the defeatists!

Enthusiasm gap? How'd that work in Berlin in 1928?

The revealed truth appears to be that the Obama administration and the Democrats are doomed, doomed, doomed because a lot of self-identified Democrats aren't going to the polls in 2010 because they lack enthusiasm. I would have thought the futility of the Obama administration and the president's inability to recognize that you can't get people who don't want to reconcile to reconcile or people who want to be disruptive and uncivil to be constructive and civil by listening might have a bit more to do with it.

It is always easier to get people to be against something as opposed to for something...and, Democrats in today's political cess-pool are in fact far less ideologically pure than Republicans. Who appear to have annointed  Sister "Gosh darn it, I'm special! Not Like Trig is Special, but Special!" as a spokesperson.

If there ever was a time to run a "give 'em hell, Harry" style effort, this is the time. However, while his name doesn't come up all that much, Obama is tied to Marshall McLuhan's view of media. Television is a "cool" media; the internet and blogosphere is a hot media. One of the aspects of a cool media is a certain level of dispassion; the blogosphere is nothing if not passionate. In addition, the administration in particular and the congress as well isn't able to respond. I'm not thinking Bush, I'm thinking Weimar...the mainstream politicians and press became irrelevant while the Nazis and the Commies and the various nutcases became the mainstream.

Well, outside of running Springsteen for New Jersey governor, how the hell do the Dems connect? They need to have a bit of party unity, and they need to scapegoat the Republicans where they bastards are vulnerable -- like Maine, for example. Rural health care in Maine is a joke, but Snowe and Collins have blown the chance to make history. Joe Lieberman needs to be invited out of the Democratic caucus, immediately, with Lincoln, Landrau and Nelson to follow. Let them be ideologically pure...somewhere else.

If they Dems pass health care, 2010 will not be a debacle. If they don't, or what ends up passing is a disaster, then a lot of Dems won't show up. In 1934, the Nazis showed up. They were evil, wrong, and totally unconnected to reality. But, damn, they were enthusiasm personified. What I suspect happens in 2010 is that who ever wins, we lose.
Kurt Weil and Berthold Brecht and the new decadence...

They're either incredibly stupid or incredibly stupid...or retarded.

Pity the previous president. His sycophants are already forgetting the high point of his reign, besides T-Ball... Ok, there was the 9/11 thing but that happened only 9 months and change after inauguration, so what the hell? And then there was the anthrax stuff, but what the hell; bio-terrorism doesn't really count, does it?

I've been wanting to write something about the Senate vote on health care but I'm finding I really am unmotivated about it. I tried to rise to a level of indignation over Beckenbaugh's comparison of Mary Landrau to a whore, but shit, she's a politician from Louisiana. At least she's only a metaphorical whore, although her family has been kingmakers in Louisiana since before the Kingfish himself and Jimmy Rogers. She comes from a long line of whores and pimps and thieves and such. However, her vote counts. And, she'll get something for it. All Davvy Vitter will bring back to the Bayou is going to be a paper bag over his head and several bails of Pampers.

Back to Landrau and Glrush Beckenbaugh. In a state where finding a Mojo woman who'll take food stamps is what counts as health care, a few more free clinics in the outlying areas and the arrival of a van with vitamins for rickets and pellagra and pills for intestinal worms will be really popular. I'm not sure I see how this works out, but I keep thinking about the Churchill line, when a woman at a party told him he was drunk. " Yes, and you are ugly. Tomorrow, I'll be sober, and you'll still be ugly."

But, back to the lead. Dana Perino or Perrino or Perrier or whatever her name is not only hasn't taken her husband's name, maybe because he's British. And thus, either a football hooligan or an illegal alien. Or gay. Or all three. Probably in the Taliban. She is not following the Wingnut way, the whole subservient to man thing. Of course, according to Wikki, she hasn't bred yet, which is a good thing. I was wondering where she went to school, and while I nothing nothing at all about her undergraduate school which has rebranded itself as something else, she has a Masters. In Communications. From a real school in a real state. Granted, she's originally from Wyoming, but she grew up in Colorado. She has no excuse for being this goddamn dumb.

The audacity of hope, the timidity of success, the certainty of absolute fucking failure

Without change. When the change candidate doesn't deliver, what the hell are you supposed to think? Once more into the breach, dear friends? Or, what the fuck?

I have been thinking about the "Fire Geithner!" movement for a while and not commenting because one bureaucratic-white-shoed -dipshit in a suit looks a lot like another. However, there has been a swell of interest in some quarters, reflected in the Huffington Post, to fire the guy and replace him with Robert Reich. Personally, I'd like to replace Obama with Robert Reich, but what the hell...however, Paul Krugman makes a series of excellent points today, and   he's convinced me. He's not a fire Geitner guy, so far as I can tell, but he's certainly taking aim at the administration's lack of testicular fortitude in the face of what Wall Street is telling Obama as opposed to what mainstream economists are telling him. Since Wall Street and the bankers got us into this mess in the first place, going to them for advice on how to get out of it is a bizarre approach. I believe the right term is reinforcing failure.

As far as I can tell, the analysts now warning about soaring interest rates tend to be the same people who insisted, months after the Great Recession began, that the biggest threat facing the economy was inflation. And let’s not forget that Wall Street — which somehow failed to recognize the biggest housing bubble in history — has a less than stellar record at predicting market behavior.

Still, let’s grant that there is some risk that doing more about double-digit unemployment would undermine confidence in the bond markets. This risk must be set against the certainty of mass suffering if we don’t do more — and the possibility, as I said, of a collapse of confidence among ordinary workers and businesses.

Being a defeatist means being disappointed but in a rational way. Right now I'd be more likely to follow Bo into the Rose Garden than Obama to Starbucks. I wasn't enraptured of him -- wasn't all that enraptured with anybody -- but he seemed to have some reasonable chops as a leader, was certainly brighter than hell, and seemed to show class and balls at the same time. Well, fuck me blind. Don't cry for me Argentina...grow some, get a goat transplant, do something that shows actual audacity. I'm pretty sure most of Wall Street didn't vote for him. I'm pretty sure that if this continues, I'll vote a write-in in 2012 for Jesse Ventura. And, so will a lot of people.

I was talking to a friend of mine...

I don't like to talk politics with friends. We either sit there in an orgy of intellectual negative masturbation (accomplishes nothing, doesn't feel good) or I realize that they are complete fucking idiots. However, I'll talk culture and social science until the cows are butchered by Pig's guard duck and Sarah Palin because she got all the moose. Case in point, one of my buddies and I went out for lunch yesterday, stumbling on a barbecue place that appears to be a small SOCAL chain called Johnny Reb's. (Strongly recommend it, by the way. Get the brisket and the hotlinks combo plate, paying extra for some sweet potato fries, and have it with collard greens. If you want the pinto beans, make certain you get the cornbread and crumble it into the beans. They're great, but it has more of a soupy texture. The cornbread will add some consistency. I'm going to fast for my next visit, especially since they have something called a Hereshie's Chocolate Cobbler on the desert menu, which sounds scarey...) Anyway, in the space of our conversation which revolved around what's happening to my former employer GINORMOUS, he admitted to watching O'Reilly and expecting him to tear into Sarah Palin. I said something along the lines of "What the fuck you talkin' about, Willis?" Somehow, he thought O'Reilly was kind of moderate conservative. This is a smart guy, and a good friend. But, Brother, I know what you're getting for Christmas...a copy of The Federalist Papers and the Constitution.

While that kind of floored me, we agreed on the substance...the country is in serious trouble, and while it's nice that our various stock accounts, retirement accounts and so on are all doing so well after the late unpleasantness, it's all imaginary. There's no reason to think the markets are based on anything other than the itching hemorrhoids of the traders. He asked me to explain derivatives,  which indicates that there is some hope. We're both pissed off at Obama for lack of testicular fortitude -- imagine the fun that JFK, RFK, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or my favorite, Franklin Roosevelt, would have had right there at the podium with ole Congressman Joe Wilson. Obama looked offended and stared hard...I watched Ted Kennedy gut the Republicans in 1970 by ignoring them and pumping up a candidate from the Left Fringe (which in 1970 Massachusetts could be pretty fringey) and turning the race into something between Liberals and Loonies...the Republicans got their 35% of the vote, and Teddy got the rest. The fall after Chappaquiddick. Obama needs to find his inner rat or hire a better guard duck.

And, on Sarah "dangit, I'm special" we agreed. There's no there there, and we don't get it. Well, Matt Taibbi does and I bow to the master . He sees it in a larger context, but she really is more representative of where 30% of the country reside. It doesn't matter that there's no there there...to a large extent, that's really what it's all about.

It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts...And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

What amazes the AXE is that he's nailed it. Politics was once about ideas...policy...direction...doing things. Now it's about a short news cycle and who can scream the loudest. And, most people don't relate to ideas, policy, direction, doing things. They want to sit there, shoving cheetoes into their pie hole and bitching about the assholes. Who're the assholes...everybody.

Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes. Me personally, I waste an enormous amount of time seething over people who get onto crowded subway cars with big backpacks on and/or talk in the Amtrak quiet car and/or drive 57 mph in the fast lane or, my personal favorite, walking with glacial slowness in a horizontal row four overweight tourists across on a New York City sidewalk. We all get into furious arguments at work that make us want to explode in self-righteous fury (in my office dramas I always realize I was actually the asshole a day or so later) and when we get home from work, this is usually what our loved ones hear about for at least the first hour or so.

Not health care, not financial regulatory reform, not Iraq or Afghanistan, but — assholes.

What can I say...he nailed it. I expect the 2012 campaign to be about whether or not we should all drink Gatorade because it has electolytes, and the 2016 to be decided by a Monster Truck contest.

Playing Palin, she thinks she freaking Madonna...

Divas do not make good politicians. I know people who have worked in the Senate, for example, and behind the scenes guys like Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer are total dickweeds. Teddy Kennedy, except for the drunken Irishman schtick and the cockhoundness before his remarriage, was a fairly decent guy. The Alaska delegation seemed to have a fixation on assholes, although Begich has yet to offend anyone the way Ted Stevens offended all sentient beings. Bill Frist was supposedly a fairly nice guy; Trent Lott was charming; Bob Dole had an extraordinary sense of humor. In fact, I suspect Dole could join the Defeatists as Cato and make all our stuff here and at the outlier sites -- or sites of which we are outliers -- a lot better. His wife, on the other hand, makes dildoes look warm and cuddly. However, they were all invariably polite to people who demonstrate that they love them. Until now...



So, Sarah Palin is showing her true colors. Not that anyone needs to be surprised but...the AXE figures that she'll blame her self-induced flashing of the true Sarah on the liberal media somehow.

"We gave up our entire workday, stayed in the cold, my kids were crying," one man was quoted saying. "They went home with my wife. She was out here in the freezing cold all day. I feel like I don't want to support Sarah."...Another woman told Indy Channel, "We bought two books from Borders to have our receipt and our wristband to get it signed tonight. My books are going back to Borders tomorrow." The angry crowd turned on Palin as she returned to her "Going Rogue" tour bus. (Emphasis added)

First of all,  The Typepad is not recognizing Palin as a proper noun as I draft this, which means Michael Palin should sue. Next when a crowd of ignorant assholes turns from cheering and orgasmic moaning to booing and catcalls, that's pretty tame behavior. Wonder how many of these twits were carrying guns? If they'd shot the tires out and torched the goddamn bus while making her sign the books and their various body parts, and then barbecuing the kid, then they would have turned. Here, some dipshits got a comeuppance...delivered by the Moose-slaughterer Profundis herself...

This makes the John Stewart bit even more relevant. Seriously, if the candidate for whatever is this oblivious, this tone deaf, then all I can say is that Mitt-Plastic-Fantastic-Romney might have a chance. Huckabee is supposed to actually care about people, even though he gets his economic theory from Malthus. The more Palin shows that she's just a self-centered, baby-popping, ignorant cunt from the backwoods, the better their chances. However, neither MPFR nor Huckleberry can get the crowds riled up and the base enthralled. If I were the Dems, I'd stockpile this footage and play it often.

Dulcinea Dowd nails it...and I remember why I love her so dearly!

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Yeah, well, I wasn't hesitant to say it, but I'm not a lady with a degree from the Gentile side of Catholic Education. She is, and the rapier is more Maureen Dowd's style than the AXE. But, she's skewered the bastards. This is what every commentator and citizen who is not comatose has thought for months. They've done everything but yell "Coon-ass half-breed nigger at the guy, call his mother a nigger-lovin' whore and hung him in effigy. Guess what -- Michael Steele is an Uncle Tom; there's a reason why finding black faces in the Republican party is hard. The party of Lincoln has been captured by the party of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not the great General, but the racist slave-trader who butchered Black Union soldiers.

This madness is sooooo Birth of a Nation. Joe Wilson appears to be getting ready to ride; all he needs is a sheet. South Carolina is almost a theme park anyway -- they have Charleston, Columbia, and alligators; an endless supply of toothless hillbillies; and, an actual bunch of nitwits. We really ought to consider walling the place in and charging admission.

Andrew Jackson threatened to hang John C. Calhoun for his nullification nonsense. I kind of wish he had -- the last 170 years might have been quieter.

"The easy way out usually leads back in."

The Kantian-Lutheran philosopher of realized reality, Karl Von Clausewitz identified the difference between what was planned and what actually happened as "friction." In much the way that friction slows and stops a ball rolled across a floor, the friction of human events, the "for want of a nail, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a kingdom lost," beats us all up.

I find a stark irony in John "Biggy" Boehner blasting the Democrats and Obama for not putting everybody back to work in less than six months. (AXE NOTE: Law 7 of the The Fifth Discipline: Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space. ) We've had nothing but jobless and near jobless recoveries since the dot.com bust. There are a number of problems that plague the job-market, but bitching about a trillion dollars not producing jobs is kind of interesting as a tactic, but not a good strategy. Bob Herbert says it really well:

Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo. (AXE emphasis and comment: The Times may be moving from the staid gray lady mode, what with color and occasional cartoons, but Herbert is too much the gentleman and Bill Keller, the Managing Editor too much a wuss to say what they really thing. It's not mumbo jumbo, it's fucking delusional! Utter goddamn bullshit, taking an economic definition and applying it to life. I'll pass over the Will Rogers thing about " a recession is when your neighbor loses his job but a depression is when you lose your job... Now, the definition of a recession is X number of quartes where the GNP shrinks. Governments, banks and the mega-rich worry about economic definitions, as do reputable social scientists. I, as you probably have noticed, am a bombthrower. The recovery is a fucking disaster for real goddamn people.) Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. (AXE note: The Parable of the Boiled Frog.) The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis....There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming. (AXE commentary: I keep waiting to see a quantification of that underutilization because it's going to shock people.)

Now, Paul Krugman and a number of other folks not blinkered by definitions have repeatedly pointed out that the stimulus package was probably not close to big enough. And, they started saying it a lot sooner that Big Boehner, except they wanted a different result. On January 25, Krugman's column led with:

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon. Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

On March 8, Krugman got pretty specific...

As I read it... (the)  White House has decided to muddle through on the financial front, relying on economic recovery to rescue the banks rather than the other way around. And with the stimulus plan too small to deliver an economic recovery ... well, you get the picture. (AXE comment: Yup. Audacity bumped into "prudence" and "Temperance" and Audacity blinked.) Sooner or later the administration will realize that more must be done. But when it comes back for more money, will Congress go along? Republicans are now firmly committed to the view that we should do nothing to respond to the economic crisis, except cut taxes — which they always want to do regardless of circumstances. ( AXE Commentary: Ah, yes, another "Bush" recovery. Great idea. Fuck 'em.) If Mr. Obama comes back for a second round of stimulus, they’ll respond not by being helpful,(AXE Comment: Were they helpful the first time?) but by claiming that his policies have failed.The broader public, by contrast, favors strong action... But will that support still be there, say, six months from now? (AXE Commnet: Maybe. Start answering their question, where's ours?) Also, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions...

It helps to remember when contemplating the Republicans that Marie Antoinette wasn't being callous when she said, "Let them eat cake." She was trying to be helpful. If you have no bread, eat cake...yeah. On the 27th, in his blog, Krugman wrote:

Now, no doubt this is partly about politics, which, as Brad says, (AXE Note: Brad Delong, Department of Economics, UC Berkeley) makes some people stop thinking like economists...   ( AXE Credo: I have come to believe that politics makes people stop thinking... or, better stated, true believers and politics results in the confusion of thought with passionate intent.)...But I think there’s something else. Doing what I think of as real macroeconomics — the tradition that runs through Keynes and Hicks — actually involves thinking about interdependent markets, in a way many economists never learn to do. At minimum you have to keep straight the relationships among the markets for goods, bonds, and money; if you try to think about either interest rates or the price level in terms of just a single market — interest rates determined by supply and demand for lending, price level by quantity of money, full stop — you get it all wrong, (AXE emphasis) especially in times like the present...And as I pointed out a long time ago, many economists just don’t know this stuff. Even in macroeconomics, you could build a career without ever understanding what Keynes and Hicks were driving at — and if you’re under a certain age, perhaps without even ever having heard about it.

Ok, this could go on for pages. However, Paul Krugman and Brad Delong and Tom Herbert have gotten it right. Timmy Geitner, Lawrence Summers and gang including Treasury, Commerce and anyone else you want to think about have GOT IT ALL WRONG. One of the interesting things about Berkeley and Princeton is that they both have a tradition of not being solipsistic in their thought. One of the things about Harvard and the University of Chicago is that they do have that tendency. However, the guys that seems to underline Krugman's thinking appears to be Peter Senge and Russell Ackoff, and the need for systems thinking. Government doesn't lend itself to systems thinking -- departments equal turf wars and compartmentalization. The President and his closest advisers are supposed to systematize things, see the inter-relationships and look at consequences and then...then...make value judgements. In American politics today, the AXE suspects that the only consequence is the immediate and the only value is re-election. Madeline Albright asked the question of Colin Powell, "What is the purpose of having this marvelous military machine if you don't intend to use it?" Bad question, of course, as the Secretary of State should have included a priviso about using it wisely to accomplish things. But, same underlying issue for Batboy...Why accrue all this political capital unless you intend to wisely use it to accomplish things.

Why I haven't said a lot...

I've relatively quiet about the election, the post-election, the pre-Inauguration and expect to say relatively little about the Inauguration. At the moment, my favorite Obamas are the kids who while as bright as the previous Democratic kids of my lifetime seem to have the ability to cut to the quick. "First African-American president...speech better be short." "It better be good.."

Well, there's no doubt that Batboy will deliver an eloquent speech. The problem is the reality that underlies the speech. Things suck, and will continue to suck for a long time and the American people -- hell, the people of the world -- have short attention spans. We'll waive flags, talk about how great everything is going to be and then like Cthulhu, return to our slumbers. (AXE just compared the American people to Dark Gods, the old ones? Yeah, make something of it...) And things will continue to suck.

Now, I hope I'm wrong. I suspect not, but I hope I am. In general, the level of hysteria is absurd. This isn't going to be like the revitalization of the countryside in one of those Stalinist films where all the happy peasants go out and build fucking canals. It's going to take time. And for many, time is not what we have a lot of...we have several wars going on (Drugs, Terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan); a tanked economy; a tanked world economy. In the past, the military has done well on recruiting and retention when the economy has sucked. Well, duh, of course it has. But, enlistments are up and retention is way up in the middle of two wars and whatever we want to think of Drugs and Terrorism as...)

So, it's looking grim. And, at about 1215  tomorrow, reality should be setting in.

Well, the problem with history is that it is what makes today...

About a year ago, I was spending lots of time in a room with a bunch of my closest friends, the negotiating team from Ginormous Defense and our counterparts across the room, the Teamsters local, who in some cases are people I regard as friends. Anyway, the union honcho and I were talking about politics, and he said something acidic about Twitsheet de la Dweeb and his cohorts. I didn't disagree; however, I said that I blamed Jimmy Hoffa I for the mess we've got. He stared at me -- he's at a level in the union where they probably have arcane initiation requirements involving tatoos of Hoffa in sensitive places, secret oaths, and something like the Skull and Bones initiation sequence from The Good Shepard. He asked me what I was talking about and I said, the Construction Workers were probably as much to blame. Now he was definitely curious, and asked for clarification. I smiled at him and said, "Who'd the Teamsters and the Union Movement REALLY support in 1968? 1972? 1980? By stiffing Humphrey over cultural conservatism as opposed to supporting the most vocal champion of labor in the history of the Senate, the whole thing started to come down..." He looked at me, shook his head and nodded.

If you live long enough, and 40 years isn't all that long, you can see the cows, ducks, horses, chickens and wolves return.Krugman has a great column this morning on this aspect of the Republicans and their southern strategy, pointing out that the government by the parochially loyal but incompetent was inevitable. However, I differ from Paul on one point -- Bush is EVERYBODY"S fault. EVERYBODY with a vote, a buck or two, a degree of awareness and perhaps some values, beliefs and attitudes that reach beyond the reptillian part of the brain that reacts and is driven primarily by fear of "the other" to cite my French Existentialist subconscious.

The "other" is a mass of things -- in 1972, it was people with long hair, girls without bras and "niggers riding in cadillacs..." It's new -- and old --ideas like the Constitution of the United States, economic justice, free love, drugs and open sexuality. Now, from that partial list, some ideas are good ideas, some are bad ideas and some are kind of neutral. But, fearing ideas is bloody stupid. Being afraid of the other just because they are others is equally absurd. If Bush actually read The Stranger, he would have encounted exactly what put him in power and the inevitable, albeit often long delayed result. Let's have some Dylan --Roxy Music Style.

Bastards...or Banker's Dream

Well, money talks and bullshit walks... all over the people of the Isle of Sark... Tell me this isn't the dream of every Steve Forbes, Bill O'Reilly, lunatic right, Richard Shelby-esque asshole. Yup, jingo Joe the plumber and the Barclay Brothers are flipsides... Since the Barclay boys own a lot of tourist stuff, I'd say a boycott -- a fine Irish tradition -- might be in order, particularly of the stuff in England, the Ritz in London and Telegraph.