O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel as George Bush ineptly plundered his ass. It had begun as a threesome, but Reagan had to be repeatedly reminded whose mouth he was fucking, got tired, and was now just watching. Unfortunately, as the senior official in the room, he had to be placated.

“Oh yes! Is democracy balls deep in ass!” He affected the absurd accent to avoid being mistaken for Margaret Thatcher. “Yee-haw! Yankee come home!” The former CIA chief was cold and businesslike, the way he had always been.
The silent vice-president quickened in his thrusts, the best sign he had ever gotten that the dismal work was near its conclusion. “Yes, cowboy! Win big game! Win it for Gipper!”

Reagan looked up, his every inch of flesh sagging over something or other, with a newfound twinkle. “Yeah, Ivan! I’m going to soak you like I did Hitler!”
Silence, then, as George climaxed. A few awkward seconds later, Ronald, noticing, made a series of loud, obviously fraudulent noises and gradually worked his half-limp dick back into his pants.

“Is good, gentlemen. Is new dawn for democracy.”
“Please help clean up the President, Mr. Havel.”
“Sure, is okay.” He picked up the toupee, carefully avoiding the obvious sticky patches, and delicately placed it on Ronald’s spear-bald head. He then reached to pull down the President’s fly when suddenly he snapped into activity.

“God damn it Rock I’m a married man! You can’t just suck me off in public any more, and no one’s more sorry about that than – Oh, it’s just the Russky.”
“Am Czech, your majesty.”
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Havel looked to the Vice-President, who nodded curtly, and he finally zipped up the elder man’s fly and moved to flee the room.

O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel.
“Oh, and Vaclav?”
“Yes?”
“Get Klaus and Friedman on your way out, would you?”

… if this is too obvious or if it’s been mentioned somewhere else before, but isn’t there a fantastic irony in the fact that the same conservatives who are claiming the Holocaust Museum shooter’s hatred of Christianity disqualifies him from being on their team have been spending the last six months or so slobbering about what a noble prophetic conservative hero Ayn Rand was?

I personally tend to identify two poles in the black American community, each with its own praxis, leadership, adherents, and vocabulary: dignity and security. As ideologies proper, I would call them ‘communalists’ and ‘socialists’. Both are somewhat loose matches for the ideology as it is practiced, but a fairly pure pair of modern figures would be MLK and Farrakhan. Between Reconstruction and the Brown-CRA period, they represented respectively the cynics and establishment – the socialists’ strivings to provide education and opportunities to the black community were accepted, but regarded as insufficient, by their philonegrist colleagues.

The Civil Rights Era basically involved a massive level of cooperation between the communalist and socialist elements; the NAACP was the prime mover in herding those angry cats. And they tended to stick to their own – King was a product of the Washingtonian middle class and Farrakhan owes an obvious debt to Moorish Science. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the NAACP is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, success stories in social justice in the West. Others had purer motives or practices and fought worse oppression, but within the bounds their founders could expect, they won.

Anyhow, the communalists tend to emphasize independent religion and culture, group pride, historical revision, social dignity, and just order. As that checklist and their opposition to the economism of the socialists suggest, various communalist strains are paleo/neoconservative in outlook and/or identification. (One extreme example, Nuwabian despot and kilopederast Malachi York, pushed his followers aggressively to vote Republican.) There’s significant crosspollination from conservative social groups and ideas – nativism, essentialist ideas of race and gender, homophobia, hoplophilia, anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism, and a general tendency towards what Umberto Eco called ‘ur-fascism’. Of course, these are not necessarily part of any communalist’s outlook, nor are socialists immune to them. One might, if one wanted to be particularly careful, divide them into ‘soft communalists’ for whom individual success and personal pride are the primary virtues and the siege mentality isn’t a central factor, and the ‘nationalists’ who tend to follow more extreme ideas.

The socialists emphasize redression of specific wrongs, positive and negative antidiscriminative action, education, improvement of working conditions, improving the distribution of wealth, and maintaining community safety. Because their outlook is more focused on redression and social well-being, they tend to get along with non-black civil rights and social pressure groups far better than communalists. They’ve also been a mainstay of labor politics in America since Reconstruction. They could be divided into liberal socialists (they look after the rafters – the idea being to make sure that members of the community are not kept from achieving and prospering without focusing exclusively on the success of individual people) and progressive socialists (they look after the floor – the idea being to make sure that no members of the community are made completely destitute either by deliberate racist or classist aggression or the vicissitudes of the system).

The latter is the typical foundation-level ideology for black politicians and activists, especially mainstream Democratic ones, and the former tends to be truer of black celebrities. The race riots, bombardment, and rise of the Klan coincident with Booker T. Washington’s self-improvement movement have significantly soured the black collective memory on pure socialist thought, though; pressure is generally towards communalism, as right-wing racists tend to smear black politicians and activists regardless of their alignment and it is much more internally dangerous to be perceived as not radical enough about it.

The career path of the black minister or community organizer involves interacting with people of many ideas and walks of life, and the communalist trend tends to foster aggressive personalization of systemic abuse. Where the socialist identifies their privation with the more general American fat-cat (often explicitly identified as white, although so is the general American fat cat), the communalist sees it in specific persons or groups, and unfortunately that often includes intellectuals and Jews.

The black-Jewish relationship is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the communalist tendency towards anti-Semitism of its own accord. On the other hand, there has since the 40s been a tendency by mainstream and politically conservative Jews to reflexively regard Muslims with suspicion, and black Muslims have always been regarded as a potential threat. Add this to a lot of bad blood between immigrants (especially poorer, working-class ones) and blacks, and the result has been a lingering contempt that nobody is exactly sure of the purpose of, everyone considers unnecessary, and few people are willing to risk their skins tackling.

And partially because of a tendency by older upper-middle-class conservative Jews (who are disproportionately represented among Jews in the media) to behave aggressively towards group slights but instinctively frame, register, and react to them in a political context, the generalized anti-Semitic attitudes – and generalized racist attitudes – of the American lower class present in the black lower class have been significantly overreported. The infamous ‘Hymietown’ remark is perfectly conversant with a lot of New York stereotyping, but because it was Jackson saying it it got repeated to the point of nausea.

A final note on a subject I have always felt intense concern and anger about: Ray Nagin, the comical/literal bete noir of right-wing bigots, has always been a Blue Dog, often on better terms with the Republicans than his own party, and his ‘chocolate city’ remarks fit perfectly into a wider pattern of right-communalist thinking and statements. And like any good Blue Dog or communalist, he is an economic conservative. The disturbing and underreported link between the two groups is underscored by the revelation that told Blanco that Katrina was going to be an unprecedented bureaucratic disaster for Louisiana was Nagin telling her he had been on the phone with Karl Rove.

Although it lacks any statistical punch, Blumenthal’s interviews of American assholes in Israel would seem to suggest the point I made earlier: the Americo-Israeli project seems to disproportionately produce voters in Israel who have no interest in Israel as anything but a political project. I imagine that if one were to poll American Israelis, one would find a disproportionate level of antagonism towards Obama in the wake of Cairo and Netanyahu’s dickery.

Wingnuts have been screaming in incoherent rage about Google failing to doughtily honor our honorably doughty greatest troops in Germano-Fallujah, or as “historians” might call it, D-Day.

There’s an entire blogging career’s worth of right-wing dissembling – ranging from subtle delusion to outright and obvious fraud – over the liberation of France; in general, it follows three core tenets which cannot be budged for love nor money:
1) Liberating France is the most difficult thing America or anyone else has ever done.
2) It is owed an eternal debt of gratitude by everyone, which no one is keen on paying.
3) The rest of the world, in fact, doesn’t seem to remember it happened.

To this end, the hoggleurs-goggleur are constantly inventing new grievances to air and shriek about over various topics to do with France, often (but not always) serving some crass, temporal purpose. In the lead-up to Iraq there were a lot of these: Iraq became France by dint of our invading it, the French owed our President unconditional support because D-Day, and so on. Pictures were posted by outraged tourists in Normandy (to begin with, unknowingly fucking around in the one area where, between intense pre-invasion bombardment and fairly loose Allied policy towards rape and pillage, the native population had and continues to have reservations about the national rejoicing over 1944) guffawing at the British, Canadian, and French flags at Juno Beach, along with the other places which would not see Americans until after the war. Where’s America??? Those fancy Jew fucks.

And now those fancy Jew fucks are at it again: Google has chosen to logo-commemorate Tetris instead of D-Day. Above and beyond the complete saturation-bombing with D-Day information, commemoration, and imagery in every Western country for the last and coming week, see, D-Day is so special that
1) It should violate Google’s policy (set well before the first logo-swap) that its commemorations should avoid any seriously military or political overtone.
2) Google should find a special way to represent something in low resolution whose primary expression in popular culture is information-dense maps and photos -
3) – including to people who have never seen those maps and photos and to whom “D-Day” is a collection of words and facts.

Finally, it’s particularly telling that the outrage has been over the commemoration of Tetris: so defined is the right-wing culture by hate objects that it has eluded and continues to elude them that the main reason France and the Low Countries could be liberated from Hitler at all (Italy took two years and a million lives, after all) was the slow, brutal progress of the Soviet army against the vast majority of the German war machine in what will hopefully remain forever the most brutal and violent military campaign in human history.

I’m just saying, you know. If it were Kraftwerk or something I could see being angry, but Tetris? Tetris is awesome.

Besides which, one of its co-developers is one of Google’s senior engineers, so fucking there. Jesus Christ.

Obama’s insistence on speaking to Israeli leaders about the ostensible diplomatic position of the US on settlements for a decade or more has been called “interfering with Israeli politics” by Americans and Israeli reactionaries, and it remains to be seen if it will have any serious backlash in Israel. (Obama is very popular there; Netanyahu less so.)

While to some extent this is because the American discourse on Israel is shaped pretty comprehensively by unswerving ideological and political fealty to Likud (with AIPAC routinely punishing American political actors for adopting positions or rhetoric similar to that of Kadima, Labor, or any other ideological grouping there), there is an ancillary influence that has recently become a critical part of Israeli politics: the new axis of debate.

Much of the debate between right and left in Israel has disintegrated in the wake of heavily US-backed integration of neoconservatism into the national politics. Instead, within Israel the debate is now between the political adherents to Israel as a nation and Israel as an ideology, and right now the latter have more money and control of the government. The latter tend strongly to be ignorant, well-off, ideologically inflexible, and foreign. The last of those seems to be the key: as long as you haven’t been raised from birth in Israel, it’s a lot easier to treat the hatred of the Arab world as either a grand, unending narrative or something arising ex nihilo. Anyone else would see the move from conflicts with states to conflicts with radicals – from surgical strikes to occupation and guerilla combat – and from bombings to rockets as indicative of some manner of change which can be somehow assuaged or at least contemplated.

It’s not for no reason that Avigdor Lieberman, the mover and shaker of the genocidal right, barely speaks Hebrew and makes an electoral strategy of courting Russophones and Americans – and that the overwhelming majority of active settlers are Americans or ideologues, and typically both. For them, and for their lunatic collaborators among the established Israeli population, the Israeli state exists to ensure that as long as you have a mother the Orthodox establishment feels is sufficiently Jewish and white, then you’re entitled to buy land in a subdevelopment and have a dozen children. Queers, secularists, and Arabs are enemies of the state whether or not they know it, and as such gay parades, cremation, and Arab Israeli presence in government and the Army are to be opposed no matter what. The Palestinians don’t exist, aren’t really Palestinian, and don’t belong there anyway, so one of the many things the state has to do to keep property values cheap is exterminate them like insects.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t discussed foreign policy here, it’s because it’s an ideological totem – something external to and not necessary for the fantasists’ creed. While their leaders are perfectly enthusiastic about the old Israeli reactionary project of nuclear blackmail, exaggeration of external threats, and utter disregard for foreign national sovereignty, those exist for the fantasists mainly as a way of adopting a persecution complex – something extremely important to Americans in particular, because the American Jewish experience’s primary activity is imagining your own destruction, an activity which produces a fairly dangerous mindset when combined with a lack of any actual danger to life or limb. (It would be ubiquitous, but Americans are only one of the several immigrant groups the ideologues aim for – and especially for those coming from the more dismal corners of the former Soviet Union, persecution isn’t some exotic thing to transform into ritual – it was big even in the Soviet days, and now it’s how right-wing politicians get elected.)

Israel plays a role in the ideologues’ grand fantasy that it not only should not but cannot in reality. It is a country of millions with citizens of every major creed, race, and walk of life, and the terra nullia created by the violent expulsion of the last rural Palestinians has more or less run out. The choice is between moving into the cities (which seems to  be deeply offensive to the Americans, for whom renting is a form of suicide) desert exurbs (which are an entirely different and less sexy kind of fantasy, banal and Southwestern) and territory whose occupation by Israel has made it a concrete force of evil in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people, which offers it no strategic and little economic value, which its citizens have no concievable claim to and which essentially makes foreign relations with Israel as difficult as with Taiwan. Realists of every political tendency have agreed almost unanimously that the settlements are destructive and need to end yesterday.

The problem is Lieberman and what he represents – not just a radical ideology whose core involves the flat denial of basic, observable reality, but massive foreign support for that ideology based on a common developed or affected ignorance. There will always be Americans coming to Israel and acting as if the place exists to give them a half acre in a stupidly-named suburb; as of right now, it is the policy of both the Americans in charge of dealing with Israel and what is or at least was the major Israeli political party of the realist right to treat that ridiculous fantasy as the national purpose. This, not Israel and more than just Likud, is what AIPAC stands for: Give me Kosher Pines or give the entire country death!

1. I’m really hoping to see some Republican flack characterize her as an illegal (besides reliable fascist G. Gordon Liddy) in the next couple of months, because
(a) it’s the single dog-whistle they seem to get the most mileage out of; and
(b) it’s legitimately and infuriatingly easy to get Latinos to accept tirades about filthy illegals at face value instead of recognizing the entire genre as one blatant ethnic slur after another.

2. Obama’s choice to go through the nomination process in the traditional timeframe is a good one, especially in light of the serious cross-purposes the Republican Party and its constituents are working at in re. despicable wop-a-doos. While it might be somewhat challenging for a White House which has yet to fully acclimatize to the relatively glacial pace of news and opinion outside of the Internet to spend seventy whole goddamn days on this one issue, that cuts both ways – there’s a long, long time for the miasma of The Base to seep out, and two months is a long time for the Republicans – whose strategy so far has been one of constant escalation, stoking an entitlement to fascist outrage as politics – to keep shit under wraps.

3. In light of the recent tragic murder of one of the country’s three late-term abortion providers by a survivalist lunatic, I have to wonder if as moderate a justice as Sotomayor seems bound to be on abortion is wholly appropriate, even in light of the benefits that exist in her presence. I like to think that sharing the court with misogynist jackasses like Scalia & Son will radicalize her a little, but I’m not holding my breath.

4. It’s a pity that with God as his witness Jeffrey Rosen will never blog again. Now who is going to get paid by a liberal institution to imagine that sensible centrist Obama will finally have his Sister Souljah moment rebuking this terrible identity politician and her extreme brownness?

5. If the phrase “we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Obama for helping us out the extremist bigots who helped shatter our solid national majority and lose us elections from Alaska to Virginia” or some variant of it fails to come up among Republican political veterans or commentators during or after this fracas, the Republican Party is a walking corpse.