Arm Yourself

If you read no other political post this month, let it be this revelatory GOP insider piece, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. It's everything you may have ever suspected about today's nightmarish Republican Party, not just anti-Democratic but anti-democracy, instead pro-oligarchy, pro-authoritarian and theocratic:

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill...

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them...

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté...

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

So is Obama up for the task of calling out these crazies or can he get anything done without compromise? Will the people stop voting for the destruction of America, or are we lost as so many empires past?

Is this first salvo of a wised-up post-deficit crisis Obama, or yet another brick in the road to a GOP-driven American sunset?

Fakakta

The deal is bad because the GOP is bad. Could the deal be better if Obama stood his ground on a clean deal or on revenues? There's no evidence that even all the Dems in the Senate would have backed him up. The GOP created the ballooning debt under Bush and left Obama with a bag of dute including revenue loss and unemployment spikes. They love talking about how much the debt has gone up under Obama -- as they love forgetting that they're the reason it came to that.

It's a fakakta situation that will only be repaired if the Presidency and Senate stay Dem and the GOP is ousted from the House in November 2012.

Seriously.

Reelected

As the President said, justice has been done. Not that it'll ever bring back those lost to families, friends and our society on September 11, 2001, but now, just four months shy of a decade, the man responsible for the most deadly and destructive attack on our nation is shot dead through the head. It's a huge, overdue victory for the United States of America, for our security, and for peace in the world. It's a monster victory for U.S. military special forces, for U.S. counter-terrorism professionals, and for all of our allies in Pakistan and elsewhere that helped us take out Osama Bin Laden, head of the Al Qaeda terrorism network.

It's also, of course, a very good night for our President, Barack Hussein Obama and his hand-picked national security team:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Raw politics:

• The President's approval ratings will go through the roof and, after it eventually starts down again, will never be as high during his term. Barring disaster, they should last strong enough through the 2012 election. Imagine how small all the others look now. (Watch for which GOP candidates congratulate President Obama by name in their statements - good job, Gov. Pawlenty - and which don't have the character to do so.) NBC even preempted Donald Trump firing maybe LaToya Jackson the last 15 minutes of Celebrity Apprentice. So much for that candidacy.
  

• America always wants a sheriff as President, from General George Washington to Hollywood cowboy Ronald Reagan. With a more cerebral warrior it can take longer for the public to realize when a guy's for real, i.e. Abraham Lincoln. Obama is now officially America's sheriff, cleaning up the streets.

• Obama has always been underestimated, starting with him Democratic rivals for the nomination, then by the GOP and all the pundits (always), and then by the opponents of Health Care Reform. As I've said the past, our enemies would learn about underestimating Obama as well, and it would go even worst for them that it had for the others. As of tonight, Obama's steel is now no longer an issue. Will Mitch Daniels reconsider running?

• As Andrew Sullivan points out:

• 12.08 am Can I say how deeply moving it is that a man named Barack Hussein Obama gave the order for the operation that killed Osama bin Laden?
  
  The pre-eminent symbol of our the multicultural, multiracial society of the future defeated the pre-eminent symbol of the darkest, bleakest throwback to medieval religious fanaticism. Im not ashamed to use the following language: Good defeated evil. And hope rekindles again.

• Huge celebrations right now outside The White House and at Ground Zero that are going to go on all night, V-J date 2011 for young American adults
  

• With this news, Qaddafi has to be reconsidering his options in Libya, especially after reportedly losing his second-youngest son and several grandchildren in a bombing last night.

• Also, per Sullivan:

• When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's-it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

  - Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

• This is a huge victory for the law-enforcement theory of counter-terrorism, rather than the massive violence approach. The Obama scalpel of intelligence and cooperation vs. the big-budget Bush blunderbuss of unilateral war.
  
  In 8 years, Bush couldn't get Osama. In less than 2 1/2, Obama brings his head on a stick.
  
  And the guy Bush did destroy a country to get didn't even attack us.

• What a great movie this is going to make -- all the secrecy, practicing and preparation, one helicopter down with mechanical failure, then a 45 minutes fire fight operation ending with Navy SEALS taking bin Laden's body as a souvenir. Paul Greengrass directing?

• Huge validation for Obama's decision to escalate in Afghanistan, where the operation must have been launched from. I always said that the action in Afghanistan was all about what we needed to do in Pakistan. This should help Obama on the Left.
  

• This is the type of victory that lets America know it is not impotent, that it can do great things, and you may see a corresponding lift in the economy. People spend when they celebrate.

• We picked the right guy to lead the country at the right time. Good job, America.

• The 66th anniversary to the day of the announcement of Adolf Hitler's death. The 8th to the day of Bush's premature Mission Accomplished speech. Nice.
  

• There were no leaks -- the President's announcement surprised everybody. Wow.
  

• Fuck off, birthers.
  

Since we all pay taxes for operations like this, contribute to the national character with our own, and did vote the first black guy into office against all odds back in 2008, this is certainly a victory for all Americans. So congratulations, America. There will always be tough days ahead, whether another attack, or another drop down the environmental disaster ledge, or a family losing a child in the military, or persistent unemployment.

But for the moment, for tonight, we're finally winners again.

Wind Power

This kind of shocked me -- the first U.S. offshore wind farm has been approved:

I'm not sure how this slipped under the radar, but on Tuesday, the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound cleared its final hurdle -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) approved a Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted by Cape Wind Associates back in October of 2010.

What is all means:

The project consists of 130, 3.6 megawatt wind turbine generators covering approximately 25 square miles in federal waters offshore Massachusetts with the maximum capacity to produce about 468 megawatts. The average expected production from the wind facility could provide about 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. At average expected production, Cape Wind could produce enough energy to power more than 200,000 homes in Massachusetts.

Seriously, America, this is the first?

I guess that puts us still well behind Europe.

Back

Apologies to regular readers of Nettertainment, but I've been out on family vacation in Maui this past week sans PC, quite liberating. I didn't want to draw attention to my leave basically because I wanted my home to remain safe, but I do hope I haven't lost any of you with the one week gap.

That said, it's kind of a joy to have missed the foul waters of the Glenn Beck rally, the Tea Party takeover of the otherwise rudderless GOP, and more Obama-bashing and weak-sistering from those on the Left who would pout through this November's election and let the U.S Congress fall to the dogs. Let me be frank: if you aren't speaking up, if you aren't opinion-making with your own friends that the Obama Administration armed with even this particular Democratic legislation branch is the best thing to happen to America since, well, Bill Clinton, then you are just as responsible for continuing the disaster of eight years under Bush-Cheney that we will still be working to dig out of over the next two years should the Dems hold both houses.

If you have any doubt, here are the accomplishments this far and a Facebook group to join about them.

So I'm back and thinking about possible changes to the blog format, but for now, in an America being so stirred to hate that this happens, I suggest you step up and be more like this guy -- unless you'd like to give up our country to these billionaire brothers.

Credit for GOPers

Two Republicans have shown themselves to be true Americans in the best sense of the word -- tolerant, sensible, respectful of the Constitution. One is 9/11 widower and former Bush Administration Solicitor General, Ted Olson, who also recently co-led the case against the heinous Prop 8 here in California, coming out in favor of what President Obama said regarding the Cordoba House near Ground Zero:

The other, and it ain't easy for me to give credit here but it is richly deserved, is MSNBC's Former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough, who is not only pounding on Newt Gingrich for that parasite's demagoguery on the issue, but also has Pat - yes - Buchanan chiming in with him against the current Republican Tea Party line on the site:

Bravo, gents. You've both earned kudos in my book, and I'll have to go a little easier on Joe the next time he says something I disagree with.

Proud to Be a Californian

There's marriage equality in Iowa, so we're not exactly the first, and there's a stay, and it's going to all somehow end up in Chief Justice John Roberts' lap, but the vile Prop 8 forbidding same sex marriage was voided in court.

Judge Vaughan R. Walker, originally a Republican appointee, presided over a lopsided trial, per reports at the time, and his opinion is just this side of lacerating, particularly with regards to the defense's key "expert" -- whom His Honorable reclassified as a pundit:

Walker, in his decision, writes that "Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gays and lesbians for denial of a marriage license." He evaluates as credible witnesses the panel of experts who testified against Proposition 8, and finds fault with the credentials of several witnesses who testified against same-sex marriage, including David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values:

Blankenhorn's testimony constitutes inadmissible opinion testimony that should be given essentially no weight," Walker writes. "Blankenhorn gave absolutely no explanation why
manifestations of the deinstitutionalization of marriage would be exacerbated (and not, for example, ameliorated) by the presence of marriage for same-sex couples. His opinion lacks reliability, as there is simply too great an analytical gap between the data and the opinion Blankenhorn proffered.

Marc Ambinder has this brilliant list of all the facts Walker is basing his opinion on -- 13 of them, including my personal fave:

11. "Marrying a person of the opposite sex is an unrealistic option for gay and lesbian individuals."

The battle's not over, and I'm sure there are hateful, bigoted pockets of individuals ready to do violence over the ultimate nationalization of this decision, but this is now about facts found in a court of law by a very smart and fair judge who has made the ruling very difficult to win an appeal against. Every single one of these facts would have to be struck down. By, like, Clarence Thomas.

And the original victims of violence who suffered or showed extraordinary courage to pave the way for this emerging civil freedom have actually won this day by providing, over several decades now, that gay marriage is not any of these threats, these fears that have developed over centuries.

Bravo, CA. It makes the fires, earthquakes and life-shortening mortgages worth it.

I Love America, Too

(Now with 50% less snark than yesterday's post.)

The late Verna Oller of Washington State understood the meaning of community:

There are two things about 98-year-old Verna Oller that just about anyone around her neigborhood in Long Beach, Washington can tell you. She was feisty, and she was frugal.

...

Oller never made much money, earning an hourly wage filleting fish until she was in her 70s. She cut her own firewood until she was in her 90s. But Oller was carrying a secret, a big one, and she entrusted the Glenns to keep it. It turned out she was a master investor.

"She went to the library and read Barrons," Guy Glenn said. "She read the Wall Street Journal."

...

The sturdy old lady with no formal education amassed a not-so-small fortune: $4.5 million. It was up over $5 million before the recession. Before she died, she directed Guy Glenn to spend every cent of it, but not on her, on her home town.

"She wants a swimming pool to be built, that was her main goal," he said.

Mission accomplished. Part of Oller's money will go to building the town's very first indoor swimming pool. The pool was important to Oller because as a poor little girl growing up there it frustrated her that kids often had no place to swim even though they lived on the ocean. But the shoreline can be dangerous in the Pacific Northwestern town. Money will also be set aside for scholarships and grants for local teachers.

...

When Oller died, she didn't want a funeral or even an obit. In fact, she didn't want any credit at all.

And then there's this America, always breaking the boundaries of homicidal behavior and language taboos, on the Today show, no less:

Kayla Manson, a 13-year-old Florida girl accused as an accomplice after her boyfriend allegedly attempted to murder her best friend, recalled the text messages that her friend and boyfriend exchanged before he attacked her.

Manson said she did not see the texts where her boyfriend, Wayne Treacy, threatened to kill her best friend, Josie Ratley, but rather only ones in which they called each other names.

Manson said the two text messages she saw were "the one where she calls him a rapist, and she calls him a cunt, I mean the one where he calls her a cunt."

"We just have to be careful with our language, but that's all right, sweetheart," Meredith Vieira said.

Reminds me of the classic Kurt Vonnegut short sci-fi story, "The Big Space Fuck," set in a future where all the words have been exposed, so the last obscenity left is "jizzum."

Thank you, young Kayla Manson.

Hmm. Any relation?

Crazy F**king Americans

What the fuck, America? Are you so high on self-righteous rage that you send Joe Stack of Austin Texas into an IRS building in his airplane, coming from setting his own house on fire?

In the California where Joe Stack started out as a fresh-from-college software engineer, fighting the tax man was, quite literally, a religion.


Back in the 1970s and '80s, California was not just the center of the "silicon revolution." The Golden State was also a teeming hive of anti-government activity, much of it aimed at the federal income tax code and the agency that enforced it — the Internal Revenue Service.

Tax protesters and self-styled patriots railed against exemptions granted to religious organizations, the Catholic Church in particular. They formed their own "churches" and invited others to join.

"It sounds like he went down that same path," said Dennis Riness, who did time in federal prison for running a church-styled tax shelter. "And ran into the same brick wall."

More like glass and metal, I imagine, but same idea. Meanwhile, psycho college professor Amy Bishop, who seems to have gotten off murdering her younger brother in an argument and sending a colleague a faulty pipe bomb, take out her self-righteous anger over not earning tenure (ironic, as she padded her resume to get the gig in the first place) by shooting up the faculty meeting. For instance:

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”
...

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

I just saw Shutter Island last night and I get why some folks might be disappointed, but I think it's right on. We're a nation out of our heads. It's not the first time in American history, and it won't be the last.

And I'm wondering what we can do to stop it.

The Pivot and The Frontier

Obama gave a major, major speech on climate change and his upcoming energy policy at MIT on Friday:



Whole transcript here. Interesting that what struck me about the speech wasn't just the ideas, since I've heard them going back to his campaign, but the final passage starting at 17:00, like this:

So we're going to have to work on those folks. But understand there's also another myth that we have to dispel, and this one is far more dangerous because we're all somewhat complicit in it. It's far more dangerous than any attack made by those who wish to stand in the way progress -- and that's the idea that there is nothing or little that we can do. It's pessimism. It's the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we're facing. And implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we've lost something important -- that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something of the past.

I reject that argument. I reject it because of what I've seen here at MIT. Because of what I have seen across America. Because of what we know we are capable of achieving when called upon to achieve it. This is the nation that harnessed electricity and the energy contained in the atom, that developed the steamboat and the modern solar cell. This is the nation that pushed westward and looked skyward. We have always sought out new frontiers and this generation is no different.

Today's frontiers can't be found on a map. They're being explored in our classrooms and our laboratories, in our start-ups and our factories. And today's pioneers are not traveling to some far flung place. These pioneers are all around us -- the entrepreneurs and the inventors, the researchers, the engineers -- helping to lead us into the future, just as they have in the past. This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery. This is the nation that will lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow, so long as all of us remember what we have achieved in the past and we use that to inspire us to achieve even more in the future.

I am confident that's what's happening right here at this extraordinary institution. And if you will join us in what is sure to be a difficult fight in the months and years ahead, I am confident that all of America is going to be pulling in one direction to make sure that we are the energy leader that we need to be.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.

It's something lost under eight years of Cheney and Bush, it's the Turner Thesis, also known as the Frontier Thesis, that he put out in 1893 about how the American character had been defined by the "Frontier Line" up until 1890, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Some ideologues try pointing to it as a justification for "American Exceptionalism" in the obnoxious, I'm always right sense, but Turner talks about the dangers of a loss of civics due to the frontier-conquering nature of Americans as well. He concludes without predicting the future so much as tying up the past with a ribbon:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survival in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

The Republicans have confused war with frontier. The new frontiers are those of connectivity and planet saving. Bush squandered the tidal wave of volunteerism all Americans but emphatically young Americans offered on 9/12 and beyond. Obama's right that American innovation and dominance of new energy grids and sources should not be a partisan issue. It's about future generations, just like the conquering of the frontier.

And this time we don't have to resort to genocide to do it.

U.S.A. Notes

So there were no responses to the Afghanistan question in yesterday's post -- fair enough, I dunno myself. Today we've got the issue of the dollar potentially no longer being the basis for the price of a barrel of oil, and the question of what that will do to the value of our currency. My bet is that if so many countries have so much debt in dollars, wouldn't they want those dollars to be worth something? Or do I have it backwards...

In better U.S. news, some of our nation's biggest corporations are expressing their displeasure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's stance against climate change legislation by quitting that organization.

Oh, and after being in seventh place last year, thanks to our new President (and, I would add, the more open-minded than expected democracy that elected him), we are once again the most admired country in the world.

The Bravest Man

My father once said you have to be a little bit crazy to want to be President. You surely need a strong enough ego. And since Presidents all too often make targets (and not just for criticism, you do need some degree of courage.

But President Barack Obama must be the bravest President of all.

The ginning up of violence is well underway. Not that the most virulently racist element of American society, borne of slave owning, trading and abusing four hundred years ago, needs all that much prodding. They call it being anti-health reform, they call it fear of socialism, but when hysterical white folks are crying that the America they once knew is disappearing, that's simply code for non-white, non-straight, and even non-Christian, per Andrew Sullivan:

But the vicious anger from the far right, which is to say what is currently the right, seems totally out of proportion to these reforms.

Where does that come from? It comes from the same place as the tea-party protests. It's partisan, of course - most Republicans, including Glenn Reynolds, ignored the deficit under Bush, blamed Obama for it within minutes of his election, and never refer to the impact of the recession on deficits. But it is also surely cultural - an expression of the rage some in white America feel at the new social make-up of their country. I just sat through a PJTV segment on Sarah Palin, in which the host blithely referred to the heartland as "real America."

If that is what you really believe - that people in cities or suburbs, that minorities, that gays, that blacks and Hispanics are not part of "real America" - then of course, you are angry. You believe a fake America has taken over. You cannot understand this. So you start believing that we have a fascist/communist dictatorship, that there was some fraud allowing a non-citizen to become president, that the government is about to "take over" all healthcare provision ... and on and on. And no one is left in the GOP to challenge this, to calm it down, to present practical alternatives to the obvious crushing problems the country and the private sector have in paying for increasingly costly healthcare.

To me, this is a triumph of ideology. And conservatism is now an abstract anti-government ideology, fueled by cultural, racial and sexual resentment. This is a recipe for more violence, and more marginalization.

Even ABC News is noting the threat to the very first African American President -- and his family:

Experts who track hate groups across the U.S. are growing increasingly concerned over violent rhetoric targeted at President Obama, especially as the debate over health care intensifies and a pattern of threats emerges.

The Secret Service is investigating a Maryland man who held a sign reading "Death to Obama" and "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids" outside a town hall meeting this week. And in New Hampshire, another man stood across the street from a Presidential town hall with his gun on full display.

Los Angeles police officers apprehended a man Thursday after a standoff with him inside a red Volkswagen Bug car in Westwood, CA [outside the Federal Building] – the latest disturbing case even though officials said the man had mental problems.

Ginned up by the usual suspects, including the most influential Republican:

Garrett said statements like one recently made by controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh comparing a logo for the White House plan to a Nazi symbol "legitimizes people who are on the edge to go do something or say something."

"And if you go and take a look at this, you will find that the Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo," Limbaugh said.

Later, someone painted a swastika outside the office of Congressman David Scott of Georgia, one of Obama's supporters.

Lest we forget, one man has already paid with his life for crossing Operation Rescue. Obama receives 400% more death threats that his predecessor, and one man has been detained this week for making his violent feelings clear in public:

The Secret Service is investigating a man who authorities said held a sign reading "Death to Obama" outside a town hall meeting on health-care reform in western Maryland.

The sign also read, "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids," referring to the first name of President Barack Obama's wife, said Washington County Sheriff's Capt. Peter Lazich.

Lazich said deputies detained the unidentified, 51-year-old man near the entrance to Hagerstown Community College about 1 p.m. Wednesday after getting calls from a number of people attending the meeting held by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. Obama was not at the meeting.

The sheriff's office turned the man over to the Secret Service, Lazich said.

Paul Krugman calls the current GOP alliance with the reactionary crazies over "death panels" lies a Republican Death Trip, and he's right. Just like the Nazi's they claim to hate and try to pin on a pro-health insurance reform left, they use fearsome imagery of death, essentially more classic KKK-style hate porn, to roil the blood and make reality recede through fiery eyes.

While there's a prairie fire of racist violence always ready to spark in America, hopefully burning out by the end of our lifetimes, those with the matches feign innocence when they're earning off the very target lists they create. Just ask mass murderer -- in a Knoxville church -- Jim David Adkisson:

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.

Rachel Maddow exposed it all last night, and everyone needs to watch, listen, and beware:



Lest we forget, the very first U.S. President to be felled by assassination was killed by a Confederate racist.

That's right, America. The first U.S. President to be assassinated was the President who freed the slaves.

Excellent 4th

I hope yours went well. Mine was enhanced by the secure knowledge that this guy is our President, our first Independence Day with him in office:



Hopefully the first 4th in a series of eight.

Final Idolatry

Per my post last night, no big surprise or even letdown that Kris Allen beat his new best friend, Adam Lambert, tonight. I believe that Adam lost because he didn't really take any big chances last night, although his "A Change is Gonna Come" was close. And while the conventional wisdom seems to be that Adam did better on the coronation power ditty due to it being written more for his range (tilting the table, producers?), it sounded just like all the other second place finisher versions I've ever heard, i.e. vocally strong but not very unique. Kris' version was much more unique, even if the band threatened to drown out his more muted volume.

In some ways it was a fairy tale ending, underdog pulls it out, leading the others in Obama-era unity to the judges platform, someone having the sense to send his wife up there for the final embrace as the live show vignetted on them in deep embrace, a bookend matching his long embrace of Adam after the victory announcement.

Kris needed this win more than Adam, who will go on to be a big personality in music. They both seemed like completely decent guys, the camaraderie that's developed between them in the winnowing to the finals genuinely moving.

It may not be the Idol of your choice, but it's a pretty great America.

Slam

There is only one President at a time. Thank God this one is Barack Hussein Obama.

This:

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Versus this:



No contest.

Eight years, baby!

Meatjoy

I've missed seeing The Fountain thus far, so I've missed director Darren Aronofsky's big budget picture which was reportedly big on metaphor, but I've seen his indie breakthrough, Pi, and his bold, super-strong adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream, and a few nights ago I saw his low budget/high power comeback hit The Wrestler, so I think I can say a few things about his work.

If you just want to hear how compelling it is to watch Mickey Rourke come roaring back, or about the meat metaphors or play with real vs. illusion both in the ring and on the screen, or the high-spirited camaraderie amongst elder statesman The Ram and his fellow wrestlers, this is not the post for you.

All that is true but what I'm interested in Aronofsky's vision, since he's pretty successfully staked out a decidedly off-Hollywood position with what appears to be total creative control over artfully assaultive, the only big-time purveyor of the Antonin Artaud Theatre O' Cruelty-style movies. Is there a more ambitious "New York" voice in the movies right now?

If you've ridden the trainwreck of lives in Requiem for a Dream, where Aronofsky honed his capacity to create both dread and imagery even more scarring than you thought you'd imagined, and now witnessed Randy "The Ram" Robinson's bad steroid habit, you know that Aronofsky creates Hell on Earth. Imagine "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" where instead of killing an albatross the protagonist is cursed by his youthful success in the ring, but he never had the smarts to plan for anything other than what happened in the ring, no future.

It's impossible to adequately analyze the new movie without talking about the ending, so here's the

SPOILER SPACE
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A LITTLE MORE
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ALMOST THERE
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The Wrestler has an open ending, but it's open in the way that the final scene of The Sopranos is open, i.e. it's implied that we're watching the final moments in the main character's life and that the next frame, the one a moment after the movie just ended, is that character's death.

It all started falling into place in the last act when Robinson screws up with his daughter. The rule of thumb is that whichever character goes through the biggest chance is your main character, but that if it's proven that a character ultimately can't change, then he or she dies, usually to end the movie. And, if nothing else, Ram's musical taste indicates that he hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.

This isn't an afterschool special about a man's redemption. It's about a guy who realizes there's no other place for him than in the ring, and that it makes sense to play there until he dies there. We're watching a pessimistic character study of a man's final days. He knows when he walks in, when he walks away from Marissa Tomei that he's not coming back to her world again. We know when he falters twice after dropping the Ayatollah.

And the final shot, projecting himself over our heads, is literally a swan dive. From his final monologue tribute to his audience it's a swan song.

So why go on this death trip? Does Aronofsky actually have something to say with it, and can we ask with the poledancing scenes as well?

The movie is a fable. It's a cautionary fable about how any of us can get caught short-sighted, but especially if we're all about the body, all about the adulation. If it's too late when we try to start thinking, chastised, beyond ourselves.

But it's particularly arresting at this moment of cascading unemployment, where the American Dream is turning into the American Hell-on-Earth for so many people. Which is interesting within the context of the patriotism of the wrestlers, from the American flag hung over Randy's trailer home bed to the wrestling ring righting of the 80's U.S. vs. Iraq conflict.

Whether or not Aronofsky is deliberately making a statement or just providing a credibly damning political context, it's a world where the simple may be physically powerful, but the simple have been duped. They've believed the hype, about what's valuable and about what's true. They willingly, joyfully, for profit participate in the denigration of the latter. It's entertaining. It's good for the ego as long as you can keep it going.

And it's the very end of the American Century.

Their House

I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through the inauguration if I'm already getting choked up -- in a sort of invigorating, fist-pumping manner -- looking at pictures of the Obamas coming over to the Bush's house today, the house they're moving into just 10 weeks from now. Oh, and video:



Part of the emotion is the fundamental patriotism for our democracy, typified every time there's a change of White House from one political party to a rival party. There's a lot of countries where that isn't guaranteed to happen, and for awhile (2003-2005?) some of us were worried it wouldn't. You know, martial law and a suspension of Presidential elections, like Rudy Giuliani tried to pull off after the attacks of 9/11/2001.

And it's even sweeter when the party you favor wins. The last time I got a buzz like this off the transition was when the Clintons took the door keys from the first round of Bushes.

Then there's the name. The White House. With this victorious black couple coming at the invitation of the current occupants to take a look around, talk a little policy, find out where the secret drawers are hidden, it's like fuck you historically racist America, you were actually laying the groundwork for this awesome moment, and from hereon out all limits of race or, I'd argue, gender for the job are history.

But what ties it all together are the three core themes of Barack Obama's campaign for President. There's Change -- that's the euphoric kick. There's Hope -- that's the tears. But there's a third theme that didn't get as much play as the first two in campaign iconography, but which is a core tenet of his oratory: Responsibility.

Obama believes that government has a responsibility to the people who elect it; that the people have a responsibility to carefully consider the issues, treat philosophical opponents with respect, and exercise their fair choice so as to keep democracy vital; and that we each have a responsibility to each other both on the personal and societal level.

This man is about to take on the most awesome responsibility in the world. Done right, there is no position more powerful that President of the United States of America. Hey, that's 50 states. Top that, Mevedev.

I'm an adult. I know there isn't a politician who won't disappoint me somewhere along the way. That's fine, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. There's every possibility that the headwinds will be so strong that Obama will somehow not succeed in his quest to save America and the world through his Presidency. Very, very bad, unmentionable things could happen; we've lived them all before. By the end of this, he may even end up being a "War President."

But somehow, I doubt it. Watching Obama enhancing even George W. Bush with his presence, with his soft-power hand on El Presidente's back as they head into the colonnade, I know this guy is there for a reason. I start wondering if he actually initiated the meeting, secretly, from his side. Because he appears to have even talked auto policy with Bush, maybe testing his political capital -- trying to get it decoupled from trade and actually get something done before even taking the oath.

That's the kind of guy we just elected, a real leader with a real purpose for moving into this house, America's house, our house. This is the guy whom his advisers were most concerned didn't have the "pathological" desire to be President, but invented it for himself through his sense of mission.

A community organizer for our desperate nation.

Moving into our house January 20th.

Booyah

Obama slides into the Tiergarten in Berlin like a wind from the West, a breath of clear air, an athlete at the peak of his game, nothing but net.

His speech masterfully wove the post-WWII history of the Berlin airlift, recalling the great feat of America rescuing their so very recent enemy from brutal Soviet blockage, and weaving it in with the challenges we face today for a compelling call to action -- a call for all to renounce apathy and take up leadership again, as only together, reunited, can we make the world we want to live in; the world we want our children to live in.

The 200,000 people who attended, in large part a young German audience, got an event they'll always remember. Without hectoring or scolding, he called up all better angels. He struck a righteous balance between love of America, in essence reintroducing America to Europe by way of his own personal story, and citizenship of the world. The latter, fodder for those within our own American ranks who would seek to destroy us by recidivism, xenophobia and ignorance, is in the grand tradition of both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Not surprisingly, the two best orators to have help that office since Obama was born.

I can't see how this hurts Obama except with the hardened rightwing partisans and the smear merchants. It's been a long time since I've felt this rising feeling about America, deep inside, a true pride in the ideals of this country as embodied by flesh & blood. Obama's message to Berlin today was not to count us out. Not if he had made it there:



To quote an email I sent to a friend earlier today, I'm not sure the MSM wants to acknowledge Obama's awesome coup in Berlin -- they seem to be downplaying. But for any intelligent American the choice of McCain now becomes even costlier, as we've seen in pictures for ourselves all the personal equity Obama has now built with these key Middle East and European leaders. Only a fool would squander that for McCain, who might not even last four full years in office.

So aside from the semiotics of Obama's adventure, aside from the leaders-equity, aside from the sheer guts to take such a risk where one real faux pas overseas could capsize his poll standings, what I like best about the whole trip is that he's very, very seriously preparing to hit the ground running when he takes office. He understands in a way McCain (and Bush) doesn't the magnitude of the job. That's why he has a transition team already gearing up, win or lose.

It's not cynical semiotics, especially as his whole trip is a gamble that it won't turn voters against him for perceived "arrogance". It's that he's actually a responsible adult who knows what it takes to lead.

America, take heed. Protect this one.

I've said before that, no matter his attributes, by the time November 4th rolls around, voting for John McCain (should he still be on the ballot) will feel like voting assisted suicide for America.

I didn't realize that feeling would actually congeal so soon.

Giants

Bravo to HBO for the just-completed seven-part John Adams mini-series. While perhaps imperfect, it succeeds completely in renewing interest in the formation of our great nation and, in the final episode chronicling the 25 years of his early 17th Century post-Presidency, a passage into pastoral irrelevancy sans Presidential pension let alone multi-million dollar lecture fees or donation-magnet libraries, it achieves a movingly elegiac sweep of this crucial man's life.

After Laura Linney's Abigail passes into the great beyond and an all-but-certain Emmy, Adams begins his famous correspondence with former revolutionary collaborator and political rival Thomas Jefferson, which ended when they both died, unbeknownst to each other on the very same day, the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence they co-authored (with help from Franklin, Sherman and Livingston). This is the redemption point of the series, where Adams finally becomes a whole human being capable of both forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and the American tradition of friendship and respect beyond political differences makes us, as an audience, whole.

Once again, I guess, America is on the edge of its seat.

Honor

The night President John F. Kennedy was assassinated:



Most Barack-like, and where you can see Obama as the populist intellectual descendant, heavyweight division. Interesting also to think of Obama as representing the King side of the argument, but the more publicized rhetoric of Reverend Wright being his Malcolm:



King the "radical" who had both civil rights insiders and the press suddenly turning against him for speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1968:



The eve of destruction:



40 years ago today he was stolen from America.