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I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say
Eskimos are terrible
In every way
Bow now now
Bow now now
A is A

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.

If you, like me, read Salon, you might have noticed a particularly odious recent effort - a well-crafted if fairly obvious concern troll by a Michael Lind. One learns from him that the party for which we vote is the McGovern Party - as opposed to our grandparents’ Roosevelt Party - and this is why the Nixon Party has been faring so well; we’re a bunch of queer eggheads unwilling to take it easy on poor innocent white-collar bigots.

His fundamental thesis is one that, if he actually intended to explore it honestly, is interesting enough - that leftist economic policies have a broad base of support among the public, unlike the more evenly divided world of ’social values’. (He touches on the ones that makes his case best - gay marriage, abortion - without actually touching on the social issues which are as wildly uncontroversial as the minimum wage, like the separation of church and state and the right to non-sectarian schools, that the Republicans back to the hilt as a matter of partisan fealty.) In short, his argument should be Stalinist. I’ve said before that Stalinism is the basic political default for modern society; that Americans fall into this pattern is uninstructive unless one is really looking for Friedmanesque cosmopolitan corporatism. But Lind is no Stalinist; he has been born and raised in the high tradition of Republican (or possibly Blue Dog) slurs on their blood enemies.

The Republican antipathy for the Democrats is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t, as they do, approach politics as professional wrestling. One of its many side-effects is making concern trolling almost impossible to disguise; the vituperation we’ve had for Obama of late is their default behavior towards politicians with the wrong letter in front of their state in the news ticker, no matter what their politics. Educating doesn’t broaden their minds but deepens their habits; it is probably only an accident of learning that he referred to the pre-1976 Democrats as the ‘Roosevelt party’ rather than the ‘Al Smith party’. (If the usage sounds awkward to you either way, it is because you don’t generally identify with a party whose noun doubles as an adjective - which is also why you don’t think of ‘Democrat Party’ as a spectacular laugh riot.)

Why in particular McGovern, though? Simple: he lost. The position the liberal blogosphere falls into at its best tends to be somewhere around Eugene McCarthy’s; McGovern was his day and age’s equivalent of Bayh - conservative, extremely well-established, and from a proudly politically ignorant state. This is why Lind uses him; it allows him to call the Democrats defeatist hippies without actually familiarizing himself with a pacifist or leftist. (It never occurs to him, in his use of ‘the Nixon Party’, to accept that Nixon lied about getting us out of Vietnam; he took a pointless war and made it atrocious - but no, what was important about Nixon was busing.) The modern Democratic Party toes the line drawn by Carter - mawkishly, stupidly ‘bipartisan’; willing to accept for his party equal blame for the horrific damage done by the right; a special kind of Jesus who turns other people’s cheeks and would make giant puppets of prominent moneychangers if it weren’t so gosh-darn extremist. And, importantly - unlike the man who worked to defeat segregation and enfranchise minorities in his first (of three) terms - they’d never take as principled a risk on social principles as LBJ. In short, the modern Democrats - politically conservative, economically apologetically liberal - are the Wilkie Party; the Republicans are the Lindburgh Party. There’s a complete - and violent - analogy. But Lind wasn’t making an analogy; he’s doing nothing but slinging a stupid, catty insult, trying to goad a party whose economics he’s just now comfortable with to the social right to suit him. (Over the aisle, of course - admitting to be a solid Democrat, even if they were to the right of Goldwater, would lose him Beltway pals.)

That was a brief analysis of the man’s intentions in his stupid, poorly-constructed hack job. (For the record - as the first liberal commenter said - proposing that a massive and undesirable change had taken place between 1966 and 1968 which turned us into big queer liberal McGoverns is particularly ridiculous; and claiming that Truman was neutral on ‘wedge issues’ is particularly stupid. He integrated the military, and it caused people like Lind to call the election - and a new age of business-government cooperation - for Dewey.) What remains to be seen is how shit like this works.

Divided We Fall comprises primarily Republicans or social actors primarily identifying with Republicans; they spent two terms of what might just have been the most hard-right government elected by a functioning democracy chiding the Democrats for refusing to play along with Our President. (They like to claim that they didn’t want to but 9/11 changed everything, but they treated Congress the same way when Daschle refused to let Bush slash emissions standards or start a nuclear war with China without a fight.) As the Republicans lost popularity, it became about staying the course, not changing horses in midstream, giving the Surge time to work, and so on - playing along again and again with stupid gimmick after stupid gimmick like a horny schoolgirl before the Sexual Revolution - and now the Republicans have lost power, now the electorate would rather put shitwads like Reid and Pelosi in power than endure even the best the Republicans have to offer, these people - after six years of demanding that the Democrats stop being so shrill and uncooperative as the President stamped on their throats - have suddenly developed a serious concern about partisan gridlock and a terror that the legislature will refuse to get together and pass bills well to the right of the majority’s stated desires.

Two years ago, after the pony they had picked left not just the recently-flooded Katrina or the less-recently-invaded Iraq in a bloody mess but had barely managed to clear the rubble of the World Trade Center, these people were excitedly looking forward to an age of political efficiency, a unicameral government in which the opposition would not wield its perfidious influence in any corner of the state to derail the will of the Chinese American people. By the end of the year, they regenerated an appreciation for bipartisan politics ex nihilo.
They’ve created a state with nearly unlimited domestic power - and now it’s in danger of falling into the opposition’s hands from years of abuse, they’ve become terrified of it.

And there’s always a cheerleading section - they like to pretend that they’re moderates, that they’re on our side, that it’s in our best interest not to hurt ‘em. But they ain’t rooting for Hammer, let me tell you: if the astute observe Lind’s recent steaming dump on Salon, they will notice that most of the responders in the first page have responded to Salon articles an average of three or four times in the last year - and reading their scant past contributions leads to hilarious concern troll retrospectives. (Tucker Carlson was right: David Vitter’s whoring was nothing like Clinton’s filthy consensual fatty sex! Predicting the evangelicals’ distaste for Guiliani is just liberal wishful thinking! Rumsfeld resigning would be just what Hillary and the Democrat Party want! Et fucking cetera.) Evidently Lind has not just put himself forward dishonestly as a member of our coalition; he’s dishonestly brought in a bunch of boosters. (They all post in rapid succession - the first liberal poster’s response time is typical of Salon articles on the front page.)

It reminds me of a right-wing astroturfer group’s efforts at pushing a tax capping law - here it was illegally-worded bills they were busted for, but in other states they were disqualified or censured for flying in petition-takers from out of state. I ran into a woman a block from my home acting like she owned the place; she had been paid $500 to fly down from Denver for the weekend and $5 per signature.

I’ll never forget her attitude - she hadn’t been there a day and she felt I was out of touch with Nevada values. I’m sure we’ll get the warmest of welcomes to the real world of Democrat politics when we confront people like this - they speak with the kind of experience you can only fake with the best seminars.

Someone on Sadly reminded me of this, which may just be the best blog post I’ve ever read. We should put it in the header. Hat tip to justme for the animation.

Fun fact: when pressed by events or Himalayokitsch to think of the Dalai Lama, the massive holes in between the few (and generally inaccurate) things we know about him are generally filled with the biography of Gandhi.

Whether this is a result of completely internalizing the party line or a more simple case of lazy racist conflation of any bald Asian men in strange clothes is left as an exercise to the reader. (Be warned: unlike most such exercises, getting this one wrong is liable to make you reincarnate as a crippled queer.)

If only Harry Reid and Barack Obama had been around in 1945; we might have been able to get the real story out of them Nazis.

This one actually isn’t too big, but it is something I’d like to comment on.

Going after McCain on Czechoslovakia is kind of uncharitable, considering that as the would-be oldest President in American history he imprinted pretty heavily on a world that no longer exists.

Things have changed a great deal since he was a young man; for instance, not only does Czechoslovakia no longer exist, but if it did it would not be ruled indirectly by Adolf Hitler.
Also newly defunct: the Comintern, the Anti-Comintern, the Anti-Anti Comintern (we call those last two the Axis and Allies nowadays, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves), the Grange Party, the Cominform, the League of Nations, Tannu Tuva, most notable Kennedies, the Empire of India, political machines, Upper Volta, the Japanese Imperial Navy, effective laws against or controversy over sodomy and interracial marriage, Step’n'Fetchit, the Gold Standard, the Portuguese Empire, dogsledding, mercantilism, caesaropapism, an innumerable number of living species, nuclear recoilless rifles, any reasonable use for a battleship, the political respectability of the Ku Klux Klan, pneumatic post, the nuclear stockpile of South Africa, German invasion thrillers, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima, prop fighters, Latin mass, the Irish Free State, the Philippines’ legal and later semilegal colonial subordination to the United States, chicken-heated nuclear landmines, powder toothpaste, widespread use of either kind of LSD, homeownership, the territories of Hawaii and Alaska and the very Canal Zone on which he was born, the innocence of mankind, Orson Welles, radioactive patent medicine and for the most part patent medicine in general, New Criticism, torpedo bombers, the Big Bopper, Josef Stalin, Flash Gordon serials, rent control, South Yemen, musical cinema, the Transcontinental Railroad, Levittowns, Herbert Hoover, East Germany, the lethality of syphillis, an alarmingly large number of black men wantlessly left infected by a government body with the same, the Communist Party USA, Jim Crow, widespread belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life within the Solar System, Eurocommunism, the Marshall Plan, mainstream anti-Semitism, belief in the healthfulness of tobacco, French Indochina, the Empire of Vietnam, South Vietnam, light and heavy tanks, military ballooning, most of Europe’s Jews, soda jerks, blackface, the Comecon, racial quotas, automobile starter cranks, hundreds and hundreds of fashions, Social Credit, the Hughes fortune, potable groundwater in southern Nevada and Utah, vaudeville, Manchukuo, Elvis, HUAC, American industry, habeas corpus, ODESSA holdouts, the Russo-BerwickuponTweedian war, the USSR, Leon Trotsky, nuclear non-proliferation, apartheid, Church Slavonic, Noel Coward, the German aristocracy, the State of France, doggerel verse, widespread legal and social acceptability of almost every hard drug, Red spies, the Chongyalate of Sikkim, the American left, pan-Arabism, Charles Lindbergh, fidelity-exclusive divorce, most buildings in Dresden and Tokyo older than himself, the independence of the judicary, sock hops, hippies, smallpox, penny seignorage, anti-Hibernism, Cuba’s political dependence on the US, the American frontier, Ian Fleming, the widespread use of breadbaskets, flooding on the Colorado and Columbia river systems, marital spanking, bootblacks, Francoism, Burma, Burma Shave, the Sino-Soviet split, old money, the sound barrier, efforts at English spelling reform, the Cold War, the Shahanshah, the Australian pound, the eight-hour workday, most racist dog-whistles aimed at the hard left, rabbit and organ meat in the First World diet, several hundred languages, shotgun marriage, Yugoslavia (monarchist, fascist, and communist), newsreels, Charles Atlas, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, plausible deniability for J. Edgar Hoover, and spats.

On the plus side, at least Zsa Zsa Gabor is still around.

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