1. Lies about George Soros by American right-wing pseudopopulists — the better to induct him into their spooky ethnic villain pantheon, a sort of Captain Planet in reverse — generally paint him the exact way Bernard Makoff is: an intensely communitarian, money-grubbing Jew. He is not quite literally a vampire, but he’s been involved in his share of theft and ethnic palm-greasing.

(POINT OF CLARITY: This is the major bit of this essay I felt somewhat uncomfortable about, if only because the subject of powerful Jews is so mixed up with cultural baggage that people are inevitably going to read this as endorsement of something it isn’t. So for the record, within the financier class Makoff is typical as an aspiring big-man but atypical as a Jew. Most of his colleagues - and I would guess even a majority of people funding Zionist charities in the US - are white Christians, largely evangelical protestants. The main thrust of the domestic Zionist project, in which Makoff involved himself as an aspirant capitalist aristocrat, is basically to set specific parameters on the social pressures on American Jews - and, most importantly, to assimilate them as much as possible into a specific subculture with a somewhat unrealistic, idealized relationship with Israel - a relationship that has become increasingly obsolete and replaced with what they regard as an unwelcome cynicism.)

“The Jews just aren’t a big issue in Louisiana. We keep telling David [Duke], stick to attacking the blacks. There’s no point in going after the Jews, you just piss them off and nobody here cares about them anyway.”

former Duke campaign manager, 1990

He is a sort of hypertrophied representative of the worst tendency among the worst, most well-discussed group (the reactionary upper-middle-class) in American Judaism - to live up to its worst stereotypes and fail to live up to the better one. They aren’t a people apart, but they are deeply invested in the idea of it.
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December 14, 2008 — Peking. Like the Greatest Generation’s doughty moral struggle against our implacable enemies, the show is over but the fallout and thousands upon thousands of incinerated schoolchildren remain. These are the secrets of the election and its candidates that - while shared by other intrepid truth-seekers elsewhere - are published by It Is *Dancing*!!!! as an exclusive Internet scoop. Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your dicks, cuz here come the mohel:

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Nuuuuh! Looks like the paranoid lefties’n Realist swine think a coupla troops add up t’martial law! Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Jesus Christ. While I’m used to how consistently wrong the establishment’s favorite line (back the badge, then backpedal) winds up being, it’s rare to see it revealed wrong so goddamn quickly. The militarization of the convention police departments (especially the RNC’s) was regarded as a necessary precaution against radicals; and even reliable liberals ignored what amounted to the decision of the securitarian establishment to throw the Third Amendment out (evidently out of spite, because Jesus, the third amendment? Was ignoring fishing licensing too much work or something?) - and now we have clear signs that the country plans to have a full division stationed domestically - and live.

Falling empires tend to take one of two trajectories: a grand moment of clarity and the sloughing of the imperial clothes after a bitter external struggle (the Netherlands; France; the UK) or violent, overcompensatory oppression of their home subjects in ways pioneered in the Empire (Russia). I was hoping that we would have the former; turns out that our professional death-squad cheerleaders can’t stand the thought of our dwindling veto power over our subjects’ destiny will be the end of civilians being destroyed with M16s. Sorry, blacks!

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.

Look at this interview on fivethirtyeight. That’s basically it, but here’s an excerpt:

NS [Nate Silver]: Did you have financing for the project or was it paid for out of pocket?
JZ [John Ziegler]: It is not self-financed.

NS: Who paid for it?
JZ: You think I’m going to tell you that? When you’ve already shown yourself to be the enemy?

…

NS: Well, that Obama ‘launched his career’ at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground –
JZ: That happens to be one of the questions that Obama supporters did the best on! They did better on that question than on any other Obama-related answers! And here you’re telling me that it’s not true?

NS: What do you mean by “launched his career”?
JZ: The first campaign as told by the person whose position he took in the State Senate, as told by her admission, his first campaign event was in the home of Bill Ayers and his wife. [Laughs] Unless you live in the Obama kool-aid world! That is astonishing to me that you would not accept that! And by the way, when you’re given four responses to that question, what else was the response going to be? Sarah Palin?

I’m making myself sick laughing here. That and the whisky.

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.

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.

Nevada is one of those states, common in but not exclusive to the West, where conventional partisan politics often have more to do with local loyalties than political ideology. In broad terms, you can see this in returns from prior elections: even in relatively good years for the Democrats, looking back at county-level elections shows even sparsely-populated Mineral County returning better results than than urban Storey and Washoe Counties, and Clark voting for the Democrat come hell or high water.

In this election, this shifted massively; while Obama only did marginally better at the polls in Clark than John Kerry or Al Gore, even having one of the country’s strongest rates of urban growth couldn’t account for the 14-point blowout in what would normally be an intensely divided state - a state which had favored McCain in the polls for most of the year and which had never been more than five points out of reach.

It has been common to suggest that the Republicans stayed home or refused to stand by McCain, but did not actively support Obama. This, too, is seriously difficult to defend: states like Nevada and Montana (which saw a similarly dramatic shift this year without actually changing colors) would be a natural lock for the Barr campaign - especially Nevada, where Paul came in second to Romney in the Republican caucus well before Romney reinvented himself as Reagan Junior. But the third-party vote was minuscule.

What has happened in Nevada is twofold:

1. The fall of the house of Bush
Nevada is, with the exception of a few issues like gun control and taxes, extremely middle-of-the-road politically. This has created an enormous problem for the local Republican party, which lacks the tradition of local independence that kept the GOP alive in New England a generation after its time. Between that and the uniquely distant relationship the local theocrats have with the national religious right (oppose Utah, where the local Republicans are strong enough and have enough power over politics that they could push the electorate to vote for Jack Chick), the last four years have been absolutely brutal on the state Republican machine.

2. The Generational Swing
As far as I’m concerned, the factor in John McCain’s loss of the Reno metro is the incoming generation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they were born and raised in a Reno which played cultural and economic second fiddle to Vegas. The Faustian pact with the largely rural, right-wing and Mormon east no longer had the gravity that got it formed in the first place; Reno’s movers and shakers, who have been faced for the whole of their generation with the binary choice between fleeing the Carson City ship or going down with it, have accepted that the Democrats are much more likely to benefit them as members of the urban middle-class.

Between these factors, we saw not just a slight uptick in Clark’s Democratic margin, but a violent, sudden shift by Washoe and Story to the blue. What remains to be seen is whether a new coalition will form, producing a state governed by an urban cordillera in competition with its exurbs and rural hinterland - or whether this election is a fluke. In the latter case, a good Republican candidate might just get Nevada close; in the former case, it might just be as accessible to the GOP as Vermont.

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2008/10/bono-new-york-times-columnist-andrew-rosenthal.php

What the hell is it about the East Coast that the most decent people on the planet are ruled by people more worthy of Oliver Cromwell than any estate on this Earth?