Grotesque Old Party

A Republican member of Congress for South Carolina made the news last night for yelling “You lie” during President Obama’s speech. Apologizing by saying he got emotional -- emotionalizing politics is one of the hallmarks of fascism, which stresses irrationality and rage as organizing tools -- Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson showed once again how utterly mired in the lunatic fringe the Republicans have become. For what was he enraged about? I mean, besides the obvious reason that a black man is President, something this neo-con(federate) member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans must find one hell of an insult to his “heritage,” as they like to call it? That’s right, he was enraged that health-care might be provided to illegal migrants. The people who clean his toilets and mow his lawn. Another stalwart self-styled Christian shows his real colors.

Of course, there could be other reasons for his freak-out. Yesterday, a Republican California State Representative renowned for his homophobic “family values” resigned after boasting on live mic about fucking two different lobbyists, neither of whom was his wife. Michael Duvall goes into the history books for introducing the phrase “little eye-patch underwear” into the American political lexicon. Maybe Addy Joe’s got more than a hood in the closet and was sweating it out last night? God gravy, could he be stumping his maid?

McNamara

Robert McNamara’s dying in the midst of the gnashing and moaning of the international mourning and grieving for the pedophilic, self-hating, drug-addled popstar was instructive. Hardly anybody was paying attention, and I'd guess that the MJ-zombies would have said, huh, who?

McNamara knew that Vietnam was a murderous folly, but sucked in by the domestic politics, he carried on, his mouth a fount of lies. More than three million Vietnamese died as a result of the American war. 59,000 Americans were killed, and years later some of the ones who made it back are still deeply wounded. These numbers doesn’t include the nearly two million Cambodians slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge, who would have never come to power if not for the US bombing of that nation. True, that bombing was under Nixon’s watch -- the war blossomed under Kennedy and erupted under Johnson after starting under Eisenhower -- but the national security state has always been bipartisan. McNamara was a mass murderer, soaked in blood. That he got away with it, other then some late apologies and second-thoughts, and died at the age of 93 surely means he’s a model for others to come.

Obscenity is

a gold-leaf covered casket.

Will no one rid us of this Palin?

Is Sarah Palin’s quitting her job a good career move? There’s a book to be ghostwritten, a television/radio gig to be gotten, and fund-raising to do, so I very much think so. Now, this creature unleashed by the incontinent John McCain can reach for her apotheosis in the party of resentment and reaction, with its ugly streaks of nativism and racism. Like the big fascisms of the past, Palinismo talks class, but her populism very much serves the big boys in power. Never mind the incompetence, the ethical rot, the incoherence, the bizarre, the contradictions, Sarah P. is for the people at the dark heart of the GOP’s freakshow tent.

William Kristol called Palin’s bail-out from the governor’s office a “genius move,” but then this Murdoch hireling of the Weakest Standards magazine has long been supremely cynical. He, after all, cut his teeth as a daddy’s boy by acting as “Dan Quayle’s brain.” Kristol’s a fan of Palin, but thinks she needs to take some lessons in policy. In other words, he realizes that image in politics trumps experience, skill, knowledge, and temperament. It’s been ever such since Reagan. Puppets, performers, actors, great communicators using other people’s words, that’s what fuckers like Kristol want to protect the master class. No matter that their choices are ethically rotten, vindictive, ignorant, and ultimately disastrous.

For in many ways, the disaster plays into their hands too. As the New York Senate shows, when you hijack the process, hamstring it, and otherwise alienate the polity, you (In NY it’s the the lobbyists, millionaires, real estate interests, etc) keep things the way you like them.

South Carolina Law

Anybody ask the Governor if he knows his state's own laws?

SECTION 16-15-60. Adultery or fornication.

Any man or woman who shall be guilty of the crime of adultery or fornication shall be liable to indictment and, on conviction, shall be severally punished by a fine of not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars or imprisonment for not less than six months nor more than one year or by both fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court.

SECTION 16-15-70. "Adultery" defined.

"Adultery" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman when either is lawfully married to some other person.

SECTION 16-15-80. "Fornication" defined.

"Fornication" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman, both being unmarried.

The Party of God, con't

My, my, the family values crowd sure is adding some fine euphemisms to the language these days, aren't they?

"Hiking the Appalachian Trail" means fucking your mistress while leaving the wife and kids at home.

Pulling an "Ensign" means fucking your employee while leaving the wife and kids and home.

Iran

In Iran, it’s an old story, the people against the thugs, the goons, the fascists. Of course, the thugs have some people behind them too… I am constantly struck by the similarities of the American right -- a nativist, reactionary populist, fundamentalist peasantry combined with insecure shopkeepers who both act as the myrmidons of their own oppressors and masters in the corporate elite -- and the Iranian right. Bush and Ahmadinejad, now weren’t they twins? Both stubborn little men of surpassing ignorance claiming a hotline to god, Manichean in their malignant simplicity, and driving their nation off a cliff.

One difference of note, when Bush stole an election, Americans rolled over and turned the channel.

P.S. This article about Iran, written before the election, is excellent.

The party of hate?

Is the “lone gunman” one of American’s contributions to world civilization?

A couple of months ago, the feds released a study saying that domestic right-wing terrorism would increase in coming years. A no-brainer, really, with gun and ammo sales skyrocketing, and the Republicans stoking reactionary populism and coddling the lunatic fringe – just remember those ugly McCain/Palin rallies, where anti-Obama shouts of “kill him” and “terrorist” were heard and racist iconography seen. But the GOP, in high dungeon (they are only too eager to exploit the crazies, but unwilling to accept responsibility for them) had the report withdrawn. With the murders of George Tiller and Stephen Johns, the GOP’s sickening dependence on fundamentalists, anti-government/conspiracy freaks, gun nuts, racists, anti-Semites, and misogynists, stands out in stark relief.

Tortured War

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was an Al Qaeda member captured in Pakistan in late 2001. The FBI questioned him, using their time-honored good cop techniques, and evidently got useful information out of him. But Bush and his puppet-master Dick Cheney wanted more. They wanted proof that Saddam Hussin and Al Qaeda were working together. They wanted WMDs.

So their little whore-lawyers wrote some memos, the “gloves came off,” and al-Libi was tortured by the CIA and its mercenary goons. Then he was delivered to the tender mercies of Egyptian state terror. Unsurprisingly, al-Libi told them what they wanted to hear. That it was false was irrelevant. They were, after all, fixing the evidence for their already-agreed upon plan to attack Iraq. Good soldier Colin Powell, who was just following orders, took al-Libi’s false confession to the U.N. as the centerpiece of his argument for attacking Iraq.

Dick Cheney is right. Torture, or whatever prettified name he prefers, does work. It got him his smoking gun.

As Jonathan Schell reminds us, the American torture program evolved out of a Cold War counter-torture strategy. In Korea, the Chinese came up with techniques to make American POWs make false confessions of war crimes for propaganda purposes. They used sensory deprivation and other methods to produce mental breakdowns. The US military later tried to train soldiers to resist these methods with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. Bush and Cheney flipped SERE on its head, and returned the methods back to their original use: the making of propaganda, not the gaining of information about mythological ticking time bombs, not the oft-spoken protection of the "homeland."

American Taliban reveals its terrorist heart again

I remember doing clinic defense in Iowa City back in the late ‘80s, when I would help the local women’s reproductive health center withstand the bused-in anti-abortion hordes. Coming face-to-face with members of the American Taliban, I saw murder in their eyes. Of course, I didn’t know the term “Taliban” back then. I knew that all fundamentalisms are united by their desire to control sexuality, and by extension reproduction, which means, in their primitive minds, a focus on women as those most in need in segregation, control, and regulation. Not that gays, lesbians, and, heaven forbid, more non-canonical manifestations of sexuality like the transgenders, are to be left out of the religious loop. Nor, of course, are men, since you only have to scratch the surface of the “pro-life” (a euphemism that beats “enhanced interrogation methods” hands down) crowd to see their desire to ban all forms of contraception.

Bybee/Torturer

So Jay Bybee, torture memo signer, is really just a swell guy, not ideological at all, say his pals on this NPR piece. He shies away from controversy, so he passed John Woo’s “legal” reasoning for torture because he didn’t want to create any waves. Aw, isn’t tat tweet! Big baby Bybee. I bet he has pictures of his loved ones in his office, too. I wonder if he glanced their way when he decided not to upset the authoritarians who were his boss. Wouldn’t want to stand up for democracy and decency and humanity, good gravy no! No, by all means, let’s use torture, the tool of dictators, and fuck everything America stands for. Another gutless bureaucrat on the road to hell, which as ever is paved with the “banality of evil.” Amazingly, this criminal is now a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

IRA the AIG?

Not that I would condone such poor sportsmanship, of course, but why don't we all go over to 70 Pine St, that lovely Art Deco skyscraper that's still the HQ of AIG, and kneecap some of the suits when they come out this evening on their way to the helipad? Here's your bonus, motherfuckers.

Could there have been a worse choice?

The unelected governor, who used to have a progressive history, has foisted a protégée of that maggot-on-democracy Al D’Amato to the US Senate. Kristen Gillibrand got her start in politics with D’Amato, who was right up there on stage with her when Paterson made the announcement. But I’m sure she started earlier than that, since her father, Douglas Rutnik, is a veteran fixer and lobbyist who’s been bleeding the taxpayers dry for decades now. He was in tight with George “It’s good to be the governor” Pataki, who ended his tenure so much wealthier then when he started. Daddy Rut now shacks up with Pataki’s brains, Zenia Mucha, a nasty piece of work whose contempt for truth -- which is, after all, the fount of democracy -- presumably does wonders for her job as Exec VP of Corporate Lying at Walt Disney. But it gets dirtier: Rutnik was the protégée of Rastus Corning, the mayor of Albany for 40 years, considered one of the most corrupt figures in state history; Rutnik’s mother-in- law was Polly Noonan, a legendary figure in the morass of Albany’s corruption, and Corning's presumed mistress.

What a pedigree! Don't let the sins of the father stain the child, you say? Why not, unless she renouces it loudly and clearly? Because if you can't hear the scumsuckers sharpening their knives in anticipation of the boodle the unelected little hack is going to steer to them, then you're deaf as well as blind.

God god, can we bring back the up-tight prig of whoremonger already?

Eight years of making it worse

Worth quoting in detail, with the whole article here: William Dalrymple, NYRB 2/12/09

"The relative calm in Iraq in recent months, combined with the drama of the US elections, has managed to distract attention from the catastrophe that is rapidly overwhelming Western interests in the part of the world that always should have been the focus of America's response to September 11: the al-Qaeda and Taliban heartlands on either side of the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The situation here could hardly be more grim. The Taliban have reorganized, advanced out of their borderland safe havens, and are now massing at the gates of Kabul, threatening to surround and throttle the capital, much as the US-backed Mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late Eighties. Like the rerun of an old movie, all journeys out of the Afghan capital are once again confined to tanks, armored cars, and helicopters. Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of the country, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007, where they collect taxes, enforce Sharia law, and dispense their usual rough justice; but they do succeed, to some extent, in containing the wave of crime and corruption that has marked Hamid Karzai's rule. This has become one of the principal reasons for their growing popularity, and every month their sphere of influence increases.

The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still. In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notoriously corrupt playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place under his watch has amazed almost all observers."

I’m always struck how our cultural narratives are formed. Obama creates a “team of rivals” just like Lincoln, and “everybody” rushes to read PBS’s favorite pop-historian D.K. Goodwin’s book. Meme signed sealed and delivered. Except Lincoln wasn’t much different from most19th century Presidents, who made up their cabinets with bigwigs from their party, including those they’d run against for their party’s nomination. In Lincoln’s case, and this is the part of the story that has been lost in the endless repetition of “team of rivals,” his cabinet turned out to be barely functional; half way through his first term, Lincoln described his team as being “on the brink of destruction”; and three of the four “rivals” were gone by the end of that first term. Is this the model Obama really wants to follow?

We seem to favor baby history, baby talk, baby religion. I listened closely to “Pastor Rick” Warren and heard his version of an easy-listening Christianity, an embarrassment to theology. Lincoln, like most 19th century Presidents of our secular republic, didn’t have a cleric bless him at his inaugural. Warren’s for keeping gays and lesbians second-class citizens, so I’m not sure what he was doing up there, anyway, besides obstructing the struggle for human dignity.

Then I listened to John Williams’ specially-commissioned piece of hackwork. Whose idea was it to get this Tinseltown cliché-monger to write an inaugural tune? And why did he have to travesty the classic Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”? Aaron Copland turned that beautiful song into a sweet music, Williams made it another bad movie score. The real musicians who performed Williams’ cheap variations should have tossed out his faxed-in sheets and played Copland. What a profound misreading of Shaker ideals Williams gave us!

Since I shut the media off about two thirds through what I thought was a lackluster speech by Obama, I missed the inaugural poem, which I hear was sub-Whitmanesque. (I’ve read it since, but like most contemporary poems, it looks dead on the page.)

Just about an hour before we can all flush Bush/Cheney down the toilet of history. The bastards are getting away with it, of course, but this flushing away of the shit-stain is the best we can do here in the united states of symbols.

One of my neighbors, who isn’t from around here, hopes that Obama has a magic wand. I heard an oldster on the radio say, “If Obama fails, America fails.” Sigh. After more than two centuries, you’d think we’d be a mature democracy by now. Millions in DC are ready to party, which is nice, but the Chamber of Commerce has its eyes on the prize. They’ve drawn the line on Employee Free Choice, one of the best ways of shoring up the middle class, and are ready to fight to the death for plutocracy.

So what I want to know is: are you ready to put your muscle where your hope is?

As hollow as an airplane floating in a river

Unhappy the country without heroes, says a character in Brecht's Life of Galileo, and then Galileo says, no, unhappy the country that needs heroes.

What’s the opposite of a miracle? Real life? The tabloid-ization of everything means that yesterday’s ditching is getting its full fifteen, to the max. In a month, hardly anyone will remember it, and that’s a good thing, since there aren’t any bodies to fetishize for weeks. The grief counseling industry is left without anything to do, and that’s the kind of economic slowdown I can get behind. WNYC’s Brian Lehrer just referred to the pilot as a “hero for the ages.” Really? What about all the other pilots who aren’t as lucky? Does it follow that they are at fault? The pilot made a perfect water landing, a bravura job to be sure, but that’s his job, isn’t it? So how come professionalism isn’t recognized as such anymore? Already, the “first responders” are getting their rewards from the Imperial Mayor. It all feels so tinny and flimsy, but if you want even more baby food, stay tuned for the book and then the movie of the week.

A dick's farewell address

"Ah wassh right, even ifs its wasssh mosssstly Dick tellin' me what to do, or Dick doin' it and then tellin' me about it and tellin' me to do it ex posty facto. (Ah'm Yale edjucated.) Hey, you might even shay Ah was Dicked."

things

Israel’s 100-to-one kill ratio is going to solve nothing, and of course will only make the pain last longer and longer. That it’s largely a campaign tactic makes it even more sickening.
*
It goes without saying that the new Secretary of State will be no help at all -- no politician with an eye to her future like Clinton will take the risk of trying to stop Israel’s mutilation of the West Bank or, god forbid, recognizing the basic humanity of the Palestinians. She’ll work for a Bantustan, and nothing more.
*
Meanwhile, who will be filling her sensible shoes her in NY? Bloomberg’s favorite is Caroline Kennedy, a non-entity. He seems to have Paterson over the barrel on the issue, however. I was amused to learn that Kennedy’s fortune is 100 million, which surprised me until I remember that she must have gotten mommy’s Onassis fortune, but that she hasn’t personally contributed anything to the NYC school fundraising organization she figure-headed. Of course, what’s a $100 mil when Bloomberg is giving another $370 million-plus to those fuckers the Yankees. Cut schools, cut public transportation, cut health, but by all means pile it on for the Yankees. They are so deserving.

Over and out

I threw my shoe at '08
Did you?