Oh, For the Days of Separate But Equal (Says Rush Limbaugh)

I've been waiting for the moment when a major anti-Obama personage finally let their cloak fall so you could see the word RACIST tattoed across their chest. A rough equivalent to when, during Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican Convention in 1991, College Republicans in the crowd started giving the Nazi salute and nobody stopped them before the camera cut away. I've been waiting for something like this:

LIMBAUGH: I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. [referring to an interracial fist-fight on a schoolbus] I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.

Yes, Rush, the cracker barrel just isn't the same anymore, what with the darkies shoppin' in the general store and usin' real greenbacks just like everybody else. How will we protect the women-folk? Some days I can only wonder if the South will ever rise again...

(Note: the snark tag to the above is set on "Stun.")

Reasons To Feel Good About the Republican Convention

I managed to catch a few of the speeches by various luminaries before last night's "Moose Head Barbie" climax, and here are a few summaries:

Rudy 9iu11ani: "If you don't elect McCain, I'll blow up Florida."

Mike Huckabee: "For freeing Arkansas from its Russian occupation, I heart John McCain."

Some Party Woman Speaking at 5:50 PM: "I...can. Read!"

The Moose Head herself was pretty impressive. Well-written, well-delivered, telegenic, roughly 25% of Sarah Palin's content was Nobama criticism, 25% hostile fabrication, 25% standard anti-government ravings, and 25% "Proud to Be A Murkin." In other words, formulaic. But for the remarkable addition of a vagina, the speech could've been written for anyone from Barry Goldwater to Steven Colbert. Listening to the Party responsible for $20 trillion in bad bonds warn against tax increases was a trifle much, of course, with the irony lost on the angry, angry crowd. A crowd which expressed its Homo Loquens sentiments as follows: "Boo. Booo! Yay. Yaay! Boooo. USA! USA! USA!"

(Aside: If a Republican wanders in here for some reason and has stuck with it this far, congratulations, and I have a question: what do you have to be angry about? Your party has been in power, has usurped more power, has exercised more power over our liberties, our finances, our allies, and our so-called enemies for the past 8 years than any other period in US history, and you're still angry. There is good news for you, a soothing Gilead's balm guaranteed to finally make you happy. Calm down for a minute, go look in a mirror, and repeat these words: "I f**ked up." Say them often, and you will start feeling better in no time.)

Speaking of feeling better, despite Sarah Palin's well-received litany of scandals, lies and deceits, the revitalized, high-energy Pugfest masks a deep rift in Republican philosophies, one which reaches deep down between McCain and the Fundie Panderers running his own campaign. Even Palin seemed to think some of the vitriol she was about to read off the prompter was going too far, acid sure to have back-splashed once the various women's focus groups which were running collate their data. The Rovian speech could be interpreted as taking a folksy Moose Head brand and transforming it into Cutthroat Opportunist.

You might call the core rift a battle between the Roots and the Shoots, a desire to deal with a plethora of contrary, dangerous details by shoe-horning them back into a narrative past. This isn't a Republican impulse--it's ancient, it's tribal, and is still the most commonly observed behavior in organizations which are in deep trouble. When facing a confusing, hostile environment, the collective decision is usually to go back to what used to work best, and try to do it harder and better. That's why (Karl Rove protege) Steve Schmidt the campaign manager who lobbied so hard for Palin, is actually trying to hide McCain as much as possible. Consider, for but one example, that Oldfinger's convention address tonight is scheduled to exactly coincide with the Giants-Redskins game which kicks off the NFL season. Palin's speech drew an audience close to 20 million. McCain won't draw 10.

The problem with the "dance with them that brung ya" behavior is that the greater the levels of confusion and danger, the less likely it will work, and sharper wits in the Republican Party realize this. In a golden media moment of illustrating that point, the feed to a microphone was left on during Chuck Todd's MSNBC show yesterday. Mike Murphy, John McCain's closest former advisor, and conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, the right's Intellectual Ballerina, talked freely amongst themselves. Contrary to their public line-toeing, they completely trashed the strategy of picking Sarah Palin. I assume you've already heard or read Noonan's damnations of, "It's over," and "The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --" The full transcript is worth reading, and it's proof of intelligent Republicans speaking honestly.

While Palin was in some ways a brilliant choice for VP, the Republican Party is playing a bad hand with yesteryear's calculator. They're scared and confused. America needs heroes, they know that, but they're offering icons treadworn and false. The other side offers Vince Lombardi, innovation, and an exercise regimen. I see the appeal in the former, I see it in the whole country "bottoming" so hard as to remove all denials, dignities, and doubts in the hard collisions that would happen under McCain/Palin. Or, as it might well turn out, under a President Palin.

President Palin. Catastroika. No decorum or restraint whatsoever would remain in what has already been the greatest corporate orgy since the Gilded Age. The tent villages of homeless in my city would swell into towns, the line outside the soup kitchen that's there every morning when I drop my son off to his $1,000 per month Day Care would stretch around the street corner, down the block, pensions and Social Security checks would be worthless, and the angry youths I see walking through our neighborhood from their alternative high school would start unleashing what they're barely managing to contain.

The other side offers coaches who know how to coax out the best competencies, even from the alien corporate-socialist substrate upon which patriots, governments and consumers must currently float like reviled stains of dirt. The coaches are the only feasible hope we've got left for climbing up into coherencies. Deep down, I think, even Sarah Palin and the Fundies might know that.

McCain Ad: Does This Look Like Change To You?

Finally, an effective attack ad comes out of the Obama campaign. Even die-hard Republicans will be unsettled by this one, and appropriately enough, these posters are first going up around the Republican Convention site in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The stark use of simple colors, graying the image of the McCain and Bush Embrace casts a wonderful pall of doom over what will be the main attack tagline from here to the election. They will (or should) just hammer on McSame, McSame, McSame, with occasional side condiments of "Win A McCain Vacation Home" and "Iraq Is So Safe, We Send Our Children There!"

(Research creds to MikeVotes.)

The Unbearable Lameness Of Being A Neocon, Pt. I

Once upon a time, in a valley far, far away, I was an anti-communist, and for fun, I mapped Soviet advances through the world in tints of red. They completely controlled 8 other countries; 6 more they ruled by proxy; over 15 were solidly under their sphere of influence; a dozen or so were struggling against communist-funded insurgencies; 10 had signed mutual cooperation treaties, and a few, which I festooned with pink candy stripes, were teetering on the fence. I was among the last crop of prospective Cold Warriors, when the Soviet Union was at its largest and all foreign policy exercises were performed with red magnifying glasses, so we could cast a leviathan into something pythonically vast.

Every graph, every veracious view proved the pernicious, creeping ideology of the Enemy was jeunesse doree, about to break through and burrow like syphilis into our closest allies and dearest resources. Above all, it was impossible to argue with the maps, which responded to questions and had inexhaustible vocabularies of 3 words: you...are...losing. The maps were all-pervading, and if you asked your professors or classmates, "So...what are Malaysia's prospects," they would refer to the arbiter of all things geopolitical and it would say, "You are losing." You could ask the map any question at all, such as, Is Greece really still in the balance? "You are losing." Will I get an 'A' in this class? "You are losing." Was the movie 'Red Dawn' made by homosexual communist sympathizers? "You are losing."

Panic is a conventional wisdom. Few wiser heads dared predict or intuit how quickly and soon the Red Tide would recede, and given that, you'd think forgiving the people who came to be called Neocons would be easier. It is not, no, decidedly not. In no small part that's because they're still wonderfully positioned to screw up the world yet more, are collectively unrepentant and unreformed, and have always been transparent fools. No one seems to even understand what they are or where they came from, and although the stars of their uber-nationalist lunacies may be setting, they might not be, and are still high in the sky. Why were such twittering machines, these ungainly and vacuous intellectual monstrosities, ever allowed to ascend so far?

There's a story, of course. The far right, having shot itself in the foot, ever-desperate and facing irrelevance, searched for a magical narrative. Once they found it, they became the loudest voices in American anti-Soviet policy circles, drumbeating the idea that strong religions, whether Christian or Muslim or Jew, were the best way to thwart communist threats. Surprisingly, amongst much that was ludicrous, this was not. The Soviets were quick to compete with and suppress religions, being structures inimical to themselves wherever they went, so the idea had solid on-the-ground basis.

For example, the Catholic Church was playing a strong, probably indispensable role in Poland's Solidarity movement, eventually tempting the Vatican into a radical departure from tradition by naming its first Polish pope. Hence, it was understandable the US would embrace fundamentalist Muslims and Jews as anti-communist, pro-stability allies, particularly when newly vertiginous waves of Christian fundamentalism were swelling, and I rode their crests and troughs off the strongest American point-break.

Reagan was the embodiment of pro-religious foreign policy prescription, so his sympathizers engaged with the Iranian mullahs well prior to his election to strike deals: arms for the return of American government hostages, to be consummated after his victory, and access for selected companies. They found much to like, and each side immediately shared an intuitive understanding of the other, not perhaps as fondly as Republicans would get along and actively cooperate with al-Qaeda operatives and Muslim Brotherhood surrogates during their formation in Pakistan, but the mullahs and the Reaganites were deeply religious social radicals who had wandered long in their respective wildernesses, outcasts who were brought back in triumph by resounding activism and majorities.

Few in wider policy circles cared much about Iran beyond its oil, and it was always Jimmy Carter's misfortune to take the phrase "we will not negotiate with terrorists" seriously. The mullahs had been toughened by austere decades of Western repression, any human rights issues were not a concern, nor were the finer points of comparative religion. By contrast, Carter and the Democrats had probably set events in faster motion by regularly undermining Iran's Shah over human rights abuses. With the proxy overthrown, from a Reaganite viewpoint and from nearly everyone else's it was better to have unpredictable Khomeinist mullahs in charge of Iran than an unpredictable, democratic, Bambi-tastic government within easy reach of Russian weapons and aid. The mullah regime could be relied upon to quickly purge the communists, and Reagan policy was to leave it alone until further notice. As for the Shah, Beverly Hills had always suited him best.

Under Reagan, rapprochement with pious forms of islam was followed through on as policy all over the Mid-East, most aggressively under Bill Casey in the mid-1980s. The notion was seen as straightforward and sensible, and it was (so to speak) orthodox. It was pointless to argue against, and even if a far-right insurgency were not in the middle of joyously taking over a government, it's always hard to argue against the quick fix.

With monacle-wearing hindsight, it's easy to see predictable consequences of encouraging the rise of disparate theocracies in whereabouts considered absolutely critical to US interests. And it's easy to notice that the stage set of "Dances with Mullahs" is where the struggling Neocons and their simple-minded Kantian philosophical frameworks of aggression first responded to a casting call and won some parts in a major play, 'Morning in America.' It's where they learned their lines, fine-tuned their performances, and were richly rewarded. When the show closed down, they departed to work on another production, which I'll pick up on in Part Two. Say what you want about Neoconian acting quality, but those stage props, sheesh!--they're to die for.

Saturday Sadism: John McCain's Off-Brand Speech

This blog has been horribly remiss in sadistic pillories of late, and we can now kick John McCain while he's down after the universal pummeling he took from the punditry in the wake of his Tuesday night debacle. Late to the party again! Still, things have been far too positive around here lately, the blog is turning into Pollyanna-land. Time for the gratuitous, time for a few vaudevillian slaperoos.

My mom flew in Tuesday night and her flight was late, so I orbited around the airport listening to McCain's arresting speech in New Orleans. It was a fascinating, disphonic, disconnected thing which started taking on a gruesome life of its own, and it moved me to think, "Sweet shotguns of Barry Goldwater! There is no joy in Pugville. Things are worse there than anybody knows, and I've got to watch this shit on video."

I did, and it was mesmerizingly bad. How can I describe how bad? First the symbolic venue: so, if you were a Republican candidate for President, would New Orleans be the setting you would choose to bemoan the evils of big government? Maybe if you're David Duke. The visual exposition: white-white man, green-green backdrop. McCain: the organic candidate. Right. He looked about as comfortable as ice cream in a deep fryer. The message: weird talking points which couldn't decide whether to push security or disaster capitalism (one example: "we should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies" WTF??). The delivery: sucked. McCain was like a punch-drunk old fighter shuffling back towards the ropes, gesturing with his gloves and saying, "Punch me, c'mon ya puppy!" At one point, slowly winding up for one of his jabs, he actually closed his eyes and grit his teeth, his smile shifting into a grimace-rictus.

If you want to cheer yourself up with visual evidence of how bad-off the Republican Party is right now, watch the video. The camera pans back at one point only to show that he's addressing maybe 70 supporters, most of them his VP candidates and their families. McCain himself exudes tragedy and paradox. He reminded me of the pained, self-hating Watto, the Star Wars character bound by tradition and overcome with greed. His few objectionably surviving scruples twitch and rebel, pricking through the armor of a career of flip-flopping, through the desensitization of decades in Congress, clear up through the tranquilizer his eyes say he took. His delivery was so pathetic it was endearing. Somewhere, there's a good man under all that pain who is killing himself.

Republicans On The Run

Here's the follow-up to last night's post on the Mississippi miracle, a memo sent out this morning by National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.). His message is a simple "To the lifeboats!" advisory. This clearly gives the lie to the congressional field trip to the White House last week to hug each other and display "solidarity."

“We are disappointed in tonight’s election results. Though the NRCC, RNC and Mississippi Republicans made a major effort to retain this seat, we came up short.

“Tonight’s election highlights two significant challenges Republicans must overcome this November. First, Republicans must be prepared to campaign against Democrat challengers who are running as conservatives, even as they try to join a liberal Democrat majority. Though the Democrats’ task will be more difficult in a November election, the fact is they have pulled off two special election victories with this strategy, and it should be a concern to all Republicans.

“Second, the political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general. Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for. This is something we can do in cooperation with our Presidential nominee, but time is short.

“I encourage all Republican candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall by building the financial resources and grassroots networks that offer them the opportunity and ability to communicate, energize and turn out voters this election."

Travis Childers Delivers Big Democratic Win In Mississippi

In a district which went 62-38 for Bush in 2004, the AP calls a tight race for Democrat Travis Childers in Mississippi. It's a win for the DCCC and a symbolic win for Obama in the staunchly conservative Mississippi 1st district. This is big; by comparison, Hillary Clinton's thumping victory in West Virginia is a sideshow. Tonight's Mississippi miracle will shake the Republican Party to its core, because it recently lost two other "lock" races and the RNC pulled out all the stops to firewall this one. Haley "Where's My Dinnah?" Barbour is also the Republican governor. His famed appetite must be suffering, and he's probably wearing a plus-size adult diaper right about now.

In race-baiting beamed forward in time from the Reconstruction era, Obama was used as a boogeyman by the Pugs; Childers had aligned himself with the new sheriff in town, counting on new voter turnout to win. It worked. This is what the RNC leadership had to say about this race, coming on the heels of special-elections defeats in stronghold seats in Louisiana and Illinois, including the one held by former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert:

"When you connect three dots in anything, that's a bad thing. This connects the dots. At that point, everybody's got to come together and have a come-to-Jesus meeting," said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), a retiring centrist who will help form a new advisory panel at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"It's a time of sober reflection and, to some extent, resolve. I hope these special elections are a wake-up call," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee.

"The Republicans would be ignoring reality if they try to explain away this race," said Nathan Gonzales, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.

Note to the NRCC: Jesus will kick your butt through the goalposts of life. Increasingly it looks to this political late bloomer that the Republicans may be facing a historic landslide with Barack Obama at the head of a ticket which mobilizes and enfranchises a new, post-baby boom generation of voters. It's also a clear indication of how far the Global War on Terra has eroded the pylons of the so-called conservative Base. In a way I almost wish this "connect the dots" win hadn't happened just yet. Because if they lost here, Republican strategists know they can lose anywhere. Everywhere. They're a smart, professional group adeptly fond of rigging elections, they're out of excuses, and the unequivocal outcome forms an urgent new question to keep them up at night: "How are we going to suppress that much more vote?"

For Good Measure: Nut Job Party Fields Wacko Candidate

Warm cinnamon donuts, just out of the oven. Every time Mike Huckabee's name is mentioned, that's the feeling I get. Why? Oh, only because he's on the Republican Party's back like the toothless hillbilly was on Ned Beatty in the famous man-rape scene in Deliverance. And because I just want a little revenge for the last 6 years. Is that so wrong?

I'm thankful for every extra day Huckabee doesn't blow up and bellow "I will destroy you!" at an audience, for another week which passes without him sending a critical reporter one of the three-page long insult-a-thons he's famous for in Arkansas. Every day is a gift. It's like getting up in the morning, opening your door, unfolding your Wall Street Journal and seeing a headline which says, "Nut Job Party Fields Wacko Candidate." How do I describe the wackosity level? I can't. But, Bruce at The River Blog put up a good synopsis written by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi:

As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. "Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn't," he says. "So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict." Huckabee's well-documented ­disdain for science was reflected in the performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools, a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee's hostility toward the teaching of evolution.

Huckabee at most times is gentle and self-deprecating in his public address, but when he talks about religion, he gets weirdly combative and obnoxious, often drifting into outright offensiveness. At one appearance, Huckabee — who's been known to make fart jokes in front of the state legislature — said he would oppose gay marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he's changed the rules." And he recently scored a rare offend trifecta, simultaneously pissing off immigrants, Jews and the pro-choice crowd when he ludicrously claimed that a "holocaust" of abortions had ­artificially created a demand for Mexican labor.

The D.C. Pug establishment has their undies in, well not even a bunch. Huckabee has them so intensely humiliated they're not wearing undies. See Ned Beatty, above. ("Ah sayed squee-uhl lahhk a peeg!") Every day, they're asking themselves, "How should he die? Let's see here...plane crash? Squashed by a bus? Suicide bomb? Somebody call Richard Perle." The Neo-cons hate him worse than any leading Democrat. For starters, let's compare Huckabee's foreign policy advisors with the other Pug candidates:

Rudolph Giuliani:
Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz, Ex-Senator Robert Kasten.

John McCain:
Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, William Kristol, James Woolsey, Alexander Haig, Max Boot, Bud McFarlane, Brent Scowcroft.

Mitt Romney:
Cofer Black, Mark Falcoff, Roger Noriega, Dan Senor.

Fred Thompson:
Elizabeth Cheney

Mike Huckabee:
Nobody

There isn't enough Prozac to keep the Pugs going. For as long as it lasts, the greatest thing about the gaseous bible-humper is that, not only does he merit his own DSM-IV entry, he's also the logical conclusion of every backward, bad, buggering thing the Republicans have ever successfully mobilized or have pandered to. What they've wrought on our country is finally coming back on themselves.

There's a very real possibility Huckabee will be able to keep the venom of god's wrath bottled up for long enough to take his Party's nomination for the Presidency. In Iowa, where Huckabee got all medieval on Mitt the Mormon, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards each got more votes than he did. I hear banjos twanging in the distance, and every day is gravy.

(Inspirational thanks to Bruce and Jesus.)

Republican '08 Front Runner Giuliani

Two words: Bernard Kerik. (OK, a few more words: churlish ex-wives.)