Left Out - Francis Fukuyama - The American Interest Magazine

Francis Fukuyama???

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.

Jerry Saltz’s Open Letter to the Republicans of the 111th Congress -- Vulture

Speaking up for the arts!

Dear Messrs. Kantor and Boehner:

Given your censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video of ants crawling on a plastic crucifix with a wooden human figure meant to represent Jesus Christ, a literary character penned by numerous authors over several hundred years and now worshiped as God, and your threatening the Smithsonian’s funding if it did not comply with your wishes, I would like you to know about a similar threat to decency.

Orwellian Centrism - NYTimes.com

Krugman catches the Washington Post rewriting history on the healthcare debate. Somehow we've gone from obstructionist Republicans to left-wing dirty hippies being the source of all our ills:

Um, that’s not what happened — and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

Republicans Love 'Breeder' Shows, Democrats Love Mad Men, Says New TV Study | Movieline

Politics and TV habits:

As it turns out, popular shows are watched by Republicans! The Amazing Race, Modern Family, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and The Big Bang Theory, among other Nielsen thoroughbreds, have a larger number of Republican fans than Democrat ones. The reason for this? Basically that Republicans like rooting for a winner. (No wonder so many Yankees fans are also Republicans.)

On the flipside, “critically acclaimed” series like Mad Men, Dexter, 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights and Parks & Recreation are watched by Democrats. So, the losers. Of course the fact that Democrats might consider themselves “too cool for school” is only half the issue, according to John Fetto, senior marketing manager for Experian Simmons.

“The big shows with mass appeal tend to have above-average scores from Democrats and Republicans but with higher concentrations of Republicans. Looking at the Democrats side, I don’t mean to make light of it, but they seem to like shows about damaged people. Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”

I would have been happier with the shorter version: Republicans watch shows that are stupid; Democrats watch shows that are smart.

The Vulture Transcript: Sci-Fi Author William Gibson on Why He Loves Twitter, Thinks Facebook Is ‘Like a Mall,’ and Much More -- Vulture

On the tea party:

Any thoughts on why the tea-party movement is so successful right now? Why is everyone so upset?
It helps to have a black guy in the White House. Any black guy. If you want to do an old, grumpy white folks party, get a black guy in the White House. You get your old grumpy white folks to turn out.

So has this been simmering and now’s the time for it to come out?
Basically. The Civil War was scarcely more than 150 years ago. It’s yesterday. Race in American hasn’t been sorted out. This used to be a country that was run exclusively by white guys in suits. It’s not going to be a country that’s run exclusively by white guys in suits, and that doesn’t have anything to do with politics, it’s just demographics. That makes some people very uncomfortable. The tea party is like the GOP’s Southern strategy coming back to exact the real cost of that strategy.

Christine O'Donnell Delaware Primary - Charles P. Pierce on Delaware Primary - Esquire

Christine O'Donnell is a sideshow freak:

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

[via Daring Fireball]

Maybe Haley Barbour Should Visit A Bookstore Sometime -The Washington Monthly

Haley Barbour thinks Obama is mysterious and scary:

He went on to say -- just as "an observation," of course -- that "there's not much known" about the president's youth. "We don't know any of the childhood things," Barbour argued.

I guess the follow-up for the governor question is, "Who counts as 'we'?"

I have a strong hunch that Haley Barbour doesn't spend a lot of time in bookstores, but there's an entire book about Obama's upbringing. Obama wrote it. It was a best-seller.

"We" arguably know more about this president than any in modern times -- his life has literally been an open-book that "we" can read.

The larger point remains the same, and it remains ugly. Far-right leaders, most notably those with problematic backgrounds on race, are obsessed with characterizing the president as some kind of foreign "other" to be mistrusted and seen as illegitimate. It's absurd and offensive, but it remains at the center of conservative thought.

The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

An astonishing bit of anti-elitism and faux-populism. The American Spectator reinvents Tea-Partiers, Fundamentalists, and ultra-right wingers as a naive and guileless "Country Class." Victimized by the left and the Democratic party, and unrepresented and therefore magically freed from sharing in the culpability of the Bush Republicans, the Country Class are entirely good, distinguished by their "non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others" which is nonsensical to the point of meaninglessness.

Despite the author's protests, what this so-called "country class" wants is not self-rule but freedom from self-awareness and uncertainty. What they really object to are not the orthodoxies of the left, but the collapse of their own traditional relationships to God, country, race, labor, and family.

This is not about the evils of the non-existent "ruling" class, but the crisis of a Boomer-led majority who long ago sacrificed civility for anti-social contrarianism and consumer individualism, while simultaneously retreating into the soft therapy of God, guns, and military "honor." All the while the economy collapses, the earth warms, and the gulf fills with oil. But rather than accept responsibility for the mess they've created, their dysfunctional value system, they seek solace in blaming others, and particularly the great villainous Other - college educated, progressive, feminist, spiritual but agnostic, and now laughably caricatured as the "Ruling" class. As if.

In short, the history of the US is the history of this very class running amok, and those of us who actually care about and understand the implicit values of American Democracy being forced to clean up after them.

Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald puts your world in a nutshell:

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

It may create a lot of noise, but ultimately I don't think it's "working." Political discourse has become the equivalent of Comic-con. Marketers come loaded for bear and the fan boys go crazy for the latest sci-fi/comic book blockbuster, but when exposed to the larger marketplace, fan-friendly junk like Scott Pilgrim can't live up to the hype.

Kung Fu Monkey: Side Note: Writing, Corporate Bad Guys, and Worldview

Rogers with an odd apology/defense of selective anti-corporatism in Leverage:

I like universal health care not for any moral reason but because it encourages job mobility, enterpreneurship, takes the burden off our manufacturing industries, and leads to cheaper health care costs. I like to spend money on education because it makes our workers competitive in the international market. I want cap and trade because reliable humans tell me that the long-term costs of climate shift will be worse than doing nothing. I want solar power so people with thousand-year-old grudges in countries half a world away stop yanking us around. I want to cut defense spending so we can move it to border control and humint resources. I favor separation of church and state because, like Thomas Jefferson, I don't want people of faith to have other faiths shoved on them by the power of the government.

I'm a goddam 1972 Republican.

The Long Game And The Breitbart Implosion - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan continues to keep the faith regarding President Obama:

He avoided a second Great Depression. The bank bailout, however noxious, worked. GM may soon be returning a profit to the government. Health insurance reform will stick and, with careful oversight, could begin to curtail runaway healthcare costs. Financial re-regulation just passed. Two new Supreme Court Justices are in place after failed attempts at culture war demagoguery. Crime - amazingly - has not jumped with the recession. America is no longer despised abroad the way it was; torture has been ended; relations with Russia have improved immensely; Iran's regime is more diplomatically and economically isolated than in its entire history; even the Greater Israel chorus has been challenged. Moreover, if the House goes Republican this fall, it renders a second Obama term as likely as Clinton's became (how many Independents would want to hand over the government to Palin and the current GOP in Congress?).

The crisis of 2011? — Crooked Timber

John Quiggin makes a good point:

I’ve been too absorbed by my book projects and by Australian politics (of which more soon) to pay a lot of attention to the forthcoming US elections, but it seems to be widely projected that the Republicans could regain control of the House of Representatives. What surprises me is that no-one has drawn the obvious inference as to what will follow, namely a shutdown of the US government.

Once the Republicans have some leverage, the country will be paralyzed. Nothing will get done, and none of our long term problems will be addressed. It will be pure entropy as the Republicans embolden themselves in hopes of a Palin victory in 2012. Meanwhile the Dems will be hoping that something in the legislation they've passed since Obama's election will bear fruit. It will be an ugly uglier couple of years.

On the other hand, Obama could probably get a lot mileage out of pwning a Republican House for a couple of years which would help his re-election chances. He'd be able to propose the expansion of popular programs while having some one to blame for obstructionist. I'd also like the Democrats get some kind of traction out of arguing that the 00s were the bad-old-days and that the Republicans are sending us back to them.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

This morning's faux mini-scandals, as outrageous as they might be, are just further evidence that McCain has essentially abdicated all control over his own campaign, and handed the candidacy over to Rove, Bush and the hard right. The Republicans never really wanted McCain as their candidate, and now he's allowed them to substitute Governor Palin in his place.

I think it's time that we start asking why McCain, whose entire life and career is based on the honorable way he endured his POW experience, has allowed the Bush administration and now his own campaign to behave so dishonorably. Where is the McCain of 2000? Why is he hiding behind Rovian politics? Why is he hiding behind the skirts of Governor Palin? Why has he allowed himself to be usurped by the hockey mom, when clearly his preference was for Lieberman or some other more sober candidate.

For all intents and purposes, McCain is now just a figure head in a campaign to reentrench the positions of the Bushies, the neocons, and the hard right.

His campaign is a disgrace. Built brick by brick on lies, smears, misrepresentations, and false cries of victimization. He has dishonored himself by not condemning these practices, and he has dishonored the country by selling it out to those same Republicans who for the last eight years have shown no regard for truth, justice, or the law. By putting country first, whatever that means, he has only opened the door to those same interests that send men to war and put their own interests above all else.

McCain is now a tragic figure: pathetic as an individual and terrifying as a harbinger of the next four years.

Lipstick

Juan Cole on the McCain/Palin theocratic platform:

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

Zing!

Now that McCain has unleashed the Christianist base, one wonders what role he thinks he'll play in a Palin/Dobson administration. Maverick czar?

More On Aerial Wolf Hunts

Sarah Palin's environmental practices remind me of the scalp hunters in Blood Meridian:

Palin didn't think Alaskans should be allowed to chase wolves from aircraft and shoot them -- they should be encouraged to do so. Palin's administration put a bounty on wolves' heads, or to be more precise, on their mitts.

In early 2007, Palin's administration approved an initiative to pay a $150 bounty to hunters who killed a wolf from an airplane in certain areas, hacked off the left foreleg, and brought in the appendage.

Oh, They're Just Saying That

A summary of the headscratching "reforms" of the McCain/Palin ticket concludes with this:

Maybe he'll change the way government helps people. In his speech last night, McCain mentioned wage insurance as a way to cushion the blow for dislocated workers affected by globalization: "For workers in industries that have been hard-hit," he said, "we'll help make up part of the difference in wages between their old job and a temporary, lower paid one, while they receive re-training that will help them find secure new employment at a decent wage." That's a solid, liberal idea. Except that McCain has never mentioned it before, the proposal doesn't appear on his website anywhere, as far as I can tell, and it's exactly the sort of thing that would require new government spending, not the budget cuts he's promising. Odds are this isn't even a real proposal at all.

Yep.

Palin's Edumacation

Ah, now I'm beginning to understand Sarah Palin a little better. She got the classic 80s middle-American underachiever's college education:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin attended five colleges in six years before graduating from the University of Idaho in 1987.

Now I want to see transcripts. How many of those schools did the beauty queen party her way out of?

Andrew Sullivan writes, "If she applied for an internship at National Review, they would turn her down."

Red State Elitism

Matthew Yglesias argues that our current culture war (brought to us by our friends, the Republicans) is not about rich and poor, elite and working class, but about two forms of upper middle class snobbery. It's about two competing brands of aspirational consumerism. Rich vs. rich.

Our current crop of candidates offers up some pretty good examples of this. The McCain family is really stinkin’ rich (inheriting multi-million dollar fortunes and owning a dozen houses) but the other three couples on national tickets are well-off on a much more banal scale. The Palin family, the Obama family, and the Biden family all have incomes running into the six figures which is much more than your average American family has. But the Palins choose to spend their money in very different ways. They’re raising five kids, getting into competitive snowmobiling, going on moose hunting expeditions, etc. This isn’t stuff that your typical coastal elites care to do with their time and money, but none of it’s cheap, either. Rather, these are the leisure pursuits of Red America’s economic elite while prosperous people in Blue America are instead raising fewer children in smaller houses that are much more expensive per square foot and spending money on cheese plates rather than moooseburgers.

In other words, the notion that the Palins are some how more in touch with America than the Obamas is nothing more than marketing. It's the myth the Republicans are selling. Like Cowboy Bush and the Crawford ranch, it's all about using imagery to buy the votes of the poor and the working class through the dream of prosperity.

Lest we forget, conservatives are the elites and the good old boys and the special interests that they only pretend to disparage.

McCain's Acceptance Speech Negates Itself

In the end, all McCain has is his story. It was funereal and elegiac at best, but otherwise left unanswered all questions regarding how he'd govern or what's next for the country. It was all about looking back to the past.

McCain's speech concluded with a recitation of his war experience which he wove beautifully into a narrative of spiritual growth. He spoke not as someone embarking on a journey, but as someone whose journey had come to an end. His revelation that he cannot stand alone, that he cannot be the smirking, carefree maverick he was, that he is part of something larger than himself is both a perfect summation of the spiritual wounds of the Vietnam as well as a gentle step away from his own candidacy. His story tells us that his candidacy has been one more step in a journey to resolve the pain of the past, one shared by many veterans, and transform once and for all into the future tense of joy. Like an Ahab, the veteran is someone who no matter where he goes or what he does cannot accept the pain inflicted on him and his fellows by the whale of war. The last 40 years of American politics has been an acting out of that struggle without healing and without resolution. McCain spoke tonight as someone who had found resolution through his career of service, and while he cannot be the one to lead them, offers it as a path to his fellow Republicans and Conservatives.

For McCain to carry forward as the presidential candidate, or, even as president will be to continually revisit the pain of the past, and continually reenact the damage of those wounds in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Georgia, just as any wounded soul returns to the familiarity of his own fall from grace.

For Palin to step up as his running mate will be to continually re-fight the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.

The Republicans are a party and a people doomed by the past, to repeat it and reenact it. There is no hope for change, or resolution in the heart of someone who cannot see that his own story has come to an end. McCain has had his say. He's told his story, and offered nothing in the way of a future. He should now step aside and make way for the next generation, and for Barack Obama.

The Angry Right

What you heard last week from the Democrats was praise for McCain's service but disagreement over policies and where the country should go after 8 years of Bush. What you heard tonight from Giuliani, Palin, and the delegates was nothing but fear and loathing. They feel contempt for everyone and everything that stands between them and power.

Why ridicule Obama's service in order to elevate her tenure as Mayor? In terms of policy and leadership, Palin's speech tonight was a joke.

Meanwhile Giuliani continues to come off as a ham-fisted thug. His post-game interview was full of lies: despite his assertions more people live Obama's cosmopolitan world of cities and suburbs than the mythical small towns of Palin and, McCain did not win decisively in the primaries; he benefited from the winner take on system that helped him win in spite of his parties' preference for people like Huckabee and Paul. All in all Giuliani is a noun, a verb, and a big fat jerk.