Change is good
I've long been skeptical of the entire notion of "citizen journalism." But I have just tonight found something out, and I think I have actual news to report.
Not sure how I should play this. It goes all the way to the top.
I also think I may be in some danger. Anyway, hold on for more info as I get it, or can talk about it.
Probably the strangest thing about the spectacle of Karl Rove as pundit is that Newsweek has ostensibly taken him on board in order to share his immense wisdom about American political campaigning -- but the most immediate reason he's available for a pundit gig in the first place is that he botched the 2006 elections.
If Rove had gotten that permanent Republican majority that we heard so much about in the earlier years of this wretched new American century, would he be writing Newsweek columns and online WSJ editorials? I kind of doubt it, myself. He'd be kickin' it Ming the Merciless style, lolling about on a throne of infant skulls while being constantly masturbated by high-tech NASA stroke-bots, granting audiences to party potentates, lickspittles, and courtiers, each seeking desperately to curry his favor or indulge his whims. I'm sure the Fox News green room is nice and all, but it's not like that.
If I were a Movement Conservative contemplating the grim GOP prospects this election season, the guy I'd be the most annoyed at is Rove, frankly. If I truly believed that "conservative ideas" are still wonderfully popular but have been betrayed by the not-really-conservative administration, well, who was the "architect" of that? Wasn't Rove supposed to be in charge of building the GOP "brand," making it so damn attractive that the Democrats would be stomped out of government maybe forever?
Yes, he was, and he whizzed it. He deliberately pursued an electoral strategy of trying to motivate the GOP base and eke out narrow victories, and this left little to no time for actually selling those yummy-delicious "conservative ideas" to anyone in the center. And the base ate it up, only to realize now that they've been had -- it's like some Christian alt-rock band got fast-talked by some slick promoter into booking a gig at Giants Stadium only to find out to their dismay that nobody's buying tickets. Just because everyone bops to the music at your live shows at the megachurch auditorium, that doesn't mean the rest of the country doesn't think you suck.
Of course, I don't suppose the lesson of all this will be grasped by the wingnut mind. The thing is, "conservative ideas" do, in fact, suck. This is why attempts on the part of our favorite commentators to explain just what went wrong are so hilarious. No, it was not immigration that sunk you; neither is it earmarks, nor can we blame inadequate federalism. The problem is that modern conservatism is hardly a "philosophy," no matter how badly its adherents want to pretend that it is. No, it's a preposterous form of identity politics and utterly inadequate when it comes to issues of, you know, governing a country.
by Molly Ivors
As regulars know, I've been cataloguing Maureen Dowd's descent into madness in recent weeks, watching her flail wildly from Hillary as Blanche DuBois to Hillary as Mildred Pierce, and the parallel narrative of Barack Obama as a feminized, effete Democratic male.
But it took me a day or so to spot this in her most recent headline: "Raspberry for Barry."
So now he's the most effete black man of all.
What's next? Barack Obama, Thriller?
You know, I don't think they will ever make a better movie about cars that turn into superhero robots than Transformers. Unless perhaps it is Transformers II.
UPDATE. This movie literally features a jive-talking robot. This is a fantastic movie.
UPDATE. "Is it fear or courage that compels you, fleshling?" Indeed.
Reporter, editor, bon vivant, and all-around douchebag Robert Stacy McCain has yet another in what promises to be an infinitely extended series of ludicrous explanations for why the GOP is currently a-swirl in the porcelain Maelstrom: Insufficent Doctrinal Purity on Anti-La Raza Demagoguery.
One of the big reasons for the 2006 disaster was that John McCain's amnesty bill alienated many blue-collar voters who had been voting Republican in recent elections. Yet not only did McCain try to pass amnesty again in 2007, but then the Republican Party nominated the La Raza-loving author of this anti-American legislation as its 2008 presidential candidate.
It was President Bush himself who, in January 2004, proposed guest-worker status and amnesty for "undocument workers." In his second term, Bush pressured Republicans in Congress to support such legislation. No doubt other factors are involved in the collapse of the GOP coalition, but it's imp0ssible to ignore the role of Bush, McCain and amnesty in this disaster.
Yeah, there really is no doubt about that, since there is absolutely no evidence that "blue-collar voters" were ever especially worked up over the "amnesty" legislation. ("Illegal immigration" does not poll well, duh, but that's different from the question of support for the legislation -- see especially in that last link the November 2007 LA Times/Bloomberg poll). More to the point, there is no evidence that immigration is much on the minds of American voters at all.
Everyone hates the war because it's been a pointless disaster, and the GOP has run the economy into the shitter, and Greater Wingnuttia has nothing to offer as far as answers except dumbass demagoguery. Their chief error lies in their ridiculous belief that their pet obsessions resonate with anyone but their own captive audience of intellectual shut-ins, moral cripples, and policy-ignorant fuckheads.
by Molly Ivors
(at right: Maureen Does Morgantown)
Of all Maureen's poses, the ones where she attempts to capture The Spirit of the Heartland© are perhaps the most annoying. Face it, Maureen: you're a Feng Shui-living Manhattanite with 100 pairs of shoes and the best dye job your inexplicably large paycheck can buy, which is to say: still a dye job. You have no secret window into the souls of West Virginians to determine why they vote as they do, and should not pretend to. Your interest in Appalachia is anthropological at best, and shoehorning it into the predetermined narrative you've constructed about the Democratic primary is unfair, belittling, and snide.
Now that we've got that out of the way: today's outrage. You will recall that when I last checked in on MoDo, she was working her "Hillary is a sympathetic truck stop waitress who, like Peter Quincy Taggart, will 'never give up, never surrender'; Barack is a girly man who can't drink beer properly and disdains all this running for office shit as beneath him" angle. The skeevy "if he can't beat a girl, he can't beat a war hero" gong was being banged theatrically, and she was slipping in comments about Bill Clinton's libido at every opportunity. (If only, if only, Bill had turned his attentions to MoDo, perhaps we would have been spared all this.) All caught up? Okay.
In today's outing, we learn that Barack Obama lost West Virginia because it's a state filled with racist, stupid rednecks who must be lied to before their votes are purchased, and Obama doesn't play that way.
Charlie Peters, the legendary former editor of the liberal Washington Monthly who ran Jack Kennedy’s campaign in Kanawha County, W. Va., said Obama should study how J.F.K. managed to win there despite raging anti-Catholicism.
(My father, in West Virginia once on business, found his car had been flipped over by some locals furious about a sign on it supporting the first Catholic Democratic nominee, Al Smith.)
..........
J.F.K. bought affection in West Virginia. “The boss of Logan County said 35,” Peters recalled. “He meant $3,500, but Kennedy thought it was $35,000, so he gave him $35,000. They put out all this money and they carried the precincts.” (Hillary has been using street money more than Obama, though it is unclear how much it has helped.)
West Virginia loved F.D.R. “because the Depression had been very tough for them and F.D.R. was kind to them,” Peters said. (On my father’s trip, he was threatened by a man who asked him about “rumors” that President Roosevelt was in a wheelchair and threatened to thrash any man who said so. My dad, a detective who served on protective details for F.D.R., assured the ruffian that Roosevelt was “a fine, athletic man.”)
Much can be explained about MoDo's worldview, I think, when she mentions her Kennedy Democrat/Reagan Republican father, who I'm sure was a fine public servant and all that, but who clearly inspired Freudian issues in his little girl at which Agamemnon would cringe. See, you have to lie to the rednecks, because they're dumb and deserve it. Or something.
The framing here allows her to hit the trifecta: slamming Obama (he didn't try in WV!), Clinton (she lied and bought the rednecks off!) and West Virginians, in one fell swoop. From a purely technical angle, it's compelling stuff, but of course to admire it, one must close one's eyes to the pernicious effects of all this bashing.
Possibly, just possibly, West Virginians voted for Hillary because she is slightly to the left of Obama on domestic issues. Or because they like her health care plan. Or because West Virginia is a state which fought hard to establish its unions, and unions are one part of the Dem coalition generally (though of course not exclusively) behind her. Or maybe it's none of our goddamned business why people vote as they do.
I happen to think that Clinton should step out at this point, not because she's so far behind (she isn't), but because the money spent now will be needed in the fall. It's strictly economic. I'm not pleased with the way her campaign has been run, and I'd cheerfully lock Mark Penn and James Carville in a 55 gallon drum together for a good decade as punishment. She's a better candidate, and would have been a better president, than these yahoos communicated. And for that I'm sad and frustrated.
But none of this really has any impact on the sheer coastal snobbery of Maureen Dowd. Her "Obama is a girly man" schtick is of noble and ancient vintage, but it may just have turned to vinegar at this point. Use it on a salad, Maureen, not on us. We know this election is too important to be subject to your bullshit analysis.
Dennis Prager tries a triple reverse backflip twirl in order to show how the fact that everyone hates Republican policies and Republican politicians is good news for Republicans.
Today's most widely accepted political belief is that because an unprecedentedly high percentage of Americans -- 81 percent -- believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the Republicans are headed for a major defeat this coming November.
If this is the case, it can only be because the American voter translates "headed in the wrong direction" as "because the Republicans have had their way, so it's time to let the Democrats have theirs."
That should not be the case. I count myself as one of the 81 percent who believes America is headed in the wrong direction, and that is precisely why I am voting Republican. Moreover, I suspect I am not alone among the 81 percent in ascribing the wrong track to the leftist, not the conservative, influence on American life.
I suspect he's not alone either, nor will ever be; Emily will always have her Homer, after all.
Maybe you could try to tell them that they're fucked because of their stupid war and their shitty economy, but they won't listen. "Love the pointless death and suffering, you ignorant, treasonous bastards"! That's the GOP rallying cry this season, and as cynical as I am, which is nigh poisonous, I just don't see how that's a feel-good winner for them at the polls. But they will chase that tail until they're dizzy, or, well, even more dizzy than usual:
So 81 percent of Americans are right. We are on the wrong track. But the future of America entirely depends on what track it is most Americans think is wrong, and if they really believe that the radical "change" Obama and the Democrats advocate will be the right track. If so, it may mark the beginning of the end of the America that our parents and their parents and their parents back to America's founding lived in. The left, given its demonization of America's history, would welcome that. Would the American people?
Gosh, one wonders why the American people should ever have been entrusted with the capacity to decide anything in the name of the American people in the first place, if the American people just might decide to vote for things the American people would fundamentally reject because they are the American people.
The problem with Conservative Thought nowadays is that this sort of tripe is all that it is. It comes bottled in "fancy intellectual" and "hardworking just plain folks" varieties, but it's all the same crap.
They have nothing. They. Have. Nothing.
The New York Times discusses the phenomenon of Karl Rove as pundit. This article is sure to delight and intrigue you.
The bête noire of the Democrats has turned pundit, and his old nemeses — along with those who used to cover him in the news media — do not always know what to make of it.
Fortunately for these "old nemeses," I myself know quite well what to make of it. It's a fucking disgrace, is what it is.
Though of course it's a disgrace to something already disgraceful; it's not like Rove's exaltation into The Punditry is going to be the straw that fucks the camel's hump. As Bart informs Homer, so do I inform The Punditry: "I have as much respect for you now as I ever have or I ever will." Nobody needed any further confirmation that The Village sees politics as little more than an insider's game in which quaint notions such as "accountability for horrible policy decisions" and "intolerance for outright corruption" are at best point-scoring mechanisms and at worst vulgar impertinences. Hiring Rove as a pundit is just one more poop in the outhouse, albeit one that emits a particularly noxious stench.
I mean, honestly:
One year ago, when he was still a deputy White House chief of staff in the Bush administration, Mr. Rove was more likely than not ducking news organizations.
Now, he has joined them, as an analyst for Fox News and a contributor to Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. A book is in the offing, too. (Still no word on a radio show, but there was an NPR appearance late last week.)
At times clearly partisan, at others apparently offering down-the-middle analysis, Mr. Rove in his new role as a media star marks another step in the evolution of mainstream journalism, where opinion, "straight news" reporting and unmistakable spin increasingly mingle, especially on television.
"Evolution" may not be quite the right word. "Journalism" certainly is not "evolving" in this regard. When in a similar situation Gregor Samsa turned into a cockroach, that was a "metamorphosis." Rove contributes to Fox and the WSJ, and that's no biggie -- like nobody saw that one coming. But that he's at Newsweek is just unnecessary further evidence that no matter how quickly you turn on the kitchen lights, some critters won't scurry -- and why should they, when the donuts are left out on the floor for them? Yes, I know that Kos is over there as well, though I always imagined they did that for much the same reasons that the old WWF used to pit the Evil Sergeant Slaughter against the Hulkamaniac, that is, in order to make a few bucks by turning politics, questions of life and death, war and peace, into a no holds barred, adrenaline-fueled thrillride. And hey, I was right!
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, said he was not worried that his readers would confuse Mr. Rove’s leanings. "No one on the planet who is reading Newsweek is at all puzzled as to what Karl’s politics are," Mr. Meacham said.
Mr. Meacham said he hired Mr. Rove as a contributor last fall in part to "responsibly provoke." Indeed, he said, several hundred readers canceled their subscriptions in response.
It's kind of fucked up for an editor to be essentially bragging about canceled subscriptions, but then, who cares about that when you are serving the public discourse and the Fourth Estate by hiring a well-known asshole to discuss freakshow politics at the expense of substantive policy? An asshole, let's remember, whose entire claim to fame rests on his overrated ability to fuck with the Fourth Estate in order to get other assholes elected, and policy and good governance be damned. If I were Kos right now, I'd be putting on tights and a mask (to be fair to The Editors, they do get that part of the history right) and practicing my guttural threatening roar next to a cardboard cutout of Mean Gene Okerlund. Welcome to the Big Time, blog boy.
Though maybe that's what Kos's Newsweek columns in fact constitute, and maybe Karl does dress up like Adrian Adonis before he taps out whatever sewage he spews over there. I wouldn't know. I don't read Newsweek. Who has time for that shit? If I want pro wrestling, I have cable TV. If I want news, I have the Internets. And both of those can get me porn, if I'm so inclined, which Newsweek cannot. At least yet. Let's see how the sales go this year.
Michael Barone produces the most hackish paragraph ever produced in the entire history of Iraq war hawk hackery.
There's still much to be learned about our decisions, good and bad, in Iraq. But Feith's book is a step forward, as were those of Sherwood and Churchill 60 years ago.
The entire review is astounding, but wow, that's some impressive hackwork, right there.
You know who's funny? Niall Ferguson. I for some ungodly reason was looking at the silly things Andrew Sullivan says, and I saw this Niall Ferguson video.
The first half hour seems to be set in a Beckettian Florida retirement center rec room, where Ferguson is plaintively haranguing old people about how pathetic young people are for being interested in politics in general and Barack Obama in particular. The other half hours I didn't watch.
Niall Ferguson wishes to cement his reputation as a Scholarly Historian Whose Ideas Shake the World by doubling down on the McCainiac Surge and, apparently, by being the proxy for McCainiac anti-young people ads of the Grandpa Simpson caliber.
Is there a more egregious academic sellout than Niall Ferguson? I say no.
You know what I would do, if I were Ricky Gervais?
I would do a comedy series of Dubliners, with each episode a different story.
That shit could be really funny. Or he could fuck it all up on an epic basis. Either way, man.
UPDATE. I'm only sort of kidding here. If you take anything away from all this nonsense, I hope it is that Lenny Dykstra really is an idiot and not a financial wizard.
That this needs to be mentioned is a sad commentary on our times, etc.
As Foucault once said, suck on Dustin the Turkey, Editors!
Unfortunately, it appears The Editors remain wedded to a theoretical model that fails to serve the ends of a genuinely liberatory scholarship but rather produces one more tired iteration of essentialist, fundamentally patriarchal discursive modalities.
The Editors (and their soi-disant "radical" cohort) make quite a show of celebrating the inherently disruptive cultural productions of the Paleo-Left Blogosphere (PLB), particularly those regarding dissolute Irishmen and their impertinent Scandinavian interlocutors. However, these sorts of ostensibly emancipatory critical reconstructions in the final analysis remain quite literally toothless. As they must. A scholarly praxis capable of truly interrogating the vexed interrelationship between the dominant MSM narrative and the unruly linguistic subversions of the PLB would surely not rely upon a oversimplified binary construction of "give and take" as occurs in The Editors' strained cultural archeology. Rather, what is needed is an approach that is rhizomic, palimpsestic, that produces a critical problematic instead of yet another instantiation of an illusory teleology which, for all its triumphalism, ultimately denies agency and authentic subjectivity to those subaltern voices it allegedly intends to champion. It smacks of nothing so much as a muddled intentionalism.
What would The Editors make of the following specimen retrieved from the as yet underexplored trove of documents pertaining to Hesiod's old Counterspin site -- a resource of whose existence The Editors seem wholly unaware, despite their self-claimed "expertise" in this area? Yet here we see on display all the commitment to social justice, drunk driving, and wearing tight leather thongs that in truth characterized this moment in history. It is in this direction that future scholarly effort must be directed, not into the fallow fields of a sprezzatura entirely devoid of jouissance.
The Editors present their version of the etiology of the Left Blogosphere, a documentary account that differs in several key respects from the canonical narrative I cited here.
The Editors' revisionism is intriguing and no doubt well intentioned. However, it remains ideologically blinkered by its fashionable theoretical approach to the subject. A more deeply considered historical perspective is required, as further research into the primary source material continues to demonstrate. In this regard, I believe the following archival footage speaks for itself.
I've speculated that the Wingnuttosphere will be less of an asset and more of a burden for McCain in November, because those geniuses will insist on blathering loudly about all sorts of crazy shit -- and so will he, of course, but he'll be trying to fake otherwise to keep Tim Russert properly bovine.
Hey look, it's the Worst Writer on This or Any Other Internet, Paul J. Cella of Red State, explaining why we need a new Sedition Law to suppress the Musselman Menace!
We must allow for the possibility that Islam as such is a threat to this country. Even more bluntly: The question of the character of Islamic doctrine — whether it can be tolerated without fatal exposure to its war-making titles — must remain an open question if we are to remain a free people.
That second sentence is of course less blunt and more confused; "more blunt" would have been "nuke the sand niggers." But then when you are trying to mean something without actually saying it, you can't help farting verbiage all over the place. What Cella is trying to tell us amid the pomp and incompetence is that he wants a Sedition law making it illegal to publicly discuss those aspects of Islam Cella does not like.
Here is the enigma with this whole business. Most Americans, Right and Left, will profess belief in a very robust principle of Free Speech. Thus the idea of curbing discussion on an important topic will arouse their repugnance. I have argued in the past for legislation embracing certain aspects of Islamic doctrine — the dogmas, specifically, of Holy War (jihad), Holy Subjugation (dhimma) and perhaps Sharia law itself — into our current sedition law: in other words, outlawing the promulgation of these dogmas. Even among people favorably deposed toward an aggressive posture vis-à-vis Islam, this is met with suspicion and hostility.
Fair enough — but why abandon this Free Speech principle when it comes to the character of the Islamic religion? There is the perplexity and the frustration. People jealous to preserve a “marketplace of ideas,” where true ideas will “out-compete” false ones in the end, while understandably hostile toward my proposal to proscribe certain forms of Islamic speech, yet exhibit an apparent insouciance about proposals (less overt than mine, to be sure) to proscribe certain forms of speech about Islam.
Now it is a fact that in parts of the Western world (for instance that obscure bastion of the West known as the United Kingdom), it is well nigh illegal to speak ill of Islam as such. Virtually the entire Fourth Estate, including the American press, preferred to sit idly, or worse, when the fury of the Islamic world was aroused against a Dutch newspaper’s chosen manner of Free Speech.
Now this requires a good deal of boiling down until you get to the bone, which perhaps accounts for the smell. In the end it appears to render to "I meant a Danish newspaper" and "neener neener you're a wiener."
Besides Cella's difficulty in distinguishing "Europe" from "The United States," there's the problem of figuring out just what the hell he's so blubbering afraid of. And that would be this:
The question of whether Islam is a threat is among the most pressing of all questions right now.
Which is admirably and uncharacteristically comprehensible English. Good for Cella! Have a biscuit!
But, more importantly, relax: this is a pretty stupid question, when you come right down to it.
There are something like 5 million Muslims in America right now; if they wanted to cause significant trouble, they would have done so already. I report with relief the total absence of IEDs on my morning commute. And heck, to extend the olive branch to the Red State cretins, I myself will concede it's kind of stupid for Ivy League schools to be changing swimming pool policies to appease the Muhammadans -- the very minute they concede that as a Catholic kid in the NYC public schools I should have gone to school anyway on the Jewish holidays, or on another level, that it's absurd to give professionally aggrieved lay Catholic gasbags veto power over what kinds of giant candy sculptures get shown in art galleries, or what kinds of bloggers presidential candidates might wish to employ.
As a pretty damn lapsed Irish Catholic boy myself -- an outcome I'm sure much lamented by the shadowy operators of the Jesuit madrassa I attended in my adolescence -- I confidently place my faith in the potently corrupting secular humanism of late capitalist American culture. Give it three generations and the descendants of even the most rabid Islamofascist immigrants will be just as glutted on Big Macs and just as deluded into thinking Family Guy is witty as all the rest of us schlubs.
