Bleah!

The Lady, or the Tiger?

Maureen Dowd, who will likely change her clothes, hair, and mind at least seven times today, quotes William Kristol (keep spinning in your grave, Irving) in today's NYT as saying:

“Conservative eggheads are my friends, but politically they’re a contrarian indicator. If they’re down on Palin, things are looking up for her. With all due respect for my fellow eggheads, they are underestimating the importance of a natural political gift or star quality. It matters a lot.”

Politically, intellectuals are a "contrarian indicator"? (I think Kristol meant "reverse barometer," but hey, who am I to argue? He's a "conservative intellectual"!) Does he actually intend to say that the opinions of intellectuals (like himself!) are the exact opposite of the truth, as far as Republicans are concerned? Then why do they exist? Party of Ideas, my monkey fucking ass!

David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens (I don't really know if he fits as a "conservative intellectual, " but nobody knows what that guy is anymore, and he supported Bush when it mattered), the Buckley clan, George Will, and numerous other conservatives have jumped off the McCain and (especially) Palin bullet train to oblivion. In some cases, those same "conservative intellectuals" have been savaged as they fled by the comfortable-but-ignorant rank-and-file of their party, those "ordinary Americans" who selfishly want to keep just a little more of the money they only could have made in America; who want to live just a little further away from the "Others" they only could have met in America; who, in a cycle of psychotic dissociation only found in America, want to punish whole segments of the population through venal small-government policies even as they continue to utilize big-government services and enjoy the fruits produced by the despised demographic populations.

In other words, the GOP, right now, is a mob-rule party. The party has assumed, with the adoption of the totem Sarah Palin, its most animalistic and base characteristics as its public image. And William Kristol, who fancies himself to be smart, at least, thinks he can ride the tiger. I just hope I'm there when he loses his grip and gets eaten alive.

OK, Just One More Thing

McCain twice tonight said Sarah Palin was "qualified" to appreciate how he, John McCain, would get funding to find the cause of autism. Does McCain think Palin's newborn has autism? He has Downs syndrome. Look it the fuck up. Do McCain and his people think Americans can't read or don't think there's a difference? "Autism" is a buzzword, so let's just go with that!

This raises the question all over again of just how many times John McCain has actually met Sarah Palin.

Oh, and overall reaction? McCain was d.e.s.p.e.r.a.t.e. and it showed. Big time. The man was popping out of his skin, he was so desperate and manic. It was not sad at all, actually; I can't remember when I laughed this much at any live performance. And I saw K-Fed in concert once.

Wow

That was a pretty shitty debate...for Bob Schieffer!

Obama did great. And, he looked responsible and thoughtful, unlike John McCain, who actually referred at one point to how Obama's campaign, by pointing out what hooligans and cretins have accreted to the McCain rallies, had hurt Little John's feelings. Awwww.

Seriously, I didn't know we could vote for the first 12-year-old boy for president.

What a wuss.

Bed now. More tomorrow.

Last Debate, First Post

First question of tonight's debate: "Tell the American people why your economic plan is better than (your opponent's)?"

McCain answers thusly: "There are several parts of my new economic plan, which you have just summarized, and so I am not going to repeat them." (WHAT?!?) And the Senator continued, "But I think the first thing we have to do is take $300 billion of the $700 billion and buy up all the bad mortgages caused by Fannie and Freddie Mae" (again, WHAT?!?) "so there's a floor under home values. And, I'm disappointed in Henry Paulson because he failed to act responsibly."

I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But, what the fuck was that answer? I have learned several new things, and it's only been three minutes: 1. McCain does not know McCain's new economic plan. Yeah, he read it, off a teleprompter, the other day at a campaign event, but tonight he ain't got no teleprompter and the old bastard can't remember just what it was that he said yesterday. 2. McCain failed to contrast his plan with Obama's plan (maybe he also does not know what Obama said recently?), but instead attacked Henry Paulson. That'll score big points with the anti-Paulson voter. One. Voter. The ex-Mrs. Paulson, I would guess. 3. What the fuck is a "Freddie Mae"?!?

Not a good start for the coot.

270 To Win

Just keep going to 270towin.com, set all the states to neutral, and play around with Obama states. It is clear, immediately, that he only needs about 10 electoral votes to sew this thing up. Those votes could come from VA or FL or OH or NC or CO or MO or NV + NM or WV...

For McCain to win, he has to carry FL.

and OH.

and CO.

and VA.

and NC.

and IN.

and WV.

and NV.

and MO.

and, if he does all that...he wins the election by 4 points.

John McCain is so goddamn fucked it's unbelievable. Get excited. Get very, very excited.

End Game

Have I ever told you about my friend, John? He's a smart guy. Good writer. Sly sense of humor. Carries on lengthy email exchanges with Nigeria scam-artists. OK, maybe not so smart.

But he has a point, made in reference to the 2nd presidential debate, that is so correct as to almost be wrong. Almost. John identified the Achilles heel of the McCain campaign and it is this: voters have not bought a single piece of the McCain rhetoric up to now. (Thus, resultant, the negative campaign that has no substance to it.)

The upshot is that McCain has one chance -- tonight -- to hit Obama where it hurts. Of course, he cannot really bring up the Ayers stuff or go negative in general, because voters also don't like him for that (at least, the NYT says so). So John McCain has only one option remaining: he has to say something completely different than he's said thus far; in effect, he has to contradict himself, reverse course on a host of issues, flip-the-motherfucking-flop, etc. etc. That's no way to win an election. But it's all he has left.

Should make for good TV watching tonight.

Smart guy, that John.

What Became of the GOP

David Brooks (no link. Ever.) over at the NYT laments that the Republican Party has lost the narrative -- that "ideas have meaning" -- that was handed down by the Buckleys, the Strauss', the Rands, the Kristols, the Friedmans. Brooks is, it would appear, a man without a country, an intellectual in a mob-rule party.

The Republicans brought it on themselves. At some point, they decided that ideas were less important than appealing to the voters the Democrats didn't want, the racists, the proudly ignorant, the misogynists, the fucktards. There were, in conjunction with the conservative "intellectuals," enough fucktards to win an election.

John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate -- the final sop, it now seems, to an unholy partnership. Palin is now the most popular person on the ticket. Over at Free Republic, where the proudly ignorant, the racists, the misogynists gather to infect each other with new strains of stupid, they are wailing about McCain's ineffectiveness. It seems, you see, that McCain keeps trying to talk about facts and ideas (silly, disproved ideas, yes, but they're just old conservative retreads that have run out of usefulness -- Reagan is dead, after all). The fucktards want hate, visceral appeals, lynchings.

The Republican Party's intellectual wing has sown its own destruction. The mud people, the ignorant unwashed trash that Buckley, Will, Kristol held their noses and embraced in the 1970s, are now in the majority and have been raised to believe they are the rightful inheritors of the earth. The intellectuals lost control when they sent their new, demented children outside, to play with their guns, and talk personally to their imaginary God, and the brain trust huddled in its ivory tower and schemed about getting richer and more powerful through its conveniently-lucrative "ideas."

Training a mob to believe that it must not only defeat the Democrats politically, but must actually personally, spiritually, and permanently destroy them has consequences, to be sure. The mob grows, the brain shrinks, and today people like David Brooks have suddenly realized that they are powerless to stand up and retake control of the GOP. It is the party of the mudsills now.

There is not only a generational gap between Democrats and Republicans in this election. There is a "class" (Brooks' term) or generational rift on the GOP; McCain represents the old guard and Palin the newly-cognizant majority.

The inherent contradiction that has existed my whole life, of a party that encompasses fiscal conservatives, the self-styled "conservative intellectuals," and also the dumbest, most hateful, elements of American society has resolved itself, perhaps.

Where will the men of ideas go?

A Word On Losing Campaigns

The idea at this point is not for John McCain to win his campaign. That is over -- or at least it will be, when he pusses out next Wednesday and fails, once again, to challenge Obama in any meaningful way.

The rest of this month will be an effort by the GOP and especially the very frightened, very insecure and angry McCain partisans, to damage Barack Obama badly enough that he will be unable to govern effectively from the start of his term. That means an endless repetition of the same smears and vicious lies we've heard already, only louder and in the most crude, malevolent forms.

Politics of personal destruction, indeed. The Republicans are truly the masters of self-delusion and projection.

Does McCain Know About This?

From Politico:

John Weaver, McCain’s former top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this behavior.

“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

Two things, dummy: One, a "classic liberal" is an awful lot like a free-trader, modern "conservative." You are a fucking nincompoop. And second, why don't you get on the phone and call your old boss, John McCain, and ask him why he tolerates this brown shirt, 1933-style shit?

The DOW went down more than 600 points today

On September 15, the DOW was at 11,388. Today, less than one month later, it is at 8,579. That is a loss of nearly 25%. Some people are calling this a market crash -- whatever it is, it looks a whole lot like what a wise man named Karl Marx once described as the wild fluctuations that precede the "bust" in "boom-and-bust" economic cycles. The losses to Americans who were urged to invest in the stock market so they could one day experience a little peace in retirement can be measured in the multiple trillions of dollars. You, me, our parents, and friends, will all have to work a lot longer now, and for less than we expected, because Republicans chose to rip out the social safety net and replace it with a roulette wheel and a couple free drinks.

John McCain thinks we should keep talking about who Barack Obama had dinner with that one time.

WHERE IN THE FUCK IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

90 Minutes We'll Never Get Back

Last night's "debate" was a total disaster. For John McCain. For his opponent, that one, you know, whatshisname, the one who looks like the black guy McCain was talking down to about the economy...? For that one, it was a complete triumph.

Because I'm shallow and only notice things to be mocked, there were only two points during the debate that I was interested at all. One came about an hour in, when the camera was in a medium-shot of Obama from the front as he answered a question, and then, in the background, we saw a pair of legs wobbling across the stage. McCain refused to sit down for most of the debate, and he tottered about incessantly, but somehow his frail, bird legs unstably weaving through Obama's shot just cracked me up. Where was he going? Probably the same place he bolted for 5 minutes after the debate ended, whereas Obama and wife remained for half and hour, signing autographs and shaking hands. (I think McCain had to go to the bathroom really, really, really bad. He probably dropped, like, a twenty-five year-old turd in the shape of his presidential aspirations.)

The other funny/sad moment was, with about 10 minutes to go, when McCain for once did not stand up to answer a question. In fact, he was slumped in his chair, or rather propped up on his calcium deposits, in what appeared to be an excruciatingly uncomfortable position. But the real treat was that he answered the entire question without his microphone. And he didn't ever notice that he was holding the microphone in his lap the whole time. And the sound guy had to scramble to pick up McCain's voice on the lapel mic. And Tom Brokaw didn't say, "use the microphone, Senator."

Apparently I am the only person who noticed that moment, because not one pundit has made mention of it. That's too bad, too, because it was goddamn funny.

Any other debate responses?

MBA Dummies Aren't So Dumb?

The GOP is trying to change the subject from McCain's Keating Five involvement, but there's something that's true now that wasn't true 20 years ago: one-in-five college students is enrolled in a business, finance, accounting, or economics course. People between the ages of 18 and 35 are now, more than ever, more likely to have a professional knowledge of business and accounting. And those people, who may have been too young to remember Keating in the 1980s and 1990s, are interested in (and more important, can actually grasp and untangle) the whole story of McCain's influence-peddling.

Another bad day for McCain.

Tonight's debate prediction: it's a town hall-thing, with handpicked audience members and known, or at least obvious, questions. So, I'd say Obama tries to frame the conversation for the rest of the week around McCain's record of supporting Bush and his own failure to enact any real reform, particularly as related to the economy. I think McCain brings up the Ayers thing (huge mistake if he does) and I also think he gets testy, at least once, with a questioner and comes off as too-aggressive and not very open in his responses. In other words, bitter, angry, confused. I would not be surprised if McCain, in trying to attack Obama, in fact mistakenly directs his attack at the audience member who asked the question. Tom Brokaw will bring pompoms and a cheerleader outfit with a big "M" on it.

That's Interesting. And Begs for a Response.

Let's recap the last few days. McCain's idiot handlers announce that they are going to "take the gloves off" and hammer Obama for knowing some supposedly shady people. Obama responds with a 13-minute online video that details McCain's culpability in the Keating S&L scandal in the 1980s. McCain's handlers go apeshit, but somehow instead of pulling a George W. Bush and just refusing to talk about the past, or stand pat on the fact that McCain apologized for his mistakes and built his entire reputation on having learned to be a "maverick" from those mistakes, the McCain people decide to call the whole Senate investigation into the Keating affair a "Democratic smear job" on McCain! Unbelievable!

This all but guarantees that this story will get bigger and stay in view longer.

Rather than waiting to see if the public would become interested in McCain's scandalous past (and, if not, this story would have died quickly), his own campaign staff have decided to have WWIII right now, on this issue.

If I were a Rovian-conspiracy nut, I'd say this was an attempt to distract from some even bigger problem for McCain, but I can't think of anything. We're now so far past that point...

Need All the Help They Can Get?

The Obama people have their hands full just now with pushing back the McCain/Palin desperation ploy to repeat "Obama loves a terrorist!" every five seconds until Nov. 4. So, lots of left-leaning sites and speakers are encouraging us all to "keep working" for an Obama victory, despite everything that could possibly go right for him actually having gone right for him in the last month. Democratic Underground's hilarious Top Ten Conservative Idiots list this week even concluded with an exhortation that Obama "needs all the help he can get."

Well, it turns out that's not accurate. In fact, it's wrong. Obama has too much help, according to fiverthirtyeight.com. Did you catch that? Indiana, for example, has like 50 times more Obama field offices than McCain offices. And Obama's offices are full -- they're turning volunteers away. Lafayette, IN, has a separate call center and, in another building, a canvassing center. And, down the street, Purdue University has another, separate canvassing operation being run by the Students for Obama group. Over-over-over-saturation.

Obama-Biden: kicking so much ass they need less help than they can get.

John McCain Knows How to Lose Money

No, not the gambling thing. The Keating Five thing.

There's even a website and a 13-min video about McCain's efforts to assist thieves in the banking industry while they stole the life savings of 20,000 Americans.

The video is available starting today at noon.

See, Sen. McCain, this is what happens when you "take the gloves off" and "get tough" with your campaign. While you're napping, Sarah Palin is running amok and quoting coffee cup packaging to no effect. Barack Obama is shifting his millions of supporters and dollars to easily-accessed advertisements.

There are millions of voters out there, young (mainly) and old, who now want desperately to feel knowledgeable about politics, and want to understand more than just the most superficial aspects of this election. And one of the first lessons they are going to receive this week will be all about what a corrupt, callous, hypocrite John McCain is.

Tick-tock, tick-tock...

SNL Gets Better Material

So, did you hear the one about how Sarah Palin went to Omaha, "because she just wanted to, OK?," and also delivered a speech in California that was based partly on a quote on her Starbucks coffee cup???

I'm sure you heard. Sorry. I was out of town this weekend. I missed this. And this. And this. And also this. And this. And this. Jesus, what a time to leave town! And that was just one fucking newspaper, the NYT. What did everyone else have to say about the tanking GOP ticket in the past 72 hours?

But, seriously, the coffee cup thing? It's Bush-wastes-imaginary-political-capital-immediately-after-2004-election stupid. Here's my pitch to Saturday Night Live for this week:

Next Saturday, watch Sarah Palin rummage through a garbage can outside a Chinese restaurant for discarded fortune cookie slips, or what she calls "speeches"! Financial crisis? Sarah Palin reads from her Visa cardholders agreement terms and conditions! Climate change? Sarah Palin has an Amana air conditioner users manual!

And...scene!

Gwen Ifill: A Retard or a Traitor to America?

Gwen Ifill is either the dumbest "journalist" in the United States, too lazy or incompetent to even command that debate participants answer her questions, or else she is so enslaved by the false and discredited idea that she, as a journalist, must never think but only act as a mirror to public figures, that she is a danger and a traitor to the people of this nation.

Tonight's "moderator" was a disgrace to all Americans.

Ifill should either be consigned to a copy room, where her indifference to inquiry and truth can do no harm, or else she should be forced to resign and attend a remedial journalism school until she feels something akin to curiosity. The first option seems most likely.

The Key to the Debate

In the closing moments of the debate, Joe Biden opened up and made a very timely, very touching observation about life as a single parent. Why was he a single parent? He very sensitively and appropriately explained, without any maudlin dwelling on details, or pathos, that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. His two sons were also badly injured in the same incident.

Now, Joe Biden has talked about this before, and perhaps that was why Governor Sarah Palin, given a chance by moderator Gwen Ifill to respond to Biden on the challenges facing American families, instead completely ignored him and launched into an unrelated string of talking points, including what a maverick John McCain supposedly is, and how she governed Alaska, and how America has a bad economy.

But she couldn't even muster the simple decency or grace to acknowledge that Joe Biden had suffered a tragedy. A mere "I'm sorry, Senator, for your loss," would have sufficed before she began her irrelevant, wandering patter.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have gone out of their way to note and applaud the humanity and sacrifice of John McCain and, to a lesser extent, Sarah Palin. But neither McCain nor Palin can conjure the strength to do the same. What is wrong with the Republican nominees that they are so tone deaf, so callous?

Or was Sarah Palin so busy frantically shuffling her cue cards looking for that last, unused talking point, that she just didn't hear Joe Biden at all?

Conservatives and the Fantasy of the True Mind

Peggy Noonan was on The Daily Show last night, hawking a very Bill Bennett-esque book about "character" and "right living" (because conservatives have such good manners and high morals!). Aside from the fact that Jon Stewart completely *forgot* to ask her about that time she left her mic on at MSNBC and called Sarah Palin's elevation to VP "bullshit," the interview was strictly kid-gloves crap, with Stewart playing his now-customary role as Mr. Nice Guy To Conservatives. This while Noonan went on and on (and on! That bag can talk, now!) about the lamentable loss of civility in American public discourse and how, in general, in a very vague way, without naming anybody at this time when the GOP is full of two kinds of people, bad examples and horrible examples, we must get back on track. Presumably, she meant that we, the voters, should keep Republicans in office because, even though she can't think of any worthy Republicans at the moment, they'll surely appear after election day.

Also, there have been a lot of Republicans in the public forum lately decrying -- as Noonan herself did a few months ago for John McCain -- that the GOP doesn't seem willing to let "Sarah be Sarah." There seems to be some dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file with how Palin has been portrayed, both by the media and curiously, by the McCain campaign. They're stifling her, say the Republican chatters. Noonan, for her part, advocated that the McCain campaign should let "McCain be McCain" so that voters could fall in love, as she did, with the funny, concise, "real" John (not the billionaire heiress-marrying, adulterous, callous, kill 'em all John McCain we see on TV). As though the McCain people have been so great at reining-in their guy so far. Nope, no off-the-cuff remarks by Johnny yet!

The problem here is that this complaint is based in fantasy. You could say that all political partisans, particularly the losers, believe in something of this sort: did many believe that John Kerry's biggest problem was an inability to say "what he really meant"? Yes. And it was. Because, for Democrats, the problem isn't at its root that our philosophy of government is paradoxical or perverse, as is the Republicans'; the problem is that our philosophy is complex and pragmatic. Thus, it takes a long time to explain, on principle, how we would address issues. Kerry, and to a lesser extent, Gore, tried to be as forthcoming as possible instead of doing what must needs be done during a campaign (when, by definition, time is limited): sum it up. But, as a partisan, I thought Gore and Kerry should have been given more credit during their campaigns for "being Al," or for "being John." I also thought they could have been "more" themselves and been proud of it, instead of running from any discussion of their habits or personalities. In the sense of their "true minds," it was less that voters felt they were phony -- though many did -- and more that Democrats, deep down, were always unsatisfied by what Kerry and Gore said. They never ran an issue to ground. They never nailed the answer. They never explained why Democrats have better ideas.

McCain and Palin have a whole different problem. Their fans and would-be voters are livid that McCain's own campaign, supposedly, has covered-up both of their actual selves. This is a bizarre complaint. Republicans, in this case, are not blaming as they have in the past the election system, or the dictates of political campaigns; instead they are blaming the very people McCain hired and who serve at his pleasure for betraying him and his VP.

What is behind this curious conspiracy theory? Bitterness, likely. The dawning knowledge that the GOP is facing an ass-fucking of historic proportions that represents an almost total rejection of everything that Republicans have been proud of for 30 years. It is as if Democrats were suddenly villified for the Civil Rights Movement, the New Deal, and multiculturalism. Oh, that's right. We have been -- by the same Republicans who are now about to pay for making those outrageous charges. As an aside, rot in hell GOP!

Republicans making the "true mind" case base their argument on a fact not in evidence: there is something else to conservatism that hasn't yet been shown (again, over the past 30 years). Unlikely as it sounds, the notion that, at bottom, Sarah Palin and John McCain have some kind of genuine, pure conservative credibility that is so mind-blowingly original and primitive (in the sense that it comes from the source) is attractive in lean times like these. But it's also a fantasy. Maybe it is unsurprising that people who by-and-large accept wholesale the literalness of the Bible and also believe in benevolent ghosts who are either all-knowing or all-powerful (they haven't yet hashed out just which it is), would also get the notion that secret virtue is just waiting to be tapped in Palin and McCain, and that will turn this election around. It's like a Rapture (alert: not in the Bible) for the American voters!

What shall never be mentioned, or even considered by this crowd, is that there probably isn't anything else to modern conservatism. That is to say, Republican ideas have been applied without limits or qualifications for the better part of a decade, and in many ways for at least three decades prior to the unprecedented open-door reign of GW Bush. There isn't any more. Or, as Peggy Lee might've said, is that all there is?

The "true mind" of a conservative is the known mind. To say that there may be some secret ideas out there (or in there, in the cases of McCain's heart and Palin's head) is ludicrous given the history we have to look at. Republicans don't change; times change and Republicans fight the times by attempting to graft moldy notions, a la Bennett and Noonan, onto the present in an attempt to retard the future. In effect, because we are all the products of the triumph, temporarily, of this regressive mindset, let us join now in one voice to proclaim that, sorry Peggy, sorry Republican rank-and-file, but we already know John McCain and Sarah Palin, and we reject them, true minds and all.

The Ground Will Catch Them