Tales From the Crypt

Last week, it seemed like mining the RNC for ridiculousness and snark would be like shooting fish in a barrel, or finding stray clumps of popcorn chicken in Jonah Goldberg's footie jammies. But since it was a house-payment week, and I couldn't swing the Costco bottle of Jameson's, I just couldn't stomach the prospect of actually sitting through that mess sober. Life, as they say, really is too short.

But I did manage to sit through enough potent bite-size chunks so far to get the gist of it. A few observations:

• The more gallons in your hat, and the more buttons and/or bumper stickers it is festooned with, the more patriotic you are.



• I sure hope the Minnesota Wild has better luck filling this thing than the Republicans are having. You could put the living half of Milli Vanilli on stage with a karaoke machine and get this many people.



• Is there anybody at this fucking thing under 60 years old? Aren't they missing an oatmeal-and-Matlock marathon somewhere?



• I keep hearing that Republican chicks are hot. I've seen a lot of crowd shots the last few nights -- more than I care to think about. I have yet to see a single one I would fuck with Ann Coulter's cock.



• So being pregnant every few years and moose-hunting are now sterling quals for higher national office. Perhaps Sarah Palin can impress the neighbors by field-dressing Fred Thompson on stage.



• Seriously, this is the oldest fucking audience I have ever seen for anything. Is there an early-bird special and a live taping of Murder, She Wrote or something?



• Joe Lieberman is so far up John McCain's ass, it is technically a violation of the Geneva Convention. Which this crowd has never heard of, even though most of their Social Security numbers are in double digits.



• Loved Fredo's aphasic reference to his "resolute desk". That's where he keeps his "action pen" for signin' "freedom documints". There's also the collection of post-its he keeps in his "idea drawer". When the finally build that factory in Crawford, the one that makes cheese-filled hot dogs, they'll know who to thank.



• Just when I thought Ol' Fred and Holy Joe were runnin' neck-wattle-to-neck-wattle for the coveted Asshole of the Week award (which for this crowd is a pretty fuckin' deep bench to choose from), along comes Rudy. Breslin's line on Giuliani cannot be quoted too often: a small man in search of a balcony. The guy's such a flaming asshole, he's not Tony Soprano, he's Phil Leotardo. Five pounds of cousin-fucking shit in a ten-pound bag.



• Finally it's Marian the Librarian's turn. The thing about following Rudy G, even when he runs over into your segment, is that you could read aloud from Mein Kampf and still come off as more rational and contemplative. The expectations have been so severely lowered already for Palin, all she has to do is not sound like a complete moron. Or Joe Lieberman.



• The only thing remotely resembling a coherent policy statement is some vague thoughts here and there about "energy independence" and investment in "alternative energy", which for this crowd means nuclear plants and "clean coal". Does anyone really believe for a moment that any of them would be willing to live either next to a nuke plant or a mountain that is being blasted and melted?



• This may be the only major event in recorded history where they have to take a milk-of-magnesia break every 45 minutes. I would not be surprised to hear that this greasy monkeyfuck was sponsored by Metamucil and the estate of Lawrence Welk.



• There are several levels of grating intellectual offense. Obviously the professional grifters and propagandists scuttling to the microphone are the first level. Then you have the commentators, each trying to be the one that susses correctly the zeitgeist of a brainless, deadened husk of a failed ideology. So far, Campbell Brown of all people has grilled some fat trout, though Nooners' hot-mike slip-up tells you all you need to know about what the GOP insiders really think about their own circle-jerk.
  
  But the final, most irritating level is that of the drones on the floor, the delegates, the nameless morons from hither and yon (mostly, it would appear, yon) who, when asked what they think and why they think it, burble the most incoherent streams of nonsense imaginable. Why do they like Sarah Palin? Because she validates their own personal reproductive choices; because she seems like she'd be a good neighbor; because they feel like they can hang out at her house on weekdays and watch All My Children and get sloshed on gin fizzes.
  
  Who the fuck can tell? None of them make a goddamned lick of sense. You want to slap these fucktards and tell them that there are better ways to find friends than, you know, voting. It's like they're all in third grade -- which, hell, maybe they are. Bored with their own lives, they have aught to look forward to but sticking their wrinkled beaks into everyone else's, while keeping them off their lawn, I guess.
  
  I mean, I get the first two sets of insufferable assholes -- they're getting paid. Ol' Fred and Rudy G make bank to catapult the propaganda. Ditto Olbermann and Tweety for their orotund furbelows. But to get all these suckers to drive and fly hundreds of miles and not only listen to this bullshit, but repeat it? My friends, that is some stupidity you can believe in.

Switch to Decaf

Yet another example of what incredibly silly people they are:

I don't think it [sic] an exaggeration to say that this girl (and her boyfriend) have caused a crisis of global significance, and if her parents are serious about "the responsibilities of adulthood," Bristol ought to face the consequences, including about 45 minutes in front of the klieg lights while reporters shout stupid questions.

Right, that's not an exaggeration at all, dude. Jesus. Look, teenage girls in podunk towns get knocked up all the time. There's not much else to do. It even happens to the children of politicians, seeing as how they are just as vulnerable to the effects of hormones and such.

I think the situation is mildly humorous, in the sense that McCain's campaign has turned into one of those "if it warn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" narratives. Other than that, I couldn't care less. It's not a profound statement on Roe v. Wade either way, nor is it the "crisis of global significance" that pathological meatballs like Stacy McCain (no relation, one hopes, to Straight Talk) are howling about. Get a fuckin' grip, bro-ham.

Bristol Palin, like any other child of a politician, is probably proud of what her mother is doing, but she didn't sign on to have her life serve as a palimpsest for emotionally unstable cybergoons to trace their projected anxieties upon. Her situation might somewhat defuse the silly clamoring over how being a mother of five automatically translates into the kind of leadership skills required to manage a complicated, interdependent global empire. And it emphasizes yet again how little vetting was done by Straight Talk's team, and how impulsive he himself is when it comes to important decisions, which reveal more and more about his decision-making process, such as it is. And you would think it would make the abstinence-only obsessives (such as, um, Sarah Palin) rethink their ridiculous assumptions, but of course you'd be wrong on that one.

But that's about it. I'd bet that if most of us just stood back from this one, we'd see how quickly some of these goofballs descend on the poor girl, as if her personal choice was any of their goddamned business. By their fruits shall you know them, as they say.

[link via Atrios]

Corporate America

I rarely talk about what I do for a living, because frankly it's not all that interesting. The most interesting thing about it, I suppose, is that I am able to support my family on a single income, which is increasingly rare these days. This is not because I make a lot of money, mind you; I make shit, to be honest. But we're good at managing what we have, and living within our means. I don't have a cell phone, and I finally just got a vehicle from this century only because my 17-year-old Accord was about to blow after 225K miles. The only indulgences are DirecTV and Netflix.

I work, as I have through most of my adult life when I wasn't playing music, in manufacturing. I like the idea of making something tangible that has intrinsic value. These days it's a desk job in logistics, with a huge component of interdepartmental communications, including between departments that hadn't traditionally gotten along. I'm fortunate in that I like what I do, I'm pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. I've found that for many people, none of those things happen very often.

When I first started with my current company a few years ago, the facility was basically a medium-sized fish in a small pond. Things were busy, which is always better than the alternative. About a year ago, all the facilities from our company were snapped up by a much bigger corporation. They immediately sent envoys from corporate headquarters to talk up their great health plans, tuition reimbursement opportunities, internal talent development, blah blah blah. Nothing like a good handjob on company time. And counterintuitively, despite oil and commodity prices ramping up drastically, we became busier and busier. Job security.

A couple of smaller places were closed during the spring and summer, and their workloads moved to our facility, but they had been glorified FDCs (forward distribution centers) anyway. If you can schedule things properly, lower and more efficient shipping costs can easily offset commercial rental space in metropolitan areas. And much of the additional work we took on fell directly in my lap. Hence the 50-hour weeks as of late. Again, not a problem. The extra cash offset the gas price increases in my 80-minute round-trip commute, and I appreciated that they felt that I could handle the extra work.

So it was a rude awakening last week for us to be collectively called up and told that the plant is closing. This is what happens when competitors buy each other, folks, and it ain't pretty. The severance package is a joke, and the only silver lining is that the closing will take some time. Many places do not have that luxury, obviously, so it can't really be taken for granted. But the whole thing is being framed as a necessary business decision driven by tough economic times, never mind that the ginormous corporation has sufficient resources to ride the storm out.

But it ain't the first time, and it won't be the last, and many people have faced far worse circumstances. Most of us land on our feet, eventually. But a couple things about this stick in my craw.

One is the basic idea worth considering, on this holiday which celebrates the working stiff, that perhaps people work better, harder, and smarter when they don't feel like they constantly have to look over their shoulders. Should people have to worry that, even as they're being glad-handed with all sorts of temporary blandishments, they are mere months from being sold down the river so that someone's stock rises half a point?

I think not; I think a large measure of Americans' chronic unhappiness can be found in that, besides being fat and teevee-addled, they know they have no real job security. They're afraid to take vacations, because they're petrified that the company might figure out they can get along just fine without them. They're stressed because frequently they're clinging to a job they despise, with people they detest, simply because the market sucks and they know they're lucky just to have a shitty PPO plan. I was lucky; as I said, I liked the work and the people, and the health plan was pretty good. Many people have to take what they can get.

But the thing that really pissed me off was when it was time to go in to discuss severance policies and what-not. The woman who had been sent over from corporate was polite and professional enough, and launched immediately into the hortatory nonsense of this being the beginning of an "adventure". Look, lady, I'm 41 and I have a family to support; I got that adventure shit out of my system over a decade ago.

Plus I work 50 hours a week, commute another ten, and had been planning on going for an MBA. That seems like quite enough "adventure". It connotes a feeling that we had become sedentary and complacent in our sinecured positions, obviously an inherently offensive insinuation. By taking on extra work, trying to be a team player, I had simply been cutting my own throat all summer. She didn't have an answer for that. They never do.

But they have to do what they're told, and when their turn comes, and a stranger gets dispatched from afar to cut them off at the neck, I'm sure they'll understand. We've all become used to the dynamic, which may be the worst part about it.

Social Distortion

As expected, Sarah Palin's nomination has excited only the already excitable. Already the usual suspects at the Corner of K-Lo Street and Pantload Boulevard are out on the sidewalk, sharpening their virtual crayons and juggling rhetorical lemons. We took a peek at the sideshow back on Saturday. Let's start with the inimitable comic stylings of one Mark Levin:

Over at his blog, David Frum asks: "If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?" Of course, the question is loaded.

This small town stuff is odd to me. If a candidate is mayor of a large town, does that make her more qualified for the vice presidency or presidency? Don't we need to know more? Is Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick more qualified than any small town mayor? Is any major city mayor more qualified than any small town mayor? I suppose the question can also be asked: Is a big state governor more qualified than a small state governor, based on the size and diversity of the state alone? Or don't we need to know more? So, Frum's line about a small town mayor is by itself useless in analyzing a candidate's qualifications.

Of course, that's not what Frum was asking, not at all. Frum correctly pointed out that McCain has made "Country First" a centerpiece of his campaign, that every decision he is making and plans to make will have the country's best interests at heart. This does not remotely jibe with the selection of someone who can only charitably be described as a political neophyte.

I don't think anyone's going to let Kwame Kilpatrick near much of anything anymore, but that's also beside the point. Only a complete dipshit would think that there's no substantial difference between being (even a corrupt and incompetent) mayor of a chronically troubled major city that, despite serious population declines, is still 50% larger than Palin's entire state, and being mayor of a very small town whose mayoralty is more ceremonial than operational anyway.

So, and I'm about the last person to defend David Frum, but Levin's rebuttal completely (and deliberately) obfuscates Frum's point, rendering it meaningless with a barrage of non-sequiturs and irrelevant rejoinders. If we are facing existential doom from the Islamojihadifascistas, and if experience and judgement are paramount, then McCain has very seriously contradicted himself with his choice. Means nothing to the rest of us, since we've come to expect it, but it should mean something to them.

Hey, hey, hey! Pantload's got somethin' to say.

I've been thinking about it and I think the bottom line on Palin is pretty simple. If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny — no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don't-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews — she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don't know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize [sic] her, she'll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That's it.

Soooo....because we already have such low expectations (which was surely part of the strategy), she can appear merely adequate and exceed those expectations. Why not? It worked for Bush, and look how well that turned out. Thanks for the penetrating insight, Lunchbox. Didn't see that one coming up the road.

Of course, like potato chips, and most other trans-fat snacks, he can't stop at just one:

But I would rather have John McCain in office for two years with Palin going to school on the job than have Barack Obama in there from day one (particularly with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the Congress!). I think Obama is wrong on a whole lot of things, might not be up to the job and would give a blank check to Congress. And he's the guy running for president. Palin might not be up to the job, we'll have to see, but we're not voting for her to be president (a distinction countless liberal bloggers seem intent on deliberately blurring). Obama is wrong from day 1. Palin possible right from day 1, but almost surely right on day 1,082 if, God forbid, that day comes.

His faith is impenetrable here. Notice how smoothly he moves from conceding that Palin might not be ready, but would "almost surely" be ready three years in. Note also that the questioner was asking about a scenario where McCain passes a couple months in, not two, then three years, as in Pantload's hypotheticals.

No matter. Palin's competence would not be the issue anyway. McCain, as with Bush, would "almost surely" turn his policy-making over to whatever vulcans are still skulking through the halls of the Pentagon. Cheney would be sure to leave his rolodex and cell number. The transition from McCain to Palin would be smooth as silk, because neither of them would really be in charge, except for catering to the intellectual boobism that passes for "social conservatism" in this country.

This is the problem with leaving serious choices up to self-righteous fambly-valyews toads; they bray endlessly about how serious they are, then betray their sensibilities on sight of the first shiny object dangled in front of them. Hell, even Sully the Pooh gets it, but these people are mule-stubborn and brick-thick.

And now I'm off to lunch with Kathryn.

Too easy.

Mark Steyn, who actually could write fairly coherently pre-9/11, cobbles together some talking points almost ritualistically.

Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth.

Well, and been president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law. Not as romantic as living out Northern Exposure, I suppose, but it's something very few people can do.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Everyone in Alaska supports drilling there; the fact that Palin's husband works for BP is just gravy. Alaska is the biggest welfare state in the union. If they didn't get their piece of the oil action there they'd be stealing moose steaks out of each other's chest freezers during yet another interminable, besotted winter.

Sixth (see Kathleen's link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

I like milfs as much as the next guy, and I certainly don't mind having that hot-librarian itch scratched. It would just have never occurred to me, even as a goof, to vote one into the most powerful job on the planet. Then again, I never thought enough people could be stupid enough to vote for a person such as George W. Bush. In many ways, I still can't quite believe it. It's like going to your 25-year high-school reunion, and finding out that the kid who used to eat his own boogers in class and molest farm animals on the weekends is a high-powered CEO. Oh, he still eats boogers and fucks livestock, it's just that someone actually thought he was responsible enough to manage something more complicated than getting his socks on in the morning.

Finally, Special Ed lumbers onto Hot Air to offer a point-by-point refutation of the arguments against Palin's nomination. The points themselves are easy enough to counter-refute, and not really worth the effort.

But the comments, as these things usually are, are priceless. Too many to choose from, really.

[Update: Turns out that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. Is it a setback or a boon for those coveted valyews? Oh, the hilarity! Will they have to set up a day-care center in the Oval Office?]

Russian Roulette

Couple more items of interest in analyzing the Russia-Georgia conflict, and our unwitting role in the whole thing -- including, of course, the blustery, mavericky incompetence of Poor Ol' Straight Talk. First this piece from the NY Review of Books, laying out the case for how we ineptly encouraged Saakashvili to lay his dick on the table, thinking we had his back. Sorry Misha, but maybe understanding what exactly it means when Bush is two or three times as popular in your country as he is here would be a clue in how that was going to go.

Then there's CNN's interview with The Man himself, Ol' Pooty-Poot. Putin is at once authoritative and discursive, even (for him) almost playing around, as the reporter goes to wind it up and Putin responds, "We could go on. I am in no hurry." This, as we've forgotten, is how people who are in charge of large countries are supposed to sound: clear, coherent, able to speak extemporaneously and at length about actual ideas, rather than endlessly babbled, fractured boilerplate and circular "in other words" handjobs.

While he's at it, Putin explains what he thinks of Faux Noise:

Let's recall, for example, the interview with that 12-year-old girl and her aunt, who, as I understand, live in the United States and who witnessed the events in South Ossetia. The interviewer at one of the leading channels, Fox News, was interrupting her all the time. All the time, he interrupted her. As soon as he didn't like what she was saying, he started to interrupt her, he coughed, wheezed and screeched. All that remained for him to do was to soil his pants, in such a graphic way as to stop them. That's the only thing he didn't do, but, figuratively speaking, he was in that kind of state. Well, is that an honest and objective way to give information? Is that the way to inform the people of your own country? No, that is disinformation.

Funny that a guy with his own, erm, tempestuous relationship with journamalists would have the nerve to point the finger, but point taken. Even he gets that Fox is a bad joke.

I don't think anyone's under the illusion that Putin's a "good" guy per se, but you have to have at least a grudging respect for him. Here's a guy who was handed an enormous basket case of a country that neither the West nor Yeltsin gave a shit about. Yeltsin was a thief and a drunk and a cheap thug, who let the country and its army fall apart in chaos and poverty, while he and his family enriched themselves.

And Putin turned that around, with his own thuggish nastiness, murdering journalists and imprisoning political opponents. But he cleaned up the nightmarishly undisciplined army and now even once-secretive outposts such as Vladivostok are thriving. No doubt he has wet his beak, but he seems content to enrich his cronies and consolidate power instead. He has been extremely effective in prioritizing Russian interests on the world stage, which -- get this -- is what he's supposed to do. I think many of us seriously think that guys like Putin are supposed to check with us first before making a move. Does your neighbor ask your permission before fucking his wife?

Of course, the reason Russia is now thriving is because of oil prices, which is our doing. Straight Talk McCain rhetorically asks what Saddam Hussein would have done with $110-120 oil. A look as Putin's record might give him a hint, albeit a more rational, less Stalinist one. But none of this happened in a vacuum, and our Serious Leaders keep pretending we had no role in any of it. Forget McCain not being fit to be president, the man's not fit to be a senator at this point, if he can't figure this one out.

Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Media Matters catches yet another conservahack smugly inventing shit:

In an August 30 post on the National Review Online's Media Blog, Greg Pollowitz falsely claimed that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin visited troops in Kuwait "a year before Senator [Barack] Obama felt the need to go." Noting a July 24, 2007, Alaska Public Radio Network report that "Palin today visited with a National Guard unit from Alaska serving in Kuwait," Pollowitz wrote: "Unlike Senator Obama's staged trip to the Middle East, Governor Palin went to visit the troops in Kuwait before she was ever under consideration for Veep. ... And a year before Senator Obama felt the need to go," a reference to Obama's July 2008 visit. In fact, Obama also visited troops in Kuwait in January 2006. Indeed, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command's website posted a photo of Obama "listen[ing] to a soldier voice his concerns Jan. 7 during a dinner at Camp Arifjan's Zone 6 dining facility" and a photo of Obama "driv[ing] toward the basket during a game with soldiers Jan. 7 at Camp Airifjan's Zone 1 gym."

To his small credit, Pollowitz actually posted a correction to his idiotic assertion, even attributing his newfound wisdom to Media Matters. But the thing is that he clearly never bothered to check. How hard can it be to use Teh Google and punch in "obama visit iraq" or whatever? He didn't even try; he just assumed he had a cheap rhetorical opening. Or maybe he did know better and just figured he'd get away with it, as they so frequently do.

And if it hadn't been for Media Matters catching it and publicizing Pollowitz' grievous error, not only would it have sat there, the 'tards at The Corner (more on them later) would have repeated it incessantly as "fact". Because in their world, "facts" are simply things that you can gull people into believing. Like the old law aphorism: if the law is on your side, pound the law; if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table.

Or in the case of these knuckleheads, the high chair.

This Just In

I still can't stand Geraldine Ferraro, and I doubt that will ever change.

In an interview with NPR yesterday, Geraldine Ferraro praised Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate, and defended Palin against the accusation that she's not qualified to hold high office. When asked who she was voting for, Ferraro played coy: "When I go into the booth I will make my decision."

I've already made my decision -- you're a preening, disloyal asshole who needs to grow the hell up and realize that there are more important criteria than plumbing. For example, on what basis is Ferraro even considered a worthy or insightful person to interview? What she did 25 years ago -- which, when you get right down to it, was to function as the anti-Viagra to an already hopelessly flaccid ticket -- is irrelevant today, in and of itself. What has she done since? What does she do now other than petulantly undermine her own party and give credence to old "circular firing squad" memes?

The only reason I registered as a Democrat this year is because in California, you cannot vote by mail as a "decline to state" or "independent". Other than that, I have very little patience with a party that seems to take pride in proving Will Rogers right about its lack of discipline and organization. They need to stop letting the Zell Millers and Joe Liebermans fester under the awning of the party; fucking put them out in the cold already.

There's having a big tent, and there's letting the crazy shopping-bag lady in the corner prattle on and waste people's time. Ferraro needs to either get down to Florida or Pennsylvania or something and help out where she can with whatever cred she still thinks she clings to, or just sit down and shut the hell up until it's over.

Unconventional

Sounds like the party's getting rained out, one by one:

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will skip the Republican National Convention because of mounting concerns about Hurricane Gustav, the White House said Sunday.

His Homeland Security chief warned that Gustav could prove more challenging than Katrina and the nation's disaster response coordinator worried about New Orlean's fragile levees.

First lady Laura Bush still was scheduled to address delegates in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, the opening day.

Really, they might as well just go to their convention; they have about as much to do with halting or alleviating the storm as Laura does. By the time this is over, it'll just be Fred and Rudy strutting around the stage, drunk on their false bravado, desperately trying to convince an emptying hockey arena that McCain and this chick he met back in February and didn't bother to vet thoroughly are the best option in a world full of serious threats. Or something.

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for them, if only just enough to hope that their demise is slightly more swift and merciful than previously envisioned.

(Won't) Get Fooled Again

Cool prefatory anecdote leading into one of the most concisely insightful comments I've seen in a while. Great stuff.

Of course it'll go right past Dreher and his fellow travelers, those things always do. They try to put a bland, benign, less malevolent face on the philosophical trappings, but then go and vote for the exact same people. That they think they mean well is irrelevant. They just can't bring themselves to quit being suckers.

Roger Codger

Lotta folks have already pointed out how ol' McCrankypants gets these days when the milk of magnesia runs out, or he makes a boom-boom and Cindy's not around with a fresh set. But the line that got my attention was this:

I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel.

The thing is, I honestly don't know if that's just the usual red meat for the rubes, or if he actually thinks that oil would have skyrocketed as it has without parking a quarter-million troops in the Straits of Hormuz, unleashing sectarian hell in the only secular country in the region, and trying to goad Iran into a pretext for another misbegotten war.

I'm pretty sure that most every first-year macro student understands the concept of "risk premium", which makes it all the more perplexing that either McCain doesn't, or that he's counting on no one else to know what it means. As usual, probably a bit of both. Even when he's not grumping through the rest of the interview excerpt, he's so predictably on-message you wonder what the point of the exercise was in the first place, other than journamalists getting to say they interviewed John McCain.

The interview responses and his recent attitude toward the media in general, like today's Palin pick, seem to be his way of tacitly conceding the whole thing. The cookie-cutter Mad-lib answers to essentially every question, regardless of topic, convey that if he even has advisers, either they're out of ideas as well or just suck to begin with.

Kinda like the Republican Party itself. If I were Schwarzenegger I'd come down with the flu or something, anything to get out of being caught giving a pep talk to the losers milling around the Larry Craig Memorial TearoomXcel Energy Center.

[Update: Heh-indeedy. Looks like Ahnult decided to take my advice, and has ceded his Monday night speaking role to -- wait for it -- Ol' Fred Thompson. Schwarzenegger says that his cancellation was forced on him because of the continuing deadlock in the California budget process, otherwise known as "August". What difference he's supposed to make by staying in Sacramento on, you know, Labor Day, he doesn't mention. Maybe he'll spend the entire day crank-calling Fabian Nuñez and Don Perata.

Or maybe, as I sagely prognosticated, he realizes that there's no political upside for him appearing in the same room with these chowder-heads. Hell, they probably even buy his dog-ate-my-homework excuse.]

Shedding Skin

Just a friendly reminder of what we are blessedly getting rid of.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)

I love the penultimate point in that excerpt, the room going silent until the subject was changed. Was it that disagreement with Le Dauphin is punishable by death (or worse yet, downward career mobility)? Or is it that they understood instinctively what sort of person they had to deal with, and that it's always a waste of time to try to argue with a bratty, insolent child?

Think about it -- Lantos was originally from Europe, and had dealt with world issues in Congress for many years at that point, where by that juncture in Bush's abysmal tenure, he hadn't been to much besides Mexico and China, and was only a few years removed from not knowing who ran that quaint little overcrowded nucular backwater known as Pakistan.

And instead of dialoguing with and listening to Lantos' suggestion, he tried to punk him in front of everyone else, 'cause everyone knows that Sweden don't have no army, dumbass. Just a big wall of meatballs and Volvos surrounding Göteborg. Fuck, this guy would lose on one of those "how long do you cook a three-minute egg?" questions they give you in the warm-up round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Every person in government who has failed to correct or engage this mendacious, clueless slob has done a disservice to the country and the world, whether they realize it or not. By humoring and ignoring his profound ignorance of even simple trivial points, they enabled an attitude of petulance and entitlement which engendered far worse things, which will take a generation to undo. Thanks for that, guys. At least Biden had the balls to share that one with the rest of us. I'm sure it's not even the 100th-worst example of enabled boobery in the past eight years.

A Modest Proposal

What's it like to go through life without a soul? Ask Karl Rove:

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst.

Indeed. Poor Republicans! Perhaps if they offer Rove up as a sacrifice to their infernal nether-lords, strap him to an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico while Gustav passes through, the dæmonic bloodlust would be temporarily sated. It's worth a shot.

Milf the Vote

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Free Speech Zone

Lest we forget that all political investitures are inherently corporate undertakings, here's a reminder:

DENVER -- An ABC News producer was arrested outside a downtown hotel here Wednesday while he and a camera crew tried to shoot footage of corporate donors leaving a meeting with a group of Democratic senators.

Asa Eslocker, who works with the network's investigative unit, was charged with trespass, interference and failure to follow a lawful order. He was released four hours later on a $500 bond.

"We expect to see this kind of behavior in Myanmar, not in Denver, Colorado, at a national political convention where a reporter is trying to videotape big-money donors trying to meet with elected officials," said ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider.

Naw, in Myanmar, the journalist leaves the police station feet first, or at least without his toenails and several teeth. Some sense of proportion is useful. Still, point taken -- corporate goons employ rented thugs to protect themselves from the prying eyes of the peons whose votes they wish to entice. Anything wrong with that picture?

The footage was shown on ABC's "World News" tonight. Eslocker was working with chief investigative reporter Brian Ross, who does stories on conventions and donors every four years. Schneider said the arrest was initiated by an off-duty sheriff's officer working as a security guard for the Brown Palace.

[emphasis mine]
Of course it was. The corporate paramilitary of privatized security. Here they can't get away with shooting up an intersection or openly truncheoning unfortunate passersby, or disappearing snooping journamalists. Yet.

It should be unacceptable to all people, regardless of political persuasion, that people can be pushed around and arrested in public areas, just for wanting to know. Fuck you, moonlighting hotel cop, I have a right to know who's renting my political representatives. If we don't even have that fundamental right, we got nothing.

Things to Do in Denver When You're Braindead

So I think we got it now -- Hillary has trumped expectations by being a team player after all, yet for the countless nattering nabobs of nincompoopery malingering at all points in and out of the arena, you wouldn't know it. She didn't praise Obama "enough", she outshone him with her orange pantsuit, blah blah blah. Jeebus knows that I had Clinton fatigue back in 1997, and I'm glad I don't have to worry about holding my nose and voting to reinstate another dynasty, but these people have a pathological need to archly ascribe ulterior motives that they seem to have pulled directly out of their asses.

It's all about the professional prattlers, as it always is, and how well they can preen their pet theories for the cameras. Failing that, one of these genius sets had a "body language expert" opine as to how much Hill was faking it. Christ, why not just break out a phrenologist while we're at it? They can't just let us watch the fucking thing (if we happen to be that bored) and decide for ourselves, you know, they have to turn to some sinecured knucklehead like Bobo Brooks and get his take.

Okay, anyone out there who really gives a fuck what Bobo Brooks thinks about anything, raise your hand and then jump off the nearest bridge.

Then there's MoDo, who rarely misses an opportunity to compete with Peggy Noonan in the "Most Likely to Project Her Not-So-Latent Daddy Issues" sweepstakes. Get a whiff of this trenchant analysis:

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks.

So let's see if we have this straight -- you need an objective perspective on some funny vibe you're getting at the DNC, and you consult McCain's former strategist for insight. One assumes that her first impulse was to dig up Richard Nixon and hold a séance, but that would entailed setting down her Sea Breeze.

The next bullet point of the MoDo playbook is to either emasculate a male politician as a fey metrosexual just looking for a pole to smoke, or a catty suggestion of ballbusting passive-aggression on the part of an overly ambitious female pol. Talk about projection.

At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.

“Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.

Hillary also said she was happy about the choice of Joe Biden because he added “intensity” to the ticket. Ouch.

Many people have made the exact same observation about Biden's role on the ticket, without the automatic assumption of sour grapes. But this is part and parcel of the entire punditocracy's role at the convention -- to stir up shit, even if it's not there, even if the PUMAs turn out to be oppo stealth ops. Nope, Miz Thang has to go out and find the anecdotal voice of overripe, self-satisfied dissent to bolster her flimsy argument. Catch the barmy wisdom of the convention concern troll:

At a meeting of the Democratic women’s caucus Tuesday, 74-year-old Carol Anderson of Vancouver, Wash., a former Hillary volunteer, stood in the back of the room in a Hillary T-shirt and hat signed by Hillary and “Nobama” button and booed every time any of the women speakers mentioned Obama’s name.

She’s voting for McCain and had nothing nice to say about the Obamas. What about the kids, I asked. “Adorable,” she agreed. Well, I said, Michelle raised them.

“I think her mother does,” Anderson shot back, adding: “I wonder if Michelle would give the Queen one of her little knuckle punches?”

Yeah. See if that shit would play at any of the Republitard events, granny. They'll toss your ass out just for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Who cares what that anonymous, doddering cow thinks? The idea that some lone crank intrinsically possesses a genuine insight worth uncritically repeating is roughly equivalent to asking random panhandlers their opinion about that whole Russia-Georgia thing.

And no, moron, I don't think "Michelle would give the Queen one of her little knuckle punches". I'm not sure why anyone would consider any of the Times' columnist real estate worth pinching a loaf on. Seeing that one of their esteemed columnists considers it worth her time to stenograph the addled ramblings of some weird biddy having an extended Maalox moment gives a pretty clear idea that real-world property isn't all that's had a bursting of the ol' value bubble. This is the sort of inane jabber that's permeated practically all of the coverage I've been able to stomach.

On the other hand, KTVU polijourno Mark Curtis has a substantially different take on the goings-on there. Perhaps someone should tell him he'll get more face time with the A-team if he amps up the 1% loons and stirs some shit. Forget the issues, and the voters, and the corporate tools bankrolling this dog-and-pony show, this weeklong pageant celebrating the achievement of gutless incrementalism. It's all about you, baby, and the trouble you can invent.

Devalued Currency

It's a floor wax, it's a dessert topping, it's got a thousand-and-one uses:

BURBANK, California (Reuters) - John McCain, who often invokes his ordeal as a Vietnam war prisoner to show his devotion to his country as he runs for U.S. president, drew on the experience again on Monday -- this time to deflect sniping over the number of houses he owns.

....

In an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, McCain, 71, said his priority was to keep Americans in their homes in tough economic times.

Then he recalled his Vietnam experience.

"I spent 5 1/2 years in a prison cell without -- I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair," he said.

Sigh. It's practically a drinking game at this point.

"Senator, what do you think the weather will be like tomorrow?" "My friend, when I spent a half-decade in Charlie's clutches, no weather at all could seep through that jungle canopy. Except rain....lots and lots of fucking rain."

"Senator, do you have change for a twenty?" "You know, I spent 5½ years without any money at all, wishing that I could break a twenty for my fellow Americans. We used cigarette butts and pictures of each others' girlfriends as currency. When the photos rotted away, we had memories of the USO girls that would come to the base and blow the officers. You can't make change of memories like that."

"Hello, Senator." "Listen, you smart-mouthed punk, for five years no one said 'hello' to me. It was all 'dinky dao' this and 'you no sit' that. Five fucking years and I still couldn't make head or tail of Charles' crazy moon-man language."

Look, here's the thing, and I'm loath to even bring it up and offer any insight as to what they're doing to themselves. (Yes, as if they're going to read this.) But this is the same thing that plagued Giuliani in the final stages of his campaign: the chronic overuse of "9/11" just dulled its edge after a while.

Even that wouldn't have killed Rudy's shot in and of itself, but once people started ignoring his rhythmic invocations of That Day, they realized that that was it, it was all he had. Giuliani has no intrinsic policy knowledge, either foreign or domestic. He knows how to sanitize a city by selling out to Disney and letting the cops run wild on even suspected ne'er-do-wells. He knows how to cash in on his circumstantial notoriety by charging people tons of money to watch him masturbate to his own leadership skills at a podium. He knows how to reward brainless, thuggish flunkies. He knows how to have the taxpayers bankroll his booty calls. Awesome.

Same thing with McCain. He just showed the world how tremendously overrated his foreign policy acumen really is, a couple weeks ago with the Georgia debacle. His campaign is run by the same asshole lobbyists he rails against, one of whom happened to work for the Georgian government, and may have encouraged Saakashvili to instigate this mess. And when the Russians strike back, as Russians are wont to do, McCain immediately goes into bluster mode, before almost as instantaneously dialing it back down to a peep. His economic policies are even more abusive and incomprehensible, encouraging working-class people to bootstrap their own whiny asses on lower real wages, while the top 1% get handed even more tax cuts.

I defy any potential McCain voter to explain what McCain's own proposals are, foreign and domestic. They can't because he has none, and like Giuliani, as he fritters away the good will his undeniably honorable sacrifices had bought him, uses it like some chit to trump the cheapest, most inconsequential gaffes, McCain exposes his paucity of actual ideas. There's nothing there that either translates coherently, or differentiates him substantially from the current regime.

The war hero thing only gets you so far. McCain's made more out of it because, since more Democrats actually served in the military, they're more reluctant to be disrespectful. You'll never see some goony cunt with a purple band-aid on her chin making fun of John McCain, not at the Democratic convention or any other sanctioned event. Never gonna happen.

But that's never stopped Republicans. Ask Max Cleland what kind of treatment his service got him. Ask John Kerry, or George McGovern. But it only plays so far, and only against an opponent that cuts you slack, and after what will probably be an entire convention week of soaking in it and ladling out the kool-aid to the draft-dodgers that run McCain's party, they're probably going to hit a wall. And since there's nothing else, they'll become even more desperate.

I'm almost surprised one of McCain's Rovian surrogates hasn't gone that extra mile and push-polled some 'tards in South Carolina about Barack Obama's black (or better yet, white) love child. Still a couple months to go.

Live Convention Blogging

I've never been able to sit through one of these things, and that hasn't changed. But there's not much else on (still waiting for The Daily Show's coverage starting tomorrow), so occasionally I'll take a break from reading and grind my loins into the screen when Norah O'Donnell appears. Takes the edge off of Olbermann's overwrought deep-throating of the whole thing. Dude's lips must be chapped by now. Take a tip from ol' Norah there, Chief, and breathe through your nose once in a while.

I did catch the very end of Michelle Obama's speech, and the big-screen family meeting with the kids and Dad and all. Very nice, especially the Stevie Wonder (Isn't She Lovely) walk-off music. Of course, I would have preferred Bring the Noise or Mama Said Knock You Out, but you can't have everything.

It'll have to do until the Republitard version, where a good chunk of the planet will likely gather before their teevees and pray aloud for the earth to sunder itself and swallow the arena whole during Cheney's selected readings from the Necronomicon. I assume he will enter and exit to the strains of O Fortuna.

I Against I

This just in: rubes continue to vote against their own interests by pretending that they're voting for someone "just like themselves", as if each one of them had married up so far that they could no longer recall how many domiciles they own.

“Illegal immigration needs to be controlled,” said 76-year-old Evelyn Perry of Fort Mill, who was among those surveyed. “I just haven’t really understood what (McCain’s position) is on that — but it needs to be controlled.”

Even without those specifics, Perry said she trusts McCain more. "Overall, I just think McCain understands better."

However, in a glimmer of hope for the Democratic nominee-to-be, more likely Southern voters polled said Obama "understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives" better than McCain does.

However, Deep South and working-class white voters disagreed, saying McCain understands them best.

They just know, yet they are completely unable to articulate -- or even comprehensively hint -- as to why. This is why Mencken loathed democracy, and damned if he didn't have a point. Wide swathes of goobers, inhabiting the states that dominate every low-end quality-of-life metric -- divorces, abortions, suicides, murders, violent crimes, lowest incomes, highest rates of child and family poverty, needing to be maintained by infusions of money from blue states -- apparently wishing to maintain all those proud statistics.

Do the rest of us a favor and secede already, please. Seems like everyone on both sides would be much happier.

House Bunny

You know, I also dig me some Anna Faris, who is hot and funny, and generally a plus to whatever project she's in. (I definitely agree on Just Friends, a movie that I would normally detest, but is actually a lot of fun. Plus, Amy Smart. And Ryan Reynolds, if Pajiba is any indication, seems to have initiated a scary number of mancrushes with that movie. I'm not going there, but he does look like he's having fun with a rom-com.)

But The House Bunny looks like one of those things where Faris is the only decent thing about it, otherwise a pastiche of Revenge of the Nerds scenes. At least the reviews have been fun to read, and in a couple weeks the in-laws will visit and we can go check out Tropic Thunder.

Biden His Time

So it's Biden after all, which, aside from his flacking for MBNA on the execrable bankruptcy bill, is more or less an acceptable choice. Even though Obama had a deeper bench to choose from than Straight Talk has, he is still obviously constrained by various in-house factionalizing, and realizes that he's not going to please everybody, but is at least smart enough not to piss off giant blocs of voters (as he would have with Bayh or even Clinton).

Some of the comments, as always, are priceless in their vitriolic lack of self-awareness, but the second of these two consecutive ones sum up the sentiments of most sensible people, I would hope:

No to Hillary means that I vote for mccain!

Posted by: joe | August 23, 2008 8:29 AM

If you consider yourself a Democrat and have rationalized voting for McCain because your candidate did not get picked, you do not deserve to be called a Democrat for you are actually an idiot. How one could rationalize voting for a man who has voted with George Bush 95% of the time is beyond my comprehension. The country's future is more important than your celebrity and/or feminist obsessions. I would have voted for Hillary but, she didn't win and that's it.

Posted by: Matt | August 23, 2008 8:32 AM

So now the prognosticators turn to Straight Talk's prospects, the announcement for which is scheduled for next Friday, McCain's own 72nd birthday. Heading into a holiday weekend. Should be good times.

Some of these clowns are "please, pretty please" type picks; can you imagine the fun in store if McCain were to make Giuliani his running mate? Christ, the comedic value of the rhetorical and visual contrasts would be worth its weight in gold, two angry one-note jackdaws warning the world off their damned lawns against two much more knowledgeable and polished speakers twice their size.

McCain's "safest" picks are the unknowns: Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Rob Portman. But they're only safe because they're unknown; Pawlenty is regarded as a drab but reliable pro-life tool from a potential swing state, Palin an entertaining and well-liked pro-life milf from one of the most corrupt, politically-inbred states in the country (which, to her credit, she has attempted to clean up where possible). Still, Alaska. Not bringing much to the electoral table there.

And either of those two will certainly be a shit-or-get-off-the-pot pick for people who are still(!) wondering about McCain's pro-life cred. Given all the other massively important problems facing this country, I don't have much sympathy for people (pro or con) who have chosen to make abortion their single issue, but I also don't see how he could be much clearer about where he stands on it and what he intends to do. So all these sixtyish dowagers I keep reading about who fought for Roe v. Wade back in the day and are now seriously considering McCain out of misplaced spite, good luck with that. Guess your struggle wasn't that important to you after all.

And Portman is a Bush hack, which gives the Obama team an opening to do what they should have been doing all summer -- hang the manifest idiocies of this administration around Straight Talk's neck. Jesus H. Christ, do these people need a diagram? One thing about Biden, like him or hate him -- he won't be shy about doing just that, and he won't be rope-a-doped by this tedious playing of the POW card at every opportunity. Biden can land a lot of body blows in this area that are simply off-limits to Obama and his perceived standing. But it's gotta be done; this dopey "John McCain means well, but he's wrong and he's mean to us" shit is not gonna fly.