Three Cheers For Howard

I was early supporter of Howard Dean when he ran in the last election. I knew he didn't stand much chance of winning, but he had the best ideas (such as universal health care) of the bunch. So I was pleased to learn that despite his loss he was able to get himself elected head of the DNC—despite the best efforts of the Clintonistas. 

In the ensuing years, he took a lot of grief from said Clinton supporters, like Paul Begala, James "crazy ass pit viper" Carville, and others. Most of the grief came for his support of a 50-state strategy, the idea that Dems should run in every county of every state. This was seen as folly by many of the Democratic establishment—the same establishment, mind you, that gave us 8 out 0f 12 electoral losses in the past half century. Begala had this to say the strategy, "What he has spent it [DNC money] on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

Well.

As should be evident by now, Dean and his strategy have been more than vindicated. We have more Democrats and better Democrats in more parts of the country than at any time since the 60s at least. There's a deep bench of talent and a stronger progressive movement ready to push the next congress and president to move the country in a saner direction. Obama and his team hewed to the same strategy and now we have McCain fighting for life in places like Montana and N. Dakota, Indiana, and Virginia. 

So, kudos to you, Howard Dean, you—and those who followed your lead—rocked the mother fucking house.

Schadenfreude III

From GQ's Robert Draper:

Palin, Alone Aboard the Bus
Almost from the very beginning, the Palin pick created tension.
…
I’m sympathetic to Eskew and Wallace, and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me—namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.” 

It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you’re Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn’t the care and feeding of Sarah Palin’s ego; it’s the furtherance of John McCain’s quest for the presidency.

On the other hand, it had to be hard for Sarah Palin—who has achieved all she’s achieved with a highly personal touch—to take all this ridicule under an enforced gag order. After being introduced to the world as one of the “Team of Mavericks,” she’s admonished not to be one. She’s being called out by some McCainites for not cleaving to all of the senator’s positions. The Republicans who fawned over her superstar looks are now shocked—shocked!—to learn that her much-admired wardrobe has been purchased with RNC funds. 

I’ve heard from one well-placed source that McCain has snubbed her on one long bus ride aboard the Straight Talk Express, to the embarrassment of those sitting nearby. It has surely been implied to the governor that she should be eternally grateful to have been plucked from obscurity. And yet the high water mark of John McCain’s campaign for the presidency unquestionably began on September 3, when Palin gave her nomination speech—and ended precisely twelve days later, when McCain went off-script—I have that on the authority of the person who participated in the writing of said script—and told an audience that he still believed the fundamentals of the economy were strong.

Victoria's Secret

Remember Victoria Jackson from SNL's 80s period. Yeah, me neither. Anyway, she used to play this ditzy blonde character in most of her skits and was moderately funny, I guess. Turns out the ditzy piece wasn't an act. This from her website:

I don't want a political label, but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti- Christ and I'm scared to death that un- educated people will ignorantly vote him into office.

You see, what bothers me most, besides being a Communist, and a racist (Obama writes in his book, From Dreams of My Father, "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and and animosity against my (white) mother's race.") (Obama's "religion" of the last 20 years is Black Liberation Theology. What is that? "It is simply Marxism dressed up in Christian rhetoric. But unlike traditional Marxism, Black Liberation Theology emphasizes race rather than class. It's leading theorist is James Cone who says Jesus was black, African-Americans are the chosen people, and whites are the devil. Cone says, "What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world." The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor), is that he is a LIAR. He pretends to be a Christian and he incriminates himself everytime he speaks about Christianity. To lie about being a believer in Christ is very dangerous. Lightning could strike him at any minute! But seriously, he doesn't have a clue what the Bible says and yet he pretends to be a church- going Christian to win votes. That is sooooo evil.

Riiiight.

Wet Dream, VIII

From Ryan Sager via Reason magazine:

The Rove Realignment
Have libertarians been driven out of the GOP?

McCain's working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half—splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

That coalition between social conservatives and economic libertarians (who tend to be socially moderate to liberal), served the GOP well from 1964 to 2006. It gave the party eight years of Ronald Reagan and 12 years of a Republican Congress. But the Bush years have proven to be one long pulling apart. And, in a matter of days, we may just see the final snap.
…
Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost.

Into The Foxhole

More evidence that even the cheerleaders—er, newscasters—are becoming unhinged by Obama's srength:

Wet Dream, VII

Also from Mike Allen's Playbook this subject line:

7 days -- One week out -- Republicans expect to be crushed in historic landslide: buy emergency time in Montana and West Virginia

Schadenfreude II

From Politico's "Mike Allen's Playbook":

***In convo with Playbook, a top McCain adviser one-ups the priceless “diva” description, calling her “a whack job.”

Schadenfreude I

Another new series of posts, this one detailing the fracturing of the McCain-Palin campaign. (I've already missed cataloguing several stories over the past couple of days, but we'll have to live with that, I don't plan on playing catch up.) So, sit back and enjoy the show. We've earned it.

Rift Cracks 'Demoralized' McCain Campaign
McCain Staffers Blame Palin's Lack of Readiness; Palin Loyalists Blame Over-Managing By McCain Handlers

The McCain campaign is definitely demoralized right now. The blame game has begun.

There is no question that there is a rift between Sarah Palin's camp and that of John McCain inside the Republican campaign, sources tell ABC News.

And you are seeing people within the McCain campaign starting to look to the future.

Not only Palin, but many of the McCain staffers, as well, are circulating their resumes and pointing the finger.

Frankly, My Dear

A flashback to late September. So good it deserves a rerun:

Electoral Maps 10/27

These maps and EV projection totals are all from sites who crunch the polls of several pollsters together into their various algorithms to come up with their figures. None of these are from single pollsters, any one of which can have flawed methodology causing it to be an outlier. Their congruence is staggering. 

By the way, a big hat tip to Melancholy Sideshow's Michael Kerr for turning me onto the outstanding Princeton Election Consortium site. It's become a daily stop for substantive poll-gazing.

Wet Dream, VI

From The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder:

RNC Goes Up In Montana

The state and its three electoral votes are now competitive?

A Democratic media buying source says -- Republicans won't yet confirm -- and Republicans now confirm -- that the RNC's independent expenditure arm has bought television ads in the state.

The ads begin Wednesday.

In 2004, George W. Bush won Montana by 20 points.

Ron Paul is on the ballot. And Ron Paul supporters aren't happy with John McCain...

A Republican congressman from Texas could throw the state to Barack Obama.

Developing....

We Have To Work Like Our Future Depends On It, Because It Does

I'm old enough to know better so it's hard to admit, but I'm just embarrassingly moved by this guy's oratory. 

McCain-Palin's Base

Cheap shot? (You reap what you sow, Pallin'-Around Palin.)

We all know this stuff is out there, but hearing of an actual plot makes it all the more eerily real. 

(WASHINGTON) — Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.

In court records unsealed Monday, federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.

"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

As far as I'm concerned those federal agents are fucking American heroes. Sadly, their job has probably just begun. 

Mad About Mad Men II

I've learned since my last Mad Men post that some of you out there have seen a few episodes of the show and were left cold. Well, all I can say is that not everything moves everyone and that's cool. I stand by my recommendation, though, for those of you who haven't tried it out. 

But I think it important to point out that one should watch the entire season before making a final decision, as the show and its characters unfold slowly and subtly. The joy of the show is its pacing, its nuance, its arc. Or as one of The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates' readers puts it:

To me each of those shows have more in common with novels than episodic TV. Which is why I never get into this episode was better than that episode debates.…To me you have to view each episode of theses series like a chapter in a novel. You never hear someone say chapter 13 of Moby Dick was the shit, but 20 was lame. You judge the novel as a whole. Same with these series. You need the whole season to play out before you pass judgement.

You may not end up liking Moby Dick, but you should at least read the whole thing before drawing your conclusion.

Speaking of Coates, he has an interesting post on Mad Men titled "The Negro Don Draper" in which he meditates on the way Draper is akin to other marginalized minorities, some of whom can "pass" in society. It's one of only two shows that have ever made him tear up:

When I rewatched the first season of Mad Men, all of this came back to me. Don's past is unorthodox for his profession, and furthermore it is an object of great shame for him. And yet the past is the source of his power. In the last episode of season one, Don has to do a pitch for "The Wheel" a slide projector in need of rebranding. Don's marriage is crumbling and he's lost his brother—the last link to his murky, and poignant past. Don pulls all of that together and makes a beautiful pitch, rechristening "The Wheel" as "The Carousel" a device that's a time machine which takes us to a place where we ache to go again." The pitch blows everyone away, and Don is hailed as a genius. But what only we know, is that Don can write such pitches because he sees different, and he sees different because he's literally seen different things. His life has been much harder than his colleagues, and that gives him a power to see more than them.

But he's also haunted by the past. Don believes his progress is tied to no one ever knowing who he truly is, to no one discovering his true history—his secret identity, if you will. Don Draper is, in the parlance of old black folks, passing. His orgins are not proper and gentile--he is the child of a prostitute, who as reinvented himself for the Manhattan jet-set. He is Gatsby and Anatole Broyard, no? And yet the irony that animates Mad Men is the fact that, without that past, Draper would likely be the sort of pampered hack he despises. He'd be Pete Campbell. His double consciousness, makes him, indeed, doubly conscious, doubly aware. Don Draper sees more.

Only two groups of people truly can sense something amidest—the blacks, and the Jews. There is a lovely scene in Season Two where Peggy, Don and the black elevator man are riding up. They are talking about Marilyn Monroe's death and noting how shocked they are. The elevator man casually notes, "Some people just hide in plain sight." It is not so much that he directly knows Don's identity, but that he is playing the role that blacks play throughout the show--they are a kind of Greek chorus, unseen, but offering short poetic takes on the themes at work.

The major theme is set from the first episode, when Don, wooing Rachel, a Jewish proprietor of a department store, is enjoying the sound of his own voice. Rachel listens skeptically and then cuts right through the mask:

I don't know what it is you really believe in, but I do know what it feels like to be out of place, to be disconnected, to see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it.There is something about you that tells me you it to.

To be out of place, To be disconnected. That is the essence of us, and I guess in one way or another, it's everyone else too. 

That scene with Rachel was the one that hooked me, the one that intimated that the show was going to be something more than interesting set pieces and nostalgia, that it was going to be something special. 

Red, White, & MILF

I'm not sure I like this vid, it's only moderately clever and sorta, kinda funny. But I thought it worth posting anyway, if only to further sear Palin's ridiculousness into the collective consciousness. Points, though, for mentioning the Bridge in the bridge.

With Friends Like These

Rumsfeld lackey and man who introduced Cheney to Wolfowitz, uber-con Ken Adelman joins the ranks breaking away from the floundering GOP. Choice cut of his devastating critique of McCain:

Granted, McCain's views are closer to mine than Obama's. But I've learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years.

McCain's temperament -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke -- and his judgment -- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

I'd rather a competent moderate president. Even at a risk, since Obama lacks lots of executive experience displaying competence (though his presidential campaign has been spot-on). And since his Senate voting record is not moderate, but depressingly liberal. Looming in the background, Pelosi and Reid really scare me.

Nonetheless, I concluded that McCain would not -- could not -- be a good president. Obama just might be.

[For the record, he's either wrong or lying about Obama's record.]

Things Like Fruit Fly Research In Paris, France

Richard Wolfe brings the nasty on this Countdown segment:

The more she talks the better it gets. I'm beginning to think she's an Obama plant.

Lions And Tigers And Obamas, Oh My!

Man, I would not want to get on James Wolcott's bad side.

Presidential Monster Chiller Horror Theater!
This Halloween be on the lookout for all the righty bloggers dressed as drama queens. They'll be the ones looking as if they just escaped from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, swatting away invisible mites as they battle a bad case of Obama on the brain pan. It's been quite an inglorious spectacle, watching these wracked souls lose their shit as they swing from the belfry.
Take that double-decker sandwich of snap judgments that goes by the name of Phyllis Chesler, one of Pajamas Media's many reclamation projects gone awry. In the first giddy rush of excitement over the Pittsburgh "B"-cheek attack (quickly unrobed as a hoax), Chesler discerned a pattern of violence unfolding across the sidewalks and lawns of America; gripped the railing; and girded for anarchy:

Folks: This is not good. American v American in a race war, a class war, a gender war [a threefer!] even while jihad has been declared against America?

Forget about all the voting fraud allegations and the chaos at the polls: Do we all have to get guns? Will we need the National Guard to protect us when we vote? Or to walk voters home?

It's an infallible sign of how porously susceptible Chesler is to bogus hysteria that in the same post she snappily salutes the cut-and-paste heroism of "Pamela the Magnificent of Atlas Shrugs," yes, the same Pamela Geller who fell with a thud for two debunked stories last week, the "B"-cheek hoax and the Michelle Obama room-service-at-the-Waldorf fraud. Put their two heads together and you've got yourself a set of maracas.

But then, these asshats deserve his blistering scorn. Read on:

Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein, who always seems to have a lot going on offstage, gives his runny seal of approval to the pessimist porn of a mysterious entity named Kim Edwards:

I am not a reactionary person by nature, but trust me when I say the first 100 days of a Barack Obama presidency will bring holy hell upon those who adhere to a classical liberal philosophy. This man is a radical of the first stripe, and he has left no stone unturned in his quest. [Some sentences follow detailing the mighty zombie army Obama has amassed to march under his command.]

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone's genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

Obama hasn't even been elected into office yet, and already he's kissing cousins with history's most sadistic mass murderers. Talk about a brother not being able to catch a break!

Even if Obama loses, he'll be blamed for unleashing the days of wrath:

But what if Obama loses? Wouldn't that win us a reprieve, at least? Not necessarily...

Several of Obama's higher-profile backers have openly said that for him to be defeated could only be the result of foul play...or "racism." In our time, "racism" is one of the foulest imprecations a man can suffer. It's a justification for doing anything and everything to him, regardless of the evidence for or against it. Never mind that the word has been emptied of all objective meaning. Remember Judge Charles Pickering, and see if you can disagree.

Regardless of who wins, the election on November 4 has a staggering potential for tearing the country violently asunder. The lines make it too probable to contemplate.

Your Curmudgeon has decided not to stint on preparations. He's filled his pantry, doubled his gold reserves, and replenished his ammo stocks.

And to think they called us "sore losers" in 2000! They haven't even lost yet and they're already blaming the victor, acting all butch and making with the big talk about stocking up on gold and ammo as they hole up in the shag-carpeted panic room and let their whiskers grow. They can't face the fact that conservatism has epically failed; this is their way of pouting and refusing to come out and play, leaving everybody else to deal with the ruin left behind.

A Groucho Marxist Maybe?

Check out Biden's response when wacky Florida newscaster Barbara West drops the Marx bomb. Perfect.



h/t: Wonkette

Jinkies!

Can you say unhinged?