the defeatists!

Hysteria in the face of reality

Never been a big Glenn Greenwald follower and frankly I think that everyone on the Left/Right/floating in the ozone needs to take a deep breath on this one. An enemy combatant had taken up arms against the US, and oh yeah, he had been born here. I personally would have loved to see him captured and tried in a military court and hung -- yeah, hung -- at Fort Leavenworth. A trial and a supermax would have been ok too. But, the guy represented a clear and present danger in the war zone -- he wasn't trying to surrender, he wasn't trying to calm things down. He was going from point A to point B in Yemen. If he'd been doing this in Alabama, using a Predator to take him out would have been wrong. He wasn't. He was doing it in fucking Yemen. Advocate war against the United States -- not like Jane Fonda but like Benedict Arnold, and it really doesn't matter what passports you're entitled to carry. You're a valid target. 

LIfe sucks in war. It's a danagerous business. This guy was a totally legitimate target. He thought he as an Islamic Warrior waging jihad against the west in general and the United States in particular. Waste him. Huffington Post, Greenwald, Wonkette for Christ sake!Get over it. In fact, be happy the bastard is gone. 

He's baaaccckkk...and needed.

The generic concept of “The Union” might be big and on the big scale it might over-reach and when you look at it only in the largest context it might sometimes be as irresponsible as some of the smaller of the big corporations, when you look at what it really is – the collected drops-in-the-bucket of the individually powerless $18,568 teacher’s aide in Fond du Lac or the $23,559 traffic warden in Milwaukee or the $48,152 cop in Appleton, or the $22,233 radio sportscaster in New York in 1980 – “The Union” is the only protection you have when the drunken boss comes in to fire you because he doesn’t like you, or because he got elected on a promise to his puppet-masters that he’d fire you and everybody else like you so as to soften this country up to pit the urban middle class against the rural middle class so nobody’s paying attention as the corporations reduce everybody they can to subsistence levels while they take the collected drops-in-the-bucket of the mere thousands of bucks stolen from the fired or the de-unionized or the retirement-delayed, and turn them into more millions to stuff into their own pockets.

Hey, Keith Olbermann can be a smug pain in the ass; on the other hand, he's knowledgable, consistent to his principles and doesn't hesitate to piss off the powers that be. It appears that he has a problem I've shared, great bosses who have lousy bosses. His new blog is up and it's got some interesting stuff in it. If I had been his boss, would I have shoved him out the door the day we made the decision? Probably not --I understand why MSNBC might have been nervous about a prolonged farewell, Lawrence O'Donnell has done a decent job and Rachel Maddow has stayed on target. I have no fondness for Ed Schultz, since he brings his right wing radio host who became a liberal schtick to the air at a time I am looking for something to watch. On the other hand, 2-3 hours of TV news over dinner is more than enough for this Irishman.

Olbermann's initial piece is about the Wisconsin brouhaha, and the place of unions. Like a lot of us, he had a union card or two as he trundled through his career. And, since being in the union saved his job once when a drunken exec decided to fire him because he didn't like him and thought that Keith's argument with his direct boss was grounds for firing and some character defamation, he's invested.

I'm sure Keith Olbermann is still a pain in the ass to his bosses. I suspect that I have been one to my bosses; I'm fairly sure most of the contributors here have been difficult to control at times... However, while I pride myself on not bowing to any Moloch-like Wannabe Toughguy or Gal, there are times when I wish there were rules enforced by an agreement to protect people like me; at the end, our only recourse is to sue, and that's not good for your wa or your karma. Although, it can be lucrative and a lot of folks are forced to do so.

Here's another thought -- unions may have problems, but in a company versus the union argument, justice will probably side with the employees. There are times when union work rules result in some injustice, but for the most part, the scales of justice are very heavily weighted toward the employee and the employee's representative.

It is that time of the year...for sexual abuse of endangered aquatic mammals!

Personally, I await LeBron James incarceration for sodomizing an underage manatee on South Beach, but we can only hope. "Collins failed to understand that while driving under the influence is dangerous and irresponsible, breaking into women’s houses to watch them sleep, especially if their husbands are home, is weird. Grasp the fine line: Normal, hyperlibidinal violence and irresponsibility are okay; crimes that reveal you to be both irresponsible and a psychosexual dissident are not." Matt Taibbi rules.

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.

If the guy was 35, they'd have nominated him for Hillary's seat...

I'm sure he's a nice enough guy even if he is going to BC, but his 15 minutes of fame were pretty grotesque to begin with, and it's time to be gone from the footlights. 

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.

Random reflections--Be right, or have your life work

The last time I was this sick, the spouse and the significant other were existentially wrestling over whom it was going to be to put crap up my nose. While I was praying to Tiffany for the blessed release of an OD and sweet death based on equal parts crank and heroin, they were struggling with Qtips covered with Aloe Vera and similar stuff. Naked. In a mud bowl...or, maybe that was the drugs. Cynical C's spouse is using some Haitian potion brewed tealike on him...and, Mrs. AXE, given that she has the field to herself, has taken to brewing tea for me. Is it a women thing -- excuse, wyrd Sisters of Shakesville, wymyn thing -- to pour tea down the throat of suffering men and Qtips of crap up the nose of the sufferers? Momma AXE used to put together a concoction of milky tea with honey and a shot of whiskey. We weren't so well off to have it have been Bushmills, I assume it was something awful like Canadian Beaver Musk, but I can recall the taste.

Is doctrinaire Republican conservatism the new "New Left?" Culture Wars has a piece basically repeating things from Kathleen Parker about what happened to her and to Chris Buckley over Sarah Palin and McCain. Now, the NR crowd never really liked McCain, so if he's all they got going for them at this point, they're fucked anyway. Barry Goldwater supposedly wasn't that high on McCain. Hell, the people who were highest on McCain were anti-government intrusion Democrats back when he had ethics, integrity and benefited from not being George Bush. So, the fact that Parker and Buckley, and Powell, and on and on and on are all opposed to this ticket and the party as presently manifested should cause some thought.

However, the Left consumed itself back in the day. Bill Ayers and Tom Hayden make an interesting contrast here. Hayden married Jane Fonda and has been a semi-mainstream liberal ever since, serving in government and running for elections, trying to change the system from within. Ayers came up with the Weathermen, which morphed into the Weather Underground ( The forecast inside the the salt mine is -- dank, damp and cold? Power to the People) and then discovered that bomb throwing had some problems...he got a PhD and is a professor of Education at a state-funded university.

Hayden and Ayers confronted a simple, existential question --Do you want to be right, or do you want to make your life and ideas work? Effectiveness versus some form of ideological purity? Hayden chose making his life work; Ayers has vacillated. He still wants to be right; he's done some very good things. But, he's still dealing with the idea that a bigger bomb might have done better. Which frankly is absurd...a bigger bomb would have done worse. The average human being is really not that into ideology, or principle, or whatever. They have other things to do. The Chattering Classes, as George Will describes them, on both sides of the spectrum, don't. The Haydens of the world get their hands dirty and their boots dirty and get things changed incrementally. Enough incremental change, and you have something totally different. Viral video, viral social and political change. The Ayers of the world want a big bang theory change...ultimately, like the Weatherperson Underground, they either self-destruct or blow up a men's room. And, talk of the tragedy of the self-destruction (If I hadn't been such a douchebag, I coulda been a contender! Goddamn system) and whimper and moan.

Well, if we look at Will, Buckley, Parker, Noonan, Brooks, Powell et al. as being like Hayden, I think it's safe to see Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Krautheimer et.al as being like Ayers. Ayers calls himself a "small c communist," which is absurd in real life, although semantically possible. I'm not a Christian, I'm a christian; I'm not a Catholic, I'm a catholic; I'm not a Democrat, I'm a democrat. Punctuation is not a part of human speech. Air quotes are absurdities. Speech is actual; punctuation is potential. It is not possible to separate communism from Communism in the understanding of the western world. Call yourself a Marxist or a Hegelian or a Jeffersonian Marxist (I think that would translate at some point into Maoist thought) or a Jacksonian Communist (which would be some sort of paternalistic anarchy at some point) or do something. Ayers has accomplished some things in Chicago and they appear to be good things. He appear to be a decent man today -- but, Hayden can say, "I didn't change, what we were doing didn't work so I did something else) and he can point to accomplishments on a bigger stage. While I prefer the city of Chicago existentially to the entire state of California, a smaller impact in a larger system probably produces more change than a relatively larger impact in a smaller system. Whatever the fuck that means...

Using the George Bush popularity quiz from the 2000 election, whom do you think Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater would rather talk to and work with? Hayden or Ayers? Biden or Palin? Obama or McCain? If Buckley was the intellectual of the conservative movement (hey, whatever happened to Edmund Burke, Aquinas and Plato), Goldwater was the quintessential hands-on, get it done, do the best for the country type of guy. Who could they forge an agreement with? Palin would make Buckley cry, and McCain pissed off Goldwater. Buckley might want to give Biden some rhetoric lessons (Slow down, you Irish clown. You think faster than you can talk, so pause every now and then to let your rhetoric catch up with your mind) but I think they could find a lot of common ground. Obama's JFK style similarity would probably work well with Goldwater, as would the practical approach. Let's remember, that JFK and Goldwater were discussing doing something similar to the McCain proposed townhall meetings for the campaign in 1964.

That would have worked because they could talk to each other. Practical men with different beliefs but a common ground. So, the center-right conservatives and the Democrats have more in common with each other than the center-right conservatives have with the hard right. The hard left has been reduced to bomb-throwers and wannabes in Harvard Square and Berkeley. It's funny, but Barrack Obama might turn out to be Ross Perot. If Perot were black, not crazy and not from Texarkana...

Well, the ash draped chubby English immigrant sings...

Although there are good reasons to the contrary, as a contrarian, Crusader AXE remains fond of Christopher Hitchens. He's so far to the contrarian side of things that he willingly takes himself. Ok, he's been erratic, somewhat crazed, and goes off on some fairly odd tangents but the guy writes well, says what he thinks and isn't afraid to make a point. "You can almost hear his melodious English grumble as he fusses with his morning oatmeal and coffee, and finds the wine-stained post-it note stuck haphazardly on his laptop screen: “OBAMA ENDORSE, SLATE.” Well, then, let’s get on with it — before some clumsy mental midget like Jonah Goldberg beats you to it, old salt. Christ knows all the big names have already done so …."

I go back to my belief that Dick Cheney should volunteer to be waterboarded if it's not so bad...Hitchens had the balls to see what it wasand the grace to feel like he wasn't really able to be a man about it. Note: when the reptillian brain kicks in at times like, oh, when you're fucking drowning, you're not a man so much as a thing trying to survive. He describes it better and more eloquently than I..." myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass."Probably not, brother, probably not.

Speaking of a thing trying to survive, we have the phenomonon of the McCain devolution. When you're drowning, you're not a man so much as a thing trying to survive. So, Hitchens gets tired of drowning... "Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him."

So, given the guy's basic integrity, I'm not surprised that he has endorsed Barrack Obama for Overlord Mayor of Wassila and all parts evenly vaguely related and and Sarah Palin for Moosecatcher. I think he sums up well the frustration of the reality based, we have to live here in this fucking country, faction with this comment:

"One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign."

Nailed it.

Sound, fury, pride, passion ...Over a Blog?

OK, just to get this straight. This is Naomi Wolf!

Our brother the immortal IOZ is taking fire from a variety of sources, including some dimwit who then got upset over Mr. Fundamental's styling. At which point, the Defeatists were called in to give some covering fire...anyway, this piece on a progressive's somewhat hysterical and paranoid response to Sarah, Todd, Turdblossom published in Huffington Post caused the uproar. The first responder said only "Wolf." Well, yes, gotcha. While Naomi Wolf is a hysterical progressive who actually is a very attractive woman according to her Wiki entry despite her concerns with men objectifying women. The piece began with this, "Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state," and rapidly spiraled downward from there into despair, gloom and wrist-slitting. For the record, which ever Naomi-thon wrote the piece was indeed hyperventilating and Sarah Palin is not going to be president of the United States, she's going to be in Alaska in jail for corruption unless she of course gives herself a pardon for it because that's what the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress intended.

Now, Naomi Klein is another hysterical progressive who is also a attractive, somewhat younger woman who has written a  somewhat paranoid but intriguing book, The Shock Doctrine  and who also writes for the Huffington Post. IOZ had a little bit of fun posting this Huffington wail as well as an add-on. "I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place...)."  Yeah, an ellipsis inside a parenthetical comment followed by a period. I have to admit that the "but intriguing" is based on reviews...I started reading it, and her syntax and level of hysteria reminded me of something on a site like "Exposing Reptillians" or the "The Gates of Vienna."

You know, I think the problem for literate people writing posts is that they occasionally miss something because they generally know how to spell, or transpose a name because they know a lot of people with a similar name who are floating around in their heads; they aren't writing term papers and they're actually thinking as they write. IOZ has actually read both gals' work and thought about their writing and their material. (If I'm a sexist for calling somethings named Naomi gals, you need to seek help.) Many bloggers and readers suffer from virtual illiteracy and an addiction to MS Office...I envision them in their little cubicles or maybe in the local Starbucks, writing their little posts in Word, Spellchecking, maybe changing the fucking font and background, adding a watermark, then copying it and sending it forward. If you spell and grammar check, and if all you've ever read is The Audacity of Hope, Harry Potter and the Utne Reader, you're somewhat restricted in your ability to err, however slightly. Wolfe, Klein, whatever. Blogging, despite what I used to endure when I would guest blog over on Eye of the Storm, and Crispin would correct my fucking grammar, is not pedagogy. It's not even gogy. It's our Speaker's Corner, and that's really all it is.

And, for the record, this is Naomi Klein.

So, Dudes and Dudettes, please, give the gay Gatsby of Pittsburg a break. Still, I'm totally befuddled by the passion on this one. Now, IOZ must be doing something right -- people actually care enough to respond to what he writes. My post, of which this is an elaborative, self-plagaristic parody, was number 74!!!   Of course, he doesn't have the typepad anti-robot to discourage comments. Still, the only time we ever got anything like that was when AGI picked on a Christian, Neo-Punk Boy(Kindof) Band, calling them retards and shit. Turns out, they were both. So, we're jealous.... But, if we got a bizillion hits at Defeatist Central over some nonsense I tossed up but misconfused to channel Twitshit a bit,  Naomi Klein-Wolf-Woof with Naomi Judd and the focus was on the Naomi Judd and not the substance  of my piece, I would just call the idiots who got that worked up fucking idiots and go on to something else more interesting. Note that IOZ read them, and actually responded to a few with his usual lupine grace and wit. When we get that level of snark, we tend to invite people to read something else, and to go the fuck away...I guess that might be why we don't get a lot of comments. That, and of course, no body reads us...except referrals from IOZ. So hang in there, buddy, and while I know you won't let the bastards grind you down, please continue to add grace, wit and that touch of viperous compassion to what  so often is a waste of synapse, energy, electricity and time.

Looking forward to the end of the Bush administration “as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal

In Twitshit and Turdblossom's vision of America, Everyman  is susceptible to utter bullshit. The redeeming factor of things like blogs -- from all sides -- and The Daily Show is that at some level they indicate an unwillingness of a segment of the population to go along with bullshit. My boss and I started in on a political slant yesterday, and I threw up my hands and said," Let's not discuss this anymore. We're never going to agree on who's right and who's wrong. Fundamentally we agree, the current state is un-fucking-acceptable." Laughing agreement and bitiching about stupidity and triviality ensued. Until I got the call about the environmental outrage perpetrated by one of our work shops. For some reason, the mechanics didn't want to use the portajohns provided, and had taken to pissing on the ground outside...which, over time turned into a large environmental issue. In the same shop that morning, all the mechanics decided it was nap time at about 8:30AM. A government monitor came in about 8:45AM. Merriment ensued...

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

And then, of course, there was this moment of sheer insight...

Given a daily reality in which “over-the-top parodies come to fruition,” Mr. Stewart said, satire like “Dr. Strangelove” becomes “very difficult to make.” “The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists’ wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true,” he observed. “You go: I know what I’ll do, I’ll create a character who, when hiring people to rebuild the nation we invaded, says the only question I’ll ask is, ‘What do you think of ‘Roe v. Wade?’ It’ll be hilarious. Then you read that book about the Green Zone in Iraq” — “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran — “and you go, ‘Oh, they did that.’ I mean, how do you take things to the next level?”

Unlike a lot of talking heads, Stewart reads the books. Unlike others, he understands what he's reading.