Sunday, October 12, 2008

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.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Couldn't be said better dg! This ugliness needs to be exposed to te sunlight. I have never been more affraid for Obama than I have been of late. I cringe in fear at his public appearances and this in itself shouldn't be so.

Distributorcap said...

dg - excellent and well put

mccain has let the horses out -- and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. palin is RELISHING in this -- in his quest, rather his alleged anointment to the presidency mccain truly stepped in the doo-doo.

but he did it willingly -- he KNEW that this is what was left. when the "moderating" forces of the GOP began to skewer (remember none of them ever really like mccain) -- he was left with the garbage -- and that garbage was stinking and festering for years.

now he is trapped -- in so many ways. if he really felt country first he would continue on his campaign as a gentleman - but knowing it really is over, he aint gonna win -- and it is better for the country that we move on. let political nature takes its course but he wont - and his people - just wont let him.

and the genie is out the barn now.

the best we can happen for is the completel landslide that puts the GOP out of business once and for all

Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...

But, but, but, we're exeptional. We're ALL exceptional. Very Exceptional. And if the SCUM (SoCalledUnbiasedMedia) were to report the true state of the Murkin political experiment (broken, in pieces, shattered and spilling its vital fluid down the drain), the People might start to think theirs maybe was NOT the most exceptionalest, most wonderfullest, Greatest Fucking Country In the History of the Universe, and THEN what would happen, hunh, wise guy?

Anonymous said...

Drifty,

Thanks for this one! Excellent!

Rich nails it here: 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.

The onus is also on our side to call them for it - LOUDLY and CLEARLY. Our side needs to make it clear in no uncertain turns that we WILL STAND UP against the thuggish behavior on display. We WILL DEFEND OURSELVES. And when the victory is ours, WE WILL PROSECUTE those who advocate criminal incitements and the fools who dare to act on those incitements.

Its time to display some spine and not back down. And, if I'm right, these junkyard bullies will fold like a cheap suit when confronted thusly.

SP

Anonymous said...

Shorter David “Lying Right-Wing Asshole” Brooks:

“If Democrats weren’t such pointy-headed coastal-elite pantywaists, the Republican Party would never have become the refuge of deranged racist misogynist theocratic gibberers.”

chaos4700 said...

Well put. I always knew there was an deep undercurrent of racism in white American society -- I come from a blue collar Midwestern factory working family -- but I never realized the current was so strong as well as deep until these rallies took the turn they've taken.

I might be waxing too philosophical -- I may be a Midwesterner but at heart I guess I'll always be one of those "East Coast intellectuals" -- but we are very lucky, as a species and as a nation, that we have the internet. This sort of thing might have gone completely unnoticed if it weren't for bloggers with video cameras who can bypass the news filters. Some of the comments that get picked up from McCain-Palin supporters are just horrendous. And it doesn't exactly take any baiting to get the feedback.

Anonymous said...

I came of age as a white girl in the segregated South. (My high school wasn't integrated until 1965, long after Brown v. Board of Education.) Recognizing and fighting my own racism was a long, slow, painful process, perhaps still not complete-- and I WANTED to leave my racist heritage behind from the time I was a teenager. How much more difficult it must be when you're older and even more set in your ways, or ambivalent about what you want to believe in.

Still, as Donna Brazile recently noted, we've come a long way in this country. A long way, but we're not at the promised land yet.

To watch McCain, Palin and their entire operation carelessly call up the demons and smash to bits what so many have struggled toward-- a country in which racism is a shameful thing, and in which every person regardless of skin color can lay claim to the American dream-- fills me with anger and sorrow.

--gravie

bill said...

"McCain, who is no racist ..." At this point, why give him the benefit of the doubt?

darkblack said...

'...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...'

U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

;>)

moeman said...

Wow, what a read. Kudos dg.

~~~

Also, what does one call a right-winged elitist like brooks and george will et al.?

Nan said...

Wow. Great post.

Angel Of Mercy said...

You DO get it done, Glassman! Thank ya one more time...

Anonymous said...

Well put DG.

tech98 said...

Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.”

Let's review:
The former mayor of New York disdained cosmopolitans.

The centimillionaire former governor of Massachusetts gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.”

That either of these clowns can make such statements and not be laughed off the stage demonstrates the pathological mendacity and blind-obedience, magical-thinking hypocrisy of today's Repigs.

Anonymous said...

Most excellent post, driftglass.

I salute you.

Cirze said...

Once again (like I need to say it).

You R O C K ! ! !

Nobody does it quite like you.

Very cool.

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.

(But that would reflect on itself, so it plays dumb in hope that its audience is dumber.)

Suzan

Anonymous said...

Please help stop the hate.

Please sign the American Petition for the Immediate Abandonment of Dangerous, Incendiary Rhetoric as it Relates to the 2008 Presidential Campaign.

Anonymous said...

What we have are neo-fascist Republi-Con-artists trying everything they have to maintain the status quo which serves those who have club memberships in the Kleptocracy New World Order Club.

McCain is a racist, as well as a golddigger. He cannot look Obama in the eye. McCain suffers, not only from cancer, but is mentally ill. He has never gotten over his weakening as a POW, when he gave the Vietcong information about Navy operations. The guy has such self-loathing and a lack of competency he has a hard time understanding reality. He has a hook in his mouth and is being led by the Con's Party big game fisherman.

He demonstrated his ability to do the bidding for thieves through his Keating 5 associations; his ability to hang with terrorist supports through his association with former Army Major General John SInglaub and his US Council for World Freedom (support of death squads and Nazi collaborators); his choice for V.P. with her association with the successionist-anti-American politic group, Alaskan Independence Party; Palin's affiliation with Pastor Muthee, a self-described witchhunter of women; and Palin's abuse of power whereby being found in violation of ethical practices as governor.

This is THEIR PARTY. They cannot own-up to any of their worst practices. And now, their CON Party has been the biggest players in the collapse of the U.S. economy.

Anonymous said...

McCain - urbane?

INSANE!

Anonymous said...

Here's what pissed me off about that bit of dribble from Bobo.

This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Fucking waaahhh. Those mean ol' Democrats just kept nominating them there eeeeleeetes, so we HAD to go at them with a barbed wire weed whacker. It's all their fault! They made us do it!

That's the first thing. The second is... What fucking "coastal pointy-heads" is he talking about??? Motherfucker needs a map and a geometry lesson.

Kerry, I'll give you. Pointy. Coastal. But 2004. Hardly the genesis of Republican class war.

Gore? Has been in the pencil sharpener, perhaps once too often, but Bobo might want to check his map, RE; Tennessee.

Clinton? Mr. Feel Your fucking Pain? From Arkan-fucking-sas? Come on.

I'll let Dukakis stand as the very basis of his premise, but really, compared to Bush Sr...

Fritz? Carter? McGovern? Humphrey? LB fucking J!?!?! Who the fuck is this guy thinking he's fooling? Where are the "coastal pointy-heads" in that crowd?

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, aka the Birth of the Republican Southern Strategy, there have been at most two "coastal pointy-heads" nominated, one of which was the most recent election, and the other facing off with someone just as pointy and even more out of touch.

If it were physically possible for somebody to approach Kristol-like levels of wrong, Bobo is leading the pack.

Anonymous said...

Also, as to Mavericky Maverickdom...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/05schwartz.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login

It's behind the firewall, but bugmenot works wonders. I'll quote freely.

There’s that word again: maverick. In Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican candidate, used it to describe herself and her running mate, Senator John McCain, no fewer than six times, at one point calling him “the consummate maverick.”

And you just know she had the emphasis on the first syllable in "consummate", but I digress.

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.


Mmmm, hmmm.

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”


Heh, indeedy.

Anonymous said...

What Driftglass said; Genius, as usual, Mr. DG.

But stop falling for the 3rd Grade Magic Tricks, folks. The distractions ... the false issues ... the Mooselini Twat dime store Alaska drama.

It ain't about McCain. (The melanoma docs have him dead in 2-to-4 years. And the Rove-Cheney Cabal is NOT scripting him.)

The Cabal is scripting Palin ... or Sarah Evita Palin as Steps-To-Fascism writer Naomi Klein put it on Huffington Post Blog.

McCain is nothing; as he has always been. (Hat-tips to the folks above who took issue with "McCain is not a racist" ... cuz he is. And even if he ever/never was, McCain is such a changeling piece of crap, he would have already flip-flopped on the Racist Thing at least 3 times. It's in his DNA.)

Keep your eye and flame-throwers on the Muse of the Coming Police State a la Rove-Cheney. (Thank you, Naomi Klein. Op Cit.)

Heeeeeeere's the Real and Infinitely Forgettable Johnny McCain. From Oct 16 issue of Rolling Stone.

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

Rollingstone.com
Make-Believe Maverick

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty BY TIM DICKINSON