1. Hit him in the neck with a brick.
2. Take his space helmet away at the last minute.
3. Set him on fire.
4. Wait about a century.
5. Nail him to a tree.
6. Shoot him often enough.
7. Shoot him too often.
8. Keep his hospital from treating his cancer.
9. Hit him near the neck with a brick.
10. Break him with a wheel.
11. Put him in a gas chamber for being a Jew.
12. Let him eat nothing but brass.
13. Delegate it to a mob het up by his honoring his Iraq-casualty sibling’s lack of faith.
14. Bombard him with a fatal level of radiation after his grip on the screwdriver holding you away from the other plutonium hemisphere slips.
15. Keelhaul him.
16. Break him without a wheel.
17. Put him in a gas chamber for having a shitty lawyer.
18. Find a way to give him kwashiorkor.
19. Hit a brick with his neck.
20. Pulp up a McSweeneys and feed it to him with arsenic.
21. Put him in Lyndon Johnson’s way.
22. Carve out his heart and eat it with chili to make sure the sun will rise next year.
23. With kindness and a dirk.
24. With just the dirk.
25. Get him and his idiot friend drunk and have them reenact that pencil thing the Joker did.
26. Wait until he’s black and about to use the phone and then shove him in front of a NYPD officer.
27. Put him in between fundamentalist oil warlords and wait.
28. Give him a blood transfusion before the vector for HIV is fully understood.
29. The same way that one guy did in that urban legend.
30. Use the brick again.
31. With a laser.
32. Provoke a nuclear war with needlessly aggressive military maneuvers just inside of Warsaw Pact radar.
33. Rob him of his manhood in the worst war in modern history and wait for machismo to take its course.
34. Refuse to heed warnings about the cold weather on Cape Canaveral.
35. Rend him asunder with a series of dogs.
36. Fill his uterus with air.
37. Botch any surgery you like.
38. Sandblast him.
39. Tell the Don about his wire.
40. Convince him to punch the President.
41. Leave him to the mercy of savage explorers with foreign germs.
42. With a .22, but don’t kill a mockingbird - they bring nothing but joy to the world.
43. Charge the stage and gut him with a katana.
44. Encourage him with likeable teen-oriented characters to regard a dangerous, addictive, and expensive habit as cool and desirable.
45. Grenade up the ass.
46. Get your running mate to convince a bunch of terrified wingnut cowards he’s a Muslim.
47. Too much or too little water.
48. Rip out his gonads and his head.
49. Treat his clearly suicidal behavior as part and parcel with his avant-garde literature.
50. Just keep shitting on him until he stops moving.
51. Bury him face-down in the sun.
52. Anthropomorphize large predators, render him retarded, and put him in the zoo.
53. Fire him from a cannon.
54. Just shoot him with the cannon.
55. Work him to death.
56. Literally throw him under the bus.
57. Pay him so much money to engage in highly competitive ceremonialized bloodsport that he is essentially forced to use performance-enhancing drugs, and wait for him to die of either injury or cirrhosis.
58. Go for the soft spot.
59. Use him as a pinata.
60. Manhandle him until he winds up in front of the third rail and pisses himself.
61. Paint him a completely unrealistic picture of ‘natural’ childbirth and let him exsanguinate a fifth of the time.
62. Fuck his brains out in a slasher pic.
63. Fuck his brains out anywhere else.
64. Drop a sledgehammer on him from a great height.
65. Really, anything that gets his brains out will do.
66. Throw a brick at his face.
67. Miss and hit him in the neck with a brick.
68. Have him help sign up and protect black voters in the 60s.
69. Convince him you need to practice your chainsawing.
70. Throw a series of switches after he has bade his heartwarming cinematic farewell.
71. Make sure he’s an Anne Rice character.
72. Punch a bunch of holes in his scuba gear.
73. Shoot him with a neurotoxin-tipped dart for invading your isolated clan’s territory.
74. Tell an important Russian he’s a communist / kulak.
75. Wait until September 9, 1976, assuming he’s Mao Zedong.
76. Tell your friends specific details about his ship’s route and cargo for no real reason.
77. Hook him on drugs and keep them illegal.
78. Get one of the other Minutemen to find the water they leave out for him and salt it.
79. Drive a wooden stake into his heart with a stout hammer.
80. Paint him with gold paint all the way and shiv him repeatedly.
81. Syphilis.
82. Marry an even older one and you won’t have to.
83. Keep on pistolwhipping him - it’s not as easy as the movies make it look.
84. Order the opposing gladiator to kill him.
85. Make him pretty and leave him in prison or the Eastern Front.
86. Keep air away from his brain.
87. Deliberately ignore him as you bulldoze Palestinian homes.
88. Piss on him, assuming you piss hydrofluoric acid.
89. Leave him unsupervised in his crib.
90. Participate in a culture of perfection which encourages him to out-pretty the other girls by starving himself.
91. Teach him the Method and film a Howard Hughes biopic with him.
92. Leave him to fend for himself in the cold ruins of American industry.
93. Get him to catch your darts.
94. Convince him that communism poses a grave threat to his homeland that can only be averted by surrendering his civilian life and killing things in a South Asian jungle, then wait until he falls onto a bunch of sticks with shit on them.
95. Cut him up and leave him in the refrigerator purely to screw with his husband, your superpowered nemesis.
96. Beat him to death with a plastic explosive.
97. Put him in Thunderdome until the law of averages wins out.
98. See to it he has incriminating information on the Clintons, then, with a solid axe, break open his ribs from behind and pull out his lungs.
99. Have a blacksmith forge him by mistake.
100. Tee him up to kick the football, and then - in an oft-repeated and soon-iconic moment symbolizing to a generation of Americans the caprice of luck, expectations, society, and the opposite sex, hit him in the neck with a brick.

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.

“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 »

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.

Not quite the antigastarbites’ Kristallnacht, but goddamned close:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/29/145032/032/755/614524

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/28/203016/697/536/613742

Remember: terrorism is when you kill white people.

I don’t have anything funny to say right now.

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!”

A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues - treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling - Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount - $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her - after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society - it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor - in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society - grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record - no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism - and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshipping it - is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss - she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience - the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims - is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan - dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his mouldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost - she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those - like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan - who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors - methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls - are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves by Cessna. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game - even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong - but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forebearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.

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.

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.