Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Is it just me, or is the Democratic primary campaign characterized by an even higher than usual level of stultifying, drivelling imbecility? It's delightful that the only interesting moments in it have been provided by a man of God from Chicago.

God and His fans have now been firmly escorted off the stage, so that people like ABC's Jake Tapper can turn their brilliant, secular, merit-class minds to the issues that really matter.

The Party of God has been busy elsewhere, however, providing news that I for one find pretty encouraging:

Lebanon reverses decisions that angered Hezbollah

BEIRUT — The Lebanese government late Wednesday formally rescinded decisions that sparked days of violence in the country, a move aimed at easing tensions between American- and Iranian-backed political camps vying for power in the country.

... Lebanon's information minister said the government would back off on decisions announced last week to declare illegal the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah's private fiber-optic telecommunications network and to fire the pro-Hezbollah head of security at Beirut's international airport.

"Since the government is greatly concerned with the higher interest, the government decided to approve the rescinding of the two decisions," Ghazi Aridi, the minister, said in a televised appearance.....

"There is no winner as a result of what happened, but there is a loser," he said, "and that is Lebanon."

Hezbollah appears to be well on the way to picking up all the marbles in Lebanon, and if some kind of deal with Syria about the Golan is really in the works -- as many Middle East entrail-readers seem to believe -- then we can confidently attribute any interest Israel may at last be showing in serious negotiation to its worries about the God boosters in Lebanon (and, of course, Iran).

It's hard to believe that the Israelis really think Syria could provide any significant help against Hezbollah. But they're operating these days like a riverboat gambler on the brink of going bust. Maybe they think that if they can embroil Syria in some kind of conflict with Hezbollah, it'll at least relieve some of the immediate pressure.

Score one for the King of the Universe. You go, God!

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Friday May 16 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the primary campaign is not really about anything but personalities, one might as well find a way to enjoy it.

My own solution to the brain-corroding tedium of the process is this: now that Hillary is starting to look like she's history, I'm liking her better. (Of course, I like history in general, which makes it easier.)

This is on a purely personal level, you understand. She's such a junkyard dog. The only face she has is her game face. And she'd keep that campaign smile on it if she were being hanged, drawn, and quartered, right through the sordid, bloody process, to the grisly, filthy end.

On a purely personal level, she has in abundance the virtue of fortitude. One has to admire virtue -- on a purely personal level -- wherever one finds it.

I watched her (rather lengthy) victory speech in West Virginia -- a state Barack Obama probably wrote off when he was about 12 years old.

Transcript here for those who'd rather read than listen.

An interesting performance. Not as interesting or unusual as Barack's original, remarkable "race" speech -- the one he made before he lost his nerve and decided he didn't really know Jeremiah Wright after all. But Hillary, after all, is a bit of an earnest plodder, and doesn't have the Pindaric athlete's ease and composure that the gods gave Barack. Considering how hard she has to work, she did pretty well.

On a purely personal level. Of course.

Hillary's handlers had carefully composed her human background, although the one moderately cute young gay guy, for some strange reason, kept waving a bowling pin around. This was a bit distracting. Where is the Secret Service when you need them? The one black guy looked a little bit like will.i.am, but maybe not quite enough.

Poor Hillary, though. In spite of her (incredibly game) game face and her sedulously competent delivery -- if she were a piano student, she would practice her scales for three or four hours a day, with a metronome -- her speech was awfully dull. Not only dull but surprisingly tone-deaf: she boasted about having extracted an absentee ballot from a dying woman, and a contribution from a child who had to sell his bike to raise the money. It sounded like Fagin's mother reading her resume.

One thing struck me with unusual force: her relentless references to the "middle class." Now West Virginia is not a very middle-class place by any reasonable statistician's standard. West Virginia is, in fact, as my Appalachian grandmother used to say, "as poor as Job's turkey."

So what, one wonders, does this "middle class" trope mean to people? Perhaps we need to have a focus group, and approach the matter by asking who's not in the middle class. My guess is that people would get around sooner or later to mentioning Bill Gates and other very, very wealthy folk; but that the first, most spontaneous exclusions would operate downward.

A structuralist, or a Ramist, would say that the primary distinction encoded in this "middle class" category is a distinction between those who have something -- however exiguous, and tenuous -- and those who have less. It implicitly associates, on the good side of this first-order fence, those who have, really, very little, with those who have -- really -- quite a lot.

Of course Hillary is not unique in her use of this kind of discourse. It is, in fact, universal in American politics. The American English phrase for "ordinary people" is "middle class" -- and so of course ordinary people always must and will and do have somebody, some logically entailed lower class, to look down on, with contempt and moral condemnation and fear.

Hillary's good fortune in West Virginia is that, unlike much of the South, there aren't many black people there. So in West Virginia, the imagined social subbasement evoked by your sense of being "middle class" -- even if you live in a trailer -- tends to be rather dark-skinned.

Of course, the social subbasement Obama's fans imagine is a bit different. It is, in fact, peopled by pudgy, dough-faced, provincial, fried-food white folks in places like... West Virginia.

One of the things I like about Hillary is that even though she herself is as much of a merit-class baby as Barack -- though not as gifted by Nature -- she's been forced by circumstances to go begging at all those trailer doors, to collect the dying old ladies' ballots and the poor kid's bicycle blood money, and by God she's done it. She has no shame. The trailer "middle class" have become her people -- and she loves them like T. Rex loves Stegosaurus.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday May 14 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

So who really won the cold war?

(After the polling booth squalor of last night, like a soaring full-chested pigeon, this dawn I wax world-historical.)

The answer really is obvious: besides the United Ogres of Amnesia, why of course it was -- people's China. And it was won by none other than -- Mao and Nixon. Yes, these two endlessly vilified titans were the architects of that massive victory. The rise of people's China under Deng was the direct, otherwise impossible product of the Sino-American entente engineered by Mao and grasped like a miracle potion by der Dickster.

Its endlessly curious how Clio uses her masterbuilders like pawns, eh? The continuing story of mankind's progress malgre-soi is obviously shot full of ironies of all shapes and sizes, but these biggest ones are so vastly, so intentionally self-contradictory as to make a flatiron dance.

And yet there we have it: today was produced by an arrangement reached back in the early 70's by these two shrewd and checkered statesmen: shrewd and checkered and ultimately mad -- I might add, like history herself.

Posted by Owen Paine on Wednesday May 14 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fact: our Luddite dollar has graciously lost about 1/3 of its puffed-up imperial value against our northern trading partners' currencies. But against the real menace -- against our hideously undervalued southern trading partners -- the decline is less than 1/6th. Enter this champion of the battle against our ongoing "off shore" jobbery robbery:

By the looks of him alone, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how could the likes of this this, this... think-tank porcupine ever hope to bust apart the trans nat-OITP(*) ring's all-in, full-tilt, take-no-prisoners attack, which is even now preparing to apply ten thousand wrecking balls to whatever still remains standing amidst the rubble of our national industrial platform?

I know, I know. Once again, I've prefered the rude senseless personal insult to the principled, documented, text-based dismantling of the argument. So okay, read this, and particularly this flapping burlap of a finale that Maestro Scott substitutes for the much-needed roundhouse left:

"The countries whose currencies are in the OITP index account for roughly 59% of the current U.S. trade deficit.... OITP's relative stubbornness is problematic for United States and global adjustment and makes strengthening currencies in the OITP index and the Japanese yen even more important for correcting the U.S. trade deficit."

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(*)The Other Important Trading Partner index. Its member currencies: China, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Israel, India, Philippines, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Singapore, Hong Kong.

Posted by Owen Paine on Tuesday May 13 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Courtesy of these folks, who went ahead and endorsed him anyway.

Posted by Al Schumann on Tuesday May 13 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

For your enjoyment, the final two faces of the Democracy's prez-nom campaign in '72, to remind the praeteriti that tarry here what that hag the Hump did to dear old George McG before the final event, the California primary of early June.

Hunter T's words: "Not even Nixon could stoop to Hubert's level, the vicious corrupt old screw."

Yes, that desperate scalded milk-rat of a candidate threw everything he could rip loose at the man from South Dakota. Behind that honest mild Western face was -- a former commie stooge, a progressive party (vintage '48) operative, a bomber pilot turned surrender sissy, a guy who never saw an idling black hand he didn't want to fill with Uncle's long green -- in short, a friend, protector, and sponsor to every bombthrower, child-rapist, drug fiend and deserter America's sick underbelly could produce.

Hubert had help, of course. Here's a couple of mainframe HH shadow bullies:

AFL-CIA chief and cold-war Catholic, George "The Animal" Meany...

... and the king of the cop riots, Mayor Daley the elder.

'Twas a Turkish gauntlet they put dear senator George through, in those runup weeks to the final primary -- but then George won California anyway, and there was the inevitable coming-together after the Hump ran out of tomahawks and votes at the convention.

Ahhh there were giants among us in those days -- real ball-eaters. _________________________________________________________________

Posted by Owen Paine on Saturday May 10 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Is it really white trash that cottons to St Hill?

That phrase -- "white trash" -- I just read on the internet somewhere is a "classist slur".

"Classism" -- now that's an odious jumble of a notion. It seems to notice how an elite might not just exploit, but also also "oppress" another class. "Classism" -- a squishy term -- far more so than 'racist' or even 'sexist'. And 'oppression' -- squishier than 'exploitation', which has a pretty crisp, quantitative meaning.

The St Hill mob is trying to pin the "classist" label on Obie. And of course that's a delight, since between Ob and la Scorpion, calling one or the other 'classist' is straight pot-vs-kettle, isn't it?

In demotic, the better word is 'elitist' either way

I like this old GOP rag. Beyond the obvious delight it gives me to see the dueling identity pols smearing each other with it, the notion seeks to isolate all the obviously embarrassing bits out of our class based society -- but leave the nuggets in place.

The nuggets? Why, exploitation, of course. "Classists" don't exploit the helotry -- they sneer at 'em, they condescend to 'em. They -- escape 'em. And best of all, classists try to -- reform 'em.

So we have a clear choice, as white trash or as blue-collars. We got one party -- the GOP -- of hard exploitation; and another party -- the Jackasses -- who like to deplore "oppression", and leave exploitation out of the picture, unmentioned, unmentionable, perhaps nonexistent.

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday May 8 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Jeremiah Wright flap provided, what, a week's worth of excitement, but the dreary campaign is back once more on its stupefyingly tedious track. The Note is again full from end to end of soporific, sophomoric inside-baseball wiseacre-y. How long, oh Lord, how long? Who cares, oh Lord, who cares?

The only mildly interesting thing to come out of the Wright-o-machia was a dog that didn't bark. The whole carpet-chewing brouhaha appears to have made very little difference to anybody. Which is actually a phenomenon worth pondering, especially since nothing else of any interest is going on. (The gas tax holiday? Puh-leeze.)

Better a non-phenomenon than none at all.

The pollsters have been busy:

In Poll, Obama Survives Furor, but Fall Is the Test

WASHINGTON — A majority of American voters say that the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say that it could influence voters this fall....

But some of the people polled allow as how the Wright flap might perhaps make a difference to some unspecified other people -- though it's made little or none to them. So that is the news. It hasn't made any difference -- yet. But some people think it might. Stop The Presses! Subjunctive Mood Alive And Well!

Mixed feelings, as usual, seems like the right response. The good news is that the ogreish cartoon of black anger which the media tried to construct out of Pastor Wright doesn't seem to have scared anybody very much. That is unquestionably progress. Score one for the good sense of the public.

The bad news is that Obama isn't utterly disgraced for his weak-kneed response. (Whatever you say, officer! I'll talk!)

One wonders how anybody who ever believed that the guy represented something really new, and hopeful, and positive, can continue to believe that after his barefoot penance at the frigid windswept Canossa where the infallible Papacy of received ideas retired to sulk after the intolerable insults Wright offered it.

But maybe even within the bad news there's a silver lining. From the same Times story:

... nearly half of the voters surveyed, and a substantial part of the Democrats, said Mr. Obama had acted mainly because he thought it would help him politically, rather than because he had serious disagreements with his former pastor.

Which brings us back to the old story -- Obama is the quadrate term of lesser-evillism, the lesser evil of the lesser evils.

But that, ah that, is apparently the inoperable tumor of American political thinking. How do we persuade people to stop caring which evil is lesser?

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Monday May 5 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

From the SF Chronicle:

House Democrats work on huge Iraq money bill

House Democratic leaders are putting together the largest Iraq war spending bill yet, a measure that is expected to fund the war through the end of the Bush presidency and for nearly six months into the next president's term....

Bay Area lawmakers, who represent perhaps the most anti-war part of the country, acknowledge the bill will anger many voters back home.

"It's going to be a tough sell to convince people in my district that funding the war for six months into the new president's term is the way to end the war," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, a leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus who plans to oppose the funding. "It sounds like we are paying for something we don't want."

A poll accompanies the Chronicle story:

Gotta love the Bay Area. But I feel sadly sure that nearly all that 88% who gave the right answer will dutifully trudge to the polls in November and vote for these inexcusable-breachers-of-promise.

Q: How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Does the lightbulb want to change?

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Saturday May 3 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Scruggs passed along this gem from 'digby':

I have to assume that the telcoms have been secretly monitoring members of congress and the Bush administration's communications and are blackmailing them. There is just no other adequate explanation for this immunity nonsense to keep coming back over and over again.

Here 's Jane Hamsher:

According to the ACLU, there is rumor of a backroom deal being brokered by Jay Rockefeller on FISA that will include retroactive immunity. I've heard from several sources that Steny Hoyer is doing the dirty work on the House side....

They really, really want this to go through. In fact, their insistence is becoming so desperate that there is simply no more reason to doubt they are hiding something..... These corporations must be knee deep in spying on Americans and their corrupt congressional puppets must know it.

The bit about "blackmail" is also rather touching. Does Rupert Murdoch "blackmail" Bill O'Reilly into behaving the way he does? No, Digby, Murdoch is O'Reilly's employer. Now apply that paradigm to Congress and see how well it works!

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Saturday May 3 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)