"They were now on the brink of nuclear war and the President [Kennedy] was concerned about the situation getting out of his control and spiraling into disaster. He recalled a part in the book The Guns of August when a German Chancellor was asked how it all began. He replied, “Ah, if we only knew.”
Of course, in the global-disaster presently at hand we know precisely who to blame. No, not Boehner and not Cantor and not McConnell; they're just the symptoms. No the real fault lies with the same shit-for-brains who are weeping into their "Give Me Liberty" throw-pillows tonight because Glenn Beck is no longer a Fox News employee.
I wasn't of much of a mind to forgive these scumbags after eight years of hunting Clinton, eight years of cheering Bush and two years of pretending the preceding 16 years had never happened whil sabotaging every effort to clean up the mess their catastrophic ideology has left in its wake. But if they crash the economy of purpose because, well, fuck you, that's why, it's time to go after them.
Hard.
Operation Rescue-hard.
Where they live.
Where they work.
Where they worship.
If you voted Republican, I think every one of your neighbors should know about it.
Loudly.
I think you should be reminded of the havoc you have wrought with graphic pictures in your face every time you stick you head outside your door.
24/7/365.
It is time long past time to stop turning the other cheek, and since this is clearly all that they are capable of understanding, I guess it's time to inherit a little of the whirlwind motherfuckers!
This column started life as a response to the "Should You Go to College?" bong that's being passed around in the familiar NYT-Yglesias-Sullivan-NYT circle in the dorm room down the hall.
Back when I was a dashing, worldly Returning Adult College Student, I picked up a little rent-and-sammich money as a student worker: a job for which I was hilariously overqualified, and which I enjoyed a lot.
After sizing me up (which, as I recall, involved seeing how well I could handle the weapon's suite in whatever the latest first-person-shooter game was popular at the moment, and playing some deep-cut "Depeche Mode" b-side and asking me if I recognized it in a tone that suggested shibboleth-testing) my fellow student workers accepted me as one of the tribe, I found myself;
1) Playing a lot more chess than I had played in years and,
2) Being asked to regale them with Amazing True Tales of a strange place called the Real World about which they had only heard scraps and whispers around the campfire ("...and so the intern hit the gas and rocketed down the old country road. By the time she got back to town she felt silly about being so scared...but when she got out of the car to look for what had made the scraping sound...she found the escaped maniac supervisor's metal hand stuck to the back bumper...still holding her shitty employee evaluation!")
Among these 20-something art, theater and videography majors, many myths had grown up about the Real World -- a terra incognita which I (not unlike Bilbo Baggins) had traversed and lived to tell about.
Overwhelmingly, their legends about the Real World all descended from some understanding that they had picked up in their childhood about how people should behave and how work ought to be.
"I mean, people can't just fire someone for no good reason, right?"
Sure they can. I'd guess that thousands of people get hired and fired every month for no good reason at all.
"But if you work really hard and you do a great job...?"
You should do that anyway, but no, being competent is no protection against being summarily shitcanned. In fact in many places being competent makes you a threat.
These were not idle questions: these young men and women had almost all taken on huge debt loads to buy a piece of paper that said they were prepared to be dropped onto an alien world, and they were beginning to suspect that, by way of practical preparation, their elders may have given them a box of Crayons and a "Steak n' Shake Funland" maze instead of the maps and weapons necessary to survive the rigors
of planet LV-426.
During one semester this sense of dread was sharply heightened when one of their older peers -- a gifted grad student -- took a job at The Very Prestigious Advertising Company, and over the course of several weeks was driven to frantic despair by what she believed to be the unfair and contradictory demands of her many bosses.
Each time she returned to us she looked more and more defeated and desperate. She spoke of impossible deadlines. Of creatively deadening projects. Of incredibly clueless superiors with enormous power. What, did they expect her to give up her outside life and just work for them around the clock?
"Yes," I told her during one of our asides. "That is exactly what they expect you to do."
"But this is ridiculous! How can people work like this?"
I shrugged. "Millions do. Every day."
She was near tears. "Well that's just totally stupid. And unfair. They don't even know what they're doing. They won't give me a chance to good work."
I agreed. I still do. My heart went out to her and to all the others with whom I have had such conversations over the years.
Part II: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that." -- Homer Simpson
Here is a useful chart (one of many) that explains where all of your hard work on those impossible deadlines working on horrible misconceived projects for those brain-dead bosses ends up going:
You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Gains
Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.
Part III: The Real World does not care that you can recite the Bhagavad Gītā backwards and can change water into Fanta with your mind.
I’ve been on more job interviews this year than any other year in my life.
This is a good thing (theoretically, at least) because it forces you to figure out who you are and sell it.
Can’t do that? You lose.
TIP #1: Miss the point.
Earlier this month, I hired a young female journalist to write a guest post on this blog for $100. (Expect to see it soon.) As a hirer, I was forced to confront the real reason why people hire you.
Because they like you.
This has been said elsewhere, but it is the single truth people fail to grasp about interviewing. It’s not about your skills, it’s not about your resume, it’s not about if you answered the questions right.
Do they like you? If they like you the best, they will hire you. If they don’t, they won’t. ...
Remember that: social networks and chemistry count for vastly more than you are ever led to believe in school. This will be on the test and will count for 75% of your final grade.
Part IV: Driftglass talks to Young Americans about college
Here, in no particular order, are some home truths I know about college that did not get covered by the New York Times or Think Progress.
The old social order that paid teachers much less than plumbers but rewarded teachers with a higher social distinction is now gone. The collapse of the union movement, the rise of the "college prep or bust" mentality in secondary education and the highly-focused Conservative contempt for all public employees has remade our national narrative into a Gothic horror story about billionaire CEOs Galtian heroes versus school teaching AFT moochers and looting SEIU goons.
As someone who has hired many, many people, I can tell you that, outside of special training and certification requirements, a degree is generally treated as little more than a filtering device to save the HR manager from having to read 1,000 resumes for every job. It represents nothing more than a proxy for "do you have a pulse, can you read at a ninth grade level, and can you sit still and not fuck up too badly for 2-4 years? Yes? Great. we'll train you to do the rest."
If you are suspected of being over 45, no one will hire you, and details about your college years and experience serve as a way for hiring managers to very quickly weed out middle-aged applicants without leaving fingerprints. In the age of "we'll get back to you, but we really never do" you will likely never know why you didn't get that job, but the whiff of gray hair and higher health care premiums are a huge reason.
The business of college isn't primarily about education anymore: it is about buying a Wonka Golden Ticket that will get your kid a place on the ever-shrinking cultural lifeboat called The Middle Class. It means a house, maybe, and a job with benefits, maybe. Sure Junior might be on the road 270 days a years for the Ramjak Corporation selling Chinese anthrax-dipped toys to babies, but Junior will be in a suit and have a per diem and have a scrap of paper that says they shouldn't be fired first when the company decides to move most of its operations to Saigon.
The day institutions of higher learning figured that they held sole title to a device that could produce secular economic indulgences was the day educational quality and college experience began to become completely secondary to the awarding of pieces of paper for which the American public would pay ANY price.
Colleges generate vast wealth and are run as a feudal system: those at the top -- officers and those with tenure -- often enjoy comforts, wages and appurtenances that would astonish you, which is why tenure is handed out only to those who work the hardest to help keep the feudal system intact. Everyone else from janitors to "associate" professors are itinerant labor that will one day be hired by the van-load for cash from pools of dirty, sullen unemployed English and Philosophy majors who will be living in abandoned refrigerator boxes insulated with moldering copies Master's theses on "The influence of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on the novels of the New South", in vast slums called "Michenervilles".
If you can afford it, go anyway. From a spiritual perspective, you'll find a couple of great teachers who will change your life and why would you deny yourself that? From a career perspective, the most durable capital is social capital. The mentors you will have and the contacts you will make in school will pay you far better dividends for far longer than almost anything you will book-learn there. Also unless you are, say, a flautist or a New York Times op-ed pundit, you are going to need skills upgrades for the rest of your life starting right now, so over time the whole distinction between white collar and blue collar career paths becomes more and more meaningless.
Part V: The Wisdom of Youth.
Before you listen either to me or to the New York Times, consider taking a real Real World lesson from some terrific young men and women who are graduating from the very first senior class of a new Chicago high school called Austin Polytech -- a flawed but promising and innovative academy in the heart of one of Chicago's toughest, poorest neighborhoods that is trying to erase the false and destructive distinction between a good vocational education and a good college-prep education, while at the same time producing the next generation of leaders in the field of advanced manufacturing.
You want hope? You want "act local"? You want a practical economic, educational and community-based vision of a better future with something to offer both Liberals and Conservatives of good faith? A place where smart labor and smart business can both lay down their swords for a moment and perhaps find common ground?
... Austin Polytechnical Academy opened on the West Side of Chicago in 2007 as the city’s first and only career academy dedicated to occupations in high-skill manufacturing. On June 12, the school sent its first 92 graduates into that understaffed job market, many with industry-recognized credentials, internship experience and more than three years of engineering classes on their transcripts.
The school, developed as part of the Renaissance 2010 initiative by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, then chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, aims to prepare students to fill some of the nation’s estimated three million vacant positions in science, technology, engineering and math. The ambitious plan seeks to engage private-industry companies to help train the students, all of them from a community that has watched local industry flee, unemployment climb and foreclosure rates soar to the highest in the city.
Where graduates go from here — work force or college, inside or outside the community — will be a test of achievement for Austin Polytech. ...
Since September, the Chicago News Cooperative has followed three students: Stran’Ja Burge and Marquiese Travae Booker, both seniors, and Deandre Joyce, a junior. In that time, the school has endured wrenching changes, many of them emblematic of a larger instability within C.P.S. as leaders seek to reform one of the country’s largest and most troubled public school systems .
Two separate narratives about the school have emerged: one public and one private; one filled with success, the other fraught with troubles.
In the positive narrative, the Center for Labor and Community Research, a nonprofit organization, helped Austin Polytech obtain accreditation for its machine shop through the National Institute for Metalworking Skills, becoming the only high school in Illinois to earn that classification. The school also rolled out two job-shadowing programs, secured summer jobs and internships for 36 students, and saw 89 students earn 123 industry-recognized certificates.
But it was also a year of nearly constant fits and starts by the C.P.S. system, sapping energy from teachers, administrators and students. ...
Yet for students like Ms. Burge, who is ranked in the top 10 of her class, as well as for Mr. Joyce and Mr. Booker, much of the hurly-burly has been a sideshow to the usual rites of passage: college applications, ACTs, prom, final exams and future plans. The unrest at the school was more a nuisance than anything else, they said. ...
What comes next is different for each: Ms. Burge will attend college at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where she will play basketball and pursue a degree in engineering. Mr. Booker landed a job at the Laystrom Manufacturing Company, where he interned last summer. Mr. Joyce hopes to stay on track during his senior year, raise his ACT score from an 18 to a 20, and then decide what will come next: college or work.
Despite the school’s tumultuous year, Ms. Burge said she had enjoyed her time at Austin Polytech. It gave her the opportunity to take advanced-placement calculus, travel to Washington on behalf of the school and participate in student government. ...
As she headed off to school a few days before the graduation ceremony, Ms. Burge walked by her uncle sleeping on the front porch. He struggles with addiction and her grandmother lets him sleep there, she said, adding that his example was an impetus to work harder.
“I’m not like ‘Aw because my uncle’s a crackhead, then I’m not going to go to school,’ ” she said last fall. “I’m going to do the reverse and because I see him do that, this is why I’m going to school every day and this why I’m going to college.” She is the first in her family to pursue college outside Illinois.
When Mr. Booker was not playing baseball or practicing with the bowling team, he spent the year working at Harold’s Chicken and trying to figure out what came next. Then an opportunity presented itself. Laystrom Manufacturing offered Mr. Booker a position, created just for him, in the quality control department. He took the job. ...
There is no Bachmann in this story. No political horse race between "I don't know" and "I don't care" for our pundit class to get a case of hopping priapism over. No place for a wingnut to get his "welfare queen" bigot batteries recharged. No pie fight over the debt ceiling between the craven and the insane.
Just a page 10 story from my own back yard about the poise, persistence and character of some fine young men and women who are up against obstacles every day of their lives that are far more formidable than Eric Fucking Cantor and his Insane Teabagger Posse.
For the record, this is what gives me hope.
Also for the record, this is why I have zero patience for whiners who counsel giving up and rolling over because Harry Reid is still a jellybag, and Barack Obama hurt their fee-fees.
“They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”
"...more than ever, Washington IS the problem, and the real solutions will come from our businesses, our communities, our schools and the most basic and powerful unit of all-our families."
A bloody-minded True Believer's faith in the Godliness of their dogma.
An unvarnished loathing for all opposition.
An boundless contempt for government.
A ruthless eagerness to sacrifice the lives and futures of the poor, the sick, the weak, the elderly and the outsider on the altar of unfettered oligarchy.
Slavishly loyal acolytes who happily blind themselves to the misery and ugliness their ideology leaves in its wake.
And fuck the facts when they get in the way.
Regardless of what feckless, dorm-room "real" conservatives may tell themselves to balm their wounded egos over being wrong about everything their entire adult lives, these are the real pillars of Conservatism, over here and over there, then and now.
Mr. Brooks' column today is, in its own way, quite remarkable: it is an entire piece on the looming Republican Sabotage of the Global Economy without so much as a mention of the looming Republican Sabotage of the Global Economy.
Instead we get a lesson-in-three-parts explaining to Barack Obama (in a tone not unlike that of Grandpa Simpson explaining his onion belt
to a random child) exactly how Barack Obama can revise his management style to be more accommodating to Republican fanatics and imbeciles.
If he can overcome his aloofness and work intimately with Republicans, he may be able to avert a catastrophe and establish a model for a more realistic, collegial presidency.
Which is, without a doubt, one of the top five most painfully ridiculous lies Mr. Brooks has written in his long and lucrative career of telling painfully ridiculous lies for money.
One day I shall be in a Men's Room at some conference or lecture somewhere. I shall glance up from symmetrically melting urinal ice in time to see David Fucking Brooks taking position in the stall next to mine.
At which time I will definitely turn and pee on his shoes.
For America.
UPDATE: No stranger to nuzzling the jum-jums of those above him on the Pundit Food Chain, the former Bush Speechwriter and still-inexplicably-employed David Frum of course thinks David Brooks' piece is a miracle of rare perception.
The money quote:
Listen to Brooks, he shows the way forward.
Omitting, of course, the fact that the last time we followed the these Davids anywhere, it led us straight into Baghdad and catastrophe
'An Evil-Looking Gnome' Just when things couldn’t get any worse for Newt Gingrich, here comes a Republican colleague with a very long memory. June 26, 2011 11:27 PM EDT
I have a voicemail Newt Gingrich doesn’t want to hear. The Tiffany's affair, the Newt for President exodus—those were nothing compared to this.
“Bryan, Bob Dornan…” the voicemail begins. “I’d like to talk to you folks about Newt Gingrich. What a piece of work. … The guy that single-handedly left us Dennis Hastert for eight years! The super-hypocrite going after Clinton when he was just as bad!”
You may remember Bob Dornan. Hard-right GOP congressman. Ur-Tea Partier. C-SPAN bellower who, in his Virginia retirement, bellows mostly into my voicemail. Bob has a bone to pick with Newt.
“This is my mission,” Bob continues. “I accept it. … Please let me have a piece of the action.”
Bob, who is 78, is this campaign’s leading Newtologist. His study of “Newtie,” as he calls him, began during the 16 full-combat years they spent together as GOP congressman. He holds something of a grudge. But his argument mirrors what—to judge by the polls—a lot of GOP primary voters feel every time Newt opens his mouth. Bob’s argument is that Newt is a pseudo-intellectual gasbag, a moral basket case, and a political performance artist whose campaign is less a bid for the White House than a marketing blitz to pump up “Gingrich Inc.” When I call him back, Bob says he wants to do the nation a service. “I want to get this man the hell out of America’s hair!” ...
Bwahahaha!
Ah, Newt, my old friend. Do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us "Revenge is a dish best served cold"?
Packed into a snow shovel?
Delivered upside the lying head of a hatemongering shitbag by someone he fucked over and forgot about so long ago that he never saw it coming?
Honestly, I'm not sure which part I like better: that a fully-loaded, 1,000 car karma train just keeps flattening Gingrich, then backing up, then flattening him again... and again... and again...
...or that no less than ultraconservative "B-1" Bob Dornin has now fully ratified just about everything every Liberal has ever said about The Smartest Baby in the Wingnut Sandbox and conclusively demonstrated-by-proxy that our multimillionaire Elite Media Geniuses who, year after fucking year (I'm looking at you, Greggers!), inexplicably keep inviting this bigoted, bile-spewing, lie-dispenser back onto their teevee shows no matter what he says or does really are the vapid, arrant Villager dolts we always knew them to be.
Either way, the Gingrich Campaign Dead Pool just got interesting again.
It is a little-known fact that, by a miracle of literary coincidence, the Quixotic tale of a bland, relatively unknown bilaterally-symmetrical Utah Mormon and former-ambassador-to-a-Major-Asian-Power who decides to leap into the Republican presidential race in a field already crowded with another bland, bilaterally-symmetrical Mormon, a couple of Fundamentalist End Times flakes, a black ultrasuperpaleoconservative fast food mogul and a guy name "Timmy" from Minnesota...by setting up shop in Florida's political fever-swap...was simultaneously pitched as the central plot of proposed novels by both Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard in 1993.
It is an even lesser-known fact that both book proposals by these worthies were laughed out of their respective agents' offices with the words, "Seriously, are you outta your fucking tree?"
"He was nae so much a man as... a blancmange!" Edition
So "Meet the Gregory" will be off next week so NBC can cover Wimbledon.
Leaving one to ask the question: Why does NBC love tennis more than America?
To absolutely no one's surprise, today at the Mouse Circus the embargo on putting actual Liberals on teevee continued for the God-knows-how-manyeth week. Congratulations, Mainstream Media! You have now rendered Liberals more invisible on Major Network Political Teevee than African Americans were on the openly-segregated American teevee of the 1950s.
Instead we get Matt Bai. We get George Will,
We get David Fucking Brooks.
Reassuring, in a way, that they no longer feel the need to even pretend to care anymore. That they have obligingly drawn the battle lines between us and them so unmistakably bright and clear.
In very much the same vein, the word has obviously come down from Villager Central Command that everybody needed to shut up and be cool about the fact -- the terrifying, irrefutable fact -- that the GOP is now just stone fucking Natural Born Killah crazy. To immediately button their fucking pie holes about the by-now-excruciatingly obvious/ criminally reckless insanity of the Right, and reassure everyone over and over again that the GOP is not a dark carnival of freaks and End Timers and weasely little Cantors. Not a cultural dumpster swarming with meth-tweaked rats who are perfectly willing to crash the global economy and drive the United States into an entirely preventable Second Republican Great Depression in order to promote the agenda of their fascist billionaire backers, advance their individual political fortunes, blow the country out from under the Kenyan Usurper, get rid every last trace of the New Deal and the Great Society. trigger the Rapture, or just up their speaking fees.
So why are the major networks lying to you -- badly -- in this specific way?
Well you must understand that a blancmange impersonator and Republican has to use some pretty clever stories to allay suspicion.
Palin is not only not going to win the GOP Presidential Wingnut Sweepstakes, she is almost certainly not even going to run. This is where Imperial Media, LLC coverage of Palin starts and stop, because our Imperial Media's job is to completely miss the real significance of just about everything. Every. Single. Time.
Palin's real importance is that she has found the weakest point in the vast, jelly-soft underbelly of our failed politico-entertainment complex and is gleefully slashing into it with a giddy fame-drunk grifter enthusiasm. She is changing the rules at the intersection of celebrity, politics and media among the Pig People in a knives-out way not seen since the days of George Wallace
and "Settin' the Woods on Fire".
And it is precisely because the Palin phenomenon reveals far too much about the real, ignorant, hateful heart of the Right that the lazy, overpaid "Both Sides Do It" clowns who populate the Mouse Circus are never going to talk about it.
(FYI, things like Urbanophile, reports from "CEOs for Cities", urban and labor think tank briefing papers, the successes and failures of various labor/sector programs, local/regional/national industrial policy initiatives, et al. are what I read when I'm not working my day job, or podcasting, or blogging, or re-reading "Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends", or plowing through some old PK Dick novel I never got around to, or scouring ancient Aztec ruins in search of new adjectives for "meretricious dick" for my next post about, say, David Fucking Brooks.
... This is brinksmanship with all of our lives, our money, our core financial stability and future growth. It is an outrageously reckless way to run a government. And Cantor's refusal to take any personal responsibility for the result of these talks is of a piece with the record of this shallow, callow fanatic who has the gall to call himself a conservative, even as he launches a wrecking ball at the very fabric of the American and global economy.
These current Republicans would rather destroy the US economy than sacrifice one scintilla of ideological purity. They are an imminent threat to the stability of this country's economy and the world's. And they must be stopped before the damage is irreversible.
Who in the fuck are you talking to, Andrew?
Who exactly do you suppose is going to make these "fake" Conservatives stop?
Who exactly has primary responsibility for their existence? For the media respectability of their Teflon-coated fanaticism?
Please share with the rest of us who precisely are you calling on -- by name -- to step up to the plate...who has not already been sounding the alarum for the last 30 years? Since long, long, longbefore you had your 11th hour epiphany about the monsters you had been bedding down with for most of your adult life?
See, Mr. Sullivan, it is you who is not the "real" conservative in this equation, and you never have been.
You are a dupe. A child. A Useful Idiot.
For your whole life, the Sword of Conservative Movement in this country has been it's powerful bigot/plutocrat/Fundy components, without which your "Movement" would have amounted to nothing more than David Frum, David Brooks and you getting high on Pop Rocks and Coke in your dorm room and jerking off to Edmund Burke.
Falwell, Thurmond, Helms, Reed, Schlafly, Gingrich, Bachmann, DeLay, Norquist and that crowd -- these were always the beating, authoritarian heart of the Right: its purest acolytes and truest believers.
Reagan and his imitators have been the fanatics' teevee-friendly Sheath, hiding the real, barbarian ugly of "real" Conservatism under a patina of studied, aw-shucks affability.
And you?
You and your fellow travelers were never more than a utile but ultimately disposable accessory: a bit of decorative fringe which, now that the Right's Sword has been fully bared and is carving the guts out of the American dream, is no longer necessary.
So stop pleading for unspecified someones to magically show up at two minutes to midnight and clean up the mountain of flaming shit that we tried to keep people like you from making in the first place and instead answer this specific question: what do you suppose is so broken in you -- so horribly malfunctioning -- that you refused to notice the plain and simple truth about Conservatism that Liberals have been tirelessly pointing out to idiots like you over and over and over again for the last three decades?
And what are you going to to about it?
Because me and my Fifth Columnist, America-hating buddies? We already gave at the office.
One of the first consultant presentations I ever did that went over like gangbusters leaned heavily on Peter Falk's "Lieutenant Columbo."
AS an icebreaker, I asked everybody what they remembered about his character. Usually it was the dog. The rumpled appearance. The 'just one more question' gambit. References to his wife. Pawing through his pockets for notes and pencil stubs.
When all that was out of the way, I asked my audience to think about the character's keen understanding of class and ego. How he curated his image as a blue collar goof with every bit as much precision as any fashion model. How he shamelessly used flattery and modesty and self-effacement strategically. How he never berated or abused subordinates, but was always firm and clear. How he only ever seemed at his ease when among his peers -- fellow competent tradespeople and craftsmen.
And most important of all, how he always, always started off by asking for help. "Could you help me out here please? Just...see...my wife...and I just need a little help here if it's not too much trouble."
A righteous and capable God metes out justice to Neocon hacks and Conservative parasites with the kind of dynamic efficiency that would make a sixth-degree ISO9000 Mok'bara Black Belt weep with joy.
Over in this Universe, we get the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in America sipping stale verbal dungspackle champagne out of David Broder's old shoe...
Twice a week...
From the pinnacle of America's Paper of Record.
This week: "Rock 'n Roll is gonna ruin them kids!" -- six paragraphs taken from an article in the "Rolling Stone", wrapped in a thin layer of Cautionary Tale for Our Parlous Times.
Read it here if you want, although for the life of me I have no idea why anyone would.
Baby, I've been waiting, I've been waiting night and day. I didn't see the time, I waited half my life away...
-- Leonard Cohen
Buried deep inside his tragicomic Grand Guignol expose of Our Lady of the Holy Killbot, Matt Taibbi accomplishes something else: The discovery of America.
Not the pastel flyover-country American cartoon that Beltway professionals blur quickly past as they invoke the fiction of th'murricanpipple a thousand times a day, but the real America.
The real, ugly America.
The America that no longer has any functional understanding of this world. The deeply ignorant, deeply angry, deeply paranoid America that has been swallowed whole by Hate Radio. That remakes its own past, present and future into whatever suits today's batshit Two Minutes Hate Fox Special News Alert.
The America where the minds of millions of our fellow citizens have grown so pudding-soft and devolved from crouching in their spider holes and waiting for the Second Coming of The Imaginary Reaganator to save them from their Imaginary Enemies, that they can now effectively be lead any-damn-where by anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile.
Taibbi explains in autopsic detail why trying to reason with the Pig People is simply impossible, and, I would argue, why trying to hide inside a snuggle sack of Fake Centrism slung between Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama is insane.
Michele Bachmann's Holy War ...
In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.
Emboldened by the lack of consequences for her early freakouts, Bachmann's self-mythologizing became more and more overt. In October 2006, she stepped before a packed house at the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and told her life story. All of history's great madmen have had that one gorgeous moment where the cackling hairy hunchback that has been gestating within for years finally comes out and shows itself, strutting up and down the catwalk for the world to see. This was Michele's catwalk moment, a lengthy autobiographical speech in which she claimed "callings" from God had pushed her to every major decision in her life — from studying tax law to running for Congress. She even told the congregation that she and hubby Marcus — who by then had opened a Christian counseling center — had been united not by love but by a unique series of divine visions experienced by three people simultaneously.
Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies. ...
Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. ...
There is an orc army on the move in America.
And they are coming for us.
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File under: Fleas leaving a sinking rat. From the AP:
Gingrich campaign fundraisers quit
By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) — Newt Gingrich's top two fundraising advisers resigned on Tuesday, and officials said the Republican candidate's hobbling presidential campaign carried more than $1 million in debt.
The departures of fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman were the latest blow for the former House speaker who watched 16 top advisers abandon his campaign en masse earlier this month, partly because of what people familiar with the campaign spending described as a dire financial situation. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the campaign inner workings, said the former Georgia lawmaker racked up massive travel bills but money had only trickled in since he got into the race earlier this spring.
These officials said that he is at least $1 million in debt. The current fundraising quarter ends June 30, and Gingrich will have to disclose his campaign finances by July 15. He is personally wealthy and could fund his campaign out of his own pocket, at least in the short term, to keep his campaign afloat.
Gingrich has insisted that he will not abandon his troubled bid and will continue fighting for the Republican nomination for president "no matter what it takes." He's revamping his campaign, given the series of departures.
"Newt 2012 continues its reorganization and alignment as a grassroots driven, substantive, solutions-oriented campaign," a spokesman, R.C. Hammond, told The Associated Press, adding that the campaign is "as committed as ever." ...
He has refused to answer questions about his rocky rollout, his vacation to the Mediterranean or the exodus of his top staff from his headquarters near Atlanta and from the early nominating states.
"I will endure the challenges. I will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land," Gingrich told a crowded ballroom at a Beverly Hills hotel recently. "And with the help of every American who wants to change Washington, we will prevail."
To the People of the Confederate States of America.
... We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages and to shed an increasing luster upon our country.
Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free; and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future?
But don't worry about Newt; as long as David Gregory has a mouth, the Smartest Baby in the Sandbox will always have a warm place to park his sphincter and hawk his drivel.
"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."
... All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all.
They're doing the same things now that they did then.
When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third.
Ponder that for a minute.
Congratulations, graduate: you now know everything you need to know about being a Big Time Professional Conservative Public Intellectual!
As your name is called, please come forward to collect your diploma.
UPDATE: Matt Taibbi tracks how Neocon Hack Chunky Bobo (Ross Douthat) has followed exactly the same, sniveling arc as Neocon Hack Bobo Classic.
Out of Power, Right-Wing Hawks Turn Dovish
... Look, people are entitled to have changes of heart. They are also entitled to learn from experience. And most importantly, people are entitled to be wrong. We all are, from time to time. And if people like Ross Douthat emerge from the experience of observing the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes finally understanding “the bluntness of war as an instrument of state” and the “difficulty of predicting” any war’s “long-term consequences,” that’s great. I applaud it.
But I don’t buy it. What happened back in ’02 and ’03 isn’t can’t be summarized as simply as a simple policy disagreement that Douthat, through the folly of inexperience, happened to be on the wrong side of. The mere fact that the Douthats of the world supported the war wasn't what made them so obnoxious.
Much more important was the shameless witch-hunting of antiwar voices, and the impugning of the patriotism of people who advocated the very sort of caution Douthat now claims to endorse. Douthat, remember, contributed to the National Review’s obnoxiously-titled “Kumbaya Watch,” pitched as “the latest in anti-American commentary from the left.” In that column he hounded critics of the president and/or those who didn't advocate immediate war against the Muslims, and wondered aloud about the political bias of organizations like ABC News (they wouldn’t let their reporters wear American flag lapel pins!).
The recent conversions to the cause of foreign-policy prudence by people like Douthat would be obnoxious even if they were believable. It’s easy to respect the position of someone like Ron Paul – he’s been against the war from the start, and for the same reasons throughout.
But people like Douthat didn’t start becoming pacifists until a) the occupation of Iraq went south, helping derail the Bush presidency, and b) Barack Obama became president and started taking ownership of new adventures in places like Libya. Before then, he was just another jingoistic twit doing the “Gooble, gooble, one of us!”chant on the march to war.
And let's be honest. Even a child could have seen, back then, that the whole WMD thing was, transparently, total bullshit and a canard – that they were going in to Iraq anyway, for other reasons, no matter what the intelligence said or didn't say. I mean, for God's sake, Bush was trying to convince us that Saddam was going to use unmanned drones to spray poison gas over American cities – drones that would have been launched from Saddam's giant secret fleet of aircraft carriers, apparently. What adult person actually believed this stuff?
All of this was obviously ridiculous at the time, but when anyone tried to point that out, people like Douthat put us on "Kumbaya watch," questioned our allegiances, called us Muslim collaborators, etc., etc. Now they want to talk about prudence and the "long-term consequences" of war? Bite me.
The only thing Taibbi omits is that, like Bobo Classic, Chunky Bobo also rode his sneering, chest-beating, America Fuck Yeah! Yellow Elephant credentials to a cushy sinecure at the Liberal New York Times.
"What did you do in the Great War against the Middle Class?", consider how many millions of your fellow citizens for whom the only honest answer can be:
...My friend Tupac Pelosi-Mumia, who lives with his parents Marge and Fred Bosley in Beverly Hills (“I kills me that they forced me to drive a Mercedes bought with his money made oppressing the workers at his department stores, but I do it for the sake of the struggle”), told me about a terrifying encounter he had with a couple of rampaging conservatives. All he did was throw a free range egg at them during a “No Free Speech for Fascists” demonstration there by Take Back the Mid-Day, his pro-civil liberties collective.
“They were going to give me a wedgie,” he reported, “But the surprise was on them — I don’t believe in wearing underwear! It’s part of the patriarchal paradigm!” The brutality of the wingnuts is truly terrifying. “Those conservatives are tough and mean and they will kick your ass,” Tupac said. “And that’s just the women.”
There were so many panels to choose from! I couldn’t decide on whether to go to “Gender Justice and Making Men Pay” or “Azatlan Now: Getting the US Out of North America,” so I just wandered around to see what superstars I could run into. It was awesome – I even got to shake Keith Olbermann’s hand, but he was kind of cold to me after I told him “I will totally watch your show as soon as I can find the Logo channel!” It is the Logo network, right? Or is it the Oprah one?
Plenty of petitions to sign too – I love getting involved in hand-on activism that makes a difference! I signed petitions about banning eating whales, tuna, beef, pigs, and chicken. I kind of drew the line at the super-vegan guys – call me a “bean curd criminal,” but as far as I’m concerned, you’ll have to pry my tofu out of my mom’s fridge.
I also signed some green energy petitions but had to stop to answer a call from United telling me my upgrade came through for the flight home – bingo! Finally, some guys dressed like pimps told me all about this deadly poison the capitalists are forcing on us called dihydrogen monoxide. I never took a science course at Berkeley since I didn’t have time as a double major in Womyn’s Literature and Oppression Studies...
It goes on and on like that.
Perhaps you can see why rarely bother trying to persuade Conservatives of anything anymore?
Between 9/10ths of the Conservative Movement who masturbate themselves blind in giggly, vicarious dread at the awful awfulness of the Cartoon Dirty Fucking Hippie Emmanuel Goldstein's their Brain Caste as created to keep their tiny minds off of just how fucked Conservatism has left this country (from "Hating Goldstein")...
... There is no Big Brother bestriding the Right, because there doesn't need to be: because the one, genuine innovation of the Right has been to spend 40 years carefully cultivating a dumbed-down Base which at this point are little more than reprogrammable Golem.
Whatever they are told today through the Right's trusted in-house organs, they will believe.
Whatever those in-house sources tell them tomorrow -- even if it is in 180 degree opposition to what they were told today -- they will believe.
..and the remaining, Expatriate 1/10th of the Conservative Movement who lament the loss of the Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement That Never Was, and strain their intellectual muscles extravagantly noticing -- finally and far-too-late -- just a fraction of what the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been trying to tell them for the last 30 years (Here, Andrew Sullivan actually has the balls to brag that his 2006 book finally taking note of the capture of the Right by the Fundamentalists was "a little ahead of its time"), I have no patience left for anyone on the Right.
They are the millstone around our cultural neck, and their continued, toxic influence is the single largest impediment to repairing the terrible damage they have inflicted on our nation.
A strong contender for this weekend's "Most Pitiable Sight" award must go to Wall Street Journal sock puppet John Fund, who I spotted skulking around the Netroots' conference room level of the Minneapolis Convention Center trailing eager-beaver, 3rd tier wingnut Warren Todd Huston like some latter-day, Randite George and Lennie from "Of Mice and Men".
It is such a stark and pathetic reminder of the fundamentally peevish and parasitic nature of the Right that they would build an entire movement and schedule entire conferences around the act of hating people like me.
That they would shadow us from city to city just to do so.
That the barrenness of their ideological cupboard is now so complete that a Wall Street Journal douchbag from New York and a mid-level wingnut talking point Pez dispenser from Chicago would travel all the way to Minnesota just to slink around among the happy energetic Liberals to grub for crumbs of incipient socialism About Which They Can Be Loudly Outraged, and crib notes about what panels the Dirty Fucking Hippies had put together to destroy America.
Local Breitbart Clone uses adulterated video to justify 20,568th consecutive unhinged rant against Those Evil Liberals Who Are Destroying America (this time the target was ThinkProgress.com.) ...
Future historians take note: This is what it looked like when the Right stopped merely drinking the Koolaid and started injecting it directly into their spines.
Perhaps here, in the land of Mary Richards, Mr. Huston can finally turn the world on with his smile and
Having been here a couple of days now with a big chunk of time admittedly taken up with other matters, two things I have noticed about this year's Netroots:
Buncha A-Listers are MIA.
Virtually no major media.
Granted, my previous experience was at NN Chicago, which drew every major Democratic candidate for president, and an assload of national and international media.
It was Big News.
Then -- wham -- the Age of the Blogosphere was over. Too bad you missed it. Very quickly the idea of several thousand Liberal members of the Reality Based community gathering under one roof to debate America's complex problems and propose some real solutions was once again of no interest to the Elite Media whatsoever. Just another wacky "water skiing squirrel" filler bit to have on-hand to pad out a loose half-hour. Instead, a handful of Bush Regime dead-enders in funny hats ranting about Big Gummint and Death Panels at a Ramada Inn in St. Reagandale, Florida could now command the attention of major news outlets.
Wall-to-wall.
Week after week after week.
It was Big News.
It was the new-new thing...despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly obvious to anyone with two functioning synapses to rub together that the Tea Baggers were nothing new at all: that they were just the same old wingnut gleeps with a new paint job and an unlimited line of credit from Koch Industries and Fox News.
But it was in no one's professional interest to look at the shiny new-new thing too closely. Or at all. Except of course those fucking Liberals, and by 2009, Liberals had once again ceased to exist anyway: not because we hadn't been proven right -- over and over and over again -- but because the moral consequences of what we were saying were too culturally and financially terrifying for our media to bear.
So where were the major networks? The powerhouse journals? Where was the Liberal New York Times? MSNBC?
Busy. Don't ask.
Instead bear-baiting freaks like Andrew Brietbart were once again handed a big wad of free air time to try to hustle his resume.
Mic’d up and with a camera crew in tow, the Big Government blogger — and recent toppler of Rep. Anthony Weiner — came looking for a confrontation at this gathering of 2,500 progressive activists.
And he got one: Dozens of progressive activists and bloggers quickly surrounded him, yelling and shooting him with cameras of their own in a frenzy that quickly drew photographers to surround them.
Liberal activists booed an unpaid intern for Barack Obama’s campaign arm Thursday night after he defended the president’s record on gay rights during a Netroots Nation breakout session.
Even here in flyover country with no Senate filibuster showdown or election looming, there is content enough here for dozens of compelling stories waiting on silver platters to fill the content-starved maw of the Media Beast, so why the desertion-in-force?
Well these are not things we little people need to trouble our silly little heads about.
Because they're, y'know,
man-talk.
On another topic altogether, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour...” will once again hand over a massive slice of America's public airwaves to dyspeptic old ruin John McCain and blood-soaked hellspawn Liz Cheney.
Oh wait, I guess that's not another topic altogether, is it?
When the summer cold that BG and I have been carefully cultivating landed on me with both feet.
The downside: I'm going to be loopy from cold meds all day, so if you see me, discount about 17% of my weirdness.
The upside: It is possible that, loopy from cold meds, I snuck out of the Liberal Enclave last night and carefully pre-moistened and then coughed on every doorknob in the Right Online's Wingnut Enclave.
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. -- Saint Augustine
On the road with the Professional Left.
Pictured above is Blue Gal editing the component parts of the podcast you are listening to into a confection that pleased our ears (her PC with all of her magic tricks took a hit before we arrived here, so we are making-do with a hand-held tape recorder and the software she downloaded onto my ancient...Old Timey... vintage machine.)
Pictured also are my giant feet nude body parts. Please feel free to tweet the hell out of them and send them along to Andrew Breitbart who can wax his little Pope to them to his heart's content and then use them as a Wang of Damocles to hold over my head, as is apparently the custom of our strange times.
With any luck, the Democratic Party will ask me politely to leave :-)
Having fun and meeting fellow travelers.
More later.
UPDATE: Off to the Alliance for American Manufacturing fashion show and party. Hope to see you there.
... It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
