Bushslime

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The criminality, corruption, incompetence, vindictiveness, and ideological blindness of the Bush regime goes on and on and on. The news out of the Justice Department’s inspector general office, that only ideologues were hired for summer internships, reminds me of neocon summer camp in Iraq. These children with connections and nothing else were sent to Iraq in the early days of the occupation. Clueless punks, their only claim to the mission was that they were Bushies, true believers, ignorant little frat boys. The disaster they helped make continues, a murderous debacle that has now lasted longer than US involvement in the Second World War. They’re lawyerly pals now run the Department of Justice, which has been turned into a partisan sewer, something even the GOP’s premier slime king himself, Richard Nixon, can envy from his perch in hell.

Her future?

With Ted Kennedy in bad shape, there’s an opening for the new liberal lion of the Senate. Senator Clinton should reach for it. She should shuck her stinking triangulating ways, renounce her shameless war-mongering, and make a stand among the 100. The fight is a long one, but it’s a good one, the best there is. The old white men who still run that outrageously undemocratic body need to have a fire lit under their plutocratic asses. She’s got lots of years left in her. It’s hers for the taking….

So the Pope and the Bush had a talk on the “fundamental moral values”? That’s the best joke I’ve heard all year. In the pseudo-state’s lush gardens, no less. A troll in the garden. I fell on the floor laughing at the thought. Bush greated Ratzy with "Your eminence, you’re looking good." The laughs keep coming.

Political economies

It’s fascinating how much attention is given to Vice Presidential candidates before an election. Afterwards, or course, they largely disappear -- unless they’re puppet-masters like Dick “Fuck Democracy” Cheney.

Barack Obama, fresh from pledging his fealty to toeing the disastrous Israeli-right line – guaranteeing continued colonialism, land theft, balkanization, and, not surprisingly, Palestinian reaction to these continued efforts to obliterate them as a people – is now hunting for a Veep. Needless to say, it must not be Hilary Clinton.

It’s yet another numbing irony of our politics that Clinton enjoys greater (white) working class support than Obama, since her DLC-wing of the Party has done so much to destroy the last vestiges of the (white) working class (cf. NAFTA) in the name of the neoliberal order. As Jesse Jackson showed, the white populist revolt, usually ignored by the Democrats, is a rich source of votes when not abandoned to the “god, guns, and gays” (and race) confidence game of the Right. This is why I think someone like Jim Webb or John Edwards should be Obama’s Veep; a populist firebrand who can shore up this flank, and then spend the next four years pushing hard for the long hard struggles ahead (global warming, health care, the war).

More than 3/4ths of adult American don’t have 4-year college degrees. What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with Manhattan, more likely: a liberal upper middle class and some enlightened rich folk don’t make much of a majority. But it’s this thin spectrum of the ruling class which funds the Democrats, making it a bourgeois party par excellence, beholden to the money. The Democrats, of course, are held up by African American voters, who aren’t much participants in the bourgeois pie. Meanwhile, the Republicans, equally bourgeois, are held up by poor whites, who also don’t get much more than ideological crumbs.

Harper's

“Everybody” reads the New Yorker, but for my money, Harper’s is where you should be if you want to break out of conventional wisdom. The latest issue is particularly rich: Mark Slouka wonders why Americans have become so subservient to “boss culture” authority, bootlicking and celebrity-worshipping, kissing up as we get kicked from above; Jonathan Rowe explains why a terminally ill man going through a divorce is the best thing for the Gross Domestic Product, that bogus and destructive way of measuring the economy (in the May issue, Kevin Phillips gave the history of the numbers racket, in which both Republican and Democratic regimes have fixed official statistics to mislead the rest of us); Garret Keizer examines the Episcopal Church’s battle over homosexual bishops, while Rome (the planet, the poor, etc.) burns. I’m half way through that last article, so I don’t know what else is to come, but I know it beats the shit out of the star-fucking that the Fleet Street hack Tina Brown debased the New Yorker with. Yes, I know she's gone, but the magazine remains largely what she made it: light, celebrity-oriented, fashionable, and soothing of its readership. There certainly are things worth reading it in, but they are few and far between.