Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lashed out at fellow Republicans Tuesday for a "capitulation ... of dramatic proportions" to Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the lame-duck Congress.
And what Communism have we been compelled to endure...?
Republican senators have broken with the party's leaders on several key votes in order to advance some of President Obama's top policies during the lame-duck. GOP members defected to pass a repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell" and have done likewise to secure likely ratification for the START Treaty. Some Republicans might allow a health bill for 9/11 first responders to move forward, while three Republicans voted to end debate on the DREAM Act, an ultimately unsuccessful immigration bill.
The comedy is that these are all rather tame, ideologically -- indeed, the arguments against any of them are, even to be generous-minded, crap.
I agree that it's a mistake to pretend that policy outcomes depend for their successful implementation upon the willpower of particular political actors. But that doesn't mean one ought to take much joy in the success of the competing hypothesis, namely, that our system is so wildly compromised that sensible policies can only ever by implemented in radically abnormal political circumstances.
This would indeed be the corollary of the "we're fucked" hypothesis, which states that the only thing the federal government can do anymore is start stupid wars and destroy the economy.
The semester is over, the grading complete: I am completely degraded, once more.
I taught my Banned Books course again, and again, I think I screwed up and accidentally talked the kids into thinking that Lolita probably should have been censored and never published after all -- and Nabokov locked up as a Menace, and likewise McGahern, Lawrence, & Flaubert.
Which they should have been, maybe. Lawrence, anyhow; Lady Chatterley's Lover is a hard book to defend on the literary merits, because it doesn't have any. But you can't teach a banned books class without it, given how important the trial was.
Unfortunately you can teach a banned books class and not get into Ulysses, because, well, it's too damn long. Stupid Joyce.
But I'm rambling. The semester is over, even the shouting, I mean the grading. So to ramble...
I've always been fascinated by the whole question of censorship as applied to Art. When I was Young, I was of course all in favor of Art, which I still am, though not in the same way. What I mean is, yes, I accept that if a work has Artistic Value its author and publishers should not be sent to jail or otherwise punished. But the more I looked into it, seriously, the more muddied the whole question got. What is Artistic Value when it's at home?
I mean, take Lawrence. Lady Chatterley's Lover, as Mad Men fans know, has a reputation as the book of Free Love and whatnot, and the trial invented sexual intercourse in England (more's the pity), and so forth. But then while Lawrence does celebrate four letter words and fucking, he's brutal about certain forms of fucking he does not like. Lawrence is perfectly loony about the Horrors of the Clitoral Orgasm (honestly, he is, read the book -- and yes I teach those passages, and yes that makes students go all pasty when I explain it); and he is almost as scathingly puritanical about joyful lesbianism as, er, say, Ralph Reed, or else Radclyffe Hall.
So, yeah. Penguin should have won the trial, but it's ridiculous to see the "freeing" of Lady Chatterley's Lover as "freeing" sexuality in general, because on a fundamental level it is so ferociously misogynist.
(The best response to Lawrence artistically is probably Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy; O'Brien -- who knew from censorship -- is extremely caustic about how male anti-censorship artistic hero wannabes can still treat women like shit, like bargaining chips in a game played against certain other masculine hierarchical factions. But I wander. I'd love to assign The Country Girls consistently -- wonderful books, the Mr. Gentleman sex scene in the first volume is the most spectacularly grotesque & offputting sex scene ever conceived, outside of Japanese tentacle porn MAYBE -- but the books seem to wander into and out of print erratically.)
I was saying...?
Lolita. Yes. Where I get into trouble with Lolita is when I show them the 1997 Adrian Lyne film version, with Jeremy Irons as H. Humbert.
I actually like this film; there are very sound reasons not to, but I like it. For practical reasons -- it makes the book easier to teach, I think, because it really is very cheesy-disturbing, a category Lyne pioneers maybe accidentally. (Lyne, you will recall, directed, like, this other stuff.) Probably but not definitely non-intentionally, the film is shot & looks like some sort of sappy semi-tastefully done Massengill commercial. Or like a Skinemax softcore -- or like the two together, because whenever the camera looks at Domininique Swain, you see what women look like in modern film and video, young and ripe and alluring and innocent and yummy...
And then you get that moment where Humbert-Irons first sees her, and the camera traces her body (in a sprinkler! Very Flashdance!), and then she smiles at him, and you see her teeth -- her braces.
Just that shot alone is worth it, because, well, it is creepy as hell, shocking, even. Even for the easily shocked, it's shocking.
Irons's grateful smile in return is fantastically horrendous, in the sense that you're being encouraged by every cinematic cliche ever to get you to really DIG his reaction. Man is reluctant. Man sees Hot Chick. Man is Not reluctant any more! Because he sees a Hot Chick!
But here... she's 14.
She's sexy.
With... braces.
I don't know; maybe it takes a director of cliches to explode a cliche, but that scene is just fantastic fimmaking. That it may also be awful filmmaking, er, only strengthens my point.
My own understanding of Lolita, the book, is to take a step back and realize that what Nabokov is attempting is the staging of a scene, and not the resolution of a theme. And this has everything to do with the question of Art and its relation to censorship.
And that's where the audience learns there isn't a future in a relationship like this. That's why I think it is a moral film, a cautionary tale, and I hope that the censors will give it a release which allows parents to take their teenage children to see it, because it's teenage children who it affects, this situation. It allows children to become aware of the dangers and adults to become aware of the dangers.
The joke, see, is that what Irons is saying here is exactly the defense of the book you get from John Ray, PhD. No, really, look it up.
One of the most amazing things about Lolita is that it contains a pretend expert introduction that explicitly makes fun of the anticipated arguments for not banning the novel it preambulates.
The real genius of Lolita is that it is impossible to read it, or deal wih it, and not find oneself caught up in endlessly convoluted questions of aesthetics and ethics, conscience and cleverness, law and individualism. And it does this while allowing you even to adhere to absolutes; HH is a monster! But is monstrousness all the book has to discuss...?
There is a tendency when it comes to banned books to think that certain questions are Resolved all of a sudden when courts render verdicts. Certainly this has happened with Flaubert: Madame Bovary is a very dangerous Classic, but it's easy to forget that, if we just consider it a Classic.
Lolita is also a classic, but it sure puts the poison in the wound.
Anyway, insisting upon the necessary moral awfulness that exists in Flaubert and Nabokov always seems to result in some final papers where the writer seems relieved to be finally allowed to wholeheartedly endorse the moral-juridical values of the regime of Napoleon III. I have weird occupational hazards.
My posting for the past eight months has been a bit erratic. You must forgive me. I have had two deaths in my immediate family, one was the man I considered to be like my father. My uncle was killed in a car accident the Sunday following Easter. The person responsible was sentenced to four years in prison. It was the most he could get.
I was prepared to hate the man responsible for the rest of my life. I was prepared to do whatever it took to exact a measure of retribution for the loss (making sure everyone he came into contact knowing that he had committed this crime), but all of that changed with a simple gesture. My cousin walked over to the man that had taken his father, extended his hand and forgave him. Could any of us had done such a thing? Could we have shaken the hand of man responsible for our father's death?
I was taken aback when I learned of this. How could I continue on my path? My family are devout Christians. In the face of this horrible event they have chosen to forgive. I cannot be vengeful in the face of their forgiveness, but where do I put my hate? Where do I put the energy it took to hate this man? Where does my life go from here? I am at a crossroads and need the advisement of the wise.
The world will little note nor long remember the Senator (Hell, I've already forgotten which ninny it was*, & will not be arsed researching it.) to whom working the entire wk. before Xmas was disrespectful to the institution & an attack on Xianity, yada, but here's a solution, Senate reactionaries: Make like newly-minted Senator Manchin of WV, who can't himself be arsed to do his fucking job, & just up & leave anyway. (Found here.)
I've no idea how many elitist jerks need to be in the Senate for a quorum (Again, I'll not be arsed.) but wouldn't it be an excellent idea for as many reactionary Senators as possible to get home to their families & campaign donors next wk., & let the Senate's business go on w/out them? Please?
Here is a Big Dumb Strawman put together by Glenn Reynolds:
We often hear politicians and pundits denounce property rights. Property rights, we're told, protect the fat cats against the needs of the public. They're a tool for keeping the little guy down.
In the actual universe we never hear politicians or pundits say anything remotely of the kind.
Similarly, in the actual universe, large private corporations with political influence swallowing up the property of small businesses is precisely what you'd expect under a government corrupted by decades of glib libertarian dogmatic rhetorical posturing.
In Glenn Reynold's universe, corporations have too much power over how the government operates because of the liberal media and socialist politicians.
(Pictured: Photograph of typical Instapundit reader)
Santa Claus and his elves are seeing more heartbreaking letters this year as children cite their parents' economic troubles in their wish lists.
U.S. Postal Service workers who handle letters addressed to Santa at the North Pole say more letters ask for basics — coats, socks and shoes — rather than Barbie dolls, video games and computers.
At New York City's main post office, Head Elf Pete Fontana and 22 staff elves will sort 2 million letters in Operation Santa, which connects needy children with "Secret Santas" who answer their wishes.
Fontana, a customer relations coordinator for the Postal Service, has been head elf for 15 years.
"The need is greater this year than I've ever seen it," he says. "One little girl didn't want anything for herself. She wanted a winter coat for her mother."
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) called Democrats' push to force through an arms control treaty and an omnibus spending bill right before Christmas "sacrilegious," and warned he'd draw the process out to wage his objections.
“We shouldn’t be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it’s sacrilegious and disrespectful," he told POLITICO. "What's going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year - they kept everybody here until [Christmas Eve] to force something down everybody's throat. I think Americans are sick of this."
Fancy jewelry and expensive electronics won’t be under Columbia resident Tamika Claybourne’s Christmas tree.
This holiday season she’ll be lucky if she can even fill her children’s stockings with the basics.
“I am worried about the everyday necessities,” the 36-year-old single mother of four said. “I just really want to get stuff that they need — clothes, shoes. I am having a hard time trying to provide for me and the four of them.”
Claybourne hopes the Maury County Community Christmas Card Program will be able to provide some of those necessities, but that will depend on the amount of donations provided by her neighbors. Like Armstrong, many of the people asking for help are hardworking people who are just down on their luck....
Armstrong is raising four children by herself. Her oldest is 19 and is hoping to attend Columbia State Community College or Middle Tennessee State University, while her youngest is 9 years old.
While raising four children, Claybourne obtained a degree from Kaplan Career University in 2007. For the past 15 months, she has worked at a local clinic, drawing blood, giving shots and performing other important tasks.
But in June, the struggling economy resulted in her hours being reduced to only about 30 per week. Since then, she barely has enough money to provide for her children, and she has fallen several months behind on her rent.
Economic statistics show that Claybourne is not alone in feeling economic pain this holiday season. The unemployment rate in Maury County stands at 14 percent, the fifth highest in the state.
Asked whether he'd support the legislation, and oppose a filibuster to it, DeMint answered, simply, "no" to both questions. "It raises taxes, it raises the death tax. I don't think we needed to negotiate that aspect of this thing away," DeMint said. "I don't think we need to extend unemployment any further without paying for it, and without making some modifications such as turning it into a loan at some point."
Huh? It raises the death tax? DeMint is talking here about the estate tax, which, admittedly, is zero at the moment thanks to bizarre tax law writing from Republicans. But in three weeks it automatically reverts to an exemption of $1 million and a rate of 55% on everything above that level. That's pretty high. Or maybe the proper point of comparison is the 2009 level: a $3.5 million exemption and a 45% rate.
Well, compare away. The Obama deal sets the exemption at $5 million and the rate at 35%. That's lower than the most recent rate and much lower than the rate that will shortly go into effect if there's no tax deal.
The United States cannot go on like this indefinitely. The glib acceptance of the wonders of grotesque inequality? The mainstreaming of anti-science nonsense?
If your member of Congress has ever proposed or approved an earmark, your member of Congress has basically ass-raped a kitten and then smashed its cute l'il head in with a shovel and then stole its credit card number so as to buy Doobie Brothers concert bootlegs.
Senate Democrats unveiled earlier this afternoon a 1,924-page omnibus spending bill to fund the government through fiscal year 2011. Aides to GOP legislators on Capitol Hill have already begun poring over the $1.1 trillion package, describing the proposal as “a total mess” to Fox News.
Kitten rape!
Or not.
See, the thing about "earmarks" is, they are negligible in regards to overall federal spending; one of the reasons people elect representatives and senators in the first place is to represent their district and/or state in the sense of getting the federal government to spend money in it; and also, whenever you actually look at these Wacky Earmarks, they usually end up seeming pretty cheap and actually kind of reasonable.
But back to the kitten rape:
UPDATE: According to a tally by Sen. John McCain’s office, the legislation includes 6,488 earmarks totaling nearly $8.3 billion. In a speech from the floor of the Senate, McCain blasted the bill, asking is his colleagues if they had been “stricken with amnesia” for appropriating such wild earmarks only weeks after a swift electoral rebuke for Democrats.
“Enough with the spending, enough of mortgaging our children and our grandchildren’s futures. The phenomenon of the Tea Party — taxed enough already — they were against the spending, the earmarking,” McCain, who is looking to force the bill be read in its entirety from the floor of the Senate, said. “What is going on here? Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia? WHY ARE THESE CLOUDS YELLING AT ME! WHAT IS IT WITH THIS ONION ON MY BELT ANYWAY! MR. PRESIDENT, WE HAVE TOO MANY STATES, PLEASE ELIMINATE THREE! DEAR SICKOS AT MODERN BRIDE....”
So it seems Red State lurves John McCain again. How pleasing.
Anyway, McCain and his "staff" (yecch) have been diligently patrolling kitten anuses:
The senator’s aides — as well as the senator himself on Twitter — have begun circulating what they deem the most outrageous and wasteful spending measures in the bill. Some choice selects:
$247,000 - Virus free grapes in Washington State $413,000 - Peanut research in Alabama $125,000 - Fishery equipment for the Guam Fisherman’s Cooperative Association $349,000 - Swine waste management in North Carolina $277,000 - Potato pest management in wisconsin $246,000 - Bovine tuberculosis treatment in Michigan and Minnesota $522,000 - Cranberry and blueberry disease and breeding in New Jersey $500,000 - Oyster safety in Florida $400,000 - Solar parking canopies and plug-in electric stations in Kansas $165,000 - Maple syrup research in Vermont
Every single one of these horrible awful earmarks looks to me as if it is cheap and reasonable and well targeted to the health of local economies. These are exactly the things the federal government needs to spend money on.
The "earmarks" nonsense is yet another example of how the right wing is profoundly anti-democracy. And also of how they are horrible nose-fucker shitnozzles.
(This review is a stop on a “virtual book tour” for the paperback version of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change, an account of the 2008 presidential campaign. My thanks to Trish Collins for inviting Whiskey Fire to participate. Up next on the “tour” is Mr. Rude Pundit, on Wednesday the 15th.)
Game Change is a shallow and ultimately pointless book, but nevertheless irritating.
The book lacks a thesis, an absence Heilemann and Halperin portentously announce in the first paragraph of their Author’s Note:
The idea for this book arose in the spring of 2008 out of a pair of firm convictions. The first was that the election we had both been following for more than a year was as riveting and historic a spectacle as modern politics has ever produced. The second was that, despite wall-to-wall media coverage, much of the story behind the headlines had not been told. What was missing and might be of enduring value, we agreed, was an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House.
In other words, what a great story! What a spectacle! What a show! Let's now find out about all the juicy backstage drama, the intrigue, the arguments, the fights, the scandalous fucking! (And yes, there is scandalous fucking, for which we can thank John Edwards and Rielle Hunter. Thanks, idiots.)
Because people love that backstage stuff -- the gossip. They eat it up.
Oh and also this stuff might be of some historical value too, because this is very historical history-stuff, ahem. Politics, you know, what fun.
Which is not to say that gossip can never be of significance; for instance, that Strom Thurmond secretly had a black daughter is a fairly revealing detail about Dixiecrat history. But then again, a detail like that only matters if it adds color to an understanding of Thurmond’s political and cultural class, and how that class was comprised of a bunch of absolute bastards. Clearly, I should hope, nobody is diseased enough to care about Strom Thurmond’s sex life for its own sake.
But why do any of the details in Game Change matter?
Halperin and Heilemann never tell us -- very likely because they consider themselves scrupulous journalists, getting all their facts right and i-dotting and t-crossing and so forth, and as scrupulous journalists, it is not up to them to tell you what anything means as far as how the policies and behaviors of these fascinating “characters” might impact real people. They are after all not partisans.
And fair enough, whatever. But all that means is that they have essentially censored themselves. All they can talk about is the game; they can never judge it.
The most glaring, and annoying, symptom of this absence of anything like an argument is Halperin and Heilemann’s constant featherbrained return to the phrase “game changer,” a cliché dressed up as a profundity. They trot this out all the time, like a mystic invocation of Importance: say the words, and poof! Revelation! Meaning!
Yet the trick never quite works. One may perhaps be somewhat underwhelmed to learn that the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards camps all came to the same conclusion about the Iowa caucuses: “looking back at it, they all agreed: Iowa had been a game changer.” No shit....
The cliché-flogging is not quite as relentlessly awful as what Tom Freidman perpetrates, but it's close. Clinton is down in the delegate count even after winning Texas and Ohio, which prompts the revelation that “for Obama to win the nomination would require a magnum-force game changer,” a sentence that deserves to be shot.
Also impressive is how so much of what is here is already well-known, and was well-known at the time. Heck, for every fact or factoid I learned, there were two or three that for some reason didn't make the cut. David Shuster's sexist snipe at Chelsea Clinton is mentioned; Chris Matthews' sexist swipe at her mother is for some reason unmentioned. Perhaps Matthews' blatherings were not considered significantly game-changey, or something. Who knows.
The reason this "game change" stuff is irritating is that the most blindingly obvious implication of the book is that "the game" – American electoral politics as it presently exists and as the authors depict it – is expensive, wasteful, unproductive, stupid, and, flatly, bad for the country.
The Iowa caucuses, for example, are utterly absurd, detested even by the candidates themselves. The rules are arcane, the process inexplicable, the state small. Its electorate is not representative of the country as a whole. Why Iowans, and not, say, New Yorkers, get to exert potent influence over the national choice of who gets to be in charge of the nukes, is a mystery.
Game Change sheds no light in this regard, but we do discover that an angry John McCain once said to his wife, “FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!” (The authors assure us that since this is in quotes it is a 100% true real statement, and I believe them.)
Also mysterious is the primary/caucus system as a whole. Why is it valuable to watch sleep-deprived candidates spend vast sums of money telling preposterous lies about themselves and each other via television commercials, at least in terms of rationally deciding who will negotiate weapons treaties or propose tax policy?
It tells us nothing: who wins a nomination or an election is dependent upon a multitude of factors, only a very small range of which are in the candidate’s control. McCain was always doomed, probably; the fact that he behaved like a psychotic ancient baby and gave the VP slot to a venomous dingaling who appeals solely to smug ignorant zealots didn’t help his cause, but the economy would have screwed any GOP candidate.
But that fairly elementary observation is not nearly as much fun as the endlessly rehashed minutiae of the campaigns, the offhand remarks, the "gaffes," the whole tedious litany related here by the authors in ardent detail, especially in their gory account of the Clinton/Obama war. As if it mattered.
Now, don't get me wrong; there is certainly a sense in which that whole awful Klingon opera "mattered." But there is a more important sense in which it didn't.
Halperin and Heilemann's description of what happened after the Wall Street disaster in September is revealing. For them, this was Obama's apotheosis, when he started to be really taken seriously by serious people. For their narrative, the most important of these serious people is Bill Clinton, because they need an arc about the Reconciliation of the Warring Camps.That's good theater!
For people who care about the economy, though, it is more revealing that these Serious People prominently included Rob Rubin, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, and Hank Paulson; it is a real feather in Obama's cap that Paulson was impressed by Obama's "sobriety and maturity." Oy.
Nothing's changed, changed utterly; a stifling consensus is reborn. And unemployment goes unaddressed.
Equally disheartening in this regard is the authors' account of Clinton's post-campaign discussion with Mark Penn, whom she inexplicably does not hate for being incompetent and awful and costing her the presidency. More disturbing is that she only demoted and didn't fire him for consulting with the Columbian ambassadorduring the campaign about getting a trade deal passed that she opposed -- as did labor. Worse than the political malpractice is the message sent about how being inside is apparently more important than the issue; from a progressive perspective, this is galling, not least because the story is so damn familiar.
Most repulsive of all is that, as Haperin and Heilemann mention at several points in the text, many politicians apparently read Maureen Dowd's drivel and take it seriously.
Game Change shows that what we most desperately need right now is to change the game, because that’s what’s killing us. That's not what Halperin and Heilemann set out to prove, but so what? They didn't really set out to prove anything beyond the breathlessly trivial anyway.
