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!

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/12297.html

The Overton Window is an interesting phenomenon. I tend to think it’s accurate as described, but as befits their surly, self-obsessed politics, the right-wingers who like to hang on it like it’s the Second Coming of Aryan Jesus get it terribly wrong, and every once in a while you see the direct consequences for that.

‘Look as extreme as you possibly can be,’ counsels Overton, ‘and treat the only alternative as being only slightly bug-fuck insane.’ It only works if only one political actor does it; the countervailing force, if given any significant coverage, tends to cancel it out. (The current political climate aside, Italy – a country without the stable political machines necessary to produce an ideological frame for national politics – hosts large numbers of both fascists and communists with relative nonchalance.)
The problem is that most people who read this from the right immediately conclude that this is an excellent way to get everything they want, right now now now!!! They no more have an adult concept of internal or external negotiation than they do an adult concept of other human beings’ thoughts and desires. In a supportive enough community, they wind up brushing against Sensible Moderates fairly rarely, and the poles of the debate are set in a way that automatically excludes almost all of the population from it.

The Overton-mongering of the hard right has completely failed in fixing public opinion to the right. If it has, it has done so no more radically than eight years of Eisenhower or six of Nixon – human societies, and governments dependent on them, can only endure so much stress from sudden ideological shifts. Meanwhile, they have taken a lot of people who (under a normal Overton scheme) might well have accepted a place within the new frame of debate and completely alienated them. Any Overton scheme does this; the trick is to keep the number of people who are suddenly Outside The Mainstream to, you know, numbers approaching the number of people actually outside the mainstream. When your radical-left positions on the minimum wage, the safety net, and executive power are to the right of the dwindling Republican rank and file, you’re going to find it impossible without the kind of state resources normally limited to totalitarian states to convince someone who has political and social experience before the Eternal Ideological Crisis that they’re a dangerous radical.

You’re not going to convince their friends or coworkers of it, either. You’re not going to convince 80% of the population that they’re too hard to the left on wage controls; you’re not going to convince the majority of the country that actively hates the man that the worst we can think of Bush is that he’s just slightly worse than Saint Reagan.

That and, you know, they cannot resist making the fight about their petty political fetishes. They’re intensely self-defeating in that way – they’ve reified all of the grounds for canned hysterics (sex education, school prayer, flag burning, Support The Troops merchandise) and invested billions of dollars into getting the American public to accept their worthless kitsch as tasteful and beautiful. What can you say to a candidate who invests equal amounts of time, money, and energy into convincing the public that (a) his opponent is a danger to all good upstanding pedophiles and (b) his shit smells like roses? Besides, you know, ‘Thanks, flower-ass.’

Between their natural constitutional inability to actually do what the Overton schema requires – they’re too goddamn greedy, too goddamn petty, and too goddamn vain – and the serious effects of insularity, we wind up with a sort of perfect storm of causes leading to a singular effect: the window falling out of its rails and plummeting outward. Katrina was simply the best example of this; watching the federal government treat the poor of an entire state as if they had brought a hurricane on themselves, watching right-wing icons beg for federal troops to shoot people in a disaster area over drinking water, and watching the Beltway treat this as not just reasonable but the winning side of the debate drove Republican voters away by the hundreds of thousands. An electorate that forgave Bush a thousand lives and a half trillion dollars in Iraq could not forgive the odious slimeball Rove, and could not condone him quietly having his measurements taken to renovate Liberty Island.

We have the same thing happening now, just in more subtle ways. The Republican hate machine has largely succeeded in convincing low-information voters that Obama might be a secret Muslim, that McCain is a butch hyper-cowboy, and that the War on Terror will be decided by Reagan impressions at dawn. The telling thing – and what might just be the fatal blow for Republican Overton politics – is that they don’t actually seem to give a shit. You got ‘em singing along to Toby Keith, you fucking assholes, and now they’re voting for the towelhead. Hope you get along great with the neighbors in your gated community.

;

John McCain has, as you are no doubt familiar, recently cut an ad framing efforts to educate children on inappropriate touching as ‘sex education’. This is not a popular position – in fact, most Republicans will unreservedly support programs like the one Obama voted for.

Why?
Read more »

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/09/john-mccain-fri.html
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/09/bad-touch.html

WHAT THE FUCK

edit:

(also: http://www.enterthejabberwock.com/junk/GoTeamRape.jpg)

The Stanford-Yale Oreo, or the Texas Graduate: Dubya and Condi: fuckin’. They know they’ll never get caught because there’s a media and political smokescreen around their private lives, and nobody really goes snooping for Republican sexual antics (case in point – you think a senior Dem senator being picked up for toilet sex would have stayed off the news for three or four months?), but it appeals perfectly to them both, and in both cases it might just be a sort of Pareto-optimal peccadillo.
Bush is the kind of right-wing evangelical jackass for whom the only esctasy is the self-destructive esctasy of a lapsed puritan, the only thrill the thrill of pushing one’s personal debasement to the limit; he had the pleasure and shame wires crossed a long time ago, and between cheating on his wife and sleeping with a black subordinate, it’s difficult to imagine the good-ol’-boy finding any more shame-driven eroticism without being gay or into crack whores. For Condi’s part, we find a reasonably intelligent and attractive woman with an extremely scant sexual history, but the documented partners are all big, strong guys, and fairly socially powerful as well – NFL players, suits, that kind of thing. The impression I get is an extremely powerful, dominant personality who is primarily submissive when it comes to sex – and besides Dick Cheney (who despises her), the President is the only man in America who could dominate her.

If they aren’t fucking now they have in the past, and if they haven’t it’s probably been from conscious effort and for the worse. And the Condi-Georgie-Laura triangle it forms is a perfect example of the relatively tame but personally horrifying sex lives the Republicans are famous for – the Democratic frontrunners in this race, after all, are respectively a couple with more genuine chemistry and mutual respect than have ever been in the Oval Office and a couple who, while by all indications sexually estranged, value each other enough as thinkers and as people that the idea of ending their personal partnership is unthinkable. (Rather like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, although roughly reversed in relative intelligence, family influence, and convictions.) By contrast, Palin and her husband both think of her as a baby factory and the less said about McCain’s horrifying relationship history the better.

The Big State Pepperpot, or The Yellow Rose of Alaska: Sarah Palin: Ron Paul in a clever disguise. You might think the children would be a dead giveaway, but he is an obstetrician.

Cee Bee Yoosta Bee or Spitball, Snowball – Same Difference: The Republican Party grooms strategic Yoostabees from the ranks of Blue Dogs for political gain and has been doing so regularly since at least 1994. It’s Lieberman now, and while it wound up being Zell Miller in 2004 I strongly suspect that it was supposed to be James Traficant.

Mighty Morphine Bowery Dangers or Why Cindy, What Big Eyes You Have: The main purpose of the war on drugs is to criminalize any kind of relief from the grind of everyday life, ignoring as it does any drugs readily available to people outside of that grind. Wackily far-out, I know, but it’s so crazy it just might work.

John McCain doesn’t believe America’s political elite is capable of surviving without enemies; his view is the sort of crass, facile anti-American pabulum you wouldn’t expect out of a young Trotskyite from Britain, let alone a successful politician ostensibly in the American mainstream.

We are to believe, per McCain, that America is incapable of coexisting with any independent power; that we have nothing but nemeses and vassals; that the world can be productively divided into the Country of God and the Land of Eternal War.

If you ask him about class, no doubt he’d tell you (if he weren’t lying through his teeth, that is) that each class is locked in an eternal, essential struggle to protect their own interests – and that unless the poor are trampled underfoot with sufficient vigor, his wealthy overclass is doomed to suffer – and this is bound to have a knock-on effect for him.

It’s a ridiculous spectacle to watch someone who honestly buys into Marxism of the master class; they invariably wind up beggaring parody, straining and taxing themselves immeasurably to cut the throats of people with nothing against them. We know that his version of America involves not just defending My Lai and Haditha, Kent State and Florida, but relying on it – that he literally cannot imagine respecting a country that doesn’t incinerate orphans, brutalize dissent, and rend the world astride like a damnable colossus. The malign behavior of the overclass is, for him, not a means justified by any end but an end in and of itself. Nixon bombed Cambodia for some tangible advantage; McCain would have done it to teach those fucking gook-a-likes a lesson.

One imagines, if he survives another decade, he’ll look for a nuclear plant to run on the cheap with a gay manservant.

‘Owners of the world, unite,’ cautions Jesus in McCain’s world. ‘You have nothing worth keeping but your slaves.’

I used to think that the way right-wingers described Satanism was simply stupid and unimaginative – I had never imagined that it was envious.