Being John Maverick

(click for larger version of pic that took waaay too much time)

Poor David Fucking Brooks -- Apparently waving the bloody rag and inciting the mob Slobodan Milošević-style wasn’t how John McSame's run for the White House was supposed to end:

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
...

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Notice the soft, pastel-toned Republican Passive Voice -- "class-warfare clichés took control" -- that hypocrites like Bobo predictably deploy when confronted with the grotesque reality that their political movement is a complete fucking horror show. As if some invisible, inexplicable and otherworldly force had seized his bootiful, bootiful Party and was shaking it helplessly around like a tiger playing with a bunny.

Of course to anyone with an IQ above sheetrock and a basic understanding of modern American political history who hasn't made a living sucking Conservative dick his entire adult life, it was utterly predictable that this hole into the nightmare underbelly of the American Dream is one down which a Republican will always jump when the poll numbers start to fall.

Especially as rageaholic a Republican as John McSame.

Still it seemed to startle Senator Straight Talk when the crazy old woman with the bag-lady hair and the rustic view of “Ay-rabs” started regurgitating his campaign’s odious talking points all over his $500 loafers. Probably because, for as long as he’s been hanging around the Congress, John McSame has ached to be President of some other America.

A simple, White, pre-digital America where Old Doc Miller still makes house calls and sends the bill off to some big White Guy building full of competent men in crisp woolen suits who take care of such things.

A prosperous America, where any Jimmy with a high school diploma, a wrench and a cockeyed idea can go down to a reassuringly White Guy bank full of competent men in gray flannel suits, get a loan, and make it big starting up a tool and die company in his garage.

An affluent America where serious economic problems mostly happen to small, nuisancy Brown People countries. Counties with weird names who we suspect are insufficiently grateful that the United States is The Greatest Country In The History Of The Universe. Countries we can sternly lecture on their shocking lack of White Guy buildings full of competent men in linen suits, or bomb until they get the hell off the front page and stop pestering us.

Of course, on the rare occasions that American economic problems wander into the headlines, they could always be remedied by competent men in crisp woolen suits deregulating each other, or passing sacks of money back and forth between various White Guy buildings, or reminding Americans that they wouldn’t be in such a mess if it weren’t for welfare cheating Brown People with weird names who are probably insufficiently grateful that they are permitted to live in The Greatest Country In The History Of The Universe.

In that America, John McSame wouldn’t have to fight for the top job against some scary, Harvard Negro half his age, who wears a crisp suit and never seems to break a sweat or raise his voice. In that America, War Heroes like John McSame are anointed to the Presidency by the acclamation of a Grateful Nation.

In that America, no mere inaugural procession would do.

That America would need a Roman Triumph, with laurels and spoils and white bulls for sacrifice, and John McSame liveried like a Mercury astronaut down Pennsylvania Avenue, in a mile-long Cadillac -- top down and pneumatic blond trophy wife by his side -- through a blizzard of ticker tape and wild applause, to be let off in front of the most important White Guy Building of them all, where he would be healed of his wounds and grievances, healed of his cancer and his rage, lope up the stairs two at a time and take command of a world where the orbits of planets and the rise and fall of nations are ruled by competent American men in crisp woolen suits making important ship-to-shore calls on rotary phones.

It is this Old and Fictional World Order that John McSame believes he is ready to lead. But it turned out that here in the real world, you don’t get to the Big Chair by bodily Assumption, and on the grotty road from hustings to White House the Senator from Arizona slammed head-first into the dirty, little secret at the heart of the GOP: that Republican domestic realpolitik is a filthy shithole where you absolutely cannot win without the fierce support of the dregs of American culture, and the native guides all work for Karl Rove.

Slobodan John thought he could have it both ways; that his campaign could chum the political waters into a frenzy by remote control, while his pet media and POW trump card spared him ever having to come face-to-ugly-face with the malice his campaign unleashed.

But it turns out its a zero-sum game and the devil owns all the preferred stock.

From the NYT:

October 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
By FRANK RICH

…
At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

…
What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.
…

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
...

The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

Rod Serling wrote this in the LA Times in 1964:

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

And in the 44 years since, the modern Right has always depended on an alliance of corporate feudalists and various species of bigots to gain and hold power. There's nothing very remarkable or profound in noting the Right's simple arithmetic: without a reliable base of hateful yahoos, Republicans would be just another fringe, 3% Party; with them, they win elections.

What is remarkable is that, after 30 years of being methodically neutered at by the Right, the traditional media would rather chew its own arm off rather than reporting this simple, ugly fact of American politics as the tragedy that it is.