Ron Paul

A couple of folks have asked in email if I've got anything to say about Ron Paul, who would, like, totally be Bull Connor if he hadn't already disbanded the police departments and sold the firehoses to private developers. What I have to say about Ron Paul is what Dennis Perrin says.

Dennis' most penetrating comment:

I might be mistaken, but so far as I know, Ron Paul has not left the campaign trail to oversee the killing of a black man. Liberal hero Bill Clinton did in 1992, flying back to Arkansas from New Hampshire to witness Rickey Ray Rector take the lethal needle. (Since Clinton was our first black president, did that constitute black-on-black violence?) Clinton also expanded the police and prison state, in which a large number of African-Americans are trapped, and shredded the safety net for the poor, among whom reside many African-Americans. Does this make Bill Clinton a racist? Hush yo' mouf!

And let me just say this about that, folks. "A large number" is Dennis' concession to understatement, I think, because the statistics on black men in American jails are staggering, extraordinary. The incarceration of black males constitutes the most odious American pogrom since FDR (hey, wasn't he a liberal or something?) threw anyone of Japanese descent into concentration camps. In its insidiousness and invidiousness it is the equal--at least--of the Jim Crow régime, and it will have longer-lasting effects. Our penal policy in this country over the last forty years will ultimately bear out as a moral failing as great as our embrace of chattel slavery, and what are the Democrats going to do about it? Maybe we'll put 100,000 more more cops on the street.

So pat yourselves on the back for your black motherfucking candidate, Democrats. Maybe Ron Paul truly does hate niggers from the bottom of his lily-white, cracker-ass heart, but at least he'd let some of them out of fucking jail.

Are We Gonna Split Hairs Here?

Watching America's putative left and and supposed right call each other Fascist! and Nazi!--and all because some fat slob wrote some bad history!--has been positively restorative, like the springs of Baden Baden or a high colonic. None of them seems to have the slightest inkling what a fascist is or was, did or does. That's hardly a criticism. Fascism hasn't actually meant anything particular since 1947 or so. The problem with today's users and abusers of the term isn't that they haven't got a clue what it means, but that they think they do. Jonah Goldberg has really done us a favor by exposing just how shallow the seemingly bottomless self-regard of American liberals actually is--toss in a pebble and empty the pool. Meanwhile, Goldberg, although he did apparently go to high school, can't figure out the midcentury realignment of political coalitions in America and thinks that "Woody Wilson was a racist" proves that Hitlery Clinton wants to conquer Abyssinia. I know I said that I would offer some sort of review in these not-pages, but truth be told: I sat down at the coffee shop in Borders the other day and tried to read it, but after twenty pages of writing that makes one long for the house style of TV Guide, I gave up and read the hilarious tall tales and exaggerations that we all told Michael Joseph Gross about Dick and Ritchie Scaife instead.

Of course, there is no left or right in America, no matter how much the soi-disant factions flatter themselves with the idea that they possess an ideology. Hell, everyone is a fuckin' fascist these days if we judge through the lens of popular political candidacies. On one side, you've got John McCain, who looks more and more like the Ghost of Christmas Future, actually telling people the truth: that America will occupy Iraq indefinitely, by which, really, we mean indefinitely to the tune of fifty to a hundred years. On the other side, you've got Aslan the Christ Lion telling his adoring "progressive" groupsters that it might be a good idea to send the army into Pakistan, because, after all, human rights, democracy, QED. If fascism is corporatist state capital with a strong element of central planning and militarism as a defining economic and cultural characteristic, then we're all fascists now anyway, so who really cares whether we brand ourselves with a cartoon Donkey or a cartoon Elephant? Haven't any of these people been to Washington DC lately? Joe Speer had nothing on this place. The World War II memorial looks like Julie Taymor's set for Titus Andronicus.

Liberal quibblers have this idea that because FDR did good things and beat the Nazis (which, of course, he didn't; "we all know how much guts yer average Ruskie's got--look how many them Nazis killed and he still wouldn't quit!") he couldn't have been a wartime dictator (which, of course, he was)--as if no dictator ever advanced the agenda of the Populares, or at least depended on their support. Goldberg, meanwhile, can't figger out that not every dictator was a fascist. Roosevelt, you'll find, was not. But this is what happens when people who don't know better begin to fancy themselves interpreters of history. They ought to stick to tea leaves and box scores. History, in the memorable words of Alan Bennet's play, The History Boys, is just one fucking thing happening after another.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Sir James Wolcott of Ocicat is more kindly disposed toward the Donk than Chevalier IOZ moi-même, but is nevertheless understandably displeased with the heavier breathing in the Obamarama balcony:

I have nothing against Obama . . . but as obnoxious as is the chortling, crowing misogyny of a Chris Matthews or the rightwing buffoon (Michael Graham, I believe) Imus had on his show this morning (or Imus himself, for that matter), the rah-rah gaga Beatlemania oozing out of the Huffington Post over Obama is even more revolting. Watching middle-aged men reclaim their innocence and idealism is like having to retrace Kevin Costner's steps through a field of dreams all over again--it was corny enough the first time.

Which is some fine invective.

Jim finds an especially embarrasing effusion from one Tom Hayden, who was one of the authors of the Port Huron statement. The original, not the watered-down second draft.

Below is a private note written after Iowa by my 34-year-old son Troy, which represents the feelings of his wife Simone and countless others in their generation. Their attachment to Barack Obama is as deep as their disgust with the political establishment. The letter speaks for itself, and becomes decisive in my considerations towards this race. I think Obama has ignited a storm of hope that outweighs any concerns about his specific policies. The Obama generation is here and will not be denied.

As Jim notes, it's a rare day indeed when a supposedly "private" note to Dad struggles to express with full poetry the Weltanschauung--or, rather, pick your German multisyllable; there are plenty--of a fictitious "generation." It's certainly odd to call the base of support for a politicain "countless," for what I hope are obvious reasons. If this generation of Jeremiahs is as disgusted with the "political establishment" as . . . well, as whatever, then perhaps they could focus the locus of their erotic energies on someone other than a sitting United States Senator. And alors unto the metaphors, which mix badly and crash to the ground. One does not ignite a storm, unless it's a firestorm, whose scorched-earth sound doesn't easily comport with Jack Handy's Barack Obama's message of universal uplift. A storm of hope, burning or otherwise, is hardly something one weighs, or that outweighs. As for "Obama Generation," I prefer the anonymous anodynity or the anodyne anonymity of Y, or X, or whichever, thankyouvewymuch.

The letter is just embarrassing, all the more so because it evidently begins "Dear Father"--totally unacceptable as a salutation except when read by Morgan Freeman for Ken Burns over a black-and-white photo-play. The body text reads like a peyote vision as narrated by a freshman creative writing major who's just read his first Rilke. Every angel is, like, terrible, dood.

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure

BAGHDAD — American bombers and fighter aircraft dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on suspected militant hide-outs in a southern suburb of Baghdad on Thursday, the military said.

In one of the largest air raids in recent months, which was accompanied by assaults by ground forces, the B-1 and F-16 aircraft dropped 38 bombs within 10 minutes on the Arab Jabour district.

Arab Jabour is a densely foliated area, blanketed with tall grasses and palm trees, beside the Tigris River. United States military officials have identified it as a known haven for militants linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the largely homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is foreign-led and now represents the principal threat to stability in Iraq. The air attacks were targeting 40 Al Qaeda insurgents, the military said.

-Reported in the Times online on January 10, 2008

Got that? 40 thousand pounds of bombs. In order to get at Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In January. Of 2008.

Ah, je me souviens bien:

Many U.S. military commanders in Iraq believe they have dealt a large enough blow to al Qaeda in Iraq to declare victory over the group, according to a report in the Washington Post.

-Reported by CBS News on October 15, 2007

Now since al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are two names for the same organization, one suspects that rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated. You may also enjoy noting some notable differences in characterization. CBS, for instance, explains that

Very few al Qaeda militants are Iraqis, and there presence is increasingly seen as an effort to divide the country and exacerbate sectarian strife.

The Times, today, reports par contre that although AQI is "foreign-led," it is a

largely homegrown Sunni insurgent group.

In the elder days of late 2007 it was good that we had "dealt a large enough blow . . . to declare victory" over AQI because

The Iraq franchise of Osama bin Laden's terror network [had] been deemed the deadliest threat facing American forces and their allies since shortly after the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Now that we have defeated them, they merely represent

the principal threat to stability in Iraq.

Progress is our product, buddy.

L'chaim

Mr. Bush, though, spoke broadly of the promise of peace, while praising the American alliance with Israel as a guarantee of “Israel’s security as a Jewish state.”

-The Times

And there you have it: America's committment to stand astride demography yelling, "Stop!"

Beware the Ides of March

If you want to understand why political "futures markets" are so--how shall I put this delicately?--fucking dumb, first watch this, courtesy of my man La_Rana:

The ideology that underlies the "wisdom" of markets is pretty kooky. Hell, downright nuts. The idea that agglomerations of human beings necessarily choose wisely is roundly disproven by human history. Like, all of it. Hell, Easter Island ought to be enough.

Now I am not in the least opposed to the idea of public ownership. Joint-stock ventures? Rockin. But these multiplying futures markets are just plain, old-fashioned speculations. Rather like our own perverted "markets," no? Believing themselves to be predictive, they are in fact reactive. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but rather than reacting to the old "fundamentals"--strength and popularity of brand; profit margins; bottom lines; balanced budgets; public reputation; etc.--they react to a collection of ineffable perceptions largely held not by customers but by fellow speculators.

In the case of these political futures markets--again, just as in any other speculators' market--participants are informed by external data. Polling numbers, for instance. And so their predictions are rarely wildly deviant from other attempts at the same. In fact, they're often wrong in the same direction as conventional predictions. Witness the Democratic race in New Hampshire, where the market made the same error as the major polling outlets. The idea that speculative investment produces unique insight into future outcomes, though, is pure nonsense. Any reasonably informed individual can make intuitive predictions about political outcomes with the same or better accuracy than the "market."

One misses the days of augery.

Clarification

To Andrew Sullivan and now to Jeff Taylor at Reason--stationary targets, I know, but bear with me--I shall attempt to explicate something. I'll quote Taylor:

Just more of Hillary Rodham Clinton saying and doing anything for power.

Taylor, you see, thinks that Hillary getting a little teary-eyed was a nefarious plot of some sort that happily backfired. Dude. First of all: Get. A. Fucking. Life.

Anyway, the explication. This notion that Hillary Clinton, somehow uniquely among aspirants to high office and in particular the presidency, seeks Power is moronic. And by moronic, I mean retarded. And by retarded, I mean so dumb that anyone who holds this view may as well give over his job and humanity and settle for a more appropriate métier, like sitting in a cage while cosmetics chemists put shit in his eyes. Of course Hillary Clinton wants power and will go to extraordinary lengths to acquire it. So too Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, McCain, Huckabee, and the rest of that gaggle of psychopaths. One does not seek the office of the President of the United States, which I remind you is singularly the most powerful office in the entire history of the human species upon this planet, without first possessing an unhealthy attraction to power. Little Dennis Kucinich and old Ron Paul want power too; they simply propose that they will effectuate their power in a different manner.

I mean, hell, look at Romney. Here is a man who has effectively recreated himself as an entirely different person, who has recanted--in full public view!--virtually every one of his previously stated legal and moral and ethical and economic beliefs in order to make himself palatable to the percentage of the population that will determine whether or not he can gain his party's nomination, upon which occurence he will with great alacrity repudiate his recantations in order to make himself palatable . . . you can see where this goes.

They'll all do or say anything. This ain't pick-up, baby. This is the pros. These people are jockeying for their turn at the tiller of the American Empire.

Things to Remember

Hey, did you know that the United States is still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq? We like totally are!

Vince Foster

The cheek-grazing has Don Corleone written all over it. Let me just say this about that. If Hillary Clinton has Chris Matthews whacked, then I will drop my objections and vote for her with pride.

This Is to That as That Is to This

Needless to say, Barack Obama's groupie followers want you to believe that he's the living avatar of Martin Luther King, Jr. An' he's gonna be prezdent! It is one of the most crass, ridiculous, and frankly insulting comparisons that I can imagine. Dudes and dudettes, Martin Luther King, Jr. stared down police dogs and fire hoses and went to jail as part of a genuinely radical program. I mean, this dude stood on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and even as he extolled the necessity of non-violence, threatened an inevitable Negro uprising if some shit didn't fucking change, bitches.

Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

This is in the old "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword" manner of the Christian messiah, by the way.

Barack Obama snorted coke or something and later admitted it in a book. What a pioneer.

Le Bureau

Now here is the sort of person who is hated by coworkers. It all has something to do with how Barack Obama is a LEADER. (It's curious, by which I mean ironic, by which I really mean sad and ridiculous, that Obama's supporters are motivated entirely by feelings of filial inferiority, but as the great rebbes have said since time immemorial: Eh, what can ya do?) The post breaks down the top three candidates into three categories: Executive; Manager; Worker. Obama; Edwards; Clinton. In the sort of Welchian, who-moved-my-cheese, HR-department, Business-Times cant that passes for deep thinkin' in the current American economy, this means that:

Executive = Declarations: bring forth, generate something new, lead.
Manager = Requests: please do x by time y with condition of satisfaction z.
Worker = Promises: deliver competent performance in a domain, over and over.

And never the twain shall meet.

Let's walk it back to our Presidential candidates.

One speaks in declarations, inspires, leads.
The second requests you elect him to fix problems, lobbies for a change so he can fix the system.
The third talks of her competence and experience, promises she will do what she's always done, and has the policy plans and papers to prove it.

Leader. Manager. Worker.

It ain't yer gramma Rosa's socialism, that's for sure.

A corrective. Executives speak in generalities because they want to befuddle the board of directors and make certain that no downsteam fuck-ups can ever be traced back to them. They generate wealth, i.e. do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible for it. Their purpose is to craft high-sounding nonsense for the annual shareholders meeting and to give corner-office interviews to the morons at Marketplace on NPR. The executive hitches vaguely martial adjectives like "bold" onto kooky neologisms like "synergisms" and concocts fictions about why it is essential for a company that has made metal stepladders for seventy years to "rebrand" itself as a "vehicle for generating shareholder value through the structured leveraging of ascencion-based commodity investment products." He is a bullshitter, but a better one than you are, which is why he makes 400 times more money than you, you jerk.

Managers do indeed make requests. The preferred mode is interrogative because it's the surest way to avoid blame for any downstream fuck-ups. They live a fevered existence in which the entirely nonsensical directives that float from the executive office in fruity, Latinate non sequiturs must be transformed into something resembling work. They transform abstractions into arbitrary measures, often called benchmarks, and they generate mountains of data showing that whatever it is they're doing is totally up to the standards of however it is they're measuring it. This takes approximately five minutes of every day. The rest of the time, they're probably blogging about anarchism or some stupid shit like that.

Workers spend eight hours a day not doing what their managers ask them to do, because frankly, who cares? They aren't competent and they know it, but at least they're getting benefits. They spend a lot of time taking long shits in the third-floor bathroom that no one uses, or smoking, or bitching that Sue got more hours than Danielle even though Danielle has seniority. Everyone knows that Sue gets more hours because she caught her manager looking at porn on his work computer, or blogging about anarchy or some stupid shit like that, but they argue anyway. They will go to any lengths to avoid doing things. They don't like you. They don't respect you. They don't care.

Prego

I have always found it supremely odd to hear couples say that "we" are pregnant. I know that it's supposed to signify something about sharing, fidelity, coupledom, committment, what have you, but every man who's ever employed the idiom within my earshot has joined it to a shit-eating, look-I-made-it grin more appropriate to a crooked birdhouse or an under-tensioned belt on the old washing machine. The truth, however loath the breeders are to admit it, is that man's contribution to the procreative act is transitory. Or, how did my pal Kate put it . . . mercifully brief. Several minutes, an odd-looking grimace, and a moan--that is what nature requires of men for the production of babies, whereas the ladies actually have to carry the little parasite around like a fiesty tapeworm for months and months.

Anyway, via Thers at Atrios' place, who does come up with some good links from time to time, I've just learned of the phenomenon of "post-abortive men." The image that springs to mind involves the tiny, bloody dismemberments that grace the protest posters outside of Planned Parenthood, but the coinage in fact refers to men who have discovered that their womenfolk have gone off and had abortions with or without them.

"We had abortions,” said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. “I’ve had abortions."

Note the plural. This, in any event, is some kind of crazy, reverse mission creep for gender equity. Where to next? "Sorry I'm testy. We've got terrible cramps. It's our period." Truly the only thing that men give birth to are bad ideas.

Don't Take No Jive from the Western Union Man

Par Contre

Okay. Fine. But you know, perhaps the reason that campaign coverage sucks is that the presidential campaign sucks.

Production Values

O'Reilly evidently shoved some dude who works for Obama and threatened to take him outside and finish the job, or whatever. God, I love this dude. He is like a gargantuan mutant version of the Pittsburgh-classic, Irish-whiskey drunk: vulgarly avuncular and somehow always getting closer to your face as his breath and speech decline in quality. They ought to get rid of the current set for his show and give him a U-shape bar with a buzzing Smoke-O-Lator overhead, a natty jackalope, and three thin domestic beers on tap. He would have only one television monitor, which would be something circa 1979, ceiling-mounted behind him and playing ESPN with a lot of red bleed. Some asshole keeps playing "Jolene" on the jukebox. The pretzels are stale. The bartender is in the bathroom doing over-cut blow off the tank of the toilet, which he wiped off with his sleeve. The only other guy in the bar is an elderly black man named Hollis who's been asleep for three hours in front of his sweating Jack and Coke, but Bill eyes him warily anyway. Could be dangerous.

Throw the Brick

Let me put it to you this way: I am willing to riot no matter who wins or loses the next presidential election. The outcome is totally irrelevant to my committment to rioting. If Noam Chomsky is elected president and makes Alex Jones his secretary of state, I will riot nonetheless.

The Hermeneutics of Senior High

Oh no! A jernulist says that elections are like high school and some pergressives are angry because, like, that sort of irreverance has no place in any description ever of this the most important election ever in our lifetimes ever. It is so not like a high school election. There is serious shit, man. There's like, Pakistan, and if Rudy Giuliani wins and Mike Huckabee wins and Mitt Romney wins then the world will not see that America can elect a grinning black woman to the highest office in all the lands under the sun and forgive us our trespasses as we kick the asses of those who trespass against us. Word, motherfuckers. It is not a high school election because there are real issues, man. Lives at steak. Problems to bare. Let the eagle soar.

Here on Earth, meanwhile, it seems to me that the comparison is probably the nearest-to-true thing that Howie Fineman--or anyone else at Newsweak--has written in years. Banal, but true. The self-seriousness required to wail against so commonplace an observation is really quite stunning. Oh well. I remember well how I passed my last class election in high school. First, I used the whole campaign as an excuse for some petty vandalism and then, when election day rolled around, I got blazed out of my gourd and played some totally satisfying hooky. Don't blame me. I didn't vote!

AFRICOM

The new command has had bipartisan political backing -- who could question the idea of taking Africa more seriously?

-David Ignatius

Insofar as the phrase retains any real meaning in the American idiom, let me suggest that it is possible to take something seriously without a garrison.