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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Future Star, Dead Giant

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?

The Post-human Fallacy

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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Save yourselves...

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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...none of you nuh better look at me funny....

Just a quick bit on the political future...

NYTimes has got an article on Walnuts' fundraising flaccidity and how BarryHussein could pretty much afford to pay for McCain's campaign and still out spend him by a factor of twelve. Walnuts, of course, then goes to the RNC and Republican machine with hat in hand and hangdog face, seeking some cash and coordination.

But that's all well and known: the old man can't raise any money. Again, my question is: what's up with Mitt Romney?

Mr. McCain is likely to depend upon the party, which finished April with an impressive $40 million in the bank and has significantly higher contribution limits, to an unprecedented degree to power his campaign, Republican officials said.

To that end, Republican officials said they were enlisting President Bush, a formidable fund-raiser who has raised more than $36 million this year for Republican candidates and committees, for three events on Mr. McCain’s behalf. They will appear together at a fund-raiser in Phoenix on May 27, and the next day the president will take part in a luncheon with Mitt Romney in Salt Lake City and then an exclusive dinner at Mr. Romney’s vacation home in Park City, Utah.

Now it's generally agreed upon that McCain needs to pick someone who could credibly step in and take his place should he shuffle off this mortal coil to that great tiger cage in the sky. Romney's an okay bet. The veep status takes the Mormonism thing somewhat out of the spotlight. Romney also brings a certain degree of chops on the economy.

But what's Romney get out of it? If Walnuts loses with Mitt as veep, Romney essentially becomes a Mormon John Edwards--nice try, but you've the stink of loser still hanging about you. If Walnuts wins, Romney is first in line after the one term presidency. But the Vice Presidency isn't as much of a straight shot to the presidency as one might think: only five out of forty-three presidents were elected to the office from the position of Vice President.

So Mittens may not take the gamble. But if he plays a good Mittens and holds the requisite fundraisers for the candidate and makes the right connections, he could come out in '12 as the new face and future of conservatism.

My bet is that he's taking the long con. He's young-ish and still very rich. He could write a book or two on the need for a return to moral purity. Decry the cesspool of the internet and cable television and co-ed colleges and automated can-openers and miscegenation. Hit up the Ingraham-Hannity-Limbaugh Circuit for a couple of years. Not rely on it too much, but have them all there as a base. In the mean time, push your competency as your major selling point. Offer yourself as the aspirin and Gatorade cure for those in the party suffering from a Bush hangover. Re-emerge in 2012 with solid grass roots support as the competent front-runner with enough support from the party's soul to carry you to the nomination.

And, of course, still lose in the general because nobody likes the Mormons.

"none of you nuh! better look at me funny
NUH! you know my name, now gimme my money!"
-Old Dirty Bastard, "Baby I Got Your Money"