Allright*. Obama is the next president.

I do have a penchant for calling these races early. Back in... I don't want to look it up, but several months ago I called Hillary for the Democratic nomination (I reiterate that I thought so because she is relentless, and I also reiterate that she sure is).

So why the heck would I call the general election now?


(A) Obama has long-ago won the Demcratic nomination. This is ridiculous. There is no math that makes any alternative outcome (Hillary) possible. None. Except that Obama dies a sudden and untimely death, which I sure the hell hope Clinton isn't counting on.

I sure, sure the hell hope not. But she is holding nothing else in her poker hand.

Nothing, by the way. Did I say "nothing" already?


(B) Obama will beat McCain; and I submit THIS as evidence. Watch this clip, listen close on every word, and pay special attention, in fact, to Huckabee's words. To repeat the poker analogy, McCain is holding nothing going into this November. Flat-out nothing. His solution for Iraq is to dig further in without real commitment to the war (no draft, no new taxes); and his solution for the economy is more tax cuts and more deregulation. Your workaday Republican charlatanry: we can get everything for nothing.

[Note: This is the Laffer Curve: lowering taxes will raise revenue. Which was always bullshit. Reagan first accepted this principle (and doubled back on it, by raising taxes once his initial lowering of taxes resulted in - duh - lower revenue), and all Good Republicans since have extended this Laffer-Curve religion into every element of public policy: lowball a war in order to win it. Cut food programs in order to feed people. Reduce government spending (direct investment in the economy) in order to stimulate the economy. Black is white, war is peace, conservatism is compassionate. (Comment to Note: John Maynard Keynes, father of macroeconomics, called government spending a "multiplier", because the initial spending stimulated the economy, but there was a secondary spending that occurred out of the salaries of the government employees paid in the first spending. This is what got us out of the Great Depression (doubters: was or was not World War II a time of increased government spending?) Whereas Republicans, on the other hand, have their own theory called "trickle-down economics", which means you do the reverse: let the government spend no money and have rich people hang onto it all. Well, guess what? A dollar saved by a rich person is put into savings, and does not create the effective (payable) demand which is the true engine of our economy. A dollar put in the pocket of a government employee (unless that employee is Dick Cheney) is rather likely to go to McDonald's that afternoon, and thus stimulate the economy. In sum, Republican economics is sheer and simple bullshit. Or, as the elder Bush notably called it, "voodoo".)]

People, in short, see where this crap has already been leading us. So I don't want to go on about it at length.

McCain has got nothing. Least of all, these days, any residual straight-talk.

Did I say already he's got nothing?

A fencepost could beat McCain this year. Which is to say that if John Kerry were the Democratic nominee, he would take the thing. However, Kerry isn't the nominee. It's Obama. Who may or may not be the Savior of the American Republic: but I sure hope he is, because I believe he will be its next President.

Seriously, watch that clip I recommended if you aren't feeling me.


And, (C). Which is that I don't believe Obama will let them get away with the garbage Huckabee suggests at the end of the clip. Huckabee says the Republican nominee is likely to lose, unless sufficient seeds of doubt can be sown into the Democrat. And I, um - well, some have said Obama responded to the Jeremiah Wright thing too slowly, or in half-measures. But I have a feeling here. I think the man knows how to street-fight these things; I think he now knows how to street-fight them even better than he did before the Wright thing came up; and I have confidence that he will punch on through.

Am I wrong? Lay a bet with me in the comments: I work nonprofit and don't have a lot of cash, but I might take you up.


PS. I began this blog with an unstated personal ban on the use of obscenities. I let that standard slip in a recent post about the fifth anniversary of "Mission Impossible", or whatever in god's name The Retard called that miscarriage. I was mad. Today I seem to have done something similar with the use of the word "bullshit"'; but I want to make it clear that I intend the term technically, with a meaning not quite captured by any other word. IE, "Saying stuff which is superficially plausible, but which the speaker, and very possibly the listeners, know is not true: but yet, in the saying of which, it is hoped that in the formalism of its merely being spoken that a given point will still be carried, or at least not too-closely questioned."

I have an elaborate definition of "bullshit", as you can see. Therefore you understand my need to resort to the term. But it resumes from here that in general, I am committed to the notion that I will make my arguments only the more persuasively if I do so without vulgarity.

(Bullshit!)


* I spell it, "allright". Not "alright" or "all right", which every dictionary in the world tells me to do. Why? Even though I am aware this is regarded incorrect? Because I like it better that way. It's the same reason I put my end-comma outside of a given "quotation", and why is that? Because the comma isn't a part of the freaking quotation, that's why. The stuff in the quotes is the stuff being quoted, yes? And no sentence ends with a frigging comma. I figure that if I defy grammar as-taught in the name of just one or two items that bear greater common sense, then these things might catch on. "Alright"? Why do we drop the second "l"?

And while I'm at this - people, use commas to separate the last item in a list. It creates ambiguities otherwise. Check this out:

The budget allocates resources to the following areas: capital expenses, salaries, building maintenance, research and development and sundries.

Versus:

The budget allocates resources to the following areas: capital expenses, salaries, building maintenance, research and development, and sundries.

You know what I'm saying. Use the last comma in a list. Not to do so values economy over meaning, which is simply goddamned stupid. AP Style be damned.

Thank you. I have exhausted all the opinions I can think of for the moment

Oh: I hate onions.

Repost

My post of March 20, which, pleasantly, regarded prison rape, was picked up for a reposting by a new site for discussing civic and crime-related affairs named 320sycamore.com. Their version of my post improves on mine by the inclusion of a couple of YouTube clips from the author of the book which I was basically reviewing in my post (Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison). Their version of this post is worth checking out for that reason alone; let me know what you think about the rest of the site while you're there...

Impertinent Comment

Jenna Bush was married this weekend, and at the reception she danced with her father to Joe Cocker's song "You are so Beautiful".

Is it just me, or does that remind you of Narcissus gazing into his own reflection?

Mission Irretrievable

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Welcome to Your New Century

I Still Hate Politics

Here are some things that happened lately:

Week before last, we got to see John Yoo's March '03 memo outlining legal justifications the Administration could use in defending its torture program. The memo was rescinded nine months later, but we learned this past week that it was only a small part of the administration's deliberations on the torture question. Beginning in 2002, the White House Principals Committee - Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Tenet, Powell - met repeatedly to set guidelines for CIA interrogators including how many times a detainee can be hit or pushed, how long deprived of sleep, etc. (Oh yes, and waterboarding. Waterboarding was part of these deliberations.) This isn't the first time (I think it's in fact the second) that an unlikely hero emerged in John Ashcroft, who said during one of the meetings, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Meanwhile, our current Attorney General has been behaving less heroically. A couple weeks back, speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Michael Mukasey choked back tears describing the need for telecom-company amnesty for their complicity in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping scheme. Yes: he actually came to the edge of breaking down in tears. Mukasey said that unfettered and warrantless wiretapping is essential because just before 9-11, the government failed to listen in on an inbound call from a "safe house in Afghanistan", a call that presumably detailed the attacks. Now: (1) Under then-current law, the government actually had every right to listen in on such a call. And (2) interestingly, this call was never revealed to the 9-11 Commission.

This past week, asked by Patrick Leahy to clarify the mess, Mukasey curiously both backpedaled and remained defiant, by saying he had gotten everything right in his remarks... except that he'd mixed up the country. The call was not from Afghanistan. So, this call's relevance to 9-11 is questionable (as well as its existence), and it proves nothing about a need for expanded wiretapping powers anyway, since the call (if it occurred) could freely have been monitored in the first place. Got all that? Woogh.

And as we all know, Petraeus and Crocker returned to DC this week to explain how much progress has been made in Iraq. Meanwhile, just this past week, 18 soldiers were killed there.

Okay. So you've got these things going on in the news. And so I tune in to watch This Week With George Stephanopoulos this morning, and what does his roundtable spend fully half their time talking about? Barack Obama's big, big problem of being an elitist.

Why is Barack Obama supposed to be an elitist? Hang onto your hats, folks, this is really bad. In a private donor meeting in San Francisco (aka, elitism central) he said this:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I, for one, am scandalized. How dare Obama summarize the thesis of What's the Matter With Kansas? (which was correct, and a great book)? How dare he suggest that gun rights and religious pandering serve as smokescreen issues, allowing folks to get bamboozled into accepting a raft of policies contrary to their interests - like, say, the shifting of the tax burden onto the middle class?

This is atrocious. This requires a national discussion around the issue of snobbery. This requires Hillary Clinton to become a bird-hunting enthusiast? Okay, never mind that one. But this requires outrage, people! Did you hear that Barack Obama turned down a coffee he was offered the other day, and asked for orange juice instead? Where does that no-good bastard get the nerve! And how can he expect to stay up for 3am phonecalls without caffeine?

Well. This is of course why I hate politics. You might hone that claim a bit to say that what I hate is the media coverage of politics... but really, you know, our politicians are all so media-conscious (and in their defense, they have to be) that it is a complicitous, evil-symbiotic relationship. You can't much tease the one loose from the other.

What bugs me about this particular flap - which, if the bobbleheads on This Week are to be believed*, is a serious one for Obama - is that our unofficial (but inexorable) system makes it impossible to become a creditable candidate for president unless you're a millionaire, and beholden to the power structure of your party, and beholden to a slate of shadowy donors who all have their hooks in you. It is impossible that you not be an "elitist", however you want to define the term. But then you've got to run back and forth across the country playing this kabuki-theater act in which you dress like a lumberjack and shoot at animals and try not to appear effete in the way you hold a glass of beer. You have to be one of the common folk: otherwise you have committed a damnable sin - perhaps the ultimate sin, politically. You weren't a regular Joe or Jane.

And did I mention that you must be a championship bowler (whatever you do, don't roll a 37!). You must play sports - but not windsurfing, because that makes you look like a girl, or something. Honestly, I could never figure out what was wrong about the windsurfing.

And I can't figure out what's wrong with Obama, at least vis a vis this elitism problem (Reverend Wright, on the other hand - that guy was a whackjob**). You see, the way I see it, Obama may be the candidate least beholden to "the system" that we've seen this side of World War I.*** The financial backing of Obama's candidacy comes mainly from small donors. His relative inexperience, whatever drawback it may be otherwise, at least comports well with the idea that he isn't ossified into the political status quo. True, Obama doesn't come to the public with the most radical policy agenda imaginable - but you can at least feel comfortable with the idea that he's his own man, not fully bought-and-sold like your typical candidate. But now we want to say that he's the elitist? And we want to say it because he essentially said kitchen-table issues are more important to America's future than legislation over religion, guns, and immigration?

The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. Or maybe that's just the Crown Royal.


* - And I guess you should believe them, because as members of the media they will decide for us how long a stupid story like this one continues to get play.

** - . Not for saying "God damn America" - in context I think that made perfect sense. But when Wright said the government created AIDS to attack Black people? Yow.

And by the way, Obama isn't responsible for what Wright has said. I'm just saying that Wright himself is a whackjob. Because another curiosity about American politics is that we require our politicians to go rub noses with religious whackjobs - witness John McCain - after which, of course, we require said politicians to provide tortured non-apology-apologies for having consorted with whackjobs.

*** - I just mean candidates with a credible shot of winning. I'm not considering Eugene Debs, or Ralph Nader, maybe even Howard Dean.

Oh, and rather than WWI, I was about to say "Reconstruction", but TR comes to mind; he was certainly a wild card.

Biden nails it

I didn't hear all the Petraeus testimony yesterday, but of what I was able to listen to, the standout item for me was Joe Biden's opening statement in the afternoon session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Looking for the clip today on YouTube, I first accidentally came across Biden's opening statement from the last time we did this - Petraeus' Senate surge testimony last September. Listening to that clip, I thought, "Huh, I'd thought Biden came on a little stronger than this." But I didn't realize until two-thirds of the way through that I was listening to something seven months old. Because what Biden has been advocating has been very consistent. To wit: this isn't working. To any extent it is working, it'll be undone whenever we leave, whether that's tomorrow or several years from now. And so we really need to leave right now. This withdrawal should be orderly and staged, and some force may likely remain for the discernible future to continue fighting the (very small) Al Qaeda powers in Iraq, and to train the Iraqi army. But in the main, we need to pull back our military, lick our wounds, and realign against the actual enemy in Afghanistan.

Biden's statement yesterday is the most cogent articulation I have lately heard of where we stand over there. It's calm, clear, reasoned, and unrelenting.

The clip doesn't seem to exist on YouTube; the best I can offer is CSPAN's page on yesterday's testimony, from which there's a link to Biden's statement in a Real file.