More contrite than usual" is apparently good enough.

But the conference's head-scratchers reveal what the Bush Legacy Project is all about.

His chief mistake -- pushing privatization of Social Security after the 2004 election, the "I've got political capital, and I'm going to spend it," assault, in ignorance of the metaphor's real meaning, see because you spend cash and you invest capital. Spending political capital is like eating your seed corn -- turns out to be a pivot on his pet domestic issue.

The problem with his failed bid to put Gramps into the thresher of the stock market was not, it turns out, that he should have been paying attention to Iraq as it spiraled into an unrivalled shitstorm, no no no, it was that the PSA putsch set back his work on immigration.

I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform. And the reason why is, is that -- you know, one of the lessons I learned as governor of Texas, by the way, is legislative branches tend to be risk-adverse [sic]. In other words, sometimes legislatures have the tendency to ask, why should I take on a hard task when a crisis is not imminent?

Why indeed? Looks pretty smart from this vantage, tho'.

The point is this: though the president tacked toward the Pawlenty-big-tent faction, saying that he should have made immigration reform -- whatever that means in reality, its connotation is "immigration crackdown" -- a top priority, more serious than fixing Iraq in 2004, is music to the ears of those in the Hensarling Quasar.

The point of the Bush Record, among other PR salvos, is that 43 was competent. Why else would anyone publish "The Policies of the Bush Administration," than to say, "See, we did too have policies..." And we shouldn't have let some of them slip through our hands. Circumstances beyond our control.

What all this means is that Bush denies responsibility for any ethically consequential decisions. His one mistake was a mistake of political calculation. The rest of the bad stuff that happened to him is exactly that, stuff that happened. "Disappointments," as the man says. WMD, Abu Ghraib, chaos in Iraq, Bin Laden free, all "disappointments." Other failures of conscience aren't even disappointing: Katrina, for instance. And let's not start on 43's essential bloodthirst regarding Gaza. On a day when 90,000 civilians were marched out of Gaza, during a week where the 900th civilian death was announced, the President had this to say:

And a definition of a sustainable cease-fire is that Hamas stops firing rockets into Israel. And there will not be a sustainable cease-fire if they continue firing rockets. I happen to believe the choice is Hamas's to make. And we believe that the best way to ensure that there is a sustainable cease-fire is to work with Egypt to stop the smuggling of arms into the Gaza that enables Hamas to continue to fire rockets. And so countries that supply weapons to Hamas have got to stop. And the international community needs to continue to pressure them to stop providing weapons.

Hamas, obviously, if they're interested in a sustainable cease-fire, needs to stop arming. And then, of course, countries contingent to the Gaza need to work to stop the smuggling.
[snip]
The challenge, of course, has been to lay out the conditions so that a peaceful state can emerge -- in other words, helping the Palestinians in the West Bank develop security forces, which we have worked hard to do over the past years. And those security forces are now becoming more efficient, and Prime Minister Fayyad is using them effectively. The challenge is to develop -- help the Palestinians develop a democracy -- I mean, and a vibrant economy in their -- that will help lead to democracy.

And the challenge, of course, is always complicated by the fact that people are willing to murder to stop the advance of freedom. And so the -- Hamas, or for that matter al Qaeda, or other extremist groups, are willing to use violence to prevent free states from emerging. And that's the big challenge.

And so the answer is -- will this ever happen? I think it will. And I know we have advanced the process.

I'll probably be coming back to that piece later.

Suffice it to say, Denial is in full effect in the Bush White House, years after it became cliche. The man showed Anger when contradicted, particularly about Katrina. He has Accepted that, even though he made no bad decisions, certain calculations, "Mission Accomplished" among them, were wrong.

And now, as a competent, ideologically sound and successful ex-president, George Walker Bush can go back to doing what he does best: raising Cash. Immigration top priority, Palestinians die, Iraq no problem, Cash rules everything around me. Give him a few years for the dust to settle, and we'll see him in Oklahoma City or Sugar Land TX, pimping his memoirs on behalf of Jeb Hensarling, or in Richmond's West End pimping Eric Cantor. Wait for it.
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Why Can't Hosni Mubarak Play Hardball?

2009-01-10T10:06:00.004-05:00

My apologies, Dear Reader; what I thought was expert analysis-in-advance turns out to be little more than conventional wisdom come a few days early. For instance, see the 8 January piece:

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son.(emphasis added)

Now comes the NYT on the mental state of folks in Cairo:

Nowhere in the Arab world is the gap between the street and the government so wide as here in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and has refused to allow free passage of goods and people through its border with Gaza, a decision that has been attacked by Islamic and Arab leaders and proved deeply troubling to many Egyptians.

Same as it ever was: Mubarak cannot be trusted, his government came out early against Hamas, the MB is attracting new support, and now government-puppet imams are being told to go on and let off some steam at the Jews.

That was one of the funny parts about Mubarak's apparent response to his street problem: that he sees it as a PR crisis, rather than a failure of policy. Instead of taking the direct route and opening Rafah unilaterally, or sending out Egyptian bulldozers to tear down chunks of wall, or working indirectly and just using the threat of unilateral action in negotiations to get the border open, he's decided that all his people really want is to hate the Jews, and that the cathartic experience of listening to Friday prayers at the state-run mosque will ease their pain.

Is Mubarak loath to jeopardize US aid to Egypt? It is a lot of aid, after all. (Christian Science Monitor has $50B as the figure.) Less than gov't aid to AIG, but a lot per year, billion-plus. Thing is, Hosni's been telling US presidents for 28 years that he's their only shot at peace in the Middle East's largest nation. He's warded off local and national elections, rephrased our appeals for help on terrorism into political street-sweeping, etc. He can tell the US that either he gets what he needs, or he dissolves parliament, Egypt has free elections tomorrow and a Muslim Brotherhood plurality the day after that.

But the really interesting thing is that Mubarak longs for Fatah supremacy, in the way that one would bring '88 back. Seriously, throwback politics will destroy Egypt's tranquility. So here are some notes for the Premier, or the Generalissimo, whatever Hosni calls himself:

Yasser Arafat is dead,

Even if he were alive, Fatah would still be a corrupt edifice with a PR-savvy former revolutionary as its figurehead, like Mandela and the ANC,

And decades of one-party government, anywhere in the world, except perhaps Russia where people have vodka instead of ambition or hope (sorry), causes people to "seethe" as you no doubt read in the NYT today

You cannot simultaneously blackmail the US (as I've basically urged you to do) with the spectre of an MB takeover of Parliament and yet pine for the return of Fatah to Gaza, as if Palestine hasn't already shown its preference, as if it doesn't already have a "street" to be appeased or broken.

And I guess that's the thing. Mubarak wants Israel to break the Gaza street. He expects Fatah to step into a void. And he's wrong. If there is a void in Gaza, Israel will step into it. And the Gaza street won't disappear, it will move somewhere, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, maybe Egypt.

See what I'm saying, Hosni? Either you play hardball now and get your borders open, or next year when the IDF is resettling one and a half million Gazans, you become their unwilling host and they your unwilling guests. And I wonder what kind of wack-ass speeches your trained imams will have to give out then...
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Read This One More Time...

2009-01-09T13:05:00.004-05:00

...and see if you don't agree that the United Nations has reason to believe that its relief and welfare operations in Gaza are the target of the Israeli offensive. Accordingly, UN spokespersons have been authorized to describe in detail the mass deaths of civilians that have occurred in the past 48 hours.

Ban Ki-Moon is calling for an investigation into the deaths of 40 Palestinians at a UN-run school that was shelled by the IDF. One of its drivers was killed at Kerem Shalom Thursday; two trucks were bombed Monday. The Red Cross was fired on at Netzarim Thursday during the second 3-out-of-48-hour ceasefire, and has halted relief operations.

20-odd dead aid workers per 200 dead Hamas fighters is a ratio indicative of targeting. The UN and Red Cross are targets, and are fighting back in the press. Whether that works, whether a media blitz has any sway at all over Ehud Barak, who's having the time of his life, is another question entirely.
I'm pretty sure we're past the point where language wars, negotiations, etc. have any relevance. The talking cure is dead. And if it's grim enough to convince the Vatican to use the phrase "concentration camp," yeah, no one's getting talked down from this war.

As soon as the first aid convoy was struck, that's when Israel's intentions were made plain. NGOs are the last barrier to Israeli supremacy in Gaza; they are the last people watching, as journalists are still verboten; absent Hamas, they are the only people who teach children, deliver water and take out the trash. When they disappear, Gaza disappears.

So look for more UN spokespersons to tell us more stories of children with their mothers' corpses, but don't look for any cease-fire until Gaza is swept and cleared.
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Hezbollah is in the Game?

2009-01-08T11:00:00.005-05:00

From AP:

The rockets from Lebanon raised the specter of renewed hostilities on Israel's northern frontier, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the Hezbollah guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. War broke out between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 as Israel battled Palestinian militants in Gaza, on Israel's southern borders.

No group claimed responsibility. Lebanon's government condemned the attack, and Hezbollah — which now plays an integral role in Lebanon's government — denied any responsibility for the rocket fire, which lightly injured two Israelis.

If Hezbollah can't be scared back into sitting on its hands in Parliament, then Egypt and Jordan have problems -- as neighbors to the Palestinians with a long history of screwing the Palestinians who are not currently in the game -- Egypt in the near term, Jordan at one remove.

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son. If Hezbollah distract the IDF enough to take the heat off Gaza (witness 2006, where the Gaza tit-for-tat was occluded by war in the north) Mubarak could be weakened enough to allow slightly more free elections. That's the foot in the door for the MB, and Egypt's days as a tidy little dictatorship are done.

Jordan will have a problem first when refugees from this conflict end up in the West Bank, and start reminding people of how the Palestinians got screwed by their brether'n and sister'n across the River. Jordan will have another problem later when Israel starts to move settlers to a more-easily-managed version of the 1967 border and slowly prepares an assault on the West Bank. Expect a restless West Bank for the three years before Israel declares "all-out war" on all Palestinians, a timeframe I'm thinking will be mid-2010 to end of 2013, during which period expect multiple suicide attacks in Amman, and a spectacular bombing of the Port of Haifa.

On 27 December, ds wrote:

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah.

which, you know, we think of here as an obvious conclusion. When the balloon goes up, etc. But, you know, not everyone sees things this way. Today the NYT lede is "Hezbollah is not a problem; peace is being brokered in Cairo; we're done here." The same article contains the terms of this miraculous peace:

The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.

Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.

Clearly, I jumped the gun on calling the end of NYT's wishful thinking. This shit is candyass.

To translate: first, walking out of Cairo with a real truce is not important, because Israel can always draw up "tacit agreements" with Hamas. Please provide examples of such. Second, this truce must contain a hermetically sealed Egypt-Gaza border AND an open Rafah crossing. That's not some merely onerous diplomatic task; it's an antinomy.

These discussions are a joke. Mubarak will realize this soon enough. The only question I have is, Does anyone in the Arab world have the balls to open Rafah?
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No More Wishful Thinking at NYT

2009-01-07T22:51:00.002-05:00

How indeed to square "ground invasion is a course no one is advocating," with

This time, Israeli military commanders are leading from the front, not trying to direct the infantry from television screens. This time, the military has clear plans, in stages, drawn up with a year’s preparation. This time, there is no illusion about winning a war only from the air.

Couple days ago, no one was preparing for the shit, today they've been preparing for a year.

The scales fall from the eyes of the NYT Jerusalem bureau...We're all men now...
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Personal Best for the IDF

2009-01-07T10:23:00.004-05:00

Israel is allowing aid into Gaza. For three hours a day. Journalists are still verboten. But this is the lede in a story that goes on the parrot the IDF's cover for shelling civilians. IDF says a Hamas mortar team was inside the UN-run (although I suppose everything in Gaza that is administered at all is UN-run) school in Jabaliya. McClatchy had an anonymous source (which we might as well assume is the IDF) saying that the mortar crew (two dudes) was in the school. NYT identifies its source and says one of the men was "in the area."

Also, butchers prefer Pepsi. Can that piece be real?

640 at this point, though as NYT says, "no reliable and current figures in recent days."

The magic number here is 1,191, the UN count of civilian dead in Lebanon in the 2006 war. Let's add about 500 (the world's best guess at the number of Hezbollah fighters killed then) for a total of 1,691. At 60 dead a day, Gaza's going to smoke that record.

And with 4 dead IDF by friendly fire, Israel can boldly claim another personal best, beating Hamas at its own game.

Much mazel!
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Covering All My Bases; Murderers Who Should Be Clubbed To Death

2009-01-05T09:26:00.003-05:00

From the Dispatch on New Year's Day:

"Israel has the moral right and responsibility to defend its citizens," wrote Marsha F. Hurwitz, president and chief executive officer of the Columbus Jewish Federation, in a statement to The Dispatch.

"It is reacting as any nation would that is under constant attack. Imagine if there were terrorists in Worthington firing missiles that were falling at Broad and High streets. What would we as citizens demand from our government in order to protect us?"

This is why Israel has carte blanche to conduct actions verging on genocide. Among those Americans who have any reason to care about the Middle East (admittedly few, and people can and should care about whatever they want, not judging) cunts like Marsha outnumber real human beings 5-1.

If there were terrorists in "Worthington" firing "missiles" at Broad and High, I would expect them to be rooted out. On this Marsha and I agree.

What we don't agree on, obviously, is the facts. Namely, that Worthington OH is closer to a densely populated territory (downtown Columbus) by a factor of 2 than anywhere in Gaza is to any dense Israeli population. Second, Gazans have glorified bottle rockets, not "missiles". This is why, not to belabor a point, up until the current fighting, 2 count them two Israelis had been killed by katyushas in the past year. And third, if my government were responsible for locking the people of Worthington inside their city because of how they vote, if the people of northern Franklin County were bound by treaty to shoot anyone from Worthington trying to escape, if Worthington by virtue of the lockdown had 100 percent unemployment, I would damn well expect violence.

Anybody ever been to Columbus' East Side? If Marsha Hurwitz wants to have a discussion, I know a halal joint on Cleveland Avenue. Or the Pita Pit on N. High.

Peace
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Amateur Hour

2009-01-04T17:58:00.003-05:00

Billy Rich is done, no hay oficia, and never trust a man with a neck like a pale hamster. A California company paid the governor $110,000 and received contracts worth $1.4 million. This was presumably something BHO and Co. knew about and just ignored.

For the new appointment, I vote for Ed Markey. Anyone from New Mexico is now verboten, Schweitzer and Sebelius are heartland Democrat governors who need to stay put for party-building, Ed Rendell though I love him is another man with a hamster-like neck and thus untrustworthy (seriously, you think Chicago politics is old-school? Try Philadelphia), ditto anyone with hands in pockets of Oil or Coal.

So the questions are two: Are all America's governors desperate for cash? And, What does an Obama administration possibly stand to gain by hiring all these Clintonites?

What was it that Billy Rich brought to the table? His exaggerated Hispanicness, even if it exists and accrues a political benefit, has nothing to do with the rational execution of the administration's energy policy; at Homeland Security or HHS it might, maybe. It's not a payoff for Billy Rich's endorsement, since getting that was like pulling shark teeth. Surely those allegedly numerous but really just very vocal Hillary-or-the-Highway, Limbaugh Democrats would have been appeased by Hillary's own appointment; Rich does nothing for them.
This was a lazy choice, made in haste, and it's coming back to bite BHO on the ass. I'm going to go watch Philadelphia vs. Minnesota...

Whoa -- State News Update

2009-01-04T11:23:00.004-05:00

Fear not, concerned citizens of both Russia and Syria, your leaders are going through an incredible period of ball-growth...together!

State news in Syria has Medvedev and al-Assad meeting to discuss the violation of treaties and agreements. Perhaps also they will play with their dolls, and have tea.

Gaza Beer-League Assessment Piece

2009-01-04T10:55:00.002-05:00

I understand that events outpace our ability to make sense of them, but really: "Is the end of Hamas rule Israel's real aim?" By the time this story was up, Israel was in Gaza, boots on the ground. By the time I had read it, the IDF owned Gaza City. And yet, as of 11AM Sunday, no edits to this:

Implicit in Mr. Benn’s argument, however, is that the only way to stop Hamas from gaining legitimacy is for Israel to fully occupy Gaza again, more than three years after removing its soldiers and settlers. That is a prospect practically no one in Israel or abroad is advocating.

Somebody was advocating invasion because troops were massed on the border all weekend; Israeli diplomats when asked about a truce were pondering the nature of language instead of working on one; and oh right, women and children continued to die. Are we to believe that the men who said "all-out war" on a Tuesday are going to revise their comments on Saturday?

This is some slo-pitch, beer-league bullshit. With evidence to the contrary mounting, we are meant to believe Israel's motivations to be sincere? That this isn't the last part of a years'-long land-grab? That this isn't a model for how the West Bank will be won? That somehow, protection from the strategic equivalent of bottle rockets requires aerial bombardment of densely-packed civilian areas?

"Hamas rule" is what's being attacked, not Palestinians? I don't think Bin Laden resorted to that kind of craven, self-exculpatory language when he last killed American civilians, you know, "We are against the rule of Bush," "The rule of Clinton in America must end," etc.

The sooner we stop sugar-coating this thing, and start talking about where refugees will go, how to get doctors into the region, how Hamas will gain political power in the West Bank, etc., the better.

"Who will lead Gaza when Hamas is gone?" Try, "Who will lead Hamas when Gaza is gone?"
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Quickly, now...

2009-01-03T10:56:00.004-05:00

Quick. First, the fact that Israel is "running out of targets," leads MSNBC to conclude that "Diplomacy Gains Steam." Once there's nothing left to argue over, then we can argue. Can we talk about Proportional Response? Can we talk about the average pothole a Katyusha leaves in the street? Let's leave the President out of this one, though, because he seems to believe that kids cowering in basements are committing acts of terror...

AP has hundreds of Palestinians allowed to leave Gaza, as though that were somehow magnanimous. Isn't the point to rid Palestine of Palestinians? Isn't that what checkpoints, doubled roads, the long wall, the spread of Jewish settlements, what all that is for?

Civilians leaving is the worst thing possible for Hamas. The threat of civilian casualites (Again, a distinction whose goalposts move. Is a Hamas parliamentarian asleep in his home a combatant? When a fourteen-year-old throwing rocks is killed by IDF small arms fire, it's a combat fatality. When he is bombed to death alongside his mother and sisters, it's civilian. The only sure non-combatants, according to the UN, are women. How much you wanna bet that distinction changes once there is no Gaza for those women to return to?), like I said, the threat of civilian casualties, we presume, is the only thing holding Israel back. They leave, and all bets are off. I mean, if we assume that this is something other than the apocalypse.

Which is the funny part about Nasrallah's allegation of a grand Arab plot against the Palestinians, whereby the leaders of the softie Arabs (Egypt, Jordan, Turkey i guess) give Israel carte blanche until Monday. At which point, Nasrallah says, the tanks turn back into pumpkins. Hassan Nasrallah may be the Islamic world's premiere satirist. How much more could he shame the Arab governments, so obviously powerless to come to Gaza's aid? Well, by mocking their pretension to power. "Oh yeah, I heard it from Mubarak, he's gonna give the Israelis 5 days, and then he's gonna bring the hammer down. You know, really fuck 'em up. Ha."

So Nasrallah knows this is the end, that Israel is going to wipe the map clean, that the first step was pulling its settlers out, that the ultimate intent is to resettle Gaza with Israelis. Pretty coastline, great weather. You can grow excellent strawberries there. Somebody check my Leviticus, what's the Hebrew for cleanse?

Prognostic Gospels...

2008-12-31T11:27:00.003-05:00

The resulting international backlash when he's found out will provide the perfect opening for Medvedev to demonstrate that he does, indeed, have a sack. Medvedev puts Putin on trial and he's exiled to the United States where he and Dubya do armwrestling for charity in Vegas.

Now, of course, we all know Putin shoots tigers and, by night, fights petty crime in Moscow to make the streets safe for larger crime; so there's little chance Dubya would have anything on him in an armwrestling contest. But now we get word that there's a feeling in certain circles that, maybe, just maybe, one of Medvedev's balls might've dropped?

Really, what are the odds of a surprise run by Medvedev when his term is up and he's expected to just pat the seat for Ol' Vlad like, "Was just keeping warm for you, Tsarov"? How fun would that be? How quickly would he get poisoned?

The most hilarious thing about that Russkie's predictionating...

2008-12-29T22:47:00.002-05:00

...is the Midwest coming under the sway of Canada. Really? Seriously? Kansas? Kansas under the sway of pot-decriminalizing, bilingual, socialized healthcare-having Canada? Madness. In Soviet Russia, prediction cracks up you!

Must've been a slow news day at the Journal. This hit reddit about a month ago and enjoyed a day of BOLD RED ALL-CAPS on Drudge around the same time. But, seriously... Kansas? Wow. And South Carolina under the sway of the European Union? Come now, anybody who's crossed the Mason Dixon knows SC is just biding its time until nobody's looking and then-BAM!-secession.

Of course, at the same time, drops in oil prices have Russia scurrying to cut costs and, well, hold themselves together. Hmph, commodity-based economy shaky in the midst of decline in global demand for said commodity? Whodathunk?

But, really, this predicting thing is fun. Let's try, eh? I predict that, in the next few years the continued slump in demand will push Putin threaten to cut off assistance to Iran's Bushehr facility if they don't do somethin' crazy. The resulting international backlash when he's found out will provide the perfect opening for Medvedev to demonstrate that he does, indeed, have a sack. Medvedev puts Putin on trial and he's exiled to the United States where he and Dubya do armwrestling for charity in Vegas.

Back like cooked crack.

Glorious Predictionhood!

2008-12-29T15:18:00.002-05:00

DR: PANARIN: Insolent Amerikanskii; your decadent empire crumbles as we are speaking!
TRANSLATOR: "Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control." -- WSJ

Dr. Fish vs. Ma Bell

2008-12-29T11:00:00.010-05:00

I have no idea where to begin, so let's start here.

I'll try to keep this brief because it is a matter of no consequence, but Stanley Fish's piece on AT&T, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Voice Mail," or whatever, wherein he tells us of trying to change his service via telephone, having a mild stroke over corporate language, and taking his revenge by writing a column (well play'd, sirra), so, see, we all fold back on ourselves with contented pop-pomo "glee" and "satisfaction," is a major thorn in my ass.

My problems are various. First, Dr. Fish asks us to forgive him in advance for having two homes and the problems that come with them. Imagine for a second if John McCain had done that. How well do you think the populace would have taken, "Look, folks. It's hard to deal with five mansions and two condos, but I can handle that challenge," etc.? Questions of class cannot be "bracketed," and the context of our Story of Frustration Rewarded, Fish's Pilgrim's Progress through the teleworld, determines our understanding. We can't forget about who Stanley Fish is and then react to his "ordeal" from behind the veil of ignorance.

How many times can I say the same thing? One more: if Fish had written a story about how he had returned to Home #2 after a long time to find it occupied by stoats and weasels, perhaps our sympathy readings would have ticked up. It's a bitch to get weasels out of your mansion, even if you do have three stout friends with cudgels. (What I'm doing here is a little text-blend on Mr. Fish, you see, so that he, with his animal name, joins Mr. Toad, Badger, Ratty and Moley in The Wind in the Willows, which, full disclosure, was my favorite thing to listen to when I was small. Cross-disciplinarity, self-referentiality, intertextual references and light caricature, let us remember, are all hallmarks of the bargain basement postmodernism seminar that Fish runs.)

Point: the quality of the pain experienced has a lot to do with whether the reader will allow Fish to bracket his class issues. Also, bracketing anticipates a return to the bracketed matter. Our sympathy for Fish presumably escalates when he publishes his piece on Class and the Telephone. Hint.

All other problems with the piece flow from this first bracketing. Stanley is not a person who gets the bureaucratic run-around so often as to be inured to it, so AT&T makes him crazy with a Network kind of amokness. People who spend their days-off standing in line at the gas company, then at Department of Human Services, constantly being unserved, approach bureaucracy with frustration, not satisfaction, as the expected end product. Thus, what Stanley brackets away is an understanding of why he has such a hard time with AT&T: he has irrational expectations of service. Note the arrogance of his demanding that AT&T be running fully staffed on Sunday. Okay, noted? Let's move on.

Again, from his cocoon, Stanley can't tell that the grammatical boner that sends him into apoplexy might actually be intentional. Operators cut in and out of multiple phone calls rapidly. Sometimes they'll lose the first syllables, sometimes the last. "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" could lose its front or back, and remain nominally intelligible and polite. The greeting has the advantage, from a corporate viewpoint, of inducing hypnosis, or from a consumer's advocate's viewpoint, of assuaging concern. (Also, I've gone seven rounds with Ma Bell, and seventeen with Verizon, and never have I heard this Yeti-phrase. Is it possible, not to be meta-anything, that Stan has made this story up as bait? Is he just stirring up the pond?)

Other things Stanley loses with his class in brackets: the realization that the operator who laughs is laughing at him, not with; the understanding that AT&T has no idea who he is, or what conference Florida International plays football in; the sure knowledge that the troubles of one little person, etc.; the possibility that there are other things outside his immediate experience worth writing about, as Israel continues to bomb Gaza, and possibly even there are some experiences near to his own worth writing about, like winter, or Christmas, because who clears up bureaucratic slop between Christmas and New Year's?

But the kicker is this: Fish, by excluding his story from solidarity with a community, clearly even while he is enacting it, forgets the double bind he's put the customer service people into. Refer the crazy man to your boss, and you seriously could be fired. Deny good customer service to the crazy man, e.g. by refusing to refer him up the chain of command, and you could also be fired.

Operators hem and haw, not because they're corporate peons (which assessment is the unspoken message of Fish's diatribe, that people lose their humanity by internalizing corporate imperatives or some such bull's shit) but because they're in an untenable position.

Seriously, a Christmas message for everybody, you, me, Fish, Israel, Hamas: try a little tenderness...

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Peace on Earth

2008-12-27T20:21:00.005-05:00

As if the end of capitalism-as-we-know-it weren't enough to bring out the pre-millenial tension, now comes what looks an awful lot like endgame for Gaza.

Opening the routes to commerce was Hamas’s main goal in its cease-fire with Israel, just as ending the rocket fire was Israel’s central aim. But while rocket fire did go down drastically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month, Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped and because Hamas continued to smuggle weapons from Egypt through desert tunnels. Hamas said this was a violation of the agreement, a sign of Israel’s real intentions and cause for further rocket fire.

Why now? This is not an off-the-cuff response to an immediate threat, remember. Every police and fire station in Gaza is a target; this isn't a fine-bore assassination. The stated provocation -- Hamas' unwillingness / inability to halt rocket attacks absolutely, despite the recent ratcheting down of same by 90 percent -- is incommensurate to Israel's response. A planned operation; so, timing matters.

Does the Bush-Obama interregnum matter here? Is this attack one last bash in the days of carte blanche? Is this a pre-election surprise? Ehud called off his campaign a la the Air Pirate, after all. (What if McCain had had something to bomb back in October? What if...) Is this, in short, something other than the end times for Palestine?

The possible net gain for Israel is so small (0 rockets a month from 10-20), indeed at this point is negative, as 70-odd rockets were launched in response to the raids, and the risk so ludicrous that the Road Map cycle (raids, talks, breakdowns, raids) is now obsolete.

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah. Israel has to imagine that overwhelming force will eliminate the threat from Gazastan, and trump any response from the broader community of militants. Which is not exactly what we saw in Lebanon, but selah.

Then: Israel carpet-bombs Gaza, which experiences Beirut-2006-like casualties, world opens its heart to Hamas. At this point, we either get back on the Road Map, and kids lose their hands for next 20 years playing with cluster bomblets, or the bombing doesn't stop, and our children will talk about Palestinians the way we talk about Tasmanians.
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More from the Life of Nouri...

2008-12-18T10:19:00.003-05:00

Little Nouri is consolidating power. Today's NYT story on the arrest of 35 Interior Ministry officials includes a correction.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that one of the Iraqi officials arrested was Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, the ministry’s director of internal affairs.

Turns out WaPo read the first draft and just called up General Abu Raqeef to ask if he had hired a lawyer. Obv., 'Qeef was pissed:

When reached by telephone, Raqeef denied the allegation and said he was still in his job. He blamed disgruntled rivals inside the ministry for spreading rumors to discredit him." I fired many officers and sent some of them to face justice," Raqeef told the Washington Post. "Probably this is why they are trying to destroy my reputation."

Until we have details of the planned coup, names of the conspirators, when they met, where they met, how much money they had, and proof that Al Awda (The Return) is more than an acronym for Nouri's Al Dawa, probably we should file these stories under "Nouri Does the Putin."

GI's are out. Surely it would help Nouri going forward if Shiite militias acting as the military wing of Dawa were active again. And the quickest route to that happening is to diminish the power of the IM's Internal Affairs, chief of which is the "squeaky clean" Gen'l Abu Raqeef. Says Mr. Kazimi at the Hudson Institute:

He was arrested by U.S. troops not too long ago on trumped up charges, and I wouldn't be surprised if these latest accusations turn out to be more of the same.

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Return the Gift

2008-12-17T20:14:00.012-05:00

Rraa. Long time no see. Where to begin?

As we transition from an economy based on speculation to one based on gift, let DS be no exception to the potlatch: a gift for you, dear Reader.

I've spent most of my time the past few weeks working down at the paint shop, whose one advantage over other jobs is the license I've been given to indoctrinate others to my musical beliefs. Ha. What this means is I listen to the first Joggers record a lot. Which is an acquired taste, Pitchfork's 8.0 notwithstanding, featuring as it does the "thing" that skyrocketed the band to fame, namely shape note singing. Check it here, at 02:30 :

Back To The Future - The Joggers

At random, on WOSU, I saw a local group of early American music singers, and lo, at 2:56 :

Happy Christmas
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When Piyush comes to Shove...

2008-12-09T11:54:00.003-05:00

...Republicans will start electing non-Anglos. Congratulations, for instance, go to new Representative Anh Johnny Cao, who rid us all of William Jefferson to become the new poster child (sorry Bobby Tomato) for a no-longer-race-exclusive-GOP. Ignore John Boehner's lame writing:

In a release titled “The Future is Cao,” Boehner wrote that “the Cao victory is a symbol of what can be achieved when we think big, present a positive alternative and win the trust of the American people.”

Mr. Cao joins Republican sponsors of terrorism Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart in the exclusive Quagmire Caucus, a group open to right-wing immigrants, refugees or children of same who fled American military action in the 60s and 70s.

I also considered titling this post "How Now Brown Cao?" Forgive me, and chuc may man, Mr. Representative. You may now git some.
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Nice paragraph.

2008-12-07T10:48:00.003-05:00

So, NYT on current tensions in E Jerusalem:

The infrastructure improvements, in ordinary circumstances, would be welcome news in a poor and neglected neighborhood like Silwan. But in the charged atmosphere of East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from the Jordanians in the 1967 war and later annexed, some perceive even municipal road works and new traffic arrangements as part of a larger plan.

Soft pedal? Ignorance? Lack of sleep? What happened here?

Since when have residents of poor neighborhoods anywhere ever seen "infrastructure improvements" as "welcome news"? I mean, I get the jobs argument, but it didn't happen that way in the South Bronx. Or Columbus OH, where I-71 cuts off the East Side from the rest of town, or Richmond VA where I-195 excises basically all the poor neighborhoods from the monied core of the city, or indeed anywhere in America.

"New traffic arrangements"?? Like Jews-only access roads? I mean, what to us are mere "traffic arrangements" are the means of repression in E Jerusalem and the W Bank.

Not to hyperventilate here, but this Robert Moses attitude towards the people on the ground is not doing the State of Israel any favors, either in terms of pure PR or more seriously, in terms of preserving peace. And all these "construction projects" are handled neutrally in the NYT, as if Palestinian anger over them is utterly incomprehensible.

Man. Flashing fuck fingers at the NYT today, y'all...
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Show me the Brita...

2008-12-06T12:09:00.003-05:00

...and I won't blow myself up in this public place?

Hamas gained popular support in a context of official fecklessness. The equation is not simply, provide general welfare = win elections. Hamas won the Palestinian assembly because it gave people, over the course of decades, the material wealth that Fatah hoarded for itself, the Arafat family, and sundry cronies.

Point is, it doesn't matter how much American civilian aid / reconstruction gets doled out. If we are still bombing civilian targets on flawed intelligence, if we are still occupying territory, we are the enemy.

I mean, never mind the fact that there is not such thing as unfettered distribution of reconstruction aid: we and the Iraqi government have some problems building those precious water treatment plants.

There is always a government on the ground that is not our government, and sometimes it does things like fire all the dudes who blow the whistle on fraud.

Pakistan under Musharraf, and I'm guessing this won't change under Zardari, said thanks but no thanks to that reconstruction aid, adding, "Could we please have some of those F-16s though? We need a rapid-response delivery vehicle for our nuclear weapons, you see."

Reconstruction aid is a bridge to nowhere. Only a legitimately elected regional government will be able to deal with the NW Frontier. Our best bet in the meantime is targeted assassinations of Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Preferably not from airplanes/drones. If that would be made easier by breaking Pakistan into little bits (a Baluch republic in the southwest, bantustans around the Khyber) so be it. Eff with the bull, you get the horns.
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Beg Clarification, NYT

2008-12-05T11:06:00.007-05:00

Doug Burgess in the NYT has editorialized in support of prosecuting Somali pirates under terrorism laws, arguing, among other things, that pirates are hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Now the last time the paper called someone hostis humani generis, it was Saddam Hussein, but you know, we'll let bye-byes be bye-byes. It was a long story, there were subpoenas, and it involved poor Judith Miller having "lunch" with -eugh- Karl Rove.

What's not to love about Somali pirates? First of all, it takes balls of brass to hit the Indian Ocean in a skiff and knock off a luxury liner or an oil tanker. There is no count of the men who have died in these pirate raids, just by virtue of foul weather.

Second, they're getting money into the hands of the Somali populace, which is something no "legitimate institution" in Somalia has succeeded in doing, from the warlords' gangs to the UN-pawn transitional government, to the Islamic Courts Union.

Third, it's not like these men have much choice in the matter. Stay on land, and you might be able to smuggle khat for a living. Oh. Or not. Of course, there's a civil war going on, and if the Ethiopian occupiers (for whom we the US provided air cover) don't mistake you for an insurgent, chances are some yank from JTF-Horn will.

Fourth, compared to the grim specter of Germany suddenly finding it necessary to vest the powers of a unitary executive in the chancellor again, the pirates look like Goldilockses.

Fifth, what kind of neoliberal worth his salt would do anything but applaud the ingenuity of these men, their ability to take lemons and make cash out of 'em. Piracy is one response to the West's relentless hectoring of the third world to do what their parents did and get a job sir. It's a small business, run in a decentralized manner. CEOs are reinvesting their capital in operations to increase productivity, you know, instead of investing it in corporate jets. Having had early success, they've broadened their scope.

And the real kicker? Shippers' insurers realize what this dillweed in the NYT chooses to ignore: it's cheaper to pay these men than to mount operations to "rescue" the impounded merchandise. Shippers themselves would rather pay pirates their ransom than pay insurance companies the ludicrously high premiums that would attend any decision by the shippers to do something rash such as arm all crew. Filling a market niche cheaply! Reinvestment and expansion! What part of piracy is not model capitalism?

Since this Doug person needs to be taken back to middle-school civics class, we'll start here: Piracy is fundamentally apolitical -- there is no pirates' polis. This is how it differs from terrorism. Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were pirates. Pirates helped the colonies throw off the British yoke. You can't pay Al Qaeda to cease operations, to release the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden etc. Any pirate, however, can be paid cash. All grievances can be settled for legal tender.

"Gimme the Loot" is running through my head.
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Sun shines on a dog's ass...

2008-12-01T19:38:00.002-05:00

Francis "End of History" Fukuyama's got a piece in New Perspectives Quarterly wondering "Is America Ready for a Post-American World?"

Leaving aside the question of whether there ever really was an "American World" to predicate a "Post-American World," Fukuyama's generally on that "man, we gotta make our society actually work 'cause other folks is catchin' up"-boilerplate steez that's pretty de rigeur nowadays, what with our society not really working and other folks catchin' up as they is. Very little new or interesting--which isn't necessarily too huge a criticism, as the problems faced are well known, as are many reasonable solution--but here was an interesting tidbit:
The critique was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.
But, in fact, American foreign policy has to be preoccupied with a certain kind of social work today. Opponents of American power around the world—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, as well as populist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa or Evo Morales—have succeeded in coming to power because they can offer social services directly to poor people in their countries.

Here's where one of the real shames of the transition. BHO pledged to double foreign aid to $50 billion. In recent weeks, he's said that may have to be one of the things on the chopping block in light of the financial Gotterdammerung. Crying shame, that, 'cause wouldn't it be interesting if'n we could stroll into Pakistan with maybe 2/3 the current military aid, putting the other third into building them... say... water purification systems?

More later...

Can I Please Name My Firstborn Eclipse Glasses?

2008-11-30T23:04:00.003-05:00

Forgive me. From Mental Floss:

In June 2001, a total solar eclipse was about to cross southern Africa. To prepare, the Zimbabwean and Zambian media began a massive astronomy education campaign focused on warning people not to stare at the Sun. Apparently, the campaign worked. The locals took a real liking to the vocabulary, and today, the birth registries are filled with names like Eclipse Glasses Banda, Totality Zhou, and Annular Mchombo.

So long Vlad, Vytautas, Ivy, Daisy, Polygraph, Mindaugas, Rickey Henderson and Barry Zito: meet new baby Eclipse Glasses!
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The Post-human Fallacy

2008-11-29T00:00:00.003-05:00

I'm actually sitting here watching The Incredibles for the second time this weekend, searching for the Main Nerve. What was it that triggered my rat-brain to respond to the so-called philosophers of the post-human with the emotional equivalent of fatwa? I have no problem with superheroes; I saw and dug the last Batman movie; I'm a fan of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and find the refrain "Humanity must be o'erleapt!" to have healing power. The current spurs to my thought are a NYT Mag interview with the maker of Wikiscanner, and a piece in Der Spiegel, but they might as well have been Heroes, Fringe, or Mitt Romney. No shortage.

The idea of superfluous human potential is a soothing fantasy. For a Saturday evening's entertainment, a spectacular fiction. Theorists of the post-human are -- I think; the lines blur between what are, to a post-humanist, the inevitable consequences of the "post-human condition," and what are ideological postures to be advocated -- doing something apart from the modern project of perfectible humanity, sublated into pure Spirit.

Which makes a defense of a -- by contrast, if not authentically -- humanist position a little more slippery. If we were talking about exceeding human potential through cloned organs, genetic modification, artifical neural nets, usw, it would suffice to refute such ambitions with a sardonic, "Cf. Levi, Primo, 'Angelic Butterfly,' in The Sixth Day and Other Tales," which is one of Levi's sci-fi works, describing the reluctant work of a Nazi scientist locked into experiments in human potential. Turns out that believing adult humans are actually larval and dosing them with hormones has ugly consequences.

But post-human theorists can't be caricatured as a new generation of Dr. Mengeles. There is a sense of fatigue in the work that any resolute modernist would shy from, and that frankly, gets its impetus (if you can call it that) from the same place as sparked Levi's pity/scorn for humanity. The problem of justifying human activity (building, writing, producing, spawning) via humanism (if our works are meant to give us fleeting access to our higher nature, where in the pantheon is Auschwitz?) is yes cumbersome. That doesn't mean that we can shunt off the responsibility to account for the ideology beneath our actions elsewhere, like "I dunno. Humanity is a problem. Let's leave it to the cyborgs."

This isn't about the menace inherent in any discussion of our non-human doppelgangers (Although of course it is also about that. I think of a Mitt-Romney-Terminator, what about you? Also: What's the difference between zombies and cyborgs? Braaaiinsss).

I suspect that theorists of the post-human, like acolytes of any new religion, need a coping mechanism to deal with radical inhumanity. Rather than do the hard work of admitting that hideous humans are still human, isn't it easier to change the subject; to enter into endless divagations about what constitutes a human, when life begins, what is the nature of consciousness, und so weiter?

How tired of human problems do you have to be to fantasize about artificial intelligence and artificial corporeality? Isn't the Singularity just one more otaku vision of hyperreal pocket pussy, as the NYT slyly suggests?

MEET SINGLES: Afraid of, or excited by, the prospect of ultraintelligent machines that can think, learn and know that they’re thinking and learning?[...]

More later. Perhaps sometime I'll be able to articulate my love of Nietzsche vis-a-vis my hatred of cyborgs (seriously, Human, All too Human is not a curse, it's a gift). Right now, I'm going to Netflix A Scanner Darkly...peace...
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Piyush-Bobby Tomato-Potato

2008-11-26T10:57:00.002-05:00

From ProspectBlogs:

But it looks as if Newt will try to take over the party machine with a bid to become the new chairman of the Republican national committee. Jindal is biding his time. The likeable Cajun newcomer, the nearest thing the Republicans have to an Obama figure, is worth a flutter.

Piyush might've been better served had his name not been bandied about so much as longshot veep-fodder. The lefties know about him now and have a healthy base from which to keep digging. But I wonder if he won't keep his powder dry until 2016. Palin will come out guns blazing in 2012, one supposes. And the base is hungry for her return, feeling she's the way the party should've gone anyway. Sac-Lamb decreed, does Catho-convert Piyush go along with?

Turkey will help cure the mindblocks.

Jim DeMint is My Hero

2008-11-18T18:39:00.002-05:00

Who said I was an ideologue? Let them fall silent, for today, unlike those 13 namby-pamby Dimmycrats who wouldn't publicize their votes against Lieberman, Senator Jim DeMint of the Palmetto State put his name to a resolution to expel Ted Stevens from the Senate, thereby earning praise from these quarters. Not only that, while Mitch McConnell was speaking, DeMint said he had the ten-and-a-half:

"After talking with many of my colleagues, it's clear there are sufficient votes to pass the resolution regarding Senator Stevens."

Making DeMint's assault on Stevens even more brazen, the whole process of retribution may be moot, because Begich is up by some thousand of votes.

Clearly, this is a choice based on principle, not expediency. A reformed conservative movement will stand on principle, and that means kicking the bums out. Even when the voters have already done so. Nothing better than a surreptitious kick to the balls...

As for the Democrats' vote on Lieberman, IHT offers some tidbits:

Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Pat Leahy, D-Vt., spoke against allowing Lieberman keep the Homeland Security and Government Affairs post. Reid, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Kerry, D-Mass., were among those speaking in his favor, according to a Democratic aide, who spoke anonymously to discuss a private meeting.

Some, like Iowan Tom Harkin, still harbor hard feelings for statements Lieberman made during the campaign. Harkin took particular offense when Lieberman said a vote against funding the war in Iraq without a deadline for a troop withdrawal meant Obama had voted to cut off funding for troops in harm's way.

As near as I can tell, from hints in this one and the articles above, those agin' Leebs: Sanders, Leahy, Harkin?, Casey? More speculatively: Byrd?, Webb?, Feingold?, Feinstein?, Kennedy?

For Leebs: Reid, Durbin, Kerry, Salazar, Dodd, Klobuchar, Nelson (NE), Nelson (FL), Carper (DE), Cardin, Landrieu.
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Show Me the Oversight...

2008-11-18T09:35:00.003-05:00

Poor Nouri Kemal al-Maliki. All the problems he contends with on a basis daily. Iran, Turkey, the PKK, Muqtada al-Sadr, now two American administrations with separate demands and expectations, and those pesky Iraqi accountants...at least the accountants he can fire.

I'm particularly fond of the Times' surreptitious kick to the Iraqi balls, noting again and again the Iraqi "endemic corruption," -- how that's just how things are in "that part of the world." And the USG should know. We ourselves keep misplacing our collective wallet over in that part of the world.

In China, the penalty for bribery is death. This accords with my latent puritanical character. (There will be Virtue, or the Terror!) For the land that birthed Hammurabi to go soft on oversight is just a damn shame.

If fraud were not pie for Maliki, he wouldn't be firing his fraud monitors. Reckon it's time we got those poor Iraqi number-crunchers each a scimitar...
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Future Sacrificial Lamb, Sarah Palin...

2008-11-14T11:50:00.002-05:00

Quick hits.

Check the step-in by TXGov in that press conference. The repub governors from the Contiguous States of Real America, along with a nice amount of the party machinery, hate this woman. She's PeggyHillClueless, I think. Coming off a personal jet, shopping spree, adoring crowds whirlwind. Just biding her time until 2012 to run again.

Check the comedy of Pat "White People Need to Breed More" Buchanan and random black (ugh) republican. Black dude's like "party needs to change," Old Man Buchanan, how fucking apropos? can't even conceive of what he's talking about.

So the repubs aren't going to get it together any time soon. They just can't present a viable alternative to the coming Democratic left-pragmatism. They'll have no organizing principle by 2012. These things don't just happen over the course of a presidential term. They have no organizing hero. No vanquished one to long for and get behind. Post 2008 election, they're left with the McCain the Antedilluvian, Romney the Creepy, Huckabee the Homely, RonPaul! the Crazy, and... oh yeah... Palin the PeggyHillClueless.

So I'm betting the left-pragmatic job creation scheme works pretty well in a few years. Things won't be great, but they'll be picking up. The country will be a few years older, more used to Obama. The muslim rumors will vanish. The skittishness about his readiness dissipates. And Americans get comfortable with BarryHussein. No reason to change horses midstream. Meanwhile, the repubs have no organizing principle, still. And they need a sacrificial lamb. Up steps Sarah...

Seriously, Who's Got the 10 1/2? Pawlenty's got the 10 1/2...

2008-11-14T00:00:00.001-05:00

The gift and the curse of Sarah Palin is in full effect as Republican governors retreat to Nixon's turf for their winter meetings. The gift is the unprecendented media attention given, by spillover, to dudes like Tim Pawlenty.

The curse is she had to speak. Beginning with "God Bless George W. Bush and I thank you Mr. President," is, I'm guessing, not what Americans want to hear. The GOP seems to recognize this. Politico's blind quote is indicative: She Is Our Britney Spears.

Pawlenty's remarks, on the other hand, are awesome. Listen to the whole thing on Minnesota Public Radio.

To start, he disses Palin before she even gets to town, saying it is not "fair and not complete" to just say "we didn't do that bad." He litanizes the ass-whupping, and I'm paraphrasing here: We cannot compete in the northeast, the great lakes, the west coast, the mid-atlantic [...] those are not factors that make up success going forward. For his money, the GOP can harmonize the Hensarling Quasar and the nameless "modernizing" forces within the Party (evidently those that recognize that non-white people can actually vote). I don't know if he's right, but Pawlenty is funny and thoughtful, and once again, I'm pretty sure that McCain called him up looking for a VP, and Tim said "No thanks, Air Pirate."

Big Government and Big Business coalescing to defend their interests! Tim! You sound like John Edwards! "Drill baby drill, by itself, is not an energy policy." To applause! There aren't enough Republicans around to be throwing people overboard! The party with a big-ass Welcome Mat! Why isn't this man a Democrat?

His closing anecdote about MJ's 56-point night was brilliant. He's buddies with Tim Kaine, which, you know, to my mind is a demerit, but to plenty of Virginians is a good thing. This is all gravy for the GOP. The question is, Can a voice of Reason, Probity and Temperance prevail against its own Hard-Ass Brethren? Can that voice then compete with an already-established Cool Hand?

Thinking a little bit longer on this, the brilliance of that Jordan story is that it makes up for the knocks against Palin scattered throughout Tim's speech. Pawlenty doesn't want to banish Palin to the Senate, he wants her front and center, making sure the voters of the family values fringe line up and vote hard. It's funny, self-deprecating (if we assume that by analogy, Pawlenty is the rookie who scores one point, and Palin Jordan with 56) and practical.

For the moment, I'm putting money on Hensarling leading a redneck-small-gubmint series of night raids. Pawlenty's Big Think is being done already, just by Democrats, and it will take longer than a couple of election cycles. So while Jeb and company focus on one half of Nathan Bedford Forrest's famous dictum, i.e., getting there firstest, Tim graciously takes the second half: getting there with the mostest.
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Always Trust Dark Steer, Readers, Always...

2008-11-12T21:39:00.004-05:00

More evidence, Dear Reader, that you profit by the speculations of the Dark Steer: Caribou Barbie wants a piece of the action.

DS called this, including the passage about non-acceptance of Senators' credentials, here. DS also speculated on the analogous relationship between Palin and MacBeth here. Read how closely the AP hits DS talking points:

Even if he is re-elected, Stevens could be ousted by the Senate for his conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, mostly renovations on his home. If Stevens loses his seat, Palin could run for it in a special election. She also could challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010.

Right on. Article 1, section 5 is Palin's best friend. Because she ain't going to beat Lisa Murkowski. End DS gloating.

Also, for the record, the press needs to quit burying the Republican Party. I feel like Cowboy in Full Metal Jacket, urging the platoon to keep moving because 8-Ball is wasted: "I've seen this before, man." The consensus that the GOP is dead is like snipers shooting into a corpse to lure unsuspecting/enraged soldiers in closer. Don't touch the corpse. Let's keep our distance, and see if we can spot where the revanchist fringe will retreat to. Signs point to here: a swath of counties running from the Ozarks to southern Appalachia wherein the population became 10-15% more Republican between 2004 and 2008.

Let's get on that nova thing. Peace
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Who has the bolshy yarbles? Female suicide bombers, that's who.

2008-11-06T17:03:00.003-05:00

The head of Putin is heavy. As Dark Steer's analysis showed, the last thing Putin really wanted this August when he invaded Georgia / accepted Georgian provocation to invade was to add yet another Russian region to the long list of "restives."

Today we saw proof. Russia can't expand a sphere of influence while continuing to wage war just to maintain its territorial integrity. What succor can Putin offer the "oppressed peoples" of northern Georgia when he can't protect his own from Chechen suicide bombers?

So, questions for the Premier: Was Putin's motivation in the Georgian incursion to deny safe haven in South Ossetia for Chechen militants? If so, can't we expect him to back down on the announced Polish-border missiles?

Don't the Chechens want what Putin does, i.e. land and thus oil royalties? So isn't the real beef a federalist beef, i.e., between the regions en masse and the central government? Thus, isn't it absurd to target the capital of North Ossetia rather than a Big Russian target? What kind of dumbass Chechen would do this?

Do Ossetians (of N and S) really want Chechens to have beef with them rather than with Mother Russia? If not, does this push them towards Moscow and anschluss, or away and toward more "restiveness"? Might Moscow have a reason to start beef between regions therefore?

(This is not nearly as paranoid as it sounds. Putin covered up Beslan, assassinated Anna Politkovskaya, etc. He likes Dark Ops. Why he can't just say, "I'm waging war on Chechnya, don't mess with me, this is an insurrection," I still don't know. Presumably he still wants to be invited to the G8, but that's a high price for a tea party...)

hasta
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Notes on Barry Hussein, Fat Hitler, Other Divagations

2008-11-05T16:35:00.004-05:00

This is how it feels to win an election. Forgive ds, but this is an entriely new feeling. The first real election I was aware of, to the extent that I felt real heartbreak, was 1994. Failure ever since; we can argue the merits of 1996 or James Jeffords' defection, but the fact remains that I have never seen a tidal wave / tsunami / landslide / metaphor-worthy election.

McCain's concession was the only eloquent thing he's said since he fired Mike Murphy. I'm betting Murphy, or one of the heads from 2000 wrote it. Even the phrases encapsulating the seed of a future "Racism Is Over" tactic were glorious. A cynic would say necessarily so. Still:

But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

...is not half bad for the guy who voted against Martin Luther King Day. Had sentiments like these come out six months ago, McCain would be president. Surely, the fact that this dude can only be gracious in defeat, and is petulant the whole rest of the time, this is the hallmark of political failure, Cf. Gore, Albert Arnold Jr..

Another note: Keep David Axelrod off the television. He looks like a communist Mike Ditka. He looks like Fat Hitler. A head out of The Jungle. Face fit for radio. Like he never missed a meal. Like he could fish Lake Michigan with his head. All Chicagoans are like this. How do they make it in the World?

Nuhs like to think Palin is done, but I disagree. I think she's just got a taste. Does she run for Ted Stevens' seat? (Again, this is assuming Begich doesn't pull a couple thousand votes out of his hat. Also assuming that Stevens a) dies, b) resigns, c) is refused a seat in the Senate, as a convicted felon. Article I, section 5: "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members[...]." I remember this from the noise about possibly not seating Ollie North in 1996...) I think she wants all the perks of office, with none of the scrutiny, and given Stevens' example, the Senate is the place to be. Keep the oil flowing, not really do shit.

But the real questions are all about the mid-term election. Largely, this is because we can't think about 2012, though we try, until 2010 is sorted. And really, what are the Democratic prospects in 2010? The speculative economy is broken. We would be able to speculate on New Energy, if the Obama energy plan were operative. So find me 100 billion dollars in the federal budget.

Iraq? Trick is that incremental drawdowns of troops don't proportionately draw down costs, Cf. Congressional Budget Office, 10/24/2007. Veterans cost money too, for starters, and the infrastructure already in country has a flat cost that ain't going nowhere. Let's be charitable and assume that the drawdown gets us to 6 billion a month down from 10. The president-elect has committed to a troop surge in Afghanistan. There go your savings.

Increase marginal tax rates, right? Without 60 in the Senate, without the right bundle of tax cuts to sugarcoat it, without some way to round the corner on all those conservative congresspeople we just elected, it ain't happening. Seriously, is Periello, assuming he makes it into Congress from the VA 5th, going to raise anybody's taxes? A sugarcoated marginal tax increase is good policy any damn way, don't get me wrong, Teddy Roosevelt caught all kinds of shit for the progressive income tax, we know this, but do middle-class tax cuts result in increased federal revenue? Which, remember, is what we need to solidify the economy, get elected again, and really get some socialism on...aw, did I say that out loud?

For real. Show me the money. The first 100 days are economy days. Taxes alone will take 100 days. The "mandate" was historical, in that the election had an historical purpose. But that purpose is acheived, and 2010 is back to ordinary politics. I'm talking to you, Fat Hitler.

Seriously, this could be a Jimmy Carter presidency. It should not be.
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On Some Real Underground Shit...

2008-11-03T09:22:00.004-05:00

So I was walking to campus the other night, and I sidestepped a woman in a Starter jacket who was yelling at the ground. She had, among other things, lost her phone. Having found her phone, she started yelling into the air things I can't transcribe because they were too wacky to remember (we come to nature through a schema, after all, and what doesn't fit is cast aside as dream-time). Things like: "Are you in a disguise?" and, "one of those fag spies," and "selling oil, real underground shit!" This is run of the mill in Philadelphia, and is mitigated by the fact that there's always someone else on the street with you and Crazy Jane. Here, sadly, no.

All of which made me think of Our Hero, the Famous Air Pirate, who has finally pulled the prohibition on running Wright ads, albeit on broadcast TV with the juiciest bits fobbed clean. He is essentially, at this point, alone on the street, yelling incoherently into the air.

Incoherence. The ad -- on TV, "God damn" is bleeped out -- presumes that the audience knows about it already. I mean, when you bleep out "God damn America," couldn't it just as easily be "God bless America?" Isn't this supposed to be an election won in the center, and by undecideds?

Once again, this is tacking to the right for 2010. The major corporate contributors to the NRTPac (scroll to the end of the individual disclosures) are rightist media outlets: Newsmax, Endeavor Media, Eagle Publishing. The treasurer, Peter Leitner, runs a talk radio blog that reminds us, "Jihad runs both ways." He appears to be his own announcer, and broadcasting from his mom's basement, btw.

Are a handful of amateur Tim McVeigh sympathizers really going to change the minds of every undecided voter in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, usw? Please.

Although, from the looks of Palin's barn-raising down by Rickenbacker Airport, it is not the Great Silent Majority, but the Mere Redneck Plurality that she's pinned her hopes on, viz.: "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson, plywood false-front barn, buckeye necklace, Ku Klux fliers.

That's right, the Klan is using 2008 as an opportunity to pare back to a core of true believers. Said one Travis Pierce, national membership director for KKK, LLC.:

This office gets about 100 calls a day, and it's been that way since the start of the election season [...] People are looking for answers to what's going on in this country and they are coming to us.

So how is the McCain-Palin Tanking like Klan recruitment? A: Both campaigns suffer from the delusion that a greater political force will one day emerge from a dedicated 8 percent of the electorate. The trouble (for our purposes, the entertainment) inherent in such a position is that no persuasion exists without mass appeal. No one listens to Ralph Nader, or Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul. Build the crowd, then sway the crowd.

Also of note: compare Hitchens' response to the McCain Khalidi attack to the desperate parrying and backtracking on McLaughlin by typical MSMers (transcript)! Everyone hears, "Barack Obama sat in a room with Palestinians," and only Hitch refrains from shitting his pants with fear! Page and Clift are scared shitless of Monica Crowley! Hemming and hawing about "They released the tape! They reported it!" Show some spine. The appropriate response to Crowley is as follows:

It ain't "Jew-bashing" to complain when some right-wing arriviste bulldozes a chunk of your millenia-old town, puts guard towers and access roads on the highest point in the area, and tells you it's okay, because God promised this land to him.

Anyway, I'm prepping the post-game rant, on some real Marxist shit. (World Socialism Now! Mandatory Abortions for Everyone! Up Against the Wall! That sort of thing.) See y'all on the 5th...
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Caribou Barbie=Silky Pony?

2008-10-22T22:13:00.002-04:00

Lack of chemistry? Now, given this is an entirely subjective reading on the part of Chuck Todd, I'm seeing shades of Kerry-Edwards here. Youngish, pretty, charismatic, obscene expenditures on coiffure or couture...

...but most importantly, the lack of chemistry. Is she aiming for a 2012 run? People seem to think so. But I'm not thinking it'll work. God willing, the Famous Air Pirate and the Beauty Queen will lose in two weeks and, in four years, she'll face some of the same problems as Edwards. That is: she'll still have little more than charm and red meat for the Base to run on.

Oh, sure, some neocon or theocon will take her under his carrion-smelling wing, try to tutor her in the ways of wickedness. She'll probably do some speaking tours on the SuperChurch circuit in between texting with Kissinger and hitting up AIPAC and PNAC gatherings to bone up on her bona fides. She'll likely seek a second term up in Seward's Icebox and win. All the while coyly dodging questions about disagreements within the campaign and whether or not she'll run again:

"Oh, you know, you get two independent minds on a ticket and there's bound to be some disagreements. Would I have done things exactly the same way? I don't really see any point in looking back. What I'm trying to make sure I do is keep my eye on the prize in ensuring I'm doing the best job I can to protect the people of this great state from what I truly believe will be destructive fiscal policies under this president. Am I going to run in two years? Oh, now let's not put the sled before the dogs here. I'm governing Alaska. It's a great job and I can't say what the future holds..." U.S.W.

And then, come 2011, she'll still have her ready made base of support. All revved up and ready to face Mittens. She's free and pretty compared to his stiffness and artifice. And then both of them get surprised all to hell by Bobby Jindal.

Let's talk more on this Republican Nova stage, though...

Obama Ferrets out the Hard Freak...

2008-10-22T10:03:00.004-04:00

This is a fabulous consequence of the Obama candidacy, and I wonder if the same effect could have been engendered by a Hillary-Bayh ticket. Check out Minnesota rep Michele Bachman on Hardball, the weenie is at 5:45.

This is an object lesson in how not to realign your party, people.

Pity Michele. She's just been sent out to echo Palin. All she has to do is stick with the topic: BHO's alleged associates. But Matthews knows what's at the end of the argument, that it's about character, that we're talking about BHO himself, not Bill Ayers.

Getting people to talk about Obama is a centrifugal question: the heaviest freaks get separated from the party they hide themselves in. I saw this happening in the Inquirer last year, where white working-class dudes, who spend all day on the docks with their black working-class cohorts and buddies, all of a sudden had to air their real racism before all and sundry. Something like this happened when HRC said "hard-working Americans, white Americans," back in the day. And poor Michele. Just caught in the gears of a media machine she pays no attention to:

Bachmann said Tuesday she probably should have watched "Hardball" to see what it was like before she went on it.

So please, hard-working people of Congress, white people of Congress, please, let us know now what you think of Senator Obama. Please let us know if you do not read newspapers, watch cable TV etc., and if not, why not. Is your response from Paul's Romans? Is this a be-ye-not-conformed thing? I need to know. Because tight-faced white women with crazy smiles are still uttering shibboleths about "liberal leftists," "socialized medicine," "real Americans," etc., and holding forth on what's in Article I. I mean damn, before this election, would you have believed that any elected official could get away with not knowing what Hardball is? Is the governor of Alaska strategically expanding the role of the vice-president, or does she just not know better?

BTW, how does Jeb Hensarling feel about the imminent purge of one more know-nothing freak from the ranks? And is there a Democratic purge coming any time soon? When can we ice John Dingell and Dennis Kucinich? Trust the centrifuge!
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Getting mav'ricky...Todd Palin as Lady MacBeth...

2008-10-21T14:23:00.005-04:00

Clearly, McCain is a rotten corpse, and is slowly being wiped off the map. The electoral map. Sarah Palin is slowly disposing of him, going, as Dickerson says, rogue. What I thought was a simple conservative realignment is more complex than that, and weird questions linger about Caribou Barbie. Namely:

Is she intentionally or unintentionally off-message? My guess is the latter. When perplexed, she punts. How else do you square her position on rewarding the DPRK with her abstinence-only diplomacy? She doesn't have a guru, she's flying blind, there's no way she's capable of orchestrating something as diabolical as a stab-McCain-to-run-in-2012 reverse.

Why did she pummel McCain on gay marriage? She has the right on lockdown. (Okay, except for Roanoke, Virginia.) Shucks, somebody out there is so fired up by her candidacy that they're illegally killing bears and dressing them up in Obama gear. Dissing McCain for her own benefit is such a surreptitious kick to the balls.

Did someone tell Palin that McCain wanted to give her the ax, sending her into a flurry of preemptive strikes and gross, confusing incompetence, leading to her ultimate downfall? Is this like Throne of Blood?

What all this boils down to is the original and abiding question of Palin's candidacy: why her? I've had the feeling that she was simply the only person McCain called who said yes. I never bought the arguments for doing something mav'ricky, for rallying the base, for attempting to appeal to the Femmes d'Hillary. Thin gruel. There are plenty of intelligent, qualified Republican women (I will never call Olympia Snowe Lobster Barbie); McCain's been pandering to the right for two years at least; he knows as well as anyone that the change-meme is Obama's property. Rationalizations. Palin answered the phone. Since, you know, she doesn't read the Jewish media outlets, she was the only person in America who thought being Walnuts' VP was a smart career move.

And now the question resurfaces, only she asks it of herself: Why me? Why isn't Tim Pawlenty stuck on this Ferris wheel?

There is, however, a light at the end of the shitstorm for Sarah Palin. Ted Stevens is done. Whether he gets elected or not, or is elected and resigns mid-term, the days of his funnelling contracts to friends and countrymen are over. Someone is going to run for his seat before 2014. Now, were you Sarah Palin, wouldn't you rather be junior Senator from Alaska than be John McCain's vice-president?
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More on this later, but...

2008-10-20T04:07:00.000-04:00

Oh Hell Naw You Didn't

2008-10-18T19:33:00.002-04:00

Alright, so I live in Columbus OH now. And I just saw this commercial on the ABC affiliate, and it's funny, because I never would have pegged BHO as Nixonian:

At least they can't call him inexperienced AND a crafty kombinator at the same time, right?

Also, notice the strategic mispronunciation of "renege." As Overheard in New York has told us before, you don't re-nig on something. You re-nig-er, you.

Anyway, I got interested in who's paying for this. The ad very briefly flashed The Denver Group, which is a batch of concerned Femmes d'Hillary who evidently at the last possible second have decided, for no other reason than that it looks like BHO might actually win the election, to bolt the party and back the party of War in Iran and Drill to Prosperity. That makes me upset.

So I wanna know who the contributors are, because Roxanne and Virginia's 750 bucks did not buy that ad.

Since you claim to speak for a "disenfranchised" and obviously aggrieved minority, but a group, in any case, of individuals, more to the point who stand for "principle," surely, Heidi Li, you'll tell us who pays the rent.

Send shout outs, etc. to Denvergroup@gmail.com.
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At the Heart of the Quasar

2008-10-17T11:21:00.001-04:00

The first thing to understand about Jeb Hensarling, head of the RSC, R-TX 5th district, is that he is going to operate as a sleeper for a long while. This is going to allow him to figure out some things, and sleep off others. For instance, he'll be able to figure out how to pay for an undefined committment to Iraq without raising taxes (A: Economic Growth! Like in the 80s!). He'll be able to evade questions about his weirdly specific interest in defending online poker sites. And he'll be able to work out his relationship with Green Mountain Energy, a greenwashing business (selling incinerator-generated electricity as wind-and-solar, among other crimes)that savaged McCain in 2000.

Unless Green Mountain goes Enron, or leaks dioxin into the East Texas atmosphere, Jeb, former VP, is safe. Even a Keating-Fiver can run for president! (DIGRESSIVE, BUT IMPORTANT: Now, whether 'Merkins will trust said Keating-Fiver with their money is another story. And the point there is not whether anyone remembers the old transgression, but whether the transgressor can demonstrate new competence. For McCain, character is the real issue: swayed by his own vanity, he leaned on a regulator on Keating's behalf. Swayed by vanity, he divorced his crippled wife, married a beer-distributionship heiress, picked Palin, dissed Letterman. He's John McCain, (R)-The Media. Vanity is the source of McCain's petulance toward Obama, as if he's mystified that anyone could mistake his hammy quips and tin smile for charisma. It's an illusion: a corpse running in a war-hero's suit. As the authors of Ecclesiastes tell us, hevel hevolim, vehakol hevel, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. END.)

But what I see in Hensarling -- though at this early date, who really can evaluate his character with certainty? -- is not McCainiac. McCain has always been obsessed with his own mythopoesis: thus the image of his body as a reliquary of torture, the arms not lifting, the hair prematurely white, the teeth mangled, the knees crushed. Hensarling, again, at this stage, is a loyal jihadi; one who believes in his body as the vessel for a cause. Witness the selflessness of his "Why I opposed the bailout." This is career-making writing: an even cadence, an appeal to reason. If he were a Back Bay Democrat instead of a SE Dallas Republican, he would need change but one word, probably "subsidize" for "socialize":

"In my heart and in my mind, I believe that this plan was fraught with unintended consequences, would force generations of taxpayers to pick up the tab for Wall Street losses and could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government in the American free enterprise system. [...] Once the government socializes losses, it will soon socialize profits. If we lose our ability to fail, we will soon lose our ability to succeed. If we bail out risky behavior, we will soon see even riskier behavior."

Now, when the bailout passed, he was capable of escaping, because it's the ideas (or, cynically, the soundbites) that are important, not Jeb of the Texas Fifth, and he can fade into the background with a hiss about the "slippery slope to socialism."

The past may hold other road work for his future. Back in 2005, Jeb was on the forefront of financial deregulation; broadly speaking, deregulation is one of the causes of our current situation, n'est-ce pas?. But in effect -- and fact-checkers, please check -- his 2005 bill was written to provide to credit unions, S&Ls and small community banks the same benefits that financial services giants got in the 2004 version of the bill. If we were in the business of spinning for this guy, it would be easy to say that in both these cases, Jeb was on the side of Main Street against Wall Street, was ensuring a level playing field, was for the David-banks against the Goliath-banks, etc.

Again, ideas are paramount, and the RSCers have been busy for a while. In May they could tell their party was going to reap the whirlwind, and called for a restatement of principles. The best part of this little manifesto is the sense of self-awareness buried in there, as if he's saying to his peers: "Fine, go home and run against 'Washington,' just remember you're It." Bring on the self-flagellation:

"And [Americans'] anger boils over as they watch politicians in Washington point fingers at each other, launch politically motivated investigations, waste money on wasteful pork barrel spending, and reward special interests over the national interest — while consistently failing to provide solutions to the real problems that they face each day[...]The time has come to move beyond empty political rhetoric and to revitalize our contract with the American people."

So, Q: Is Hensarling too devout to be successful? That is, when his balanced budget noumenon hits the defense appropriations phenomenon, which one yields? Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp all lost. (A: I don't think so. The man has admitted that reforming the budget process is unsexy. I think he defines success differently than other politicians.)

Q: Is he then unlikely to win hearts and minds even if he wins his ideological turf-war?

Q: Is any of this stuff even plausible in the face of a trillion-dollar deficit and endless war?

Q: And by the time BHO is done remaking government, isn't the Phil-Gramm-budget-hawk-model going to look awfully vestigial?

Q: By the time we've set up a national Infrastructure Investment Bank (whereby gov't subsidies stimulate the production of physical objects that we sell to other people in the World War on Carbon Emissions), isn't the notion of tax-cuts-as-stimulus going to look like what it is, i.e., endlessly dosing a dead heart with atropine?

These are my concerns, Jeb. What I'm hearing on the radio telescope, it's either a faint persistent signal, or just static...
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Hagelwatch...

2008-10-16T14:33:00.002-04:00

I missed this piece in Slate last week, but here it is: Chuck Hagel, deployed properly, could win North Omaha for Obama, giving him one of NE's five electoral votes. And with the GOP pulling out of Maine, there'd be no counterweight McCain-district-in-Obama-state...but all this is academic, as we're talking about a coast to victory...boat drinks, gentlemen...

Hagel endorses Obama, hits the stump five days before election...
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Joe the Plumber....

2008-10-15T22:02:00.002-04:00

How many interviews is this guy going to have up until the election? Jeez, it's like we're trying to make this movie real...

Jou wanna leef like da'? Like some kinda cheep...Baa Baa

2008-10-15T21:00:00.000-04:00

In the aftermath of the rapidly floundering attempt to link BHO to the Weathermen, re which I can't wait to watch Walnuts get all fusty and unhinged tonight as he promised to once more try the Obama-is-a-terrorist waters, there emerges a late entry in the right-wing-counter-terror-as-career-strategy-meme: it turns out that McCain and Lieberman are quislings for Cuban radicals! While campaigning for McCain, he promised to pursue a presidential pardon for Eduardo Arocena:

Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983. Arocena was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In 1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign government property within the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana. His targets included:

Madison Square Garden (he blew up an adjacent store);
JFK airport (Arocena's group planted a suitcase bomb intended for a TWA flight to Los Angeles—in protest of the airline's flights to Cuba. The plane would have exploded if not for the fact that the bomb went off on the tarmac prior to being loaded);
Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (causing damage to three levels of the theater and halting the performance of a music group from Cuba);
the ticket office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot;
and a church.

He also attempted to assassinate the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.

So while McCain is busily denouncing Barry's domestic leftism, Lieberman is getting it on with "freedom fighters," like Furs jou get de money, den jou get the power, den jou get dee weemen...Ileana Ros-Lehtinen beware!
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Save yourselves...

2008-10-15T10:48:00.002-04:00

I don't get this. The NYT finds itself duty-bound to vet the McCain campaign's allegations of a nefarious Obama-ACORN connection. This neither-nor criticism effectively grants some right-wing-rant about Those Ones stealing the election equal time with mere facts from Barry's CV. The NYT covers the story about BHO's connections without questioning the legitimacy of the allegation that those connections are themselves dubious. Slate covers the "Q: What's wrong with ACORN?" angle, but sticks to interviewing the people who put a bounty on ACORN's head in the first place.

Okay, so big deal. Small ripple. Never mind that it's this kind of acrobatic accomodation of the far-right that got Judith Miller's Iraq stories printed. Never mind that Ed Murrow figured in the '50s that all opinions are not equal: when covering a lynching, do you make sure to give the local Grand Wizard equal time? Never mind that if so-called bastions of the liberal media have to kowtow to the right fringe now, what lengths will they go to to protest their innocence once Republicans are out of power and spoiling for a fight? Seriously, look at how they savaged Jimmy Carter, for no other reason than to prove they didn't just hate Nixon.

I hate to think that I've become a one-issue bloggist, but the discovery of the Hensarling Quasar (alternately, the incipient Fourth Red Shift in American politics) has become a unifying theory for the McCain Campaign. Why pick Palin? Why harp on Ayers? Why holler about ACORN? In a time of national crisis, the campaign decided to run sludge ads? (The last Ayers ad I saw, btw, was far more savage than the flip-flopping Kerry ad from 2004. See? Isn't that cute?)

The people who are working on his campaign clearly expect to work for someone else: what's their best-case scenario? One term, followed by a Palin 2012 run? The man has lost a 14-point lead in North Dakota; he's clinging to West Virginia by 2 points; there is no future for you, staffers.

Again, at the risk of being prolix, if McCain wanted to win the election, he would have never run the Ayers-meme. Clearly, he has no interest in winning the presidency, as at this point who would? Presumably, he has a crock pot full of Wright-meme ads, ready to rock, so that by 2012, there will be a core of wounded free-marketers with exaggerated senses of entitlement for the Palin-Romney ticket, all shouting about black separatism, reverse discrimination; weeping about how McCain was martyred and how they was robbed.

Running on McCain's corpse is more profitable than running beside it.
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Lilibetcha!

2008-10-14T20:35:00.003-04:00

The Obama campaign announced that Lilibet Hagel, the wife of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, will accompany Michelle Obama at Wednesday night’s final presidential debate.

Quick thought... is the Obama campaign holding back on a Hagel endorsement until a more opportune time? Hagel's not really going to sit on the sidelines for this one, is he? When do they come out with it? After the debate? Week before the election? Special event to steal that one electoral vote in Omaha or somewhere? Only the Shadow knows...

Play this at about 3:50...

2008-10-10T15:33:00.004-04:00

I saw this on Global Dashboard:

This bitch's harebrained wildness I colossally underestimated. Her joke candidacy must end. I don't care what the crypto-fascist fringe has to say, some 100 retired assholes in Wisconsin -- WI kiss my ass: Milwaukee is your crown jewel? 'You fucking kidding me? -- I don't care if Troopergate does martyr this mushmouth ass-tosser, thereby throwing the election to Walnuts. Don't matter. Dick Cheney knows god ain't start war in Mesopotamia, but clearly he(Cheney)'ll countenance the diversion. Who wouldn't?

Revisionists, beware! When we get to 60, we're shipping all your asses to the Hague!
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Well kids, we're fucked; run the Obama-Hates-Babies ad...

2008-10-09T09:51:00.007-04:00

I realize this is going to provide aid and comfort to the know-nothing Bob-Barr fringe -- essentially, women in parka vests with coolers of rain water and grain alcohol in their camper-back pickups, busily protecting our precious bodily fluids --but this ad started running in Ohio yesterday, 10/7, night after the debate, during the news hour:

BHO is up 14 in Pennsylvania, up 10 in Wisconsin, up 14 in Minnesota, up 6 in Colorado, up 7 in Nevada and ahead by a couple in Ohio, Florida and Virginia. Obama has a plus 19 favorable. In order to win the election, McCain has to sweep 8 toss-up states (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida). To repeat: Barry only has to win a state larger than Colorado. Stakes is high.

What's interesting to me is to see what McCain does when cornered, and to figure what that means for his party: it's clear that, in a tough spot, he's decided to swing to the right. Bad debate fixed with abortion ads. Bad VP debate fixed by domestic terrorist smears. Bad economy fixed by accusing FNMA and FMAC of loaning too much money to poor, inner-city black folk. The preconditions-meme, the government-chooses-your-doctor-meme, usw; all the familiar tropes of 1990s AM radio on an eternal-return.

Now, what that means is that McCain has adopted a revolutionary posture. Like the SI said, revolutionary language (or punk rock, for Greil Marcus) brings the unsettled debts of history back into play. 1990s revanchists evidently believe that their concerns remain incompletely addressed. And there's a case for that. But there's no real way to pay them their ransom; when public discourse is held hostage, the price of release escalates every time it is met, (e.g., the NRA radicalized gun ownership in the late 1970s via the specter of government raids on private homes; then by fighting mandatory gun-locks, mandatory gun registration, background checks on purchasers, handgun bans in inner cities. Their demands are now so acute that even Pennsylvania's proposed one-gun-a-month law was treated as a mortal danger and scuttled.) thereby making the tactic profitable so long as the stakes are low, and incremental gains tiny.

If your movement calls for France to reclaim the Ruhr valley, your movement will fail; if your movement calls for the full funding of French-language private schools in Alsace, then you can work your way east. Likewise, no one wants to overturn Roe v. Wade; they want to stop clinics that promote abortion-on-demand, stop spending tax dollars on contraceptives overseas, and protect the babies that survive partial birth abortion.

THUS, the ad above. Barry clearly voted against the Illinois law because he refused to be baited by the fringe right. Let's recall that less than one percent of all abortions in the US occur after 24 weeks; extraction-and-dilation accounts for a fraction of that; what Illinois zealots believe to be botched E&D would account for a fraction of that number. If that number exists at all. The whole intent of the law was to scare providers into no longer providing. If doctors think they'll lose their license for a one in a million mistake made in a one in 10,000 procedure, they'll do the math; if insurers see a risk, no matter how infinitesimal, they will kill said risk.

The capstone in the right's strategy is to gradually push all women wanting abortions into late-term, high-risk procedures: 87 percent of all American counties have no abortion provider; 60 percent of all women delay abortions. If there's no Plan B, if there's abstinence-only education, if there's intense public disapprobation of abortion, women get funnelled into the high-risk procedures. Then, all the right has to do to de facto outlaw abortion is to outlaw the high-risk procedures. Viz. the Guttmacher Institute.

I mean, that's the theory. Again, the whole point of fighting on the fringe is to keep the issue alive. The point is to fight, not to win. The vast majority of women who have abortions do so for economic reasons. To tangle with the main causes of abortion would be to tangle with poverty. This ad is to bring out the base (in both senses of the word). Running this ad, at this time exemplifies the McCain-Palin retreat-to-the-right, and their preparation for the advent of the Hensarling Quasar...
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I didn't say "Bomb, Bomb, Iran," I said "Rock the Casbah"...

2008-10-08T10:43:00.011-04:00

Obama had two replies. First, he wasn't calling for an invasion of Pakistan—just for "taking out" Osama Bin Laden if we had him in our sights and the Pakistanis couldn't or wouldn't do it. Then he won the round decisively by remarking, "This is the guy who said 'Bomb, bomb Iran,' " who called for "the annihilation of North Korea," and who, after we ousted the Taliban from Kabul, said, "Next up, Baghdad." That's not talking softly. (McCain's response, that he was just joking with an old veteran friend, was, first, not true—he said it in a public forum—and, second, quite lame.)

Yeah I was wondering about that lame excuse. I mean, for my money, it wasn't the most outlandish, nor the most important/heavyweight misdirection Walnuts used in the town hall, e.g., he will fine you, he will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, (at 02:03)

he was wrong on Russia (btw, we're all wrong on Georgia; are Georgians sniping at Russians as they (the Russians) leave?).
Right, sod all that. Where is this "Bomb Bomb Iran" thing? Murrell's Inlet, SC? Listen to the wackjob fascist asking the question: When do we airmail Tehran? Poor Walnuts had to do something...I actually think the Barbara Ann thing is hilarious, and it's going to be in my head for the rest of the afternoon. We out here at the 'Steer already understand that the Famous Air Pirate is off his gourd, so the joking about nuclear annihilation thing is, we feel, to be taken in stride. Like the man says, get a life; Politics has no real-world application, right?
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If only Lil Chuckie had worked for Blackwater...

2008-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, founder of the Demon Forces (officially referred to as the Anti-Terrorism Unit) is in the Hague. His son Chuckie McArthur Emmanuel, born in Boston, in in Miami facing prosecution under 18 USC 2340A, the extraterritorial torture statute. In Liberia in the late 90s,

Mr. Emmanuel selected and shot [three men] in the heads [sic]. He then ordered their bodies to be dragged away and displayed two of the heads at the checkpoint posts,

you know, among other counter-terrorist-spring-break activities...

Q: Is his defense attorney smart enough to make use of exemptions to US torture law to get Chuckie off?

(Chuckie's trial in the US, btw, might have been mooted by extraordinary rendition; can't we just call this guy a terrorist and ship his ass to Syria and pull out his fingernails?)

I mean, it's tricky, but this is what the guy is paid for. It all hinges on his status. Emmanuel, clearly considers himself an anti-terrorist operative. It's clear that the USG doesn't want to deport/extradict him, so there's no real loss by his claiming to be a paramilitary fighter, or a civilian contractor working for the Liberian (i.e., his pop's) army. At the time of the atrocities, the nearest thing governing the actions of American civilian contractors was MEJA (Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, 2000), which covers any American employed overseas by Department of Defense. Commit a felony, you're tried in the US. There were, until last year, holes:

The holes in MEJA became especially apparent during the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004, when a civilian interrogator from Titan Corporation and a civilian interpreter from CACI International faced no punishment, despite their implication in the official report.31 These civilians were technically working for the US Department of the Interior, rather than the DOD, thus shielding them from MEJA’s reach. Their military colleagues had no such protection from courts-martial, however.

So, to rephrase the Q: Is there light between being an American torturer abroad and being an American civilian contractor not employed by DoD?
And, Q: Since we've spent so much time cobbling ways (way, way, way, way, way, way) for non-soldier torturers to escape prosecution by a "host country," or indeed, by anyone, where's the sympathy for the Demon?
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The Backwards Way looks forward...discovering the Hensarling Quasar...

2008-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

Not to refry the VP debate or anything, which in this 49th hour of coverage has finally gelatinized into a tight bolus of conventional wisdom (Palin did not trip over her shoelaces; Biden did not push her face into the mud), but I can't shake my ideological middle-ear back into alignment. There were steeplechase moments on both sides (Biden triangulating on gay marriage, Palin's "darn right it was those predatory lenders,"), but the strategic-level outburst of cognitive dissonance, the peal of feedback in my polisci-lizard brain was in the tandem pronouncements:

"We do need the private sector to be able to keep more of what we earn and produce [sic]. Government is going to have to learn to be more efficient and live with less if that's what it takes to reign in the government growth that we've seen today."

and,

"And the rescue plan has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving."

Or this pair:

"Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper."

and,

"We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings [...]"

If you believe, with John Dickerson, that this debate was about rebranding Sarah Palin for future use, you have to square these statements. This is the Republican VP candidate calling for massive regulation of financial markets alongside massive deregulation. My brain, together with my hair, stood on end! WWMilton Friedman D?

Never mind that Palin is participating in the same overt hypocrisy of Reagan's "Government, you are the problem," pretending that government is something you can be in and not of, something you seek but won't accept, (also, necessarily, presuming that government is something other than the things we choose to do together), etc., the way that diehard evangelicals read the Letter to the Romans' "Be ye not conformed to this world, but be transformed," and find free license to run a child-rape cult...Again, never mind all that. Never mind the soggy logical turf her handlers are inhabiting there. What kind of party brand can you build on this?

What I would have given for Biden to have started autistically screeching "Fuzzy Math!" or "Voodoo Economics!" Clearly, we need a shock into awareness. The party brand -- listen up, Mitt! -- that is built when you promise to shrink government while maintaining an open-ended war in Iraq, while increasing non-emergency approprations for defense, USW, is the Bush-Cheney brand. It is deficits don't matter. It's this kind of pigeon shit.

Maybe it's an Eastern thing, like "Spending and tax cuts are the father and mother of the ten-thousand things," but my guess is it's far from it...

IF, on the other hand, you struggle to comprehend why anyone thought this a successful appearance for SP (at 01:19 here, she called Al Qaeda Shiites:

she said the trouble on Main Street was trickling up to Wall Street (which she didn't mean to say, clearly, but is true nonetheless), and this is recalled off the top of my head, God knows what other horrors lie in that transcript), then the above are just parts of a cynical "Sure, you can have your cake and eat it, why not?" gesture.

No Republican president has ever shrunk government and none ever will. We all know this. But the only thing worse than a will-wank-for-coins tactic is a will-wank-for-coins tactic that doesn't work. The tax-cut-spending-increase bait-and-switch will crash the Republican party (and looking very far ahead, the thing I really fear is a hard nut of a latter-day GOP emerging when this party goes -nova, the remaining True Believer fiscal conservatives sloughing off the excess gas of the past 14 years to become a mighty quasar, a radio beacon audible throughout the universe; those guys are more comfortable on AM anyway; the Hensarling Quasar is a metaphor pret a porter).

Either the tune is going to change, or Jeb Hensarling will be the only one standing When the Revolution Come...
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Should the Worst Happen...

2008-10-02T16:18:00.002-04:00

Sarah Palin is not a blithering idiot. She is only woefully underprepared to speak on the issues facing our nation. She can speak in broad terms. She can speak in terms of "Protect America" and "Stand With Our Allies" and "Defend Freedom," but, when asked for specifics... for "tactics," if you will, she falls flat. Therefore, Biden shouldn't have to win this debate, for Palin will lose it for him in a manner like unto my beloved Lakers this past summer. Woefully unprepared, green, with potential, but undeveloped.

But, should the worst happen, and she prove herself likeable and not fumbling. Should she come out and shine and not answer questions but still look goll-darned likeable while she's not answering questions... well, the "Liberal Media" will jump all over it.

Could she be the comeback kid for McCain?
New Life for the McCain campaign?
Palin resuscitates the race?

Und So Weiter. And the polls may shift a bit, and McCain may gain some in the battleground states, and the talk will shift back to What Can Obama Do to Counter Palin, the Thorn in His Side? etc etc etc.

Before any of that has the chance of happening, I just want to predict--should Palin do moderately okay--a surge for McCain which will be quashed following the next presidential debate. This is an easy prediction, but I just want it on the record.

Hitting is timing, Joe...no need to pull the ball...

2008-10-02T12:49:00.007-04:00

Dude, I loved that Chris Webber clip so much, here's an analogue:

Man set a breaking ball down and in, where ostensibly no righthanded hitter can do anything with it, and Manolo somehow gets the bat head out in front of that thang and we out. Peace. Folks said he wasn't a team player, that he'd lost the heart to compete, that he was a showboat, that he couldn't play left field, that Youkilis should have messed up his face back in June or whenever...I say he's a consummate veteran who understands the task at hand, that nothing matters until the end of the month when the champion is crowned.

Does any of this sound like Joe Biden? Blowhard, slacking off in the Senate, picking silly fights with people (A noun and verb and 9/11? Isn't 9/11 a noun?), prone to fits of pique. The only lesson of Manny Ramirez' career that Joe needs to learn, really, is to smile...your job is the greatest game in the world, you will go down in history either as a bum or a titan. Choose.

And the baseball metaphor I'm thinking of, I suppose is actually from the West Wing.

Bartlet: You think the strike against me is people don't like the smartest kid in the class.

Ziegler: It's not a strike unless you watch it as it sails by.

Seriously, Joe, you can get the head out in front of a bad-looking slider. Crush 'em...
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Laugh to keep from crying (havoc and letting slip the dogs of war)

2008-10-01T21:11:00.003-04:00

This is past absurdity. It's like one of those jokes on Family Guy. You know: Peter hits his knee and then sits on the ground and winces and moans for like two minutes. It goes from being WTF? to being chuckleworthy to being hilarious at how long they're drawing it out to being OK when are they done with this to being Okay, it's funny again.

Yeah, it's like that. Except there's no commercial break. Except it's real. A number of commentators have pointed out that Palin's appeal is that she's "one of us." (oneofus. oneofus. oneofus.) Don't read much beyond the local paper--mostly the funnies. love that Sally Forth--but gosh darnit, if we just got some reg'lar folks in the Oval Office and cut through the horsehocky, by gosh, we could get this country back on the right track-- and get rid of them Messicans while we're at it.

(Me? I'm in the John Stewart camp: I want a president who's Embarrassingly Superior to me. But what do I know? I'm typing this on a Macbook, smoking American Spirits and tabbing between Blogger and The Atlantic.)

Yeah, Palin's for real. Her stunning ignorance as to any matter outside of Alaska and the rearing head of Vladimir is real and very much in line with oneofus status in a nation in which something like half the populace hasn't finished a book in the last year. No laugh track for her, though. The laughs--to keep from crying--should be saved for when she tries to appoint Judge Joe Brown to the Supreme Court in a year and a half after McCain's face falls off.

Brooks: Let's not split hairs here, they were threatening castration...

2008-09-30T09:41:00.005-04:00

Lot of different threads today...the first is the vertiginous ascent of the young right wing within the GOP as of this weekend's bailout failure. This is interesting to me because I can see the next generation of GOP leadership (whatever that means for politics in this country, good/ill, we report, you decide) budding beneath the klieg lights, like the 1948 election that brought Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon to Congress all at once, and no wonder McCan, Famous Air Pirate had to jump ship and split to D.C. for a day, because these men, Hensarling, Cantor and Ryan (and how remiss I was to exclude out of ignorance Rep. Hensarling, when he was the main man calling George Bush's plan socialistic; a thousand apologies) are going to be running the show. Cantor reps suburban Richmond, is a huge fundraiser, which presumably is how these (insert a derogation if you must) got into the negotiating room and got John Boehner to put their "plan" forward in the first place. Power is on display.

But not just power; grace. They are demonstrating an ability to see the long march ahead. Realizing that George Bush has crippled their brand for a generation (or whatever period our accelerated media represents as a generation, one possible rule being the distance between Oliver North's testimony before Congress in 1987 to his 1994 campaign for the Senate, so call the media-refractory period seven years), the RSGers have to purge the President and his followers. It's not that Bushites got us into trouble with the war, it's that they've repeatedly sold out conservative principles. Run to the right, on an eternal return to the party's Goldwater core.

David Brooks' problem with this (Nihilists? Really?) is that the short-term destruction wrought by House Republicans (and the story at this point is that liberal Democrats jumped ship when it became apparent that Pelosi had no help across the aisle) is enough to doom McCain and the Party. Perhaps. But the Hensarling clique has to figure that Walnuts was doomed from the start (who's been raising 50 million a month since February?), that the short-term damage is not only inevitable (seriously, Indiana is in play, the financial crisis has scared enough natural conservatives out of voting that Virginia and North Carolina are Obama's by like 5 and 3 points, respectively; these are things that should not occur; for the times, they are a-etc.) but is, as any free-marketer worth his salt will tell you, a form of creative destruction, clearing out the dead wood of leadership for the benefit of new growth. After Republicans lose 30 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate, betcha John Boehner is out of work, Roy Blunt gets to be minority leader, maybe, if by that point he's still considered ideologically pure, and Cantor gets min. whip.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like these men, but it's at least possible to like them. The way one likes Nixon. They do have an ethos. Eric Cantor may be a wild-eyed, exurban crypto-fascist itching for the opportunity to zap Tehran with Rods from God, but on the whole I prefer knowing where people stand, as opposed to having to sift through PR-speak and intentionally foggy jargon and blatant, opaque bullshit to get the nuts. Compassionate conservatism, and all the other 1990s Luntz-Rove memes are now consigned to the ash heap of history.

Now, other thread: what all that means for our continued influence in the multipolar world is anybody's guess. It is, and will be for the next decade, politically expedient to keep American troops out of harm's way. Period. Witness Joe Biden talking about Iraqis rebuilding their own country. But it's clear that Russia can't step into the void; the adventure in Georgia shocked foreign investors and prompted Putin's own bailout. This may be a period more like 1992, where there was a recession, no clear geopolitical balance of power, a rookie president, and all this anxiety about foreign ownership of American assets.

At the very least, our anxiety about our place in the world ought to shut up the Chomskyite "American Hegemon" fringe, because obviously, and you can ask Ho Chi Minh about this, the US was never a hegemon, we just played one on T.V. And again, let's talk about Dagestan, Chechnya, Igushetia, North Ossetia, the Transdnestr: the Russian Federation can't get its pants on straight, much less project power over oceans, or start naming towns "St. Putinburg."

Seriously, would you rather own dollars or rubles?

And finally, on hegemony, the Yankees' and Mets' seasons are over, the Boston Megalith has squeaked into the playoffs by the back door, the glorious Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles, who Pythagorically speaking should have gone like 89-73 instead finish 100-62...the Phillies play the Brewers tomorrow...and there's a one-game play-off for the AL Central today. Holy Cow...
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ds

Form of: Hegemony!

2008-09-29T19:06:00.005-04:00

Really, what kind of world do we live in when we've ceded the leadership role on international terrorism to the Russians?

Russia has called for a revival of the global anti-terrorism coalition that formed after Sept. 11, 2001, but that started to unravel with what it called the subsequent domination by a single power - a veiled reference to the United States.

"The solidarity of the international community fostered on the wave of struggle against terrorism turned out to be somehow 'privatized,"' Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia said Saturday at the UN General Assembly annual ministerial meeting.

Oh, I know what kind of world: a multipolar one. Oh, joy!

"It has become crystal clear that the solidarity expressed by all of us after 9/11 should be revived, without double standards, when we fight against any infringements upon the international law," he said.

Lavrov also called for "solidarity" within the international community and a strengthened United Nations, saying that only in the post-Cold War world could the organization "fully realize its potential" as a source of "open and frank debate and coordination of the world policies on a just and equitable basis, free from double standards."

"This is an essential requirement, if the world is to regain its equilibrium," he said.

Beautiful. How much of a clusterfuck has the Bush administration proved to be? Seven and a half years in, we're getting lectured on multilateralism and international law by the Russians. And, strangely enough, world opinion is in agreement:

Some 29% of people said the "war on terror" launched by President George W Bush in 2001 had had no effect on the Islamist militant network.

According to 30% of those surveyed, US policies have strengthened al-Qaeda.
Asked who is winning "the conflict between al-Qaeda and the US", 49% said neither side while 22% believed the US had gained the upper hand. Just 10% said al-Qaeda was winning.

So the Russians--of course, taking their airs of magnanimity with a grain of salt and a ton of vodka--are calling for a strengthened UN and international cooperation regarding terrorism, rightly calling out the US for flouting international opinion in invading Iraq and calling us on "double standards" with regard to Georgia and Kosovo's independence movement. Meanwhile, the Famous Air Pirate is still tipping his Cold Warrior hand, still wanting to keelhaul Russia and make 'em walk the plank out of the G8. And the Beauty Queen continues to ramble on--to the embarrassment of those who should be supporting her--spouting something about the disembodied head of Czar Putin hovering over the Aleutian Islands.

Aurora Putinalis aside, the real issue here is just how right BHO is when he says "McCain just doesn't get it." The Russians get it. The Chinese are counting on it. The Europeans--if we may judge by their reaction to Georgian episode--get it. The Germans definitely get it. But Bush, the Air Pirate, the Beauty Queen, and most of America don't get it: the Post-American Moment is here in full force.

So, while the Air Pirate, et al, wax fanciful about some new Superfriends League of Righteous Democracies--Wonder Twin Powers, Activate! Form of: Eternal Hegemony!--the Rest of the World is very much moving on. One only hopes that BHO, with his talk of being a citizen of the world and the need to fill the position of Leader of the Free World, gets it. Otherwise, it's a harder drop to the level playing field than it needs to be.

Various adventures of McCan, Famous Air Pirate...once more crashing his own plane...

2008-09-29T09:02:00.010-04:00

Whoa. About that debate that Walnuts promised not to go to...also re: which see Letterman on getting stiffed...did McCain actually say that he would veto every spending bill that came across his desk? I was at a party at Skylab, watching it on a 9-inch b/w TV, so I had to check the transcript...

As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I've got a pen. This one's kind of old. I've got a pen, and I'm going to veto every single spending bill that comes across my desk. I will make them famous. You will know their names.

Ohhh you have to love this week: McCan the Air Pirate (last week I read DFW's essay collection CtL, which has a long-form 2000 campaign piece called "Up, Simba"), hero to the Vietnamese, lies to David Letterman about when he's leaving New York (which is forgivable, because a man has to sleep sometime), flees to Washington in a pale attempt to off the debate (to which BHO said, This is not Nam; here there are rules), plainly realizing that Palin ain't gonna hack it (and what if she doesn't, what if she's a Harriet-Miers-esque smokescreen built to make an unpalatable choice seem palatable just because said choice will actually know you know some things, and if so who is this masked man, and if campaigning in the internet age has sped up the news cycle such that a VP resignation would be destructive for about 48 hours, why not just nominate the obnoxious dude first and let the controversy fade, which brings us to the conclusion that McCan, Air Pirate's real VP is not noxious to the electorate, he's just cranky and boring: he is/will be Joseph Isadore Lieberman), and while negotiators are wringing concessions from Bush (inlcuding caps on executive pay for companies in the New Fund, an equity stake for the American people, extended bankruptcy protection and payouts to homeowners, all of which at week's beginning were poison pills for the WH, all swallowed without complaint by Thursday night), McCan the Air Pirate sweeps in and conjures some far-right Sedona caucus, growing up Rep.s from the ground like Cadmus, whose terroristic threats include the scuttling of all consensus in favor of some far-fetched insurance scheme (Q: If a bank doesn't have the liquidity to lend to another bank because so much of its shit is in credit default swaps, why do you think it has the liquidity to buy insurance from the USG to cover its assets? And a follow-up Q: In the event that the assets covered by this new insurance are unsaleable, isn't the USG more broadly on the hook for covering their full, i.e. original cost? And if not -- assuming we write the coverage to pay companies say 9 cents on the dollar when their swaps hit 0 -- isn't that paltry amount of protection just going to shock the system further? In other words, whose ass-brained idea was this? A: Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), et alia. Q: Cantor?! No f'n wonder!), which within hours was scaled back to demanding insurance be only a part of the overall bailout (which is kind of like AQIM capturing a French diplomat, demanding a total retreat of all Algerian gov't forces from the countryside, then settling for a plate of babaghannouj. Send any thoughts on spelling of babbaganoush c/o the Editors, Dark Steer, 1 Terminal Plaza, Cleveland OH); if that didn't constitute an awesome week, then the burgeoning media interest in SP would make it so: Palin got zoning aid, gifts.

If that weren't enough, there are some serious acts of cognitive dissonance in McCan's bran that need to be addressed. For my money the most serious is the one going on between the personal-responsibility-fiscal-probity wing and his maverick-bozo wing. (This is fundamentally a subset of the Big McCain Question: What is it to be a Maverick? Does being a maverick mean making deals with your opponents when your party demands absolute fealty, i.e., is the maverick a pragmatist? Or does it mean bucking the demands of everyone and snarling the works until you get your own way [a la E. Cantor], i.e., is the maverick a fanatic? Seriously, I don't know what you mean by The Original Mavericks. Are we selling jeans?) Witness twice in the debates, McCain's assertion that the system corrupted the people, not (as it is in fact) the other way round:

We Republicans came to power to change government, and government changed us. And the -- the worst symptom on this disease is what my friend, Tom Coburn, calls earmarking as a gateway drug, because it's a gateway. It's a gateway to out-of-control spending and corruption.

And we have former members of Congress now residing in federal prison because of the evils of this earmarking and pork-barrel spending.

Okay, first of all, has Tom Coburn ever smoked weed? That's interesting. But what I really like is that "government" and "spending" are entities that exist outside of individual agency. Government changed Republicans. Spending put people in jail! If only Bob Ney had known about that line of defense at his trial! Nevermind the obvious hypocrisy: when Republicans game the system, it's the system's corrupting influence; when Democrats do it, it's "Chicago-style politics." Which I didn't know was a thing; deep dish, sauce on top politics? Second:

Maybe to Senator Obama it's not a lot of money. But the point is that -- you see, I hear this all the time. "It's only $18 billion." Do you know that it's tripled in the last five years? Do you know that it's gone completely out of control to the point where it corrupts people? It corrupts people.

That's why we have, as I said, people under federal indictment and charges. It's a system that's got to be cleaned up.

I have fought against it my career. I have fought against it. I was called the sheriff, by the -- one of the senior members of the Appropriations Committee. I didn't win Miss Congeniality in the United States Senate.

Seriously, who was the last conservative to run on a platform of taking a mulligan on personal responsibility? William Jennings Bryan? Didn't Americans screw themselves to that Cross of Gold? Walnuts sounded like he was reviving the Temperance movement, blaming the ills of Washington not on the people in it, who are of course his friends and neighbors, but on some extra-human miasma, and he might as well be blaming Demon Rum for the evils of our age...dead in the water...
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Once you're off black...

2008-09-29T00:09:00.002-04:00

...you never go back. (via the indispensable Juan Cole):

Why wouldn't the Kingdom want to squeeze the maximum out of customers? The Saudis have long memories and recall how high prices can cut into consumption; it happened in the 1980s and it's happening again now. Any threat to oil's leading role as a source of energy is a big worry for a country that sits on reserves of some 260 billion barrels. "We are concerned about the permanent destruction of demand," says a senior Saudi official. "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs."

This from Business Week, in an article titled "Saudi Oil, OPEC's Ire," or, maybe, "Once You Go Black, They Never Want You to Go Back."

The Saudi opinion as to American oil consumption, of course, contains No Surprises. Keep them Yankees hooked on their quiet lives and handshakes of carbon monoxide. Fine. How to turn this to politicadvantage? Easy... we stick BHO in Detroit. Speech to an auto workers' union.

"I was reading Business Week on the drive over. You know, they had an article about the Saudis and how their economy is affected by oil prices. And a Saudi minister said... and I'm quoting here... He said "Those who buy hybrid vehicles are not going back to SUVs." [crowd alternately boos and cheers] Now I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like even the Saudis know the way forward for America in the 21st Century. That's why I supported extending aid to the American auto industry so that we can build the cars of tomorrow and jumpstart our economy. That's why I'm calling for investing American tax dollars to make sure blah blah blah..."

Seems so easy. Just wanted to point that out. I'd love to see BHO set out in plain terms exactly how futile the Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less movement is. Say yeah we're going to drill, but it's not our top priority. Twist the blade in Palin, who said we could drill our way out of the problem. Really set out what a 21st Century American energy economy would look like... I think it's coming, and I think it's the knockout blow.

Palin begins to pall...

2008-09-26T10:30:00.001-04:00

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

That's Kathleen Parker writing in the National Review.

The bounce is over, the glory has departed.

The Palin phenomenon is Ichabod... dead and done. And now all that's left is for Biden to put her away.

This will go down as Walnuts' biggest gamble, the one that cost him the election.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney bets on the economy tanking and bides his time until 2012.

Technical fouls...

2008-09-24T19:20:00.002-04:00

First the attempt at a campaign timeout...

...and then this, via AMERICAblog:

What theee hay-ulll? I honestly don't know what to make of this... it looks like they're imploding...