Some people think George W. Bush did as much as he could to bring about Armageddon with his earlier interventions in the Middle East. But not the man himself, apparently. He has signed up for a fundraising event for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, an organisation which aims to promote the second coming by converting Jews to Christianity, and will speak today at their fundraiser in Irving, Texas.
The idea is that Jews must be converted in order to trigger Jesus Christ’s return to the Holy Land for the Last Judgment. So it is written, somewhere. It’s deep stuff and Christian fundamentalists wouldn’t expect us heathens to understand.
Laugh if you will, but Christians have made great strides toward tolerance over the centuries. Sure, there were the countless pogroms and the Inquisition and they were not nice people during the Holocaust, but that’s ancient history. The new pope is cool and even the Christian primitives — the Baptists and such — are much better behaved, especially when the end is nigh.
And yes, support for Israel is conveniently in tune with the foreign policy goals of American right-wingers, but let’s not be too cynical. The fact that a great Christian thinker like Dubya is eager to convert Jews rather than slaughter them is progress, don’t you think?
Trust me with this. Elizabeth Warren isn’t running. She wasn’t an eager Senate candidate. It took lots of cajoling and begging to get her to make that race. And if you’re hesitant to mount a Senate campaign in a small state where you can go home and sleep in your bed after a day of campaigning, you aren’t going to want to engage in presidential craziness.
You need an immense ego to run for president, a religious-like certainty that you are the best person IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF 314 MILLION to run it. That’s not who Elizabeth Warren is. She’s on a mission, make no mistake, to reform the way Wall Street does business. But she already has a platform to make that happen—a perch in the nation’s Most Exclusive Club and a grassroots army of millions amplifying her voice.
What a relief to read that Moulitsas knows what tomorrow will bring. For a while I thought he might be mulling the pros and cons of someone other than Wall Street’s darling, Hillary Clinton, heading the Democratic ticket in 2016. But that’s almost as silly as thinking he’d own up to being a faux-progressive.
Make no mistake, this guy is being disingenuous as well as patronizing. He pretends to know Warren won’t run — how would he know her mind? — but what he’s really saying is she shouldn’t run. Maybe he’s afraid that, in seeking the nomination, she would wreck the love affair between the Democratic establishment and the Wall Street crooks who tanked the economy in 2008, and that this would be a bad thing.
I’m still looking for logic in The Great Kos’s argument. If Warren is indeed “on a mission… to reform the way Wall Street does business,” then why wouldn’t she consider running for president? Why would she be content to be a voice in the wilderness of the Senate, where only Bernie Sanders and a few others appear to genuinely believe the concerns of the poor and middle-class are more important than those of the obscenely wealthy?
“Given [Warren’s] goals, the Senate is a great place to be,” Moulitsas wrote. This is like saying, “That’s a good girl, Lizzy, sit back in your nice little Senate seat and grouse about income equality and let the old pros run the party, even though they’re as corrupt as the old pros who run the GOP.”
But I’m glad Moulitsas, a long-time apologist for Barack Obama’s disastrous presidency, is so sure Warren will stay put. It means those of us who think she might make a good candidate, and in the process help rescue the Democratic Party from total irrelevance, are probably on the right track.
Footnote: Moulitsas, of course, was fiercely anti-Hillary when she ran against Obama in 2007-08, but likes her now because “she has evolved with the times.” I’m not sure how he’s defining “evolved.”
I handed Swamp Rabbit a bucket of epoxy and put him to work fixing a new crack in the shack that’s deep enough to let in plenty of water if there’s a downpour. While he worked I talked politics, I guess because I’m better at talking than fixing leaks.
“Christie won big, but Ken Cuccinelli is done,” I said. “Terry McAuliffe wasn’t the ideal candidate, but at least he’s a Democrat.”
The rabbit flung a dab of epoxy at me and said, “What planet you from, dude? McAuliffe is a house boy for the Clintons. He don’t answer to nobody but millionaires. And he won by a whisker, even though he spent a fortune and the other guy was an knuckle-draggin yahoo who wanted to outlaw oral sex and probe every pregnant girl who didn’t want to — how you say? — carry to term. The Cooch don’t like no cooch, no way.”
The greasy old varmint hopped off the roof and got on the computer and showed me a Washington Post story from last week. Excerpt, with my bolding:
…Tuesday’s vote – which left McAuliffe the victor by less than 2.5 percentage points – revealed potentially important lessons about Virginia’s evolving politics for both parties.
McAuliffe’s victory masked the fact that although Democrats in Virginia can reliably depend on nonwhite and unmarried voters, they seem to lose among whites and married people almost without regard to their candidates’ ideology or personality. Democrats have lost the white vote by 20 or more percentage points in the last four Virginia votes for governor or president, according to survey data.
“Less than 2.5 percentage points!” the rabbit yelled. “They couldn’t have run a slimier candidate, but he still got the white vote, and a lot of that was women.”
“But he lost,” I said. “What’s your point?”
He spit in the swamp and said, “I gotta draw you a picture? Karl Rove and them other sharpies are looking at the presidential election. They know them good ol’ boys down South won’t never vote for no Democrat, even if he put on a Johnny Reb suit and whistled Dixie on Fox News. But they also know most Northerners, even the yahoos, ain’t gonna vote for some Republican whack job who cheers when the federal government shuts down. So they’re gonna pick somebody who’s into union busting and tax cuts for the rich but not into race-baitin’ and cooch-hatin’ and government shutdowns, at least not out loud. Somebody who’s down with states’ rights but don’t wanna bomb Fort Sumter. They’re gonna pick that fat boy in Jersey.”
My rodent friend has seen little of the “civilized” world, but he’s sure the GOP’s big-money boys will annoint Chris Christie king of the yahoos and in this way bolster the sort of backdoor secession that lets the yahoos give the finger to federal laws but still get federal aid when they want it.
It’s the same point I brought up in October, but with the fat boy thrown in. Hard to argue with the rabbit on this one. I’ll find out when it rains again if he can argue and fix leaks at the same time.
Maybe you missed reports of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bullying a public school teacher at a campaign rally a few days before he cruised to victory on Election Day. The teacher, Melissa Tomlinson, asked Christie why he has referred to NJ public schools as “failure factories.” The XXXX-sized champion of privatization shouted, “What do you people want?” Tomlinson told him teachers want more money budgeted for students. A “heated discussion” followed.
Getting back to the issue of money. I am fully aware of our educational budget. Where is all of this money? To me it seems like it is being siphoned right off into the hands of private companies as they reap the benefits of the charter schools and voucher programs that you have put into place. It certainly hasn’t gone to improve school conditions in urban areas such as Jersey City. The conditions that these students and teachers are forced to be in are horrifying. Yet you are not allowing the funds needed to improve these conditions. Are you hoping that these schools get closed down and more students are forced to go to private charter schools while the districts are being forced to pay their tuition? I know for a fact that this is what has happened in Camden and Newark. Yet these charter schools are not held to the same accountability as our public schools. Why is that? Because deep down you know that you are not really dealing with the issues that influence a child’s education. You are simply putting a temporary band-aid into place. Unfortunately that temporary fix is already starting to be exposed as Charter Schools are showing that they actually are not able to do better than public schools.
The sentences I bolded also describe the situation in my state, PA, where Gov. Tom Corbett is working as hard as Christie to strangle teachers’ unions and privatize education. Both phonies have the same agenda – to enrich large-scale campaign donors and other cronies at the expense of teachers and schoolchildren. The difference between them is that Christie has his eye on the presidential nomination and therefore uses the compliant mainstream media to portray himself as a moderate. Democrats who think Christie can’t get the nomination because he doesn’t have enough cred with the Tea Party are really, really stupid. As AlterNet noted last winter, “…You can piss off some of the people some of the time, just so long as you don’t rock the billionaires’ boats.”
Footnote:Moron or monster? The latter, in Christie’s case. He was sharp enough to somehow demonize schoolteachers and firefighters in his successful first-term efforts to boost his profile (I know, poor choice of words) and the interests of his wealthy backers.
One more: This wasn’t the first time Gov. Ralph Kramden, I mean Gov. Christie, bullied a teacher, of course. Here’s one of several other instances.
My friend Susie, who has read some of my fiction, sent me a bunch of male-novelist jokes from The Toast, all of them in the “how many” format. Like this:
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: This lightbulb is inauthentic.
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: He straightened his tie. He had lost, but in a romantic way, which meant that he had won. “I’m going to do a pushup,” he announced to his tie. His tie respected him for it, and secretly wished that it could have sex with him.
Here’s one of my own:
Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. They retreated at dusk. He ran 30 miles, until his shins were splintered and his lungs on fire. The pain felt almost as good as a bullet. He sat and waited for the commissary mule with the keg of wine to catch up.
I’m waiting for my man/Twenty-six dollars in my hand… — Velvet Underground
“Twenty-six dollars!” Swamp Rabbit yelled. “That’ll git ya one Oxy from the ice cream man on Staten Island. Maybe two mixed drinks at Death & Co.”
He was on the porch at my shack in Tinicum swamp, drinking Wild Turkey and making snarky comments about the record on my turntable. In front of us were mallards paddling through the pond scum, which for some reason gets thicker when the weather turns cold.
“You can’t feed a drug habit with twenty-six bucks,” the rabbit said. “That’s good for three packs of ciggies at 7-11, or a few toots on the pipe with the mayor of Toronto.”
“Twenty-six dollars went a lot further in the 1960s, when Lou Reed wrote the song,” I explained.
The pesky rodent has been dissing Reed all week. I recited for him the Velvet Underground’s discography and informed him that Reed, on “I’m Waiting For the Man,” is working the “white Negro” hipster persona that Norman Mailer glorified in the 1950s.
I suspected the rabbit had no idea the song was so old and hadn’t even heard of the Velvets until Reed died. Then again, he reads a lot more than he lets on. I realized he might be setting me up for another of those questions I can’t answer. He pretended to doze.
“You’re as dumb as duck shit,” I said, looking out at the mallards.
“Maybe so,” he replied. “But if you’re so smart, how come you live in a swamp?”
Footnote: I couldn’t find a live version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” that sounds as junk-sick as the studio recording posted above. First thing you learn is you always gotta wait…
My friend Swamp Rabbit was trying to make me stop reading a lengthy op-ed with the provocative headline “Plutocrats vs. Populists.” “This paper ain’t fit to wrap fish in,” he said. “Even virtual fish.”
He’s right. The New York Times rarely publishes anything truly provocative — I thought they were trending the other way in summer 2011, but I was wrong — even if the subject is as important as corruption of government by the super-rich. The piece on plutocrats, by Chrystia Freeland, “a Liberal Party candidate for the Canadian Parliament,” makes so classic a case of false equivalence that I’m tempted to think The Times’s former editor Bill Keller helped write it. The first paragraph:
Here’s the puzzle of America today: the plutocrats have never been richer, and their economic power continues to grow, but the populists, the wilder the better, are taking over. The rise of the political extremes is most evident, of course, in the domination of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and in the astonishing ability of this small group to shut down the American government. But the centrists are losing out in more genteel political battles on the left, too — that is the story of Bill de Blasio’s dark-horse surge to the mayoralty in New York, and of the Democratic president’s inability to push through his choice to run the Federal Reserve, Lawrence H. Summers.
Populists are “taking over” what, exactly? How do you define “centrist” when one of the two major parties keeps moving further to the right? How accurate is the phrase “rise of the political extremes,” given the fact that only one party, the GOP, is pushing an ideologically driven agenda? Use of the plural “extremes” points to the big lies at the core of Freeland’s argument — that populists are undermining plutocrats and their lobbyists, who control both major parties, and that left-wing populists — whoever they are — are having an impact on Democratic policy-making.
Freeland compares the GOP’s shutdown of the government with the Democrats’ nomination of De Blasio and resistance to Summers, as if these are equally significant examples of extremist power. As if the accepted choice for the Fed, Janet Yellen, is a fire-breathing leftist. As if there is a Tea Party equivalent on the left. As if there are any true leftists in the Dem Party!
If the Dems had a left wing, Obama’s nomination for a second term wouldn’t have gone unchallenged. There would have been resistance in the party to massive tax breaks for mega-corporations, pressure to prosecute George W. Bush and other war criminals, a strong push for single-payer insurance rather than acceptance of clumsy Obamacare. We would have seen a real fight for laws to address climate change and a serious effort to create jobs programs and rescue homeowners rather than big banks.
Freeland warms up using false premises then spouts one logical fallacy after another. Her false equivalence of the GOP’s billionaire-backed “populists” with mythical left-wing foes of the Obama administration seems willfully obtuse. Honest observers know the Tea Party is on board with plutocrats, and that the left — such as it is — is not.
But The Times is interested in the appearance of so-called objectivity, not in presenting an honest assessment of our broken political system, even in the op-ed pages. The plutocrats who own The Times and the other media giants don’t allow that.
My friend Swamp Rabbit, who only likes bluegrass and Bulgarian folk music, asked me about Lou Reed: “If this guy was an outsider, how come insiders sing his praises?”
The rabbit was referring to the subhed of The New York Times’s front-page (!) obituary for Reed: “Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ’n’ Roll.” The obit was a reminder that successful outsider artists, if they live long enough, encounter the irony of being accepted by people and institutions they’d set themselves against early on.
I thought of when I saw Reed in concert at a packed stadium in Prague, in 1996. A friend told me one of Reed’s biggest fans was Vaclav Havel, the Czech president and a well-regarded playwright and essayist. Havel, it turned out, was proud that he’d smuggled a Velvet Underground LP into Communist Czechoslovakia after hearing the band during a visit to America in 1967.
Reed had fronted the Velvets, whose artsy, rough-edged style was far removed from mainstream American tastes and values. The style was dissonant and anti-authoritarian, to put it mildly. Some critics called it anti-musical. The same white, middle-class moms and dads who had tolerated “A Hard Day’s Night” and even “Satisfaction” would not have warmed up to “Heroin” or “Venus in Furs,” even if the Velvets had sold a lot of LPs.
And yet, by the 1970s, it was clear that Velvet Underground had been in the vanguard of an alternative aesthetic that sneaked into the mainstream in a big way, under various guises — glam rock, punk, new wave — and changed the culture. VU-influenced bands led by former art students, underground fashionistas, street toughs in drag, etc., had sprung up in New York City and all over the world. Reed himself broke into the Top 40 in 1973 with “Walk On the Wild Side.”
Meanwhile in Czechoslovakia, Havel was working against the Communist regime as part of a network of dissident artists and intellectuals. Many of them had been inspired by rock ’n’ roll and Velvet Underground in particular. Havel was jailed for several years. The dissidents’ struggle culminated in the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989.
By the 1990s, Reed was still making music but he also was settling into an insider’s role, as an unofficial elder statesman of rock ’n’ roll. Havel had transitioned from outsider to official statesmen, as the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic.
Reed played Prague a few times before and after 1996, sometimes with Havel in attendance. The former outsiders were friends who admired each other not only for surviving but also prevailing against the repressive yahoos of the world. Reed’s brutally honest art had helped make America more tolerant of alternative lifestyles. Havel had helped tear down the Iron Curtain, and he said Reed had helped, too.
“OK, I get it, they were heroes,” the rabbit said. “They helped kill the Commie monster and make America safe for gay marriage. But who’s gonna kill the capitalist monster? Who’s gonna make America safe for poor people? Skrillex? Lady Gaga?”
That’s why my rodent friend annoys me — he asks questions I can’t even begin to answer.
Footnote: Check out The Economist for more on Reed’s friendship with Havel, who died in 2011.
Another: The term “Velvet Revolution” may have been coined by Rita Klimova, a longtime friend of Havel’s and a fellow dissident. The revolution was so named because it went so smoothly, but it’s easy to believe Klimova, maybe with input from Havel, was also alluding to Reed’s band.
One more:John Cale, who was with the Velvets for their first two LPs, deserves as much credit as Reed for the strange beauty of their first and, arguably, most influential LP.
Swamp Rabbit swam two laps around the swamp then dragged himself onto the porch, where I was commenting on the virtual secessionists who are still fighting Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act.
“I can’t get my head around this one,” I said. “Obamacare is a piece of shit compared to single-payer insurance, but it would cover hundreds of thousands of poor people in Virginia alone. If Virginia allowed for Medicaid expansion, the state would save $135 million a year. But these Republican yahoos would rather see poor people die than see them get health insurance.”
The GOP’s refusal to fully implement the Affordable Care Act will leave more than half of the nation’s uninsured working poor, approximately 8 million people, without access to health insurance. The 26 GOP-controlled states not participating in the law’s Medicaid expansion are home to a disproportionate share of low-income Americans who aren’t poor enough to qualify for the existing Medicaid program and make too much to be eligible for subsidies in the ACA’s insurance marketplaces.
The rabbit hadn’t yet caught his breath. His new swimming workout is to wean him off Wild Turkey, but every time he starts to shape up, he goes out and buys another bottle.
“It’s the morons-or-monsters question again,” I continued. “Do the yahoos in the green shirts with the anti-health insurance fliers know they’re doing something rotten, or are they being duped by Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch brothers?”
I told him my favorite Americans for Prosperity argument: People on Medicaid tend to be sicker than uninsured people, therefore Medicaid expansion is bad. The yahoos skip right past the fact that, as Paul Krugman wrote, “Sick people are likely to have low incomes; more generally, low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid just tend in general to have poor health.”
“Do the yahoos who aren’t rich really not know they’re being duped?” I repeated.
The grungy old hare rolled over and heaved into the swamp. “Yeah, they really don’t know,” he said. Then he quoted Karl Marx, who’s supposed to be one of his pet hates:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas — i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
“It ain’t about what the rank-and-file yahoos want,” the rabbit explained. “It’s about what the Koch brothers and them other billionaires want. They own the companies that own the mainstream media and so on. They know how to scare the rank-and-file yahoos into thinking Obamacare is a socialist plot.”
“But Obamacare is a capitalist plot. It makes the health insurance companies even richer.”
“If it helps poor people, it’s socialist,” he said. “That’s one of the ruling ideas. If the ruling yahoos let others ideas catch on, they might not be ruling no more. That’s why they encourage fights between blacks and whites, and between them that’s poor and them that’s almost poor.”
I said, “But this is terrible, Swamp Rabbit. These rich yahoos are fascists. What’ll we do?”
“Do what you like,” he said, “I’m gonna get me another bottle.”
Footnote: Merriam-Webster defines “yahoo” as “a boorish, crass, or stupid person.” The online dictionary has “crude, brutish, or obscenely coarse.” Jonathan Swift, the inventor of the word, used yahoo as a synonym for human being, although he didn’t seem to hate all humans equally. At one point in Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver describes life back in England, where “the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by laboring every day for small wages to make a few live plentifully.”
It’s no secret the yahoos who shut down the government for 16 days have a grander goal than merely scuttling Obamacare. They want to achieve something akin to secession, but without the blood and gore that made the Civil War so unpleasant. Most of them don’t run around publicly voicing the s-word because, as Garry Wills noted, they’ve orchestrated a virtual, undeclared secession that seems just as effective as the real thing:
So we have one condition that resembles the pre-Civil War virtual secessionism — the holding of a whole party hostage to its most extreme members. We also have the other antebellum condition — the disproportionate representation of the extreme faction. In state after state in the 2012 election, there was a large vote for President Obama, but a majority of House seats went to Republicans. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Obama won 52 percent of the votes cast, but Republicans got over twice as many seats (13 to 5), thanks to carefully planned gerrymandering of districts by Republican state legislatures. This advantage will be set in stone if all the voter restriction laws now being advanced block voters who might upset the disproportion…
… The Old South went from virtual to actual secession only when the addition of non-slave Western states threatened their disproportionate hold on the Congress and the Court (which had been Southern in makeup when ruling on Dred Scott). It is difficult to conjecture what will happen if the modern virtual seceders do not get their way. Their anti-government rhetoric is reaching new intensity. Some would clearly rather ruin than be ruled by a “foreign-born Muslim.” What will the Republicans who are not fanatics, only cowards, do in that case?
David Sirota thinks the cowards won’t have to do anything but go with the tea party flow. They won’t have to “openly support actual secession” because…
They know that the filibuster and the gerrymander have already let them politically secede and yet still rule this country. They know they are still ruling because they see government shutdowns structured to protect conservative priorities and they see a Democratic president endorsing conservative healthcare, Social Security and national security ideas. And most important, they know their continuing rule doesn’t have to involve any of the downsides of an official secession, even though a secession has already happened.
It’s the South’s dream come true — secession, but without the payback from Grant and Sherman.
Footnote: I bolded some of the quote-outs from Sirota’s article to remind readers that the yahoos couldn’t have successfully engineered a virtual secession if Obama hadn’t repeatedly caved to Republican demands over the past couple of years. In fact he often agreed with the yahoos, up to a point. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a Budget Control Act of 2011 and the sequester that followed.
One more: Neo-secessionism isn’t confined to the South, of course. It’s also strong in parts of the Midwest and in places like rural Pennsylvania. Don’t kid yourselves — in their hearts, these yahoos are all waving the Confederate flag.
Odd Man Out 