Honest Abe and Uncle Saddam

I just finished watching "House of Saddam", a joint BBC-HBO production documenting the political and personal life of Saddam Hussein in a style which combines the aesthetics and techniques of "John Adams" and "The Sopranos".

These two networks, and next to no others, have a way of forging a connection between the viewer and an on-screen character than said viewer would despise in a real context. Great rappers also possess this skill. And what a revelation it is to understand tyrants as mortals.

The most conspicuous aspect of this series was the presence of the Other side. By Other side, I don't mean to conjure up an amoral purgatory in which Saddam Hussein's sins are excused because of "context" or "extenuating circumstances" or any other such surrender to the insidious elixir of moral relativism.

I mean simply that this series was a shocking reminder of how little we really think about Saddam Hussein's enemies when we appraise his sins. Saddam Hussein did not make Iraq; Iraq made Saddam Hussein. Saddam ruled Iraq because he was better at conspiracy and revenge than all other comers.

For example, let us consider the crime for which Saddam Hussein was executed. He was executed for brutally retaliating against a whole town for an assassination attempt on himself.

In 1982, Saddam Hussein visited a Shia town in the south of Iraq. As he left the town, members of the Da'wa Party, a Shia Islamist Party loyal to Iran, fired 300 rounds at Saddam Hussein's car. Think Lee Harvey Oswald on crack.

Saddam Hussein replaced his slain driver and returned to the town. He gave a formulaic speech about the cowardice of his attackers and the bravery and integrity of true Iraqis. And then he left. And then his men arrested, tortured, and killed hundreds of people.

Of course, this reads as a brutal affair. But what I saw in "House of Saddam" was an appraisal of all points of view, the rarest of things when discussing Saddam Hussein.

It also reminded me that Saddam Hussein was executed for what was deemed to have been a criminally brutal reaction to the assassination attempt by the Da'wa Party. And who was it that executed Saddam Hussein? It was an American-protected government whose Prime Minister was a founding member of the....wait for it.....Da'wa Party.

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein crime's were invented; it simply means that they did not occur in a vaccuum, that their targets were rarely angels, and that the forces that have sat in judgement of Saddam Hussein have no shortage of blood on their own hands, or oozing from their own pens.

Consider: the political leaders of the south of Iraq declare that they are not loyal to Iraq, but to themselves and, indeed, a foreign nation (Iran). The President of Iraq then has 300 bullets fired at his car when he visits the south of Iraq.

Does that not sound like the south of Iraq aims to secede from the nation? That was their plan. Whether their plan was justifiable or not is totally separate from the fact that they attempted to implement their plan. And their target, Saddam Hussein, struck back.

Let us consider Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has had more books written about him than any other person who has ever lived other than Yeshua Ha-Nostri, aka Jesus Christ. Lincoln is a demigod, as has been idolized by statesmen of rather harsh stripes, from Bismark to Ataturk to Stalin to Hussein.

What did Lincoln do that these supposed devils so admire? Well, he made a statement in blood and iron. That statement read as follows, "in the interest of preserving the unity of the nation, all laws and morals are negotiable".

The south of the United States made it clear that they did not consider themselves a part of the United States, and the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, got a half-million people killed to prove his point that the sanctity of the nation outweighed ALL other considerations up to and including habeus corpus and posse comitatus, which are fancy terms for legalized tyranny. One may agree with this sacrifice, but one may not ignore it.

And how was Saddam Hussein any different? He made the same decision as Lincoln. "The sanctity of the nation outweighs ALL other considerations". Add to that a uniquely artificial nation and a uniquely violent brand of politics, and we get Saddam Hussein.

I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a great statesman. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we are not so fundamentally different as Americans as we delude ourselves into thinking.

There are real moral differences between Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein. But the biggest reason for the universe of difference between how these men are evaluated has much less to do with morals than it does with the conspicuous lack of television in the 1860's.

Sup Wit Shoe?

What a bizarre yet simple twist of fate this is. President Bush was never so powerful or popular as he was in April of 2003, when Iraqis pelted statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes in what was essentially the best 1940's-style newsreel footage of all time.

Alas, we have since grown to understand the Iraqis' rage more fully with the passage of time, and we have realized that they have shoes not just for Saddam, but for us, and indeed for themselves.

As for the attacker, I can not muster any particularly rational argument against what he did. I feel that legally and intellectually and morally, it is hard to argue against any Iraqi's right to attack any servant of the American government which invaded and occupied their country, regardless of professed intentions.

So my problem is not with the attacker. In fact, I admire his courage and his aim. Surely he knew he would go to prison for assaulting the President of the United States. But he did it. And he knew that he could not possible kill Bush. All things considered, most acts of violence are far more cowardly than this one was.

Still, I took absolutely no joy in seeing this spectacle, though I'm sure that many Bush-haters did. The reason I did not find this entertaining in the least bit is two fold.

The first is that I do not hate George Bush. I hate very few people, in fact. And this occasion reminded me of the few things I actually respect about Bush, specifically his physical prowess and his sense of humor.

I admire the fact that Bush keeps in shape, and let me tell you, no other president we've ever had (except for the one we're about to have....yes the fuck We Did) could have dodged that shoe. Bush was on some cougar shit there. And he laughed about it afterwards. While I don't respect Bush's brand of humor, I respect that he appreciates the value of laughter.

The second reason for my sobriety around this YouTube riot is that this was a physical assault on the presidency and I was extremely unimpressed with the quality of the security.

I understand that the media room is supposed to be the "safe area", when the security work is essentially done because every person has been thoroughly searched and nobody else can enter. I get that but, not to be impolitic, when you're in fucking Baghdad in a room full of Iraqis, you might want to step your game up and assume ill will from everybody in the room.

The simple fact is that a man assaulted the president with something that could have injured him, but not killed him (but that could not have been know as the attack unfolded, in this age of the shoe-bomb) and the line of sight between the attacker and the president was unbroken even as another object was hurled by the same man.

I don't know enough about professional security to know whether my critique has any merit, but I know enough about my own intuition to know that it unnerved me.

It takes not a leap but a simple skip in imagination to consider what would've happened if that first shoe had struck the president squarely in the face, visibly exposed blood, and knocked him off his feet. I'm here to tell you that wars have started over less.

All those overly-wrought nerdy analyses aside, it somehow just made perfect sense. An Iraqi man physically assault the President while condemning him for civilian casualties and calling him a dog, and Bush's honest response was to smile and turn the whole thing into another act of persecution in the test of trials that all great men must navigate, all the more proof that he was right all along and shall eventually be redeemed.

The Nature of Things

I was talking recently with my right hand man about the relative virtues of the Greek and American minds. Our consensus was that while the American mind matched and eclipsed the Greek for at least the first one and a half centuries of our nation, it has recently been bureaucratized and inundated and OMG'd from divine revolution to soul-less but competent management to moral, ethical, and intellectual decrepitude.

The American mind has been utterly disaggregated with technocracy, with myths, with virtuality, with an endless inundation of images and sounds imploring us to borrow, to buy, and to never settle for anything, including our first wives. In a sentence, we have lost our ability to recognize the Nature of Things.

The Greeks, due to the conspicuous lack of YouTube, TacoBell, iPods, or even billboards, had plenty of time to sit and think. The American mind no longer has this time, and this is evident in American actions. The Greeks were able to get to the Nature of Things.

Deliberation before action made for inordinately great political thinkers and actors in Greece and early America. But when America became swamped in an endless deluge of information, gossip, entertainment, and consumption all blended seamlessly into an inseparable goulash whose whole is even more worthless than its mostly useless parts, deliberation came to be seen as vaguely pathetic, as a sign of a jellied spine and a European (read: gay) orientation.

American actions now are not based on the Nature of Things; instead, they are based on a foundation of self-imposed delusion which holds that an American hand at the tiller is enough to defy the Nature of Things and to superimpose ideological solutions onto problems whose Natures are willfully ignored.

For example, 9/11 was an attack by a stateless entity, and the Bush administration responded by overthrowing two states in set-piece battles (in which the enemies of the American Army had decidedly few "pieces"). The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad would have made a sick newsreel in 1945, but as a response to 9/11, it fundamentally ignored the Nature of the threat.

We now have the issue of the big three American car companies and whether we should bail them by confiscating the wealth of other citizens. The Nature of the problem, of course, is that the world no longer exists where an American company can make cars nobody wants and pay folks 50 bucks per hour to do so. That world no longer exists. That is the Nature of Detroit's problem, yet most proposed solutions ignore this obvious truth.

My heart is literally heavy at the thought of all those folks losing their jobs, but did not the candle makers all get laid off when we invented electricity? That's the nature of progress; victims are a part of the equation, just as surely as beneficiaries are. If we spend the peoples' money on the car companies, how is that different from spending my money to bail out VCR companies after the DVD was created?

It seems that we need to get back to the Nature of Things, which will require the renunciation of the myth that we can have a perpetually and universally wealthy, healthy, and safe society. That is a myth, and it is a myth whose misguided attempts at implementation have caused more misery than anything else in the history of the world.

Spare the Rod

I know that I am not alone when I say that my consumption of news has trickled to a pittance since the November Revolution. Partly this is due to exhaustion and relief. It is also due to an urge to not have My President's victory cheapened and cliched beyond redemption before he even takes office.

But my self-imposed exile from political news is also because of people like Rod Blagojevich. I had never heard of this douchebag before today, but I knew he existed nonetheless. Still, attributing a face and a few sordid details to the archetype that I knew existed was rather illuminating in a pathetic way.

First of all, LOOK at this guy. He looks like a cross between a 1980's game-show host and the bad guy from a Karate Kid movie. He's just a mess. And I don't mean that in the sense that he is not handsome by our decadent and materialistic standards; I mean that in the sense that you just KNOW this guy is a scumbag.

Scumbags, of course, are commonplace among alpha males, and one might even argue that certain crises can only be effectively managed with a certain dose of scumbaggery. But Blagojevich wasn't even a big-picture scumbag; his ambition was so narrow, and his greed directed towards such pedantic lusts, that I almost would have felt better were he more devious.

This man has the authority to appoint the successor to Barack Obama, who is the most popular human being on the planet at this moment. Now, assuming Blagojevich were purely cynical and ambitious and sociopathic, what would he do? Well, he would look at this purely as an opportunity for personal advancement.

Which is what he did. And which is what, frankly, most politicians would have done. But how did Blagojevich DEFINE personal advancement? On on the one hand, he could have ingratiated himself with the most powerful person on Earth, who would have owed him one. On the other hand, he could risk the ire of that man as well as his freedom, his job, his reputation, and his property for some money in an envelope.

And what did he do? Well, we know what he did. Our system has so much room for legal corruption, that when a politician is caught in such a flagrant act so far out of our corrupted "legal" norms, it is nothing less than an act of ethical pornography. Selling Senate seats. And leaving the house in the morning with that hair.

This is the fragility of Obama. We're all in that secret club now. We feel different. We don't know why exactly, but we know it's real. But I also know that I despise nearly every politician I know of. Obama's revolution cannot survive him. Blagojevich reminds us of the rule to Obama's exception.

Poor Us

Before the election of Barack Obama, eggheads and rednecks alike pontificated on how radical a thing it would be for a black man to be elected President. And while Obama's election was, in my mind, the greatest single event in our history as a nation, it was not as revolutionary as many might think. Indeed, another barrier, no less formidable than race, has been eclipsed by several American presidents.

It is bemusing and a bit irritating to hear knee-jerk leftists bemoan the lack of non-white presidents among our first 43. "Look at all those white faces" they drone as they scan the visages of our first 43 presidents. This fixation, however, is ignorant to realistic expectation and common sense and it entirely misses the larger point of how far America had truly come even before the election of Obama.

From the founding of our nation until about 40 years ago, 90% of American citizens were white. The white majority is not now nearly as large, and it will continue to shrink, but it is a matter of historical fact that, for the huge majority of our history, whites were 90% of the population. Given that simple fact, what other color could our first 43 presidents possibly have been? Of course they were white!

"What about the blacks?" one might retort. America's sins against blacks need not be catalogued here, but if you can show me a country that has elected a member of a 10% minority to lead it, I'll show you a war that George W. Bush has won. In other words, the whiteness of America's first 43 presidents has been drastically inflated in importance. The lack of women, in fact, is infinitely more relevant, since they represent 50% of the population and 0% of presidents.

That issue aside, we must ask ourselves what this race-obsession obscures. Specifically, it obscures class. And the issue of class is where America made huge and unprecedented strides which were real and historically important before Mr. Obama arrived. Put simply: since World War II, Americans have much more often than not elected men to lead them who were born poor.


Let us consider our presidents since FDR, since the office of the American President became the most powerful office in the world. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. 12 men. And only 3 aristocrats. Only in America.

Think about that. Only 25% of our imperial presidents were born into status and/or wealth. Just three men from aristocratic dynasties, the Kennedys and the Bushes. The rest, the other 75%, were born normal and nameless men and rose to become, for their own respective moments and by their own respective merits, the most powerful men in the world.

This is a moral revolution in government that I have not heard anyone address amid all the hoopla surrounding Obama. Yes, he's black. But he was also born poor. And that has as much to do with his worldview as anything else.

Indeed, the huge majority of post-war American presidents were born poor. Poor. And look where they ended up. Again, ask yourself, as one must do often with America, "what other country in the world...." To ask the question is to answer it.

So, the next time we look at that row of photographs of our presidents, let's go deeper than race. Let's consider the fact that to look at these men and see an indistinguishable white mass is simply racist. Let's consider the fact that Ronald Reagan was raised by a single mother in a poverty very few Americans can imagine. Despite what one may think of the man's politics, was Reagan not evidence of the promise of America?

We should not diminish the importance of Barack Obama's election; few things are more important. But neither should we diminish the edifices and boundaries that we had collectively shattered long before that day but received such little credit for. It took a while for a white country to elect a black president. But it took much less time for a rich country to elect a poor president. We deserve credit for both.

The Voice

When I consider my obsession with song, I think of it as a triangle of music, words, and voice. I have enjoyed many a spirited debate with my nerdier acquaintances about the relative importance of these components.

When listening to rap, does the beat trump the lyrics? Would the best lyrics you've ever heard be irrelevant if delivered over a subpar beat? Conversely, can great production artificially inflate the quality of subpar lyrics?

Rap seems to me to be dominated by music and words. Voice is extremely important as well, but not as important as it is in rock. I attribute this to the fact that the demography and perspective and life experiences of most rappers is far narrower than the corresponding characteristics of rockers. I attribute this mostly to rap's relative youth as a genre; it will evolve.

There are some rappers, however, who seduce and convince me entirely with their voices. The two greatest voices in rap today are Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne. Their insipid insistence on misspelling their names belies the genius of these men. Yes, Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne are geniuses, poets of singular skill, who are only seen as inferior poets to long-rotted Englishmen by those are who are far too clever for their own good.

But these men are not just surreal poets. They are VOICES. And when I consider what makes their voices so great, I realize how this whole thing (as with so many "whole things") started with Bob Dylan. The voices of Ghost and Wayne are so great precisely because they are so flawed, as it was (and is) with Dylan.

When Ghost says "why's the sky blue? why is water wet? why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he's not just delivering a stunning bit of verbiage. When you hear him say it, he sounds like he MEANS it. He's not singing it; he's living it. It doesn't sound as "good", but it sounds more "real". And that's what I prefer.

When he says "why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he says it like someone just walked into his house and killed his dog in front of him. He's living it, and he's angry, as any "real" person would be if they were "really" talking about Judas.

Wayne's voice does the same thing. When he says "you know what they say, when you're great, its not murder, its "assassinate", so assassinate me, bitch!", it may not be the sort of thing most eggheads would describe as "poetry", but when you hear him say it, you can almost hear him pulling off his vest and walking out onto a balcony circled by snipers.

And here's where Dylan comes in. Dylan is like Obama; he changed the game...no, REDEFINED the game so drastically that it is impossible to count the ways, as the song says. I'll try to stick to the script here, though, and just talk about the Voice.

Dylan's voice was not a "singer's" voice. He sounded more like a farmer than a singer, like a man who ritualistically abused his throat, and like the sort of person who was a good writer but perhaps too stubborn to let "singers" deliver his songs and insisted upon doing it himself. But he was REAL.

And this is where the standard of singing shifted. The standard used to be Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had a perfect voice, but as we all know, perfect is not real when it comes to voices, since voices are human and therefore imperfect. It is the imperfections, in fact, which make voices so human.

Sinatra sought to sing songs as technically flawlessly as the human condition would allow. And, from what I know, he was great at it. And that's fine. But Dylan, and his successors, sought to sing songs to make them seem REAL rather than flawless.

So when Dylan's voice cracked, it was not a defeat, but a triumphal necessity. After all, how can one deliver a line like "you don't count the dead when God's on your side" or "I'm in love with a woman that don't even appeal to me" or "ring them bells for the time that flies, for that child that cries when his innocence dies" in a singsong voice? How could a REAL person's voice NOT crack when voicing such words?

And there it is: do we want pure voices, or do we want real voices? There are virtues to both, of course, but I would side with the latter more often than not. The only singers with nearly "pure" voices that I enjoy are Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and Jack Johnson, and they lent their unreal voices to some very "real" songs.

It's true that people should strive for greatness. For example, I want a president that's smarter than me. I want athletes than are bigger and stronger than me. And I want poets who are better than me. But I want VOICES that I know belong to people just like me.

How Bad Was Bush?

How bad was Bush?

As an historian, I can not so glibly conclude that he was the worst president in the history of our republic, as many in my profession are so quick to claim. Picking the "worst" American president is like picking the "worst" Bob Dylan album or the "worst" aircraft carrier. They are entities of such unique precision that even the most flawed of their iterations retains redeemable qualities.

And even given that fact, if every American president had been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as Mr. Bush, we would all be absolutely petrified at what we'd discover. Calvin Coolidge? Black uncle. James Buchanan? Gay. Woodrow Wilson? Fascist.

Despite his well-and-duly-harped-upon failures of leadership, Mr. Bush has done some redeemable things. I wish to point to three specific achievements for which Mr. Bush is unduly deprived of credit.

The first is the fact that both of Mr. Bush's Secretaries of State were African-American, and one was a woman. More importantly, both were well-qualified for the job, despite what one may think of their politics. During the Bush years, America's chief liaison to the world was black and/or female, and that is an precedent Mr. Bush set but has not been properly praised for.

The second is that Mr. Bush has done more than any person who has ever lived to alleviate AIDS and malaria in Africa. President Bush saved millions of lives. In my opinion, Mr. Bush criminally and recklessly deprived many people of life and liberty during his tenure, but he also saved millions of our most desperate brothers and sisters from a horrible death, and he deserves no small amount of credit for this.

Thirdly, Mr. Bush's proposal on privatizing social security made sound moral and fiscal sense, yet he was never given an honest hearing. The president shoulders no small amount of blame for this, as his credibility was shredded by this point, but my generation would be better off if we had followed George W. Bush's advice on social security.

Beyond that, this man was a uniquely catastrophic president. Shall we approach this chronologically?

Firstly, President Bush was never legitimately elected president. Secondly, the worst attack on America in its history happened on his watch and, let us be frank, he clearly had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Thirdly, he couched the response to 9/11 in a strictly authoritarian sense. He immediately adopted the presumption that the attacks were not reflective of his administration's failure of anticipation, but of the pesky premise of the rule of law.

"I got this", he said to the American people. He asked for no shows of patriotism beyond consumption and conspicuous silence in the face of his wartime policies. Fourthly, he gave into fear and severely curtailed the checks on his office imposed by the Constitution.

Fifthly, he used the nation's fear and grief and a means towards a personal and ideological end. The invasion of Iraq was irrational, illegal, and unwise in the extreme. Sixthly, he disgraced the troops he had plunged into the cauldron by sending decidedly mixed signals on the legitimacy of torture, which is the moral equivalent of endorsing the same.

Seventhly, he serially subverted the constitution by attaching "signing statements" to laws passed by the peoples' Congress. The gist of these statements was that Mr. Bush would execute the law "as he see fit" the practical implication of which is tyranny.

Eightly Mr. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gave him the authority to personally deprive citizens of habeus corpus and which retroactively pardoned him of all war crimes he had authorized to date, including torture.

Ninthly and lastly, the intangibles. The way Mr. Bush behaved. The way he carried himself. The way he represented US. "Mission accomplished". "Bring Em On". "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." These were failures of leadership which even the most partisan of citizens were aghast at.

No American president should have to assume the burden that was thrust upon George W. Bush on 9/11. And of course I feel not a little presumptuous critiquing a man who shouldered a burden I can not conceive of. But it is my job as a citizen to do just that.

Barack Obama is inheriting perhaps the greatest burden of any American president since Lincoln, and perhaps of all American history. But unlike Mr. Bush, he has chosen inclusion and hope over passivity and fear.

My final critique of President Bush is that he was a fundamentally well-meaning man who was intellectually and morally unfit to hold the office he did. 9/11 exposed the open book of history to Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, impulsiveness, arrogance, and lack of curiosity.

Put very simply, what GOOD thing has happened in or to this country since George W. Bush took (and I use the word "took" advisedly) the presidency? .........anyone?.....anything?.....(Jeopardy music)......ANYthing?....

Well, there is one. And WE did it on Tuesday.

America......Fuck Yeah

While trying in vain to find some way to overstate what has just happened (there is none), I wondered what song might best sum up my feelings, which are utterly without precedent. Some weighty and wordy and weary ballads like Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In" sprang to mind, but then I settled on a track from "Team America: World Police" (made by the creators of South Park), a song whose chorus revolves around the line, "America....fuck yeah!"

Sometimes such a crude and unfiltered honesty is called for, and I feel no need to prettify or anesthetize the way I feel about my country this day. America....fuck yeah. We are, in short, the greatest nation in the world once again. We have reclaimed the myth, which many of us never had rationale cause to believe, that anybody, ANYbody, can do anything, ANYthing, in this country.

Let me begin with a profoundly drastic statement which I invite any reader to refute: Tuesday was the greatest day in the history of this nation since the signing of the Constitution. Sound extreme? What other day, what other event can we point to? Surely we should abjure all those turning points which involved bloodshed. Surely we should abjure those turning points which were all heat and no light, rhetorical promises buttressed by lack of action. What then are we left with when picking one day better illustrates our better angels?

What other event in out history serves as such manifest evidence that we, WE, are who we think we are? America has once again turned the world on its head. And it has done so this time not just with words or with technology, but with ACTION. And it is the ownership of this process which makes it so revolutionary.

While I wept for my country on Tuesday (and Wednesday. and today) I wept not just because my country can produce men such as Obama, but because my fellow citizens will CHOOSE men such as Obama.

I wept, and continue to break down without notice, at the thought of millions of Americans who woke up Wednesday and looked upon their sleeping children with a new set of eyes. Rarely if ever has the world changed overnight. Well, it has happened now. And WE did it. Not a meteor strike, not a terrorist attack, not a financial meltdown over which nobody has control, but instead, a CHOICE, made with the world as witness.

I wept for my country in a way I thought I never would. The only two times I had experienced anything resembling such a well of emotion on behalf of my country was on 9/11 (fear, anger) and upon the invasion or Iraq (unmitigated shame). And now, I weep because the myth that I had stubbornly clung to has been proven true.

I weep because scores of millions of white folks lined up throughout the Midwest and even the old Confederacy and did the right thing, with the world watching and with their ancestors shrieking in horror from their graves. The ghosts of history were resurrected only to be driven through and killed again. And it was a good death.

America has achieved the moral equivalent of landing on the moon, and then some. The moon landing is a good example, because it is so illustrative of the schizophrenia so central to the American character. Americans wrote the Declaration of Independence when they weren't busy beating and raping their slaves. Americans walked on the moon when they weren't busy incinerating Vietnamese villages. And Americans, WE, elected Barack Hussein Obama to be OUR president while George W. Bush fell asleep on the silken sheets that we, the same WE, bought for him.

This transcends the moon landing, of course, but the world's reaction is the same. It is something along the lines of, "holy SHIT.....those Americans....they can do anything". And WE can. And WE did.

I find myself feeling almost jingoistic in my viscerally bursting pride in my country. I can say, and DO say, that this is the greatest country in the world. I know that now. I can say, and DO say, that despite all of our sins, we have all just been reminded of why people the world over are inexorably drawn to our land. And I know that there is literally no human being on this Earth who is not profoundly humbled and moved and inspired by the fact that WE, alone among all people, would gladly pick one of THEM to lead us.

I know that conservatives, including some I call friends, are sickened by this type of rhetorical exultation. But I don't care. Because this is necessary. And this is real. The world today is NOT the world of 2 days ago, and that world will never again exist. The world has changed for the better. Mankind perceives fewer barriers between their brothers than ever before. Multicultural democracy is redeemed. And WE did it. America. Fuck Yeah.

The College

If Barack Obama is elected president, there will be no shortage of ways by which to articulate the utterly revolutionary portent of it. A black man, an African man, a man with a Muslim name, a man younger than all but three prior presidents, a (let me admit it) rather unexamined man, all rolled into one.

But perhaps the simplest twine in this twist of fate is that if Barack Obama is elected president, he will, by definition, win the Electoral College. And the Electoral College was created to appease slave owners.

There are euphemisms employed to defend the Electoral College as necessary to protect the "small states" but when the Constitution was written, "small state" meant "slave state".

The Electoral College gives disproportionate power to the "small states", mirroring the Senate much more than the House.

Since the slave owners did not recognize their slaves as human beings, they could hardly be citizens.

And, since a state's representation and influence in national government was based on the number of citizens in said state, the slave owners tried to have their slaves count as citizens in regard to that state's power in the national government, while at the same time denying those slaves any rights of a citizen or even of a well-heeled dog.

The "compromise"? The 3/5th's clause, which designated each slave as 3/5 of a human being when assigning the "small states" their representation in the national government.

The Electoral College was a compromise necessary to convince the slave states to join the Union during the American Revolution. The only (thin) chance at defeating the British was to have all 13 colonies united, even if that meant ignoring slavery. Even, in fact, if it meant giving slaveowners disproportionate power in national government.

Slavery is gone, of course, but the system which violated one man-one vote by giving disproportionate power to certain states remains our method of selecting our president, even though the genesis of this system was a bribe to slaveholders.

Such compromises are understandable, and only historians infected with a "presentist" attitude could cavalierly denounce that compromise. It was necessary at the time toward what was in fact a greater end.

But after the treason of the Confederacy, and after the United States was spoken of as "is" rather than "are", why do we maintain this antiquated anti-democratic charade? It failed us miserably just 8 years ago, and I leave the reader to entertain the consequences of that.

This is not a post about the evils of the Electoral College; It's a post about the fact that if Barack Obama wins this election, he will do so by rules written to give undue influence to slaveowners. Reminds me of when I went to Berlin and visited the spot of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide. On the sight stood a Chinese restaurant and a gay bar.

If Obama wins the Electoral College, perhaps with some help from Virginia, the former seat of the Confederacy, it will imply a great many things, but given the fact that this African man may win by the rules explained above, we all have ammunition to use against anyone who dares deny the legitimacy of his election or the fact that he won a game governed by rules that were written under the assumption that his ancestors were not human beings.

On "Real Americans"

All of the talk about "real Americans" coming from Sarah Palin and those of her sociopathic ilk has stirred a contempt in me that swells daily. The sleight-of-hand by which these people turn themselves into victims fleeced of their earnings and their dignity by haughty elitists never fails to impress me for its unbounded shamelessness. What is even more amazing, however, is that, at long last, it does not seem to be working.

One of the most useful exercises when one hears something that intuitively seems absurd or dishonest is to extrapolate the implications of the offending statement. When Sarah Palin speaks of her joy in addressing "real Americans", the implication is clear: there are "unreal Americans" out there somewhere.

Sarah Palin makes this exercise a bit too easy, and perhaps that is why it is finally failing. Sarah Palin seems to really believe that she represents a "real Americanism" that is shared by others she relates with but by none with whom she cannot. For Sarah Palin, "real Americans" are from small towns, vote Republican, are practicing Christians, etc.

The disquieting thing about this is that if Sarah Palin is a "real American", then apparently America is overrun by "unreal Americans". Why? Because most Americans don't shoot moose from helicopters (elitist), most Americans do not receive yearly checks from an oil company (socialist), and most Americans do not receive yearly torrents of cash from the federal government (welfare queen).

Sarah Palin has an image of a condescending, un-American urban elite that in reality accounts for about 80% of the entire country. And here is where the sleight-of-hand comes into play. If two-thirds of the American people (I assume both "real Americans" and "unreal Americans" were polled) say that they do not consider Mrs. Palin to be qualified for the presidency, how do Mrs. Palin and her legions reply? They condemn the opinion as being a vicious assault on small-town America, on American values, on Christianity, on civilization itself.

If I say to Sarah Palin, "you are not qualified to be president", she will respond as if I had said, "people who live in small towns are incestuous, Bible-thumping retards who spend their weekends burning books and shooting tin cans with shotguns."

If I say, "the war in Iraq was illegal, immoral, and unnecessary", she would respond by saying, "I really wish your respected the troops who gave you your freedoms instead of denigrating their sacrifice." (Just for the record, God and the Constitution gave me my freedoms, and Americans soldiers invading Mesopotamia does nothing to secure my right to a speedy trial, as far as I can see.)

These "real Americans" are so well-practiced at aggrieved indignation and constantly casting themselves as the victims that they are oblivious to the reality that THEY are the ones who hurl insults and slurs at their own countrymen as well as their (probably) future president.

The elitists tax you too much? No, blue states pay their own bills AND a sizable proportion of red states' bills as well. For every dollar a red state spends, maybe 70 cents of it is theirs. The rest of it is from the elitists, the "unreals".

I know I belabor this point, but it can't be said enough: self-sufficiency is the ultimate self-imposed delusion of the "real Americans", who are kept afloat by their "unreal" countrymen who actually do work for a living, despite what the "real Americans" may think.

In fact, blue-staters work so much that they have far less time to murder each other and get divorced nearly as often as folks indulge in those pastimes in "real" America.

Barack Obama, the godfather of the "unreal" Americans, is a "'socialist" because he believes in a progressive income tax whose function is to "spread the wealth around"? You know, like how pagan pothead fornicating slum dwellers like myself "spread" some of my wealth to the "real" America so they can have electricity?

Since every president in the last century has approved of and imposed a graduated income tax, then by the logic of the "real" Americans, Ronald Reagan was a "socialist" too. In fact, since Reagan's top tax rate was HIGHER than the top rate proposed by Obama, Reagan was even more a "socialist" than Mr. Obama, according to the unexplored "logic" of "real Americans".

In addition, Barack Obama is a "terrorist" or "appeaser" or some selfsame slur because he wants to talk to enemies of America. Okay. Ahmedinejad? Wackjob. But not very bad in the pantheon of bad guys who naive American terrorist appeasers such as Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, or socialist legend Ronald Reagan have sat down with.

The two biggest mass murderers in history were Mao and Stalin (Hitler wasn't even close). Both of these men met, shook hands with, smoked cigarettes with, posed for photos with, indeed, PALLED AROUND WITH American presidents. Would the "real" Americans tell us that every post-World War II American president was a naive terrorist sympathizer?

Perhaps the best intellectual exercise would be to imagine Barack Obama speaking in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles and saying, "its nice to be among some REAL Americans....some folks with real pro-American feelings!" Hard to imagine? Impossible to imagine? Exactly.

And this is why the "real" Americans must not fear; we ain't mad at cha. We don't look at people who spend 20,000 dollars per week on clothes for her VP campaign as an "unreal" American. We may doubt her integrity, her judgement, her fitness to serve, but never her Americanism.

The beauty of America, according to this "unreal" American, is that it resembles any single human being; a fundamentally good thing, but also a fundamental contradiction, a volatile mix of angels and devils, but something we must love regardless. Sarah Palin is as American as apple pie. And so am I.

What's Left?

It is a stock-in-trade assumption among both eggheads and Joe the Plumber types that fascism is a right-wing phenomenon.

Among other similarly absurd yet just as widely and blindly held beliefs are "the United States played the lead in defeating Nazi Germany" or "American slavery was no different from the slavery practiced since time immemorial" or "Mahmoud Ahmedinejad runs Iran" or "George W. Bush won the 2000 election" or "the Democratic Party is the historic defender of African-Americans", and so forth.



The assumption about fascism being right-wing, however, and about how it should therefore be understood as the opposite of communism, is so profoundly wrong that it distorts the present even more than it distorts history. Communism is left-wing tyranny. That much is true. But so is fascism. Indeed, ALL tyranny is left-wing. Only anarchy is right-wing.



The battle between fascism and communism was not a battle of opposites. It was, instead, a civil war within leftism, and it serves to remind us that the narcissism of the small difference often leads to more brutal conflict than would otherwise be the case. Keep in mind, Stalin killed a lot of people, and he accused most of them of being heretical leftists rather than unrepentant rightists.



In other words, communism vs. fascism was not like crips vs. the salvation army, or vice versa; it was more like crips vs. bloods, with each side massacring each other over differences which prove remarkably opaque to the disinterested observer.

Any political system which operates under the premise that the state is the proper arbitrator of most or all aspects of a citizen's life is, by definition, left-wing. A system is only right-wing if it revolves around the premise that government governs best when it governs least. Each of these ideologies can be put to either good or ill ends, but that is irrelevant to the ideology itself.

Communism and fascism both empower the state over the individual. Whether this power is harnessed to eradicate illiteracy or to eradicate Jews is of course very relevant, but it is utterly inconsequential as pertains to whether said system is left-wing or not. ANY system that empowers the state over the individual is left-wing, and we, as individuals, are left to hope that the all-powerful state is benevolent.

A right-wing state empowers the citizen over the state. In such societies, government is for the people to control and manipulate, whereas in left-wing societies, the people are for the government to control and manipulate. A right-wing society, at its best, protects god-given liberty. At its worst, it stands impassive in the face of tragedy or abuse. Just as with left-wing regimes, there are both benefits and risks.

Fascism is left-wing. Need more proof? Look at the very name of Hitler's party: Nazi is an acronym for the German equivalent of "national socialism". Socialism! It's right there in the title! And so is "National", and therein lies the distinction between the communists and the fascists. The communists were internationalists. The fascists were nationalists. But they were ALL socialists.

The cry of the Communists was "workers of the world unite!" The cry of the Nazis was "Germans of the world unite!" Germans are, how shall we say?...pretty into nationalism. A German worker was much more likely to "unite" with a German aristocrat or a German peasant than with a foreigner of similar station.

So the communists and the fascists had identical views of the proper role of the state; they simply differed on what DEFINED the state. For communists, the state was defined by class. For fascists, the state was defined by race. But the state was always the God. And that is left-wing.

It is impolitic to point out that the Nazis "made the trains run on time" but they did not run (they WERE elected, let us not forget) on a platform of world war and genocide. They actually had close to a decade of peace in which they harnessed the German state to vastly improve life for most Germans.

In the perfectly crafted words of Jonah Goldberg: "So, we are supposed to see a party (the Nazis) in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the nationalization of industry, the expansion of health care, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing?" He made it a hot line, I made it a hot blog.

The point remains: the lessons learned from both fascism and communism are identical, and therefore singular: the consequences of exalting the state above all else, always with the best intentions of course, are always invigorating, often a net positive, but potentially catastrophic.

Yet we NEED the state to maintain the standards to which we are accustomed. Politics, therefore, is a delicate and endless dance between the relative exaltation accorded to man's twin idols: the state and himself.

The Tone

The photograph above depicts one America's first computerized mass mailing. It is an indictment for treason leveled against the President of the United States. This indictment was mailed to tens of thousands of Texans in November 1963.

The interesting thing about the Kennedy assassination is that the President was killed by a lone communist, but almost everybody, up to including the slain president's friends and family, were invested in the idea of a right-wing conspiracy.  

That psychodrama is beyond the purview of this piece, but the atmosphere that was ginned up before John Kennedy was murdered is very pertinent, regardless of who pulled the trigger.  

The wave of revulsion following the slaying washed over the right-wing because the logical conclusion of their attacks on the president were now painfully laid bare.  For although the men who made the flyer above did not murder the president, they publicly accused him of treason, and the penalty for treason is....precisely.

A similarly dangerous quickening of rhetoric occurred in the 1990's among right-wing militia, who harbored what were in my mind several legitimate critiques of abusive federal power in the wake of Waco and Ruby Ridge.  Their rhetoric, however, came to overtake their legitimate grievances, and it only took one deranged acolyte, in the person of Timothy McVeigh, to permanently discredit that movement.

Oklahoma City did what the Kennedy killing(s) did; it illustrated in graphic and visceral violence the logical conclusion of certain rhetoric.  If the president was guilty of treason, he must be executed.  And if federal buildings are legitimate targets for attack, then the children attending daycare in those buildings are combatants.

Now I bare horrified witness to an agonizingly familiar but uniquely despicable radicalization of rhetoric.  For Sarah Palin to accuse Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" is such a grievous sin against decency that it took several days for me to fully absorb the weight of her words.

First, there was the crowd.  The crowd that seemed primed for blood.  The crowd that lustily booed the very mention of the New York Times.  Were they booing reading?  Were they booing New York?  This rabid anti-intellectualism must be understood as part and parcel of this insidious rhetoric, which peaked when Mrs. Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists."

"Terrorists"  Plural.  With no qualifying adjective.  For Sarah Palin to speak this sentence in post-9/11 America is beyond comprehension for me.  Does this woman genuinely not understand what she has said?  That Barack Obama "palls around with terrorists" does not just mean that Obama is naive or liberal or elitist; it means that he is literally one of the enemy.

Post 9/11, it became this country's policy that no distinction would be made between "terrorists" and those was harbored them, aided them or, one would presume, palls around with them.  Mrs. Palin placed Mr. Obama clearly with the "terrorists".  And if that were true, well the only remedy to be sought be a concerned patriot would be....
McCain and Palin are putting an energy into motion that they cannot hope to contain.

Even when McCain feels compelled to make pro forma defenses of Mr. Obama, he is booed by the audience.  Yes, when Mr. McCain pointed out that Mr. Obama is not "an Arab", he was booed.  

When someone was heard to yell, "Kill him!", or "Bomb Obama!", Mr. McCain lost his only chance to attempt to gain control over this train.  Any decent American patriot, including an earlier incarnation of John McCain, would have responded thusly: "How dare you, sir?  How dare you direct such an ugly attack at a fellow American?  I don't want your vote, and I don't want you at my rally."  That didn't happen.  And history will remember that.

This actually brings to mind a moment about 2 years ago when someone yelled from the audience at a Bill Clinton speech that the Bush administration had orchestrated 9/11.  "How dare you...how DARE you?" said Mr. Clinton, eyes narrowing and face pinkening.  That was the proper reaction.

But now, I realize, this thing has been let loose.  There are thousands of citizens who go to McCain rallies not to cheer for Mr. McCain but to congregate in an orgy of self-reinforcing hatred for Mr. Obama.  Only in such a crowd is one liberated to yell, "Kill him!"  And from these crowds, killers are born.

Really? REALLY?

I'm not sure if I've blogged on this issue before, or if it was relegated to the cupboard while I went sans Internet for the last month, but this is something which arose again at the recent presidential debate and which I found ethically and intellectually despicable, both in its utterance and in the solemn silence that met it, indicating that the premise was accepted by the witnesses.


Mr. McCain is fond of informing us that "he knows how to do" certain things. There are two specific things he repeatedly claims to "know how to do" which raise disquieting questions, at least among those devoted to intellectual honesty and to the future of our nation, not to put to broad a point on it.


The first, much more ambiguous, and slightly less tenuous assertion is that John McCain "knows how to win a war." This declarative assertion raises the logical question: what war has John McCain won? "Know" is a strong word. A 4-letter word.


When Mr. Rumsfeld said 6 years ago, and I do quote "We know where the WMDs are", the entire inertia of the drive to war should have screeched to a halt. "If you KNOW where the WMD's are, why don't you just tell the inspectors so they can destroy them?" a halfway competent journalist may have asked him.

Mr. Rumsfeld was lying of course; nobody KNEW anything about WMD. They THOUGHT plenty of things, but KNEW nothing. As soon as they used the word "know", however, they strayed from paranoid conjecture to criminality.


When John McCain says "I know how to win a war", we should rightly inquire of him, "what evidence do you have for that declarative statement? What war have you won?"


Well, John McCain fought in the Vietnam War. The United States lost that war, perhaps because it did not ask John McCain how to win it. At any rate, Vietnam is not evidence that Mr. McCain "knows how to win a war." Was he referring to the first Gulf War of 1991? Perhaps, but he has never said so explicitly, nor claimed to have played any decision-making role in that conflict other than voting to endorse it.


Was he referring to the Iraq War? Deep down, we assume he must be, despite the fact that we have not won that war. So what is he talking about?

Well, it strikes me that Mr. McCain is similar to Mr. Bush in this regard; they both view themselves as so pure of motive and so unshakable of character that reckless statements and precipitous actions are justified post facto by the manifestly pure motives of the man, which is manifest to none so much as the man himself.


So, if Mr. Bush oversees torture, it's not really torture because Mr. Bush says it isn't and Mr. Bush is a Christian. If Mr. McCain recklessly nominates a woman for vice-president who is clearly leagues out of her depth, that decision could not possibly have been venal or misguided because John McCain is an honorable man.


In other words, John McCain gets away with saying "I know how to win a war", offering absolutely NO evidence, because he's John McCain. And John McCain is an honorable man. And a maverick. So he must be right.

The more troubling of the "I know how to" assertions, however, is Mr. McCain's oft-repeated statement that he "knows how to get bin Laden." Really? REALLY?

Eviscerating this assertion is small bore for even the most average of intellects. Country First, Mr. McCain. If you "know how to get bin Laden", why don't you go ahead and tell the commanders on the ground exactly how to do so?

Does Mr. McCain expect us to believe that he "knows how to get bin Laden", but for some reason has failed to share this insight with the American military? Does he infer that he is waiting to "get bin Laden" until he takes office?

In short, if ANYONE at such a high level as Mr. McCain "knows how to get" bin Laden, then I would respectfully query the right honorable gentleman, "then where the fuck IS he?"

Mr. McCain doesn't "know how to get bin Laden". If he did, we would "get bin Laden." But we haven't gotten him because apparently nobody in a position of authority for the last 7 years has "known how".

The problem is that Mr. McCain makes such patently disprovable assertions, and erects such combustible rhetorical strawmen, and he is not challenged on the audacity of his statements. The unspoken logic is "John McCain was a POW, so of course he knows how to get bin Laden."

Perhaps I'm wrong; that happens often enough. Maybe Mr. McCain does "know how to get bin Laden". But if it turns out that he doesn't "know how to" win an election, perhaps the Senator could share his secrets with the rest of us. Country First.

Welfare Queen

I'm not mad that Sarah Palin is a bulldog with lipstick.  I'm not mad that she is a Joe 6-pack American, because she isn't; I could kill her in either iteration of a 6-pack contest, be it beer or be it sit-ups.  I'm not mad that Sarah Palin is a conservative, for the simple reason that Sarah Palin is NOT a conservative.

If Alaska were a caricature bandied about by the right wing, it would not be one of flinty self-reliance and individualism, a mosaic of men who wrap splints around their broken bones and women who scoff at the notion of welfare cheese.

If Alaska were appraised for what it really is, it would be seen as a Socialist paradise populated by welfare queens.  Let's think about what Alaska really is.

It's not a contiguous or defensible part of this country.  It's a step-child.  It's the ultimate example example of American arrogance and disquisition.  Hey, lets put an enormous and perpetually vulnerable and militarily indefensible American "state" right next to Russia!

I don't think Alaska and Hawaii should be states.  I'm old-school.  I grew up with 3-channel black and white TV, rotary phones, cloth diapers, and baths in the sink.  Countries must be contiguous, in geography as well as culture and political priority.

What is my relationship with Alaska?  Alaska is a place I send money to.  I don't have the money to move out of what most people would call a ghetto, but I have sent money to Alaska.  

There are states in this dyspeptic federal system who pay in.  And there are those who pay out.  Now, considering what Republicans say about fiscal responsibility and local prerogative, who do you suppose it is that is fleeced by the Feds?  

Well, it just so happens that the states that pay more to the federal government than they get back are the states that vote for Democrats.  So, the states that bitch about how much the federal government taxes them are actually the states that are receiving money they never earned from the very government they condemn.

Sarah Palin plays the role of a self-reliant capitalist ass-kicker.  But where does most of Alaska's money come from?  The money that allowed her to "cut taxes"?

Alaska's money came from two places: the oil companies and the federal government.  First, for the oil companies.  

This "conservative" ran a regime under which every resident of Alaska got a check from the oil companies.  Wow.  Socialism, anyone?  Is this not what some say Chavez  should be killed for?  Dispersing private profits to the people?  To paraphrase from Richard Nixon in 1948, Palin's pink right down to her underwear!

Secondly, the federal government.  I am not a huge fan of the federal government, and one of the sources of my dyspepsia is states like Alaska.  Alaska gets more money from the federal government than any other state.  

So what does that mean?  That means that Alaska is our welfare queen.  It's that state that we send money to and that never gives back.

Okay maybe we need to prop up some of our neighbors.  But here's what I will not abide:  I will not abide a welfare queen bitching to me about wasting money.  

Sarah Palin complains about the federal government.  If it wasn't for the federal government, Sarah Palin's "state" would've been swallowed by Canada or Russia.  If it wasn't for the federal government, Sarah Palin's "state" would have no running water, roads, hospitals, or any of the other things that she cites as her heritage.

The issue here is hypocrisy, and how casually it is tolerated.   This woman comes down from Siberia and tells us that we're interfering in her state.  I'd be glad to cease said interference.  I'd be glad to stop spending my money to Alaska.  

However you spin it, I've be coerced into sending money to Alaska and Sarah Palin has the ovaries to go onto national TV and act like she'd have been better off without it.  Well, I'd have been better off without giving it to her. 

Sarah Palin runs a welfare state masquerading as Lord of the Flies.  This is the masquerade that must be unmasked.  This woman collects money from us and scolds us for interfering.  Sorry for intruding onto your liberty by building roads.

They Live

Congress yesterday defied the President, both of the men who may replace him, the Secretary of the Treasury, their own party leaderships, and essentially every concentration of unelected monied interest in every civil society of the entire world.

Was this a cynical and venal refusal to save their nation from economic calamity in the name of ideological purity? Or was this, finally, real democracy in action? Perhaps both, but only the latter matters.

There is a tension that exists among all holders of governmental power; they must ask themselves, "Am I here to do what my constituents tell me, or am I here to do what I think is best?" Henry Paulson and George W. Bush clearly believe in the latter, a belief made easier due to the fact that these men are either unelected or are elected on a basis other than one man, one vote.

The House of Representatives yesterday did what their constituents wanted them to do. For better or for worse, they followed the explicit orders of those who they represent. The elites instantly condemned this course of action as an abdication of responsibility, but what does that reaction say about the elite's view of democracy?

Let's consider how "democratic" this country, which deigns to impose democracy via violence on others, really is: What members of the federal government are elected on the basis of one man, one vote? There is precisely one office in this country that is democratically assigned, and that is the House of Representatives.

All other members of the federal government, from Senators to Presidents to cabinet secretaries to CIA directors to IRS paramilitary agents, are either unelected or are elected by votes which carry vastly different weights (e.g. the Electoral College, or the "equal" voting power granted to a Wyoming Senator representing 300,000 citizens and a California Senator representing 30,000,000).

This is simply to make the point that the United States is NOT a democracy; it is (or was) a representative republic, in which few decision makers are democratically elected and the most powerful men are subjected to no vote at all. The House of Representatives, then, is the only democratic institution in the federal government. We should keep this in mind while we interpret the elite's disgust at this body.

I don't subscribe to the idea that Representatives should necessarily take marching orders from their constituents. There are occasions when they are (hopefully) better informed about a pressing issue than those they represent, and it is incumbent upon them to make the tough decision and then defend that decision to their constituents every two years.

With this specific situation, however, I find myself trusting the decision of the House by default. The simple reason is that I have no rational reason to trust any member of the Bush administration. I have no choice, therefore, but to trust in democracy, even if that democratic decision is misguided. (It happens; remember, segregation was democratically protected.)

But consider what we would have to believe in order to take the position of the elites in this country. We would have to believe that the President and his advisers are a) competent and b) trustworthy. This element of trust is of nearly divine importance in any functional society, and I have lived without it for most of my life.

We MUST be able to trust the President and his men because the Presidency has evolved (or degenerated?) into the most powerful office in the world and is responsible for decisions that most Americans simply could not make an educated choice on.

For example, the invasion of Iraq. Remember that one? Remember how no average American citizens were clamoring for war in 2002, because Iraq hadn't done anything to us? It was the Bush administration that introduced the idea of starting a war against Iraq and sold it on the premise that they alone were privy to information that made it clear that a failure to act, and the peoples' failure to give them a blank check, would bring catastrophe to America's shores.

I am always disconcerted when someone dismisses the utter abuse of trust that got us into Iraq as nitpicking and irrelevant Monday morning quarterbacking. That attitude shows either a profound ignorance or a profound disregard for the sinews that hold a "democracy" together: Trust.

No rational person would trust George W. Bush. So when his appointees come to me and say, "Your failure to give me a trillion dollars of your money would bring catastrophe to America's shores", I say, well, I say, "How fucking stupid do I look to you?"

The tragedy, of course, is that they might be right; how would I know? I don't understand for a moment the intricacies and balances and speculations and contradictions of the global money markets. I don't. Since I don't, I'd like to be able to defer to administration "experts". But since I have no rational reason to trust these men, my only remaining option is to defer to the only national democratic institution, the House of Representatives.

The men who were in charge of regulating and monitoring these markets for the American people told us that the fundamentals of their purview were secure. Trust us, they said. We got this. A week later, the same men told us that the fundamentals of their purview were so endangered that only the biggest expropriation of wealth in the history of the universe could save them, and that said expropriation must be done NOW. Trust us, they say. We got this.

Well, I don't trust them, and perhaps people should consider the cost of a people who doesn't trust its government then next time a member of that government says "we KNOW where the weapons of mass destruction are." If my refusal to trust those men ruins my nation's economy, that's on them. Believe me, I'd love a reason to trust these guys.

The House's rejection of the bailout plan may well have been a catastrophic mistake. I acknowledge that possibility. But you know what? Everyone dies of something, so it may as well be democracy that kills us.

A Trilli

Don't you dare compare me
Cuz there ain't nobody near me
They don't see me, but they hear me
They don't feel me, but they fear me
I'm illy
-Lil' Wayne (or Henry Paulson)

This week's "proposal" (which was a "proposal" in the sense that Hitler "proposed" to his army that it invade Poland) for you and I to bail out private banks to the tune of one trillion dollars is difficult to blow out of proportion, even for obsequious blowhards such as myself.

Here's one way to frame it: this is the biggest theft in the history of the world, perpetrated upon a prone and prostrate public under color of legality, a "color" so pallid that it would embarrass a serf on a feudal manner. How it can be foisted upon a supposedly free and fiercely independent people for whom property rights are religious in nature is beyond my capacity to comprehend.

Here's another way to frame it: this is the biggest power-grab in the history of the world, perpetrated not by Kubla Khan or Saddam Hussein, but by the unelected, unimpressive, and unbelievably unconstitutionally-minded Henry Paulson.

Last night, in a piece of hard-hitting journalism, I learned on NBC nightly news that Mr. Paulson is a down-to-earth outdoorsman. Thank God! If only Saddam Hussein had been an avid fly-fisherman, perhaps we could have come to some peaceable arrangement with his crimes.

Here, in the plainest English is what has happened:

First, several private businesses operating in the "free market" failed.

Second, members of the federal government decided (on what authority, pray tell?) that these businesses could NOT be allowed to fail. Tens of thousands of American families could fail due to health care costs and mortgage woes, of course, but these businesses simply could NOT.

Third, an unelected member of that government, Mr. Paulson, proposed taking one trillion dollars of your money and my money and everyone else's money to GIVE to the failed private companies.

Fourth, the Congress, the only body legally allowed to spend our money, gets in line to dress this crime with ex-post-facto legitimacy, much as the UN did after the US invaded Iraq.

Much like Madame Clinton's health care proposal, what we are seeing now is a synthesizing of the worst of both worlds, of the risks of capitalism and the tyranny of socialism. We see profit being privatized and failure being socialized.

When private companies operate on the free market, whether it's a cocaine dealer or a Dunkin' Donuts or Bank of America, it's largely on its own. The upside of this arrangement is that entrepreneurial risk-takers can conceivably generate huge profits, which they then keep for themselves since they took all the risk. The downside is that such risk can, and usually does, end in failure, in which the risk-takers and investors lose their money.

When socialized entities operate, whether its a fire department or an army or a library, it's protected by the collective faith and credit of the society. The upside of this arrangement is that these institutions cannot "fail" in the sense that a private bank can. The downside is that they are seldom efficient, their investors are coerced, and even less seldom are they "profitable" in the purely capitalist sense.

What we have here is the worst of both worlds. We have private institutions which have failed, but not before they have reaped huge profits which have gone directly into the pockets of individuals. Now, after those institutions have failed, we are informed by our government that our society cannot "afford" such failure, with the implication being that they should have been socialized in the first place.

All indispensable institutions should be socialized, e.g. police and firefighters. If the failed banks were indispensable institutions, why were they left to the vagaries of the free market, and why were their executives allowed to pocket millions in profit?

The ex-post-facto labeling of the failed institutions as indispensable is the problem, for it creates a situation in which you and I must bail it out, but only after all the profits have been spirited away. So it was private until it failed. And now it's ours. Profits were privatized. And now, failure is socialized.

I understand that these things happen. I understand that they have happened before. But what we must ALL understand is that, when they did happen before, FDR took a vastly different approach.

When private businesses folded 80 years ago, FDR did indeed expropriate vast sums of wealth from the American people, but the whats and hows of his actions illuminate how far we have fallen as a society.

FDR did two things. Firstly, he had Congress expropriate the money, which seems rather...quaint? cute? Constitutional? Whatever it was, I'll take Congress over Henry Paulson any day. Secondly, he used the people's money on....THE PEOPLE.

FDR took money from the people, citing an emergency, and used that money to put the people to work. They built roads. They built sidewalks. They preserved national parks. They painted murals. They wrote books. They performed plays. They regained their dignity.

Bush (in the guise of good ol' Hank) took money from the people, citing an emergency and....gave it right back to the private businesses which had just failed. Nobody will get a job from this trillion dollars. Nobody will get their house back from this trillion dollars.

No, what we get is the peace of mind that we will wake up in a world tomorrow made safe for insurance companies, if not for homeowners or breadwinners. And what use is winning bread if the government can steal it from you with the excuse that you and your children come second to the health of a private bank?

It used to be that the government would rob you to feed you and give you a job. Now, the government robs you to feed the bank that just kicked you out of your house.

Kobayashi World

The greatest trick the Republican Party ever pulled was convincing America it didn't exist.

It has been a surly and substantive experience watching the GOP convention this week. The irreducible blend of cynicism and political genius only reminds us of how brilliant the GOP is at winning the presidency, a skill the scale of which is only matched by the self-same party's propensity for sub-par governance.

If John McCain wins this election, it will be the most brilliant political maneuver in the history of American politics. While we should keep in mind that the Democrats' nomination of a sexy, skinny, 3-point swishing African with the middle name of Hussein gives the Republicans an artificial boost, there has rarely been such broad agreement among the American people on any issue other than this: George W. Bush has been a catastrophe.

If 80% of Americans agree that the country is headed in the wrong direction, we must ask ourselves two questions: when was the last time that many Americans agreed on anything, other than the weeks following Pearl Harbor or 9/11? And secondly, how is it that the governing party in such a discontented nation could harbor any hope of re-election?

Watching Sarah Palin and John McCain address the GOP delegates made me think of what it must have been like for the Soviet leadership to listen to Khrushchev after Stalin's death. Khrushchev waited until Stalin was dead to tell his peers what they already knew; Joe Steel was a sociopath and Communism would not survive unless Stalinism died with Stalin.

It turned out that Communism would survive Stalinism, but Communism could not survive Communism. Still, because Khrushchev owned up to and acknowledged the sins of his peers, he stalled history by 30 years. In a very cynical sense, this was political genius.

And in the same sense, the nomination of John McCain and his selection of Sarah Palin is the most brilliant maneuver of American politics in recent history.

The GOP should have no chance of holding onto the presidency. The only way they could do so would be to nominate a candidate whom they openly despised. And they did so. Conservatives HATE John McCain. He is an apostate in their eyes. And that is exactly why he might win.

McCain is running as a Republican on the platform of "throw the bums out!", conveniently omitting the inconvenient fact that he is one of the bums. The GOP is an incumbent party whose candidate is running on a platform of radical realignment.

This is a brilliant strategy by McCain, but it would have been in McVain had he not nominated Sarah Palin for VP. By nominating Palin, McCain has ensured heavy conservative turnout, and Palin's story is one that will appeal to the right wing far more than that even of George W. Bush.

The GOP has no business even continuing to exist as a political entity after the last 8 years. The fact that it may actually cling to the presidency, which is has held for 28 out of the last 40 years, is beyond comprehension.

John McCain hijacked his own party, and I commend him for doing so, but as most wise men recognize, a man can be adequately judged by the company he keeps.  As Republicans go, Mr. McCain is less guilty than most, but he is still guilty of the most salient crime in America today: he is a Republican.