Hillary wins

As of 3 minutes ago, it looks like Hillary pulled ahead in the New Hampshire primary: 40 to Obama's 36. Thus ends a brief, shining moment - beginning last Thursday night - when it appeared for a little while that somebody other than Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee.

But I think that's over; I think she'll go on now to sweep "Super Duper Tuesday" on February 5.

Oh, wait - I thought I wasn't posting to this blog anymore. Damn!

I don't care about politics anymore.

An exaggeration for effect? Maybe. But if you scan down to my previous post, you'll see it was several weeks back (ten already - yow). And I'm only writing today, on this first day of a new year, to announce that this experiment in political blogging is going on ice (lest one fret, I'm commencing a new blog. So you could say I'm not so much abandoning politics as taking up religion).

Oh yeah - there's another reason I'm writing today, which is to post this:

[The idea for this cartoon is actually about as old as the blog itself (six months), so I'm glad to have drawn it at last. Even though I didn't draw it very well. George Bush Sr. sure doesn't look like George Bush Sr., despite being traced from a photo. In the second panel he does look a little like Bill O'Reilly, if that helps, and it doesn't.]

But to the matter at hand: not caring about politics.

All my life I never really did care about politics, by the way. My apathy was based on the sound intuition that America is a behemoth. It's got a vast and peculiar momentum - economically, culturally, socially; and sure, doing one's piece by being an engaged voter and so forth is a wonderful thing, platitudinally speaking. But it has always been clear that the Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do. And it was also clear, back in the '90s when being a political junkie meant following non-issues like Whitewater and blue-dress ejaculate, that politics was at best just a food fight, something for Rush Limbaugh to simper about. Sure, maybe stuff was at stake - will some tin-pot dictator, formerly on the CIA payroll, get bombed this year? Will we get universal health insurance someday - or will the Republicans keep your second cousin's grandfather from getting that transplant he needs? In other words, you could always consider the stuff at stake to be reasonably remote if you liked. And why not like? We all have other stuff in our lives to worry about.

So I didn't care about politics.

And then - 9-11 didn't change everything. Of course that's not what you hear from most quarters, where it's well-echoed that 9-11 changed everything. For me, no. Not that I sided with the terrorists, mind you, as I might have been accused of doing for saying such a thing in the hurricane of jingoism following the attacks. All I mean is that 9-11 didn't surprise me. In the back of my imagination I'd always figured something like it - or something much, much worse - would be coming down the pike. And, terrible though it be, things like 9-11 and things much worse than 9-11 are still coming down the pike at us today. Very little of what's gone on in the past six years has helped make that any unlikelier.

But what did change everything, as far as I was concerned, was the substantially-less-famous October 11, 2002. As it happened, I was at home in bed that day, hung-over, lying next to a radio tuned to NPR. They were running live Senate coverage of the Iraq war resolution debate, which had passed the House the day before. Now... I hadn't been paying a great deal of attention to politics in the months prior. But I knew the claim that nothing more was on the table than a "use-of-force resolution" - rather than an open declaration of war - was perfect bullshit. Bush was clearly going into Iraq, and that was clearly that.

I also knew that the arguments being adduced in favor of this resolution, with mind-numbing repetitiveness, by Senator after Senator - whether Democrat or Republican - were perfect bullshit too. "Saddam gassed his own people." Yeah, 14 years earlier, partly abetted by Reagan's de-listing of him as a supporter of terrorism. An undoubted atrocity nonetheless - but grounds for invasion? We'd gone through a Gulf War and a dozen years of sanctions since the Halabja massacre, and needed to invade his country now? While our Uzbek ally Karimov was out there boiling people in oil that very day?

(I know, Saddam had also been screwing around with the weapons inspectors. But there were some very shrewd proposals on the table for beefed-up inspection regimes: let the inspectors show up for a look-see whenever and wherever they like, and if they're turned away then the facility gets an airstrike within 15 minutes. What was Saddam going to do about it? In other words, there were options available to us shy of taking over the whole frigging country.)

So, hearing the debate that day changed something for me. Not my belief that political activism "makes a difference" (which it actually does: just a very, very, very small difference). But rather my belief that the stuff at stake - in this case, our response to 9-11 - was something I had the luxury of ignoring. Because here we were, starting a war on manifestly absurd grounds. Folks running around years later saying "Bush lied" were either disingenuous or missing the point. Not that he wasn't lying about his case for war; of course he was. But he never did lie very well, and I can attest as a casual observer of the period that it was always obvious his case for war was false. Thus, I figured - best to get that voter registration updated, spend some effort keeping abreast of the issues, and, you know, generally do my very-small piece.

So I went on to read 30-odd books, and spent a couple hours daily for the next few years inhaling the news (my knowledge of current music was an early casualty of the War on Terror). For the sheer quixotic joy of it, I went to New York during the '04 Republican National Convention and ended up carrying a flag-draped coffin past Madison Square Garden. I didn't think the world was getting particularly changed by any of this - just like it wouldn't if I took up writing summaries of political items for the online reading pleasure of a dozen or fewer friends. But I did hope that writing a blog might be entertaining, which it has been, at least until lately, when I began to realize I'm back to not caring about politics so much. This comes partly as a relief, as I appreciate getting back those two hours every day.

But mainly it's saddening, because of why politics has been losing my interest. Ironically the problem is that things have generally been going my way. But at what cost? The Republican Party has dealt itself some pretty nice blows of late. Through sheer, brilliant incompetence they've lost a war they readily could have won, and in any event should never have started. They're so damn venal and sexually repressed that they've buried themselves beneath an impressive hillock of scandals. They've undermined our economic health in ways that will continue to become clearer in the couple years ahead. They've hobbled our international power diplomatically, militarily, and economically for the foreseeable future. If this stuff is the price of being proven right, I'd like to be shamefully and embarrassedly wrong. But I'm not; they are, and each candidate the Republicans has out there running for President right now is wronger than the next (Ron Paul weirdos be damned). Which is why the Republicans will lose in November. Iraq-plus-the-bursting-of-the-housing-bubble is more than enough to do it, but their whackjob anti-immigrant nativism truly seals the deal.

But this brings us around to the Democrats, and closer to the heart of why I'm finding myself losing enthusiasm. They refuse to take the ball of their success - thrown into their hands this past year through no great fault of their own - and simply run with it. Before us now, in the looming post-Bush power vacuum, lay a politico-historical moment where a lot of stuff could get set straight. Insert your whole liberal laundry list here. Single-payer health insurance. A Manhattan-Project-esque "Apollo" program to remake our energy infrastructure. Little stuff like the restoration of civil liberties and true checks and balances in our government. And some kind of plan for Iraq, since I'm not sure what the hell we should be trying to do over there anymore. The three-state plan always sounded like a good idea to me; maybe it still is.

But there's the rub: there isn't a very imaginative debate going on around these issues. The Democrats will cobble together some kind of health program (but nothing particularly optimal or visionary). They'll toss some bucks at ethanol, and at those new lightbulbs. Maybe the rate of lobbyist control over our regulatory agencies will go down a tic. The same crap will proceed largely unaltered in Iraq, but strenuous efforts will be made to frame it differently for the press. Maybe some of the more egregiously illegal abuses of executive power - torture, surveillance, and stuff we don't yet know about - will be more or less rolled back, but not publicly repudiated to the extent that the precedent won't still be there for the next guy.

In this next, Democratic administration I just anticipate a lot of "Yeah, whatever" all around. A plethora of minimal solutions born from the deathly fear that anything bolder will lose the next election. And should that turn out true, and should nothing change too dramatically, then soon enough it'll duly be considered time to give the Republicans another shot. And there we'll all be all over again.

In short, I've been feeling pulled back toward my original intuition about politics. An attitude well-summed-up by Bill Murray's brilliant "It Just Doesn't Matter" speech from Meatballs. Things change in this great nation of ours - but slowly, annoyingly, by half-measures and rarely very decisively. Consider civil rights: have things gotten better for African Americans in this country in the past fifty years? Sure. But that's just the point - it's been fifty years. And things may have gotten better, but there's more "better" out there for them yet to get. That Beast - the American behemoth - is going to do what it's going to do, in its own way and on its own schedule.

Hope has not escaped Pandora's box, of course. Best still to keep one's voter registration current and to stay abreast of the issues. I haven't changed my mind about that. But - to keep score on whether House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers intends to follow up on the flouted subpoenas for testimony from top administration officials regarding their roles in the US Attorney firing scandal? (to take one example out of 218) - I guess I'm not feeling like I've got two hours a day for that anymore. Because Conyers isn't going to follow up; Pelosi has made sure of it; she's scared to death of stumbling in the next election, and believes that somehow meekness will help. Sickest of all, from a market-research standpoint she is perhaps right. And impeachment? Don't make me laugh, or cry, or laugh until I cry. Impeachment of every impeachable member of the Bush Administration goes so far beyond being richly deserved as to be an exigent matter in the defense and preservation of our democracy. But no, not this time, that's not how the ball bounces. The Beast is going to do whatever the Beast is going to do.

So I figured I'd take up writing about the Bible for awhile instead.

Local Politics

Since low-rent impresario Chicken John is running for mayor of San Francisco, alongside a nudist, a professional clown, and a rather spaced-out homeless cab driver; I thought it would be good fun to attend the only mayoral debate in which the incumbent, Gavin Newsom, planned to participate. This took place last Thursday in the auditorium beneath the City's main library.

I was ten minutes late getting there. On the one hand, this didn't matter since Newsom was about ten minutes late himself, and the first half hour of the show was taken up anyway by a lecture about how San Francisco's new system of ranked-choice voting will work. --On the other hand, being late mattered a lot because the auditorium had already filled beyond standing-room capacity, and spilled into a short line outside. Guards were only letting us in when someone else left.

But I was #12 in line, and there was some movement happening; plus I had a book to read and some time to kill before I had another place to be at 8. So I waited.

I was well-buried in that book when a klieg light kicked in on me, and a thoroughly-groomed man was tipping a microphone into my face while introducing himself from CBS-5 and asking what had brought me to the debate.

Ambush!

Before anybody gets excited about the fact that I have the video clip below, be warned that (a) it's of abysmal quality - I mean, criminally bad. I VHS-taped the 11:00 news off of my little TV, tilting the rabbit ears into the best position I could (because yes, I can only watch TV with the help of rabbit ears); then transcoded it to quicktime for upload. And considering that (b) I am a catastrophic disappointment in the video (if not, indeed, a bit of a fool), I wouldn't even have gone through that trouble had it not seemed like an amusing tech experiment.

Yeah, I blew my big opportunity in front of the camera. I didn't say, "Why, I came to see Chicken John's agenda of art and affordability enunciated in the public square!" I did not say the truth, which was, "I came here to see whether a circus erupts!" Instead, I gave a numbingly dull good-citizen translation of that latter thought:

Anyway, I was finally let into the debate for its last 40 minutes or so. Some funny things were said. The cab driver, who calls himself Grasshopper, kept putting his hands into the "flying birdman" goggles position while other people were answering their questions (as per left, below). When answering questions himself, he just gurbled on in spaced-out tones about how marijuana and sex work should be legalized.


A candidate named H. Brown was giving Newsom a little hell, saying apropos of the new system of neighborhood security cameras, "If we'd had a camera in the mayor's office this past year, Newsom wouldn't even be in office today." --An evident reference to Gavin's affair with a top aide's wife, which is about the only piece of local politics I've actually heard anything about.

The nudist (who was, sadly, not nude) actually sounded level-headed enough. He just kept saying San Francisco should borrow more progressive ideas from major European cities.

Chicken John - at least while I was watching - ignored the questions he was asked about surveillance cameras and earthquake preparedness to hold forth about how the City drums out artists with its high rents, and that Muni buses should be run on coffee grounds. In his summary statement, he jabbed in the very funny line that, "San Francisco is not a city of zombies!" - funny, since there was a zombie flash mob slated to gather outside the library and attack the audience and candidates as they left.

And that's San Francisco politics for you, at least in an off-year like this one.

Before the batteries in my camera died, I was able to take one or two pictures of the zombie flash mob that were as bad as, or worse than, this one:

(If you click on it you'll at least be able to get some detail.)

Update: Jim Lamb has provided me the link to some much better documentation of the zombie attack.

citizenship test

This is a bit of fun. Ten questions from the new version of the US citizenship test.

I got nine out of ten - god knows how I was able to pull from out of the dim reaches of my recollection that there are (spoiler alert) 27 amendments to the Constitution.

But I didn't understand their interpretation of the question, "Name two rights of American citizens," and, silly as it sounds, I missed that one.

In defense of Jenna

It feels more than a little weird setting out to defend Jenna Bush. Just seeing her creeps me out a bit: she looks far too much like her father, although younger, and in drag. Quite like the weird little pop! of the senses you get when you see Lisa Marie Presley.

She's him - I mean, she's her own dad... but yet... she's her?

You know.

Plus, Jenna seems to carry the analogy with her father right into the frat house. She strikes one (okay, me) as a bratty, gum-snapping entitle-ee, chafing at the bit - now that she's earned that B.A. - to go pull down some mid-six-figures for doing little or nothing at a consulting firm; but feeling obliged first to build up some public image by helping a handful of disadvantaged third-world youths and pulling down a six-figure royalty advance for writing having a book ghost-written about it. A rather shoddily ghost-written book at that, by most accounts. But an easy read for the pre-teen set.

I know I said I've come here to defend her. Just not about any of that.

No, I want to defend Ms. Bush against this foolish notion that she's required to go fight in Iraq. And sure, there's one obvious reason she shouldn't: she'd be a target, a danger to her fellow soldiers, etc. The Prince-William thing. But I don't care about that. What I care about is the more basic implication that parents' children should be held to account for their sins. It's such a patently ridiculous idea that you can actually find it espoused in the Old Testament.

Michael Moore loves this line of attack. I always thought it was one of the dumbest bits of Fahrenheit 9-11, him running around Washgington, DC asking Congresspeople if they'd send their children to hunt down those Mesopotamian WMDs. To me that's a softball; you answer, "I am terrifically proud of my wonderful son [daughter] and would support wholly his [her] decision to wear the uniform of his [her] country if he [she] so chose. But his [her] life is his [her] own, and I respect his [her] decision."

Oddly, none of the Congresspeople did that. They just got nervous and squirmed away. The line worked so well for Moore that he took it to the 2004 RNC and pounded Bill O'Reilly with it (~ minute 6:00). "Would you sacrifice your child to eliminate a brutal dictator?" "Er - I'd send myself, but I'm not talking about any children here!"

Anyway. The poor girl (Jenna) doesn't know about this whole complicated thing (Iraq) one way or another. She no doubt believes in the war because to do otherwise would be the beginning of the admission that her father is a moron of world-historical proportions. Further than that, I do not believe she's much thought about the matter. You know - just like 90% of the American public didn't much think about it in the buildup to this Vast Miscarriage in the first place.

("Vast Miscarriage": I like that. I think I'll actually start using it to refer to the Iraq war all the time.)

But none of that's particularly Jenna's fault, and it's not logical to somehow punish George by attempting to send his daughter into the conflagration he's uncorked. Even rhetorically.

As for George himself? He should be turned out for lifetime infantry duty on January 21, 2009. We can give him the rank of Sergeant so that Cheney can serve as Private right beneath him.

No Gore '08

Well, I wish he'd run, since I think everything he's come out supporting in the past six years has been borne out to be stone-cold right: and I'm leery in the extreme about ending up with another round of Clintonian triangulation, which is what we'll get if the presidential race proceeds as it has. Not to mention that Gore '08 would be an elegant piece of poetic justice.

But I think he won't run, and the reason, indirectly enough, is that the Republican candidates suck.

All of them, fearsomely. Which is a crying shame.

See, Democrats are very comfortable right now. They feel like they're going to take the White House next year in a walk; and, to be fair, they will. But what this disastrously results in is a total lack of dissatisfaction with the current crop of Dem candidates. "Hillary? Sounds fine by me, but if there's a problem down the road we've got Barack to fall back on. If he doesn't work out, well hell, Edwards will do in a pinch."

And thus Gore lacks the sort of opening through which one might most energetically catapult. So he will likely have to content himself with a cozy little life of racking up Academy Awards, cash, and - from the sound of it - a Nobel Peace Prize in the morning.

Although I agree with Hitchens about the loss of cachet he will suffer for not running (at least for me personally).

Interrogation Techniques