The Plan Cannot Fail!

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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Ghost in the TV

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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