The Truce of the Bear

I am pleased to note that that my countrymen were, indeed, not That Fucking Stupid.

OK.

Some were.

But the critical mass of Americans rejected the siren call of Republican cloudcuckooland. the fantasy that we could lower taxes and fight wars and "privatize" everyfuckingthing and not get screwed like a drunken prom date.

Better; it seems that the immense Edifice of Stupid that calls itself the Tea Party managed to find candidates that were not just stupid but stupid and indiscreet to the point where not even the most purblind of scriveners and the least informed of voters could ignore them.

That the sort of men like Akin and Mourdock are now, happily, hopefully, now filling out the employment application at the local quickee-mart warms my liberal heart.

Note to the GOP: next time, run fewer rape philosophers.

Krugman summed it up well: "...one big thing that just happened was that the real America trumped the “real America”. And it’s also the election that lets us ask, finally, “Who cares what’s the matter with Kansas?”

But.

That was merely a battle. The war continues. Now is not the time for complacency or mercy. Now is not the time for pity or ease. Listening to the commentary late in the evening on CNN I was stunned by the punditry talking about how this victory meant that Obama and the Dems would need to make MORE compromises with the plutocrats and oligarchs.

The Rovian disease abounds in the land; nearly half our countrymen voted for an entitled dick who wanted to govern like Herbert Hoover and whose functionaries are worse, who are working for the New Feudalism. The people who loved them some Bush, some Cheney, will not respect our "cooperation" and our "bipartisanship". They never have. They will respect a boot in the face.

Bob Reich talks about how we must "rediscover the public good".

But that would mean purging the Right of those Visigoths who deny that there IS such a thing as "public good"; the relentless union-busters, government-shrinkers, privatizers, theocrats, and teatards.

We must always remember; as it is presently constituted the Republican Party cannot be reformed. Ceterum censeo GOP delendam esse.

"But (pay, and I put back the bandage) this is the time to fear,
When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near;
When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise,
When he veils the hate and cunning of his little, swinish eyes;

"When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer
That is the time of peril -- the time of the Truce of the Bear!"

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door,
Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o'er and o'er;
Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at the flame,
Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow's game;

Over and over the story, ending as he began: --
"There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!"

~ R. Kipling The Truce of the Bear

Stranger in a Strange Land

I'm studiously trying to ignore the election today. Whatever happens will not be good for my country, although I truly believe that some outcomes will be worse than others.

But I do want to comment on this piece by Matt Taibbi.

Matt begins by agreeing with me that whatever happens today it's going to suck for most of us. But his main point is that's because "...we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there." So - in Taibbi's view - we just need to chill, be calm, and carry on if the "other guy" gets elected.

As short a time as ten to twelve years ago I would have agreed. But not today.

Today the 27-percenters, the people who still hugged Dick Cheney to their breasts back in 2008 when the evil fucker's arc of despotism was clearly visible to anyone not wearing their Rush Limbaugh beer goggles, make up the critical mass of the GOP. The people who vote Republican are either flat-out neofeudalists, plutocrats, Christopaths, or hardcore bananarepublicans longing for a strong nation with an iron will to kill Muslims.

While I agree with Taibbi that these people are "patriotic", that they love the United States, here's the thing; they don't love the United States I love.

Goddamn it, these people DON'T want the same things I do; a United States that tilts towards labor rather than capital, wages rather than trust funds, peace rather than war, small rather than grandiose, alternatives to the old petroleum-based economy, local rather than imperial, atheist rather than devout, equal rather than opportunistic.

They love a United States that is represented by an investment banker wheeling derivatives, a team of Rangers kicking in a door, or a drone strike on a mud hut in the FATA.

I don't.

We are becoming, we have become, two nations, separate and unequal. Most of the people who are out there voting Republican today are citizens of one of these nations.

But not the one I love.

And until that changes while we may share the same flag there can be no peace between us. This nation is a house divided, half Fox News and half free. And a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Poison and the Rope

The fact that tomorrow a contest between a flawed but decent Eisenhower Republican and a contemptible oligarchich fabulist deeply in hoc to plutocrats, luddites, Christopaths and unregenerate racist shitheels will likely be decided by the narrowest of margins fills me with rage, despair, and loathing and the deepest contempt for my "fellow Americans".

I'll be the first to point to the problems that Mr. Obama represents for the Democratic Party. A bloodless policy wonk unwilling to go to the canvas for any sort of policy resembling an upgrade for the non-trustafarian America, he and his party resemble the party of FDR the way a dead spaniel in a roadside ditch resembles the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But the stark staring alternative is simple madness. The GOP as currently constituted, as led by the mendacious poster boy for white privilege, is crazier than a shithouse rat and about as cuddly.

And by that I don't mean the grifting greed of the plutocratic classes that dominate the top of the GOP food chain; stuff like the 15% capital gains rate, attempts to kibosh the inheritance tax and kill any meaningful regulation of financial chicanery, environmental rapage, and the vicious cramdown of jobs and wages. That stuff, while loathsome, is at least comprehensible. It makes sense for these larcenous fucktards to WANT this stuff. It's terrible for the nation and for anyone who doesn't own a yacht, but it makes sense if you DO.

No, I'm talking about simple gonzo nutball stuff, real canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves shit. "Privatizing" things like emergency relief and health and safety regulation. Regulating what people do with their sexy parts. Returning to the gold standard. The entire Ryan "revenue plan". "Islamofascism".

I'm talking batshit crazy, tinfoil-hat nonsense. Things that no human with a functioning reptile brain could believe. Complete and utter crap that forms a huge proportion of the ideas central to the GOP ideology.

You can stand afar off and gaze down at this contrast, the unfruited plain on the one hand and the immense, groaning mountain of lies, damned lies, and stupidity on the other and the stench from the right hand would inform a blind man that there is only one sane choice for any American who doesn't own his or her own timber company or live off mommy's trust fund.

The most stunning characteristic of this election is what we will NOT discuss.

The appalling upwards transfer of wealth. The defenestration of the middle class. Poverty. Regulation and fiscal policy that favor wealth over work and the rentier over the worker. The value of foreign wars, secret prisons, and torture. Our addiction to the petroleum tit. The value of taxation as the support of civilization; roads, cities, ports, libraries, schools, and universities.

The GOP will put all of this; the entire mass of the social contract we have forged since the dangerous days of the early Depression, into the noose and hang it. They will do their level best to kill this America as quickly as they can so they can revive the unquiet corpse of the Gilded Age and hasten forward to the New Feudalism they dream of.

Their opponents are a slower death of the American Dream, the Great Society, of the New Deal. Their poison is the poison of abandoned belief, of triangulation, and compromise with the unslakable. But a slow death is at least less sure, less violent, than the noose. And there is at least to hope of an antidote, even if a small hope.

The noose leaves nothing but dead meat.

And yet...here we are, poised on the perilous point, within a whisker of getting four years of a man whose integrity and intellectual constancy make George W. Bush look like a mashup of Socrates, Solon, and goddamn Albert Einstein. We are poised to hand this sonofabitch the noose and thrust our own heads through it. We the People are within an ace of electing a man President that we know is a grossly arrogant lying douchenozzle.

The entire business sickens me.

And I can only leave you with the devout hope that my "fellow Americans" are not

That.

Fucking.

Stupid.

Enemy of the State

I've been avoiding these gawdawful presidential-candidate "debates" like a pious Catholic a near occasion of sin.

I know perfectly well what both men "stand for", as much as they "stand for" anything in this age of cash-infused politics where a principled position is as rare and as tenuous as a truthful statement and about as welcomed.

The massive, weapons-grade avoidance of history and common-sense on display - largely from the Republican candidate, but that is the necessary and unavoidable consequence of his entire political party having descended into gibbering madness - is both revolting and irritating.

The past week's episode - which I understand was based largely on "foreign policy" - was perhaps the worst of the lot largely because of what was NOT discussed.

Both candidates apparently agree that my nation should be involved in constant low-grade warfare against shadowy Islamic groups in the least-stable portions of the Third World, apparently on the fact-unsupported belief that killing people and wrecking things in these fetid and festering hives of scum and villainy will have a salutary effect on the locals instead of being the geopolitical equivalent of tossing gobbets of raw flesh into an open sewer in hopes of attracting rats to smash one by one with a ball-peen hammer.

No hint of re-evaluating the U.S. voracious appetite for petroleum, it's purblind embrace of Israel, it's knee-jerk embrace of unproven techniques of human destruction such as drone assassinations, it's monstrous "defense" edifice or the attendant incestuous entanglement of warfare, cash, politics, and the economy (otherwise known as the "military-industrial-congressional-complex") was on display. In this both men were practically reflections of one another, and both were a noxious display of the vile consensus that comprises the "Washington Rules". Charlie Pierce put it best when he said:

"In no area have we as a self-governing nation so abandoned our obligations as we have on foreign policy. In no area are we so intellectually subservient to expertise, and to the Great Man Theory of how things should be run. In no area are we so clearly governed, rather than governing ourselves. The president, at least, occasionally seems to be aware not only that this is true, but also that it puts the whole experiment of self-government in mortal peril, just as the Founders knew it would when they lodged the war powers in the Congress, which has spent the last 225 years giving them back, in one way or another, to the Executive, which is presided over, always, by One Great Man. He at least seems self-aware enough to appear troubled by the power he nonetheless wields."

That is combined with an almost surreal capability to either ignore or forget our nation's history. This was perhaps best presented by Romney's statement: "America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators."

I read that and thought: Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ on a milking stool, do you want me to start geographically or fucking chronologically?

Fulgencio Batista, the Duvaliers, Somoza, Rios Montt, Micheletti, Pinochet in Chile, the Greek colonels, Mubarak, the Marcos disaster, the Shah, the sad attempt at foisting Chalabi on the Iraqis that failed only because the sad bastard turned out to be incapable of leading four bazaar ruffians to a kebab shop, the Diem coup, god knows how many satraps and tinhorn strongmen we're propping up in the former Soviet stans because we need their airfields and roads...

We - the imperial we, the we that is We the People - hide behind the idiotic refrain of American goodness and democracy. And within our borders we have, indeed, a fairly enviable record for probity and political honesty. But our goodness has traditionally ended at the water's edge, and we would do ourselves a huge favor to be honest with ourselves and each other about that.

But we have not, and the evidence suggests we will not, and therefore the evidence also suggests that we will continue on this blundering path of inadvertent empire, spending blood and treasure in search of a ghost we ourselves have raised, all the while tormented by the unquiet spirits of the evils we have worked on others in our ignorance and strength.

Update 10/25: And the hidden reality of what this is doing to my country appears even more dangerous than the open stupidity. Read Glenn Greenwald's summary of the recent efforts by the current administration to organize this apparently-limitless expenditure of armed force in the global hustings: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list

As Greenwald concludes: "...what we have had for years, is a system of government that – without hyperbole – is the very antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a "disposition matrix" to determine what punishment should be meted out."

I'm reading a very breezy account of the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian by Lindsey Davis ("Master and God", for those of you who enjoy your historical novels with a touch of modern British snark). And the takeaway lesson is that polities, ALL polities, have to be VERY careful about setting up procedures and agencies that are capable of applying force unconstrained by law.

Even when those laws are there they are not ironclad; the Soviet Union had lovely laws prohibiting things like judicial murder and false imprisonment - they just never bothered to use them.

But when a republic allows its agents to act in secret, and without public accounting for their acts, it almost guarantees its own destruction.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

One last political post, and then I really have no more to say about national politics until some genuinely significant change occurs.

I begin with the recent tempest in an e-cup involving the blogger Glenn Greenwald and a post he wrote about Ron Paul.

I don't want to go much further than that - Google "Greenwald Paul liberals" and you'll probably get the crux of the biscuit - other than to say;

1. Greenwald makes a terrific point, and
2. He managed to do it in a perfectly impossible way.

To begin with, the original post was about Ron Paul and the "problem" he presents for liberals, to wit;

"Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views."

Because, as Greenwald points out, among all the Presidental candidates (and, I should add, the candidates for ALL federal offices, high and low, in the two major parties) only Paul "...stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, (is) devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality."

And y'know what?

He's right on the nail on that.

Pretty much every other warm body - from Obama to the wingiest nut in the GOP wingnut farm - is generally pro-war, anti-due-process, pro-social-legislation (read "outlawing things (or at least not legalizing things) involving gays and sex"), anti-transparency, pro-Fed/Wall-Street-bailout, and pro-Drug-War.

The entire business has blown up into this huge contretemps, with people of good intentions, good liberals all, kicking and punching each other because of this. Greenwald himself has posted a second round of the brouhaha, responding to his critics.

But.

Here's the problem.

Paul is "right" (and Greenwald is "right" about him) - in the sense that he is anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-social-legislation, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War and so am I - for completely different reasons that I think I'm "right" on these issues.

But Paul is "wrong" (and so Greenwald is "wrong" in saying that he holds up a mirror to the establishment liberals in which they see ugly truths about themselves and their candidate(s)") because he's like someone who agrees with you that forcible carnal knowledge of underage girls is wrong - but not for moral and ethical reasons but because sex with underage girls is forbidden by Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source and the Elder God has told him so in a series of bloodsoaked visions.

Oh. Yeah. That.

Paul is "anti-war" not because he has a moral, legal, or realist objection to war but because he hates the federal government and wars tend to empower the federal government.

Paul is "anti-social legislation" not because he thinks gays are people and that governments have no business nannying citizens about their personal lives but because he hates the federal government and doesn't want IT intervening - either for or against - groups or individuals. He's fine with STATES doing either or both.

Paul is "anti-Drug-War", again, not because of the effect it has had on our civil rights or sane legal policies, but because of the way it empowers the federal justice system and, again, he's fine with states locking up dopers forever and passing fucked-up search and forfeiture laws.

He'd have gleefully allowed Jim Crow to continue rather than have let the Fed intervene, he would happily see Grandma eating cat food rather than give the Fed power to disperse medical or financial aid. His ideas about economics would have made John D. Rockefeller green with envy, being straight-up libertarian and, thus, utterly nuts in a real world.

He...

Look, let's cut to the chase. The bottom line is that the problem is that Ron Paul IS whack. He's a complete whackaloon and the virtue of many of his political positions has nothing to do with his reasons for chosing them and, in many cases, are fatally weakened by the utter craziness of those reasons.

He's a mysogynist, racist, goldbug goofball that thinks that the Articles of Confederation were a grand idea, that we should really go back to the time when banks printed their own money, and that if life were like a libertarian fantasy world where the people with all the guns and all the money were free of all outside constraints they would act responsibly instead of, as history has always shown and the rest of us know perfectly well is the inevitable consequence of unlimited power, taking whatever they wanted, raping whatever would move and shitting on what didn't.

And the really insane part is that Paul is the only national candidate taking what I would consider sane positions and he is as nutty as a fruit bat.

So the problem isn't, as Greenwald implies, that liberals are forced to attack Paul because "their" candidate(s) are a bunch of wholly-owned subsidiaries of the financial/MICC industry and "child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior(s)".

The PROBLEM is that "The only candidate to articulate sane, realist policies in the current U.S. Presidential campaign is a total whackaloon whose advocacy is based on equal parts idiocy, delusion, vanity, and selfish greed...and I HATE what the FUCK that says about the current U.S. Presidential campaign and U.S. politics in general!"

And I think if Greenwald had phrased it that way all he'd have received would have been a chorus of heartfelt groans of agreement.