Pundit intoxication

I bet someone is wishing they had this one back.

Uncle John 'n' Huck

Before we say goodbye to Huckabee, who's been so good to us even though we didn't begin to scratch his creamy surface, I want to send you this piece from WJB biographer Michael Kazin on the limitations of comparing Huckabee with Bryan.

Bryan helped initiate the progressive income tax; Huckabee wants to abolish it in favor of a national sales tax that would fall most heavily on the working and middle class. Bryan tried to expand federal power to aid working people; Huckabee opposes universal health care “mandated by federal edict.” Bryan was the first major-party nominee to receive the official backing of organized labor; most unions shun Huckabee, who governed a right-to-work state where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Bryan hated war and resigned as secretary of state in 1915, when he thought President Woodrow Wilson was leading the U.S. into the hell of World War I; Huckabee strenuously supports the war in Iraq.

How to apply one’s faith to public life has always been a controversial matter. In 1896, Bryan’s Republican opponents lambasted him for using the Crucifixion as a metaphor for his monetary policy. But neither in that campaign, nor during his two other races for president (1900 and 1908), did he ever, like Huckabee, advertise himself as “a Christian leader,” give sermons in churches or call for amending the Constitution to fit “God’s standards.”

For Bryan, who idolized Thomas Jefferson, the separation between church and state was absolute. As an exponent of the Social Gospel, he used the Bible to justify aid to the poor and scorn for the rich – not to install his faith into law. What’s more, he needed the votes of Catholics and Jews, and so avoided taking positions that would alienate them.

Many somewhat reputable gossipers (about the best you can do, really) have Huckabee filling out the GOP ticket as McCain's veep, which makes no strategic sense to me. Huckabee is toxic to the kind of independent moderates and Republicans embarrassed by the prevalence of religion within the party that McCain will need to pull to have any chance at winning. Also, Huckabee won't be much geographic help; if a GOP presidential candidate needs to solidify southern white evangelicals, he's already in a world of trouble.

Speaking of ol' John, there's a burgeoning and admirable effort among liberals to scrub the popular media image of McCain as a straight-talkin' maverick. But their focus is narrow and their incredulity a little forced; McCain is a conservative, but there are good reasons why the right-wing populists don't fully trust him. In particular, many white liberals may not appreciate how great a shibboleth the immigration issue is to the hardcore jingoes, and thus the significance of McCain's relatively sane position go right past them. McCain is seen as someone who goes along to get along with the social conservatives; while he gives lip service to them, they don't believe he's someone who'll fight for their issues once he's calling the shots, especially with more Democratic gains in Congress. He is an extremist on the war and foreign policy in general, of course, and is only a "moderate" because he clears the exceptionally low bar of opposing the torture gulags.

But what of all those right-wing media gasbags and other public mouthpieces who are suddenly overcome with enmity for McCain now that it's too late to reasonably derail him? And why did James Dobson finally endorse Huckabee once the race was effectively over? (Most of the Frat Row conservatives similarly became infatuated with Romney.) My hunch is that they are bailing off the sinking ship so when McCain goes down heavily they can initiate the inevitable meme that he was not conservative enough and won't have themselves tied down to a landslide loss. The truth is exactly opposed; McCain will do the best he can running as a faux-moderate who will still struggle to escape the shadow of the Bush regime. But I don't expect that to faze them.

The weekender

Been a slow posting couple of weeks, as I've been feeling especially stupid and dense lately. Also, it looks like the election won't be over anytime soon, so I've been less interested in delving into the day-to-day minutiae. Luckily, I can still post video treats. Here's Joanna Newsom and her traveling band playing my favorite song of 2006, boiling down Van Dyke Parks' lush string arrangement into a minimalist but still sublimely effective stew.

Also, I hope everyone was up late to catch Yeasayer on Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Friday. If I haven't plugged their record "All Hour Cymbals" enough yet, allow me to do so again. I'm really becoming addicted to it.

I wanted to pick a George Carlin bit for the sermon, but couldn't settle on just one. I think what I admire about this the most is the subtle rhythm of the cadence that lets you enjoy it even on repeated listens.

Baby I love your chemistry

I've been slogging my way through Dr. Louann Brizendine's book "The Female Brain" and, alas, it doesn't appear I can make it all the way through. It's not that the book is long, exactly, but my poor abused wallpaper tells me it can take no further punishment. Perhaps I should have taken the back cover blurb by David Brooks as a warning sign.

Maybe I'm being unfair. I did make it through the sections of the book on love and sex, and it can only get better from there, right? But that's what I'm here to talk about today, as you might have reckoned by the date.

The title of the book thankfully spares me the trouble of describing its contents. Brizendine is an accomplished psychologist, and distilled this book out of decades of her own research. It is, as far as I know, scientifically unassailable, and may even be informative if you've never spent significant time around a woman and occasionally listened to anything she said, a solution I'd recommend I'd recommend as a source of more accurate information than this dreck. I admit my bias here; I'm a quixotic crusader against determinism, biological or divine; which is to say I'm pissed off at whichever one gave me the short end of the stick, and intend to get my revenge.*

In Brizendine's book, she tells the story of one of her clients, a film producer named Melissa who has had a string of misses with on the dating scene, until one night at a dance club.

Melissa was locked in gaze with this stranger. A wave of energy shot up her back. It was the feeling she hadn't experienced in all the months of her bad dates. There was something vaguely familiar about him. "Hmm, who's that?" she said under her breath to Leslie, as her brain's cortex scanned her memory banks. No match was found, but all her attention circuits were now on "mating alert status."

The closer he got, the more unfocused Melissa became. She grabbed her drink tightly. Her eyes and attention were riveted on him--his leather Armani shoes, his sexy black cords, and no wedding ring on his finger.

Aww, yuppies in love! Indeed, this is an ongoing theme in the book which makes it easy to see why Bobo and his friends were so enraptured; it could more easily be titled "Trials and Tribulations of the Urban Bourgeoisie."

Even though Melissa is an "independent economic unit," she must still go through her assigned evolutionary duty of seeking a man to be a provider, which Brizendine assures is us "not sex stereotyping" but cold, hard biological fact (reminiscent of the scientific racism of "The Bell Curve" and the unfortunate Dr. James Watson). I'll save you the suspense; Rob is indeed a successful marketing consultant, saints be praised, and as far as we know their molecules coexist happily ever on.

Melissa may not have wanted to meet anyone that night, but her brain had other plans that are deep and primitive. When it saw Rob across the room, a signal went off for mating and long-term attatchment, and she was lucky that his brain felt the same way. Each of them will come up against anxiety, threats, and mind-numbing joys, over which they have little control because biology is now building their future together.

Yes, very lucky indeed. For us ugly shits*, or people without the limitless leisure hours for gene experimentation as a San Francisco film producer or marketing consultant, we'll have to find some other way beyond the time-tested ways of our ancestors, who were apparently Yalie Cavemen. Brizendine here actually contradicts something she says at the beginning of the chapter, which is that Melissa was, in fact, looking to "settle down" and find a mate now that she was secure in her career. This is an ongoing problem throughout the book; using arbitrary anecdotes to buttress supposedly hard-wired behavior. In another passage, we learn Melissa doesn't sleep with Rob on the first date because her brain is still sizing up his long-term suitability. I'm more than capable of doing the same, of course. If our brains assign us long-term partners based on first sight, most people's experiences would suggest they aren't very good at it.

Everyone, I think, can point to having a similar response as what Brizendine describes in Melissa. Mine was my first year of college, when I was wholly smitten by another journalism student with a cherubic face, a river-long smile and a cool sweep of blonde hair. On any given day I was both earnest and terrified with the prospect of seeing her, and felt the onset of stomach sickness if I was around her for too long. You can predict how it played out, and it wasn't with me screaming at her that my brain had ineffably assigned her to me against my will. (She was mercifully graceful when I did finally confess it.) I think most people emerge more practical from these infatuations, and don't try to justify it with evolutionary twaddle.

It seems to me people can be just as fulfilled in relationships where they talk to each other in addition to fucking. Perhaps Brizendine shares Brooks' concern that white folks are denying their biological impulse to extend their genes and are being outbred by the darker-skinned mob. I'm sure we'll find a way to survive, even if you end up with a withered branch of the evolutionary tree.

*I'm aware this is not a sufficient excuse for me, of course, since beyond beyond horrifying to look at I have all sorts of other personality defects that won't be getting passed on. I reckon this is a point in Brizendine's favor.

It bears mentioning as well that Brizendine doesn't consider much beyond the straight-arrow polarities of "male" and "female" brains. What about the vast gray area in between? Too unseemly, apparently, along with the rest of the proles who don't fit the Urbane Gothic paradigm.

After all that depressing inanity, I'll raise you a Billy Bragg elixir.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.

..and belated Sermon, w/commentary

Sam Smith, on Edwards and the Donkeys:

It didn't used to be like this. I have sometimes tried to explain to people, usually unsuccessfully, that we've always had born-again Christians; we just used to call them New Deal Democrats. And those construction workers, easy foil of the New Yorker cartoonists, were once part of a Democratic electorate before they were lured away by the likes of Ronald Reagan.

For many years, as the Democratic establishment has become wealthier, the traditional Democratic base has been steadily pushed away as too dumb, too prejudiced, or otherwise too unworthy of the party. It wasn't that abortion, gays and family values were intrinsically so important. But if your campaign contributors won't let you talk or do anything about pensions, healthcare, outsourcing or usurious interest rates, the door opened wide for the rightwing hypocrites.

Class has always been the forbidden fruit of American political debate. A civil rights activist, Julius Hobson, with whom I worked once put it this way:

"The struggle isn't whether you like a nigger or a nigger likes a cracker or whitey is a pig or any of that stuff. I've called people whitey and pig and the FBI never said a word. All I have to do is put on a dashiki, get a wig, go out there on Fourteenth Street, and yell, 'Whitey is a pig and I'm going to take care of him' -- the FBI will stand there and laugh at me. But the moment I start to discuss the way goods and services are distributed and I start talking about the nature of the political system and show that it's a corollary of the economic system, that's when the FBI comes in for harassment."

And the Washington DC of today proves Hobson's point: a black city run by black politicians that is one of the most class-divided places you'll find in America but about which hardly anyone ever talks.

So along comes a wealthy southern white male lawyer and tries to change things back to the way Democrats used to do it. And what happens? Yes, those with power move to keep him in the background. Yes, from the start the establishment media gave him as little coverage as possible.

But more significant was the reaction of average members of the liberal - really post-liberal - establishment. Ridicule and disgust combined with a stunning disinterest in Edwards' issues that told much about the Democratic Party today.

Not only was this elite bored with Edwards' program, it made clear that the candidate didn't look or talk right, was too wealthy to say such things, and, when you come right down to it, wasn't one of us.

And, oh yes, the most frequent comment of all: he once had a $400 haircut.

Nowhere was it mentioned that Hillary Clinton had had a $1200 makeover during her Senate campaign. But then she wasn't the issue. She belonged.

I cut a lot of the post, because it's an absolutely brilliant analysis, and I still left quite a bit there worth reading.

When Deer Hunting with Jesus was released, a lot of people instinctively compared it to What's the Matter with Kansas? because both dealt with the rightward drift of the rural white working class. But there's a crucial distinction. Frank's dilemma is why these voters supposedly vote against their economic issues in favor of their social values. Bageant's counterargument is to point out that this is a false choice; the Democrats don't in any meaningful way represent the economic interest of the white working class, so they go with the right-wing puppets of fundie religion instead, the only people who'll at least pretend to care. (Incidentally, Frank seems very aware of how the DLC sellout in the '90s brought about the current paradigm, but doesn't let it faze him too much, perhaps because liberals wouldn't want to read his books about the backwards proles.)

But to suggest the Democrats have become a narrowly-defined platform of feel-good social liberal causes is severe heresy, and causes certain liberal activists to blow their stack. You're selling their issues down the river to appease the white Christian male oppressors, just like the scheming Liberal Dude(TM) they always suspected you were. Pretty soon we'll have back-alley abortions with coathangers, government-sponsored re-education camps for gays, and all kinds of other unpleasantness.

And they aren't necessarily wrong, because this is how the Democratic establishment typically behaves when it needs to pull in some rural voters in flyover country. They certainly don't want to step afoul of all the Party's new friends who are giving them such a huge fundraising advantage this election cycle. Besides, they reassure the activists, everyone knows the rubes are utterly implacable on Jeebus and abortion anyway, and letting them in the party would erode all your work.

Is this true, or a convenient lie to keep the barbarians away from the gates? I won't fully sanction the hagiography of Edwards, but he was the candidate with the most aggressively populist message, and he was also a very popular choice among social liberal activists on the Internet. There doesn't need to be a conflict here; indeed, the only places where it exists are the heads of the donkey brass. Edwards ran very well in head-to-head polling against the GOP, but we'll never know if he could've built a much more radically inclusive update of the New Deal coalition than the celebrity version proffered by Hilbama and endorsed by the media and the Party.

Sunday song...

Continuing the theme of songs for summer (or perhaps it's me associating everything good with the summer months), here's Beirut (the band, not the city, of course).

In the belly of the beast

Mister Leonard Pierce of Sadly, No! is blogging from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. It may be ostentatious Tompsonesque prose, but that and a barrel full of narcotics are probably necessary to survive that much crazy all packed in one location.

I do have to steal this particularly revealing picture:




The only thing wrong with all those flags is they're blocking the telescreen. Saint Reagan can't see out.

Hey Knight

King Kaufman gives the dear departed General a well-deserved one-finger salute.

The Knight chorus -- which, it's important to note, includes most of his former players -- will go into iambic pentameter about discipline and molding young men. But who was more undisciplined than Bob Knight?

If he had an ounce of self-control, the slightest ability or desire to tame his own impulses, his career would be ending not with his slinking off in the middle of the season in a relative basketball backwater, but as the much-respected coach of a perennial power, if not Indiana than some other giant in the Big Ten, ACC or Big East

If Bob Knight had a player with the same lack of self-discipline that Bob Knight the coach had, the kid wouldn't have made it to Thanksgiving of his freshman year.

Convicted felons aside, Bob Knight is probably the single famous sports figure I'd least want my kids to grow up to be like.

For authoritarian sociopaths like Knight, however, the hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug; a fact Knight tacitly acknowledged throughout his career. He had paid his dues to society, and now society had no sway. This is how paternalism recycles itself; by ensuring each new generation of the repressed resents its masters enough to empty out the pent-up frustration on their successors.

Knight's defenders have often claimed that his massive list of accomplishments has accorded him space beyond the moral law, a curious invocation of relativism from people normally not persuaded by it. But they realize admitting Knight's great achievements amount to winning basketball games would be vulgar, and they know any ordinary coach would have been sacked long ago for Knight's embarrassing shenanigans. So they point instead to his graduation rate and speak in lofty terms about crafting perfect masculine icons, as if this somehow would have justified his employ if those banners weren't hanging from the ceiling. But even this is damning with faint credit; in the flaming degraded pit of the college sports industry, Knight was the rare figure who did what should be the bare minimum. He was also filled with sneering antipathy toward the egg-headed academics who wanted to reform the system.

But in the world of late capitalism, there is no competition too trivial, no platform where refined masculine warriors locked in a brutal contest to slay their competitors is irrelevant, perhaps Bob Knight is an American hero. One who broke a cardinal rule of jockdom by quitting on his team in midseason. To the very last, nothing ever applied to him.

Bring 'em on

Obama last week won the endorsement of the members of Moveon.org, the activist group representing the largest liberal faction of the Democratic Party. A candidate needs a 2/3rds supermajority to win the group's endorsement, which Obama eclipsed with over 70 percent of the poll. The New York Times' Caucus blog reports.

The Republican National Committee weighs in, scoring the endorsement as a sign of what they call Mr. Obama’s left-leaning ideology and a rejection of Mrs. Clinton.

“It’s no surprise MoveOn.org would endorse the newly crowned ‘most liberal’ member of the Senate. Obama may claim to unite the country, but he’s only uniting the extreme-left wing of the Democratic Party,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Republican committee. He added, “Considering how MoveOn.org was originally founded to defend the Clintons, this must be a blow to Senator Clinton. Coming after the Kennedy and Kerry endorsements, today’s news begs the question: Why are those most familiar with Clinton’s record rejecting her?"

What the GOP spokes-bot is referring to, before further killing the English language with yet another misuse of "beg the question," is the annual National Journal survey claiming Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate last year. You can't take a list too seriously that considers Obama and Biden further to the left than, say, Sanders and Feingold, and, as the Crooks and Liars post suggests, the conspiratorially-minded will note that National Journal's 2004 top spot went conveniently to Kerry and Edwards. Where would the GOP be without a liberal helping of liberal liberal talking points, preferably backed by authoritative sources! Liberal liberal liberal liberal liberal!

Kidding aside, this could make for an entertaining dynamic in the general election should Obama pull through and face McCain, who looks like a dead lock (and also looks just...dead). Will Obama follow his predecessors and react to the inevitable Liberal Scare by burying the base and running for safety in the Mushy Middle? Well, yes and no. Obama is an infinitely more skilled politician than Kerry, and he has so far been able to juggle the seemingly incongruent coalition backing him, and he knows he can't count on the muddy middle against McCain. Alas, he won't turn into an unabashed liberal in the general, and the substantive outcome will most likely be the same. But I think Obama's a better counterpuncher than he gets credit for being, and he could react effectively by using the "divisive" card to deflect charges of his liberal liberalyness.

The imperial pastime

As much as professional football is contributing heavily to the general rot of society, I still sometimes give in to the temptation, and I must say how much I thoroughly enjoyed the outcome of last night's Supper Bag, or whatever they call that thing. Mostly for the schadenfreude on Boston fans and self-righteous white liberals the country wide, I admit, though perhaps the only thing worse than a Boston fan winning is a Boston fan losing, especially if the loss is in tragic or dramatic fashion. Still, I think I can live with it, at least until the Don DeLillo novel XLII hits the bookshelves.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how few American Loyalty Checks there were during the Fox broadcast, though I didn't see any of the 58-hour pregame show. Give credit to the NFL; they run a tight ship and the broadcasters rarely stray from worshiping the Almighty Pigskin. Also heartening was the low quality of the perennially-hyped Super Bad Marketing Bonanza, giving hope that perhaps the country's best creative talent isn't expended in selling products.

No football for another eight months? It's Morning in America! (Hey Mel, my team needs a third-string safety!!)

Sugar!

This is gonna be awesome.

How should we then live?

The liberals are already reaching for the Nader Panic button, which can only mean one thing; the Democrats are about to nominate another pro-war, pro-corporate jelly-legged mud golem for the presidency, and someone's going to have to take the rap for another underwhelming performance in November. And with John Edwards folding his tent on Wednesday, that's the "choice" you have left.

Perhaps the only people more delirious than old Ralph's retinue of diehard supporters are the liberals who think he's still a factor in elections. Leaving the long arguments about 2000, it's indisputable that Nader was a total non-factor in 2004, when the Democrats were facing an unpopular incumbent in conditions where none had ever survived and still flubbed it, spending seemingly more energy on legal challenges to Nader's ballot status than fighting the smears about their own candidate. Yet still they cry "No Nader, No Bush!" and this is their absolution.*

Which is not to say I'm among Ralph's holdouts. There's good reason to believe backing Nader has done significant damage to the Green Party, to the extent that the party is now sharply divided between those who think the Green's should endorse his "independent" run and those who want him to just go away at any cost. Nader's political usefulness is shot; he's too much of a lighting rod for liberal angst to be of much value anymore.

It's time to get a fresh face or two, someone who'll hit the donkey party and its liberal lackeys on their weak link--serious electoral reform. Sane liberals will admit to you that following Democrats to hill and dale will usually result in supporting the lesser of two evils but, they insist, you must vote with the system you have, not the system you wish you had. What the dishonest party hacks won't tell you is that they're perfectly happy with the system they have, and don't have any plans to change it.

Nader is actually cogent on this point, although his solutions come up short as we'll see. Liberals often argue that people seeking to move the Democrats to the left should work from within the party through the primary season. But no progressive campaign is going to have the resources to compete against the corporate-funded Dems in the current Money Primary system , the follies of which I detailed here last week. Progressives should watch the Huckabee campaign (and the social conservative movement in general) and take heed; the party is happy to have your loyalty, but strike out on your own and you'll be crushed. They'll outspend you five-to-one and call it a mandate to dismiss your concerns.

Tony Benn is fond of saying that democracy is such a radical idea because it takes power away from the ruling class and gives it to everyone equally regardless of wealth, which makes it easy to see why we haven't got very much real democracy anymore. So you'll be hopelessly outspent inside the party, but there is one powerful option available to you--your vote. But even here, there are few possible positive outcomes. You can, as Nader has argued, withhold your vote from the Democrats in the general elections, hoping that forcing losses on the donkeys will make them more receptive to your ideas in the future.

In practice, however, this is completely ineffectual, as the last seven years have shown. The liberals will blame you for every bad Republican policy that congressional Democrats capitulate on, and the party itself doesn't care. The DLC/Hilbama/Muddy Middle vanguard of the Dem establishment fulfills its duty to the rancid system by being the liberal wing of the business party. They do their service to the Empire by keeping the levers of power out of the hands of dirty hippies and anyone else challenging the birthright hegemony of Yankee Capital. Sure, they may boost the good social liberal causes like abortion and gay marriage but, like their Republican colleagues have done for the opposite side, they are not much invested in the outcome beyond fostering the illusion that you have a real choice. So you can abstain from voting for Clinton or Obama if you wish, but its a wasted non-effort. They are beyond the point where you can meaningfully punish them.

I haven't yet gone over to complete despair yet; it's much too early in my life to begin that sequence. The way out is through serious electoral reform; public campaign financing, preferential/transferable voting, open debates, and more just primary system. (Proportional representation as well, but let's not get carried away here). This ought to be on top of the agenda for the Greens or any other minor party's presidential ticket. Neither of the monopoly parties will accede willingly, of course, but if enough outside factions could be arrayed together, perhaps some of the more honest party hacks will take notice and even some sympathy. From there, who knows?

*"No Bush, No Bush" works just as well. See how much easier a one-party state can be?

From your lips to God's ears, vol. 1

Steve Benen brings us this beauty from Jonathon Hoenig of the unironically-named CapitalistPig Asset Management, on the equally unironically-named Fox News program "The Cost of Freedom."

“What worries me about the Democrats is that if you listen to them, their message is so explicitly socialist. I mean, at every opportunity they seem to have this contempt for capitalism, this relentless pursuit of collectivism and this total distrust for free markets. If you put all the politics aside, their goal is a national health care program. Their goal is environmentalism. They see bigger government in every element of public life. That has never been good for America and it has never been good for the market either.”

After many years wandering in the wilderness, experimenting with hard drugs, pansexual orgies, and "Liberal Fascism," the prodigal sons of the Right have finally returned home to their red-baiting roots. Let us kill the fatted calf in celebration, and give a toast to Comrade Hillary and the Democratic

Too little, too late

The Wall Street Journal throws some cold water on the Obama-mentum after his blowout win in South Carolina.

Among the major Super Tuesday contests, Mrs. Clinton has wide -- in some cases double-digit -- polling leads in California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arizona, Missouri and Alabama. Mr. Obama leads in his home state of Illinois and in Georgia.

The demographics in many of those states also seem to play more to Mrs. Clinton's strengths, with big populations of Latinos and white women, groups that helped carry her to victory over Mr. Obama in New Hampshire and Nevada.

So far, Clinton's big leads have had a way of disappearing as the primary date grew closer, but this time the significant Obama ground game won't have a chance to plant itself and gain traction. Turnouts will be lower, and will be decided more by the Clinton-worshiping Dem establishment.

A quick and merciful end may be the best-case scenario for the pitiable donkey party at this point, before anybody gets seriously injured, and before too many Sensibles start to realize that the Clintonian reputation for underhanded Machiavellian tactics wasn't just a creation of the Evil MSM after all.

Sunday sermon

It's about a week late, but here's some Martin Luther King, Jr. for your edification.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

-April 4, 1967

Saturday song

I'll save the nostalgia for another week, I think. Here's The Gossip

Now that's more like it

I sometimes think the free-market fundamentalists must lack the courage of their convictions, what with the running for the heretical government bailout whenever the seas get rough. Everybody likes the laissez-faire when times are smooth; I want to see someone keeping a hand on the rudder while the ship's going down.

Luckily we have David Brooks; finally someone willing to fiddle while Babylon burns. Of course, Bobo's paradise isn't going to be ruffled one way or the other, why would you ask?

Good on him

I thought the "Choke-avic" snickering after the US Open final last year was pretty unfair, so I'm happy to see the kid emphatically redeem himself. The other finalist is Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, an unseeded French player who has beaten three top-10 players en route, including an annihilation of Nadal in the other semi.

Things are set up for a Serbian sweep if Djokavic comes through and Ana Ivanovic beats Sharapova in the women's final on Saturday.

All you fascists

Jonah Goldberg is an editor at National Review, the bastion of highbrow American conservatism, and as such is what passes for an intellectual on the right these days. He is the son of right-wing publisher Lucianne Goldberg, proving, along with the Kristols, Podhoretzes, Buckleys, Bozells, and Bellows that intellectual conservatism is remarkably hereditary.

If you follow my "On the Beat" widget, you know that Goldberg recently wrote a book called Liberal Fascism, a laborious effort to revise the history of fascism by placing it as the sole property of the political left. Goldberg infamously claimed his argument "has never been made with such detail or with such care" which is rather self-evident, since no one's ever made that argument at all. That detailed, careful argument is essentially a drawn-out recreation of the old gotcha game that places the Nazis on the left because they had "socialist" in the party name. (One wonders if Goldberg also believes North Korea is "democratic.")

I'm not going to waste my limited patience for reading on Jonah's 50o-page whale of idiocy, and I don't imagine you are either. (Thanks to the Oprah-like power of the Mel-Anon Book Club, Jonah's tome will now disappear forever from bestseller lists). If you must have a little taste of the blubber, Sadly, No has many excerpts from a leaked copy last month, including the instant classic "the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism." (Goldberg, unluckily, hits the trifecta.) Crooked Timber and Orcinus have steamrolled what little there is of a substantive political argument between its pages.

I do have a couple of minor observations to make. It's ironic that Goldberg's apparent definition of fascism effectively mirrors that of the '60s New Left which helped drive the term into meaninglessness; which is, as a shorthand for any authority forcing me to do something unwanted ("I have to tuck my shirt in; this job is so fascist!") This may still be a colloquial misuse of the term, but Goldberg apparently mistakes if for a scholarly opinion Goldberg does want to apply the clause "with my money" to the above definition, which is apparently a modern libertarian trope.

Goldberg goes to great pain to reassure you that he is not calling liberals Nazis. Liberals don't want to gas Jews and homosexuals or invade inferior Slavic countries, they only want universal healthcare and sustainable organic farming, just like the Nazis did. In other words, they are like fascists in all the ways except those that actually make fascists dangerous. So why is "liberal fascism" such a severe revelation? Because they're still FASCISTS!! BLAAAGGGH! FASCIST FASCIST FASCIST!!

Of course, if liberals and leftists have degraded the term fascism by applying it carelessly to conservatives, the right has returned the favor by smearing liberals as crypto-Communists. They may want to get their story straight. A synthesis of fascism and Communism may prove beyond the capability of even Goldberg's revisionist pen. But perhaps this provides an opportunity to have some fun of our own.

I liked it better when it was called Big Brother, part the second

Welcome to the next installment of our short-running game show, America or Oceania?

Today's quiz:

Which nation has a ruling party which possesses the technology and means to create a more equal and prosperous living standard for its citizens but instead allows inequality and poverty to skyrocket while it spends lavishly in the name of defending itself from phantom, ever-shifting international enemies.

America, or Oceania?