Goddammit
No, I'm not referring to the Eagles' almost-heroic loss to the Patriots tonight, though it was one of the most surprising (I thought the 24-point spread was about right and that the Eagles would roll over, as they generally have on "Sunday Night Football"; I couldn't have been more wrong on either count) and ironic (think similarities to Super Bowl XXXIX, with turnovers, dumb blitzes and questionable clock management wiping out superb effort and occasionally brilliant execution) football games I've ever seen.

I'm referring to the upcoming film adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first novel in a superb trilogy by British author Phillip Pullman that takes the fantasy forms of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia and attaches them to a thundering denunciation of faith-based authoritarianism through history. Annie's finishing the trilogy right now, and we are--were--greatly looking forward to the movie's release next month. The look is right, the casting was strong, and you presumably could trust New Line Studios, who made the Lord of the Rings films, to competently handle the production.

What they couldn't be trusted for, however, was to stay true to the moral and philosophical core of Pullman's story. Terrified of controversy and the depradations of professional assholes like the anti-Semite Bill Donohue, New Line gutted the story and, based on this Atlantic Monthly piece, has produced something that will have the body of Pullman's story but not its soul:

The final, shooting script includes no mention of sin or the end of death. As Emmerich told me, Dust is “akin to the Force” in Star Wars. Coulter tells Lyra that Dust is “evil and wicked” and makes people “sick.” Asriel sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi: “They taught themselves to fear Dust, instead of master it,” he says. “They’ve ignored a tremendous source of power … That is what it all comes down to, Lyra. That is what Dust is. Power. Without it, we are like children before the might of the Magisterium.”

It may make sense if you’re in a dark room dazzled by special effects and not thinking too hard. Then again, maybe it won’t. What’s left of Pullman’s story is a string of disconnected proclamations that obscure not just his original point, but any point at all: “Master Dust!” “Freedom is at stake!” “We’re not alone. We’re never alone! We have each other.” They satisfy, but they don’t really explain. Or perhaps they offer explanations so familiar and straightforward that they don’t invite questions.

This is Hollywood at its most hazily indignant and self-congratulatory, recycling the generic theme of Victory, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dead Poets Society, and countless other films—a band of grubby, half-crazed heroes takes on the System and wins.

As the piece details, The Golden Compass had a long and difficult gestation period, with multiple writers and directors coming and going. Chris Weitz, who wound up writing the script and directing, comes across as a well-intentioned douchebag who let his best instincts get rolled by Hollywood types desperate to avoid "controversy." Weitz claims to love the books; it's hard to grasp how anyone who truly gets what Pullman was going on about would allow the story to be stripped of the themes that elevate it from "good yarn" to "becomes a permanent part of who you are."

Call it--like the Eagles tonight--a tremendous opportunity squandered.

Moment of Truth?
It's conventional wisdom, and probably correct, that the message of the November 2006 election was that voters wanted Democrats to end the war in Iraq. Most also believe that the abysmally low approval ratings of the 110th Congress--20 percent at last report--are in large part the result of the Democrats' failure even to start winding down the war. Again and again since last winter, they've come to the brink of a showdown with the Bush administration--and, every time, they've folded and given the architects and champions of this war what they want.

In recent weeks, we've seen the first steps of the tango: the Democrats in Congress pass a military appropriations bill that includes timelines for withdrawal, and the president vetoes the bill. The next step is for another funding measure that doesn't include timelines. But this time there are indications that the Democrats might just stand their ground:

QUESTION: Mr. Obey, the rhetoric from the president is just going to get worse as the holidays approach. Are you going to continue to maintain the stance that you have of providing these conditions on war funds if he's to get the money?

OBEY: Of course.

I mean, we have provided the money. I will repeat that 50 times. We have provided the money. The money is not the issue. The issue is that the president is simply refusing to accept the conditions under which the money is provided.

This document says that that's the proper role of Congress. If you look at Article I, Section 8 and Article I, Section 9, they define the authority of the Congress to determine what policy is supposed to be financed and in foreign affairs, and we're simply -- we're simply following that document to the letter.

So much of the last decade in American politics has hinged on the Democrats' essential inability to tell even minimally complicated stories, from how and why the voting in Florida in 2000 was a sham and a disgrace, to why the war in Iraq wasn't helping in the fight against terrorist groups, to why it mattered that the administration had turned the Department of Justice in a Stalin-era claque of staunch partisan loyalists. At some point, the Democrats lost their nerve: having failed to control the public narrative (which admittedly is much harder to do without the presidency), they concluded that they would lose big fights like the one over funding the war--and backed away from them.

Obey seems to be gambling that they can control this narrative, and win the fight. As he says, Congress did provide the funding--but with conditions. It's not that they won't "support the troops"; it's that they want to make sure the commitment isn't endless.

Already the administration is ginning up its noise machine with accusations of "surrender dates" and "micromanaging the war." The second charge is pretty easy to push back against--if any group needs adult supervision, it's the Bushies--but the first might resonate, particularly given coverage like this story in today's New York Times. (Side note: I worry constantly that the Democrats are so keyed on inflicting political damage to Bush and the Republicans that they miss what is undeniably good news. Yes, the political tale has yet to be told, but if the strictly military purpose of "the Surge" was to improve security and provide a measure of stability, intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that.)

Of course, "surrender" is shamelessly hyperbolic; our forces haven't been defeated, and for that matter there's no one to "surrender" to. But the perception is politically dangerous, and war opponents have yet to present the truly daunting opportunity costs of this war--the unmet domestic needs, the limited capacity to exert force anywhere else in the world. the cumulative damage to the overstrained armed services--in their full dimensions.

It's honorable for the Democrats to engage in this political fight at this time. But they'd damn well better win it.

Ah, Makes Me Feel Like An Old Bolshevik...
I know he's a hypocrite. I know he's obnoxious. I know he's as responsible as anyone alive to giving the country the unalloyed disaster of Bush's second term, when by any standard he should have known much better. I know he'd probably put more right-wing nutballs on the Supreme Court, exactly because he doesn't really give a shit about the "values issues" those Christianist assholes are so crazed about. I know he's for the current war, the other current war, and at least two of the next three proposed wars. I know he hardly ever talks about the things that made me a little gooey for him once upon a time, like campaign finance reform and defense appropriations reform.

Still, when I read something like this, I remember why I was once a fan of John McCain:

"Yes, I've made a lot of people angry. But I didn't go to Washington to win the Mr. Congeniality award. I went there to serve my country," McCain said. "I might not like the business-as-usual crowd in Washington, and they might not like me. But I love America. I love her enough to make some people angry."

Too bad he happens to be a warmongering reactionary. I do have more trust for his "character" than I ever could for any of the other Republicans--and for that matter, Hillary Clinton. I think McCain loves this country somehow in the way that I love this country, and while I can't rationalize that--hell, I can't even explain it--it seems like as good a reason as any other on which to base one's view of a public figure.

Actually, what I'd like to believe about McCain is that being on the campaign trail again somehow brings him back to the person he was (by which I mean the person I saw him as--which itself could have been bullshit) in 2000. That person seemed like he was growing and changing as a result of prolonged exposure to people outside Washington, DC and the channels of power that a Republican Senator of long standing might reasonably be expected to travel in: think rich, selfish white people. He seems to sharpen up out there; almost to remember some better purpose than just the zombifying Potomac Fever that's animated him these last seven years, impelling him to violate his better self in all kinds of disgusting ways by making nice with people he knows are slime.

It would also be nice to think that McCain's last and arguably greatest act of heroism might be to take out the worst threat to the country's best character now in the race: his fellow Republican Rudy Giuliani. Sullivan puts it this way:

If Rudy wins the nomination, we will, I fear, have a campaign in which he routinely pulls the fear-chain to justify enormous powers for himself as a post-Cheney president. Any crisis or attack would lead to his eager suspension of the civil liberties we have left. And he will be aided in this by Fox News and even, I suspect, by Joel Surnow, who will deploy the "24" series next year into a running campaign for more torture and more war. Rudy will run on rounding up illegal immigrants, building a massive wall on the Southern border, bombing Iran, fighting indefinitely in Iraq, and tearing up what's left of America's alliances. There would be no transparency in his campaign or administration - just an appeal to trust a strong leader to protect us and attack undesirables. Think of a Malkin-Hannity fantasy - and that is what he would eagerly provide. McCain, in contrast, still has a link to the honor of the American past, its tradition of tolerance, of welcoming immigrants, of embracing diversity. And Democrats would not immediately see a McCain presidency as a source of fear and loathing. Increasingly, I'm afraid, I see the main task in this campaign as stopping the Giuliani freight train to unchecked power. McCain may not be able to stop it; but he helps reminds us why it's necessary.

McCain continues to make the case against torture to proto-fascist Republican audiences who are at best open to "enhanced interrogation" and at worst as erotically charged for it as Giuliani himself. It seems the essence of leadership is telling people something they don't want to hear--not apologetically as Giuliani does when talking to social reactionaries about abortion and gays ("never mind what I believe, I'll act in a way consistent with what you believe"), but in an honest way that respectfully challenges the audience to see it differently.

Ultimately we elect these people based on assessments of their character and the intuition that they know better than we do. But somehow we've gotten these obfuscators and panderers who try to skate by on celebrity or name recognition. McCain at least occasionally will pick a battle and show at least the desire to fill that function of leadership: persuasion.

Three Ideas for Presidential Debates
For some unfathomable reason--maybe bad judgment exacerbated by extreme fatigue--I watched the entire Democratic debate from Las Vegas last night. You probably know all you need to know about it: nobody fucked up too egregiously, Hillary Clinton was deemed "the winner" by virtue of this fact, and CNN did an atrocious job from soup to nuts, punctuated by pushing an absurd and embarrassing question to end the debate and then parading Clinton adviser James Carville as a non-affiliated expert analyst in the painfully inane post-debate "coverage."

But the frustrations of the event itself got me thinking about how to do them better. My ideas are as follows:

1) Let each candidate either moderate a full debate or control the discussion for 20 minutes, asking questions of his/her competitors. This would both give the front-runners a chance to go at each other directly, and allow the candidates farther behind to actually direct the conversation rather than be shoehorned in by the starfucking moderators in a pro forma way, as happened to every one of the candidates aside from Obama, Clinton and to some extent Edwards last night.

2) Set a full-debate time limit on each candidate rather than constantly having the moderator cut them off or, as the execrable Wolf Blitzer did last night, passive-aggressively prompt them to finish by mumbling, "Thank you." Here's one way to set this up: Take the full time available to debate–-say, 110 minutes of the two hours of airtime last night, minus commercials-–subtract a set amount of time for the asking of questions and moderation-–12 minutes, say (this also has the advantage of forcing brevity upon those clueless gasbags)-–and then divide the remainder (98 minutes) among however many candidates are on the stage (seven, last night). In this scenario, they’ve each got 14 minutes available to speak. They can use that 14 minutes however they want–-a long opening harangue, a mix of longer answers and shorter answers, a closing statement, whatever. But once they use it, their mic is cut off.

3) Every candidate has to drink a shot of bourbon every 15 minutes in a two-hour debate, every ten minutes in an hourlong, and only the last half-hour of the debate is available for media clips afterward. Admittedly this probably gives Richardson and Dodd an edge among the current Dems; in Richardson's case, he's a big guy, and Dodd evidently used to party with Ted Kennedy. But there's something to this: to a lesser or greater extent, all these candidates are so tightly wound, so scripted, so cautious. Let's see how they act, what they say, when they're crocked. We've all been drunk; you know that it's not like you become an idiot. You're just sloppier--and in some cases at least, more honest: in vino veritas. Yes, you'd have to run the thing on a time delay because there's candor and then there's the hair-curlingly obscene vitriol I suspect Hillary would fire at Edwards. But that's a small price to pay for such a deeper look at those who would lead our short-attention span democracy.

The Tiny Speech of Lady Triangula
It's been pretty clear since the jump that the most interesting, not to mention consequential, rivalry among the Democrats running for president is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I've never made any secret of my preference here; Obama is the candidate I'm most strongly for, while it's extremely unlikely that I could even vote for Clinton. (The scenario in which I'd do so--she's running against Giuliani and it's actually close in New York--probably means that she's be roadkill in the general election anyway.)

Friends and colleagues have argued, somewhat understandably, that the substantive difference between Clinton and Obama is so small that my strong support of one, and even stronger disdain for the other, makes no sense. I don't exclude myself from the millions of Americans who perhaps irrationally and almost surely disproportionately revile Senator Clinton. (Though, unlike most of them, in my case it's not because she's this super-liberal but because she's not nearly liberal enough. John Edwards has done the party a service in pointing out that Clinton is a "corporate Democrat" par excellence; I hope he keeps it up.) But the substance, in terms of policy proposals--which are very slightly better than meaningless as a guide to what these individuals would actually do in office, since legislation originates in Congress and, in Clinton's case, even a shriveled Republican minority would have tremendous political incentive not to let her do anything of significance--misses the point. It's the planted questions, the tight control over media availability, the endless moneygrubbing, and above all the spin and triangulation.

I finally found someone who expressed this the way I'd been trying to put it. After noting at the outset that he's supporting Obama and retains some fondness for Edwards, technology sector icon Lawrence Lessig writes:

The other front running Democrat, however, is not a close call for me. (Saying this is what terrified my newly allcaps friend.) She supported the war, but as my support of Edwards last time round indicates, I can forgive that. The parts I can't get over all relate to the issues around corruption. I signaled as much in my comments about her comments about lobbyists. We see two radically different worlds here. And were she President, I'd bet everything that we'd see radically little change.

But the part that gets me the most about Senator Clinton is the eager embrace of spinelessness. I don't get this in Democrats generally. I never have, but I especially don't get it after two defeats to the likes of George Bush (ok, one defeat, but let's put that aside for the moment). Our party seems constitutionally wedded to the idea that you wage a campaign with tiny speech. Say as little as possible. Be as uncontroversial as you can. Embrace the chameleon as the mascot. Fear only that someone would clearly understand what you believe. (Think of Kerry denying he supported gay marriage -- and recognize that the same sort of people who thought that would win him support are now inside the control room at ClintonHQ).

All politicians of course do this to some degree. And about some issues, I even get it. But what put me over the line with Senator Clinton was the refusal to join the bipartisan call that presidential debates be free. Not because this is a big issue. But because even on this (relatively) small issue, she couldn't muster the strength to do the right thing.

Her failure here was not because her campaign didn't know of the issue. I spoke directly to leading figures (or so they said) in the campaign. The issue was discussed, and a decision was made. And the decision was to say nothing about the issue. You can almost see the kind of tiny speak that was battered around inside HQ. "Calling for free debates might be seen as opposing copyright." "It might weaken our support among IP lawyers and Hollywood." "What would Disney think?" Better to say nothing about the issue. Better to let it simply go away.
...

We (Democrats) and we (Americans) have had enough of this kind of "leadership." That (plus the Lincoln Bedroom) made it impossible for me, honestly, to support Senator Clinton. No doubt I would prefer her to any Republican (save, of course, the amazing Ron Paul). But I can't support the idea that she represents the ideals of what the Democratic Party must become.

Aside from the Ron Paul love (about whom maybe I'll write another time; I'm glad he's in the race and I think he has one supremely important idea-- that we're on a path to empire abroad which will inevitably, in fact is already, destroying our democracy at home--but I just can't take seriously the fantasyland ideology of Libertarianism), he nails it.

The "tiny speech" line is both the key, and indicative of a fundamental problem. From the candidates I really like (Obama, who wants to move the country past the argument over the 1960s; Dodd, focused on restoring the Constitution after the Bush abuses) to those I'm basically okay with (Edwards, economic justice; Biden, a return to bipartisan foreign policy realism) to the ones I dislike (Romney, better management in government; Thompson, because his hot wife wants to be First Lady) to the one I detest (Giuliani, to speed up the push toward authoritarianism in the name of "fighting terror"), I think I get what the point would be; I think I understand why they're running.

But not for Hillary. Even Bill Clinton started out with a good idea: to reconcile the left and the center. Maybe what happened in his second term just demented them both, because he certainly wasn't doing anything progressive by the end of his administration; what good came out of those years (the tilt toward surpluses, which unfortunately just enabled the disaster who followed him) was the result of divided government. Power became the point in and of itself.

The only thing I remotely see from Senator Clinton is the health care plan--which happens to be a decent plan, far as I can tell. But her political persona gets in the way here: that thing will never pass, because the Republicans would never let her get the victory, succeeding where Truman, LBJ and Bill failed. They might not let any Democrat do it; William Kristol's warning that passing universal health care would "give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party" is as or more true now as it was then. But certainly not the woman who's the embodiment of everything they hate about "the Left"... despite their failure to understand either the woman or the movement.

At best for the Democrats, Hillary will get her 50.00001 percent, take office, and then... nothing will change, and we'll keep drifting toward the edge.

Two Steps Forward
It hasn't gotten much press attention that I can discern, but the country took a long-overdue step forward yesterday when the House of Representatives passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act by a vote of 235 to 184. This measure, for which supporters have been fighting since 1974, would make it illegal for businesses to base hiring decisions upon perceptions of sexual orientation. Though some on the left are sufficiently upset with what the bill leaves out--protections for transgendered individuals--that they could not support it, anyone familiar with the history of civil rights movements understands that you never get everything you want in one shot. Once the principle of nondiscrimination is enshrined in the law, it becomes easier to make the broader case--and once hysterical opponents are faced with the fact that the measure they deplore hasn't led to the downfall of civilization, or in fact any discernable change at all, their objections become much easier to refute.

Heartening as this is for anyone who deplores the fact that homophobia remains our last societally accepted prejudice, it is unlikely that the legislation will become law anytime soon. Prospects in the Senate are favorable, with Ted Kennedy set to champion the bill and Maine Republican Susan Collins interested in co-sponsoring. But Bush is going to veto it, of course, and supporters do not have the votes in the House to override.

Nonetheless, the passage of ERDA is a welcome reminder that the Democrats' victory in last November's midterm elections did, in fact, mean something. Under the Republicans, the agenda of Congress was filled with non-issues like flag burning, and the leadership was more interested in measures restricting the rights of homosexuals--namely the Hate Amendment to the Constitution--than protecting them. The Senate will pass this bill early next year; Bush will veto it; and any Democratic president--yes, even Our Lady of Perpetual Triangulation--will make it the law of the land, provided Democrats retain congressional majorities, in 2009. This might be the single finest thing the 110th Congress has done to date, and upon hearing the news, for the first time in a long time, I felt proud of my country.

It was also thrilling for me to see one of the great heroes of the last civil rights movement, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, rise to support the cause of justice in the current movement. Check it out.

Another encouraging step came today in a House hearing on torture. An Arizona Republican named Trent Franks asked Col. Steve Kleinman, a military interrogator and intelligence officer who strongly opposes torture, whether perhaps "extreme measures" can be justified in a "ticking timebomb scenario"--you know, when you've got the suspect in custody, there's a nuke set to go off somewhere in the city, and he knows where it is and how to defuse it but won't tell you unless and until you hook up a car battery to his balls. Kleinman said, in essence, No--and offered an argument about the inefficacy of torture that I'd like to think might resonate even with the growing legion of right-wing creeps who are ever louder and prouder in their support of techniques embraced by the Inquisitors and the SS:

...[H]e offered a brief explanation of that process that sheds light on why torture is counterproductive for a professional interrogator, leaving aside questions of morality and law.

It's not just what a subject says in an interrogation that an interrogator needs to watch for clues, Kleinman said. The way in which he expresses himself is significant: does the subject fidget? Does he shift in his seat? Does he gesture, or suddenly stop gesturing? All of these non-verbal clues -- "clusters, groupings of behaviors," Kleinman called them -- provide interrogators with valuable information to observe what a detainee is like when he's lying, when he's being uncooperative, and when he's being truthful, or a combination of the three.

But if a detainee has his hands tied, or if a detainee shivers because a room is chilled, then "I don't know whether he's shivering because the room is cold or because my questions are penetrating," Kleinman said. That degree of abuse "takes away a lot of my tools." It's one of the clearest explanations in the public record about what torture costs professional interrogators in terms of actionable intelligence, as the debate is so often set up as what a lack of torture ends up costing national security.

If those who know best don't think it works, then what you're left with is an essentially pornographic wish by some deeply disturbed individuals to utilize these measures for their own sake. I'd like to think the public will recognize this for what it is.

A Lethargic Cheer for TV's Fred
I think it's increasingly clear that if we had to have a Republican president in 2009, Fred Thompson would be the least worst option. Yeah, the guy has the energy level of late-second term Reagan, and it would be weird to have dirty thoughts about the First Lady. He's way too hawkish on foreign policy for my tastes, and he hasn't always shown total command of the issues. But Thompson seems to have a quality that eludes, certainly, all the other serious Republican contenders and arguably the top-tier Democrats as well: willingness to stick to principle over political expediency.

In past weeks, Thompson has suggested that the federal government shouldn't have intervened in the Terry Schiavo case, and that he wouldn't support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage--two views severely at odds with the rabid theocratic followers who serve as the backbone of the Republican electoral coalition. Sunday on "Meet the Press," he finished the hat trick, coming out against a nationwide ban on abortion. His reasoning was the same as in the previous two apostasies: principles of federalism always trump Washington's fiat. Yesterday he covered all three topics:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about an issue very important in your party’s primary process, and that’s abortion.

MR. THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: This is the 2004 Republican Party platform, and here it is: “We say the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution,” “we endorse legislation to make it clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. Our purpose is to have legislative and judicial protection of that right against those who perform abortions.” Could you run as a candidate on that platform, promising a human life amendment banning all abortions?

MR. THOMPSON: No.

MR. RUSSERT: You would not?

MR. THOMPSON: No. I have always—and that’s been my position the entire time I’ve been in politics. I thought Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. I think this platform originally came out as a response to particularly Roe v. Wade because of that. Before Roe v. Wade, states made those decisions. I think people ought to be free at state and local levels to make decisions that even Fred Thompson disagrees with. That’s what freedom is all about. And I think the diversity we have among the states, the system of federalism we have where power is divided between the state and the federal government is, is, is—serves us very, very well. I think that’s true of abortion. I think Roe v. Wade hopefully one day will be overturned, and we can go back to the pre-Roe v. Wade days. But...

MR. RUSSERT: Each state would make their own abortion laws.

MR. THOMPSON: Yeah. But, but, but to, to, to have an amendment compelling—going back even further than pre-Roe v. Wade, to have a constitutional amendment to do that, I do not think would be the way to go.
...
MR. RUSSERT: And also with gay marriage, according to the Associated Press: “Thompson favors a constitutional amendment that bars judges from legalizing gay marriage, but also leaves open the door for state legislatures to approve the practice.” So if a state said, “We want to have gay marriages in our state,” you would be OK with that?

MR. THOMPSON: Yes. This, this, this—the—marriage is between a man and a woman. Nobody ever thought that that was contested until recently, and we’ve had a couple judges in a couple states decide to turn all that on its head. So we’ve, we’ve had, again, a judge-created problem. I would support a constitutional amendment that addresses this judge-created problem. But at the end of—and, and say judges can’t do that. But, at the end of the day, if a state legislature and a governor decide that that’s what they want to do, yes, they should have, they, they should have the freedom to do what Fred Thompson thinks is a very bad idea.

MR. RUSSERT: In March of ‘05, the Congress, the president signed legislation allowing a federal judge to intervene, to perhaps re-insert a feeding tube in the famous Terri Schiavo case.

MR. THOMPSON: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: You’ve spoken about that, about the death of your own daughter. Your view is it is a family’s decision to make whether to insert or remove a feeding tube.

MR. THOMPSON: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: And that should...

MR. THOMPSON: And then, and then, obviously, in consultation with their doctor.

MR. RUSSERT: But there should be no laws involved?

MR. THOMPSON: No. I’ve not said that. What—I mean, you, you got to put your lawyer hat back on, you know, with this most personal, should be nonlegal consideration. If there is a family dispute, then there’re courts in, in every state in the nation that you can take a dispute like that to. I said the federal government should not be involved.

MR. RUSSERT: But the government should not have gotten involved in Terri Schiavo?

MR. THOMPSON: No. Now, you know, keep in mind, now, the, the government didn’t come in and say “You got to do this; you got to do that.” It gave federal court jurisdiction. Federal court didn’t need jurisdiction, in my opinion. These are kinds of things where the, the, the—well, you mentioned it myself, my own personal situation. Let’s just say you never know when you make the right decision, what—it, it wasn’t totally comparable, but it was, it was the same, it was the same general end-of-life kind of consideration. And I, I—I’ve resisted and, and resent, frankly, the political football that’s been made out of all that, and, and it’s unfortunate. The less government, the better.

Those last five words represent a worldview. It's not a worldview I strictly agree with; I think when it comes to, say, making sure meat and produce sold isn't poisonous, or that a new anti-anxiety medication doesn't cause seizures, the opposite is closer to true. But it's a principle, and for a Republican Party that has almost gleefully thrown away any principles in pursuit of unlimited power to be wielded through a messianic leader, it's a start.

I doubt that Thompson wins the nomination and I think it's less than 50-50 he'll even win a single primary. He's not a good campaigner, and these deviations from right-wing dogma would seem to scuttle the media narrative of his candidacy as "the reliable conservative who isn't personally scummy (Giuliani) or the opposite of what he was five years ago (Romney)." Sadly, it's the fact that Thompson does seem to be a "reliable conservative," of the type that Barry Goldwater and Bob Dole might recognize, that's likely to ensure his defeat.

The Crazed Clown
If we really are a Torture Nation, the moment this will go beyond argument is when Rudy Giuliani is sworn into the presidency on my dad's 66th birthday, January 20, 2009. Giuliani, to a greater extent even than George W. Bush, is the embodiment of all the worst deficiencies in the American character: unbearably arrogant and self-righteous, incapable of self-reflection or second thoughts, dishonest, and perhaps above all cruel.

Like many New Yorkers, I grew entirely sick of these flaws during the second half of Giuliani's mayoralty. The excesses of the police were matched only by the excesses of the mayor himself, constantly looking for new enemies against which to define himself. Ultimately, New York magazine, the Brooklyn Museum, and ferrets--not to mention his second wife--didn't prove as suitable as squeegee men and welfare cheats had been. But at the figurative eleventh hour, he found an enemy worthy of his abundant hate, and leveraged the unspeakable tragedy of September 11 into, first, many millions of dollars, and then a political resurrection.

On the merits, there is no way Giuliani should even be under consideration for high office. Beyond the failings of his own character, he was a bad judge of others' character, and despite the constant touting of his own executive experience, he wrecked the city's finances and made a mess of a number of key city agencies. But his confrontational temperament is better suited to the angry, fearful mood of today's Republican party than any of his competitors', and that willingness to loudly and ostentatiously hate--Muslims, liberals, the press, taxes, anyone and everyone who angries up the righties' blood--could be enough.

The New Republic recently ran two very good pieces on Giuliani. The first is a devastating analysis of his economic views, which come fairly close to making Bush look like Tip O'Neill. The second is a terrific and surprisingly even-handed analysis of Giuliani's views on "freedom and authority," and how his worldview played out over eight years in City Hall. Both highly recommended.

Torture Nation
Sometimes it seems that every day brings new proof that America is no longer a nation of ideals, no longer deserving of the historically heroic stature we've always awarded ourselves. It's always easy simply to blame the Bush administration, and liberals (and not just liberals) have availed themselves of that expedient. But really, it's not them; it's us. It's Democratic officials who have allowed the administration to run roughshod over our laws and traditions, and Democratic voters who have enabled them to do so.

We are about to have a second consecutive Attorney General, in theory the nation's foremost upholder and enforcer of the rule of law, who condones torture. Once is an accident--in the case of Alberto Gonzalez a historical abortion, in fact--but twice is a trend. Michael Mukasey's nomination will be successful because two prominent Democratic Senators from the two most influential liberal states, Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, will vote to confirm him. Feinstein has long been a sort of pre-2006 Joe Lieberman with pearls, a pro-corporate, pro-war pseudo-Democrat at the front of the line when there's a principle to be tossed aside. Schumer's decision wounds me more, in part because he's my Senator (the one I've voted for, in fact), in part because he's a political genius, and in part because on other issues--includes ones I've worked on personally--he's terrific. But on this one, he rolled. He put his own credibility--it was Schumer who supported Mukasey in the first place--ahead of a foundational moral principle. If that doesn't indicate a lack of integrity, I can't imagine what does.

It is all but official that torture is now the legally sanctioned policy of the United States. I quote Andrew Sullivan (whose blog I've added to the links on this page):

Even though waterboarding has always been regarded as torture and is illegal under any meaningful understanding of English; even though the United States prosecuted Nazis as war criminals for performing exactly the same torture techniques now authorized by the United States under the rubric of "enhanced interrogation"; even though the United States has court-martialed soldiers for doing what the president has authorized; unless the specific techniques are entered explicitly into the law, according to Lowry, the Geneva Conventions and settled law don't apply. And so any vote for Mukasey will now be interpreted by torture advocates like Lowry and Bush administration officials as legal support for torture. Here's [National Review editor Rich] Lowry's proof:

If waterboarding is torture, whoever has authorized and conducted this training should -- as a strict matter of the law -- be vulnerable to war-crimes prosecutions... If the Senate disagrees [with allowing the president to waterboard prisoners], it should put itself clearly on record forbidding waterboarding. Otherwise, it should confirm Mukasey as the careful legal mind he has shown himself to be throughout his career and during this controversy.

See? This is how they keep pumping the poison of torture into the American constitution. And so a new precedent will be set; and the torture program, already well-established, will further entrench itself into US law and practices. The current law is not in any way mysterious. Schumer's promise that the Congress will now pass a law specifically banning verschaerfte Vernehmung, to use the Gestapo's name for the Bush-Cheney techniques, is insufficient. It presupposes that the torture techniques described are not already illegal, thus retroactively exonerating all those who authorized them.
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Many seem to think that because these techniques are only used on terrorists, they are no threat to American liberty. What this complacent view doesn't grapple with is that these torture techniques can be used against any terror suspect; that such suspects are not subject to due process under president Bush's understanding of his powers; that such suspects can be captured within the United States; that they can be citizens; and that the war that justifies this extraordinary power is defined as permanent. That is why combining the power to detain without charge with the power to torture is an effective suspension of the rule of law and the Constitution. And such a suspension is astonishingly broad and open-ended.

That is why this has become a fight for the West's values against the moral relativists, legalistic parsers, and advocates of total executive power. The point is not a subjective judgment about the intentions of the torturers. It is not about whether Cheney and Bush can be trusted. It is about whether any individual can be trusted with such power. In a republic based on the rule of law, the intentions of the torturers - whether good or bad - are utterly irrelevant. In the West, we assume that the intentions of our rulers are likely to be evil. That's what distinguishes the Anglo-American tradition from those who trust individuals to govern them, rather than those who trust the law to allow us to govern ourselves. The point is that no person in the United States should ever have the power to detain and torture another person without due process. Once you make an exception for one man, the rule of law is over. The Decider may decide out of his own benevolence not to torture again. But he can still torture. And the knowledge that he can, and the knowledge that he was never stopped, and the knowledge that he was able to distort the plain meaning of the law to mean whatever he wants it to mean is a precedent that is staggeringly dangerous.

Emphases mine. With these standards in place, the entire frame of our politics changes. We are no longer a nation of laws; we are no longer a people of principle. Our political structure is teetering between a devalued but still somewhat functional democracy, still ruled in part by the legacy of the rule of law, and what I would call laissez-faire or just-in-time authoritarianism: it's all but certain that I (or Sullivan, or Markos Moulitsas, or Greg, or anyone) won't be detained and tortured for writing this post or anything else on my absolutely insignificant little blog, but I could be, and if the cost/benefit calculus were sufficiently different, I probably would be. All we're fighting for now is the preservation of the remaining Constitutional tools and governance traditions, and the chance to one day reassert them as the legal and moral basis of our society.

Hating When I'm Right
When Hillary Clinton entered the presidential race last January, I wrote the following:

[T]he advantages of money and organization are probably largest in the first stretch of the nomination race. With seven or eight candidates in the field, she can win pluralities in the high 20s and low 30s; as the field thins, those dropping out will be under pressure to endorse the likely winner, and eventually it could and probably will come down to Hillary versus Not-HIllary. At that point, a ton of institutional weight falls upon Not-Hillary: stop resisting the inevitable, stop doing the Republicans' oppo work for them, stop squandering resources we'll need for November. Unless she's been bloodied by then, Not-Hillary won't win that duel.

In the last couple months, Sen. Clinton has taken the lead in all the early primary states and increasingly projected the aura of "inevitability" that had been speculated about since she entered the race. Last night's Democratic debate, in Philadelphia, was more interesting than most of them have been, and exposed a number of her weaknesses as a candidate--but almost certainly did nothing to change the basic dynamic of the race. The storyline--and in these things, considering they're always more read about than watched, the storyline is always crucial--was that Sen. Clinton's opponents were approaching now-or-never time to cut into her lead and would come out swinging. They did, and scored some points on her Iran war-enabling, penchant for secrecy, and general proclivity to triangulate. But nothing ultimately happen to make me doubt that she'll be the nominee, or that the general election will proceed as I thought it would nine months ago--as close, and bitterly fought, as it will be free of substance, ultimately doing little either to roll back the damage of the Bush years or to address the major crises we will soon face.

It's too bad, because if everyone who will vote this winter had watched the debate, they would have seen Sen. Clinton revealed as the moderate Republican she essentially is.

• Has a foreign policy bias in favor of confrontation and war? Check.



• Ardently courts special interests? Check.



• Pulls the Thomas Frank Two-Step of rhetorical bait (attacking Bush in every statement) and switch (closely resembling Bush on war, executive power, secrecy and fuzzy answers)? Check.

Barack Obama remarked that the Republican contenders talk about Sen. Clinton because “it’s a fight they’re comfortable with.” While this is accurate, it leaves out two points. One (and Sen. Dodd obliquely got at this) is that the Republicans talk her up because to their primary voters doing so is like waving the red cape before the bull; they hate her, and hate--for her, and for us, and on some abstract level for Muslims/terrorists/foreigners/gays/whatever--is what motivates the modern Right. Two is that not only are the Republicans supremely comfortable running against her, the press is as or more comfortable pushing her forward. This is true both at the newsroom and boardroom level: the first group knows how to cover her, and the second know she won’t screw with them.

I’ve heard it said that Hillary Clinton appeals to the low-information voter. While there’s probably a touch of snobbishness in this sentiment, there’s also definitely more than a little truth. Those who see no need to go beyond the generalities and platitudes she spouts, who find it thrilling to see another Clinton (hard to imagine) or the first woman (a lot easier to picture, though I still have trouble understanding how the wife of a former president becoming president represents a true advance for feminism), are satisfied. Those of us less willing to go on faith and less trusting in the good judgment of people who've made catastrophically bad calls again and again, not so much.

It’s not a coincidence that her spokeszombies intone “strength and experience” in every prepared statement, or that she used the phrase last night, or that she twice gave a canned line about "not balancing Social Security on the backs of the elderly." The Clintonistas think the public only absorbs sound bites and simple arguments. They might well be correct, but this strikes me as a case of pandering to the lowest common denominator and then hoping the rest of us on the left side of the spectrum “fall in line” against the Republican adversary–-rather than trying to raise the level of our national conversation, which strikes me as a key element in leadership.

Fan Democracy?
As my hopes dim for public life in America, at least for the 2008 election cycle, I'm starting to think about power in other avenues. Maybe it's inspired by The Power Broker, the classic critical biography of Robert Moses, which I'm about 430 pages into; Moses began his long public career as an idealist, a man admirable in every way, but soon embraced dark means to achieve worthy ends, and later the means justified themselves as he became a sort of J. Edgar Hoover of public works. The author, Robert Caro, condemns Moses' sins and transgressions, but the point to me is how this man in the second stage of his career--when he'd abandoned procedural idealism but was still acting for goals any person of good faith would support--educated himself as to the tools of power and their uses.

I'm not really thinking about parks and bridges and roadways, though; I'm thinking about baseball, as usual.

The emergence of the internet hasn't revolutionalized baseball, but it's certainly revolutionized fandom. I remember in April 1993, as a sophomore in college, receiving an e-mail about a new listserv (I didn't know what that word meant) devoted to the Philadelphia Phillies, inviting me to join. For the next eight years or so, this was the primary vehicle of my fandom; with no internet at that point, I had the listserv and the AP wire, which featured game stories and was accessible through the university network, to keep me informed. (It's amazing to me now that I used to routinely go to sleep not knowing whether the Phils had won or lost; this happened, I think, exactly once in the 2007 season, the September game at St. Louis when Rod Barajas came off the bench to get the game-winning hit in the 13th inning. I'd pooped out around the 10th, after driving all day from a conference in upstate NY and maybe four hours' sleep the night before.) Over that period, the listserv evolved from fanboy basics to a fairly sophisticated news relay service, publishing (probably illegally) the game stories and other pieces from the Philly papers, trade rumors, and for awhile the contributions of Phils ace Curt Schilling. (Sideline: there's a terrific piece about Schilling, who's always been both huckster and hero, on the NYT site today.)

As the internet emerged and grew and added functionality, the listserv started to feel needlessly constraining, and when I became aware of Philliesphans in late 2002 I switched my time and mindshare there. During the next four years I made over 10,000 posts there--I'm not particularly proud of this, especially considering that a good chunk of that was squandered on idiotic political fights, with idiots--and a bit more than halfway through that time, I started The Good Phight with a few friends from that community. In December of '06 BackSheGoes emerged from a schism within Philliesphans, and I joined that community as a moderator. (The host/founder was one of the right-wingers I'd argued with on the former site, and reactionary politics notwithstanding he turned out to be a pretty good guy, so that at least represented some value from my time.) It's been a great not-quite year over there, and we've integrated it with TGP to the extent practically feasible.

The point of all this isn't to recap how much time I've wasted on online fandom, but that these evolving forums (fora?) represent a formalizing of community that was well-nigh impossible twenty years ago, and difficult ten years ago. Through the early '90s, the fans you knew were family and friends, and those you were aware of were the other 20-40,000 people in the park, people who called into the sports radio shows, and so on. You couldn't really coordinate anything with them, and you couldn't plausibly claim to have a particularly informed opinion because the data--the statistics, the game records, video, et cetera--weren't readily available to anyone but the insiders. None of this is true anymore. One of the primary functions of The Good Phight is to debunk the moronic "conventional wisdom" frequently espoused by the Phillies and and their guild of stenographers in the Philly media. And on both that site and BackSheGoes, we argue every day about possible courses of action for the team as well as what they actually do.

This is all a lot of fun, of course, but it hasn't meant anything--at least not yet. There are no real-world consequences to our theoretical power gain by virtue of having the data to form independent conclusions and coordinate with potentially many thousands of other fans. At times over the last two years (most prominently right after the Abreu trade/heist of 2006), a few of us have raised the quixotic notion of trying to force the sale of the team. But a few hundred signatures on an internet petition is unlikely even to register public notice, and to my knowledge the next canceled season ticket plan from this mini-movement will be the first.

The specific issue on which I'd like to test this nascent fan power is the possible elevation of assistant general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. to the GM chair, probably after the 2008 season. Amaro is universally considered the heir apparent, and many of us believe the only reason he didn't get the job after Ed Wade's firing at the end of the 2005 season is that the PR-conscious Phillies knew there would be outraged reaction. With the division title this year, they have some credibility to make an in-house replacement when current GM Pat Gillick retires... but Amaro seems no more qualified for the job now than he was then.

Amaro is a second-generation Phillie, a former bat boy for the 1980 world champs and a (lousy) bench player for the club during the '90s. He has a degree from Stanford University, and he would in some sense fulfill the mandate for greater diversity in front offices announced (but rarely followed up upon) by the Commissioner's office. But unlike Gillick, fellow AGM Mike Arbuckle, or even newly hired top scout Chuck Lamar, Amaro has no tangible organizational accomplishments he can tout. HIs current responsibilities include "negotiating contracts and handling medical issues"; I would characterize the team's work in those two areas as, respectively, a mild plus and a big minus. The Brett Myers deal last off-season was okay, the Chase Utley deal looks pretty good. On the other hand, it doesn't feel like the Ryan Howard situation was handled well, though that tale will be told in earnest this winter with Howard eligible for arbitration. The "medical issues," though, is tough to see as anything but a complete meltdown: in short, the Phillies traded for Freddy Garcia and his shredded arm without getting assurances, and they didn't sign Joe Borowski who went on to save 40 games for Cleveland (albeit with a high ERA and mediocre secondary numbers--but he still would have been no worse than the second-best full-year reliever on the roster).

More worrisome is that I've heard, second-hand but from multiple sources, that Amaro's both an asshole and a fool. He's reputed to be entirely dismissive of performance analysis; even Gillick, the epitome of old school, has expressed an appreciation for statistical metrics. The potential for a GM who's invincible in his arrogance to get fleeced in trade is almost incalculable. It's always worth repeating that "Moneyball," the best written account of the performance analysis revolution, isn't about "stats" per se but rather finding and exploiting irrational valuations in the market of baseball talent. If this characterization is correct, Amaro is a walking irrationality--and thus ripe for exploitation.

I don't know what's to be done here, but at least a little more scrutiny as to the succession for Phils GM, and laying the groundwork for fan reaction if our worst fears are realized, seem like possibly attainable outcomes.

As If I Wasn't Bummed Enough Already
By way of Andrew Sullivan's blog, which I'm coming to like more and more, here's an article from the libertarian Reason Foundation--a group that tends to lean right, but has had no love for the Bushes and neocons--that makes all the points I've been trying to articulate about Hillary Clinton's yen to perpetuate the Imperial Presidency:

[W]hen you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton's grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn't conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
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Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government's ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing "decency" standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.
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What about secrecy and executive power? It's difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband's administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests—claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney's similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.
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That jibes with a February 2007 New York Times article on Clinton explaining her refusal to back down from her vote for the Iraq war: "Mrs. Clinton's belief in executive power and authority is another factor weighing against an apology, advisers said... she believes that a president usually deserves the benefit of the doubt from Congress on matters of executive authority."
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[A]n increasingly imperial presidency isn't good for our republic.

Neither is our overly interventionist foreign policy, or the continuing erosion of our civil liberties, be it in the name of "family values," government paternalism, the war on drugs, or the war on terror.

Activists on the left... should also realize that even if they succeed in electing Hillary Clinton to the White House, it's likely that the only real resulting change in Washington will be that come 2009, we'll merely have a Democrat pursuing the same misguided policies.

Much like the point I made earlier about how "spite voting" on the left could propel the Democrat uninformed Republicans hate the most into the White House, the author cites "the temptation on the left to want to stick it to their political opponents by putting their worst nightmare in the White House." But this won't mean a whole lot two years from now, when Madame President Clinton screws over the unions with another awful trade bill, orders air strikes against whoever the dark-skinned villain of that moment might be, and further seals the archives of all previous Bush and Clinton administrations. At that point, millions of Democrats are going to smack their foreheads, ask themselves what the fuck they were thinking, and find themselves forced to choose between defending a president they deplore and disagree with, and letting the same people they'd tried to spite by putting her into power run rampant in national politics.

We're Done with Democracy
The big political news of the weekend is coming out of the Values Voters Summit, a gathering of far-right Christianist groups to which all the Republican candidates have made pilgrimmage to pander. The utterly shameless Mitt Romney and Rabid Rudy Giuliani have taken shots at each other, and TV's Fred Thompson evidently seemed even less interested than usual; remember, TV's Fred's only in the race because his hot harpy right-wing wife really wants to be First Lady. I think it's probably about 50-50 that the marriage ends within a year of his campaign ending, and that's absolutely no more than four months off. Oddly, I sort of admire Thompson's refusal, whether from sloth or principle, to deliver the Hate in a cause he's not really feeling. Gail Collins nicely captures the rage-addled essence of these "Christians" in her op-ed column today.

This is a miserably depressing time for American politics. The large minority of the electorate represented, to a greater or lesser extent, by the people at the "Summit" live in a self-defined world where any resemblence to objective reality is purely coincidental--a world in which Iraq was a heroic (and successful!) undertaking, all taxes are confiscatory gambits of a malevolent polity determined to enrich non-white welfare recipients and leftist libertines at the expense of God-fearing families, and the only thing to fault George W. Bush for is not pushing hard enough to amend the Constitution to discriminate against homosexuals. Meanwhile, a plurality of the majority that rejects this insane worldview seems set to empower a woman who seems to have no guiding principle except power and shares most or all of the core assumptions that have informed the Bush administration these last seven disastrous years. Her election will do nothing but ensure that the awful politics of the last sixteen years--characterized by zero-sum partisan fights over generally small matters, viciously personal and blind to the larger issues--continues for at least another four.

Actually, I suspect Hillary Clinton will unite the country much as Bush has--in rejection of her governance--but to an even greater extent: while the 30 percent or so who still support the Deciderer have proven themselves far more loyal to ideology than empirical input, categorical Clinton supporters will prove to be far fewer in number. It's almost impossible to be ideologically bound to someone who has no ideology. She similarly won't be able to count on a cult of personality following, because she also has, or at least shows, no personality. The liberals who find her tolerable or even likable now will have defected inside two years; they'll cheer Russ Feingold in his noble and doomed attempt to primary her in 2012, and a lot of them will sit at home or vote third-party when Jeb Bush wrests away the Crown and Scepter that November.

I've spent a lot of the last two months or so reading books by a novelist named Steve Erickson. He's probably best characterized as a post-modernist in the style of Don Delillo, though he adds obsessions with sex and pop culture to Delillo's mix of time, historical pivot points and official and personal violence. Erickson also shares Delillo's ongoing fascination with the meaning of America, and for about fifteen years from the early '90s to 2004 he popped up from time to time as a commentator on the intersection of politics and culture. One piece he wrote that strikes me as especially resonant appeared in early 1995, shortly after the Gingrich takeover of Congress. It's evidently gone from the interwebs now, but here's the key bit:

History is clear that democracy cannot long navigate a sea of national rage. Untempered by rationale and open-mindedness, fury eventually consumes democracy rather than nourishes it, because it overwhelms our tolerance, our willingness to be reasonably informed, our determination to hold ourselves accountable for what we decide. Most important, it overwhelms our basic faith in democracy itself and our belief in the individual freedoms that are inviolate to the power of the majority, identified by the Declaration of Independence as endowed by God and codified in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. We display less and less patience with what we previously held to be inalienable, less and less patience with democracy’s inherent messiness and inefficiency and the morass of conflicting interests that are read in democracy’s results. We display less patience, in other words, with other Americans.

A deep freeze has settled in the American soul. The nation gets meaner and more petty until rage is the only national passion left -- and then it is anger not at those on top, which is the anger America was born of, but at those on the bottom. ... This myth, that the process has grown helplessly out of touch with what we really want and feel and need, is the opposite of the truth. The truth is that we are the problem with America. The process and politicians, the lobbyists and “special” interests -- by which we mean any interest that doesn’t penterain to us -- have reflected us all too perfectly; and we hate them for it.

From dismal campaign to dismal campaign, we demand “change” and then give every indication of wanting nothing of the sort and of not having the slightest idea what we ever meant by it in the first place. Confronted with change that is truly profound or revolutionary, which is to say unavoidably painful and disorienting, we scurry back to the status quo that so infuriated us to begin with, and that not so long ago we claimed was unacceptable.

I've maintained for years that rage is the biggest, arguably the only, motivator for those on the right. The unhinged hatred of "liberals" on display every time a Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter or Dick Cheney or Clarence Thomas gets in front of a camera isn't extraordinary; it's reflected in the filler speech some right-wing functionary is probably giving right now at the "Values Voter Summit." One major difference I perceive between the left--at least, this particular left-leaning guy--and the right is that I wish they'd just go away, while they seem to wish me dead and burning forever in a Hell I don't believe exists.

"Spite voting" is the reason why so many millions of people who didn't particularly like George W. Bush in 2004, and certainly didn't think he was doing a very good job, voted for him anyway: to stick it to John Kerry, and to stick it to you and me.

This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix "if only the people knew the Truth."

But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.
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The reason is simple. The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology states that people are intrinsically sympathetic. If people are defiantly mean and craven, the humanist-left structure falters. "Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle Americans," they ask, "if they're just as loathsome, in their own petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?"

But we on the left are, increasingly, guilty of the same thing. For one thing, it hurts to be told, by the President and his Men (and women), that we aren't really Americans. Erickson shrewdly observes that this was probably the biggest reason why so many people became enthusiastic about Howard Dean in 2003-2004; he was the one Democrat of that time to stand up and scream (literally, alas) that, yes, we are Americans and we're damn well entitled to be treated as such. I admit that the only reason I could even consider voting for Hillary Clinton--hell, the only reason I voted for her in her first Senate campaign, the same year Bush stole the presidency--is to stick it right back to them. The mania of spite voting is real, and increasingly it's bipartisan.

There's probably a cultural/societal component to this as well. I also believe this is the Age of Selfish Pleasures, and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The rise of mass media in the 20th century created a somewhat unified culture for the first time: suddenly, people in Iowa and New York and Alaska and Louisiana were listening to, then watching, the same things, and the differences between those places and the people who lived in them began to diminish. Then, as mass media diversified--a thousand cable channels, then uncountable millions of websites--the newly coherent whole fractured to a greater extent than ever before. We could make our own amusement, and those personalized entertainments are so engrossing that now many of us, certainly myself, couldn't tell you what the highest-rated TV shows even are. Suddenly people in New York, or Iowa, or Alaska, or Georgia, had as little or less in common with those a hundred yards away as with those a thousand miles away. If you don't feel community with those even within shouting distance, it's unlikely that you'll feel a national sense.

In the long run, it's not hard to see how this could be a good thing. It's probably not that hard to chart a path from self-entertainment to self-fulfillment, and anything that helps break down hierarchies of control--the sort of hierarchy in its full glory at the "Summit"--is ultimately good for democracy. But for now, we're far from that, and there seems little to be done except to surf the web, play some video games and hope something good is on TV or at the movies. The public sphere is a no-man's land.

Rockholm Syndrome
I'll admit it: I'm rooting for the Rockies now. And I've even been watching the NLCS, earlier comparisons to televised Boggle notwithstanding.

This doesn't really make sense on my part. First of all, they did beat the Phillies and there's some atavistic craving for sweet, sweet vengeance; if the Indians knock off Boston and win the AL pennant, I'm sure I'll be pulling for the Tribe in the World Series, because I generally root for them. (And, damn, Cleveland needs a little joy. That town is like Philadelphia, only without the history or cuisine, and with maybe a third of the culture.)

Second, the Rockies are God Squadders, starting with their top management, and there's nothing I deplore more in sports, other than maybe Terrell Owens, than the sanctimonious assertion that God Almighty has taken a rooting interest. GM Dan O'Dowd, who brought in Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle--failures on the field and, at least in Neagle's case, conspicuous sinners off it--might be doing nothing more than kissing up to his boss, a Tom DeLay/George W. Bush-type reformed party animal who's now evidently into judging others. Or he might be sincere. Either way, it's grating. (Considering that Colorado is also home to some of the most obnoxious would-be theocrats in the country, it's doubly annoying that they're presumably weighing down the Rockie bandwagon these days.)

To be fair, I haven't heard any Rockies players rubbing this in anyone's face during the last few weeks--and with wins in 20 of their last 21 games, standing a victory away from the World Series after coming within one strike of not even making the playoffs, it's sort of understandable to entertain the notion that God might be on your side.

All that aside, though, what this team has accomplished is staggering. Winning 20 of 21 games against any schedule is impressive enough; the Rockies, though, have notched the last 19 of those victories against teams with winning records. In no more than one or two of those games (I'd need to go back and figure out exactly when the Dodgers were eliminated--they might have been done before the end of their final series against Colorado) were they playing against teams out of the race: the last seven were either play-in or playoff games, of course. And most of them have been close: the streak-starting 13-0 win over Florida wasn't, and two of the Rockies' seven wins against LA were by five runs or more; they beat Arizona 11-1 on Sept. 29, and I guess you could argue that the 10-5 win over the Phillies in Game Two of the NLDS wasn't close (though Manny Corpas earned a save, so the tying run was on deck late). Otherwise, they've all been relatively tight games.

Like the Phillies, the Rockies won in the regular season mostly on the strength of an overpowering offense. In the playoffs, though, they've done it with arms. Other than the five runs the Phils scored in Game Two, Colorado hasn't allowed more than two runs in any of their six playoff wins. The Rockies bullpen has allowed two runs in 23 innings; that's almost unimaginable.

When the Phillies lost, I was a little embarrassed that they got swept, particularly that they dropped the first two games at home. Now I'm almost feeling good about their role--and the fact that they battled in all three games--in what could prove to be the greatest run in baseball history.

(Archival note: if Arizona wins 10-0 tonight, I reserve the right to delete this post.)

Taking Kansas National
I watched the first hour or so of the Republican presidential debate in Michigan the other day. It was fascinating, just as a window into how willfully and completely these guys have disconnected themselves from American life as people experience it on a day-to-day basis. Asked about the economy, and the evident disconnect between statistics that show prosperity (stock market gains, low inflation and unemployment rates) and the widespread perception that we're in or approaching a recession, the candidates mostly responded that the strong economy is, in Fred Thompson's words, "the greatest story never told."

The truth, as anyone paying attention can tell you, is that the current economy closely resembles the hypothetical of Bill Gates in a room with a hundred retail clerks: on average, that's a roomful of millionaires. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the gains of those at the top more than offset the declines for those in the middle and bottom--so we have both statistical prosperty and widespread stagnation or deterioration:

The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.

The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.
...
The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.

Even without their other disadvantages--the Iraq War, the incompetence and dishonesty of the Bush administration, and the widespread perception of corruption--I honestly wonder how the Republicans expect to win next year when the party refuses even to acknowledge that most Americans are struggling to hold their ground, let alone get ahead. I suppose it has something to do with the core contention of modern conservatism that government can't do any good in matters other than war--so policy actions that might help improve families' circumstances but require some additional spending, like broadening college access or health coverage, are prima facie unacceptable.

Indeed, at the Michigan debate, which focused on economic issues, the presidential contenders talked not about addressing the problems of working families but the need to hold the line or force deeper cuts on "discretionary" spending (other than the military, of course) and "reform" non-discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicare so as to get the budget under control. That these programs are so popular that even Bush after his re-election and with Republican congressional majorities couldn't come close to "reforming" (read: undermining) them evidently didn't register.

I'm not the only person to note how weird this all is. The conservative David Brooks in today's New York Times warns his co-partisans that they're on the brink of losing this argument before it's even truly begun:

You’d think that [the Republicans would] start every election by putting themselves at the kitchen tables of middle-class families with ambitious kids. Their first questions would be: What are the barriers to their mobility? What concrete help do these people need to realize their dreams?

Yet at the Republican economic debate in Michigan this week, there was no talk of that. The candidates declared their fealty to general principles: free trade, lower taxes and reduced spending. They talked a lot about the line-item veto and the Chinese currency. But there was almost nothing that touched concretely on the lives of the ambitious working-class parents who are the backbone of the G.O.P.

Sometimes the candidates seemed more concerned with massaging the pleasure buttons of the Club for Growth than addressing the real concerns of the middle class. They talked far more about cutting corporate taxes, for example, than about a child tax credit for struggling families.
...
Instead this ground is being seized by a Democrat. Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton has issued a string of specific policy programs aimed directly at members of the aspiring middle class.

Yesterday, it was a tax credit for college. Earlier in the week, Clinton offered a plan to give families down the income scale access to 401(k)-style plans. Right now, 75 million workers have no employee-sponsored pension accounts. The way our tax code is structured, people up the income ladder get big tax incentives to save, while working people, who have the most trouble saving, get the smallest incentives.

Under the Clinton plan, if a family making up to $60,000 a year put $1,000 into a new 401(k) account, they would get a $1,000 matching tax credit. The plan would create millions of new investors. Struggling families could choose mutual fund options and participate in the capital markets. They’d be encouraged to move away from a month-to-month mentality to a saving-for-the-future mentality.

Clinton’s plan poaches on economic values that used to be associated with the Republican Party. Moreover, it undermines the populist worldview that is building on the left of her party. Instead of railing against globalization and the economic royalists, Clinton gives working people access to Wall Street and a way to profit from the global economy.

Brooks's column reminds me of the smartest policy piece I've ever read in a right-wing publication: "the Party of Sam's Club." Written about two years ago as the Bush administration was really starting to unravel, the authors shrewdly observed that the Republicans were losing touch with their own base: white middle-class and working-class families who were with them on social issues but starting to feel that the Republicans weren't addressing their domestic concerns. They urged the party leaders to flesh out and develop the Bush/Rove "big-government conservatism" that had been implied, if not promised, in 2000. Specific proposals included a child investment credit that's strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton recently proposed (a very good idea, by the way); a variant on the universal individual mandate to purchase health care that Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts (and has mostly disavowed on the campaign trail); and, most shockingly to me as I re-read it today, subsidizing low-wage work as part of a second phase of welfare reform.

If you've heard any of these ideas advanced by any Republican presidential candidate in this cycle, you've been paying much closer attention than I have. More likely, the problem is that the dominant interests in the Republican coalition couldn't give a rat's ass about any of this stuff: Brooks's jab at "the pleasure buttons of the Club for Growth" could have been written by most any Daily Kos poster. Maybe it's inevitable that when any group has unfettered access to power for as long as the Republican business interests have, they lose track of what it takes to retain that power in even a flawed and provisional democracy like ours.

In the absence of a viable domestic platform, maybe the Republicans plan to run another campaign on xenophobia, fear, and "social conservatism." Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" sets out how this has been their model for a couple decades now. But it will be tough in 2008, for a few reasons: first, because the domestic issues are increasingly insistent, second, because their leading candidate is anathema to the social conservatives, and third, while support remains high for fighting "terrorism," there seems to be a broad consensus that the Republicans haven't done this in a smart way, either.

Other than demonizing Hillary Clinton or whatever Democrat becomes the face of the party, I find it almost impossible to see how they plan to win next year.

The Madness of Boss George
The first round of the baseball playoffs is complete, with dismal results in all local precincts. The 2007 Phillies are no more, as are my wife's cherished Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. (Okay, she could generally care less about the Halos, but adores Mike Scioscia more than anyone really should.) The Cubs went down even more meekly than the Phils, setting up a National League Championship Series between Colorado and Arizona that promises to be about as compelling as televised Boggle. And, as of an hour or so ago, the New York Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians.

Short playoff series are the definition of "crapshoot," and the Tribe knocking off the Bombers was the only one I predicted correctly. (I really would have enjoyed that Cubs-Phillies NLCS... ) Cleveland's pitching was too good, and the Yankees' too suspect, for me to pick the local guys. But that the Yankees made it at all is fairly incredible. They mirrored the Phillies in many respects, coming back from a slow start--which lasted a full 50 games in their case--to reach the playoffs on the strength of a relentless and powerful offense. New York's pitching took as bad or worse a beating from injuries as the Phils'. And through it all, legendary manager Joe Torre kept his cool, never complained, supported his young GM Brian Cashman in not trading homegrown talent for veteran fixes... and led his club to a 73-39 record over their last 112 games, for a .651 winning percentage that's almost unfathomable in a baseball season of (I think) unprecedented parity. As his veteran arms faded, Torre and pitching coach Ron Guidry integrated a new cohort of Yankee pitchers that, always provided they stay healthy, seem all but certain to lead the team back to the title within a few years.

But if they do, it won't be Joe Torre who gets another championship ring. In a dick move reminiscent of what he did in the '70s and '80s to become arguably the most reviled sports owner since the O'Malleys took the Dodgers west, Big Stein recently stated, "I don't think we'd take him back if we don't win this series."

At the time he said this, the Yankees trailed two games to none. They'd gotten blown out in the opener when starter Chien-Ming Wang couldn't handle the Cleveland bats, but very nearly seized homefield advantage before squandering a 1-0 lead late in Game Two and ultimately losing 2-1 in 11 innings. Though I didn't see most of that game, I haven't heard anyone suggesting that Torre's decisions were to blame. (Joba Chamberlain, perhaps the most talented of the Yankees' kid pitchers, lost the lead with a wild pitch in the 8th inning, Mariano Rivera threw two scoreless, and Luis Vizcaino--clearly the third-best arm in the New York bullpen, after the two guys who already had pitched, took the loss in the 11th.) But even if Torre had done the managerial equivalent of pooping on the lineup card, without him you're almost certainly not in the playoffs to start with--and he's as beloved in the city as Steinbrenner is detested. A similar state of affairs seems to hold in the clubhouse; if Torre is fired, it's probably less likely that Rivera, star catcher Jorge Posada and the certain MVP, Alex Rodriguez, choose to come back for 2008.

As self-defeating as it seems--and as unseemly as it is for a 77 year-old billionaire to act with a four year-old's petulant need for instant gratification--this is in keeping with Steinbrenner's nature, and the public response from Torre and his players acknowledges as much. But Nate Silver at Baseball Prospectus thinks the old guy might just be off his nut.

What it suggests to me, though, is that most of us are lucky not to have our professional fates controlled by possibly unhinged nut jobs like Steinbrenner. Six hundred years ago, that guy probably could have had you put to death; now he mostly just hurts himself unless Brian Cashman, Stick Michael or whoever else is in the Yankee brain trust these days can talk him down.

I don't hate the Yankees as so many of my friends and family do. Baseball is more fun when they're good, and when they're good for the right reasons--as is the case now with Cashman's emphasis on building from within and being opportunistic in trades--the whole game improves because other organizations look to the replicable aspects of Yankee success. But Steinbrenner's such a miserable, tyrannical prick--and always has been--that I do derive a certain pleasure from knowing that he's unhappy. When one expects the near-impossible--in Big Stein's case, championships every single year--it's inevitable that the disappointment of defeat dwarfs the joy of victory.

Though it also might have to do with this curse-as if New Yorkers weren't likely to support the Dem anyway--I'll go out on a limb and predict that the first year after Steinbrenner dies, the Yankees will win their 27th championship.

Huckabee: What'm I, Chopped Liver?
My favorite unhinged right-win would-be theocrat, James Dobson, has an op-ed in the New York Times today threatening to take his flock--I use the sheep metaphor advisedly--out of the Republican Party if they don't nominate someone he deems acceptably opposed to abortion, The Gays, and whatever else freaks these people out. Referring to a meeting last weekend of "pro-family" leaders in Utah, the man I like to call the Christatollah writes:

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

The other issue discussed at length concerned the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values. Though there was some support for the proposal, no consensus emerged.

Speaking personally, and not for the organization I represent or the other leaders gathered in Salt Lake City, I firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

The other approach, which I find problematic, is to choose a candidate according to the likelihood of electoral success or failure. Polls don’t measure right and wrong; voting according to the possibility of winning or losing can lead directly to the compromise of one’s principles. In the present political climate, it could result in the abandonment of cherished beliefs that conservative Christians have promoted and defended for decades. Winning the presidential election is vitally important, but not at the expense of what we hold most dear.

This has been interpreted, probably correctly, as a shot across the bow of Rudy Giuliani, the Republican hopeful who has argued that conservatives should support him because, first, he's the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton, and second, whatever vitriol he lacks toward gays and women who shtup outside of marriage (which is what this is really about), he more than makes up for regarding Muslim Evildoers.

As there's no candidate I personally deplore more than Giuliani (though Senator Clinton herself isn't too far behind him), his misfortune is my pleasure. Without both sides of the Republican coalition--the rich elites who enjoy Golden Ages of Profitability whenever a Bush sits in the Oval Office, and the angry religious voters who evidently get gratification from hearing coded hymns or Bible verses in State of the Union addresses--they can't win nationally. Indeed, a new Rasmussen poll shows that in a three-way race between Clinton, Giuliani and a far-right third party candidate, Sen. Clinton wins easily with 46 percent of the vote; Rudy gets 30 percent, and "Gary Bauer" (hey, let's have some fun with this) gets 14.

What I wonder, though, is why the Dobsonites wouldn't just get behind former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. I've thought for awhile that Huckabee is the strongest general-election candidate the Republicans can muster anyway: he is, to paraphrase his own words, "conservative but not angry about it," an ordained minister, a public official of clearly superior competence than the Bush crowd (faint praise, but still), and solidly in line with the rightists on substance, and somewhat on style. He's a much better "retail" politician than Giuliani, and probably better than Mitt Romney or John McCain, and he's got enough economic populist credentials to run against a corporate pseudo-Dem like Clinton from the left on some issues.

I suppose the reason why the Dobsonites haven't gotten behind Huckabee is that doing so could risk a deeper schism with the Norquist wing of the Republican Party than merely sitting out next year's race, which many think the Democrats are certain to win anyway. Huckabee has taken fire from the small-government/anti-tax extremists for such sins as increasing state spending during his tenure and supporting levies such as a three-cent gas tax increase, four cents for diesel, so the state could make infrastructure improvements. The horror! Though he did eventually sign Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge, in March of this year, and he claims to support the thoroughly idiotic "Fair Tax" proposal,they likely still don't trust him. Remember that these guys both want low or no taxes and bad government--because every time FEMA bungles a Hurricane Katrina, it reinforces their core argument that the public sector is useless--and Huckabee was, as far as I can tell, a reasonably effective governor.

But in a Republican field where nobody has caught fire and a big chunk of the voting power is threatening to walk away, it seems strange to me that the rightists wouldn't get behind the candidate who both comes closest to their views and is generating the most buzz on the stump. Maybe it's not enough to be a conservative; maybe you really do have to be angry about it. In that case, there's always Alan Keyes...

A Protest Song for Our Time
I've become somewhat omnivorous in terms of music consumption: when someone says, "listen to this," and even better if he or she is willing to put it on a disc for ripping and later iPod uploading, I'm game. So it was a couple weeks back when a guy in my office burned a few hundred song files to a CD and I put them through the formats and added them to the 5,000-odd other tunes on the iPod.

Yesterday I'm walking to the subway and suddenly had my ears blown out, with my mind quickly following, by one of those songs, from the last Ted Leo & the Pharmacists album.

Here's the video, though I recommend turning the volume way up, closing your eyes and just listening, at least for the first time.

Below are the lyrics. Suffice it to say, though, that the song is so kinetic and heavy that I could see a tank commander getting as into it as the kid protesting his war...

Like a gray bird in a blue sky over a blue ocean civilized men fly,
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Through puffy clouds and beautiful rainbows with the power and the speed
And the will to succeed, moneyed men fly high.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb
No need to clomp around through the ash,the rubble, and the mud.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
No need for face-to-face, or even worse to put a perfectly spit-shined brand new pair of leather boots on the dirty, busty ground.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Oh sure, you could mobilize a million troops
(but a thousand could probably get the job done)
But then people start to ask questions,
So when you drop in and out of the white clouds in a blue sky,
Don't worry about them having to see the whites of your eyes.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Just let the payload fly and wing on home, my son - it's not your day to die.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
And when the crying starts, you won't have to see their bloodshot eyes turn red,
And when the dying starts, you won't have to know a thing about who's dead.
This is your mission: pretend it's television, where the good guys always win,
And they're gonna win again, because you're gonna bomb.
Oh, they can keep talking - let 'em keep talking - they can talk while the bombs fall around them, for all I care.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
But when you've had enough of this diplomatic bullshit and your patience is up well alright!
It's on, and they asked for it.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Ah, but you'll want to give yourself a minute, to take in the beauty of the sight.
As you come in over the mountains between the green earth and the sky and bomb yes.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
In and out, no mess, no fuss.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
And when the crying starts, you won't have to see their bloodshot eyes turn red.
And when the dying starts, you won't have to know a thing about who's dead.
This is your mission -- like television - where the good guys always win.
And we're gonna win again because you're gonna,
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.