Beer And Loathing

This is not a review of Joe Bageant's wonderful, important, subtle, passionate, and, I think, lasting contribution to American Letters and journalism (There, that was my review.) I'd like only to offer a couple observations, from my educated, upper-class, third-generation immigrant perspective, on a few points he raises.

While he levels some justifiable criticism at Democrats for neglecting whole sections of small town, mainly southern, America, let us not forget that the predominant social atmosphere in these places is intolerant of dissent and difference, all too often violently so. Consequently it should come as no great shock that those people, the bright, the independent, the gay, who can escape that environment do so, and don't look back.

Rather than an ascendant culture, I think Joe is describing one in the last stages of decay, a social landscape that is dying from hatred, self-loathing, ignorance, bad diet, violence and apathy. This is not the fault of any political party, though the forces and party of capital have certainly moved to take what parasitic advantage it can.

Joe's passion, affection, compassion and regard for his people animates the book. But he offers no solution to their plight, because, frankly there is none. Rather than save redneck culture, his sub rosa argument, it seems to me, is the need to transform it, mainly by seeing it through what is a terminal illness, to something decent and true beyond.

Broad and penetrating journalistic examinations of subcultures or rogue political states, and here I am thinking of Thompson's Hell's Angels Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Mailer's Armies of the Night, even Steffans' The Shame of the Cities, historically tend to describe the peak, or at least the full flowering, of their subjects. It is not farfetched to see that Joe's book, the equal of the above, is less a warning for the future than a valedictory for a subculture that, as dispossessed as its people are, was the foundation of a provisional, if pronounced, political change that is now grinding to a dead end.

Bluntly put, these people are going away. I don't see how their political successes, or rather the successes they enabled, over the past 30 years--the summit of which is the rule of dumb King Zog--has translated into any benefits, in health, finances, or social advances, for most of those who made it happen. Think about that. Whatever you think about FDR, his programs fed and educated two generations of Americans and built a popular coalition of rural and urban politicians that lasted fifty years.

That the politics of monetary selfishness took advantage of the insular ignorance of rural Americans is regrettable, but to expect Democrats to have abided with a proudly racist and, let's face it, superstitious electorate, is contrary to the meaning and needs of social progress which was the philosophical bedrock of the party. Were Dems guilty of their own selfish whims? Yes. But I would submit that, rather than abandoning southern whites, they found the traditional door south shut in their faces and turned to other interests.

My main disagreement with Joe's book is how he sets up the debate over gun ownership. He makes an important point about the resistance to allow urban blacks arms to defend themselves in the '60s. However, the argument for gun control has never, ever, moved to take rifles from hunters, but rather to restrict the sale and importation of handguns, and banning outright the possession of automatic weapons, the sort of firepower meant only to kill humans.

Should Democrats have struggled, somehow, to block the gun industry's right-wing takeover of the NRA lobby? If you say yes, then tell me how that could have been done.

Ultimately, I think, Joe is arguing for a spiritual awakening, for a sense of compassion to enter politics as our times become hard indeed. He is right. Democrats should not scorn anyone as they move to repair the damage of the last thirty years. It is, however, hard to pierce the core of self-loathing and unworthiness in people like those whom Joe gives insight to here. His message in Deerhunting is that political narcissists need not apply.

Surge Out Of Washington Begins

Posted this evening at The Hill: Anxious Republicans fear another beating, which reported much GOP second guessing, plus this!

llinois’s 18th congressional district hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in nearly 70 years. But Republican Party leaders scrambled to convince Rep. Ray LaHood to run again when word spread that the popular congressman was considering retirement.

“If I run for reelection, I win,” LaHood said.

LaHood said House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) and campaign chief Cole (Okla.) all urged him to stay.

LaHood said he noted the district’s voting history to leaders, who urged him to come back anyway. He agreed.

Posted this evening at the Chicago Tribune: LaHood will not seek re-election

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) will announce Friday that he will retire at the end of this term, removing one of the most outspoken, aisle-crossing congressmen from Capitol Hill.

LaHood, a 30-year political veteran first elected to the House in 2004, said the time has come to spend more quality time with his grandchildren.

"I'm going back to a normal life with my family," he said in a telephone interview this evening.

As I was saying, an historic GOP flogging looms larger everyday.

Karma For A Chameleon

Just a quick note in passing that Senator Oleaginous Boob (R-MN) has lately dropped to a 43% approval rating, a loss of five points since last the good, no - make that nice, people of Minnesota were polled. Having myself lived happily, mainly, in Minneapolis for eight years, I feel qualified to observe that though Minnesotans have doubts about the war, they have no use for a politician who will, in this case, signal opposition to a policy, then vote, again and again, to continue it. A lot of them disagreed with Paul Wellstone, but admired him for voting for what he believed in.

Thing about Norm is that he used to be very good at changing stripes, and states, one of those I-didn't-leave-the-Democrats-they-left-me assholes able to soak up enough dumb centrist suburban support to slip into public office. (And here I will say that even if Wellstone had lived, I think he'd have lost the election. In most of the state, Mondale did as well, or better, than Wellstone six years earlier, while Coleman gained much greater support from the suburbs than the previous GOP candidate.)

But I digress...

That such a craven chameleon like Coleman is still sticking with the party, says that either he has been threatened with death for disobeying, or, like so much of the population, has fallen into a complaisant helplessness, and cannot imagine behaving any other way. This is learned behavior, and based on a perception that those in charge of the system will somehow protect their own under all circumstances. Worked so well in the old Soviet, nyet?

Oh, and while we are visiting the Cities this morn, have a gander at a fairly new feature of the Minneapolis Star Tribune's web site, the county foreclosure map.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Since the subject has come up this morning, I'd say Al Franken has a very good chance of getting the nomination over the wealthy and bland attorney Mike Ciresi, and thereafter beating Coleman like a rug. Franken is personable, knows the territory, and has been campaigning across the state since announcing, hitting the spaghetti suppers and village parades to tell jokes and otherwise press the flesh. Don't forget, the guy has been on several USO tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and knows how to work a tough audience.

Future Tense

I think when people look back at our dysfunctional times, the monumental failings of the Republican Junta will not be seen as the Katrina disaster, which was a huge blister of incompetence, of course, and the Iraq debacle, which was, given the bloated state of the military/industrial/political complex, an inevitable tragedy waiting to happen. Huge, society-crippling outrages, no question. But the real failings of squalid King Zog, and his henchmen, and enablers, and the deluded percentage of the population which stuck by him until fairly recently, is how little attention they all paid to the conditions that are going to really transform the country, in mainly rough ways, in the next three-five years, viz: The crashing consumer economy, the crumbling of the infrastructure, road and utility, grids and the collapse of public health.

Iraq and Katrina, aside from showing how stupid and criminal these actors are, are really one-offs (though here I'll say that the prospect of destroying the Army and Marines over the next couple years gives the Iraq Project tremendous potential) when compared with the looming outcomes of our vast social myopia.

Everything is connected, of course, so our increasing death rates, from bad diets, lack of exercise, poor living conditions, and unattainable decent health care, will be attributable to more power outages, lousy roads and interrupted medical and nutrition supply chains, not to mention substance abuse, depression and despair.

While many see the coming bad times and fear armed insurrection, I think it is more likely that most people will be either incapacitated by no-longer-manageable health problems, or caring for those who are. Americans are mainly law abiding and, while there will certainly be those who will go play cammo kommander in the mountains, most people will depend on law enforcement and look to find capable civil leadership, which is certainly out there, as we rebuild.

The problem I have with the Democratic candidates, as fine as they are, (and here let me repeat that anyone who says or thinks that any of those GOP twits have a prayer of being elected president is either deluded, timid, or in the politico/infotainment biz) is that they are all staking out sensible policy points for Now. Point being, it is not much of a stretch to imagine that things in two years will be a lot different, and social conditions rather worse, than they are Now. The person elected will need strength as well as creative and imaginative capacities which, right now, are not wildly apparent in the portfolios of any of them.

Oh, and if you'd like to know what put me in such a pensive mood, yesterday's bad news from Countrywide Financial (creepy name, wot?) put Jim Kunstler's recent talk at the Commonwealth Club of California into vivid relief (as if Kunstler needed to be any more vivid. . .)

Niceties In Nomenclature

On Friday last, a college chum sent me a link to a Gawker post that tries to choose the Most Annoying Liberal Arts College, in which our own, dear Kenyon, was nominated.

Frankly, I can't see, given the competition, how our old ivory tower even rated a mention on the list. (And here let me say that, in my day, we drank in the dorms, or at the V.I. and saved the woods for dropping acid.) Last time I checked the comments, it was Sarah Lawrence and Oberlin neck and neck for the lead by several lengths over Bard, Hampshire and the rest of the pack. Kenyon, characteristically, barely rated a hello, Kitty.

Though it probably shouldn't have, what astonished me the most in reading the comments posted by the brainy and overwrought alums of these once-distinguished institutions--few apparently over the age of 27--was how nearly all of them seemed unaware that the word Liberal in the term Liberal Arts is not a political designation.

Just as one may be catholic in one's tastes without being a Catholic, so may Conservatives have liberal interests, and Liberals be not liberal in their perspectives at all (see, pace, the Daily Kos.)

The other depressing impression left by the forum was how bifurcated the education of the upper classes has become. One is either fast-tracked to fucking up the planet via Wall Street or Washington, or sidetracked into intellectual, artistic, or politically correct irrelevance via low-thought, though occasionally high-paid, media scams or greasy-pole grad programs, the N.Y. or S.F. pads subsidized, as a matter of course, by the 'rents.

Now I know, I know, thousands and thousands of bright, eager, committed and intelligent young people leave these colleges every year looking to do good, but my overall feeling is that the deck has been stacked against them, and us (for you have read thus far, my friend), in planning for a decent social future against several looming and dire problems.

I could go on and on about how we reached this pretty sticky pass. Lots of reasons. But for this morning, bright and beautiful here, I'll just say it is a collective lack of rigor in challenging commonly held social ideas (a rigor once supplied by a liberal arts education.) We have allowed the market, in this case the wants of affluent consumers of college degrees, to determine the validity of social and political ideas that, in a commercial society, quickly harden into accepted understandings without the virtue of being right or true.

Like, for example, the current understanding of the word Liberal.

Now I am also aware that even clinging to such ideas as Right and Truth is enough to get one laughed out of any over-priced program in the liberal arts these days, but the respected fall-back notion of the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number is the top of the slippery slope that led us to this poor educational point. Life, though, is a ready corrective to dumb ideas, and so perhaps we can agree that the best education is the one which prepares an open mind to meet the advent of disappointment, and then act appropriately for oneself and, if need be, the society at large.

Sent Packing

I think it is great that liberal war-thinker George Packer is writing a blog now. I do. Good journalist, smart guy, engaging writer, recognized first in his crowd that the Iraq Project was a sack of shit, and said so, a voice one can trust, even when he misses the point entirely.

Like here for example

I grew up during the Vietnam era and belong to a generation of educated liberals who came of age with a visceral dislike of the military. In the seventies and eighties, it was almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister. At the same time, on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor, a subscription to The New Yorker the mark of an oddball, and the words “liberal” and “academic” terms of abuse.

Here’s a crude generalization: after the sixties, intellect and patriotism went separate ways, to the detriment of both. This mutual hostility made intellectuals less responsible and soldiers less thoughtful. We’ve come to think of this antagonism as natural and inevitable, as it is between cats and dogs, but in fact it was a product of recent political and cultural changes in American life.

No, George, it was a product of a insane American military political culture which, facing utter defeat in Vietnam, decided to turn the entire area, North and South, and Laos and Cambodia into free-fire, de-forested wastelands, a six-year program which killed millions. It accomplished this in large degree by dehumanizing a subsection of American young men, many sucked involuntarily into its bestial enterprise, though maybe as many were enthusiastic participants, while providing passes for the priviliged and, mainly, criminalizing those young men who, from principle or fear, declined to serve.

This insane military state culture also leveled every method it could to stifle and ridicule civic dissent, violently too, when opportunity and need arose. On May 4, 1970, kids in National Guard uniforms shot into a distant crowd of other kids protesting the war on a college campus, killing four of them, including two bystanders.

You're a fine reporter, George, but today why don't you go fuck yourself with your product of recent political and cultural changes in American life.

Crass Chamber

Honestly, all this bickering in the bloogopipes about how the press is characterizing the senate cloture debate. . . why not start calling it the Harry Reid Republican Colleague Rescue Act of 2007 and leave it at that? That so few of them accepted his offered hand, indeed after several intimated that they just might, I see no reason to feel sorry for them, and a growing impetus towards delighted laughter.

For here's the deal, either through fear, ignorance, myopia, spite, or plain old mulishness, the senate GOP stuck with a delusional twit, and his malign henchmen, who cares not a whit for their, or their party's, well-being. Now I do think that a lot of them want out, but they want out on their own terms, so they can remain feeling good about the lies they've told the people, and, the biggest lies of all, the ones they've told themselves.

One of the more recent lies they've decided to accept, probably because it's direct from the MSM, is that Americans now blame the Democrats for the shocking inaction of the Legislative Branch. I think that, though people may not follow the ins and outs of legislative protocol, they know that the Dems want us out of Iraq, a proposition that looks pretty damn good, no matter how much it is mischaracterized by the corporate press, to over 60 percent of the electorate, and better every day to a good percentage of the balance.

Meanwhile the GOP field of presidential candidates is beginning to feel like a gas chamber: the longer one is in, the worse one does. Bye John, see ya' Rudolfo, feeling a little headachy there, Mitt? Hey Fred! Nice to see ya, pull up a chair! That your wife?! Whoo! You old devil!

This is by no means an endorsement, but a Bloomberg/Paul ticket would clean the clock of every declared candidate in either party: Geographical and religious balance, a host of practical accomplishments and progressive ideas, clear-talking pleasant individuals, a clear rejection of big-gov, police state politics as usual, and a billion bucks to spend.

Anyone want to give me odds?

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman has the inside baseball take on the debate at TPM: says in effect, the GOP won the night, but Reid succeeded in turning September from the date to begin deliberation to one where the R. rank and file begin to file for the door.

Mmm. . . maybe, presuming, as it does, that they have more sense than they have heretofore demonstrated.

UPDATE II: Like I was saying. . .

Dead Zone

Matt Yglesias is a busy enough bloke, and his blog is a good survey of issues as they crop up in the day-to-day. But he is young, and wonky, and occasionally lets slip something so transparently . . . I was going to say dumb, but really it is heartless . . . so transparently heartless that we can see through it to the insane right-policy thinking that has poisoned the republic.

Like this:

I'm not really much of a death penalty abolitionist, insofar as I don't see it as necessarily wrong to execute people in all circumstances. One circumstance in which it's a really bad idea to execute someone, though, is when he's being set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit.

State executions degrade everyone and everything connected to them. Not only are they worthless in controlling violent crime, they are in almost every instance the outcome of trials conducted by political appointees, prosecutors hired by party-affiliated district attorneys, against, all too often, overworked, if not incompetent, public defenders.

The insane Georgia case which Matty notices, in a golly-gee way, in the course of his busy day explaining things, is not only a crime-in-progress by the State, but also exactly why the death penalty is necessarily wrong and should be abolished in all circumstances.

UPDATE: Oh look, Matt has further made clear his position:

To clarify, "Not much of a death penalty abolitionist" means I am, in fact, a death penalty abolitionist. I think of the "real" abolitionists as making sanctity of life appeals, which I wouldn't do, but I'd certainly vote against the death penalty in a referendum.

Well, M.Y., all life is sacred, though we would not have to drag our enlightened point of view into the discussion at all if the death penalty was abolished for more, ehhh. . . down to earth? policy reasons.

Black Out

Last week a Chicago jury found former media tycoon Conrad Lord Black guilty of looting his publicly held company and obstruction of justice. And while they let him walk on a racketeering charge, it was because, though they suspected he was guilty of that too, it was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

I bring this up not to gloat, though Black is an arrogant, right-wing shit of the first water, but to point out that the jury endured months of testimony in sometimes eye-glazing detail (some from about as slick a pack of rich goniffs ever frog-walked into a court house) as well as thousands of documents. They then struggled in camera for two weeks before rendering their well-considered verdict.

This is to say that average citizens, contrary to the considered opinion of the chattering classes, once engaged in important deliberations will take their task very seriously, can cut through bullshit and will work honestly to see that justice is done. Which is to say that anyone who thinks the Repubs will somehow avoid a catastrophic flogging at the polls next year, because of an easily distracted and ignorant electorate, is either in acute denial, on wing-nut welfare, or a lefty peabrain too scared of shadows to do this country any good whatsoever.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Two guys singing carefully about some girl.

Crash

Last month, near my hometown, five young women, recent high school grads and members of a champion cheerleading squad, were killed on a rural road when their SUV collided head-on with a truck. Their vehicle had pulled into the left lane on a two-lane highway to pass a slower car. Though the SUV had moved back into the right lane, it then swerved into the path of a semi truck carring a load of paper. The young women were killed instantly. I'm sure you saw the story.

It was evening and they were heading to a lake resort home for the weekend, part of a larger group of friends of the same age, the rest of whom were in a second car following them. Those friends at first told police that the car the SUV pulled out to pass speeded up to prevent them from doing so, though that story was quickly dismissed by investigating officers.

Toxology reports did not indicate any use of alcohol or drugs by the fatal driver or her passengers. A final judgement as to cause was rendered yesterday. It found that the driver was not certified to drive on her junior license at that hour, and that her cell phone record registered a call and text message just moments before the impact.

Though there is no evidence that the driver was the one on her phone, she has come under a predictable rain of posthumous scorn, as can be seen in the local paper's readers' forum.

And while the story has raised feelings that have ranged from anguish to moralistic tut-tuting, and prompted other stories about restricting teen drivers and cell phone use, it has astonished me that the most obvious explanation as to the accident's root cause was, as near as I can tell, completely unconsidered by the authorities and the press. Here is what I wrote, under my real name, to the story's reporter at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle this morning:

Another contributing factor of the tragic East Bloomfield crash, nearly unconsidered judging by reports, might be that the TrailBlazer, which was carrying five young women and, presumably, their belongings, was dangerously overloaded.

The friends in the following car said at first that the Short car sped up as the TrailBlazer passed. It is entirely likely that an overloaded SUV did not have the usual acceleration the inexperienced driver expected to have in such a situation, thus making it appear to witnesses behind that the car in the right lane was preventing the SUV's reentry.

And again, an overloaded vehicle might have caused an inexperienced driver to overcompensate a correction after swerving back into the right lane.

Cell phone use by drivers is certainly a menace, and apparently some people are quick to condemn a teenager for horribly bad judgement. But a poorly engineered vehicle, packed beyond its capacity for safe and stable operation at high speed, should, I think, receive greater consideration by the press.

The D&C reporter may be young, and she is certainly working for a crappy enough paper (flagship, btw, of the Gannett chain), however the institutional inattention to this possible primary cause of a horrific fatal crash is that much sadder considering a Google search of overloaded SUV would have produced a wealth of wretched examples.

Now certainly a lot of things went horribly wrong that evening. More than cell phone use, I would also lay blame on a certain suburban sensibility that encourages an inattention to the harsher facts of life, a willing myopia that assumes nothing bad can possibly happen to the right people. One sees that attitude played out on almost every level of our reeling nation.

However, part of the reason people get to think like that is the mad self-referencing commercial spectacle delivered every media minute, one which has absolutely no inclination, or ability, to criticize or hold accountable its corporate masters.

Dow Wow Wow

Normally I would not comment about anything the stock market does, as one can safely assume it is disconnected from the day to day. However. Yesterday's nearly 300 point dash upwards has to be the most unjustifiable advance in memory. Even in the dumb dot-con days there was a sense that new technology, however ill-defined, was leading to a new era of growth. And it was, though the impact of that was monumentally oversold.

But now with oil prices rising, the housing market, outside Manhattan, tanking, and cherry-picked retail results that are, at best, okay, you gotta wonder what is on the minds of the marketeers this quarter.

I have an idea it is dough fleeing the subprime mortgage bond market, hedge funds racing to at least break even over the summer. This is not optimism so much as a lack of any sensible alternative, something we see also acted out each day now in the coo-coo land of King Zog.

If I were you, I'd sell.

Tipping Points Memo?

Josh Marshall has a new site design up, and it's a beaut. Over time, TPM has evolved very logically and carefully, imho, from a single blog into a site for news with commentary and a daily video feature provided by several staff members. Marshall's done this by following mainly three big stories over the last couple years, the fake uranium Wilson/Plame affair, the Cunningham/Abramoff congressional corruption follies and, growing from that, the prosecutor purges at the DOJ, solid persistent reporting in the context of advocating progressive change, the sort of thing which was called a century ago a Crusade for Good Government.

So well done, Josh. Keep up the good work.

Anyway, seeing just how sophisticated TPM has become reminded me of something I read a couple weeks ago and wanted to bring up here. In Ken Auletta's New Yorker profile of the Wall Street Journal's consumer tech columnist Walter Mossberg, he tosses out this very interesting nugget:

On January 9th, when, at the annual MacWorld conference, Steve Jobs, the C.E.O. of Apple, offered the first glimpse of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, a combination cell phone and music player, the blog Engadget.com had more traffic than the Times’ Web site.

Every New Media director at every old media enterprise read that bit of information and shuddered, with good reason. Perceived advantages of brand, of size and financing, melt quickly away online. The cautious judgements of print journalism, unrolled with dull precision every day, mean less and less in our incautious times.

Not especially related to the above, but orbiting germane, is the pending success of the Dirty Digger's purchase of Dow Jones. Apparently the company, facing a worker revolt (HA!), is looking for someone else to come in and pay over $5 bill. for, let's remember, a money-losing enterprise. Maybe Rupe really is the smartest man in the world, but everyone thought his old rival Bob Maxwell was pretty smart too until his bloated bankrupt body was found floating in the Bonny Blue.

UPDATE: Looks like TPM had to take a step back from the new design this morning. Still, once the bugs are ironed out, it'll be be-yoo-tee-full.

Flee Market

'Nother fascinator in the Times of New York this AM: Increasing Rate of Foreclosures Upsets Atlanta

The lead: Despite a vibrant local economy, Atlanta homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments and losing their homes at one of the highest rates in the nation, offering a troubling glimpse of what experts fear may be in store for other parts of the country.

How can this be?? Well, the article explains that Georgia allows quicker foreclosures than other states. But why foreclose at all? The answer is tucked into the 12th & 13th grafs, to wit:

Though Atlanta has added jobs in recent years, they pay less than the jobs the region lost after the technology boom of the late 1990s ended. The median household income was only 7.6 percent higher in 2005 than in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. That is about half the rate of inflation during that period, and it mirrors what has occurred nationally.

While wages have languished, average Atlanta families are shouldering more debt. As of March, residents had bigger credit card balances, mortgages and car loans relative to their income than average Americans, according to data compiled by Moody’s Economy.com. And the equity that Atlanta residents have in their homes — the value of their house minus what they owe — has dropped 14 percent since peaking in late 2005.

Well. . . not a message you will find on the financial pages when the latest government numbers on job creation are trumpeted, as they were last week. But the best was saved for nearly last:

Dean Williams, the president of Williams & Williams, the firm that conducted the auctions, said results of the sales in Atlanta and elsewhere in the country showed that real estate prices were inflated during the recent boom, especially in less affluent areas.

“When you find out what the market price really is, it can be a joke,” said Mr. Williams, whose family-owned firm is based in Tulsa, Okla.

No one sees us clearer than the undertaker, right? Now the invisible hand has been awfully busy in Atlanta and elsewhere lately, but isn't Mr. Williams' central point here that the market, at any given moment rather than across history, can, in fact likely will, be out of whack? Don't get me wrong. It's dandy for pricing watermelons in St. Paul in August, or ball bearings in Toledo next spring. But the free market is a dumb, no - worse than dumb, lazy paradigm for social policy, and another reason why the rancid GOP's fortunes are falling faster than Atlanta home prices, and King Zog's approval ratings.

Times Running Out

Much has been made this steamy day about the N.Y. Times' call for an end of the Iraq Project. While heartening in a needless-to-say sort of way, it is another in the self-important rhetorical editorial genre of what one might call the If I Had a Hammer sort, one, most popular recently on the right, where the writer presumes to advise or speak towards a reasonable way forward, usually predicated, though not in this instance, with something like "The president should..."

After quckly acknowledging what a fucking mess Iraq is, and glancing at its own debris trail of reasoning in support of King Zog's dumb misadventure, the paper of record then goes on to present a litany of remedies and results necessary for a successful disengagement, based mainly on the presumption that our problem there is the problem of all nations of good will seeking balance in that chaos, the premise of that being that the United States still has a measure of leadership that must be recognized by all, allies and rivals alike. This, though, is just one Foreign Policy article removed from the shithead logic which led all the smart guys and gals to sign up for the Iraq project in the first place.

What the editorial does not mention is the one act which would do the most to restore our nation's moral standing in the world, namely the rendering of every fucking one of those war criminal assholes to the docket at the Hague, hanging, though much desired for the likes of Dick, Don, Scooter and Elliot, the only option off the table.

Hanging, as the saying goes, is too good for them.

For until we get some talk from the egg heads who run things about real moral solutions to our woeful state, remedies they are probably incapable of considering absent their own moral scales, then our only trajectory is downward.

UPDATE: While I scold the Times for it's Neverland dialectic, its new so-called Public Editor, Clark Hoyt (one somehow pictures his desk on the West 43rd St. sidewalk) takes the paper to task for its lazy acceptance of the administration's insistance that Al Qaeda is the main bad actor in Iraq .

Simmertime

Your obt., hmbl. just checking in here. I hope everyone's summer is going as swimmingly as it can. I've not had a heck of a lot to say, obviously, as things are shaking out politically pretty much as I called it a year or so ago. To recap, a GOP thrashing at the '06 polls, just the first of a steep six-year decline, will lead inevitably to a fracturing of the party (now playing.) The so-called RW noise machine will drift steadily into low-rating irrelevance as the next election approaches and, you heard it here first, will be a pathetic, and expensive, shell of itself post the massive GOP meltdown of '08.

Details can be annoying, I'll grant you. I figured there'd be some noble repubs willing to step forward to rescue what they could of the party from a dirty war, but, wow, no, not really. No help is coming from their prospective standard bearers, twits all, either, though the MSM needs a semblance of a race to justify their wildly inflated salaries. That illusion will be harder and harder to maintain as it becomes clear by early next year that MSNBC, CNN and FOX, to name but three offenders, take the Repub campaign far more seriously than the Rebubs themselves. I also can't say how the Iraq Project will end, other than badly, or when, besides after the inauguration of the next president, though I can't tell which Democrat that will be. I doubt we'll invade Iran before then, mainly 'cause there's scant desire in the Pentagon to follow Zog anymore, but one never knows.

It is bracing now to see the apparatchik outline of the Viceroy's office come into full view, a bell-the-cat development that not only reveals the extent of his meddling, but how singularly unsuccessful his efforts have been, in light, that is, of the lack of any long-term good for the nation or his party. Related too is the absurd Supreme Court, revealed with every new 5-4 decision to be not so much an instrument of philosophy than a crooked zoning board. It should be clear to all that victory at anything is beyond the sore losers that constitute the GOP.

Dysfunction, in case you have not noticed, is everywhere. Lately I've been thinking less of the plight of dumb King Zog and the villainy of his nasty Viceroy. Really, those jackshits are just the latest iteration of Vicious Asshole given to run things in this land since, well . . . how far back do you want to go? My thinking, maybe because I only just finished reading Against the Day has become more, uhm, tangential.

The ascent of the money/market culture, the widespread agreement that it was the best system imaginable, agreement even - especially - among those whom it fucked over the most, is still a subject of constant fascination to me. In a nutshell: How is it that sociopaths get the clearest way forward in our everyone-has-their-price system? A feature, not a bug, to be sure. Something to do with what passes for a higher education in this country, is my guess, once a soulful inquiry into the sometimes invisible workings of the universe, now mainly a business-based compartmentalization of the known world that engages a small portion of the mind and nothing of the heart.

Jim Kunstler rants today about the slobs he sees in airports, a subject touched upon here once or twice in the past. I do think though he levels too much fire on the feckless young in his sharp assessment. More interesting to me are the slobs who look like they've otherwise got it made. Fat, nervous, tired, brittle looking rulers, most of them at the ends of whatever pricey teathers they've got. This country is run by the fearful and distracted, has been for years. Huzzah, sez I, for that free market and the riches its invisible hand so reflexively withholds.

A lot of people are going to be disappointed, if not capsized and lost, in the next few years. Lots. And to prevail with anything resembling good will; that is, to offer even a small way forward to your fellow citizens, will depend on individual resources not especially political as much as intuitive, compassionate maybe - shit they don't study much in college anymore.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

Forward and back again with Weird Al.