The Banality of Banality

There are few things as embarrassing as being a Jew, I tell you. It entails living one's spiritual life in a defensive crouch, which rather cramps the spirit. This is just absurd. It's true that modern Judaism--excepting some strains of hyperorthodoxy and Hasidism--is fixated on the Holocaust far more than the Torah. It's true that the community of American Jews in particular uses that past catastrophe as a get-out-of-jail-free card for any criticism of Israel or Israeli apartheid. Tony Judt wrote about it just this month. Modern Judaism is at its core the most un-vital of religions: backward-looking, dessicated, and degrading. No wonder all us young'uns turned out to be atheist fags.

Child Prostitution

Wow. Sober political analysis from Ann Coulter. Within the limited scoped of mainstream electoral politics, I've got to say that she's pretty much spot-on in her limning of the Clinton-vs-McCain dynamic.

On the other hand, for a woman who's supposedly friends with tons of fags in her private life, she sure looks like she could use their tips on eye makeup. She looks like the 13-year-old Drew Barrymore.

Ca continue

It turns out that Iraq is home to a number of ethnoreligious groups with their own distinct nationalisms, and it turns out that they are all maneuvering for an end state that reflects historic desires for independence or territorial supremacy or control of resources . . . etc. It's an error to concieve violence as "insurgency" alone. As was often the case in colonial wars, the colonist now finds itself as only one of many interested parties. Our schizophrenia regarding alliances is a dangerous game.

Fitz of Regret

In the headier days of 2004, internet Dems crowed gleefully when Patrick Fitzgerald tossed Times reporter Judy Miller in the klink for refusing to reveal sources that may or may not have given her information that she never in fact put into print. Miller had been a reliable propagandist for the pro-war line during the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq--she was notably a mark of that con man extraordinaire, Ahmed Chalabi. Digby, the popular Democratic partisan who runs the blog Hullaballoo, and the folks at FireDogLake were especially vocal on the justness of all this. Because they and their buddies judged that Miller was no journalist, and because they found Miller ideologically offensive, and, most of all, because they thought this time they were really going to get Bush in his own little Watergate, they loudly made the case that when it came to "national security," when it came to the "outing" of a CIA agent, the traditional, unwritten immunities that we confer on writers and journalists so that they can pursue and reveal the government's secrets with some modest protection from reprisal did not apply. They made a qualitative judgment about Miller's reporting--one with which I largely agreed, to be fair--and then decided that since she wasn't a "real" journalist, she was an Administration stooge. Patrick Fitzgerald was on the side of the angels, and anyone who suggested that it was bad precedent to toss a reporter in jail for protecting her sources, no matter how venal the reporter or degraded the sources, was inherently on the side of Bush, the warmongers, the Neocons, and the rest of the infinite gang of bogeymen who haunt Progressive dreams.

It was shameless and deeply unethical. Most people in most professions are pretty lousy at what they do, reporters included. But principles ought not be mere exigencies, and the speed with which Democratic partisans abandoned defense of a free and unfettered press in order to pursue a political hit job shocked even me--the frequent guests of this site know how gleefully unshockable I usually am when it comes to Democratic-Progressive perfidy. The next time you read a prog-blogger lamenting the way "the administration" has abandoned some principle--about privacy, about torture--in order to pursue some slapdash end, search their archives for a glowing defense of imprisoning people without trial in order to force them to reveal their private sources of information within the government.

Most papers are mostly infotainment, media arms of vast conglomerates that exist to sell print advertising and provide brand prestige. Most reporters are PR reps for the corporate economy and the imperial state. That doesn't obviate the necessity of protecting journalists from government retribution when every once in a while one of them produces the Pentagon Papers. I am by no means sanguine about the efficacy of the so-called Fourth Estate at guarding our liberties. If anything, I am a pessimist. But our default position should always be on the side of an increase in the rights and protections for autonomous individuals--and for whistleblowers, reporters, revealers, reactionaries. To throw over our principles and embrace limits on speech because you think that Judith Miller is a conservative and a slut is tawdry and despicable.

Now we see the thrown-over principle in action, as the government moves against a writer who reveals the incompetency, viciousness, and fraud at the heart of our so-called Intelligence Community. If James Risen can't avoid his Grand Jury subpoena and must appear before it, and if he refuses to reveal his sources within the government and CIA, will Progressives support jailing him? Or will they recant and claim he has a right to protect them because, after all, they agree with his reporting?

Have You Forgotten?

N'oubliez jamias

Bad Intelligence

Is there a reason that none of you bastards told me Mitt Romney's real first name is Willard? Huh?

And ne'er the twain shall meet

I rarely stray over to the Huffenstuff Post, but this cri de coeur is embarrassing enough for a chuckle or two. My favorite graf:

Even if we were to strike the war from the syllabus, we'd still be left with a choice between a once-in-a-generation, transformational candidate who's running parallel to our collective desire to remake the party, and, on the other side, a candidate who represents a species of Democrat that we've traditionally rejected. If the blogs choose to step out of the way on this one, they're forfeiting an historic role in the most historic presidential election of our time while the antiquated, embarrassing politics of DLC triangulation sneaks on by without a fight.

I note in passing that parellel lines meet only in infinity, and thus does geometric innumeracy doom another progressive to utter an unintentional truth.

The Thing About Herpes . . .

is that you've probably got it and just don't know it, especially you asymptomatic fellas out there. As a Wise Commenter explains to his host:

I’ve said it before and will say it again, Nader can’t force anyone to vote for him.

If Clinton and/or Obama can’t persuade voters that they are worth supporting, then it’s they who have a problem. It isn’t Nader’s fault for trying to offer an alternative, and even if he doesn’t run there’s always another alternative, namely not voting at all.

That's good, tasty stuff. Let us recall that Nader supposedly "threw" the election to Gee-Dub last time around, and the time before that. Thing is, last time around, out of a vote-eligible population of just under 203 million, sixty percent turned out, and that was the highest percentage in decades. Out of that sixty percent, which was 123-4 million folks, 3% went for Unsafe at Any Speed, and that, friends, works out to a short-stick over 3 million souls. Meanwhile, the 40% who stayed the fuck away from the fever swamp numbered some 80 million selfish souls.

As for these spoilers, let us turn our jaded eyes to Saint Joan:

Perhaps the most persistent of the fables from which the political process proceeds has to do with the "choice" it affords the nation's citizens, who are seen to remain unappreciative. On the Saturday morning before the November 2000 presidential election, The Washington Post ran on its front page a piece by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane headlined "As Turnout Falls, Apathy Emerges as Driving Force."

[...] Accompanying the main story were graphs, purporting to show why Americans did not vote, and the Post's analysis of its own graphs was this: "Apathy is the single biggest reason why an estimated 100 million Americans will not vote on Tuesday."

The graphs themselves, however, told a somewhat more complicated story: only thirty-five percent of nonvoters, or about seventeen percent of all adult Americans, fell into the "apathetic" cateogy, which . . . included those who "have no sense of civic duty," "aren't interested in politics," and "have no committment in keeping up with public affairs." Another fourteen percent of nonvoters were classified as "disconnected," a group including both those "who can't get to the polls because of advanced age or disability" and those "who recently changed addresses and are not yet registered"--in other words, people functionally unable to vote. The remaining fifty-one percent of these nonvoters, meaning roughtly a quarter of all adult Americans, were classified as either "alienated" ("the angry men and women of U.S. politics . . . so disgusted with politicians and the political process that they've opted out") or "disenchated" (these nonvoters aren't so much repelled by politics as they are by the way politics is practiced"), in either case, pretty much the polar opposite of "apathetic." According to the graphs, more than seventy percent of all nonvoters were in fact registered, a figure that cast some ambiguity on the degree of "apathy" even among the thirty-five percent categorized as "apathetic."

So, in short, a quarter of the adult population of the United States has made the independent determination that none of the murderous clowns from the two major parties is worth a trip to the local middle-school multi-purpose room once every four years--a damning, if perfectly rational, decision. But it's not the vacant nothingness of Barack Obama and the calculating imperialism of Hillary Clinton and the total crazitude of the Republican field that will help determine outcomes in 2008. It's Thanksralph! Partisans. God. Love. Em.

I Dreamed Last Night that I Was on a Boat to Heaven

Oh, please please please please please let it be so.

Liquid Crystal Dismay

You know, Orwell thought that the government would force people to live in homes where they were never out of sight of a telescreen. They wasted their time.

Zero Sum

I think I'd like presidential campaign politics more if the stakes were a little higher. I mean, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson and John Edwards all raised a bajillion dollars, ran around the country screaming at us that only they could push Our Children unwittingly or unwillingly into the future, where they would bond with the essence of futureness and transform all of mankind into a giant space baby, and then, because no one actually, you know, wanted to see them in the White House, they got to say, "Oops, well, thanks for the dollars and the time. Peace, yo." I think there should be conseuqences. There was this campaign in aught-four, "Vote or Die," which curiously enough involved Puff Daddy but not any actual death. Couldn't we reinvent it for the candidates themselves? Win . . . Or Die. I mean, if Hillary Clinton got to drag Edwards out back by his hair and pistol-whip him to death as punishment for his concession, you can bet your ass he'd've run a better campaign. If John McCain were allowed to feast on the palpitating heart of Rudy Giuliani and absorb his life energy rather than getting some bland statement of support on some tacky dais, well, fuck. I might renew my registration.

Searing Vision Naivete

You would think that Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, not to mention all the Frenchies who turned out to be Stalinists, would've taught us to beware Authors bearing Politics, but nooo. Courtesy Michael J. Smith, I bring you Toni Morrison's endorsement of Barack Obama.

Paragraph One:

This letter represents a first for me--a public endorsement of a Presidential candidate. I feel driven to let you know why I am writing it. One reason is it may help gather other supporters; another is that this is one of those singular moments that nations ignore at their peril. I will not rehearse the multiple crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon, and I am convinced you are the person to capture it.

For an endorsement, the letter begins on an oddly metafictive note, as Morrison chooses not to tell Barack Obama (and, presumably, the rest of us) why it is that she supports him, but rather, why it is that she is writing a letter to let him know why it is that she supports him. I'm pretty sure that something along these lines happened in Conrad's Nostromo, which was also set in a banana republic, so it's probably fitting. The not-quite-anaphoric "reasons" for her support are odd, but I suppose it's convenient that America's "singular moments that nations ignore at their peril" always fall in an election year. For a putative writer, Morrison seems strangely unfamiliar with what the word "rehearse" means. If she did, I think she'd be careful about applying the verb to "multiple crises." How one captures "a national evolution" is a question for the philosophers. How one captures an "opportunity" for evolution or revolution or whatever is a question for the managerial-class hucksters who write books like Who Moved My Cheese.

Paragraph Two:

May I describe to you my thoughts?

Too late! It's like a dude who shoves his hand up his girl's sweater to cop a feel and then asks, "Is this okay?" as she writhes away in disgust. The first paragraph was forced entry. It's too late for consent.

Paragraph Three:

I have admired Senator Clinton for years. Her knowledge always seemed to me exhaustive; her negotiation of politics expert. However I am more compelled by the quality of mind (as far as I can measure it) of a candidate. I cared little for her gender as a source of my admiration, and the little I did care was based on the fact that no liberal woman has ever ruled in America. Only conservative or "new-centrist" ones are allowed into that realm. Nor do I care very much for your race[s]. I would not support you if that was all you had to offer or because it might make me "proud."

Quality, not quantity. Hillary is exhaustive, but Morrison is just exhausting. I may be your typical faggot misogynist, but even I wouldn't say of poor Mrs. Clinton that I "care little for her gender." The choice of "ruled" is devestatingly telling. "Nor do I care very much for your race[s]." She does have a thing for Asians, though.

Paragraph Four:

In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it. Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace--that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom.

My machete isn't dull enough. "I stunned myself"! I'm not suprised. If wisdom is unacquirable even through innateness ("inherit it"), then who gives it? I enjoy alchemy as much as the next fellow, but this is an incantation too far for me.

Paragraph Five:

When, I wondered, was the last time this country was guided by such a leader? Someone whose moral center was un-embargoed? Someone with courage instead of mere ambition? Someone who truly thinks of his country's citizens as "we," not "they"? Someone who understands what it will take to help America realize the virtues it fancies about itself, what it desperately needs to become in the world?

How do you embargo a "moral center"? This is pure birdshot. What does any of it mean?

At last:

Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.

There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time.

Good luck to you and to us.

We might begin by dialing down the hallelujahs a bit. The birth metaphor is deeply confused. Nostalgia for the womb can't affect those who never left it. Or are we all mere spectators in the obstetrics wing, watching a sweaty Obama heave our bloody future into the bright foreceps of the fierce urgency of the ripe future of the now. Oh bird, Oh Tree, Oh Flower!

If Barack Obama really were prescient, he would've seen this embarrassment coming and asked Ms. Morrison to keep her pen to herself.

Kerry On

Dennis' mordant reminder of the Donk's on-again, of-again affair with the Senator from Hanoi is a good, funny, and timely reminder that Frailty, thy name is Democrat. As an addendum to his thoughts on McCain, we might recall that in the last Presidential election, the Donk tried to run a national-security campaign by creating a War-Hero John Kerry Action Figure and setting him up against Draft-Dodger Bush, which resulted, as you might recall, in his embarrassing defeat. In order to prove their balls, Kerry was reinvented as a philosophic John Rambo--reluctant killer, one part Ford Coppola, one part Terrence Malik, and all motherfucking man, baby. Suddenly he was all Purple Hearts and Iron Crosses, or whatever, and we were ceaselessly reminded that while Bush blew coke with co-eds, John Kerry went to fight for his country.

Now most Donks and Progs and Libs claim past opposition and present disgust for the War on Vietnam, and so they must turn their already weak critique of Bush's draft-dodgery into the standard Dem line on whatever it is that they disapprove of in Republicans: Hypocrisy! All men are hypocrites, so the attack is weak to begin with. In the case of Bush and Kerry, they ran into a particularly knotty double-bind. Bush supported the war and didn't go, so he was a hypocrite. Kerry didn't support the war but did go, so he was a . . . paragon? From a moral standpoint, Bush's hypocrisy or cowardice or whathaveyou has got to count as a weak virtue. His "support" for the war was never a matter of activism or genuine conviction. He was the son of a conservative pol in a great American conservative family that uniformly supported the war, so, yeah, sure, whatever, he supported it, and pass him another cold one, and you're blocking the TV when the game is on. His failure to act seriously on his unserious conviction meant that at the end of the day he didn't contribute materially or politically to the holocaust in Indochina. Kerry, meanwhile, of the more philosophical bent, whose political ideology had some thought behind it, whose self-servingly anguished correspondence from the period reveals someone who actually thought about the rightness or wrongness of Vietnam, went anyway, and oh-by-the-way killed a lot of Vietnamese in their own country. Which is the worse hypocrisy? Which is the greater moral failing?

So then you had Kerry losing at least in part because an even crazier bunch got together and started accusing him of not killing enough Vietnamese to be considered a legitimate hero, and furthermore, after he got out of the war that he never actually believed to be right, he very publicly repudiated it. Most of what these "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" had to say was glaringly false, but their caviling raised an interesting point: that John Kerry was deeply opposed to the senseless killing of Vietnamese except when he was the one doing it. That, friends, is monstrous. But Kerry is, by the standards of the American ahem-left, something of an intellectual, and his incoherency on war and responsibility is mirrored in Democrats' reflexive troop-worship, not to mention their broader approach to imperial management. Better to oppose murder as you commit it than somehow support it as you don't.

Is that a Black Monolith in Your Jovian Orbit, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Chris Floyd notes the depravity of the consensus view that Saddam Hussein precipitated war against the United States. Isn't it interesting how the mind works? Despite the fact that the United States has repeatedly provoked and begun wars, and despite the fact that there is ample historical documentation of this fact, avaialable to anyone without the slightest effort or difficulty in searching, the idea that the United States has, would, did, or could act as the aggressor in a conflict is literally unthinkable to the majority of Americans, including our political and infotainment eligtes. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that even as George W. Bush and his inner circle were starting a war with Iraq with full practical knowledge that they were starting a war with Iraq, it didn't occur to them in any meaningful way that they were starting a war with Iraq. That doesn't abrogate their moral responsibility or negate the basic depravity of the act, but it's something to consider when writing, speaking, or acting against policies of American aggression. It's a remarkable sort of doublethink: to be able to not believe that you are doing what you are doing while you are doing it.

The President's Duty, Which I Shall Produce Out of this Empty Gentleman's Top Hat . . .

I've always considered CATO at best worthless, more likely deeply pernicious, and in any case routinely stupid. We had a joke at my alma mater: Rich kids with too many trips to rehab to get into Brown. (Brown students, surely, have the same joke about Harvard.) CATO, I figure, is a dumping ground for middling intellectuals too lazy for tenure and too idiosyncratic for the clubbier environs of AEI. On economics, it is basically corporatist in its outlook--Grover Norquist would not not be at home. On liberty in the broader sense, it might as well be the National Review. P.J. O'Rourke is their "Mencken Fellow." Nuff fuckin said, right?

Via Thoreau at UO, I see that Roger Pilon, "the Cato Institute's B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies"--yoy and double-yoy! to that--wants us to understand that unless Congress exempts telecoms from the law, "the president's statutory power to prevent terrorist attacks will be seriously compromised." Now, y'all, I'm no fancy big-city lawyer, nosiree; why, I'm just a simple country IOZ with simple notions 'bout right an' wrong . . . But in the paragraph that follows, I smell a big fat rat:

This dangerous situation should never have arisen. From the beginning, presidents have exercised their Article II executive power to gather foreign intelligence--in war and peace alike, without congressional or judicial intrusion. As our principal agent in foreign affairs, the president is constitutionally bound to protect the nation. For that, intelligence is essential.

I'm pretty certain that powers delegated to the executive by the Constitution do not constitute statutory authority. Why, I'm fairly certain that statutory authority is conferred by statutes, and I'm pretty sure that those are acts passed by legislative bodies, like, for instance, Congress, and it occurs to me, friends and neighbors, that if "the Cato Institute's B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies" wants to not-so-cunningly elide the difference between the two as part of a sophistic tangle of bad-faith arguments that Congress' and the Judiciary have an affirmative responsibility to act in the increase of executive authority but must also obey a prohibition on "interference" when it comes to any decrease in such authority . . . well, I'm pretty sure that what you've got there is know-nothingism in defense of tyranny.

Trump

Let me get this--you'll pardon the expression--straight. To note that Barack Obama is black, whether as a compliment or a pejorative, is to play "the race card." On the other hand, to speculate that Blacks as some kind of transcultural racial unit are proveably, genetically inferior in intelligence is . . . not?

Djoo Know?

Well, now that I, too, have been dragged to see Juno, I guess I ought to say something that differs from or adds to what Roy E. said, although I think he was pretty much right on.

What I found particularly galling and preposterous was that the titular character is bruited and advertised as a punk, a fan of Iggy and the Stooges, and yet I sat in a dark theater for ten thousand hours listening to some boy-and-girl band croon nonsense pop. There is no one on earth I find quite so aesthetically despicable as Wes Anderson, so you can imagine my dismay. Emo is supposed to be short for Emotion or Emotive or something, and yet for all its saccharinity, it lives as a veil of cheaply purchased irony and an absence of real feeling. Falsetto chirping is inapposite to psychic distress, and yet here is a character whose most difficult test is sountracked by the sound of uninventive chords on acoustic guitars. How I longed for John Belushi to smash one against a wall in the stairs.

Otherwise, what Roy said. Slight.

Liberal Fascism

This morning's Times begins its reflections on Bush's State of the Union address by recalling a prior effort:

Six years ago, President Bush began his State of the Union address with two powerful sentences: “As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our union has never been stronger.”

If this sounds familiar to you, it's because you heard it in 1998:

TONY THE CHAUFFER: So he says "My wife's a pain in the ass. She's always busting my friggin' agates. My daughter's married to a real loser bastard. And I got a rash so bad on my ass, I can't even sit down. But you know me. I can't complain."

THE DUDE: Fuckin' A, man. I got a rash, man.

Either instance is a fine example of what Mencken called the Americano's gift for belieiving that which is palpably not true. And the Times reflects on that capacity in itself and the rest of the country approvingly. It really does want a president who will stand in front of the Houses of Congress and say with great feeling, "Nothing is fucked here, man."

The rest of the editorial is less a reflection on what George W. Bush said last night than a projection of what he might have been able to say if he "had capitalized on the unity that followed the 9/11 attacks to draw the nation together." The editorial board notably fails to reflect that such "unity" was the result of relentless scaremongering, perhaps because the editorial board was at the time engaged in precisely such.

After a laundry list of centrist pseudo-policies that the Times wishes would have been enacted, the ultimate sentence:

The nation yearns for leadership.

To which I say, Yikes and break out the ammo. While it would be Goldbergian in the extreme to extapolate from boilerplate editorial rhetoric that the Times board secretly dreams of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!, I don't think it exaggerates to say that this express longing for a Leader who will set right the wrongs, draw together the tribes, make the trains run on time, etc. does sound the faint harmonies of fascisms past. Though they claim to regret Bush's power-grabbing and expansiveness in his view of the Office of the President, they publicly long for someone who will arrogate to himself exactly those authorities that George le jeune has found hiding between the lines of the Constitution--just, you know, that he wouldn't fuck up so much when deploying them.

The Present is the Past of the Future

“It is time again for a new generation of leadership,” Mr. Kennedy said, speaking over a crowd of cheering supporters here at American University. “It is time now for Barack Obama.”

It is time now for Barack Obama? What, is he a Snickers bar? Feed your hunger, dudes.

Meanwhile, check out the visuals:

Even if we take Change and Belief in the post-linguistic, Singularity-Now, realm-of-pure-forms spirit in which it is apparently meant by the Obama campaign, the movie-trailer tagline that Nothing is the Same because Everything is Different, then we are still left with the specter of three members of the political dynasty most representative of the Democratic Party brand qua brand pimping soft revolution.

But let me digress. There is a genre of film and literature, ostensibly anti-clerical, and yet imbued with the vain spirit of crass ecumenicalism. A movie like Kevin Smith's Dogma is a good example. It sets itself up as a vicious satire of religious belief. God is Alanis Morisette. Angels are murderous sociopaths. The Church, in the form of Cardinal George Carlin, is a marketing gimic. Yet the film ends not in irreverence but in deadly earnest bromiditude. "It isn't important what you believe. It's only important that you believe." This, in fact, is the animating spirit of American religiousity in general in our currently occuring Greatest Ever Awakening, despite the persistent anger at fags and abortions. The specific content of belief--Faith, as our believers would have it--is finally incidental to the edifying fact of supercategorical belief. I believe that the Moon is the view-foreshortened penis head of an interstellar giant. Well, IOZ, it isn't important what you believe. It's only important that you believe.

This is clearly nonsense. The content of belief is the fundament of belief. The old bastards who hammered out the Nicene Creed weren't practicing for high-school forensics. Anyway, the Obama campaign proposes that there is content to belief. They believe in change. And what is change? It's what they believe it. They approach tautology at Warp 9 and slingshot through its vast gravity into the past. Spock saves a whale. Kirk gets the girl. "Duncan Hunter, in the spirit of his hero Salvador Dali, promises the immediate complete random change of everything, all at once. If elected, I will melt all the clocks and turn earth's atmosphere into a solid." A clock strikes thirteen. "It rains."

A Secret Plan

Well, another funny catch from a blogger we've jibed at from time to time. K-Drum finds McCain explaining that he's got a secret plan to capture Osama bin Laden. Better elect him! Why don't you just tell the President, Johnny? Because, only a President can implement the plan. Oui. Allons-y. Ils ne bougent pas.

Also, McCain's really got to stop talking about the Gates of Hell. He's aged and infirm. If he could say we will pursue . . . that'd be one thing. As it is, he sounds like grandpap bellowing at the screen when the Steelers' offensive line collapses again. "If they put me in the game." If they'd put you in the game, Pap, god bless you, but you'd've been dead an even longer time ago.

Hallal

Well, I may not think much of their politics, but the FireDogLake folks have found something hilarious.

Soviet States of America

It appears that Rahm Emmanuel is embracing a plan to nationalize education for tomorrow's Better Worker . . . Tomorrow.

6 HG 80

So. I'm heading into the office this afternoon to work on a project. I walk past the security guard. I'm carrying my lunch:

He looks up from his lunch:

"Sushi, huh? I don't eat that stuff. You know it'll kill ya."

Pick-a-little, Talk-a-little

Is it only me, or does it seem a little fishy that this article in the Weekly Standard holds out congressional earmarks as an example of "strict free-market ideology"?

McCain Proposes that We Blow Up the Moon

SARASOTA, Fla., Jan. 26 -- Sen. John McCain of Arizona accused former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney of having once supported a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, sparking an angry demand for an apology from Romney, who called the statement "dishonest."

When someone proposes that we triple Guantanamo . . .

Fountain

Obama sure kicked ass, for what that's worth. He's got the "momentum." Isaac Newton naturally remains in a spinning motion in his grave. A cock crows. Digby says valedictorily:

The voters, once again, made their voices heard and the politicians will have to heed them.

I pride myself on the occasionally Dada quality of my mind, but wow, that's really something else. I mean, what does it mean? Heed them how?