THESE United States have provided to the world, as shall doubtless pale in comparison to posterity, the very model of the geometric growth of men and wealth, & all respectable populationists assert that, should we as God made manifest close our shores to the Celestial and Slavic menace, the corrupt fecundity of to-day’s Papist and Deseretman shall be drowned as surely by our swelling numbers as the same heathens shall in good time be drowned in the Colorado & its tributaries in the coming century of good government.
But even this grand growth of the number of Christian men shall not compare to the eternal surge of white betterment by means of the rail-road. I shall withal to all men of good wisdom reveal the nature of the coming rail-transit singularity & conclusively prove that to all human misery, Marxism & Georgism & other anarchists, and alternative modes of transport (including even the grand and glorious tall-ship) the engine bears in its consist a doom as sure as the late end of Massa’s wantless provender for the Negro race. And though we shall doubtless face all manner of challenge and terror in the coming dominion of the steam engine – as those innocents quailing in the pacific Germanies at Napoleon’s relentless sponsorship of the chemin-de-fer would readily confide – it is worth it simply to stand at the boundless frontier of a promised-land free of rivers, women, and the loathsome opium tariff. Join me, your humble & obedient servant and engineer, when next ☞Dancing!!! sees fit to serialize my work.

There is a distinct area which many characterize as ‘Appalachia’ that emerges distinctly when you look at the counties that voted for McCain in 2008 by a higher margin than for Bush in 2004. The strong temptation is to write this off as ‘racism’, but I don’t think that’s technically accurate.

What must be remembered is the regional divide between what in Virginia were known as the ‘tuckahoe’ and ‘cohee’ – between the early Baptist Scots-Irish subsistence pastoralists and later primary truck-workers and the largely Anglican planter aristocracy which wound up decaying and then modernizing into what we know as the Deep South.

These areas were electrified and linked firmly to the outside world in living memory; except for the areas overlapping with the Rust Belt they’ve never had a major stake in American exports or the global economy, and – most importantly – they were never host to any serious attempts at slave-holding plantations, were subject to only extremely sporadic and occasional black migration from the Deep South, and have never seen significant immigration and only very rarely have even seen internal emigration (the large exception being the initial wave of Scots-Irish settlers moving inward as usable tidewater land became valuable for cotton production and the pre-Revolutionary strictures on westward movement disappeared – and those largely settled the westward leg of the Cohee boomerang).

As Tim Krieder suggested in The Pain – When Will It End’s America’s Scum Belt, the motto of the area could well be ‘You ain’t from around here, are you?’ – not exactly hostile, but far from friendly, and a gentle and constant reminder of the area’s fundamental resistance to outside influence. The post-Civil War mainstreaming of pro-Confederate opinion in the area spawned the secondary, ahistoric rallying cry of the secessionist and states’ rights movement – ‘We just want to be left alone’.

Clinton’s campaign, which faced after Super Tuesday a primary map which was nothing like as favorable as she would have needed to cinch the nomination before the convention, realized that there was one reliable way to get the whites of the South, who had (with few exceptions) gained little from racism and didn’t hold the oppression of blacks as near and dear as the Republicans had hoped – pointing out Obama’s exoticness.

Not in general terms, either – he was an elitist! a bold young man, in stark contrast with the region’s tradition of political lifers! Maybe possibly just could be gay, certainly not a member of their church, and by God, a black- just like they have in Richmond!

This was a sound strategy for capturing the region, but the problem is that even coming from a campaign with reasonable liberal bonafides, the entire exercise stank to outside observers of racism. Clinton won Pennsylvania but lost the Carolinas, which should have been clear evidence that she wasn’t going to smash Obama in the border South so badly that the convention would decide anything.

Of course, there’s nothing the Republicans like more than other people’s ideas, and sure enough the McCain campaign decided to plagarize this one. They started drawing contrasts between the Democrats and ‘real Americans’, started calling the tidelanders Communists, started suggesting that Obama wasn’t just black but a dangerous radical.

This didn’t exactly endear him to the High Cohee – after all, they don’t believe they have a monopoly on being Americans, they were (witness Pogo, for Chrissake) pretty indifferent to red-baiting throughout modern history, and they had less objection to blackness per se than its presence in their lives.

But the fallout was incredible. In a moment, the flailing effort to capture the south of Virginia suddenly alienated everyone outside of its panhandle – he was clearly trying to pander to a group that everyone outside of Appalachia saw as ignorant hicks, and he wasn’t even doing it convincingly. You can excuse Clinton’s seeming race-baiting away on it simply being how things work in Appalachia, but a campaign comprising an Arizonan and an Alaskan couldn’t come even close to pretending that. It won him West Virginia, but it cracked the Republican hold on the Deep South – which knew and held in contempt the cohee opinion of their big-city decadence – and it’s probably opened a suppurating wound in the Southern Strategy.

In short: we can excuse away charges of ‘racism’ against the Clinton campaign on this basis. They knew the difference, in a way it would take someone from Appalachia to be familiar with, between hating blacks and holding everything outside the near and familiar world in a sort of sweeping contempt – but that difference never occurred to anyone on McCain’s staff. Huckabee might have been able to pull it off – but McCain’s dog whistle was never even close to inaudible. Heck of a job, Johnny.

With apologies to Scott -

“In 2008, we ran an angry geezer and a crazy moose-hunter, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2012, we ran the crazy moose-hunter and a plumber/country singer/professional bald man, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2016, we ran a doughy giggler who touched himself and made high-pitched gawping noises whenever he saw a woman, and a street preacher who screamed “HOMONUPS NEVER!” over and over during his speeches, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2020, we ran a clone of Adolf Hitler and a bucket of frozen embryos, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2024…”

First they elected a moderate paleocon,
And I said nothing, because fuck atheists.
Then they elected an angry old man,
And I said nothing, because fuck Clinton.
Then they elected a spic-loving nepotist,
And I said nothing, because fuck the poor.
Then they elected a hardline right-wing race-baiter,
And I said nothing, because fuck the blacks.
Then they elected a shrieking empty suit to whip up angry crowds,
And I said nothing, because fuck most of America.
And when the time came for me to say something,
There was no one left to elect.
I blame the liberal media.
Fags.

rapture – a phenomenon for which I have observed no existing name in which the President strategically appoints legislative opponents to desirable Cabinet positions.

Rapture works owing to an amendment and a convention: the amendment holds that the Governor of each state may be invested with the power to temporarily fill vacancies until the term ends and/or the seat can be filled permanently by special election – usually during the next biennial election, although there are exceptions to this. The state legislature has the power to regulate this locally. In three cases – AK, MA, and AZ – the governor has no such power and the election is to occur within a set period

The convention is that the Governor is anticipated to appoint acting senators by party. This means that there is no obligation on anyone’s part to elect a Senator from the same party as the preceding, although it is not particularly common for Senators who were elected comfortably to see the seat’s party change permanently after their absention.

See a map of potential raptures (Dem and GOP) here.

Assuming a Democratic administration (the alternative would require an unimaginable succession of deaths at this point), the following Republican Senators are eligible for rapture (colors indicate Presidential vote, and italics indicate leaders, whips, chairmen, or other essentially unrapturable senators)

Arizona has two GOP senators – John McCain and Jon Kyl – but appointments result in special elections immediately rather than following an appointment, making rapture impractical.
Iowa – Chuck Grassley.
Kansas – Pat Roberts; Sam Brownback.
Kentucky – Jim Bunning; Mitch McConnell.
Missouri – Kit Bond.
Maine – Olympia Snowe; Susan Collins.
North Carolina – Richard Burr.
New Hampshire – Judd Gregg.
Ohio – George Voinovich.
Oklahoma - Jim Inhofe; Tom Coburn.
Pennsylvania – Arlen Specter.
Tennessee – Lamar Alexander; Bob Corker.
Wyoming – Mike Enzi; John Barrasso.

In addition, several Democratic senators in states with Republican governors – Daniels Inouye and Akaka of HI and Senator Feinstein of CA – are old enough that there might be reasonable worry their seats will be lost to the GOP. This is especially true of the two older senators, both WWII veterans (and incidentally Asian-Americans, the former a Nisei and the latter a Hawaiian-born Chinese-American) whose replacements would be Republicans facing a relatively weak local Democratic party and historically low turnout for reelection.

Some of these raptures would be politically sound. (Grassley has been suggested repeatedly for Agriculture, for instance.) Others would be inconcievable – both Senators from Oklahoma have little experience outside of right-wing kulturkampf, and with the GOP in shambles it seems like a serious risk that even a fairly low-profile Senator might use the Cabinet as a springboard to an effective 2012 run.

As someone who agrees with the broad strokes of the argument that Wright was treated as an unacceptable radical for – the sentiment that the vicious inequity that America spent centuries promoting were a shame on us all, evidently only acceptable to believe if that inequity involves people enjoying their sex lives – I’m not that personally attached to America in and of itself. I find its ideals admirable and am often impressed with its people’s basic benevolence; what impresses me about the outcome of this election is the profound spirit of general amity.

As we sometimes have cause to remember – almost sadly, now that we have been made to swallow the bitter harvest sown by the blood-lusting Republicans – the reaction to 9/11 internationally was extremely similar to the reaction to 9/11 internally. While there were certainly some people who reacted with a sort of nasty, unwelcome, and almost always vicarious fury (I have never met among the ‘nuke Mecca’ crowd a man or woman closer than six degrees to a WTC casualty), the predominant reaction to the day’s tragedy was sorrow and support. It’s worthwhile to compare it to the London tube bombings – the right had so fully coopted the basic idea of suffering that to express sympathy for the day’s victims of al Qaeda had been drummed and massaged into an informal referendum on murdering wholly unrelated people in Iraq.

We have, for the last six years, been convinced for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy military-industrial fuckwads surrounding Cheney that the world hates America, that we’re fundamentally incompatible with the people and values of Europe and England, and that there exists a foreign contingent that reflexively sneers at us and wishes us failure. Of course, the latter is only a simple case of misidentification; there is such a foreign continent. The problem is, they are – like Mark “The Human Jizz” Steyn and Christopher “Intefatigable Doughty Socialist Fag” Hitchens – cheerleaders for the current vile administration, eager to provide philosophical or psychological fig-leaves to the American neoconservatives’ comprehensive contempt for the Constitution, international law, and human dignity. Whether you’re a jack-ass whose contribution to socialist theory revolves around how awesome you are and how awful darkies are or a vile, race-baiting neo-Nazi who gleefully mocked the American victims of his intellectual cousins in Oklahoma, the Bush Administration had a warm spot in its heart and a soft spot in its brain for you.

The farthest fringes of the right have been conscripted to project a sort of gleeful, shit-eating hate to foreigners. The cowboy stereotype is a kind one compared to the one presented by Broder, Rice, and all the fuck-the-world gang – our cultural, political, and economic leadership has spent the last six years screaming hate at the world, insisting that we’re ignorant, bellicose monsters whose firepower entitles us to anything we want, consistently presenting the bare basics of humanity as limp-wristed Foreignese gibberish.

And the same people who had spent those six years in a desperate struggle to preserve civilization from our government – who have seen terrorism, global warming, and diplomatic tension spiral out of control as a direct consequence of us – have erupted over the last few days in joy.

Of course, the totalitarian freeper goons – and their beloved America-hating dancing monkeys – have all erupted into passionate hate, wishing death and destruction on Obama and the country and shrieking in impotent rage at a country in the throes of collective triumph, cursing at a people who would not put another of their angry, rotten old men in power.

It’s not sufficient to spoil it, though – the sense, among Democrats and Republicans, the left and right, and the great majority of Americans and people of the world, that we’ve stepped back from the brink. We told a pair of candidates – who shrilly berated us for liking a man who had not only grown up in Chicago but was clearly a ni, who called us Communists for favoring a tax policy common to the entire first world, and whose sole agenda consisted of a long, unbreaking stream of hate-objects up to and including the Earth itself – to fuck right off, and we elected the country’s first black President in the process, an intelligent and genuinely decent man.

After all this time, the world – and we – didn’t know and couldn’t but hope that we still had it in us, that we were even in the loosest sense the same country that destroyed fascism and tamed the atom. The Republicans figured we didn’t – and we weren’t – and in front of the entire world we showed them just how wrong they were.

And that is why the world wept for joy – in the words of Tim Krieder, like a happy 9/11. Not just our allies – but friends throughout humanity, people happy to see us prosper without seething in desperate eagerness to see our enemies destroyed.

There will be a time for cynicism – the inside-baseball stuff, like the high-level appointment of Rahm Emanuel, has been all too disappointing so far – but after eight years of Bush I suspect we’re all happy just to enjoy these high days’ international comity, and rest secure in the knowledge that none of the usual thugs is in a position to exploit it.

The current raft of talking points being run against Obama by the McCain campaign indicate that McCain’s people had planned at some point on Israel being a major selling point. The belief that elderly Jewish voters formed a swing bloc in Florida was crusty when McCain’s running mate was up in the air (nobody who’s been in America long enough to see Arabs as implacable race-enemies to Israel would also automatically associate blacks with anti-Semitic radicalism), and as has been repeatedly documented, the choice of an evangelical kulturkampfist seems to be enough to push non-Democratic Jewish seniors away from McCain.

What we’re seeing now is the McCain campaign’s early September attack lines from an alternate universe in which the RNC opened with the selection of Joe Lieberman as a running-mate. Lieberman could and – disgustingly – probably would convincingly argue that Khalidi is a dangerous pro-Palestinian radical; the best Palin can do is shout – with increasing vehemence at an unhearing crowd – “The new President is a niggarab!” It’s one of a series of loud, shrill dog-whistles that was clearly planned for a different campaign; the Republicans are currently running McCain’s campaign with Schmidt’s tactics, a kind of nasty compromise that pleases nobody, makes the paternal autocrats look petty and the fascist parvenus look over-grasping.

I suspect the next attack line is probably going to be an effort by McCain to spin the disastrous campaign against Lebanon as a triumph of democracy, followed by most of Election Day spent shrieking about how Obama doesn’t care about Israel. Short of calling him a secret Chinaman, I can’t imagine what the fuck else the Republicans have left.

“Mister President, count back from a hundred for me,” said the fat woman. “One hundred,” said the fat man, “ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety.”

John McCain had a number of severe health problems, all aggravated by his experience as a prisoner of war for the bulk of the conflict in Vietnam. Downed after his twenty-third bombardment mission against North Vietnam, he could do little but cheer as Nixon, elected on the promise to end the war honorably, stepped up the bombardment of Vietnam, extending it quietly to Cambodia.

Some wiseass knew they could count on her when the old man went under, and it hadn’t been fifteen minutes before Belya Revolutsiya had sent out texts to all of its members. The leak, who would remain anonymous to history, honestly thought something good would come of this; that freedom would be spread and the Bear’s iron heel caught in a steel trap. Read more »

So McCain and Palin have been trotting out the asinine canard about Bill Ayers; the slur has always been a little ridiculous, appealing to a convoluted guilt-by-colocation hermeneutic and a kind of racism which is politically dead. ‘Barack Hussein Obama, ergo wooga-booga Mahometan’ aims for a relatively open and well-understood set of fears, but does so in such an obvious and malignant way that it’s actually impossible to do without it backfiring. The Ayers slur, as much as it’s racially charged, relies on associating any politically active black man with radical Marxism – a well-pedigreed bit of right-wing hysteria evolving from the converse, back when being black was regarded as inherently offensive and ‘socialist’ wasn’t automatically abusive. It seems likely that Bill Penn, in pushing the Ayers-radical storyline, chose fairly shrewdly – it lacks even the most basic corraborating detail (the closest anyone can associate the two is sitting on a board together with Republicans, independents, and non-political figures to improve education), and it appeals to something far-fetched enough that someone would really have to be desperate to vote against a black man to connect the dots on it.

The Democratic caucus, owing to a hypertrophied sense of conservative perfidy and backwardness, is profoundly reluctant to accept people for a number of reasons. Feingold would face serious difficulties if he were the only challenger in the field; Frank would be turned down in favor of even some nonentity like Warner, and God forbid we found an actual Arab. The Bradley Effect seems to be much more prominent internally than externally.

But whatever people might think of black people in the aggregate – and it’s true that the conservative part of the electorate is fairly backwards about this – any but the most lurid racists have internalized the meritocratic idea central to America sufficiently that even groups who can be vilified in polite society could still make their way into office. Between that and its relative obscurity, attempting to prove that Obama was the devious protege of the Weathermen by pointing to a picture of him and saying “See? Black!” doesn’t work for anyone who could be expected to vote for a black man to begin with.

All of this has occurred to the Bush/McCain electoral team; what their using the Ayers meme indicates is that their opposition research has turned up nothing and they’re beginning to go into a shrieking panic. The slur, unsurprisingly, gains nothing by Palin’s usual half-baked country-frying; I’m not confident that ‘palling around’ is ever even used the way she meant it, but who knows.

At this point, McCain is down no less than 5 points and possibly as much as 12, he needs to win not only every state currently voting for him but every state leaning towards Obama – especially a seemingly unwinnable Florida and an increasingly hostile Ohio and Virginia – and all he’s got left up his sleeve is a shotgun wedding. This is what it means that he’s throwing shit like this up in the air – he’s having Palin shout about Ayers because it’s less embarrassing than anything else she could do, and that’s saying a lot.

Max Hardcore pays a young masochist to get kicked around for commercial gain, he goes to jail.

John Woo condemns millions of friends, enemies, and citizens of America alike to horrifying torture and death (almost all of it directly and obscenely lascivious and corrupt) primarily to satisfy some kind of sick partisan fealty, he winds up in line for a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And the election is, of course, now about whether or not the candidate opposed to this sat at the same table as a jumped-up hippie anarchist.

Stop the planet of the apes, I want to get off.

‘nuclear’ is a fairly recent word (its origins are older, but it’s only been a common feature of American English from around the time my parents were born), but it’s one old enough to have an established consensus on how it’s pronounced.

That consensus, generally speaking, is new-cle-ur. Not nu-cu-l[ea]r. New-cle-ur.

This is the way it is used in the neutral American accent, although like many recent or strongly regionally marked words its pronunciation is ultimately likely to be a matter of who is speaking.

The common perception in the popular media is that the b-pronunciation – nucular, as it is usually transcribed – is uneducated. It is often even used as a sort of shortcut for unpolished stupidity in a way that ain’t is no longer suitable for and few other largely Southernisms are politically correct for. I’m not sure if I’ve addressed this here, but if so I’ll happily do so again: ‘nucular’ was and still is in common use among nuclear physicists, nuclear naval engineers, and other experienced reactor and policy personnel. It’s declined sharply – ‘nuke’, common to the nuclear and nucular zones, reinforces nuclear rather strongly – but the distinction is one of region rather than erudition. Carter, Clinton, and Truman each used it.

I’ve long harbored the suspicion that Bush favoring nucular – in spite of having been brought up by a New Englander in a primarily Midwestern political circuit – was just a bit of dumb-hick theatrics, something you do to impress the papers with how very populist you are. Bush, no doubt, has at least once in his lifetime congratulated himself for pronouncing the word ‘nuclear’ in a way foreign to his constituents, believing it makes them more willing to sit down and have a beer with him. O’Doull’s please. Can’t forget that the Lord is with us and drinking’s against the Bible. Like so much else about the man, political theater mingles in more generous proportion than anyone wishes to admit with any other cause.

Governor Palin – who was raised and educated in the Northwest, worked in a Middle-American-obligatory field (broadcasting) before going into politics, and lives in a state whose dialect is an approximate mixture between Iowa, upstate Washington, and western Canada – has no reasonable excuse for pronouncing ‘nuclear’ as ‘nucular’. If she wishes to, that is of course her call, but it’s a particularly obvious and glaringly artificial call – one made evidently under the apprehension that that is how idiots pronounce it and we Americans, the illiterate Heartland hillbillies especially, are slack-jawed morons.

Palin, more than Bush ever wanted to, has settled into a political persona which is more aggressively patronizing than any sane observer ought to tolerate. She’s taken her complete inability to form a coherent sentence about anything that concerns people beneath her and made elitist lemonade, condescendingly changing her diction and register to the disjointed, surreal Ozarkian pastiche every untrained European and left-coaster aiming for the bourgeois American evangelical immediately latches onto. She’s jes’ folks, the McCain campaign assures us, not a fancy lie-ber-ul e-lite what reads books or brushes her teeth.

It’s a pity that the media fell out of love with Palin fairly quickly; otherwise, I wonder if she’d get to the point of affecting a pot belly and a ramrod-straight family tree before anyone actually called her on this shit.

Nuuuh! We’d Americaahs judt laak yeew! No Osama! Nuuuuuh! USA first! Yee-haw! Dale Junior ‘n’ Tyler too!