THIS MODERN WORLD

Headline at Politico :

McCain forcefully rebukes Gramm

Oh really? It’s nice that McCain is willing to “rebuke” those comments, why hasn’t he rejected or denounced them? Phil Gramm has said other things I disagree with too, yet I’m still waiting to hear if John McCain is willing to rebuke or dismiss or reject or denounce those comments as well. Does John McCain secretly agree with everything that Phil Gramm has said that I find objectionable? When if John McCain going to finally cut his ties with Gramm?

I really think we need to spend the next month talking about this.

Seriously though, Kos is totally right about this. John McCain has said numerous times that our economic problems are “psychological”. A competent press corps that actually dug deeper than “he said, she said” trivialities would recognize the pattern in McCain’s various statements on the economy and have the guts to ask him “Do you think the American people are hallucinating when they see higher gas prices, rising unemployment, and declining home values?”

John McCain is having a townhall-by-telephone for Virginians tonight at 7:00 pm ET. Anyone with a Virginia area code—and maybe people with unidentified area codes—should be able to call in and possibly ask him a question. As far as I know questions aren’t screened, and everyone has an equal chance of being called on.

Here’s how it works:

Dial: 1-877-850-4146
Passcode: 84831

These are a few questions I’d try to ask if I were from Virginia:

1. Iraqi leaders are now saying they want a timeline for the withdrawal of US troops. If you become president, and the elected Iraqi government has decided it wants all US troops to leave by a certain date, will you commit here and now to following their wishes?

2. Phil Gramm, one of your top economic advisors and your close political friend, said yesterday we are having are “mental recession” and that we’ve become a “nation of whiners.” You’ve just said Mr. Gramm doesn’t speak for you on this. If he doesn’t speak for you on the economy, why is he one of your top economic advisors?

3. You’ve just said about Social Security that “it’s terrible to ask people to pay in to a system that they won’t receive benefits from.” Do you know that, according to the Social Security Administration’s projections, even if the trust fund is exhausted in forty years, recipients will STILL get higher benefits than retired people today get? [If YES: Then why are you claiming young people today will never get any benefits?] [If NO: Why are you talking about Social Security if you don’t understand anything about how it works?]

4. You’ve said that you have a strategy to capture Osama bin Laden, but it’s something that can only be done in secret by the president. Instead of waiting to be president yourself, why haven’t you just told President Bush what your strategy is?

I have a children’s book that I’ve written and drawn. Not just a proposal, I’ve got a finished package, kid-tested-and-approved, ready to go out the door. And to be clear, it’s not one of these sly, knowing books that are really aimed at adults, and view the actual children in the audience as an afterthought — it was written as a genuine kid’s book for the roughly kindergarten-aged crowd, albeit one which would amuse parents as well, or at least not cause them to weep with existential despair at the prospect of reading it aloud for the fiftieth time. On this topic, I speak from experience.

It’s important to me to see this one in bookstores, if only to show my own kid, who’s been following the process from its inception, how persistence can turn ideas into reality. My agent’s been shopping it around but it’s going slower than I’d like — I think partly because people tend to pigeonhole you, and it may be difficult for some to imagine how a verbose political cartoonist such as myself could also be a straightforward children’s book author. In other words, how can someone whose career has been devoted to mastering the interplay of words and pictures ever, you know, create a work of … words and pictures?

(Also: you’d think that having an established readership would actually be an advantage. I mean, yes, it’s a different arena, but I’m guessing that some percentage of my readers have — or at least have friends and relatives with — children. Kind of a built-in audience, you know?)

Anyway … in the off chance that someone reading this is, or knows, a children’s book editor — shoot me an email (contact info is over to the left), and I’ll pass it along to my agent. The rest of you, move along, nothing to see here.

(UPDATE: I was completely wrong about this; see here for proof McCain literally has no idea how Social Security works. Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz for pointing this out.)

Here’s John McCain yesterday, rambling on about Social Security:

MCCAIN: Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s got to be fixed.

Of course, Social Security has always worked by “paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers.” Thus, many people—including Dean Baker, Bob Somerby and Matthew Yglesias—are saying McCain was calling Social Security itself “a disgrace.”

However, if you read the quote in context, it’s clear McCain meant the disgrace isn’t the basic mechanism of Social Security, but that today’s young workers are paying taxes for which they may not get their promised benefits.

The rest of McCain’s Social Security bloviations are an incredible farrago of deceit you could spend the next 100 years unraveling. But on this minor point, he actually is being treated unfairly by people who’ve let the situation get the best of them, cognitively-speaking.

ALSO: I guarantee conservatives will obsess about McCain being horribly mistreated by liberals here, and it will become yet another example of how monsters perceive themselves as martyrs.

AND: This type of behavior on my part is how I keep winning.

Obituary here. His later years, at least, seem to have been designed to prove the old bumper-sticker axiom that “life is hard and then you die.” I read The Genocides twenty-five years ago and it haunts me to this day — I think it may be the best parable of the consequences of unchecked capitalism ever imagined. And while I’ve never read The Brave Little Toaster, a certain rugrat of my acquaintance was obsessed with the movie version for awhile, and before I understood that it was based on something written by Disch, I described it to friends as “the sort of movie you might end up with if you locked some degenerate junkie screenwriters in a room and said, ‘write an uplifting, heartwarming children’s movie–or we will kill you.'” And I’m not entirely sure Disch, who apparently hated the movie, would have disagreed.