Less Than a Blessed Week

You can't entirely give up on PBS and NPR. I know some of the folks at our local NPR affiliate, WUNC. They're really great people, they do a dedicated job with terrific professionalism, and before there was a home computer in my life, I used to wake up every morning to their voices, informing me in advance of the things that mattered in the upcoming day. These days I have a classical station on the radio alarm. It goes off and I'm up and cutting it off in less than a minute. Then I make coffee, and feed the Houdahenians (who are up to three packets of Whiskahs now, and big as panthers when they decide to jump off a perch onto my chest). If I'm lucky at that point I'll get some puter time, reading the events of the day via good bloggers, doing a bit of writing, whatever. When it starts to get light I'll look out the kitchen door and usually find Momma looking up at me. Pops, the old reprobate, is also hanging around these days, and will steal Momma's food if I don't give him some dry bits to keep him interested in what's in front of his nose. I can't believe we now have, more or less depending on how you term the two wild ones, 5 cats. Lordy. We'd done fine with just one, our little Yoey. Life has changed. Last night Libby said it was my childhood dream to keep them all. I don't remember that dream.

Nonetheless, the pernicious and on going task David Brooks has set himself--to make the increasing vile and grotesque politics generated by the Republican Party palatable to the general public by explaining that the Democrats are the cause, and do "it" too--is greatly abetted by Brooks' presence on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and I refuse to abet it further by sending PBS any more money. And now the same is going to be true for NPR. Mara Liasson, who now works for Fox, did the trick yesterday afternoon on the way home from work. She offered up a seemingly centrist analysis of the campaign so far. According to her, the decisive moment was the Denver debate. That would be the first one, the one Mr. Obama "lost." According to Ms Liasson, who delivered her verdict in the tones of a scholar, and was joined on the segment by the forever amiable Doris Kerns Goodwin, who predictably invoked FDR (although I had my money on a Kennedy ref), Mr. Obama was brought to earth by that first debate, which proved that he had taken Mr. Romney lightly and, even more shockingly, did not really like politics all that much. Was of "two minds" was I think the phrase.

The goal of all these "centrists" is to find "reasons" sufficient to justify a vote for Romney amongst the mysterious undecided voters who apparently lurk in the shadows of the electorate and end up deciding every election, or at least the ones not stolen by frauds, repressions, and the Supreme Court. So it comes down again to arguments by Mr. Brooks and now Ms Liasson, which essentially conclude that "really" there's not all that much to be concerned about with Mr. Romney, if you're just bored with Mr. Obama and want a "change."

Charlie Pierce does not go so quietly into that dark night. As usual, he's absolutely right:

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/hurricane-sandy-climate-change-14261502

This is the choice. Authoritarian bullshit, v. somebody who does have a reasonable perception of reality. If the authoritarians really get a good foothold, I expect their complete contempt for democracy will eventually wend itself into political action even more than it is already--see, e.g., the internal sonogram government rape laws, and the assorted voter suppression i.d. laws. Mr. Romney represents the forces of repressive authority. That is what a vote for him amounts to. And here's how authoritarian thinking works, just as example:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/10/27/mitt-romney-don-know-nothin-bout-birthin-no-gay-babies/

They will come for you next, my friend. Unless, of course, the next big storm doesn't arrive first.

[photo from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/pictures/121030-hms-bounty-sinks-science-nation-sandy-weather/ ]

'Til I Get Back

I've got a whole lot of stuff to do today. Here's a piece from Driftglass that gets at a great deal of the deep problem that America has with it's operation of democracy and rational choice:

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/10/silly-shit-andrew-sullivan-says-ctd.html

Most of us do have the innate ability to make rational choices. Yes, in some cases a piece of information or misinformation will so distort the process that wrong choices are the result. Republicans, for example, have played the so called "right to life" issue to the extent that many sensible, rational people have entirely forgotten that we used to have nothing but dangerous, illegal abortions, which killed and maimed young women caught in life-circumstances and desperate for some solution that wasn't going to destroy their relationships and their futures.

As Driftglass points out here, the daily disinformation is so rampant as to be unremarkable. It is on all the newscasts, pretty much daily. People who are not intensely focused on an election just soak up the muddle, pretty much without a clue that they're doing it. Their prejudices are massaged, their fears enhanced, and Republicans are willing to lie with breathtaking audacity, not only in ads, but in face-to-face conversations such as what we witnessed last week with Romney and Obama.

It should not be the case that after this election we will say, AT BEST, "whew, we just dodged a bullet." This is not the way to have a democracy.

But this might help:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/10/25/sodom-gobama/

Artifacts

I ran into this fine piece via James Wolcott today:

http://www.technologytell.com/entertainment/7616/essay-misquoting-pauline-kael/

As for Pauline Kael, well I read every review she wrote in the New Yorker, and rushed to most of the theaters where the movies she'd reviewed were playing, this being back in the day when most people I knew then did that--there was at that time no video tape not to mention no CDs or DVDs or BluRays or home computers or cell phones. All we had was Vietnam, the movies, Jesse Helms, and the atom bomb.

So when Kael told me about how great "The Wild Bunch" was, I had to go check it out. And it was better than she said, a western that was about Vietnam, the movies, Jesse Helms, and the atom bomb. (And as it turned out, it formed the template for most of the movies Tony Scott made, which he admitted in an interview when he said he never could think up endings.)

The misquote? That's the text for the great problem we have in the body politic. Which is amnesia. Someone said on MSNBC this week that the worst thing about a Romney victory will be that it will teach both parties that wholesale lying is an effective strategy for victory. But of course one of the things the subliminal right wing fascist 24/7 radio machine teaches the millions of folks who unthinkingly use it as their background entertainment as they work is this very lesson. Everything is couched in the parentheses of winning/losing.

This fallacy, indeed, is why we now have these absurd "debates" as a cultural pivot point, as solid and everlasting as the next Olympics, the World Series (starts tonight!), Xmas and New Years Day. We're putting a person behind the controls of the most devastating war machine ever created, which includes on that big control panel full of lights and dials and buttons and joy sticks implements capable of literally destroying countries or even the whole world, and we're making this incredible decision on the basis of a reality show which showcases nothing about the candidates which is particularly relevant to the position one of them will be given (or re-given) in a couple of weeks.

The more rational question is: given the stakes, why in the world would one ever vote for the challenger, unless the current occupant of the seat had already made such a mess of his decisions that another four years was obviously not a good plan. And this way of looking at it has nothing to do with the "debates," but everything to do with looking at events.

Ahhh, but this involves memory. And so we circle back to the big problem. Given that Mr. Obama has done a reasonable job, from day one, all the opponents can do is mischaracterize the history we've all lived through. Indeed, Mr. Romney has presumed that we can't even remember what he said last month, last week, yesterday, or even a paragraph or so back. But MSNBC is wrong about politicians needing the outcome of this election to reinforce the strategy Mr. Romney is employing. That strategy was already proven by Herr Goebbels, and analysed by George Orwell. In the real world it took the deus ex machina of Joe Stalin and George Patton to prove Goebbels wrong. If the Nazis had just been content to keep the hell they built within their own borders, they'd probably still be running things in the Reich.

Or maybe some nihilist heroes, some Viking Wild Bunch, would ride into Berlin and turn the whole apple cart over. That might have happened by now. (I base this analysis of "The Bunch" on Borgnine's line: "No Mr. Pike, we ain't at all like them. We don't hang nobody.")

Consider that this is happening, today, in the fascist regime of Assad in Syria:

[photo (c) Rick Findler for The Politics Blog, Esquire]

Meanwhile in the real world, Mitt Romney continues to endorse, and stands by his endorsement, of Richard Mourdock, candidate for Senate, Republican, Indiana. Mr. Mourdock, well, let me just steer you to Juan Cole, who knows of which he speaks:

http://www.juancole.com/2012/10/murdock-rape-as-a-gift-of-god-and-islamic-sharia.html

The Wild Bunch warn't so good on the wimmen subject matters. There was a joke about Warren Oates and his two Hondo whores in tandem, which was a word he didn't know. And just before the apocalypse that ends the movie, Bishop Pike does shoot a women who shoots him first. That's about it for the wimmens. Just sayin'. Aristophanes was writing over 2,000 years ago.

_______________________________

Further update on the amnesia problem. (Mr. Obama's sorta humorous Ann Richards impression, viz, "Romnesia," somewhat muddies the waters of what is actually a much more serious problem for the United States Democracy of America.) Possibly readers here will actually remember how the Bengazi story went down, in real time. I do. If you don't, or if the ceaseless Fox and fascist counterspin big lie tactic aimed at creating some kind of equivalence between Iran/1979 and Libya/2012 in the "mind" of the typical voter has been making you wonder if you actually remember correctly the events of five and six weeks ago (how long ago they seem now, can it be the Yankees were still in the pennant race, that A-Rod got a hit now and then...), just read this and be reassured:

http://www.juancole.com/2012/10/open-source-center-reports-from-sept-12-on-consulate-attack-support-crowd-protests.html

After which, take a deep breath. Your keys are on the dresser. And, after this election, you might want to even go back and take a look at the actual factual details of Tehran, 1979. It's really odd that the Republican lie machine wants to bring Tehran, '79, up, since it gives the lie to another piece of their alternative history of America, which Mr. Romney asserted in the last debate with great vehemence. Remember when he said that America never instituted tyranny, or supported it? Well in Iran we supported the overthrow of an elected leader, and then supported a royal despot for nearly 30 years. This was why in 1979 Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy in Tehran and held over 50 Americans hostage until the very day Mr. Reagan was sworn into office. It would have been a blow for our collective mental health had Mr. Obama corrected Mr. Romney on this vapid point of rose-glasses faux history, but of course a Final Debate wouldn't be the proper place for truth to crop up.

Within the Margin of Theft

It's been obvious to anyone who cares to think about it that elections in the US can be affected, and results even altered, by a strategic manipulation of various mundane factors which are rarely of newsworthy interest, and so rarely get covered by the media. Nonetheless, last night on MSNBC this story was briefly noted:

http://firedoglake.com/2012/10/20/come-saturday-morning-republican-voter-id-laws-dont-stop-republican-voting-crimes-just-ask-nathan-sproul/

This fine piece of reportage by FireDogLake does much more justice to the facts than the brief MSNBC mention. Here in NC, the local media reports that the Romney people have stopped spending money on ads here. The implication is, they think NC is now in their bag. Possibly it went into the dumpster first? Who knows.

I voted on Thursday. Libby voted Friday. Here in NC, judges are on the ballot as "nonpartisan." (Why this is true given the obvious partisan character of even the Supreme Court is beyond me. I'd much rather know who I'm voting for--maybe that's exactly the point.) Anyways, there was a little tent set up across the street from the voting station with a big banner that read "get your conservative and Republican slate here," and so I went over to it and got a nice list of the judges to vote AGAINST.

I'm still hopeful that the nation will not find itself, in early November, with a cipher who seems to have no ability to empathize with anyone who's not a millionaire, who is advised by the Bush foreign policy team that brought us the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, and the economic team that brought on the financial collapse of 2008. A guy who's Party has worked tireless since January, '09, to defeat every policy the Administration has attempted to employ to bring the economy back, no matter what the consequences for the actual citizenry--this is our next President if Obama loses.

At the same time, I will not be at all surprised if Obama does lose. He's tired. I can see it. Another four years might wear him plumb out, and it might be his personal blessing to be defeated by our appalling national ignorance. And, too, it's pretty much what we all deserve, a Romney Presidency. The US has gotten away with murder for longer than O.J. Simpson. Charles Pierce might be right:

http://www.esquire.com/features/cynic-president-obama-1112

I used to tell friends to always keep in mind that we're in the belly of the beast. In here it's pretty easy, the food's good, the gasoline remains plentiful and relatively cheap, and this fall it still hasn't come a frost. My famous cats are as sanguine as I. One of 'em even opened the bag of cat food on his own yesterday. And I know which one, too, even if he doesn't know that I know.

It concerns me, however, that with Romney we get five sons. A party with no interest in democracy beyond how to thwart it, with a titular head who brings with him heirs and more, and a queenly wife who already talks frequently about "you people."

It was a great relief to get voting out of the way.

______________________________

Sunday Update. Maybe I should have said I "voted." There's this in the news:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/20/romney-family-investment-ties-to-voting-machine-company-that-could-decide-the-election-causes-concern/

WTF! Here's the money quote from the Ungar piece at Forbes, rather unfortunately buried three clicks in:

Numerous media sources, including Truthout, are reporting that Solamere Capital—the investment firm run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, and the home of money put into the closely held firm by Tagg’s uncle Scott, mother Anne and, of course, the dad who might just be the next President of the United States—depending upon how the vote count turns out, in our little tale, in the State of Ohio—have shared business interests with H.I.G. including a reported investment in H.I.G. by Solamere.

So Tagg, the son who wanted to take a sock at Obama at the end of the last debate, own's a chunk of the company that builds voting machines for a chunk of Ohio and some other crucial swing states, as does Tagg's mother Anne. Ain't that a coinkedink. Nothing to see here, move along.

You'd think maybe these Romney folks would at least realize that this connection doesn't look right. Maybe it depends on who's looking though. In the room full of millionaires to whom Mr. Romney is willing to bare his soul, it probably looks just fine.