Prius Dementat

Briefly noted during a foray into the drive-time news - the now-inevitable GOP Dauphin Mitt Romney saying

"For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job ... for grandparents who can't afford the gas to visit their grandchildren ... for the mom and dad who never thought they'd be on food stamps ... for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month — to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I've met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight."

and bitterly observed, to the solitude of the dashboard radio;

"And in that "better America" the policies you support - every act of your Party to date - every small-town, back-bench, mean-minded, spiteful Teabagger swill you've ingested and now claim you'll swill out to the nation if elected - will ensure that her second job will pay less for longer hours, that their gas will be exhausted more quickly and profit it's producers more richly, that those food stamps will be harder to come by and more desperately needed, that the small business will be more likely to be battered and beaten, sold, gutted, and re-sold by your crony-capitalist friends' megacorporation, and that all those good and decent Americans will be further crammed down, shat upon, disenfranchised, wage-slaved to the wealthy and connected who are your primary supporters and beneficiaries"

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, how huge a lie does this man, and this Party, have to tell before the American public screams "Hold! Enough!"?

And I'm afraid that we all know the answer, my friends.

There IS no lie huge enough, for the vast Gadarene herd that still gobbles up this swill.

We cannot continue in this fashion without destruction. We Are SO Fucked.

Or, as one might say in Latin, were one philosophically so inclined;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam

Hard Work II: Electric Boogaloo

Apparently the latest D.C. flame war is the Ann-Romney-vs-Hillary-Rosen Chain-Cage Death Tweet Grudge Match.

This sucker kicked off after the Romneybot trotted out the Little Woman to try and display that, yes, indeedy, he DOES understand that Wimmens Are People, Too, and so they should vote for him because he married one of these women-things so he can do women-positive stuff like cut people off those oh-so-demeaning entitlement programs and refund the money saved to the wealthy (like...Ann Romney!).Ms. Rosen pointed out, rather obviously, that Mrs. Romney wasn't exactly wet-nursing a dozen toddlers in a go-down off of Gin Lane; she was (and is) an insanely rich housewife who could afford to "stay home and raise five boys", as opposed to 95% of the rest of the moms in the U.S., who would quickly be reduced to standing on a streetcorner with a baby on one hip and a basketful of matches on the other if their family lost their share of the income.

This pisses me off on a number of levels.

It pisses me off because of the ridiculous assumption that stay-home moms "work" harder than moms who, y'know, work.

Which is ridiculous, because stay-home moms are way at the bottom of the work food-chain, below the working moms and far, far below the single working moms, for whom there are simply not enough hours in the day.

It pisses me off because of the way it automatically genuflects to the "traditional" wife and mother without any thought of how difficult it is to "choose" to be a stay-home mom after the relentless thirty-year cramdown of wages for the non-two-yacht family.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about this.

That's the Twitter feed from Rosen's original post. Go and read the comments from the Obama people walking Rosen's comment about how Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" back; "I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly.", "Families should remain off-limits" (because...Romney trotted out his little wifey for no reason other than personal pride?) and especially this one: "i personally believe stay at home moms work harder than most of us do."

To which I say; great gigongeous flaming titanic planetary-sized balls of horseshit.

And I speak with some authority because I've been a stay-at-home-dad. And a paratroop sergeant. And a diesel mechanic, a jumper stable undergroom, the downstairs guy in a JiffyLube^TM, a high school AND a community college teacher, and a professional geologist.

And I will freely tell you this; every single damn one of those jobs. Every one. Every fucking moment of every one.

Was harder than being a stay-at-home-dad.

Oh, there were things about being a SAHD that kinda sucked.

The hours often aren't great. The clientele is not always friendly. Flat-out the WORST thing is the fucking boredom; raising a kid is often like playing catch with a dog - trust me, you're going to get bored waaaaaayyyyyy before the dog (or the kid) does. Remind me I said that after reading "Thomas the Train and the Blustery Day" to your toddler for the eight zillionth time.

So at-home parenting is sort of like one of those brain-killing data entry jobs people with "computer science" degrees used to get in the Seventies and Eighties. Long, insanely dull, repetitive, occasionally panicky, sometimes stressful.


But "hard"?

Fuckety fuck, no.

And the reason this "Ohhh, those sweet stay-home mommies, they work so haaaard!" crap drives me so nuts is because - while they're doing their best to make things harder for the sort of people who don't have the Ann Romney kind of cash to hire nannies and au pairs and cleaning services and diaper services and all - the GOP sorts of people luuurves to talk about how wonderful and hard-working all those SAHMs and SAHDs are (though good luck expecting them to get excited about, you know, the people with penises staying home with the kiddos - how the hell you gonna hang with the Tea Party Commandos with that baby bag, there, dad?)

But here's the Big Reveal; staying at home with the kids really ain't hard work.Physically the worst nuisance is between about 18 months old and five or six; as babies they're basically noisy luggage - you can take them with you wherever you need to go as long as you remember their mountain of kit (diapers, wubbies, change of clothes, Cheerios...) - and after that they're in school most of the day. It's a pain again when they're older - starting in the late-grade-school tween years - because of the emotional headaches; you have to worry about herpes and smoking weed and drunk driving and on-line predators.

But the "work" part throughout pretty much consists of feeding 'em, cleaning them, and cleaning up AFTER them, and word up - nobody reading this is living in fricking "Little House on the Prairie".

And sure as HELL not Ann Romney. Little Mansion on the Hudson, probably.

Laundry? You got a machine for that. Dishes? You got a machine for that. Cleaning? How the hell long does it take to vacuum a floor and wipe down a countertop? You've got a fridge and a microwave and a range/over - you don't exactly have to hunt, kill, butcher, and roast a mammoth haunch over an open fire.

When my kid was little and I was out of work I swear, I could get pretty much all the housework done in the space it took for him to nap; maybe an hour, tops. I could toss him in the car and do the marketing, with stops on the way for the library and some coffee. Hang out at the bookstore, go to his fave indoor play place. I pretty much had a leisurely day with the kiddo, tantrums and the hour or so of housework aside.

Now...what I couldn't do was the stuff I liked doing; I couldn't sit and read (unless he was sleeping), or exercise, or watch a movie or a soccer match on television, or blog. And that was frustrating, no kidding.

But it was not effing hard work.

Nope.

So this pisses me off because it's a plain and simple attempt by a hereditary rich couple to try and con the marks suckers "independent" voters into believing that the RomneyTron 2000 is really a warm, empathetic humanoid that loves him some good ol' plain folks because he's, you know, a family man with a Hard-Working Li'l Woman just like them!

But instead it tells me the opposite.

Because as a guy who's been one; if this gomer and his wife think she was "working hard" when she was staying home with the kiddies and the nanny and the housekeeper and the gardener?

They need to go out and learn about real hard work.

'Cause hanging around the house vacuuming the carpets and wiping the baby's ass ain't it.

Nasty?Yep. I'll give you nasty.

Looking for fitzUrse

Last week I posted a comment about the late give-and-take regarding the unwillingness of the U.S. Catholic Church to accept the conditions of the U.S. Code regarding health care.

After I wrote that post the Obama Administration offered a deal to the prelates; you don't have to front up birth control to the people who work for you. But your insurer has to, under the terms of the law.

And, again, if you choose not to, you will not get the sweet and juicy federal tax breaks. You don't pass go, you don't collect $200.

And that the Church would be perfectly free to indulge their passion for telling the life-support systems for wombs (those things the rest of us not stuck in the 11th Century call, y'know, women) that the wombs belong to God, or, more specifically, belong to what the Church tells them God thinks. Which is pretty amazing, when you think about it, since I haven't heard God's opinion on the subject other than the ridiculous screed Humanitae Vitae, which even his fellow heirophants advised the Pope who wrote the damn thing was the religious equivalent of the first shot on Fort Sumter in 1861.And - not surprisingly or even notably - the bishops refused even this, since every time a sperm or an egg falls fallow Baby Jesus cries or something.

I really don't have a good handle on the political ju-jiutsu of all this. At least on the surface it looks like that the seculars might have snuck one through the wheelhouse of the religious, but it's hard to tell.

But I do know one thing.

Popes, prelates, mullahs, whatever you want to call them, have never given up their quest for control over everyone they can get their hooks into.

This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's what religious - and most other human - organizations do by their very nature.The Catholic Church canonized a man named Tom Becket, away back in the 12th Century. You can read all about the man in all the usual places, if you want, but the Clif's Notes version is that he was killed by four men who worked for the man who was then King of England, Henry Plantagenet, second of that name run the island kingdom by 1170.

And the reasons he was killed were, when you strip away all the verbiage and bullshit, pretty much the same things the present-day Catholic bishops are trying to pry out of the hands of the U.S. government; control of what people can do.

In Becket's time the issue of real contention was also a legal one. The Catholic Church insisted that it's employees (and keep in mind that the 12th Century Church was the Microsoft AND Goldman-Sachs of England - probably more people worked in some capacity than for any other organization in the place) were outside the civil and criminal law of their country. A priest who raped his altarboys (and who could imagine that would happen..?) couldn't be arrested and tried in a court of law. He could only be hauled before the bishop's court, where he would be tried and sentenced by another cleric.And who could think that would be a problem?

Henry, who, for all his faults, was a genuine legal reformer who did more for codifying English law than anyone had or would for about 500 years, found this intolerable.

I would have, too.

He appointed his chancellor, Tom Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in hopes that having a made guy as the head Jesus-pesterer in England would help bring his church around to a more reasonable position. Instead the Church captured his guy, who became as big a pain in the ass as his predecessors.

The story goes that one day in December 1170 Henry was so pissed off with his former pal that he snarled something about being damn sick and tired of people who seemed to think they had the right to give their king the finger, which motivated four of his tough guys - Reginald fitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton, to saddle up and head out to have a little talk with Archbishop Tom.

To say that things didn't go well would be putting it mildly. The boys ran into Becket in his cathedral and told him flat out that he was ordered to report to his king.

In the spirit of the U.S. bishops, Becket told Henry's boys to talk to the finger.

Concluding that conversation wasn't getting anywhere, the guys went outside, got their toad-stickers, and proceeded to open up Becket's head like a tin of canned tuna.This didn't work out well. The dead priest became a martyr and saint, Henry had to eat humble pie, the four mechanics ended up buried somewhere in the Holy Land, and the Roman Catholic Church continued its merry way as an immense political force in English politics for another three centuries until it ran into an altogether harder Henry who smashed it for good and all.

In a particularly telling move, Henry VIII had his hard men smash up the old theocrat's tomb shrine and huck the bits into the trash. All that remains is a spot on the floor of the cathedral nave.So nothing really changes, does it? Religion and hierarchical religious corporations like the Catholic Church will ALWAYS try to pull as much power as they can into themselves. This has nothing to do with holiness or "salvation" or whatever the P.R. handout reads. It's about people and how some types of people want power, whether they are priests or politicians.

The difference being, of course, that politicians are just that, and speak with no more authority than their own gravity. A politician that talks like a gibbering idiot is usually recognized as a gibbering idiot and treated with the sort of deference given to gibbering idiots.

But gibbering idiocy is often indistinguishable from religious exaltation, and the latter is utterly irrefutable. A politician that demands you cut part of your genitals off will get treated like a poop-flinging monkey by most sane people. A prophet or pope or preacher?

People might well end up doing that sort of crazy thing.

One of the truly fundamental principles of the United States is that you're only allowed to pester people with your whacko religious ideas to the degree and extent that your powers of persuasion allow. The U.S. government, by its constituative documents, is forbidden from allowing - much less encouraging - one religion or other to enshrine its prejudices and preferences into civil or criminal law. For the good reason that the United States is supposed to be a land where the public forum is open to people of all religions, or none, and the moment you let the pope's nose into the lawbook that freedom is doomed.

This does not, has not, and will not prevent prelates of various sorts from trying to do this. Repeatedly, patiently, relentlessly, mercilessly.

Which is why the steps of the Capitol must, must always be guarded by fitzUrse with his naked sword in his hand.For that pious, humble, saintly man Tom Becket is the black enemy of public freedom and always will be.

Lies that Won't Fly, or, Wingnut Defilade

I must be getting cynical or something.

It's not so much a sort of general outlook sort of thing. It's just that I've gotten completely used to - still a trifle irked with, but used to - the idea that "conservatives" will lie about whether the sky is blue or the grass is green if it serves their purposes, or if it doesn't, or when the sky IS blue, or for no reason at all.

As an example of this, I give you the second sentence in today's editorial in the World's Worst Newspaper by Susan "I'm an independent, no, really, I am, I just HAPPEN to have the same position as the wingnuts 99.86% of the time" Nielsen:

"The Obama administration picked a fight it was sure to lose by decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control."

In fact, think I gave her some extra credit for waiting until the second sentence to lie out her ass.

It's not like I EVER expected the truth from these gomers on some things.

For example, I have always and fully expected to hear lies about gays from these wingnuts, other than the truly unhinged and rabidly feral ones, the ones that really believe that Baby Jesus cries when gay people have sex.

The semi-sentient ones, the others, the ones who know full well that they have lived with and befriended and partied with and shot the shit with homosexuals of various flavors for years, who know perfectly clearly that their position on denying these other human beings the legal sanction of their personal union is both inhumane and idiotic, are just straight lying, however they may try to shove their fingers in their ears and chant "lalalalalalala!" to drown the savage condemnation of their own consciences.

They really have no option, given the unhinged condition of their faction; it's either lie to us or tell the truth to themselves, and they can't do the latter, their brains would probably explode.

But it's one thing to lie to try and save oneself from self-immolation.

So that kind of wingnut lie never bothered me. But it's another thing entirely to lie about simple, obvious facts. And it's here that I can feel myself sliding down into a sort of frustrated anger-defilade. Because it used to set me alight when I'd read these ridiculously idiotic bullshit lies, lies that wouldn't convince a four-year-old, amateurish, moron-grade, sad, shitty little lies about simple facts that were gob-smackingly obvious to a gibbering poop-flinging monkey.

(Let me add here that my experience in the fine art of lying comes from when I was posted at Ft. Bragg. I had a friend there, Alfie, who was a sort of Vegas-blackjack-dealer-class liar, a positive maestro of the lie, a man who could lie to your face about something you knew positively otherwise and may you believe him with the effortless grace of water sliding off a cat's ass.

One thing Alfie always insisted on was that you had to lie around a core of the truth; the essence of a lie that will fly is not that it's true, and is not that you'd like it to be true, or you want it to be true but that it COULD be true.

In that respect your desires actually get in the way of telling a truly effective lie, and so it has proved. The things that wingnut "conservatives" usually like and want to be true are either hopelessly moronic or physically impossible; a "free market" (as if the second and third merchant in Babylon hadn't immediately colluded against both the first merchant and all their customers or that their breed had stopped ever since...), "low taxes and strong defense", "social decency", "job creators"...you get the picture.

So the lies they tell are, by their very nature, ridiculous. They aren't built around a core of truth, they're built around a core of pink rhinoceros fairy dust, so for those of us who don't spend six or seven hours a day hammering a FOX "News" cork into the top of our heads to keep the packing peanuts from fluffing out the idiocy is so apparent as to be kind of embarrassing.

Alfie would have told them that they had their heads jammed up their fourth point of contact so far they could see the back of their own teeth; that was the kind of guy he was.)

So I've been reading wingnut after wingnut going on and on about this whole ridiculous business of how the Evil Kenyan Usurper, the New Justinian, the Scourge of God, is making all these poor holy prelates pay for flushing the bleeding fetuses out of women's wombs as they sob and pray for righteousness, just like this Neilsen idiot. And back in the day I'd have gone utterly, full-gonzo, bull-goose looney, totally Asiatic, really medieval on their lying ass. And then here comes this Neilsen goof, and I'd have hung her up and flayed her like a windsock.

Because "decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control" is, simply, an incredibly simple, rudely stupid lie. A lie as amateurish as the eight-year-old caught pissing her pants who looks down at the spreading yellow stain and mumbles "Uhhhhh...it wasn't me..."

And because the truth is a lot simpler, like most truths.

The Catholic - and other religious employers - are offered a simple choice.

Charlie Pierce describes this choice in his usual delightfully rotund fashion:

"...the president has told various Catholic institutions — and told them quite gently, too — that, yes, if they want all those nice juicy tax advantages, they must abide by the federal law and, in their capacities as employers, make contraceptives available to their employees under the new Affordable Care Act."

Period.

That's it.

So no, Susie, no one is "decreeing" anything.

No cardinals or priests are being hauled weeping and praying into the regulatory arena where they will be devoured by ruthless federal health bureaucrats.

No one is demanding that Plan B be offered up with the Eucharist, or that good Catholic matrons be offered contraceptive devices (and wouldn't these good matrons refuse the offer, anyway?) and, when they refuse to accept them, be held down by the Contraception Goon Squad and forcibly contracepted.

Tax break? Contraceptives for those who want 'em.

It's that simple.

And - as little as a couple of years ago - the incredible arrogance of this lying little Neilsen shit would have been enough to spin me up like a fucking Beyblade Metal Master.

I'd have gone off on the issue to all my friends who had the patience to listen as well as writing a long blog post about how utterly fucked-up this was and what it said about the desuetude of American politics, throwing in allusions to the fall of the Roman Republic and all sorts of other dire warnings of what this Meant To Our Future.

And now?

It's just like watching a cow. It wanders around, shits everywhere, and what the hell can you do about it? It's not worth getting excited about. It just is.

These people are just lost. Gone. Pinin' for the fjords. A rough third of the U.S. public has gone and taken the mental dirt nap. Their brains are good to holding their hats off their shoulders, and that's about it. And where that used to frustrate the hell out of me and madden me to fury, I've gotten so I just shrug.

Rain is wet, night is dark, "conservative" liars lie.

But I think there's a worse part to this.

Because I used to believe that the third of the U.S. public who sits their staring at these knuckleheads like they've never seen a cow or heard a lie would smell their bullshit and hear their lies and get tired of being lied to by a herd of goddamn beefwits and toss the idiots out into the far end of the pasture.

And I don't believe that anymore.

And that feels like heading down into a very deep defilade, indeed.

Forever Fools

My pals jim and Lisa over at Ranger Against War have a nice vituperative little post up discussing the bizarre success of Newt Gingrich (or, as Charlie Pierce likes to tag him: "N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of the Civilizing Forces") in portraying his 1%-wealthy-Beltway-insider, perpetual-staff-banging-serial-adulterer self as a good ol' Christian Boy to the good people of the great State of Florida.

My friends speculate that:

"...(t)hese are not fit people and would in fact do well to walk, but have bought into a society which has effectively rendered them hostage to Big Pharma and Big Agra. They feel impotent -- often are -- and out of frustration will vote on seeming kinship alone, so disenfranchised are they from the system. Maybe someone who looks like he has to take the same statin drugs or eats the same fast food will feel their pain."

It's a great post, and well worth the reading.

But, in the tradition of how many words is the worth of a single picture, all I can say is:Do we really need to know more about the U.S., circa 2012, than that people are willing to both purchase, and, worse, leave the house, in something like that?

For this, men and women gave their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to wrest independence from Great Britain? For this, whole families suffered in the coal mines, men died builing the intercontinental railroads, sacrificed and bled to win the terrible World Wars?

For this?

WASF

Update 1/31 PM: Speaking of Chas, here he is in brilliant form, discussing Santorum, the - excuse the expression - hindmost ass in the GOP Florida donkeyshow:

"He had the right to expect better than to be reduced to being the undercard in the low-class donkeyshow into which the "fight" between Romney and Gingrich has devolved. Two colossal fakes, one with more money, gulling the rubes by pretending in many cases to be what Rick Santorum has been his entire career, for good and ill. Meanwhile, Santorum is the purest product out there of what the conservative movement transformed the Republican party to produce. It may, in fact, be true that Rick Santorum is too much of a modern Republican for the modern Republican party to nominate. He may be the mirror into which his party is afraid to gaze."

Hard not to wince in recognition.

Yep. We truly are well on the road to being irrecoverably fucked; having a third of the electorate harking after clowns, fools, charlatans, and grifters is the broad, smooth road to Hell and there is no disguising that.

In Case I Wasn't Clear

Here, from Matt Taibbi, is a little chart showing the top donors to the current GOP frontrunner as well as the the last two presidential victors:So now...is it all that surprising to understand how, regardless of who gets elected, we seem to be governed with the intention to comfort the comfortable and, well, afflict the afflicted?

In all honesty things WOULD have been worse under a President McCain. But it's a difference is degree, and right now for those of us not in the two-yacht family the boat seems to be foundering - slower than we'd have gone down with Captain Crashboom and the Half-baked Alaska at the helm, but, still - the ocean looks damn cold, and awful deep, and the prospect of a steamship on the horizon looks awful dim.

Topsiders, Duct Tape, and the National Dilemma of Wealth

I finally broke down and got a new pair of shoes last week. The old ones had become so worn that the sole had actually come loose and was flopping around like one of those clown shoes and had to be held in place with duct tape.Now here's a funny thing; when I was a college kid the whole duct-tape-on-the-Topsiders was considered the height of studly cool in some quarters.

Specifically, preppy quarters.

Remember "preppies"? There was a whole little cottage-industry of preppy-this and preppy-that in the late Seventies and Eighties, if I recall correctly. The whole plaid-skirt and penny-loafers for women, khakis and Lacoste shirts for men (and crew-neck sweaters for both, of course...) was the popular image of the thing. Labrador retrievers were involved, too, I think (or maybe Goldens. It was a while ago, c'mon).Now I was no different than many young people in their early twenties. I had just outgrown my childhood but was fitting badly into adulthood. I was turning and tapping bits of myself to try and see how to make them fit. I invented bits of this and lies about that to try and make myself seem...cooler, more interesting, different, more exciting.

But what I more than anything else wanted was to fit in. To be part of the accepted center of my then-life, a small, undeservedly-snooty Eastern liberal arts college. And a huge proportion of the "accepted center" of that place were the young people who had come from the private schools of the U.S. Northeast.

I don't really have any sense of the breed today, but in the Seventies the products of the Peddie School, Deerfield, and Lawrenceville Academy were the most upper of upper-middle class America. They had spent a dozen years acquiring not just a private-school education but a private school "manner" and part of that manner was the clothes they wore.

Now I was too callow to understand that a dozen years at the Peddie School would do more than teach you how to wear a polo shirt inside a button-down shirt under a crew-neck sweater. But that fashion was the only thing I could understand, and so it was the fashions I aped.It is more than thirty years since I left that place, and my sense of person has expanded to fill the inside of my head since then. I no longer feel any particular need to dress, or be, anyone to please anyone other than myself, my bride, and my children - all the public I need at this point in life.

But some things linger long after the reasons for them have fled, and I still find the Topsider shoes the most comfortable and easy to wear of any men's footwear.So when my old shoes finally died it wasn't a huge surprise that they were made by the folks at Sperry, or that I jacked some tape around them to hold them together before they went to their reward. If it worked in 1977...But I got to thinking, as I painfully parted with the cost of new shoes, that the people whose style I still walked in would have thought little and cared less for the expense.

And that really means something.

Because for most of us, for most Americans, for most people, life centers around the arithmetic that Dickens describes as "Income twenty pounds, expenses nineteen pounds, eleven shillings, sixpence, result; happiness. Income twenty pounds, expenses twenty pounds sixpence, result; misery."

I'm not saying that most of us are poor. What I'm saying is that most of us need to watch what we spend and what we save. We have to worry about things like getting sick. Or getting fired or losing our jobs. Of our roofs leaking, or our cars breaking down, or our taxes being screwed up and costing us penalties and interest.

And the one thing I've noticed now - especially this election year, but for quite some time now - is that the people our political class has chosen to "lead" us seem somewhere between somewhat to utterly clueless about that life.This year's poster boy, of course, is Willard Romney, who can and did talk about "firing" his insurance company.

That's really all you have to know about "Mitt" (a preppy nickname if ever there was one and, sure enough, Willard attended the Cranbrook School in Michigan [his wife prepped, too, at Kingswood]). Most of us don't "fire" our insurance companies; we hope instead that we don't get sick enough that our insurance companies don't force us into bankruptcy and then fire US. That Willard thinks such a thing tells you that the man had lived his entire life swathed, wrapped, bathed, and laved in what in the Army we used to call "fuck-you money".

And you know what?

Damn near all the other pols I can think of are, too. And that's no surprise, because for all we like to pretend it's not true, it's nearly impossible - and by that I mean 99.94% impossible - for a poor or even a modestly wealthy person to run for high office in this country.

Because I've thought about running for office. I'm a pretty smart, well-informed guy. I speak well, I write well. I understand the principles of this country and I think I have a good sense of what is in the best interests of most of its people.

But I can't afford to run.

I can't afford to lost the time I'd need to spend schmoozing the local Democratic Party, volunteering, getting to know the Thrones and Dominations. I can't afford to spend the money I'd need networking, or the lost work time in commuting to Salem or to various meet-and-greets. And if I GOT elected I'd have to constantly fundraise because I couldn't then afford to lost my government job and go BACK to my work as a geologist; I'd simply be too old, too disconnected, too...well, I'd be unemployable. So I'd have to slime my way back to Salem, or D.C. as some kind of lobbyist. Or think-tank scum. Or "consultant"...And that's really sad, and wrong.

Looking around it seems like we're beavering away trying to institutionalize not just bad governance (although God knows we seem to be doing that) but bad, clueless, craphanded, entitled governance. The kind of governance that fusses about "Islamofascism" but not unemployment, about deficits but not bankruptcy, homelessness, and civil rights.

And it may be a coincidence - but it seems unlikely - that it also seems nearly impossible to find anyone in, or running for, public office from local to state to federal who is intellectually anything other than a Lacoste-and-topsiders-or-plaid-skirt-and-pearl-wearing-variety, clueless, craphanded, entitled preppy asshole.And then we wonder why it seems like the world wags towards them and not towards us.

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.

The Post After The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Ever Wrote

I know, I know. I said I was done.

But this is so brilliant, so succinct, so perfect an illustration of the level our political discourse had sunk to that I cannot with good intent pass on commenting on it. Here's the quote, from Charlie Pierce again, citing Rick Santorum on the evils of putting the totem pole in the donut hole without throwing the pregnancy dice (emphasis mine):

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Now sit back and think about that for a moment.First of all, this man isn't running for stake president of the local Mormon outfit. He's not a cardinal hustling votes for the Papacy. He's supposed to be one of We the People, a citizen of a nation explicitly designed around not codifying religious dogma into civil law ("an establishment of religion") who is trying to convince you to vote for him as its Chief Executive.

And this is part of his platform.

Second, consider the semantics of his statement; "do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be".

Obviously, for Santorum, it's how GOD wants them to be.And this is...why?

Why should we care what Santorum's Bible says? Or even what PART of it Santorum wants us to listen to.

My grandfather was a Salvation Army officer, and I'm as familiar with the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, as a heathen can be. And in my opinion there's a ton of stuff about sex, almost all of it archaic, almost all of it confusing, and none of it applicable to the job of the President of the United States.

There's all the old Hebrew stuff; "be fruitful and multiply", the Sin of Onan, but you'd expect that from a culture that demanded progeny due to the insane rate of death in infancy, childhood and childbirth.

But there is also some genuinely bizarre shit. Like how you're supposed to fuck your brother's widow? Or the etiquette for raping your female slaves? (Hint - make sure you have a spare ram around in case you get caught...).

In other words, there's all SORTS of ridiculous desert-wandering God-pesterer crap in the Bible, sexual or otherwise.And that Rick Santorum cherry-picks some of it says more about him than it does about the Christian Bible.

But that's kinda not the point, really, isn't it?

The point is that we're supposed to be living in a non-sectarian state, as in, you can't circumsize my daughter - or my son - because of what YOU believe. You don't get to decide whether my wife and I have kids when we have sex because YOU believe we should, or even if your GOD believes we should and tells you so. And we don't have to figure out what part of the Bible that's in; it's right in the Constitution.

That's really all there is to it.

And Rick Santorum doesn't believe this.

And Rick Santorum is not being laughed, reviled, and mocked off the public stage.

Rick Santorum is not being held up as a living example of the very dangers of theocracy by the sort of people who will swear to you that Muslims want you to live by sharia law.No.

Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by the "news media" and by a significant number of people in one of our two major political parties.Update 1/4: And the fact that this god-botherer pulled a quarter of the GOP vote - that between them this religious whackaloon who believes that it is the President's job to intone on what my wife and I do in bed and the goldbug who thinks that our country is still working under the Articles of Confederation pulled half the GOP electorate in Iowa - should tell you all you really need to know about our nation and why we are where we are today.

We Are So Fucked.

The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Will Ever Write

Because, honestly...what can you say?

Really, it's worth going to spend some time with Charlie Pierce in Iowa if you want a clear, cold, brutal picture of what politics in the United States is and will be for the remainder of our political lives.

Two days into 2012 the United States is in real social, economic, and political trouble, and the fact that the Oregon Ducks broke 75 years of shit-luck in this year's Rose Bowl isn't going to change that.

The U.S. economy has gone south. And I don't mean in "whoa, it's beginning to look like we're in some sort of Lesser Depression" sort of way. I mean in a very fundamental, "Holy...this changes everyfuckingthing" sort of way.

The GOP and their corporate stooges (or perhaps that should be "the large corporate "citizens" of the United States and their Republican stooges"? Enh, who cares. You know who they are and who's putting what in whom...) have spent the better part of the past thirty years torquing, twisting, screwing, tilting, and raping the commercial and regulatory systems in this country to favor the sort of crony-corporatism that helps bring them immense amounts of lucre. This has also entailed and has since the late Forties the destruction of the "Grand Bargain" whereby the U.S. bought labor and social peace at the cost of some minor corporate profits by making the corporations the middlemen between the consumer and the workers (often the same people) who made the corporate gidgets the corporations profited off of.

This has mushroomed into a whole nutroll of interlocked problems, including;
- a vast and increasing disparity between the tiny, wealthy few and the increasingly un-wealthy many, who are trapped in
- an economy that has been shedding jobs, living-wage jobs, since the Seventies and who were then conned into trying to use their houses as ATMs and their credit cards as income - admittedly, largely with their own complicity (just because you get swindled doesn't mean that you're not a willing mark) and now becoming
- a badly educated, credulous public dominated by fear; real fear of losing their jobs and consequently their homes and health care and insurance as well as the ridiculous ginned-up fears of things like Hordes of Brown Meskins and Dusky Muslim Terrists - ridiculous but real to them and thus grounds for making stupid, self-destructive decisions in their own and others' lives, because they are "informed" by
- a debased, corporate-owned, lowest-common-factor media composed of people who are either mendacious fools or cynics; they either genuinely believe that talking about Kim Kardashian's vulva is more important than detailing the behavior of the malfactors of great wealth or they don't care and do the former because "the readers/viewers want it" and
- a relatively-bipartisan, highly-toxic federal consensus about a number of fairly critical issues; that "deficits matter more than jobs" (as long as a Kenyan socialist is president), that "We Are At War", that it is and always will be the responsibility of the United States to intervene whenever dusky foreigners are busy with something that might, possibly, potentially, or hypothetically be a future "threat" to "American interests", and that spending tax dollars on aircraft carriers is good but spending it on educating people is not.

All of these represent a problem if you are a citizen of the U.S. who believes that the national charter represents a mandate to promote the general welfare - in ways that do the least harm to the most people (including those dusky foreigners whenever possible) - and secure the blessing of Liberty to themselves and their posterity.

But.

None of this will appear on your evening news, or on the front page of your paper. Your political candidates will not speak of them except in scaremongering terms. And some of these problems - for example, the multigenerational, bipartisan effort to free labor from the bonds of higher wages through "globalization", offshoring, downsizing, "increased efficiency", and deunionization - will not be mentioned at all.

I'll give you just one example; fracking.

Using the overpressuring of injected fluids to increase permeability of a geologic formation to boost petroleum or natural gas yields has been used in the petrochemical industry since I worked there in the early Seventies.

It works, it has worked, it is not in itself dangerous or frightening although it's worth noting that "fracking" is never a first-choice. If a formation must be fracked it tells you that it's an unpromising reservior rock to begin with, and that every other easier, more accessible, cheaper source of petrochemicals has been tapped. In other words, fracking is telling you that drilling is getting more expensive and more difficult, not that it is an exciting new prospect for domestic supply.

It may also have some problems, including the potential for air and groundwater contamination - but these may be controllable, or avoidable, and may be limited by developments that allow for a reduced shut-in pressure.

Because there IS NO absolute good or evil in fracking; it is a technique, and one that has the potential for benefits and for damage.

In my opinion the best way to deal with hydrofracturing is carefully. It is not the same as conventional drill-and-pump techniques and the secondary and tertiary recovery methods used to scavenge the reservoir rock. In the same way that deepwater drilling involves considerably higher risks than shallow platform drilling, fracking should be approached carefully to ensure that both the potential hazards are reduced as well as that the benefits are proportionate to both the economic and environmental costs.

But you will not hear any of this in the public debate in this country. For God's sake, look at effing Iowa!

Because there it is, in its most awful, unvarnished, plain-vanilla form. Watch the antics of the idiots that Doghouse Riley once called the "Seven Specks of Granite" as they try to pander to the stupidest notions about "fracking" held by their already-debased electorate. Listen to electable-grade morons like Santorum, Romney and Gingrich parrot some version of the weapons-grade moron Palin's "drill, baby, drill" nursery rhyme.

You will hear nothing about the economics that has led to the Lesser Depression other than nonsensical rhetoric about "job creators" and taxes. You will hear nothing about a nation that has the largest military budget in human history and more citizens living in poverty than since the end of WW2. You will hear nothing but nonsense about issues that matter little and mean less; abortion, prayers, guns, and queers.

I'm picking on the Republicans because they've gone further into the Crazy. But their loss of sanity has allowed the Democrats to build their own little echo chamber of lies and prevarications, evasions and delusions.

The combined result has been that the United States of America is rapidly becoming a vast and fetid political sewer where it doesn't matter all that much which of the turds in the punchbowl are red and which are blue except the red ones will get flushed quicker and more thoroughly.

Needless to add, this benefits only those who can afford to have their own private septic plant; those of us who need a decent public sewage treatment system have or will find that that the shit can get deeper quicker than any sane individual could imagine.

But by then I believe it will be too late; I have little hope for my country's political system.

So IMO there's really no value in writing or talking any more about the would-a and the should-a. There's really no significant factor on the political horizon I can see changing our direction. The rot is just too deeply engrained, the sickening corruption of money, greed, power, and mental dysfunction so destructive throughout, that there really is no power base outside the "system" to reform it.

If, and when, I ever do it will be worth taking up this issue again. But until then...

The oligarchs, with that venal purblindness that has characterized oligarchs since the days of Versailles, will pursue their greedy vision of a new Gilded Age.

And - let me remind you - the U.S. has functioned as an open oligarchy and can again. So there's no reason to assume that the race to the bottom cannot end with the vast majority of Americans in the position they were in in 1885, working at dangerously chancy jobs for shit wages at the mercy of their employers - when they could find a job at all - and starving when they couldn't.

The only objection I've heard to this is the notion that somehow the system will "crash" and that something better will rise from its ruins. And, in the long run, perhaps something will. After all, the chaos of the Parisian Terror eventually resulted in the cosmopolitan pleasures of modern Paris.

But to get there the French had to live through generations of war, revolution, conquest, and occupation.

I don't want to have to live through those sorts of interesting times. And IMO the chances are that a "crash" will, instead of a return to sanity, bring to the surface the worst in the American public; fear, hatred, a desire to be "saved" by The Leader.

So, sadly, I think all the rest is just rearranging deck chairs. We have chosen our political fates; to be pulled down into late Imperial poverty by midgets who will repeat the lies we have told them we want to hear while we look in vain for something better. Our destination is determined, and the only variable is the length of the trip.

And all that remains now is the wait.

Update 1/3: Here's Ed at "Gin and Tacos" with his opinion on the Iowa Caucauses that pretty much mirrors mine, but which I think can be expanded to cover the U.S. political system circa 2011 as a whole (emphasis mine):

"When will this process get so absurd that it will change? It's not impossible. It happened in 1824, it happened during the Progressive Era with the introduction of primaries, and it happened in 1968. The question is, given the current health of our political system and electorate as a whole, would we end up replacing it with something worse? The evidence suggests that we would. And that has become the guiding principle in American politics – disgust followed by detachment, apathy based on the conviction that we can always make things worse by opening them up to change."

Logical Fallacy

Driving south to Oregon City this morning (at a truly uncivil hour of the pre-dawn) I was pulled from my post-sleep/pre-waking numb by the pickup in front of me, which was doing some sort of cross-lane carioca.

In southeast Portland you have to be circumspect dealing with erratic drivers in the pre-dawn hours. They may be weaving around only because they're coming off the night shift and their errata comes from mere exhaustion. But there are also a lot of tweakers and all-night drunks down here. And no few of them travel strapped, so getting into an altercation with one of these brain-baked bastards can cause you to contract a case of death or serious injury.

So I tend to give these gomers a fair amount of room.

As I backed off this guy I had some time to study his rig. All things considered it was pretty restrained for SE Portland. No rubber scrotum hanging from the trailer hitch, for one thing (these "truck nuts" are sort of the wattles-and-comb of the alpha SE Portland male, the latex finger shot at the rest of Stumptown for it's contempt and distain for his blue-collar cockitude). None of the other sorts of goofy redneck colors that these guys tend to fly; no rebel flag, no "Bad Boy" stickers, no mudflap nudes.Just an NRA logo in the rear window and a single bumper sticker:

"Annoy a Liberal - Use Facts and Logic".

Maybe it was because I'd been reading about the latest GOP candidate debate and the Rise (or is it the "Re-Rise"?) of Newt I had been thinking about just that.

And I had to wonder - does this guy, and, by inference, guys like him - really believe that American conservatives, people like Newt, and the Romneybot, and Michelle the Girl With The Faraway Eyes, and Rush, and...well, you probably know the rest...are coming up with their ideas based on "facts and logic"?

And I had to admit that they probably do.

I've dealt with a fair number of "movement conservatives" over the past 30 years. I'd say that probably in the last twentysomething I've seldom met anything but the common or garden-variety GOP-er, the sort of people who are uncomfortable with Mitt Romney because he once actually endorsed something kinda-sorta like Obamacare because he was the then-governor of Massachussetts, thus having to worry about people in his purview getting sick or incapacitated and ending up on the public purse, and concluding (using, y'know, "facts and logic") that using said public funds to PREVENT them from getting sicker and unable to work might actually save the public money in the long run.

And that led me to thinking about the sort of things that modern U.S. conservatives are "supposed" to believe, and wondering - how many of them seem to be based on actual "facts and logic"?

Tax cuts.

The by-God Ultima Thule of modern American conservatism appears to be tax cuts. In good times and bad, in war and peace, for richer, for poorer, the conservative answer to any question appears to be "tax cuts".

I cannot see how this has anything to do with "facts and logic".

Would you consider a driver who drive in a howling sleetstorm the same way he drove on a sunny summer day to have been guided by "facts and logic"? Would a surgeon who operated on a ingrown toenail using the same procedure as one operating on a triple bypass seem to be employing "facts and logic"?

So how does this square with the conservative fixation on tax cuts?

I don't see how it does.

Fighting land wars in Asia, regardless of whether they're "on Terror" or not?

Deregulating, well, everything?

Considering the actions of "big government" innately Evil yet trusting "big business" to be inherently Good?

Preferring pre-partum fetuses over post-partum women? Considering regulating things like workplace safety, environmental cleanliness, and financial fraud to be an unmitigated wrong? Talking loudly about fear of "government" yet trusting that government with great powers of secrecy and espionage - providing that government is "conservative" and promises to use those powers against "enemies of the state". Talking loudly about "job creators" while watching the unemployment lines grow, the median wage drop and the concentration of wealth at the top increase?

Facts and logic?

What are these? Because if modern U.S. conservatism springs from "facts and logic" I am Dorothy Lamour.

...but for Wales..?

It's early in the pre-dawn. Or late in the night, I'm not sure, but I'm up to go to work early. I checked the weather to see how fucking cold it is (it's fucking cold!) and made the mistake of checking in to a couple of blogs only to find this.

I'd seen this bill mentioned over at my pal Labry's place - she was spitting fire about it, good woman that she is - and it occurred to me that what I feel is just a sort of tired, sad, inevitability.

How many times in history have we watched this play out?

The frightful, desperate "enemy" that must be "defeated" at any, and ALL costs. The populace tittilated and terrified by tales of that enemy's desperate frightfulness. The group (or groups) that insist that "the old rules don't apply". The rush to "do something" that results in granting power upon power without a moment''s reflection of whether that power can ever be taken away.

I know I use this quote a lot, and, yes, I understand the irony of making that rigid old tartar Tom More into a petty saint of restraint and good government (the man who delighted in the aroma of crackling heretic, honestly...) but the words spoken here are NOT the words of Thomas More but of Robert Bolt, his playwright:

ROPER Then you set man's law above God's!

MORE No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .

(He says this last to himself)

ALICE (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!

MORE And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

And yet we are so fucking terrified of a bunch of raggedy ass Allah-pesterers that we won't give THEM the benefit of law for OUR safety's sake.

I'm so tired. Just tired.

And I haven't really even been all het up about this nonsensical "War on Terror" and the way it's got us hitting ourselves on the head, the way my pals Jim and Lisa have, say, over at Ranger Against War, ringing the changes of our eagerness to put down our legal trousers and hand the rod to our "leaders" and policemen and soldiers like a firebell in the night.

Or the way Greenwald has.

Or the way a hundred better writers, better bloggers, better citizens that I am have decried this silliness, this mouse blown up by shadows and smoke to the size of an elephant.

Because, really, I mean, people?

The fucking "War on Terror"? How stupid are we, collectively, to buy into this? We're supposed to be the adults here, the "We, the People" that those guys in the wigs supposedly put in charge to sort things out. We're supposed to remember things like that in wars, or lovemaking, capabilities count, not intentions. We're supposed to be able to see that these ridiculous villains are no more capable of actually "warring" on us any more than a sneak thief can "war" on your television set, or a Newberg high school freshman of making love to Angelina Jolie.

And that for all that he may masturbate frantically over her picture and describe the business as a "love affair" that it is not, and will never, be in HER best interests to describe it as such or act as if it were in fact.

And that a pack of reasonable adults should be able to sort this out about this idiotic "War" on some-forms-of-terror-perpitrated-by-some-groups-we-don't-like-but-not-others-that-we-sorta-do before their coffee get cold.

But we don't, we aren't, and we haven't.

And what the fuck more can I do?

I elected the goddam Democrat three years ago, worked for all my local sane guys, people like my Senator Merkeley, wrote letters to the paper, talked to anyone who would listen...

...and for what?

We're stuck right where we were about five years ago. A third of the U.S. public recognizes the insanity of this idiot's tale. But - and despite that more than three-quarters of the same public is more than ready to end the misadventures that the active pursuit of the "war" brought in train - the Third Gulf War and the God-Knows-How-Manyth-Afghan-War - the other third is still all about killin' us some ragheads.

And the final third is just too fucking stupid, lazy, poorly-informed...or something. To care.

So...what the hell will it take to make the point to the ignorant third and the radical-conservative-wingnut third that Sun Tzu sussed out, like, two thousand years ago - that fighting long wars is NEVER good for the combatant...even if it "wins"? That war makes people and nations do incredibly stupid things to themselves because those things seem "right" at the time?

I have no idea.

But just thinking about makes me tired.

I guess I always thought that if my country was to go to hell it'd be in some dramatic fashion. We'd hand ourselves over to the devils of authority and oligarchy in the midst of some titanic struggle with the Great Foe; the Soviet Union bristling with nukes or the Chinese hordes of Asia. We'd go down in a monumental crash of great rhetoric and epic protests, with the last defenders of the old outmoded liberties herded into the cattle trucks for the journey to the Utah camps. I never pictured my countrymen lying about on our dead asses while we drift along in a state of perpetual "war" with a bunch of sorry ass Islamic fantasists...I mean, can you THINK of a stupider way to give away the gift?

Bolt again:

MORE I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?

CROMWELL Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.

MORE (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales..!

Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden...

Occupy Portland is over.An ad-hoc force of police from several places including Portland Bureau today cleared the two downtown parks that Occupy had occupied. The protesters have regathered in several other downtown sites to "discuss" their next move, but in my opinion this is the end for Occupy.

For more than a week the local pols, newspapers, and television outlets have been voicing increasing impatience with Occupy and, truthfully, it seems hard to imagine how the "protests" would have done anything more than they have which beyond generating a sort of unfocused unease amongst the chattering classes has been no more than an irritant under the silken drawers of the rich and powerful.

It's been more than forty years since the mild insurrections of the U.S. Civil Rights era, half a century since the "nonviolent" protests of the Indian National Congress forced Britain's release of her Indian colony, a full century since the end of the violent strikes and near-rebellions that empowered the American labor unions.In the interim we have forgotten that "peaceful" protest is exactly as effective as "peacefully" resisting a savage beating unless you have your "peaceful" beating carefully planned to maximize your PR value - and it helps if your opponents are frigging morons, or politically and financially exhausted.

The civil rights marchers won because the Southern bigots were stupid enough to physically attack well-dressed men and women on national TV and newspapers. The Indian factions won partially because BG Dyer was a fucking bloodyminded idiot and partially because the Empire exhausted itself fighting two world wars. You could argue that the labor unions didn't actually win, but rather reached a sort of armed truce that lasted until the plutocrats shat the bed in 1929 and helped elect a labor-friendly administration.

Occupy had none of these to help it. Instead, it faced a massively corrupted and paid-for military-industrial-congressional-financial complex that is doing quite well under the present system. Any hopes of an FDR moment disappeared early in 2009 when it became obvious at least to me that the current Democratic administration had no interest in even trying cocking a snook at the banksters. The New New Deal this wasn't.

And the Occupiers forgot the other lesson of those earlier protest movements; that the public could give a shit about your politeness. The relative discipline of the Occupiers ended up looking like meekness, and regardless of what the Good Book says the meek won't inherit jack shit without a pair of brass balls, friendly press, and a sackful of bricks and cobblestones hidden away in case all the politeness doesn't work. And Occupy Portland had none of those things.

And ask the Paris Communards how even WITH those things, if the government is willing to ignore you when you're weak - and kill or arrest when you're strong - you you will lose.So the banksters have proved that a camel can leap laughingly through the eye of a needle. They have bought all the government they need, they or their lickspittle brownnosers own the media conglomerates, and the U.S. public is about evenly divided into thirds, and while one third is ignorant and indifferent one of the other two-thirds is actively hostile, either hoping to curry favor with the plutocracy or, tragically, mistaking the random helium in their guts for wings; by the time they fart away their good luck they will be plummeting too rapidly to have the time for regrets.

Occupy might have had more hope if the public was more intelligent and their enemies less powerful. In the first couple of days, or weeks...

But no matter. That hope is gone forever.

In March, 1935 the tiny German Army marched into the Rhineland, the first of Hitler's Thirties gambles. And it was more than a gamble; Hitler and his commanders knew how tiny their little force was. As hapless as the French Army of the Thirties was, and it was a fairly ginormous clusterfuck, a whiff of grapeshot in the old Napoleonic style would have seen the Heer packing across the Rhine and, probably, the end of the Hitler Era two years after it began.

But the French were too meek to make that move, and Hitler's success propelled him all the way to the wreck of the European world ten years later.

And here again, the first couple of days - "Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden" is how Hitler phrased it - were key.Once the larger public failed to rise in the first couple of days the Occupiers proved to have no strategy to force the issue or force their enemies to submit and their attempt to tame the bulls and bears is done.

Update 11/14: Upon further review, I had a couple of thoughts.

The antiwar protests of the Sixties have something a answer for in what they've done to the U.S. left. The protests were far less effective at "ending" the war than they seemed at the time (and have been mythologized since) - Nixon's concerns for the economy and the public's indifference to the Vietnamese were more crucial. But the result is that somehow the notion that merely marching around and sitting-in would be enough to effect political change and the record of those actions since then have proved this to be the nonsense it is.

The civil rights protestors, the INC activists, the labor movement radicals all had a collection of things that the post-'72 U.S. protests haven't:

1. An actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theatre to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied. If OWS had anything other than "be there" I haven't seen it (mind you, the combination of vast public indifference and active media ignorance/hostility made it difficult to see how they could have done anything else effectively). And to orchestrate this these groups also had

2. An actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting, but the leaders were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents. The OWS seems to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very WORST hangover of the Sixties protests. People like Lewis and Nehru and MLK were in many ways very unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The OWS people seem to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person. Couldn't be wronger. Many, perhaps most, of the people who have done "good" things for the mass of humanity have themselves been real bastards. You have to break a lot of eggs sometimes to make a good omlette...

Sorry that I'm such a little ray of sunshine today. But, as Matt Taibbi points out, the things that OWS is pointing fingers at aren't minor issues - they go to the very heart of the corruption of the crony-capitalist scam that has been driving the U.S. (and much of the Euro nations) back towards the Gilded Age. I'd have liked to see the U.S. and other western publics "get" that. But this doesn't seem to have happened, and at this point I have to conclude that it ISN'T going to happen. And for someone like me, who is and whose kids will be, part of the 99%, that looks like a bad thing for the future.