Nader’s critique of corporate power and its corrosive effect on American democracy is spot-on. But if the point of these third-party runs is to inject that critique into mainstream discourse — well, we’re way past the point of diminishing returns, and actually deep into some sort of anti-matter universe, in which information is literally sucked out of people’s brains at the first mention of his name. In the way that Dan Rather’s report on George Bush going AWOL turned into a discussion about Dan Rather, the only debate another Nader candidacy is going to inspire is a debate about Nader himself, and I just don’t see the point.
I know the MSM isn’t particularly quick on the uptake, but this one is so obvious even they should be able to get it. I have been hearing for the past 24 hours how this NYT story has really been good for McCain because it finally brought the base back over to his side.
Can we get real here? The “base” meaning Rush, Fox and the lesser wingnut blowhards, were desperate for an excuse to get on board the Straight Talk Express. The man is the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, the electoral arm of the conservative movement. Did anyone really think their animosity for McCain was going to last through November? Please. They are all on wingnut welfare to one degree or another and there’s no way in hell that they could continue to do their jobs in opposition to the Republican presidential nominee. It’s ridiculous. I’m sure they all felt a huge sense of relief that they had finally found a hook to get back down to business, which is demeaning and destroying liberals on behalf of Republicans.
It’s what I was predicting in this cartoon from last week. Clearly the right wing radio nuts were going to have to find some excuse to pull a 180 once McCain became the presumptive nominee. Anyone in the media who didn’t see that coming probably shouldn’t be writing about politics.
For your enjoyment, a rare Neil Young clip I lifted from Roy:
That line at the very start, “Don’t relax too much, time’s going by, you know,” reminds me of a show I saw around this same time. I was visiting Boston at some point in the late eighties or very early nineties and managed to snag the very last ticket to an acoustic show he did in some little rundown theatre (a spring sticking up out of my chair ripped a hole in the ass of my jeans that night). But it was a great seat in the front row of the balcony, practically hanging right over the stage. Neil was trying out some new work and was getting a little impatient, as he tends to, with the audience calling out requests for old songs. At some point I remember him looking out and saying something like, “All right, all right, but when you walk out those doors it’s still going to be 1990,” or whatever year it was. Might have even been this same show, who knows.
Since the race is all but decided on both the Democratic and Republican sides, here’s a few random things that have been going through my mind :
- It’s funny how quickly conservatives are so quick to jump on Michelle Obama for a relatively innocuous statement. If the right-wing really wants to drag the candidates’ wives into the mud-slinging, let’s start a conversation about how John McCain’s wife is a former drug-addict who was investigated by the DEA for stealing drugs from a non-profit organization. Do they really want to go there?
- This business about Obama’s “pledge” to opt for public matching funds is silly. If he opts out, it’ll be a story for 2-3 days and then die. If he opts-in, he kneecaps himself for the general election at a time when he’s sure to raise millions of dollars more than McCain. What Obama needs to do is publicly criticize McCain’s smarmy plan to use public funds to bail out his campaign in case he didn’t get the nomination and insist that when it comes to the spirit of the law, Obama’s the one on the side of the angels here. John McCain is self-righteously trying to take the moral high ground by seeking taxpayer money to match the contributions of his lobbyist and corporate pals while Barack Obama raked in the cash by getting small dollar donations from more than a half a million ordinary Americans. So which campaign has a claim to the mantle of “publicly funded”?
- In 1992, the Clinton campaign’s mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid”. This year, I think the Obama campaign’s should be “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. It’s hard to listen to McCain speak in the future tense and take it seriously when the man has no new ideas. Even worse for McCain, when late-night talkshows are already joking about him like he’s Mr. Magoo, you know he’s in for a rough nine months.
- Finally, is it just me or does McCain’s candidacy lack a coherent raison d’être? Hillary Clinton is the hyper-ambitious former first lady who wants to continue where her husband left off. Mike Huckabee is the conservative regular fella who wants to do save our nation from moral decay. Barack Obama is the inspirational guy who wants to bring people together to Change™ the nation. John McCain? He seems to be this year’s “I’ve been around Washington forever and it’s my turn to run for President” guy. Maybe he’ll have more luck with “Vote for me, I’m really old.” than Bob Dole did, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
… Hillary’s Budweiser-drinking, Ford F350-driving supporters?
Clinton surrogate and Machinists union President Tom Buffenbarger: “Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”
I went to the Obama rally in Hartford, and the audience — the huge, arena-filling audience — was strikingly diverse in race, age and apparent income class. While I’m probably leaning toward Obama at the moment, I don’t find him as transcendent and transformational as a lot of people seem to — but this is simply not a characterization of his supporters rooted in reality.
Definitely take the time to check it out, if weather permits. I saw one a few years back, and the moon just looked surreal — I remember thinking that it looked like a basketball hovering maybe thirty feet in the air. As the AP explains:
The moon doesn’t go black because indirect sunlight still reaches it after passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the atmosphere filters out blue light, the indirect light that reaches the moon transforms it into a reddish or orange tinge, depending on how much dust and cloud cover are in the atmosphere at the time.
Sometimes the stagecraft of the world stands revealed for a moment, in these small and wonderful ways.
REJALI: [T]orture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.
So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you.
MADISON, Wis. - The online gun dealer who sold a weapon to the Virginia Tech shooter said it was an unnerving coincidence that he also sold handgun accessories to the man who killed five students at Northern Illinois University.
Eric Thompson said his Web site … sold two empty 9 mm Glock magazines and a Glock holster to Steven Kazmierczak on Feb. 4, just 10 days before the 27-year-old opened fire in a classroom and killed five before committing suicide.
Another Web site run by Thompson’s company also sold a Walther .22-caliber handgun to Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in April on the Virginia Tech campus before killing himself.
“I’m still blown away by the coincidences,” Thompson said Friday. “I’m shaking. I can’t believe somebody would order from us again and do this.”
If only there were a lesson to be learned from this. Oh, I know: gun control would never, ever work, and there’s no point in even thinking about it!
Back in April, 2003 a friend of mine told me that, just after the war began, he’d seen William Kristol appear with Daniel Ellsberg on C-Span. He said Ellsberg had brought up the U.S. support for the 1963 and 1968 coups that brought Saddam Hussein to power, and Kristol appeared genuinely not to know about it.
Since then I’ve been trying to track the show down. There weren’t any transcripts and it didn’t seem to be in the C-Span archives. Only recently was I able to locate it, thanks to Kenneth Osgood of Florida Atlantic University, who pointed me to a dusty little corner of the C-Span store.
While watching it, I realized Kristol had performed at a superhuman level. At normal times he is, of course, one of the wrongest people on earth. Yet I’d never seen him be wrong quite like this. So I wrote a long, long piece about it. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done about politics, so I hope you have a chance to check it out and perhaps go over to my site here to comment.
The Lost Kristol Tapes What the New York Times Bought By Jonathan Schwarz
Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn’t merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper’s. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you’d want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.
That’s how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have “terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East”? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us “respected around the world” and his classic statement that there’s “almost no evidence” of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I’ve got something that will blow your mind!
I’m talking about Kristol’s two-hour appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can’t even fish it out of LexisNexis. It’s not there. Yet it’s a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you’ve heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It’s a performance for the history books — particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.
So, sit back, relax, and let me play a little of it for you.
The C-Span page tells you how many times the segment’s been watched. When I first checked, the number was one. By this time yesterday, it had risen to four. All three additional viewing were me.
Hezbollah leader Imad Moughniyah, on the United States’ most wanted list for attacks on Israeli and Western targets, was killed by a bomb in Damascus, the Lebanese group said on Wednesday…
He was implicated in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, which killed over 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.
As it happens, one of my favorite things ever written by anyone anywhere was about Moughniyah. This is from a 2001 article about him by Kenneth Zimmerman in the Washington Times:
Imad Fayez Mugniyeh [is] a Lebanese Shiite long considered one of the world’s most ruthless and elusive killers…
Once the Palestinians were kicked out of Lebanon in 1983, Mugniyeh and his two brothers, Fuad and Jihad, joined a new organization set up by Iran called Hezbollah (Party of God). Its goal was to drive the Western powers out of Lebanon…
Intelligence officials believe Mugniyeh is seeking personal vengeance on the United States and Israel for the deaths of his brothers, which explains in part his willingness to lend his expertise to operations organized by other groups. Mugniyeh’s brothers were killed in retaliatory attacks in Lebanon believed to have been carried out by Israeli and U.S. operatives.
“Bin Laden is a schoolboy in comparison with Mugniyeh,” an Israeli-intelligence officer told Jane’s Foreign Report recently. “The guy is a genius, someone who refined the art of terrorism to its utmost level. We studied him and reached the conclusion that he is a clinical psychopath motivated by uncontrollable psychological reasons, which we have given up trying to understand. The killing of his two brothers by the Americans only inflamed his strong motivation.“
Wait…you’re telling me that a young man, when his country was invaded by foreigners, got angry? And then when they killed his brothers, he became even madder? And he wanted revenge on the people who’d done it?
Well, we’ll put our best scientific minds to work on it, but I don’t think we have any hope of understanding this bizarre freak of nature. He’s simply too far outside human norms for us ever to comprehend.
