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.