Sticking It To Whitey

The second I saw Billmon's Uncle Wolf spoof, I knew he had to be anticipating the shrill imprecations from all sides to be imminently lobbed at his bunker. Sure enough, they arrive as scheduled, perhaps the safest yet shallowest mode of demonstrating one's putative commitment to at least the appearance of grave concern over something or other.

Of course such nonsense conveniently elides Billmon's essential point, which was how absurd that Blitzer, a toady's toady, as reliable a corporate water-carrier as one is likely to find outside of an Alhambra truck, is suddenly taking umbrage, suddenly noticing the seething contempt that creatures like Lynne Cheney have always felt for people like himself. It took someone as preternaturally smug, condescending, and hostile as she to truncheon Blitzer with the political talking point the current wave of zone-flooders wish to drive home -- "do you want us to win?"

And because Blitzer is conditioned after years of mendicant stooping to his (and our) inferiors, bred to pretend that titles magically confer some sort of holy authority, he is more concerned about his patriotism being questioned by a vile shrew than about the deliberately absurd, pointed scope of Cheney's question. Say what you will about these people, they know exactly how to draw a fucking line, and then stand back and watch the scrambling fun.

If Blitzer (or any of the other people who have been speared with this faux-indignant scrap of cheap sophistry) had an ounce of wit about them, the immediate response would be, "Do you?"

But instead we get bogged down in the political accessorizing, the rallying around of this or that perceived jab at gender or racial or tribal identity, as if Billmon was running around screaming the n-word. It's a needless distraction, always, but especially right now. We should be more concerned on an order of magnitude about Republican operatives like Lynne Cheney and Bill O'Reilly asking this stupid, hypocritical question of their political opponents, and about crafting a well-timed, well-aimed response to it.

People have been speculating since late August about the traditional "October Surprise". Much of that speculation has centered around a destroyer group that is arriving in the Straits of Hormuz for what most are euphemistically terming "military exercises"; i.e., a surprise attack on Iran a few days before the election. This is not exactly an unrealistic notion, though such an attack would fail to utilize basic principles such as sufficiency, necessity, and viability. By that I mean that an attack on Iran would have to consist of air raids exclusively, with no ground support to follow, which would incur many civilian casualties and instantly render us as a rogue nation in the eyes of the rest of the world. It would create a real problem with our Chinese financial patrons, who have a lot of their own money sunk into deals with the Iranians. That's not to say that it couldn't happen, but there is demonstrable lack of sufficiency and viability.

I believe that lack of necessity can be contended by positing that the real October Surprise is that there isn't one. Oh, another Osama tape or some such might surface, or we might kill our 400th #3 al Qaeda commander on November 5th. But once again those are merely media distractions. The real beauty of the surprise is that they haven't needed one as badly as we think they think they do. Because their ground game is much better, much more established at this point. Members of church congregations are generally on the same page, as are owners of extraction industries, as are jingoistic yahoos. It's just a matter of getting and keeping brand recognition from self-selecting demographics. Overtly appealing to the "broken glass" voters, the mouth-breathing retards who will show up out of spite more than anything, is the backbone of their electoral strategy. We seem to think we're supposed to win just because our ideas and principles are better; perhaps we should brush up on our Mencken.

If they lose, it won't be because Democrats got their shit together, though they are finally starting to find spine in at least microscopic quantities for a change. This is a start, but it is only that. Even in a solid victory, even in a retake of both houses, Democrats will have to immediately ramp it up to maintain momentum. Because the Republican media echo chamber has many rooms, from the radio screamer noise machine to passive pussy enablers like Leslie Blitzer, who routinely barter their common sense in exchange for perceived journamalistic credibility.

I don't know how to put this any more simply -- there is no reason to take a person like Lynne Cheney seriously, especially not in a public forum. There is no reason to ask Ann Coulter her opinion on anything, any more than there could be a legitimate reason to interview Charles Manson. Sensible people understand this, even if people like Wolf Blitzer and Tweety Matthews do not.

Those are our concerns, and we do not have infinite time or space to waste on peripheral piffle like complaining about the blogospheric spoofing of journalist lackeys. We are getting a lot better at flooding the zone on the internets, but we need to know when to just let them waste their own time and space on one. This is one of those times. They're looking for anything and everything they can scrounge up on our side, to try to distract themselves and each other -- and us -- from the manifest failure of their people, their principles, and their policies. Creating a bullshit diversion over political correctness is a move of desperation, and as such, should be met with scorn and contempt, and nothing else, if at all.