Against The Day

With an excitement once reserved solely for packages from Battle Creek, Michigan, I tore into the Amazon box delivered yesterday, sliced open the inner shrink wrap and hoisted out my copy of Against the Day. I have a feeling this is the start of a beautiful friendship. The opening:

"Now, single up all lines!"
"Cheerily now . . . handsomely . . . very well! Prepare to cast her off!"
"Windy City, here we come!"
"Hurrah! Up we go!"

I count four sentences and five exclamation points. The author's enthusiasm is noted. The merest freshman would tumble to the idea that it is the novel itself being launched. Us English major types of a certain cast will note that Pynchon starts the first, ahem, line of Against the Day with the very word he used to start the last line of Gravity's Rainbow: Now.

Now due to the rigors of airline travel undergone yesterday, closely followed by pronounced THC intoxication, yrs trly was unable to keep his heavy lids open long enough to get much past the opening page, but I had no plans to anyway. Plenty of time to go over TP's latest, and as our political world broadly spins out of whack to crash like the carousel at the end of Strangers on a Train you will find me in the Windy City with my books and guitars, trying to plot the future.

The present, alas, holds no mystery for me. Mainly because my friends and I (online and anonymous) figured out what it was going to be like (hideous, shot with hopeful rays) months ago. Last Sunday, Msr. IOZ picked clean the carcass of the "Baker Commission" before the bird was even delivered to the table; the transparent workings of an official Washington, which includes the chin rubbers of the fourth estate as much as the back stabbers in the White House and on the Hill, now doomed by their shared appetite for state violence.

Steve Gilliard, so right in describing today's Iraq three years ago (and beautifully glossed, as mentioned earlier here, by driftglass), has of late cast a strategic eye on the realities of a U.S. withdrawal (scroll to see them all) and sees a fucking catastrophe.

There is, as I am overfond of repeating, a shitstorm coming; once all the options have been exercised and all the troops sent, all the oil burned and the possibilities engaged, once all the policy has been enacted and the talking points pointed out; once all the assumptions are assumed and everything found useless against the day; what follows that instructive moment is what I am trying to get a bead on.

And the best thing I can come up with, a preliminary Will Divide Survival Guide, is that, all in all, adults, grownups, will be in a better position to deal with the varied demands of the coming hours than will the legions of arrested adolescents who've been driving the big car to this point. That's all, folks. If you have not done so already, my advice is to start growing up.

Imagine my pleasure reading that Neddie is already on board. So plot a course, chum. You don't mind stopping in Gambier for a couple quick ones, do you?

Now everybody--

Go. Read. Drift.

My fellow anonymous Chicagoan, driftglass, makes me awfully damn proud. Picking up a precient post by the Great Gilliard, drifty recalls one of his own, then adds

For myself, there was never any pleasure in watching the Bush Administration make every single fuckup it was possible to make in Iraq like they were going down a God damned checklist.

No pleasure in watching every one of my country’s most precious assets -- our blood, our treasure, our good name, our respect for the rule of law, our repudiation of torture -- going up in smoke at the hands the Neocons, the Theocons, the Fuck-Everyone-But-Meocons and the squealing porcine masses of the Republican Base.

The rest is here; long but oh so worth it.

So is this one. One of many highlights:

Most of the Modern Conservatives I know, regardless of regional and religious variations, have this in common: The almost universal belief that their Glorious, Godly and/or Patriotic ends ALWAYS justify whatever means their Dear Leader uses. Shit, they’ll tell you as much with the Barney-Fife-braggin’-pride positively swelling in their voices because somewhere along the line they were told that reflexively hating “the system” is some kind of impressively macho dick-waving.

Somewhere between showing off their guns and talking up their bench-pressing prowess.

They spit on the idea of having to go through the laborious process of trying and sentencing criminals, roll their eyes at Miranda and habeas corpus, at the tedium of proving a threat actually exists before going to war, at worrying about the ethics of torture, and at fucking around with exit strategies when there’s so much ay-rab ass (for someone else) to kick (for them, by proxy.)

Their model public servant is Dirty Harry, their motto for public debate is “Shut the Fuck Up!”, and they know deep in their brownshirted little hearts that only queers and Mama’s Boys want to grow up to be Parliamentarians.

What they are never, ever willing to face is the fact that when you will the ends, you will the means.

Thanks, Anita

If you want to pitch a ball
And you can't afford a hall
All you go to call is,
"Let me off uptown!"

The great Anita O'Day passed yesterday. A Chicago girl who got her start as a professional dance marathon contestant, she took her last name from Pig Latin for money: dough = Oh-day. A pretty little blond with vast appetites, she hooked up with Gene Krupa's band in '41 and had a hit with her bandstand mate Roy Eldredge (the great trumpet player who connected the jazz of Armstrong to the Bebop of Gillespie and Davis) with Let Me Off Uptown. It may have been the first mixed-race pop vocal duet and it is STILL as hip as nighttime, dancing and booze.

Thing about Anita was, she did not care what anyone thought. Her life was a mess and it was her own: the men, the reefer, the smack the arrests. She did not even consider herself a singer, rather a stylist. Here she was wrong. Her voice had bottomless soul, perfect enunciation and swung like DiMaggio. She was also an utter babe. If you have not done so already, go see her in 1958, in Jazz on a Summer's Day (pictured above) and get ready to fall in love.

Thanks, Bob

This year I am thankful Bob Dylan has a radio show (bootlegged here!) in which he has taken an extended trip into the Pop American mind. We learn that he loves corny jokes, admires popular singers and songwriters, respects everyone who's had a hit record, is nuts about Jamaican Rock Steady, has a distinct feel for poetry, a deep respect for the tragedies of life and show biz, an understanding of the deals people make to survive, and is as cagey as a card sharper.

On the heels of an astounding first volume of memoirs and another rambling, off-hand gem of a record that merges sound and sense as exquisitely as Sinatra's Only the Lonely (while going dozens of different places), and apparently playing live shows with a renewed passion, one senses that maybe for the first time since leaving Minneapolis for Greenwich Village, Bob is genuinely having fun.

Sinners In The Hands Of An Ironic God

Gotta give Nabodaddy full props for this one: that squalid little man strutted to a microphone in Vietnam and said of the latest quagmire: "We'll succeed, unless we quit."

(I guess even an ironic god would not have put him on the roof of the U.S. Embassy to say this; too corny. Oliver Stone however...)

Man, it is hard to think straight after reading something like that. In fact, I'm kinda done for now. Go read Arthur Silber if you need to know exactly how I feel about what needs to be done.

Mushroom Clods

It is a symptom of mushroom poisoning that the victim first feels very ill, then feels much better, and then dies.

Of all the isms, pessimism is the easiest to believe in and the hardest to shake. Right now I fear that any sense of promise the elections gave the Republic will be sorely tried by two more years of GOP deadending; the last grasping of mean, powerful and selfish shitheads who will give it One Last Try because, well, that's always the way it's worked in the past.

McCain pins his White House hopes on 20,000 more soldiers sent to Iraq. (Back when John was a POW we called this sort of thing Escalation, a fine Vietnam-era policy term which has vanished from the contemporary DC lexicon.) The Baker group, pretending this is some oil rights negotiation, presents "realistic" "policy" "goals" meaningful only to the Washington chattering classes.

These assumptions, and others of more liberal and humane bent about doing the right thing in Iraq, are all based on the great notion that the US is still a powerful actor capable of forming its own fate on the world stage. It pains me to say that this is not the case any longer. The monkey at the lever went and wrecked the train. The world has gone wrong.

Now the disgusting creep in the White House has come in for his well-deserved share of contempt here, but let's not forget that he is emblematic of conditions, a host of crappy ideas, which have prevailed in this nation for decades, if not since the Hayes administration and the undoing of Reconstruction. I need not rundown the angry socialist checklist here; but big money, class privilege, social engineering (in the guise of advertising and public relations) and a heartless system of higher education, combined with insane ideas of power and success, have led us to this social vanishing point. An insane (dry) drunk living in a dream world ordering people around? The nation has millions of them, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, white and black. The problem is that our political system was once hearty enough to mainly keep such specimens away from elected office above the county level.

So we watch and we wait. Maybe we have turned a corner in the way we think about the people we send to Washington, but I am not in the mood today to offer any advice beyond this: The problem in Iraq is only a symptom of the problem in America. Any "fix" restricted to the bounds of Mesopotamia is doomed to failure and promises the ultimate death of the patient.

Drum Beat

Kevin Drum this morning notes the increasing professionalization of the Sphere of Blogs, and then says:

I keep hoping someone will get inspired by the suggestion and go off to write a shrewd and perceptive piece about the phenomenon. So far, nobody has.

(Clears throat...)

It should be clear to anyone with a magazine subscription that a great many bloggers on current events are people with journalism/publishing backgrounds who, for one reason or another, have been made to seek their needs beyond the walls of the Fourth Estate. I have written columns for publication twice in my life, both god-awful for low-circulation rags, I went to J-school and eventually spent the better part of fifteen years writing and editing, on staff and freelance, for a variety of photography magazines, several of which you have heard of. I left the game over ten years ago, but not before contributing a number of pieces to the early Salon under my baptismal name.

While there is no one exactly like me, I think my experience is typical.

Put baldly, a lot of bloggers are people who found the exigencies of contemporary journalism or the publishing business to be (take your pick) wearying, distasteful, stupid, vicious, mindless, corrupting or jus' plain pointless. The shakeout of titles and purges of staffs which took place in the late 80s and 90s set loose a broad army of disaffected, writin' ronin who have, in the main, been happy to freelance for free in Blogsylvania.

(It seems the other main cadre of bloggers is drawn from academe. Many of them are fully employed in screwing up the lives of young people and look to spread wider their pernicious nonsense into an indifferent universe. The great Juan Cole is a rare and valuable exception.)

The point I am running at is that the increased professional nature of online essayists is the next phase of the decay of daily newspapers and network TV. The professionals running those sad enterprises have had to hone their backstabbing and shit eating skills to such a degree to keep their jobs that the product inevitably suffered. No one could afford to take a chance because to fail in that environment meant death. The result is dull, infotainment bombs that speak without informing and preach without shedding light. Intelligent people are turning away from this crap by the gaining thousands and migrating to those forms which presume, if only by the welter of voices, opinions and points of view, to provide an evolving world view that is useful as well as lively.

IMHO, the daily newspaper of the future will have a solid news hole, a selection of features and photo essays, almost no entertainment coverage outside of reviews of local events and exhibitions, and a digest of current blog posts from the day before. Papers will have a clear political bias, like in the old days, but the best will encourage useful argument in their pages as well as prompt the sale of other papers with rival points of view. I have a new idea for advertising revenue too, but right now I'm keeping it to myself.

Circulation will likely be smaller, but that is not a sure thing as people like holding the sports pages, they like being informed and entertained by lively writing, graphics and drawings. Once papers find their niche as, if you will, the passionate arbiters of the wider discourse available online, the audience just might return.

Skipping The Snark

The national nervous breakdown did not end with the Democrats' takeover of the legislative branch. As Josh Marshall noted in a somewhat related matter yesterday:

But beyond the numbers and policy changes a lot of things are going to need to be rethought in Washington now. A lot of people's conceptual meal tickets just expired.

And here I will note that in the purlieus of media whoredom conceptual meal tickets = real paychecks. The next wave is bound to hit those who presume to explain stuff they can't understand to people who don't give a fuck about what they say anyway.

I would not know Hugh Hewett to sneeze on him, though the name rings a bell, as I sometimes read about daffy things he spits out, like this via the Carpetbagger:

"[I]t is a wonderful day for new media, especially talk radio. For two years we have had to defend the Congressional gang that couldn't shoot straight. Now we get to play offense."

If Hewett is dumb enough to consider radio a new medium then he is not worth even pushing over. Radio, as McLuhan took pains to point out in Understanding Media is a Hot medium, a one-directional enterprise that allows zero input from the individual accessing it; perfect for telling people already inclined to follow orders what to do. It is not accidental that radio ushered in an the age of mass movements, most of them murderous, in the 20s and 30s.

Though I have no published trail to prove it, I suspected from the get go that Air America, as sympathetic as I am to its mission, would not do all that well because of that very McLuhanesque hotness. For the most part, the people it needed to reach in large number tire quickly of being told how to think, or at least feel an implicit frustration with unanswerable authority, no matter how sympathetic they are to the point of view expressed. This is what The Medium is the Messege means.

I am not saying that A.A. cannot have an audience of liberal listeners, only that from a psychological perspective, because of the very nature of how radio works on the mind, the liberal audience is bound to be much smaller than the conservative one.

If someone is stupid enough to bet on a growing audience for talk radio in the face of interactive communications, in the era of You Tube, they deserve that apartment above the dry cleaners in Tulsa, or Rantoul, because very shortly those are the only places they'll find an attentive audience.

There is a American Zen admonition that goes something like, Let go of any expectations of an explanation, and I will here caution all my fellow political science fiction writers to keep watch in lieu of marching for a while. Everyone, like the poet said, is trying to make some sense. Among many I admire, cynicism seems to be the default setting. Billmon is a repeat offender.

And now I'm sure the Dems will immediately repay their most loyal supporters [blacks and latinos] by firmly embracing policies of social justice and economic opportunity for those at the bottom of the sdfqiiwe82ds2.ks2/,

Sorry about that. I was laughing so hard I couldn't type straight.

My new friend Monsieur IOZ notes a looming dustup in the Sphere 'o Blogs and then opines:

Within the next few months, the Democratic party line will move along to smarter fighting, better occupation, more troops, timelines for those backwards Iraqis to get their shit in order. The firebreathing "antiwar" democratic blogs, meanwhile, will make like Echo and repeat the party line, since dissent might lead in two years to defeat. Like Echo, they're cursed by their own idolatrous longings. And who do you suppose that makes the Dems, you mythologists?

Uh, Bill? Black representatives, including the very chipper Charlie Rangel, will now chair three very important committees on the Hill (CR gets Ways and Means, Conyers the Judiciary and Thompson on Homeland Security). I cannot fucking wait. And IOZ, cher frere, all I am saying is give peace, and the Dems, a chance. Lotta new faces coming on board who do not deserve the lash today. Speaking as the male issue of two big, and highly accomplished Italian clans, I'm warning everybody that to underestimate Nancy Pelosi, to presume to grasp how she thinks or even assume how she'll react, are mistakes of the first water; mistakes you will never find me making.

Apparently only dear, sweet Ned of the Jingovilles has kept his wits about him this week. He sees what's going on. (Nude Erections??!! What th'??)

Grateful Live

The pithy I told you so's can wait. Today some Thank You's are in order.

Thank you Howard Dean; thank you Rahm Emanuel; thank you Nancy Pelosi; thank you Harry Reid.

Thank you John Murtha; thank you Louise Slaughter; thank you Charlie Rangel; thank you Russ Feingold; thank you Robert Byrd; thank you Ted Kennedy; thank you Al Gore; thank you Bill Clinton.

Thank you Neil Young; thank you Keith Olbermann; thank you Steve Colbert; thank you Jon Stewart; thank you Al Franken; thank you Jack Cafferty.

Thank you Kos, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Steve Gilliard, Billmon, Steve Benen, Juan Cole, John Amato, Dan Froomkin, James Wolcott, A Big Fat Slob and Neddie Jingo.

Thank you Eric Massa, Tammy Duckworth and everyone else who campaigned in tough districts.

And thank you, thank you Senator Wellstone. We did it.

Morning, Everybody

Now, really, was that so hard?

My main regret this morning is that Eric Massa did not dislodge that mook Kuhl from the NY-29, but Kuhl is just a dope. Many, many creeps were flushed from the system (the torching of Gil Gutknecht, MN-01, was especially sweet, as I had to endure his brand of righteous shlock constantly when I lived in the Cities; a mean, self-serving jerk.)

As for the drips who held on? We go after and get them next time; that is, any of them who have not been indicted before then.

I'm sure this is being said in a number of ways today, but let me add my voice: This is only the beginning. The R's now have, uhm, about eighteen months to Win In Iraq or run as far from that useless asshole, no, wait, those useless assholes, as their tight shoes and fat legs will permit. Nowhere for them to hide now. Me? I'm keeping my whip hand limber.

Most of you probably don't believe in Astrology, but I do. And if you go to Astro dot com and type in the chief twit's birth info, this is what you will see for his horoscope today:

Fierce struggles **
This can be a time for creatively transforming the world around you, or it can be a time of fierce power struggles and disagreements. These are the two poles that this influence swings between. It arouses your ambitions and makes you want to get ahead. Your energy level is very high, and you can use it to get a lot of work done. But unfortunately you will have a tendency to go about your work in such a way that you arouse great opposition from the people you confront. Or you may have to confront someone else's energies, which may result in your taking a different course of action from what you originally intended. The energies of this influence can also lead to being the victim of someone else's ruthlessness. Therefore you should avoid dangerous places and violent people.

But the fault lies not in our stars, right?

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents...

Ladies and Gentlemen, for your election day enjoyment, every Republican's nightmare... the Salvador Dali of R&B, that Great American: the One ... the Only -- Mr. SCREAMIN' Jay Hawkins!!!!

A Bit Of Lit Crit

Let's recap, shall we? That squalid little man - he with the 37% approval rate - goes on the radio show of a fat drug addict whose approval number is about 28% to A) announce to the nation that we are fighting for oil and B) reaffirm his commitment to two men even less popular than the fat drug addict.

Then one of those men, who indeed may be the real chief of this sorry clan, records an interview for broadcast today where he proclaims that the public is wrong about an unpopular war, and that the policy remains full speed ahead. This, and a series of mountain state, small market visits by the insane captain, is called by a dazed press energizing the base. Here I will give the press a pass. Events are moving far too fast, and in a way to threaten its own well being, for it to comprehend.

I suppose the main fantasy of any schoolboy is to be at the head of a handsome and righteous nation, and lead it, banners flying, as it overwhelms a cowering foe. (All as one, and cue the band.) The fruiter fancy, by far, though is the beleaguered captain and his small band of true believers who, by dint of right and strength, prevail not only over the godless enemy, but also over all the complainers, thieves, cowards and fools who would give the enemy purchase in their own land; a glorious campaign which not only beats the alien, but also purifies the homeland. Yowza, that is one sweet dream, no bout a doubt it.

Melville's Moby Dick is one wild book, an overwrought grab bag of alienation and insanity that, one way or another, has served to exemplify American craziness since its publication in that period in our history between the removal of the southern Indian Nations and the Civil War. Somehow Melville hit all the bases: unhinged religiosity, greed, submerged homo eroticism, the assault on the natural world, isolation, deranged commanders, misplaced loyalty and the tractability of the crowd. It is, though, basically a simple tale of a ship, named after an exterminated Indian tribe, owned and commanded by, ahem, conservative Christians, on a hunt for oil; what's more, a hunt for oil that becomes personal in a batshit crazy kind of way. It does not end well for anyone.

America is such a simple country that its great writers have been able from the get go to look deeply and long into its revealed heart. It is such a new country that one can believe that the utter insanity that roosts in parts of that heart can be made to give up its perch, to find some other accommodation, maybe go fuck itself. Conservative historians like calling this the American Experiment. Maybe it's better named the great American Novel.

An Embarrassment Of Bitches

Billmon (and I cannot decide if that B should be capitalized or not) looks at the brave new world of declining FOX News viewership and does a little thinking out loud:

One explanation would be that Fox's mindless shilling for the Bush administration has finally turned off enough Democrats (21% of Dems polled in a June 2004 Pew survey listed Fox as their primary news source) and Independents (22%) that they're finally tuning out. Another, however, would be that Fox's trademark frantic flashing format and conservative ideological bias are both now the norm in the cable news universe -- giving viewers who wish to be ignorant and confused a much larger menu to choose from.

For my money, I think that people are tired of the senseless noise and staring at bitter, iron-jawed hags and mean, fat-faced corporate fuckwads. The old TV culture is going away. No one's buying what they're selling anymore.

I wanted to fill in a bit on yesterday's observations before I go play outside, viz: the effect of new media on the current cultural collapse. I did not mean to imply that media have their own pixie dust which mysteriously corrodes intact social structures. Rather new media, which are nothing more than new ways of perceiving the world, serve to expose long-standing interior contradictions which exist in every person and social hierarchy.

One might argue that the path to achieving full status as a mature individual is one of acknowledging and accommodating those inner conflicts - love and hate, super ego and id, body and mind - call them what you will. New media, which McLuhan brilliantly observed are extensions of the nervous system, will reveal these conflicts in forceful, new and, if one is not a real aware person, embarrassing ways.

Hence cultures in collapse: anti-gay ministers snorting ice off a hustler's dick, or child safety lawmakers preying on teens, or compassionate conservatives who watch a city die, or a secretary of defense who is distroying his army to prove a theory of engagement; news organizations which present jabber instead; the promise of a fair and balanced perspective which is patently neither. What happens when an army officer corps, trained to the highest standards of honor, is now expected to sign off on dishonorable acts against prisoners?

-----
Post script: I wrote the above last night, before reading this.

Here It Comes

Let me reiterate for emphasis this chilly morn that what we are witnessing is not a political realignment, it is a nervous breakdown, a cultural collapse. Why? Because reality has intruded on the fantasy. Why? Because people look at the world and communicate completely differently now. Why? Because of cell phones and digital cameras, email and blogs.

It does not take much thinking to realize that an army with cell phones, digital cameras and email is a vastly different enterprise than one which only wrote letters home. Families follow the troops in real time, expect to hear from loved ones very directly every day. This is a new way of thinking about the national service. One consequence of this, and a huge one for planners, is that the level of casualties people are willing to accept plummets. I bet no one in charge thought that people would be bothered by a mortality rate around two a day. Well they were, and when it ratchets up to three and a half, pretty damn low on the scale of previous conflicts, it becomes pretty nearly politically unacceptable. Unable to grasp this, idiots blame the media.

Well, they are right, but, being idiots, they are blaming the wrong media.

Just because the Democrats are going to beat Repubs like government mules next week does not mean things are going to be okay. Not talked about in the election frenzy is a looming financial collapse brought on by a crumbling housing market and an economy that does not make stuff any more, energy prices that can only go up (Or look at it another way -- from here on out, lower gas prices is not good news, but indicative of lower economic activity.), wobbly electric grids, lousy roads, astronomical debt, public and private...

No need to go on like this.

And here I speak rhetorically and politically. There is, as Norman Mailer famously observed to James Baldwin, a shitstorm coming. We don't have to go on like this, though the question hanging in the air this morning is Will we anyway?

Hmmmm... beats me.

In only my second post here, I noted that the brainy Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, when he made his famous prediction about how new media would create a global village, added a caveat which, near as I can tell, has been utterly overlooked. There are drawbacks to village life, McLuhan observed, the main ones being a climate of gossip and superstition. He may as well have added a lack of privacy too. You feel like a villager yet?

But there are positive aspects of village life: respect earned by action and words, a tolerance of the innate differences of others, respect of the elderly, initiation of the young, collective enterprise. Hard to be a hypocrite in a village, a prosperous one anyway. We have a way to go before the scales are anywhere near balanced in this country, but if you don't think the process has already begun, you are probably in that 37% who thinks that disgusting man is doing a great job as prez.

Video Gulled The Video Liar

As hard it is for some to believe, just because something isn't on TV doesn't mean it's not happening. Case in point, the Kerry "controversy" took up a lot of space for a number of reasons, very few of which reflect well on the news sense of the cable guys, or the common sense of J. F. Kerry. (Personally, I think anything that keeps the line "stuck in Iraq" on the front burner is a net plus, but, Jesus, there are better ways...) A lot of blog complaining I read was along the lines of "The Prez jokes about looking for WMD in the Oval Office and no one bats an eye, Kerry flubs a line, etc..."

Also yesterday folks were hopped up about the lack of coverage of Iraq PM Maliki ordering Army checkpoints removed from Sadr City.

Now this may sound a bit strange after I've just finished savaging daily newspapers, but I, you know, contain multitudes...

Far from ignoring the Maliki story, the Tribune (which has had superb in-house Iraq reporting) ran a stark, near full-page banner hed - Iraq stands up against U.S. - on it yesterday. Believe me, this is a narrative with deep and bitter roots that goes to the heart of the U.S. misadventure and is not going away. Or, more to the point, it will be back in spades after the election.

Furthermore, I think you can draw a circle around the date of that squalid little man's comic "hunt" for the broadcast reporters' dinner in March '04 and then note how the popular support for his fool's enterprise began draining away after that. Not because of the TV guys and gals, who evidently howled with delight at the perp's video hijinx; but because, I submit, all the editorial boards of Midwestern newspapers, large and small, who tend to look solemnly on the Office of the President, witnessed what that boob was up to and were utterly appalled. (I noted a distinct, if faint, jolt in the Trib's editorial stance at the time, and am extrapolating from there.) Let's just say the dolt burned a lot of good will with that stunt which he never earned back. Which is why we are having a national nervous breakdown now.

Right or wrong, this explanation would never even dawn on a TV reporter. Notte bene that that moron was clowning on camera for television people who mainly, if accounts are to be trusted, found the sketch to be a fucking riot. This is what you might call a cultural peculiarity. Maybe if things had gone well in Iraq since, regular folks would not scruple a little joshing at their expense, but if I were running a close campaign against a Republican stooge in a Red state, I'd try to show that DC WMD hunt at least twice a day for the next four.

Herd On The Street

Hard to come up with a coherent post, what with the national nervous breakdown and all, so here I'll jut round up some stray observations that have been kicking around the ranch.

All politics are local, but all elections now are national. It astonishes me how completely national themes and concerns have turned the off-year into a national referendum. Part of it is certainly the nature of the Iraq war and I think the GOP has only itself to blame after first running into this season fully behind their dim standard bearer and the rightness of his cause. But, here again, what gains they made in the last decade were all due to nationalizing local races. This is a world of their own making.

A amplifying this trend is the effect of new media which the Dems have used pretty well in targeting races, collecting money and launching low-cost, flexible ad campaigns.

GOP losses will be at the bloody end of painful. Hedge if you feel like it, but since the weekend GOP campaigners been puking on themselves in desperation. The Oval Office squirt went from clueless ("We'll retain both houses") to vicious (Dems = Terrorist Stooges) in the space of five days. I say the House and Senate, going away.

Lame Duck. That squalid little man has queered what little room he had to maneuver in in the coming legislative season with the probably ugliest mid-term campaigning a sitting President has ever indulged in. (Yeah, right. Who'd have guessed?) Americans like the idea of being led by wise men, by statesmen who have grown in stature with the job. Insulting 60% of the electorate? Not so much. That creep, and the vice creep, have just kissed whatever golden sunset the media was preparing for them goodbye.

It will sound like a branding and castration corral until January. Some fatheads will say the Republican electoral disaster could have been worse. Some boobs will say the outcome is immaterial. Some numbnuts will dare you to knock that stick off their shoulder. Some will threaten, some wall-eyed creeps will even resort to small town violence.

You know what? In a year, most of them will have all gone away. When the boat is sinking, no one needs to hear from the heartless.

Lately Charlie Rangel, my favorite congressman, has been smiling like the cat who not only swallowed the canary, but has seven or eight more stashed away in case he's feeling peckish later. I have the feeling that the Dems are preparing an agenda of investigation, oversight and lawmaking that will not only ball up those responsible for an unjust war, but also lay out a path for progressive change for the next three elections. Here's the beauty part, let the Ding-dong veto all he wants. Think of the next two years as a lab for all the legislation that will go through in the first 100 days of the next administration.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...