Free Speech for the Dumb

Is there anything quite as tedious and tendentious as these ludicrous, intellectually louche "arguments" that defend the indefensible under the guise of protecting free speech?

This is not the only deeply offensive speech protected by the Constitution. Nazis are allowed to march, and racists are allowed to spew racism. If legislatures have the power to disapprove certain categories of unpopular speech, a lot of expression could become illegal.

Christ. Not the old "first they came for the dogfighters and the chick-squishers, and I was not a dogfighter or chick-squisher" cliché. Look, first of all, Nazis are allowed to march and racists are allowed to spew as long as no one gets hurt. It's not that complicated.

These idiots keep looking around for a line to draw, and it's right fucking there. Dogfighting is illegal, animal abuse is illegal. This is not a "free speech" issue, it's a "causing harm to others in clear violation of the law" issue. The laws are pretty clear about those things, just as they are about kiddie porn. No court is going to confuse a PETA jeremiad with a crush video. Obscenity guidelines typically revolve around prohibiting content that is overtly salacious or prurient. And as obnoxious as PETA's exhibitionism can be, there's a huge and obvious gap between their tactics and those of these twisted assholes.

(And seriously, the bastards who get their jollies from watching the unwilling and helpless be raped and abused, tortured and killed, they need to have their fevered brains splattered across the nearest wall, right along with the actual perpetrators. Just be done with it. Trust me, no one will ever miss them.)

I'm not sure what the self-styled First Amendment absolutists see in tilting at this particular windmill, that our civic lives and freedoms will be unnecessarily circumscribed by preventing these vile people from doing these vile things. Sometimes the theorists need to get out of their ivory towers and take a stretch in the real world, and think about the unnecessary damage that gets committed under their rhetorical umbrellas. I'm betting most of them were upset about Michael Vick, and Robert Stevens and these crush creeps should be no different.

Family Values

If you're like me -- and of course you are, you poor sap -- you've been wondering how the wealthy have been managing in the current economic climate. I bet you assumed that the poor dears have had their domestics and estates foreclosed upon, and are now huddling beneath very nicely appointed bridges outside Greenwich, Connecticut. Pretty close, bro-ham, pretty damned close. Here but for the grace of Leona Helmsley go you and me, podna:

IT turns out the other half — or at least the tiny slice who live at the top of the wealth pyramid — are not sleeping any better than the rest of America.

At a closed-door meeting of advisers to family offices — which serve families who typically are worth more than $500 million — I learned that the super-rich are just as concerned about the future as everyone else.

....

Before you start laughing up your sleeve, be advised that this is not a good thing. When the super-rich get cold feet, the rest of America gets swine flu. They are, after all, the people who might finance new companies that create jobs, make big investments to support existing companies and spread their wealth throughout the economy.

According to a study the Family Office Exchange plans to release this month, the super-rich are most worried about what they do not know. Some 45 percent of the 108 ultrahigh-net-worth families surveyed in August ranked the economy and financial markets as their No. 1 concern. They were most concerned about government intervention in the financial markets and a commercial real estate bust.

Sooo....let's see, the implicit threat here is that if the eeevil gubmint gets some bright utilitarian idea to do the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people, maybe help protect taxpayers from having to foot the bill from future financial malfeeance, they'll take their ball and go home. On the other hand, if a way can be found to further socialize the costs of leveraged tranches and wastrel descendants of wealth accumulators, that would be just about a dozen kinds of awesome.

In the past, family businesses and family wealth were commingled. If the business was struggling, the patriarch would often finance shortfalls. “Now the kids are upset about where the money is going,” said Holly Isdale, managing director at Bessemer. “Intrafamily dynamics are playing a bigger part in decisions.”

If the family put in place a strict estate plan, the children may legally own a good portion of what the patriarch made. And now they have choices to make that may go against his wishes. “These families have recognized that autopilot is not a good strategy,” said Amelia Renkert-Thomas, a lawyer with Withers Bergman.

The other risk to super-rich families is government action and increased regulation. They suspect it is coming but do not know how it will affect them. The result is that they are increasingly anxious about the future while still shell-shocked from the past year.

The article mentions this several times, but never elaborates on it. It's obvious why Wall Street predators don't want to be regulated, but why investors? Don't they want to be protected from being rolled by boutique bookmaking schemes and spreadsheet grifts?

Of course not, because the regulations wouldn't really protect them all that much. They would prevent them from getting the low-risk (since the gubmint foots the bill when it goes south) high-reward venture they all think they're entitled to. The gamblers and their bookies basically look at the other 95% of the country -- the world, for that matter -- the way Roman Polanski looks at a girl scout troop.

(Yeah yeah, cheap shot, don't get me started. And fuck the Hollywood assholes for their new Free Mumia petition. I don't think there's much utility in turning the world on its side to nab a 76-year-old creep who apparently has not repeated his transgression. But the guy got a seventh-grader drunk and high in a hot tub and buttfucked her on a couch. Just because he's a talented guy who got a seventh-grader drunk and high in a hot tub and buttfucked her on a couch doesn't buy him a pass, except in LaLa Land. Sheesh, must these tone-deaf idiots go out of their way to prove the Big Hollywood doofuses' points for them?)

Anyway. Back to the other clueless assholes.

One thing the group convened by Bessemer agreed on is that their clients were hesitant to buy commercial real estate. They fear that the value of it could collapse with greater ferocity than the housing market.

The logic behind this is that with everyone cutting back — companies laying off workers, consumers watching what they buy — there is less demand for office and retail space. If leases expire and are not renewed, building owners will have trouble making their loan payments. That, in turn, will affect the investors who bought the bonds secured by this debt.

Even those real estate owners who are doing well could be hurt. “A lot of this debt is short term and it needs to be refinanced, but there is no market for that,” Ms. Isdale said. Next year and 2011 are expected to be the worst, Ms. McCarthy said.

Yeah, just watch. This will be the next bailout, this commercial real estate collapse. It cannot be repeated often enough -- these people do not believe in the traditional risk/reward scenario sketched out by traditional capitalist economists, the basic Scottish Enlightenment principles invoked by Adam Smith, that work and product define the right and the utilitarian good for producers to retain control of their means of production.

But nothing's produced here, the reward only accrues to the bettor when the wager is won, and the costs are socialized when the wager is lost. And the implicit threat that these swells just won't invest and revamp the economy if they don't succeed, or if we don't intervene to keep them from failing, becomes less and less of a threat if they're pulling their money out and hoarding it anyway.

The bailout would have worked -- and by worked, I mean jumpstarted the economy so a sufficient amount of consumers and business could be re-engaged in it in a relatively short period of time -- just by giving every household a low five-figure check, say $10-20K. Some people would have pissed it away sure, put it up their noses or bought sacks of magic beans. But most rational people would have saved some, paid down some debt, and/or bought toys, all of which would have rejuvenated the most impacted economic sectors and helped lower the perilous national debt-to-income ratio.

Hell, some of us might have even made sure to donate to politicians, so that we might have a seat at the table, and actually have an opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect our lives. That would have been something. Instead we're supposed to give a shit because old-money douchebags are taking a hit in the trust fund. This let-'em-eat-cake schtick is getting old real fast.

Loved To Death

The Olympics are an overrated, overcommercialized event anyway, but the fact of the matter is that the wingnuts are precisely what they insisted they despised just a couple years ago. Anyone who criticized the Cheney junta, no matter how well justified, got their words twisted into some variation of "wanting America to fail", though that was obviously not the case.

But these fuckers, they quite openly admit that their fondest wish is for Obama to fail. I submit that this is true regardless of the specific issue at hand. They would rather have more foreclosures and more job losses than an economic recovery, because that would make Obama look bad. They would love to rope-a-dope the Democrats into getting stuck in some sort of military action in Iran, because it would endanger American soldiers, and kill many thousands of Iranian civilians, and thus make Obama look bad. It's not a stretch to assume that they'd love another 9/11, because....well, you know.

They love them some America. Just ask them, they can't tell you too quickly or frequently. The shrill, wheedling insistence of their plaints should be a dead giveaway as to their general mindset. They just hate American citizens, clearly, since not only do they openly wish for the indisputably elected leader of the majority to fail miserably, they gladly accept the very real consequences that failure would have for millions of people, for average families across the country. That's the cost of doing business, the price they have to pay to get more suckers on their demagoguery wagon.

The thing is, like Bobo, these guys are just in it for the money, for the most part. They just cash the checks and don't bother with the notion that there really are morons out there who take them seriously and believe their schticky agitprop. It's troubling to consider the potential consequences of this ever more reflexive dynamic, this lurch toward violent rhetoric and toxic imagery. Nothing good can come of it.

Epic Flail

The only thing funnier than Bobo Brooks is two Bobos, and this week finds Our Pastel Hero in rare form, as he once again attempts to limn the American Character by spelunking its stanky nether regions. Let's ponder the nuggets o' wisdom he finds therein.

Anguished Missive the First forges the well-trod iron path of the ivory-tower historian, squaring the usual tropes of classical historical theories and the misgivings of the founding fathers against the current cultural dynamic.

“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.

Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.

That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

Fair enough, except that the fact was that every hardlined pioneer began their trek with the hope of getting rich (aside from your garden variety Great Awakening god-bothering loons), and the government's reach was limited by the size of the country and the constraints of the day. The moment any territory showed a sign of being a profitable venture, it was duly annexed; the idea that there was some underlying libertarian motif is silly. This is a fairly prosaic reduction of human nature, a rhetorical momentum-gathering device.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Well, the WASPs thought they could take it with them or something, and conflated ritual abuse with familial bonding. "Decadent" does not necessarily require the usual connotation of "hedonistic sybarite" when "unconscionable hoarding" will do just as well. What the leisure class lacked in public displays of sexual excitement was more than made up for in indefensible greed.

I've made the point many times that people in general and Americans in particular have perverse relationships with food, money, and sex. They binge and purge on those things, and feel guilty about it later, engaging in other destructive behaviors as a result, instead of just enjoying all those things in moderation. I don't mean it as a moral injunction, merely to point out how wasteful and dumb it can be at times for a great many individuals. But genetically uptight worshippers of Establishment mores such as Bobo almost always view these issues through the prism of the Sixties.

It is considered practically a given amongst such moral guardians that the sex-and-drug libertines of the Woodstock era eroded some great moral bulwark that had been erected up to that point. They seem to think that people weren't getting high and/or having indiscriminate sex until 1967, rather than that they were simply a bit more circumspect about those things until then. It drove them crazy that those damned kids didn't have the decency to feel guilty and ashamed about what they were doing, invoking Mencken's classic observation of a puritan being someone who was inconsolable that somewhere out there, someone might be having a good time.

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

Yes, and? It's not as if they weren't actively encouraged to indulge in those distractions by the very same self-styled moral guardians -- that is, Bobo's own Republicans and movement conservatives -- who were fleecing them, and not trying very hard to disguise it. They chose to focus on the perils of sexual licentiousness, because to call attention to financial licentiousness or consumerist depravity would have been bad for business.

The dangers of societal permissiveness are more grave and more profound than whether someone gets or gives a blowjob outside the sacred circle of marriage. Time and again, Bobo fails utterly to even perceive this, much less understand the role his own party has played in their own downfall.

Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move. There is no effect on the favorability rating or the re-election prospects. In the media world, he is a giant. In the real world, he’s not.

But this is not merely a story of weakness. It is a story of resilience. For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.

This is the insularity of the sinecured pundit -- they genuinely do not get that the studied cynicism that they have purveyed for well over a generation has stuck with people who not only don't know any better, but are proud of that fact, make a point of staying in that zone and taking up permanent residence. I recall once linking/excerpting something by Gertude Himmelfarb wherein she tacitly admitted that the whole "America is Jebus' Favrit Nation" schtick was just something to keep the rabble in line, that neither she nor her claque in the opinion-mongering movementarian smart set really believed in the Judeo-Christian deity, so much as they recognized the political utility of encouraging mindless fervor from that crowd.

But that's where cynicism can really bite you in the ass, ideologically. When you have deliberately cultivated this deep-but-narrow swath of morons to do your bidding, not only do you ultimately push out anyone with an IQ over 90, but you force yourself to cater more and more to this political golem of boobism you've constructed. The Republicans heartily encouraged a climate of proudly anti-intellectual licentiousness, made it an issue of freedom and liberty to consume as much as possible, to be gluttonous and dull-witted, to self-actualize by spending every fucking night watching random idiots sort their sock drawers on reality shows, to be heedless of the consequences, and to characterize anyone who raised an eyebrow as practically a traitor.

A true moralizer would have taken issue with the notion that excess, waste, sloth, greed, and ignorance were anything short of reprehensible; the conservatard attitude was that to even suggest that such things were shameful was un-American. So activities such as smoking, eating to obesity, and watching hillbillies drive in circles all day were not just silly pastimes with obvious externalities, they were expressions of freedom. Turn on, tune in, drop out indeed.

They could at any point have made an effort to engage sensible, reasonable people and encourage a climate of intellectual rigor and honesty, and deliberately chose to go in the exact opposite direction. They may not have really meant it as such, but they have no right to be surprised that the people who were dumb enough to fall for that nonsense chose to take it literally and make it a way of life.

It's unclear by Bobo's weak tilt at "slightly educated snobs" whether he means the usual bien pensant limo-lib suspects, or effete snipe-hunting twaddlers like himself. It doesn't matter -- utlimately it's all a bunch of half-assed attempts to chicken-egg the current toxic stupidity back to some First Principle. Again, though, you can't just pump people full of dumbass juice for 20-30 years, and then suddenly climb some high horse of moral rigor because of the lack of prudence that you helped drum into their paper-thin crania.

So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power. And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

Yes, poor Republicans, always getting rooked by the "media mythology". Why, it's sad when you think about it, because despite being obstructionist at every turn, despite heckling and taunting Obama even when he comes up with a halfway decent idea, despite having spent the last year doing absolutely nothing other than being a reverse rubber stamp because that's all they have left, they really just want what's best for the country. They've been trying their durndest, only to be thwarted at every turn and taken advantage for their well-meaning naïveté.

Bobo really has lost touch with his party. He seems to think they're trying to return to some sort of Dick Lugaresque vision of moderate, principled, somewhat informed conservatism. He doesn't get that the sideshow has taken it over, that it's just a giant clown car powered by Palin and Bachmann and the screams of small children. The Republican party stands for nothing other than fucking Barack Obama over at all costs, and empowering every dipshit and yahoo with whatever scare tactic their astroturf elves can conjure up.

Whatever Bill Buckley may have meant for the movement in his heart of hearts, his ideological descendants continue to regress, devolved to knuckle-dragging oafs whose sole mission is to stand athwart common sense and decency and scream "Death panels!"

He's a Loser, Baby

Super fun series about all-world twisted fuck Glenn Beck. Just affirms your faith in 'murkins all over again. No surprise that Beck is the sort of creep who taunted his former close friend on the air about the friend's wife having a miscarriage; no surprise that Beck is a borderline personality who traded coping mechanisms from coke and pot to magic underwear. It makes sense that this animal has a fan club of weirdos, and it certainly makes sense that the morning zoo assholes of the '90s devolved into the wingnut radio assholes that pollute the airwaves of this benighted decade. It even makes sense that Beck would have a #1 bestseller by plagiarizing a classic title, poaching a misused sentiment to spoon-feed his nonsense to a bunch of retards who have neither the guts nor brains to actually read Thomas Paine.

A piece of shit like Beck himself would say that talk radio would have been better off had Beck given into his suicidal impulses of the early '90s, but that misses the point. There's never any shortage of narcissistic sociopaths waiting for their chance to scuttle out of the woodwork to inflict their neuroses on reactionary morons, just as there's always another maggot on a corpse. I mean, he's a rotten soul, and I wish nothing but the worst for him, but even if he retired tomorrow there'd just be another one, because scumbags like Beck reflect the issues of their audiences, who function only by projecting their own failures at thinking and comprehending onto whichever interchangeable radio rage monkey is handy.

Beck is to political commentary what Kanye West is to music, which is to say that his very presence and popularity are as much symptoms of a diseased and dying system as they are factors in its problems. They give their fans what they want, and if that's all they want, then they deserve every bit of it.

Monetheism and Its Discontents

Here's an interesting, if earnest, discursion into the boutique rationales of Why It All Collapsed Around Our Ears. Digging up contrarian theorists from bygone days is no doubt a rewarding pastime for many these days, and not without its merits. Lucky timing, seeing as how Michael Moore is set to launch his latest broadside at The Man.

It's probably not a surprise that I'm mostly a fan of Moore's bumptious populism, though some of the street-theater antics can be tedious and self-serving at times. But I respect that he's trying to make a dry subject entertaining and draw more people into the salient arguments; however, at this point his audiences, as with Chomsky, are largely self-selecting.

As with most Moore efforts, I'm inclined to presume that Capitalism: A Love Story will have plenty of valid points to make, all of which will quickly be swept away in the tide of reflexive nattering and rigorous fact-parsing performed by individuals who save exactly such tasks for exactly these occasions. This does not mean that I think Moore is never wrong; rather, for every time he's wrong or injudicious in his remarks, there are several dozen other instances that he's absolutely correct.

There's a helluva lot more wrong, in terms of editorial emphasis and intellectual honesty for starters, in any given nightly network news broadcast. Certainly the niching (in cable and blogs) of the distribution of information and analysis echoes in tone and context any of Moore's rhetorical shortcomings; the problem for the ankle-biters may be that Moore's soapbox is larger than theirs. Also, he's fat.

Anyway. Since I haven't seen the movie and won't till it hits Netflix (I love documentaries, but the theater experience seems remarkably ill-suited for viewing them), I'm not going to go out on an intellectual limb and praise or damn the effort. (This seems to be an increasingly uncommon stance to take, to be unwilling to inflict an opinion about something without actually having experienced it, but there ya go.) My quibble -- and it may in fact be addressed somewhere in the film, we'll see -- is in the title. The subject discussed in the movie, and in the linked Globe article, is nominally "capitalism", but it is not in fact actual capitalism. This is not the usual difference without a distinction; it's the very heart of the matter.

Every generation naturally thinks (or more accurately, intuits as part of its collective self-actualization) that it bears witness to unique occurrences in history. Sometimes that actually happens, but more often than not, they are variations on past events rendered on a greater order of magnitude by technological advances. This is especially true of the economic collapse. It is not a failure of capitalism itself, at least as that term has been understood for several centuries now. I hate to sound like some ivory-tower Hayekian or something, but capitalism is much less likely to fail people than the other way around.

And that is precisely what happened over the last couple years. It bears no resemblance to the capitalism that Adam Smith wrote about, nor David Ricardo, nor Hayek, nor even Milton Friedman, though certainly Friedman was as sound a proponent of pure muscle and gall as the dismal science has ever seen.

But capitalism, at its heart, is about finding and creating efficiencies in production, operations, financial capacity and mobility (presumably culminating in an orgasmic celebration of Ayn Rand copulating with a throbbing dollar sign). A product is made, and its desirability in the marketplace determines its value, price, and cost, all of which are run through various operational processes to find the most efficient methods of production, pricing, and distribution.

What we've borne witness to was no unique moment -- it was a small, insular group of spreadsheet bookies, armed with an arcane formula none of them understood, and a withering sense of entitlement that more than offset their distaste for accountability. It's organized crime, dressed up with the trappings of legitimacy and the furbelows of institutional opacity.

The difference is that thieves and grifters didn't always have Excel to help them commit their crimes more quickly and efficiently, and on a much grander scale. Bank robbery is for pikers; the man who can fuck over the entire planet and make them pay for it besides is someone to be reckoned with. Neither Adam Smith nor Hyman Minsky could have predicted the stranglehold such people have on the financial engine of the world, and they sure as hell wouldn't have recognized it as capitalism.

One of my many pet peeves is the oft-misquoted Bible verse regarding money, which in fact states that it is the love of money that is the root of all evil. Again, it is not capitalism that fails people, it is the other way around. It is the painstaking worship of money for its very own sake, for the cause of sheer accumulation and nothing else, for the studied indifference to the greater utilitarian good in the service of greater pyramidal asset/income disparities. It's people who buy enough influence to tell you to your face that they deserve all your money, and you should be grateful for the privilege of mortgaging your grandchildren's futures to cover their gambling losses, and they're gonna do it again, and there ain't a fuckin' thing you can do about it, podna.

But of all things, what it most certainly is not is capitalism, any more than what passes for conservatism these days has anything to do with, as Russell Kirk called actual conservatism, the negation of ideology. This abuse of capitalism is, as with modern conservatardery, the opposite of the actual meaning of the word.

It discourages actual production of tangible goods, and embraces a baroque system of triple-cross-wagering which even its own practitioners do not fully comprehend. It's leveraged tranches and credit default swaps and infesting the political process. It's scumbags betting on the actuarial viability of bundled life insurance policies, where the sooner you die, the more money they make. It drives prices up on captive markets with spec trading, in order to manipulate profit-hoarding. It's parasitism on a violated corpse. It's not an economy, it's a necronomy.

Worst of all, what these people do bastardizes the pragmatism of true capitalism's risk-reward scenario by removing the intellectual underpinnings of rational self-interest -- after all, if you're not actually risking anything of your own, you'll throw money on every Nigerian prince scam that comes your way, because there's literally no reason for you not to.

Substitute "accountability" for the much-abused "capitalism", and some of these critiques might find themselves on a sounder track. It's as much a political problem as it is an economic one.

Westward Ho

It's been at least a few weeks since our good friend Kanye West has gone the extra mile to remind everyone what a complete douchebag he is. Seriously, I'd rather be trapped in a chlamydia sandwich with Paris Hilton and Kate Gosselin than be in the same state as this fucking clown:

At the beginning of the evening, Kanye West stormed the stage just after the first award, for Best Female Video. Taylor Swift won the award, and during her acceptance speech, West abruptly cut the teen singer off, grabbing the mic and protesting in support of Beyoncé, who was also nominated.

"I'm sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time," he proclaimed as B looked on from the crowd, stunned.

Soon afterward, West was escorted from the building.

You know you're a jerkoff when Heidi Montag comes off as a voice of reason compared to you. Somebody needs to beat him unconscious and lock him in a dumpster. In an industry littered with talentless, self-absorbed assholes, Kanye routinely distinguishes himself from the pack. It's as if he has some sort of compulsion to constantly prove that he can be an even bigger dickhead than previously assumed. Texting "2mrw" for "tomorrow" just seals the deal. Where's Mark David Chapman when you could really use him?

At some point, this worthless turd-burglar will be asking people if they want fries with that, and that day cannot come too soon. Hell, without AutoTune, that day would have come years ago.

No More Excuses

Same as it ever was -- the Republicans never fail to disappoint with ever newer and more innovative ways to pollute the "debate" with their clownish bullying and strutting, and the Democrats never fail to drop to their knees and suppress their gag reflexes. The latest case in point is inbred mouth-breather Joe Wilson, who has heroically decided not to give in to Democratic demands to apologize to President Hopenchange again. And really, that is the most sensible response Wilson could have.

Consider: the Democratic Party has a sizable majority in both houses of Congress, they have the White House, they won less than a year ago with a significant mandate. Hopenchange gets heckled at what both sides pretend was an important policy speech on a contentious issue. A party with half a clue how to use the electoral majority possessed by the Democrats would have taken care of business with a shithead like Wilson -- wordlessly accepted Wilson's "apology", dropped the subject, and promptly found someone to run against him next year with triple whatever funds Wilson pulls together, and made goddamned sure that nothing this scumbag brings to committee in the meantime makes it out. Instead they set Wilson up for further grandstanding for his retard constituency by asking for another apology. Eight years of political wedgies and being forced to eat garbage by the Cheney crew taught these people nothing.

The most galling part of all this is that Wilson is correct, just not for the rabble-rousing reasons he asserted. But Obama is in fact a liar and a sellout; he campaigned on a platform of idealistic principles that were actually fairly pragmatic and viable in scope, and sold them out at the first opportunity. He promised to take on the vipers in the financial sector who heedlessly wrecked the economy, and first chance he got he gave them a fresh new stack of chips to play with. How's that recovery workin' for ya, folks? Executive bonuses for epic failure continue unabated, and even the pathetic regulatory oversight will remain unchanged. The casino managers have gone right back to doing what they were doing, and you can't really blame them. Again, they've been given absolutely no reason not to.

The health care reform scam is just as unforgivable; after Hopenchange spent the entire summer last year promising to make the public option a cornerstone of his reform plan, he and the rest of his party chose to do what they always do, and punted on first down. This is going end up being at least as big of a naked grift as the bailout has been -- medical costs will be as unconscionable as ever, and corporate waste and bonuses will be unaffected. The only change will be that, instead of getting soaked when you're unlucky enough to actually have to use the system, it'll just be taken out of everyone's front end. It would have been bad enough, but at least understandable, if somehow Hopenchange and his minions had fought the good fight but still come up short. But they didn't even try. They're every bit as gutless and craven as their buffoonish opponents think they are.

The financial and health-care industries have certainly gotten what they paid for. You can't say that both parties don't do their damndest to make sure their corporate owners get a right proper return on investment. Getting value is important, as every good shopper knows, and the most important value in Washington is "once bought, stays bought".

The question has to be asked, at least rhetorically: what exactly would have been different if John McCain and Sarah Palin had been elected? Sure, the symbolism would have been substantial; it would have told the rest of the world that Americans were every bit as dumb and mean as eight years of Bush/Cheney had led them to believe. But operationally, what would have been different? Maybe a more belligerent tone with Iran, but not much more than that; our Chinese creditors would probably not find an additional American military adventure in their backyard to be all that good for business.

There was an awful lot of talk at the beginning of the year, how messages had been sent and received, how they were ready and eager to fight the stupidity that had infested the government, how Rahm Emanuel was a tough-guy back-room enforcer who doesn't take shit from nobody, how an insurmountable electoral majority was going to provide the impetus for saving this country from its past excesses, blah blah fucking blah. It worked out as these cheap promises and dickless half-measures always do. Plus ça change and all.

I don't know what the solution is; short of bringing back the guillotine, I doubt there is one. It just cannot be noted often enough how despicable all of these people truly are. They're vile, through and through. They're a goddamned disgrace. They need to go. Either vote them all out at the next opportunity, or refuse to vote at all. That's a start.

Bonfire of the Inanities

This Malcolm Gladwell beignet from about a month ago (link via Mike Lombardi's column in NFP, of all things), is as much a profile of a man who's made a reputation overlooking Ockham's Razor in favor trendy aphorisms, than of the mentality of the Masters of the Universe. The "I'm good at this, therefore I'd be good at that" excuse is especially hilarious. "Gee, I won the Super Bowl on Madden 10. Maybe I should be playing or coaching actual football." Only people who don't worry about accountability for their actions have this mentality.

Look, this is not that complicated. Which is more relevant -- obscure and tendentious psych models that may or may not draw valid parallels between upper-echelon finance weasels and the fops who botched Gallipoli, or the more obvious notion that terminal fuckfaces like Jimmy Cayne, John Thain, Lloyd Blankfein, et al, do what they do because there's no reason for them not to?

Seriously, economists and their literary catamites prattle on about incentives and disincentives and such. Very well, then. At what point has any disincentive occurred -- or hell, even been seriously proposed -- to discourage the recklessness of Jimmy Cayne and his bridge buddies, retroactively or pre-emptively? It's other people's money they played with, it's other people's money they lost, and it's other people's money that constitutes the ginormous stack of chips they've been given to play with again. No penalties, no consequences, probably not even any truly meaningful regulatory changes. Can't say they're not getting what they paid for.

It doesn't take a handful of pop-behavioral psychology theories to understand why they keep doing what they do. For all his earnest semantics, Gladwell seems ill-equipped to answer the negative corollary to "why do they do it" -- what's do discourage them from doing it again? Cayne's a loudmouth chump, a pushy rentier capitalist who'll never be forced to pay his karmic freight, certainly not by the government they just doubled down on. This has nothing to do with Gallipoli, it's just a jerkoff who's never been given a reason not to be a fuckin' jerkoff. I've said it before, and not to frighten the Palin Power retards, but "socialism" is when the government runs the banks -- what do you call it when it's the other way around?

Because I'm petty and pedantic, and because I think people like Jimmy Cayne should be dunked in maple syrup and dropped on Grizzly Island, here's a bonus bon mot from the Weasel of Wall Street:

When Cayne told Greenberg that he was a bridge player, Cayne tells Cohan, “you could see the electric light bulb.”

As opposed to what, a mechanical light bulb, an origami lightbulb, a fucking drawing of a lightbulb? Is there a non-electric lightbulb we have heretofore been uninformed (you know, kept in the dark) about?

Maybe a derivative of a lightbulb, where one person actually manufactures and markets the damned thing, while Jimmy Cayne and his parasite bookie friends run their little off-track betting parlors with everyone else's money, betting on esoteric features such as how long the lightbulb takes to sell, how many hours it'll work, what percentage of milfs will buy it at Home Depot, etc. Certainly every lightbulb on Wall Street has been powered for quite some time by the bullshit these assclowns have been selling. Beats working.

Stay Classy, Mike Huckabee

In case we hadn't figured it out by now, I think it tells us everything we need to know about the soulless planarians who rally under conservatard and/or Republitard banners, that if you heard about a nameless someone mentioning that, under Obamacare, Ted Kennedy would have been told to "go home to take pain pills and die" during his last year of life, most of us would have rattled through at least a dozen or so names before guessing the correct, um, person -- Mike Huckabee.

As it happens, Huckabee made his remarks shortly after he derided Democrats for using Kennedy's death to make the pitch that "Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,"

"That not only defies good taste," said Huckabee, "it defies logic."

How the hell would he know about either of those things? Good thing Huckabee and his fellow partiers have been vigilant against crass politicization of Kennedy's passing. Good thing also that, per usual, the nearly filibuster-proof Democrats will just pin their legs behind their ears and take it.

Assbeckwards

"I'm not sure you can get AIDS by burning down your house, but I get your point." -- Sen. J. Billington Bulworth, D-CA

"It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money." -- W.C. Fields

Sigh. The problem is not that Glenn Beck might be a "traitor" or a "racist", the problem is that getting political commentary from him is about as bright as getting medical advice from a randomly picked reality-show contestant, or financial advice from someone who sleeps under a bridge. The problem is that Beck merely ventriloquizes the ignorant rage of a certain swath of people, many of whom actually have good reason to be angry, but never seem quite able to point it in a coherent direction.

Giving voice to proudly moronic boobism is an ancient and profitable American pastime, but organizing against it whilst the coffers are being looted by government-associated goons is like sending the SWAT team to bust a stumblebum juggling lemons, while the bank down the street is getting robbed. There's a practically infinite supply of metaphors and similes for this scenario -- oh, and the health care system's still a joke and the economy still sucks, and Saint Barry ain't fixin' either one. But by gawd Geico's been put on notice.

The problem is that one side's brilliant idea of political action is to strap on an AR-15 for a health-care rally, and the other side's is to boycott Whole Foods and Glenn Beck. Might as well market Bill O'Reilly toilet paper while they're at it.

On the Other Hand

Previous rant aside, I am absolutely loving the MBA thing. Everything about it is all kinds of awesome -- the curriculum, the campus, the locale, the students, the library, the ginormous new rec center. Most importantly, the idea of keeping the ball rolling. I've felt for a long time that a major cause of cancer is stress, but I'm starting to believe that another one is inertia. I actually do pretty well at avoiding both in my life. It's been a pretty sparse month for posting, but it sure as hell hasn't been dull. Between work, school, family, etc., it's a blast.

Future Schlock

Really interesting post and discussion over at The Oil Drum, just to get the ol' futurism juices flowing (ewwwwww). I have no value judgments as to whether it's true or plausible, fair or foul, moral or indefensible, or merely the natural by-product of getting one's swerve on whilst reading World War Z and watching Children of Men. But it's certainly provocative.

I would, in fact, submit that many of us are living out a similar scenario, to a much smaller scale and degree, obviously. And if we're not, perhaps we should consider doing so. But think about it -- half the world lives on a dollar a day, which means that pretty much every American and European at the very least is subconsciously protecting their nut. Just making a token effort at the notional advantages of upward mobility is a form of socioeconomic self-stratification.

And for every case where that may be a "bad" or "unfair" thing to do, you can make an equally (or perhaps even more) valid case for it being the most rational thing to do. Let's say, just to pick a random example, that you are an idealistic sort of person, or at least would like to be. You endured the last eight years of Cheneyism, and the previous eight years of Republican witch-hunts and Clintonian triangulations and debaucheries. You may even be old enough to recall the predations of Reaganbush. You are battle-scarred and war-weary, in the political sense. You realize that they're all full of shit, and that said realization is every bit as much a part of growing up as realizing the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

So when you cast your sacred lot not just against the least-offensive douchebag, but actually for someone who finally tickles that funny bone of idealism a bit, someone who not only promises Hopenchange, but more importantly accountability, it will harsh your mellow even more to find out that you have once again been rolled. Worse yet, you see that stupid people have somehow managed to become stupider, and more vitriolic.

Suddenly we're in a bad movie where idiots are strapping themselves with assault rifles to attend health-care rallies, and recipients of government largesse have decided it is their sacred mission to disrupt said debates with moronic invocations against the same government beast that keeps them alive. (It is almost a mathematical axiom that these idiots also have the highest percentage of family members who are on some other part of the dole, because they're too fucking dumb and/or lazy to go to Planned Parenthood.) The media's role is to give the screamers a radically outsized voice in the debate, and the governing party's role is waver and cater to that stupidity. Maybe when they get that eightieth Senate seat, they'll come through with all that Change they promised.

So really, faced with all that, friends 'n' neighbors, why wouldn't anyone who had the means set about backing slowly away from the toxic retardation of their fellow citizens and the dickless incrementalism of their elected representatives? Doesn't necessarily mean heading for the rammed-earth bunker in the hills with the raincatchers and solar panels and a few Saigas (though there are days where that sounds better and better), but it does mean judiciously assessing the situation and planning accordingly. You cannot get out of a debt-leverage financial crisis by leveraging more debt; you cannot have an equitable recovery by only bailing out the few hundred people who caused the problem in the first place. That's not politics, that's just arithmetic. What they're doing is not going to "work", except in the short term, and except for their own immediate interests.

The important thing is the basic realization that nobody, not Barack Obama, and certainly not the vipers at Goldman Sachs, give a shit what happens to you. The Republicans, vile as they are and unencumbered by facts or intellectual honesty, are at least more honest about their sociopathy. But in the meantime, I dunno. Be idealistic about individuals, but cynical about people. Be skeptical of people who promise to "help", or at least be aware of what's in it for them. Stop watching the network news, and stop voting (except, of course, when the Republitards offer up their inevitable Sarah Palin/Lonesome Rhodes ticket in 2012) -- the best way to disempower liars is to ignore them. That goes for the health-care nazi protesters as well; those animals need to kindly fuck off and die already.

It's been a while since I've had a good, solid rant on, and damn it feels good to be a gangsta. But I do seriously think that we do not necessarily have to be wealthy to have our own "separate peace". We just have to pay attention and plan ahead, live within our means, keep our skills sharp and keep learning new ones, be nice to those in our lives (and on our teevee screens) who deserve it and rid ourselves of those who just bring toxic baggage with them. Be our own mercenaries, basically, rather than worrying about the bloated plutocrats who think they should rent some to save their own sorry hides from the seething masses they helped perpetuate.

Deep Preseason Thoughts

If I had the time to play fantasy football this year, I would just make sure to load up on as many running backs that will play against the Raiders this season as possible. They have no run D. They're vulnerable against power sweeps around the edge; they get burnt on gap blocks up the middle. They gave up over 250 yards against Frank Gore and a bunch of scrubs.

I like #7 pick Darrius Heyward-Bey a little more than most of the analysts; he's blazing fast, has a good attitude, and seems to genuinely care about working on his hands. He's going to draw double coverage in opposing secondaries every time he's on the field. Compare and contrast with #10 pick Michael Crabtree, who is still holding out for #7 money (seriously), and who, when he finally does end his holdout/tantrum, will join a 49er team coached by a, let's say, fairly intense Mike Singletary. (Yes, I know Tom Cable beats up his assistants, but compared to Singletary, the Cable Guy is a freakin' teddy bear.)

Best case scenario, DHB will have an average of 3-5 receptions per game, and only a few of those will be actual game-changers. And the pass defense looks solid, though those safeties are going to get burnt at least once or twice a game.

But the most gaping hole on the team -- the run defense -- went completely unaddressed in the offseason. Of the line rotation of Tommy Kelly, Terdell Sands, and Gerard Warren, only Warren plays notably well, but is too old to be an every-down run stopper. Kelly is way overpaid and gets a lot of offside penalties, and Sands, at 6'7" and 300 lbs., routinely gets beaten by smaller o-linemen because he's useless and doesn't understand the principle of leverage. Sands must have pictures of Cable and/or Al Davis with a dead girl or a live farm animal, because there's no other reason to keep him, especially after he punched punter Shane Lechler -- by far the team's most consistent player during their six years of suck -- on the plane ride back from a victory in Denver last season.

The Raiders have two more preseason games to get their shit dialed in, because so far, LaDainian Thompson and Darren Sproles are just licking their chops at the prospect of September 14th. Even with all those rushing yards, the Niners only won by one point because they're still trying to figure out who's going to be their quarterback (and Alex Smith deserves credit for two excellent tackles, one of which saved an interception return from becoming a touchdown). The Chargers don't have that problem. It could get ugly early.

....And the Horse You Rode In On

Oh, this is fuckin' rich. Mere hours pass after America's favorite crazy-ass ex-governor starts yammering some fever dream about "death panels" and shit, and she has the balls to call for moderation. That particular farm animal is long down the road, honey. You and your goober-rousing friends have taken what should have merely been a tedious dog-and-pony show to legitimize the Democrats' latest exercise in circular-firing-squad futility, and turned it into an ongoing series of town-hall putsches, punctuated by the addled bleats of ignorant goat-fuckers, mindlessly goaded into action by the most transparent scam this side of Nigerian royalty.

The more I see this crap, the more I resent it, but not because of its obvious lack of legitimacy as genuine grassroots activism, not because they resort to ever more vile tactics and rhetoric, not even because its participants are uniformly unencumbered by even basic facts. It's because if they had half a clue and a sense of proportion, they could be channeling that weird energy into at least a slightly more productive direction -- for example, menacing Goldman Sachs employees until they either give back the money they've stolen or jump out their office windows.

The world is crumbling around them, and they've allowed a scumbag HMO meat-puppet like Dick Armey to deploy a cyber-army of flying lobbyist monkeys, and bamboozle them into thinking that the most constructive thing they can do while they're indefinitely between jobs is to show up half-cocked to harass Arlen Specter with a misspelled swastika placard and a bunch of poorly remembered slogans and catchphrases. Chickens voting for Colonel Sanders indeed.

The health-care "plan" is surely an industry-written crock of shit, but not for the reasons these bozos think it is; indeed, if they were even close to being right, from the looks of most of them they would have been converted into soylent green for the FEMA concentration camps already. It's certainly their right as 'murkins to be losers and morons, and proud of same, but they've abandoned their last semblance of dignity in the process as they shamble toward their inevitable dream ticket of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

The Winamp Shuffle

Calling to You -- Robert Plant
Dun Ringill -- Jethro Tull
Flathead -- Fratellis
Longing for Fire -- Scorpions
Purgatory -- Iron Maiden
Wait -- Zo2
My Mathematical Mind -- Spoon
Fuck Her Gently -- Tenacious D
Day of the Eagle -- Robin Trower
Faultline -- Yngwie Malmsteen

Bonus: Cypress Grove -- Clutch

My Daily Misanthropy

I've said it before and I'll say it yet again -- there are days when I actually wish their paranoid fantasies were true, if only because it would definitionally mean less of their whinging, cringing, tedious bullshit. They string words together without bothering to learn the meaning, and they rail against imaginary nazis while studiously ignoring the real ones among and around them. If this isn't a group that needs to be curbed from further inbreeding, I don't know what would qualify.

But more to the point -- they quite deserve the miserable health-care/employment/education/infrastructure they so avidly desire, which is the one we all currently have. I am tired of reading anecdotes about so-and-so's sister/aunt/senile grampa who collects SSI and Medicare, hasn't held (or even looked for) a job in fifteen years, and goes to teabagger parties to rail against The Man. Do us all a favor and fucking pull the plug on yourselves already. Or whatever. Go John Galt, get off the grid, do what y'all keep threatening to do. It'll work out better for everyone.

But the day someone, say, uses their infant's stroller to hold up some offensively ignorant "protest" sign that doesn't remotely mean what they think it means, they definitely deserve to have their goofball dreams come to pass. See you in the concentration camp!

Brewtality

Belated congratulations are in order, I suppose, for the media's comparative restraint on Obama's silly-ass beer summit. What an epic circle-jerk that whole thing was. One would have ordinarily expected much more fulminating about the president's choice of beer, one of those usual can't-win-for-losing deals like mustard or cheese. Pick something "regular" and you're fake, or trying too hard; pick something that actually has some taste and quality and the yew-thank-yer-better'n-me yahoos start climbing the walls. But he had a Budweiser, currently produced by a Belgian company. I doubt Obama is much of a beer-drinker to begin with, but does anyone really think he drinks Bud? (Of course, I'm sure the "birthers" are cracking wise with malt-liquor jokes; we'd expect nothing less from them.)

Maybe it's a California thing, but Budweiser is typically imbibed by hicks and migrant workers around here. Sure, Bud Light has more universal appeal, and is great for keg stands and frat parties, but that's a different animal. It's just strange how even the simple choice of a preferred beer conveys a perception of status for some people. Speaking for myself, I like microbrews, I like something with some craft and quality to it, I like dark, heavy beers sometimes, and there's always someone who'll make a face when I grab a Sierra Nevada Porter, while they choke down some Natural Light swill, fuckin' swamp water that's already been passed through a hobo. Keystone Light. I mean, that's gotta be like ass-eating Kate Gosselin or something, you know? You could lick envelopes and postage stamps with more character and taste than some of these beers.

I dunno. If he wanted to go for symbolism, I think Obama could have gotten some real mileage out of a more adventurous choice of brew, instead of playing it safe. It's nice to have a premier brewery in our backyard up here in the NorCal, but Sierra Nevada really does run a quality operation from the top down, and have been forerunners in everything Obama purports to stand for -- ethical business practices; paying workers a decent wage and treating them very well (they have an extremely low turnover rate, and job openings there are highly competitive); exceptional employee benefits and health care; green business practices (everything from solar panels in the parking lot to innovative wastewater treatment systems) -- they actually walk the talk.

They've even gotten in on the locavore movement, and are about to release a new ale made entirely from locally-grown hops and barley. And they're not a "microbrewery" (with the snide connotation of elitism the faux populists so enjoy) by any means -- in 2005 they were the tenth-largest brewery in the country, and with Anheuser Busch owned by the Belgians and Miller owned in part by the Canadians, at this point SNBC is the second-largest "craft" brewer (behind only Boston Beer Company, who still use Stroh's facilities to crank out Samuel Adams), and certainly one of the top five American-owned-and-operated breweries.

For a guy who rode into town with promises of creative thinking and solutions, he seems not to think outside the bottle much. After hanging out with Goldman Sachs scumbags for so long, it might be a refreshing palate-cleanser to check out a business with some ethical practices.

Confirmation Bias

I know, I do go on and on about perfidious corporate news entities and dickless Democrats who never miss an opportunity to screw their own party (and national) interests over, hypocritically bleating about "special interests" when they're in thrall to them. But damn, they prove my case for me with such regularity.

Afterbirchers

This summer has been the hottest in California for several years, and as I like to say, it's not the heat, it's the stupidity. Mediawise, it's enough to make one reminiscent for the Summer of the Shark -- except, of course, for what finally knocked all those stupid shark-attack stories off the front page.

But seriously, just the past six weeks has been epic in terms of absolutely useless, meaningless crap being presented as news -- a wave of celebrity deaths culminating in that of the still-dead, still-unburied Michael Jackson; a preening, know-nothing shopaholic pretending to be the governor of a state, pretending to quit yet pretending that she's not really quitting, apparently buying her enough time and funds to purchase a large-enough mountable cross to tow around the country with her; a Bahston cop and a crusading black egghead pushing each other just a little too far, and the president who stepped on his dick when he didn't even need to walk in on the contrived "issue". And which bar skank is getting Jon Gosselin's manchowder written across her tramp stamp tonight? Hope he stocked up on Valtrex!

Ahem. That's an awful lot of stupid to compete against, and yet the "birther" story easily trumps them. Conspiracy theories are a time-honored American parlor game, to be sure, but they're more interesting when there's at least one (1) detail about them that makes sense, or is irrefutable. What made, say, the Vince Foster conspiracy theory interesting was not that there was any credibility to the notion that the Clintons actually had Foster killed, it was that they did send HRC flunky (and 2008 campaign manager after Patti Solis Doyle got shoved overboard) Maggie Williams over to Foster's place to grab a box of documents immediately upon hearing of Foster's death. It was a case where, even though the conspiracy was outlandish, the information revealed about the participants' first instincts was, at best, unseemly.

With the birther weirdos, it's the opposite -- the persistence of the nonsense reveals too much about the idiots perpetuating it. The more evidence available to refute their theory, the greater the conspiracy in their minds. Of course this is true of all conspiracies, by definition, but perhaps never before has such a grain of rumor managed to travel so far, aided and abetted as always by the sheer laziness of the media, of clowns like Lou Dobbs, who has been refuted by his own network, and by his own guest hosts on his own show, yet still persists in feeding the zombie lie.

It's the Paranoid Style all over again, the dumbest goddamn thing since the Birchers' "commies fluoridatin' the water supply" schtick fifty years ago. Except this time around, the wingnuts have had lots of help mainstreaming their obsession. No Richard Cougar Melloncamp Scaife bankrolling this one, folks, this and other foolishness is kept going by outlets like CNN, who spend actual studio time reading aloud the e-mail and twitter comments they receive on this and other non-stories, and then wonder why they've lost legitimacy.

Enablers

It doesn't matter what the subject is -- anytime a writer chooses to intro their article with a Billy Kristol reference, nothing good can ever come from it.

Bill Kristol, a powerhouse policy guru for Republicans, often has a tin ear for politics. A week before the presidential election last year he predicted John McCain would “win huge.” In May, he said President Barack Obama had decided to nominate Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan to the Supreme Court, and he’s been a cheerleader for Sarah Palin.

Mr. Kristol was prescient, however, 16 years ago in advising Republicans that defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care overhaul would be devastating for the Democrats. He’s making the same case today, imploring Republicans to “go for the kill” on the Obama health care initiative.

He’s right again. A defeat would be a killer for Democrats. The trademark of Mr. Obama’s first year in office would be failure; the reputations of the president and his celebrated White House staff would be decimated.

The occasions of being "right" have everything to do with the usual stopped-clock syndrome, and nothing at all to do with having a principled argument in good faith. Kristol exemplifies the utter worst in American political analysis -- a legacy hack who would have trouble picking the winner in a Harlem Globetrotters game. The only reason he was "right" in 1994 is because his betting pattern happened to pay off that time.

And let's face it -- even when they're successful, there's rarely much downside to betting against Democrats. They're bad at being the minority party, but they're even worse at being the majority party. When was the last time these people found the occasion, discipline, and intestinal fortitude to break out of the usual circular-firing-squad formation?

That's not a rhetorical question; I seriously cannot recall the last time they had this sort of electoral mandate and legislative advantage, yet they have no idea what to do with it. They are continuously flummoxed by the simplest obstructionist clowning from the Republicans, who have nothing to lose by being obstructionist clowns, because they know that the Democrats will fail to do anything meaningful about it.

Same with people such as Kristol. When has he ever had to deal with any consequences for being wrong, for failing to bring any insight to a discussion, for being tendentious and intellectually dishonest to a comical degree? Until people stop bringing him on as a commentator, or publishing his water-carrying jabber as if it should be taken seriously, what incentive is there for him to stop?

Kristol has never even bothered with the pretense of displaying more than a surface knowledge of any given subject. He has never attempted to hide his role as a purely partisan strategist. This has never mattered to the corporate media outlets that continue to request his services. Perhaps we can see a pattern here, if we choose to look closely enough. Just incompetence is never a reason to lose one's media gig, so too is it axiomatic that cost arguments are only relevant in certain issues, primary among those being health care.

The so-called public option — some form of government-run plan to compete with private insurers — will only be a fallback in the event private insurers fail to meet the goals, and will probably be in the form of health cooperatives or another mechanism. Liberals simply will have to accept that they lack the votes for a full-fledged public option.

Raising revenue — in the neighborhood of $300 billion over the next decade — may be the toughest nut. The House Ways and Means Committee’s millionaire’s surcharge plan is dead; at most, only a much smaller tax on the rich will fly. More likely will be some amalgam, including a tax on the most generous health insurance plans or the insurers that offer them, that would be part of the $200 billion in tax measures on the Senate Finance Committee’s table. Fears of a budget-busting bill are misplaced. Neither the politics nor the procedures will permit that.

Cost controls, so great in theory, will bite and will require politicians to take on special interests. The Blue Dogs, for all their talk of bills being too expensive, start off demanding more expansive health care for rural areas.

Sigh. Where to start? First, "liberals" do not lack the votes, at least along party lines. Big-tent wanking aside, the Blue Dog assholes take advantage of their all-liberals-are-Democrats-but-not-all-Democrats-are-liberals cred and use it to constantly force their party to negotiate at gunpoint. And they never seem to have to concede a thing; the party is content to let them pad their districts with useless boondoggles in exchange for a constantly fraying party loyalty. Like Billy Kristol, they never seem to have to pay any meaningful consequences for their actions, so there is no incentive for them to change.

Secondly, the issue of "cost" is both a shame and a shibboleth. We sunk $2 trillion into Iraq in just six years, yet there's just no way to maybe one-sixth of that in a decade, not to mention the lost productivity costs that would be offset by a genuine health-care initiative, as opposed to the industry-written handjob that the Democrats will eventually sign off on? We've spent over a trillion in the past year bailing out the thieves who turned the world's financial sector into a giant casino, yet refuse to cover their own losses.

And why precisely is this health-care cost estimate what it is? Look at what we're paying for now even when we have insurance -- increasing deductibles and co-pays, more people getting kicked off for pre-existing conditions, and on and on. So someone ends up paying thirty bucks for a Tylenol at the hospital, and people put their houses up for hock if their kid breaks a leg or gets ill, all so the executive salaries and bonuses of the HMO/pharma/insurance can stay in the eight- or nine-figure range. It is a most insidious version of the usual upward wealth-transfer that afflicts just about all our systems these days, every bit the highway robbery as what passes for our financial system.

They like to tell you that politics is the "art of the possible", but it should be obvious by now that it's really just the art of figuring out what you're willing to put up with.

Benchwarmers

Frank Rich is correct, of course, about the sneering, patroning hypocrisy undergirding the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. Jeff Sessions and Tom Coburn are two of the biggest bozos in a chamber chock-full of them; the rest of the Republicans are either closet cases or sanctimonious moralizers who can't avoid getting caught, knuckle-dragging troglodytes all. No mystery there.

But the vanilla kabuki of the hearings does no favors to their Democratic counterparts -- Chuck Schumer turning on the waterworks like he just finished a case of bon-bons watching Steel Magnolias with the rest of the local Oprah Book Club chapter; Dianne Feinstein conferring a super-special "A-plus-plus" grade on Sotomayor, perhaps with a gold star and a smiley face.

But nothing is revealed, aside from the tendency of senators to enjoy their own tedious jabber. Roe v. Wade is still apparently the apex of American jurisprudence; no mention of, say, Kelo's curious interpretation of eminent-domain laws, or even what Sotomayor's opinion on the previous administration's enthusiastic usurpation of previously clear rights and mores. You can't just wiretap any citizen you want to without any oversight; you can't just yank people off the street and throw them in an island dungeon without charge or representation; you can't use interrogation techniques on prisoners for which we have executed soldiers of other countries for using in wartime.

Or can you? Well, it's not like Schumer or Feinstein will ever bring it up, not to mention Coburn and the rest of his claque. And Obama has shown no inclination to push the issue, opting instead for a convenient combination of sweeping things under the rug while double-checking them for future viability. Si se puede, indeed.

And That's The Way It Is

Lost (not that they're going to bring it up) in the well-deserved encomia over Cronkite's passing is how tectonically the media have shifted since his day. With Cronkite, you never got the feeling that you were being pushed or led around by someone who wanted to be a high-paid star and party with the people he covered (though of course, in his later emeritus status, he did just that, but at least he earned it and the potential conflict of interest was gone by then). Although I am half-expecting LaToya Jackson to show up and claim that Cronkite was murdered for his money by scheming doctors. Interesting times.

Cronkite just showed up and did his job, reliably and without attempting to convey any unearned gravitas or self-importance. That was always projected on him by others, by people who self-actualize in public "shared grief" rituals, people who tend to memorialize the famous dead by memorializing where they happened to be when so-and-so died, people who prefer "events" to "facts" and newsreaders to news. And the media we have, with its vested interests, organizational structures, preening celebrity anchors, cage-match idiot pseudo-analysts, and dermis-deep coverage, is the ideal media for just such people. Neil Postman, as I've said before, was an optimist.

To think of Cronkite and what he brought to the craft of journalism is, unfortunately, also to be reminded that the landscape now mostly consists of jokers like David Gregory, smugly hypocritical, much more deeply committed to the branding side of journalism than the, you know, journalism side. It's a sad thing. Gregory knows he's there to move product, to convince his guests and audience that his is the go-to show for ass-covering pols and sound-bite conflict, so that they'll sit through ads for vehicles and pharmaceuticals they don't need. Plus, John McCain the third Sunday of every month. Talk about your winning formula.

On some level, Cronkite no doubt understood the business he operated in, but the difference is that there's no goddamned way he'd have ever gotten on a stage and done a disco shuffle behind a rapping Karl Rove. They can roll out all the collegial "Uncle Walter" schtick they want, but they know perfectly well that they've let him down, and that what they do is not what he did.

Culture Vultures

Heh. I'll never lay any claims to pop-culture awareness, but am I the only person who didn't realize that they had even made a Butterfly Effect 2? Of all the clunkers that seemed least likely to spawn a franchise, it seems to be right down there with Glitter. If it's this easy to get crap made, I really do need to start cranking out some shoddy spec scripts, or an idea for another reality show.

Maybe a spec script about two people trying to start up a reality show, and along the way they have merry misadventures that bring them closer together, and the audience falls in love with them as they fall in love with one another and make the bestest reality show evah. I'm thinking either Vin Diesel and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Nicolas Cage and Katherine Heigl, or Zeta-Jones and Heigl. And a masturbating zoo animal, probably a monkey or a bear, or Seth Rogen. Fun for the entire family!

The Honeymoon's Over

Articles such as this, while perhaps a bit early in the offing, are not entirely unexpected. I would agree with Watson in saying that unless Obama egregiously screws the pooch, he should be okay for '12. But that's primarily a function of how comically inept the Republicans have become. They can't get out of their own way; they're seriously debating whether Sarah Palin has a shot as their nominee in three years.

Certainly stranger things have happened, and the inherent stupidity of large swaths of 'murkins means that such a prospect can never completely be written off, but friends 'n' neighbors, let us stipulate for a moment that politics is a business, and businessmen expect a return on investment. Sarah Palin might be the Blessed Virgin Mary for her weirdo refuse-to-watch-anything-but-Faux-News fan base, but she's pure poison to the rest of the country. Why would anyone put their money on toxic sludge?

So she's taking an 18-month sabbatical to bone up on fundamentals in time for Iowa and New Hampshire, BFD. The only way this will fly is with the media's complicity in helping her rehabilitate her well-deserved image as a clueless, blustery dilettante who, after almost a full year of constant coverage, has yet to this observer's knowledge to say anything that is either true or substantive.

So Obama's worst enemy is not Sarah Palin, or any of the other trolls on their bench. It's Obama himself, not doing the things he said he was going to do, having more than sufficient numbers of fellow Democrats to get things done and yet failing to keep them disciplined, leaving people to wonder yet again why voting for Ralph Nader is such a terrible bad awful idea. Sixty Democrats in the Senate, a substantial House majority, a clear popular mandate, and still he's handed the economy back to the people who wrecked it so they can re-inflate and re-crash it -- and recharge us for the privilege. Health care reform is already doomed to be an industry-written abortion. We're finally getting out of Iraq, but nothing will ever be done about the people and lies who got us in there, while we're simultaneously getting more entrenched in Afghanistan.

So if Obama fails in 2012, it will be because enough Americans realized that he has his chance right now, and is failing to take it, despite all the high hopes and high-minded rhetoric. Yes we can, but for some reason, "we" have chosen not to, and if not now, with all the political stars and opportunities very favorably aligned, when? I mean, really, we can bitch about the apathy of the American electorate, but this is exactly why they don't bother to fuckin' vote. And it's getting harder and harder to blame them.

Spectator Sports

Here's a news flash: political consultants, much like the people they represent and work for, are more often than not unprincipled mercenaries. I know, I know, it's a shock. But hilarious all the same in its collegial garment-rending.

“The risk for someone like Howard is that he is surrendering his credibility,” said Joel Benenson, a senior political adviser to President Obama who was Mr. Weiner’s campaign pollster. “He made countless statements to the press during the presidential primaries that were wrong, and now he’s saying things that completely contradict what he said four years ago.”

As opposed to, say, Obama himself, who made a good many statements and promises during his campaign that he now suddenly not in any rush to fulfill, perhaps because it might piss off the Goldman Sachs thugs Obama decided to surround himself with. [Link via Global Guerrillas.]

But really, this notion of "credibility" Benenson plaintively evokes, whence does it originate, and to whom does it redound? Surely no sentient being, whether or not they work in the political snakepit, can take (or even say) this with a straight face. It's been said a million times, and remains ineluctably true -- the only thing that hurts the careers of politicians and their hangers-on is getting caught with either a dead girl or a live boy. Pretty much everything else is negotiable.

Joel Benenson knows that, and he knows that Jim Rutenberg and Raymond Hernandez know that, who in turn know that you and I intuitively know all the metaconnective properties of those epistemological extensions, and so on. Even people who have no clue who or what Howard Wolfson is get that; indeed, it's as likely to be their rationale for tuning out of the political as stone ignorance might be. Who could blame them?

It's an incestuous little crowd of people, discernible only by their lack of belief in anything substantial, who make careers out of appearing on each other's shows, peddling conjecture as analysis and demagoguery as policy. After a while they become indistinguishable, leaving us only to mark time as to when, say, Wolfson would jump from Hillary Clinton's campaign to Faux News, or John McCain will be appearing on Press the Meat yet again. (Answer: Tomorrow, of course. It's Sunday!)

So a rented smear artist has lent his talents to the pint-size would-be potentate-for-life (who just happens to be a billionaire financier) of America's largest city-state. He'd probably work for Sarah Palin's 2012 presidential campaign if the money was there, as would Joel Benenson or any of them. The idea that political advisers -- whose sole purpose is to take a lump of steaming horseshit and either mold it into a favorable impression or chuck it at the nearest opponent -- might be grievously wounded by one of their own creating a bad impression is pretty funny.

Not quite as funny as, say, every one of them -- consultants and media weasels alike -- suddenly having to find an honest day's work, and not nearly as funny as Bobo Brooks letting himself get felt up by a resolutely heterosexual Republican senator, but we have to take our chuckles where we can find them.

Copping a Feel

You know, I've (half-)joked in the past about Bobo Brooks being effete, dickless, possibly latent, definitely a ginormous pussy who wouldn't know which end of a socket wrench to use, but damn:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

If this is Bobo's idea of being "provocative" then it explains more about him, both as a man and as a journalist, than his entire career as a columnist. First of all, be a man and don't put up with being groped by perverts, unless you're secretly into that sort of thing, in which case don't act all shocked with your "revelation" with this mystery senator (which of course was a Republican, like there was any doubt). I'll go for the easy money and say it was Larry Craig (R-Tearoom), but there's so many to choose from. Hillbilly moralist Mitch McConnell, for one, is rumored to enjoy his share of tube steak, and there's always confirmed bachelor Huckleberry Graham.

Can't wait for the inevitable Lifetime movie where Corey Feldman, as Bobo, uses a doll to show the special prosecutor where the bad man touched him. In the meantime -- sheesh, what a punk-ass bitch, really. "Ehh, get me out of here," like it never even occurred to young Bobo to just look the mystery groper in eye and say, "Dude, what the fuck? You can stop now and retain your dignity, or draw back a stump while I loudly ask the entire table why your hand is massaging my cock. Take your pick. You got two seconds before I stop using my indoor voice."

The man really has no fucking balls -- and that is an unfortunate character trait which will permeate every facet of a person, personally and professionally. People like Bobo actually care who these creeps who are feeling him up are, because he defines himself (certainly professionally, and probably to some extent on a personal level) through them, and through his access to them. It's a damned shame, and no doubt Bobo's experiences -- and more importantly, his reactions to them -- are not unique.

But seriously, I wonder how this guy explains this sort of shit to his wife. It's not a gay/straight thing, really, it's a matter of a grown man allowing himself to be treated at a public function like a cancer-ridden tween in Michael Jackson's hidden bedchamber. Just sad and weird, but it explains a lot about the people who bring us our news and carefully considered analysis.

Palintology, July 2009 Edition

People are coming up to me in the street with alarming regularity and asking point-blank, "Regis, what do you think of Sarah Palin's latest move?" To which my reply is the only truly sensible one, "I don't," presumably leaving the impromptu Q&A session at that.

But that's a dodge, when you get right down to it, for a variety of reasons. One is that the interminable train wreck that is Palin's political career is never not going to be at least entertaining. Another, perhaps more important rationale, is the intensely symbiotic relationship between Palin and her devotees. It is not unlike that between the recently deceased King of Pill Pop (perhaps you've heard about his demise) and his legion of unemployable weirdos. The wampeter becomes almost messianic in the eyes of the followers, in that their adulation cannot be rationally articulated, and refuting evidence is readily ignored, no matter how abundant that evidence happens to be.

Anyway, La Palin. What's the deal? the kids are asking. Well, the deal seems pretty easy to me -- she's heading for the land of more money and fewer headaches. Buried fairly deep into Todd Purdum's already infamous Vanity Fair takedown is probably the clearest message of who and what Palin really is, operationally:

Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”)

It's easy to assume at this point that there are many government officials who use parallel communications in order to circumvent those pesky transparency requirements. But for Palin it appears to be SOP, which belies not only her usual populist "nothin' ta hide" pose, but her other usual pose about do-nothing government. Really, if you're not doing anything all that earth-shattering, if it's really that mundane and needlessly overblown, then why the opacity?

And that seems to dovetail all too nicely with her stock patter on last year's campaign trail. Palin seemed to relish her "pit bull with lipstick" schtick a bit too much; no matter how quickly and thoroughly her assertions were debunked and refuted, she obstinately refused even to alter them, much less drop them for the sake of mere accuracy. This is the mark of someone who neither knows nor cares about the integrity of the things they happen to say, and if your instinct is to use language to conceal rather than to reveal, it's bound to be an overriding instinct. Everything you do and say is going to be used for that purpose.

Even worse than the smooth pathological lying is the endless playing of the victim card. It's gotten so old that even moderate conservatives such as Debra Saunders and Bobo Brooks are sick of it, which means that as soon as Goldberg cleans the Cheeto dust from his paws, he'll be on that wagon as well. It's become painfully clear that Palin, just like her perpetually aggrieved fan club, is much better at dishing it out than taking it. She'll lie about her own and her opponents' records on the campaign trail like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and casually call people terrorists and socialists, but boy howdy, you do a lame PhotoShop of her kid or make fun of her non-abstinent daughter, and she pops a lung blowing the rape whistle.

If the lack of self-awareness these people routinely exhibit could be processed into some form of renewable energy, you'd have an endless supply of bullshit and our oil resource constraints would be over in a fucking heartbeat. But trillions of cubic feet of butt-hurt ain't solar power, and nobody other than the terminally stupid are buying into this Li'l Miss Can't Be Wrong act of hers.

Which is why she has to duck out while the getting's good, before her moron base has moved on to the next batch of fudge-covered nachos that passes for their intellectual lives and replaces their mental stability. Palin's only political options are to either run for a second term as governor, and now that she's gotten a taste of the outside world, that's out; run for Lisa Murkowski's seat next year, which would truly be a match between Dumb & Dumber, but one that Murkowski would almost certainly win; or become the Goopers' nominee in '12, which even Palin has to realize would be a tacit concession by her disarrayed party. Might as well nominate Bob Dole, for what it will get them; even Palin has to realize that her base is as narrow as it is (ahem) deep.

The mark of the true believer is to simply carry their martyr's cross for her, and John Fund is nothing if not absolutely reliable in his sheer intellectual dishonesty. He starts with the usual "baseless ethics investigations" hokum and then jerks the heart-strings.

Everyone in the family was weary of endless personal attacks, including mean-spirited suggestions on liberal blogs that all of her children should have been aborted and that she would run on a presidential platform promoting retardation.

Really? Which "liberal blogs" "suggested" such things, even polemically? I don't even recall reading any commenters who made such suggestions, much less actual blog postings. Near as I can tell, most simply pointed out the shameless hypocrisy and ignorance of Palin's holier-than-thou stances on reproductive choice, and her insistence on using her infant as a campaign prop. But again, she also initiated her own fair share of baseless, intensely personal attacks, and it's certainly no great challenge to find any number of conservatard blog commenters who regularly truck in thinly- (or not-at-all) veiled racism against Obama. I've seen exactly one (1) nasty PhotoShop of Sarah and Trig Palin, and that was recent; there are months worth of Obama pickaninny caricatures and angry-loner threats out there if you've got the stomach for it.

But Fund is nothing if not resolute in his hackery, committed to helping Miss Thang play her victim card just one more time, whatever and ever, amen:

In helping to convince Sarah Palin that her road forward in national politics would demand even more sacrifices and pain than exacted from most politicians, the media did nothing to encourage women or people of modest means to participate in politics. By sidestepping her critics, Sarah Palin is now moving to another playing field where she has more control over the rules of the game. Her friends say her critics may call her a "quitter" now, but they should wait and see what new role she decides to fill. She may wind up having the last laugh.

Oh, boo-fuckin'-hoo, Mary. Sarah Palin is going to where the money is, the Rudy Giuliani route, the traditional home of all good charlatans and hucksters -- the lecture/commentator grift. She can pull some decent bank for probably a year or so on the rubber-chicken circuit, pay down her legal bills and hit the Neiman-Marcus, telling the assholes what they want to hear, without disclosure rules and standards for accuracy and all those inconveniences, impediments to her (and their) peculiar solipsism. Then she can go to Faux News and be a color commentator, if she can live with Hannity and O'Reilly endlessly fwapping outside her dressing room.

I'd like to say that Palin's political career is well and truly over for good, even with a backhanded compliment that her weird celebrity status has transcended the mediocrities of politics. But she's young, and there's always that bloc of Americans that never run out of incoherent anger and volatile stupidity. This country allowed George W. Bush into the White House not once but twice (even if by chicanery); clearly anything's possible.

News of the World

I've been on vacation/out of the loop for a week or so, so just wondering -- is Michael Jackson still dead, or did He rise up on the third day and cure cancer and shit? Say this for the American media, they make every conceivable effort to exceed any possible mode of parody. The only good use for the Staples Center tomorrow would be to lock the doors after everyone's in and turn it into a job fair, since clearly these goofy motherfuckers could use some gainful employment. Or, you know, a few strategically dropped canisters of sarin. Whichever's cheaper.