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.

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.)

Because John McCain is unbelievably McOld (you can probably tell I used to write for the Onion, folks) it has become common on the left to consider attacks on this element of his character ageist.

To some extent, I accept this. (I refuse to accept the right-wing talking point version of it - in general the right only cares about any kind of ism when it’s personally inconvenient to them, and ageism is no exception.) The major excuse I have to justify my trucking in it is this - while he may well be at least partially senile, McCain chooses to be ‘old’ in the way pop culture generally demands it. There’s nothing about being an advanced age that makes computers inherently unapproachable, that keeps you from stringing together a coherent sentence about foreign policy or fills you with murderous contempt for people you’ve never met.

One of my grandparents was born in ‘33 and we spent hours the last time I was up to visit discussing the role the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had in the current state of the Middle East - and he was a special-needs education professor, not a historian. Even my grandfather on the other side - about McCain’s age and a kind of shameless racist the modern world no longer produces - is willing to engage the foreign suffering our domestic politics cause. One of my grandparents was born in the Arizona Territory and she rarely gets as irascible or verbally confused as the senior senator from Arizona.

In short, yes - dumping on McCain for no better reason than being old is unpleasant and wrong. But just as he does Whitey, he gives the elderly a bad name; he’s been rotten inside his whole life, it’s just that - like a bottle of shit left in a wine cellar - he’s grown only more purulently despicable with age. Letting him use that age - an age shared or exceeded by millions of Americans with minds and souls in far better shape than his - as an excuse to be a horrible human being is as ageist as anything. He’s been treating computers as a fad and brown people as disposable since my parents were in high school; just because he’s gotten nastier and more unusual for both with age doesn’t excuse him.

As far as I’m concerned, American politics has entered a transitional period - the Republican Party has fallen into a tailspin and the Democrats’ ideology is vague enough that at this point almost anything could happen. In light of this, I’d like to offer a hypothesis explaining the current situation and a sober warning to the right - whose countervailing influence, however unpleasant, is ultimately necessary to purge the left of its unreasonable transitory fetishes. Read more »

A despicable article on Salon, along with its asinine and credulous responses, reminds me again that ‘well’ is quite possibly the most dangerous word in the English language. Medicine belongs to a special category of human sciences in that it is an area of extreme complexity requiring an enormous amount of intellectual investment to understand which everyone nonetheless presumes to hold an opinion on; thankfully, if you observe long enough you learn how to weed out the two more malicious categories of fakers from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

In general, one can divide promoters of pseudomedical woo into two categories - hucksters and dupes. The dupes are, like all dupes, the right mixture of ignorant and arrogant to buy into whatever stupid idea the closest guy with a loud voice is pitching; the hucksters, on the other hand, are experienced frauds whose MO involves obfuscatory language tailored to pitch a useless product. Some hucksters might actually fall into the category of dupes themselves, but - as the Rotten Library observed of Pat Robertson - in general, when they or their loved ones come down with dangerous afflictions, they usually seek out aggressive medical treatment rather than trusting in God, nature, or inscrutable Oriental secrets.

My purpose today is not to take on the hucksters in general; it is to specifically shine a destroying light on the idea of wellness - for in addition to being a stupid replacement for ‘good’ with which you can respond to ‘how are you?’ to indicate you have been to college, ‘well’ is an often-abused power word in pop medicine. In fact, it might just be the most dangerous scientific delusion of our times - there are more audacious ones, after all, but creationism hasn’t exactly killed anyone. Read more »