44 posts tagged “politics”

I'm even more sick of postelection election analysis than I was of the goddamned campaign. 

A majority of whites voted, as they have for a long time, Republican.  A majority of minorities voted Democrat, which, along with the white votes Obama did win, was enough for 52% of the popular vote.  Why is it that so many people comment on the Republican tilt of white voting with disfavor, like "Oh, those whites, they just can't see past the party line" but not when it's African-Americans or Hispanics (Hispanics as a group are not as solidly blue as African-Americans, of course, in part because there are so many complications to grouping all those nationalities and histories under one sorry label)?  African-Americans continue to vote Democrat despite the fact that there is evidence that they are more socially conservative as a group than whites (Hispanics, for what it's worth, generally are, too).  Democrats seem all excited by Democratic wins in the West, but Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Rep. Barney Frank have virtually nothing in common as far as I can tell.  If Obama gets too liberal, African-Americans may not cut him off, but Hispanics just might.  It's hard to say--possibly the generation that is born in the US and growing up here will turn out more liberal than their parents.  All I'm saying is, why do people comment on white voting patterns like it's horrible to vote more for one party than the other, but not say the same thing about other ethnic groups.  I mean, basically I know the answer, and it's twofold.  One, most of the people saying that are Democrats, so it worries them more when whites, who are for now still a majority, don't vote Democrat.  And two, it just isn't done, is it?

And another thing:  SHUTUP ABOUT SARAH PALIN'S CLOTHES.  For Christ's sake.  Let's talk about how much the Obamas spent on their clothes, hey--or just how much they spent, period.  That worries me far more than the vague and totally unproven notion that we might have been in danger of getting ourselves a Vice-President who likes to shop and look good.  And PLEASE you fucking hypocritical jackasses who have suggested that if she was running as a woman of the people, she should have just kept dressing the way she dressed in Alaska.  Right.  I can see how that would have made you snigger and snark daily, making fun of her clothes.  Instead, since the RNC dressed her up, you snark instead about how much the RNC spent to do it.  I actually read one piece that suggested that she could have made do with just a few pairs of pants, a couple of jackets.  Yeah, because she wasn't being photographed or appearing in public in contexts where appearance counts for a lot on an almost daily basis.  And of course the press would never have commented in snarky tones about how she just keeps wearing the same pants every day.  Sure.

Which brings me to another point:  We don't think you're sexist for questioning Palin's qualifications.  There were legitimate questions there.  We think you're sexist for harping on "how's she going to raise her kids and be president?"  Yeah, I don't hear you asking that about a man named Barack.  We think you're hypocrites for balking LOUDLY every time someone mentioned Hillary's pantsuits and then spending weeks--but WEEKS--talking about the RNC's budget for Palin's wardrobe.  Yes, absolutely it's also hypocritical of the Republicans to call you out on this one, since the Republicans denied it was sexist when it was done to Hillary (and I'm not so sure either case is sexist--politicians' clothes and styles get talked about.  Remember when Al Gore changed to "earth tone" suits in his 2000 campaign and how we had to hear about it for days?  Remember Edwards's haircut?), but for cryin out loud, take the high road for a change.  We also think you're sexist for repeatedly making comments, overtly sexual comments, about Palin.  Perhaps my favorite was when one writer called her an "ideological lap dancer."  Right.  I'm sure you couldn't find a less overtly sexual and dehumanizing way to put it.  Good job.  Now anyone who doesn't agree with you is a pole dancer.  Why not just call her a slut and get it over with?  I also liked all the people who referred to her as a "Stepford Wife" when, in fact, every indication is that she is far from it.  We think you're sexist because it was pretty clear from the first moment that she entered the campaign that you weren't going to be happy with any woman candidate who wasn't from the blue side.  That has been the clear implication of most of what has been written about her from the beginning.

(What I think now that so much dirt is coming out of those quarters is that McCain and Palin were badly advised by their campaign managers.  The country already knew who McCain was and many independents and moderates liked him a lot, so instead his managers decided to get him to appeal to the far right "base" and alienate the voters who already liked him.  Palin is more moderate on some issues than we were led to believe and is quite knowledgeable about others, especially energy policy, not that you would know it from the way she was handled.  Looking back on the Katie Couric interview now, for one thing, I wonder how much of that was that she didn't know what she was supposed to say.  I'm not saying that McCain and Palin don't share the blame for going along with what was clearly a losing scheme.  I just don't buy the crap that I'm supposed to believe about Palin--not at all.  She is neither as far right nor as stupid as we were led to believe.  Some of the blame also goes to media bias and sexism, too, in my mind.  And, no, I didn't vote for McCain.)

Also, can you let it go that Palin hunts?  A lot of us do.  The numbers of women hunters are actually increasing and will continue to increase as it gets harder to afford food for your family and especially to afford meat that one might consider safe.  The moose in Palin's chili had no antibiotics given to it at all, ever.  It had no growth hormones.  It lived free range for its entire life in its natural habitat and was responsible for no pollution.  More than that, it was probably killed within Palin's local foodshed, making her and most hunters, locavores (it's hard to be a locavore in Alaska--it would be totally impossible if you didn't eat meat or fish).  This is a big reason why white people don't vote for you, because of the obvious and extreme anti-hunting prejudice that is usually based on nothing related to fact.  Of course, the reality is that without hunters, Fish & Wildlife Departments would be hurting badly and there would be no money to save the boulder darter or whatever other endangered creature you want to save.  In a lot of the West, Hispanics hunt, too, so I'd be careful on that one if I were a Democrat.

I notice now that Californians are shifting blame for passing Prop 8 from African-Americans--because that is clearly very sensitive territory--to Mormons.  Apparently what the Mormons did wrong is contribute money to the Yes on 8 committee.  I mean, it's clear that Mormons as a group don't support gay marriage, but it's also clear to me that Mormons do not actually constitute a large enough voting bloc in California to be directly responsible for this.  Jeffrey Toobin rightly pointed out that some blacks are getting irritated that gays keep trying to make it seem as if the situations of these two minority groups is really comparable.  I'm white, and it's starting to bug me, too, frankly, because while there are some similarities, I would say that the differences are far greater.  The situations faced by the gay community and by Hispanics also aren't morally equivalent, and if I were Hispanic I'd also be getting a little annoyed at this comparison. 

Back to the Mormons.  So, what they did was donate money to run ads that gay activists then found objectionable because they were ads encouraging voters to vote for Prop 8.  I hate to be a dick here, but that's our democracy (such as it is) in action.  That's kind of how it works.  I can't see that they did anything wrong.  I don't agree with their beliefs, but, as they say, I would defend to the death their right to believe them and to speak them.  If you really want to tell me that the Mormon church somehow brainwashed voters into voting for something they didn't agree with, then you are way more cynical about people than even I am.

Now back to the gays.  I have heard two alarming things from gay-activist quarters (including but not limited to Dan Savage).  One is that you cannot be against gay marriage without also being homophobic.  This is presented as a tautology with no argumentation or evidence that I've ever seen.  But, in fact, as I have argued in the past and will continue to argue, there is substantial evidence that you can be against gay marriage without also being homophobic and/or a bigot or whatever.  For many people who voted for Prop 8, the crux of the matter was not whether or not gays should enjoy equal civil rights but the word "marriage" which, like it or not, is still tied to religion in the minds of very many people.  I read many interviews with people who said that it's just the word "marriage" that made their vote go that way.  The Court doesn't make a formal distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage, but voters do.  Eventually, particularly in California, religion will probably die out and there won't be that objection.  Until then, that would seem to be the major hangup here.

The second alarming thing I've heard is that passing Prop 8 represents a return to persecution and oppression of gays.  Uhhh...I don't know where they're getting this at all.  Domestic partnerships, which as far as I can tell allow for the same legal rights and responsibilities as heterosexual marriage, remain legal in California.  California did not go back in time to reinstate laws that forbid homosexual sex or, certainly, to allow discrimination in the workplace of gays.  Nothing like that.  As a group (and admittedly, this may have more to do with sample sizes than anything else), gays make more money than non-gays.  Nowhere except in the military (um, and maybe Idaho...and Arkansas...but I'm talking about California here) are gays asked or expected to hide their sexuality the way they once were expected to.  So, in California, despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, they enjoy the same legal status, rights, and benefits as anyone else, how the fuck are they persecuted and oppressed?  I understand that simply being a minority can lead to attempts to "normalize" oneself that can be psychologically difficult or even damaging, but I don't see that any act of law can change that.   

Me, I would have voted against Prop 8, but it gets under my skin when the essence of the complaint here--as far as legality goes and what was voted on--is that gays are prevented, formally, from using the word "marriage" to describe their relationship (informally, of course, everyone is free to use it).  If I'm reading the domestic partnership law correctly, then there are not any significant rights or benefits being withheld.  Just a word.  Yeah, I would have voted against it, but this is a far, far cry from being oppressed or persecuted or somehow akin to groups of people who weren't even allowed to use the same water fountains as white people do until 45 years ago.  It's a bit different.

And finally.  I just read something Obama said that really bothers me.  Apparently he said it a while ago, but I missed it.  He said, "As a general principle, I believe that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms.  But just because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right."  This might seem OK to you when applied to the Second Amendment.  But think about the implications of this in terms of other amendments.  State and local governments used to constrain the exercise of the right to vote, for example, by instituting literacy tests and poll taxes and so forth.  That clearly wasn't OK.  Or how about the right of free speech?  How might state and local governments constrain the exercise of that in such a way that would be acceptable to Mr. Obama?  Or perhaps the right to due process?  I just cannot imagine that such a broad statement would be acceptable if we were talking about any Constitutional right other than the Second.  On the other hand, it's well known how Democrats in general feel about the Second Amendment, so I guess it's no surprise. 

Alright, I'm sure I've said way more than I ought to have and pissed everyone off.  My work is done here.  I obviously need to cut myself off from the news for a while.

I've written several times now, both here and in the comments on friends' Voxes, that I've been more turned off by the Cult of Obama than by Obama himself.  For a long time, I couldn't separate the two, and I had to really bring myself to focus on Obama himself, rather than the quasi-religious following that he has.  I hoped that once he was elected, the cult of personality would die down a bit and the man himself would emerge from behind the cloud of messianic rhetoric sometimes spouted by his supporters.

Near the end of the campaign, Palin said several times that we still don't really know who this Obama guy is, and she was roundly scoffed at by the press, because my god, how could we not know him after such an interminable campaign.  Yet, in a way, I think she was right.  Only I don't think it's Obama's doing that we don't know him (partly, maybe--his campaign was a bit withdrawn, not to say "secretive" which would put one in mind of GW Bush and Nixon).  I think it's that too many people look at him and see whatever they want to see, regardless of what he has said or done.  Of course, his opponents do that, but what has disturbed me, perhaps unduly, is that his supporters do it even more.

Listening to Obama's supporters is, honestly, confusing.  Other than the key words "hope" and "change," they often don't seem to know anything about him.  For example, it is commonly said with approval that he espouses a platform of "universal health care" when he espouses no such thing.  He may at some later point in time, but the proposal he put on the table is a far cry from that.  Most people will just go on with their employer-sponsored programs, although he does propose some changes to what insurance companies must offer and cover, and he proposes to offer the government health-insurance plan to individuals and families who do not have access to an employer-sponsored plan.  This is hardly the radical change that many of his most ardent supporters seem to think it is.

It's not just the specifics of policy, though (and it must be said, because I am stony-hearted and not especially moved by appeals to "hope," I vote on matters of policy).  Some of his supporters seem to think he's a hardcore liberal; some of them think he is a moderate or even a conservative, at least inasmuch as he is reserved and cautious in judgment.  For the record, I tend to think the latter, but not only because he is reserved and cautious in judgment.  He also seems moderate-to-slightly-conservative on some issues, like abortion.  During their live election coverage, Stewart and Colbert talked to one of his old mentors at Harvard Law (whose name escapes me--pardon) who has known both of the Obamas since that time and confirmed my belief that both of them are somewhat conservative people and take quite moderate stances on social issues.  Yet, many supporters of the President-Elect seem to think he mirrors perfectly their own leftist views.

Moreover, many of his supporters are claiming that his election is a mandate from the American public for a broad shift to the left.  I'm sure they'd like to think so, just as GW Bush's supporters liked to think the opposite 4 years ago.  Unfortunately, there is no great evidence of this.  Obama's lead in the electoral college was huge (more than twice the votes McCain received) but he only won 52% of the popular vote, only 1% more than Bush 4 years ago.  This, of course, also proves again that the electoral college makes perfect sense [1], just as the 2000 election demonstrated.  It remains an open question whether Obama would have won at all--along with the Democrats who won seats in Congress--had it not been for the precipitous decline of our economy in the months before the election.  He may still have won the electoral college, but a reasonable guess is that he would not have won the popular vote, and so I cannot see how this constitutes a broad mandate for the country to shift left.  There is still the rest of the people, 48% of them, most of whom voted for McCain but who remain part of this country and quite obviously did not shift left.  Indeed, looking at the map of how each county voted, there are huge swaths of this country in which Obama did not win a single county (I heard that in my own county, he only won 61 votes, total--not that Idaho matters at all in the electoral-college addition).  If the country is going to move forward in any meaningful way, all of those counties and states are also going to have to be brought along for the ride.  Anyway, I think the more reasonable view is that this vote was a mandate from the public to be anything but Bush.  Obama has remarked that he will be a president for us all, presumably even Clark County, Idaho.  Then again, Bush said the same thing (and he was more bipartisan and conciliatory as governor of Texas than he has been as president) and look what happened.  Obama's most ardent fans currently don't seem to care at all if Obama governs the 48% of the public who did not vote for him--some of his devotees, indeed, seem to be filled with a noxious hatred of most of those counties where Obama did not win and the people who live in them (and then they wonder why those people don't like to vote for them). 

In Obama himself, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of hatred or self-righteousness.  He never seems to harbor the messianic fantasies that so many of his supporters seem to.  I could be wrong (I know many people on the right attribute this to him directly rather than to misguided flocks of worshippers--I think I did for a while, too), but in his speeches, in his musings on legal issues, and so on, he seems to be a very measured man.  I have thus come to believe two things about the next two years.  The first is that his most leftist, most adoring fans are likely to be the most disappointed in him.  I could be entirely off-base with that, of course.  It could be that his plan is to govern to the left of where most of the country is, but at the very least, since I expect he will want re-election in 2012, I don't think it's going to happen.  Bear in mind that even many people who voted for Obama are to the right of Obama on some social issues; the results of Proposition 8 in California are one indicator of this.  Obama could lose a lot of votes if he does some of the things his fans want him to.  Again, though, the case of Proposition 8 may be illustrative here:  Obama has expressed opposition to "gay marriage" while also expressing support for equal civil rights for same-sex couples and also for states' rights to decide.  Perhaps he is in line with many of the people who voted for Prop 8 in this case.  Many of the people who voted for Prop 8 recognized the need for equal civil rights for all couples, regardless of sexual preference, but at the same time attributed religious and historical connotations to the word "marriage" that they don't want to see changed.  If this is in fact what Obama thinks as well, then it would seem to make him a moderate, not a real hardcore liberal, at least not on this issue. 

The second thing I think is that, because the country has not taken a broad-based left turn and because the Congressional Democrats have a tendency to make themselves totally fucking obnoxious, they will lose some seats in 2010.  I don't know whether they'll lose enough to really threaten their current majority, but I expect the country will grow weary of them.  I am already weary of Pelosi, for crying out loud, but for some reason, I have no authority to unelect her.  Maybe Obama will have the testicular fortitude to keep them all in check once he is in office and once they're done occupying themselves with the Lieberman witchhunt (really, guys?  Still don't have anything better to do than shuttle Lieberman out to Congressional Siberia?).

Am I babbling again?  I've been writing this post off and on, while doing other important things, for over an hour, and my eyes have glazed over.  The point is that while I think I finally have Obama the man separated from the Cult of Obama, I'm not sure most people do and this is only going to make his job--already a task to make Hercules shudder and Sisyphus rejoice his fate--harder.

[1]  For those who are unfamiliar with the system, Americans don't actually vote directly for the president.  We vote, instead, for electors who promise to later go vote for the candidate they are promised to.  The number of electors each state gets to represent it is based on population, so California has 55 electors while Idaho has a measly 4 because hardly anyone lives here.  The problem is in most states, the electors are chosen on a winner-take-all system rather than a proportional system, so that when a Democrat wins in California, even if only with 51% of the vote, the Democrat gets all 55 electoral votes.  Thus, since California pretty much always goes Democrat thanks to its large urban populations, you don't really count if you're a Republican there (at least not in the presidential election).  Similarly, since Idaho is reliably Republican, anyone who votes for anything other than a Republican for president here is basically wasting their time.  While dividing up Idaho's votes in a proportional manner would be unlikely to affect the outcome of the election at all, dividing up California's (and Washington's and Oregon's and Florida's and Texas's and a bunch of the other well-populated states) likely would make a difference.  In this case, Obama would still have won since he won a majority of the popular vote, however there would not have been people claiming that this was a landslide because those people are judging mostly from the electoral college vote.

Tomorrow, of course--or, rather, later today--is the election.  I keep trying to think positive.  By that I mean that I keep trying to hope that after tomorrow, the name of the next President will be known and we can quit the partisan bickering, the fear-mongering, the hateful invective.

Then, Slate came and sucked the hope right out of me.  Why do I keep reading Slate, anyway?  It's like I'm some kind of masochist.

So, she lives in a blue city in a blue state and then apparently thinks her kids will naturally turn out "tolerant" because that's what liberals are!  Apparently, it did not occur to her that when you are only liberal (and at 8 years old, nonetheless!) because every single person you've ever known is liberal, it doesn't actually say that you're an open-minded type just following your rational mind to the best, most just political positions.  It means you're just doing the same thing everyone around you is doing, which is hardly the picture of themselves that liberals usually have.

Apparently it never occurred to this woman, either, that it's really damned easy to be tolerant of people who think the way you do, regardless of the color of their skin.  Of course, this is also the woman who wrote a piece a while back about how her kids were acting very smug and superior because their family drives a Prius--makes you wonder who they're getting that attitude from.

But, people, when kids are wishing John McCain were dead, they are hearing it from someone else, probably their parents but in this case it's also being reinforced by the entire town being liberal.  The author seems to think that this is nothing to worry about.  I guess she thinks that as adults she and her friends are not responsible for having taught this crap to their kids.  She seems to think this will all end tomorrow, but it won't.  This is just going to get worse because it started with adults acting like children who could not get along, could not reach a compromise, could not see any other point besides their own, didn't even bother to listen, and when they found that their neighbors were going to vote for the other side, they moved to a neighborhood with a tacit political agreement to all vote the same.  If you don't, you're a traitor, though maybe only the kids will give voice to that opinion in public.

So, the parents are vicious partisans who fancy themselves tolerant and open-minded while totally isolating themselves from anyone who thinks differently from them.  What exactly did they expect their kids to turn out like? 

I take my son to vote with me.  For one thing, I don't have a babysitter, but I also want him to get in the habit.  He is only 3, but even when he's 8 I'm not going to expect him to pick a party and attack anyone who dares to choose the opposite one.  He is exposed to political arguments on both sides, and the thing I hope he takes from those are that we still love my uncle, the one who is an unrepentant Reaganite even though his economic ideas are clearly wackadoo, just like we still love my mom even though she has this crazy idea that it's unethical to eat animals and is an obvious bleeding-heart (mainly we love her because she can't lie at all so it's really easy to take all her money at poker--just kidding!  We love her for other reasons, too).  What I want my son to know more than anything is that he is free to make up his own mind about every issue, and that he has a responsibility as a citizen to know as much as he can about the issues and make up his mind regardless of any party doctrine, regardless of what his friends think is cool.  What I want him to know is that people can disagree with you and still be good people, even fantastic people, who simply see the world a bit differently or give different values priority.  Despite the fact that my husband and I are socially and economically somewhat conservative (though not Republican), we agree about this, and yet this notion of being free to decide your own ideals and to still love your wackadoo Reaganite uncle, this is supposed to be the essence of being a liberal.  What could be more open-minded and tolerant than that?

But since we are conservative (or traditional or old-fashioned or however you want to look at it) in our parenting as well, you bet your ass that if our kid said some of those things, he would be in for a serious discussion about his disrespect for others.  We would not just shrug and let him eat his candy.  Even my mom the bleeding-heart wouldn't have done that.  He is free to choose his own politics or religion or even become a vegetarian if he wants; he is not free to wish the death of another person. 

No, people, no.  I am in total despair for the next four years.  At this point, the hatefulness and fear on both sides do not bode well.  It isn't right to just decide that everyone who disagrees with you is a racist or a bigot or greedy because they don't like taxes (or, from the opposite side, a babykiller or a socialist or whatever).  At the very least, could we start watching what we say around our kids?  Could we not teach our kids that it's OK to hate people who have different ideas?  Please?

I think I mentioned a while back that Slate had started running a blog called "The Big Sort" and that it does not piss me off.  I continue to find it fascinating and basically balanced and accurate, and it continues to not piss me off.  Oh, of course, I don't agree with every word written there; it isn't the point whether I agree with it or not.  The point is that on the whole I think the picture it is painting of our nation, of the American people, is kind of true and kind of frightening. 

See, the basic gist of the blog is that there are Two Americas, for lack of a better term.  One will essentially always vote liberal/Democrat; the other will essentially always vote conservative/Republican.  You can study these people by the way they tidy up their dorm rooms, by the way they rear their kids, by what kinds of cars they drive, certainly by what media they consume, or any of a number of other factors, and you will find little overlap.  Spank your kids (or, at least, admit to spanking your kids)?  You voted for Bush.  Drive a Mini-Cooper?  You'll vote for Obama.  These basic splits, on issues that are seemingly unrelated to health-care policy or the economy, are more predictive of how people will vote than any other demographic factor.

Some of these studies, admittedly, I have quibbles with.  I think, for example, in the spanking survey, the dichotomies about child rearing are unhelpful at best, false at worst.  Is it better for your kid to be obedient or self-reliant?  For me (and my husband), the answer is clearly "neither is better; both are equally valuable in different situations."  Is it better for your kid to be independent or respectful of his elders?  Again, neither is preferable because both have value.  This is certainly how I was raised, as were most of the kids I went to high school with, though most of them were spanked as children, while I was not.  I found it interesting that one of the conclusions is that consevative-type people favor the "strict father" routine, while lefties are supposed to prefer the "nurturant parent" ideal--it's interesting to me that we are meant to prefer a government to mimic our parenting ideals, and so apparently the old cliche that Democrats want a "nanny state" is more or less true. 

I was also interested to read that conservatives are tidier and more conscientious while Democrats are more "open to experience" and "tolerant" of "diversity."  I have some quibbles with this, too.  Having attended a very liberal college and having wasted many of the best days of my life in literature seminars, I feel pretty confident in stating that the "diversity tolerance" we're talking about here is of a fairly shallow nature.  Sure, sure, the liberal kids have the world music CDs which shows an openness and a tolerance (especially a tolerance for the didgeridoo beyond all reason), and they're much more likely to have gay friends, but they tend to be extremely intolerant of conservatives, country music, Christians, white male authors, and so forth.  Personally, I haven't ever seen the virtue of "tolerating" diversity anyway--for me all individuals are either worthy of respect as individuals or else all individuals are assholes (depends on my mood).  The position of, "Hey I listen to Linton Kwese Johnson and have gay friends, but I don't talk to those stupid conservatives" is morally spurious and untenable. 

Liberals are said to favor curiosity, while conservatives are said to favor self-control and order.  Again, here, I don't see any moral superiority in the one over the other, though liberals will claim that their ideas are better and conservatives will claim theirs are.  Aren't both curiosity and self-control equally valuable, depending on the circumstance?  

But, then, see people have said I have a split personality before.  My Japanese friends used to remark about the fact that my house was very tidy but my car was very messy and explain it by my conflicting blood types (I'm A-dominant, O-recessive--interestingly, my husband is B-dominant, O-recessive, and our son came out O.  We hope that the next one is AB so that we'll have the hat trick of blood types.  Wait, isn't a hat trick only 3?  Anyway...)  Or maybe it's how I grew up.  We lived in a lot of places, which encouraged curiosity and self-reliance, but most of those places were conservative places where obedience and respect for elders are definitely valued.  Maybe it's because my nurturant mother and my strict step-father, my vegetarian mother and hunter step-father, had to dispense with a lot of the emotional dogma just for us to all get along.  Maybe living in so many places has just forced me to see the way other people think and feel.  Maybe it's because--you know those Myers-Briggs personality tests? Well, you know I think the two categories that would most pertain to these political judgments we're talking about here are the intuitive-sensing axis and the perceptive-judging axis.  And you know what?  Although I come out extremely high on both the E (extrovert) and T (thinking--feeling is for losers), my N and S are somewhat close (though I lean more S than N) and my P and J are almost tied.  

So, maybe I am just weird.  Perhaps this is why I will forever be in basic, unresolvable conflict about politics with nearly everyone.  I can and do see value in both sides of the arguments.  I do have moral preferences, certainly, but in terms of running a giant nation, I think some kind of guiding pragmatism is best.  Our country's currently enormous problems are not going to be solved by finger-pointing and calling each other stupid.  We are not going to be able to move forward as a nation if each person continues to think he/she is right and the other side is wrong. 

It's particularly ridiculous in light of the growing body of research that most people are liberal or conservative by virtue of their fundamental personalities and by dint of emotion.  You're not going to change those things.  No amount of reasonable argument--oh, who am I kidding?  Reasonable argument is pretty damned scarce anyway.  No amount of hectoring and invective is going to change people's basic personalities.  I dunno what we do if people won't consent to a certain amount of pragmatic compromise on behalf of their nation. 

On a related note, I keep seeing those eHarmony ads that ask you if you aren't curious who you'd be matched up with.  I'm not curious about that exactly.  What I am vaguely curious about is whether their machine would be smart enough to match up me and my husband.  Obviously, I haven't take their test, but they promise to match you based on "deep compatibility."  On the surface, my husband and I are totally dissimilar, and we often find ourselves wondering what the fuck the other one is all about.  Even a little deeper, we're quite different:  We're both intelligent (I think) but in completely different ways (one reason that I don't think that college is necessarily an indicator of intelligence).  I'm bookish, while he's practical.  But way down deep, our most deeply held values and morals are quite similar.  We both equally value self-reliance, independence, good manners, duty, responsibility, courage, and freedom.  We would far prefer to live in a free world (accepting some inequality) but where self-reliance matters (where hard work and good decisions count for something) and where people do their duty by each other, than live in a world of equality where people value things like "happiness" and ending suffering.  We both tend to agree with Kant that doing your duty is the only way to make yourself worthy of happiness.  We both agree that people get offended way too much and should just get some brass testicles and deal with it rather than whine and complain.  Yes, deep down, we're both fairly conservative, skewing more libertarian than Republican.  Maybe someday I'll convince him to let eHarmony hook us up--gosh, it'll be so romantic!  Where should we have our first date?  And should we bring the kids? 

Things have taken an odd turn around the GinBaby household the past few days.  I found a news-analysis show (a straight one, not a Comedy Central one) that I actually like.  I have found peace on a major news network.

And, actually, I owe it to Jon Stewart.

Campbell Brown was on The Daily Show the other day, and she was talking about her CNN show:  Campbell Brown:  No Bias, No Bull.  She sounded serious about this nonpartisanship thing, sounded serious about trying to make a center between MSNBC and Fox.  So, I thought I'd give it a whirl.  And I think it's good.

The thing I like most about it so far is her "No Bull Final Exam," in which some guy who is clearly subordinate to Campbell Brown herself and has bad hair, goes over what the candidates have been saying and gives a fact check.  None of the candidates do very well.  This is remarkable because nearly every other news source I watch/read usually fails to criticize anything Obama says.  I'm sure if you're a Fox viewer, this would be remarkable because Fox probably doesn't criticize McCain a lot.  I don't know.  I don't watch Fox. 

Last night's Final Exam was about health care, or, rather, what the candidates have been saying about their health-care platforms.  McCain did get one "True, but incomplete," along with some "Misleading" and one "False."  Obama's were solidly "Misleading." 

Um, Stewart, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this is why some people are still undecided.

The Idaho Falls newspaper has actually been running a series of sidebars with occasional longer columns after the debates that are also just for fact checking.  Again, you find both candidates mislead a lot, sometimes outright lie, and very rarely tell the whole truth (McCain did win big truth points for admitting he knew nothing about the economy--ah, those were the days).

This thing Obama just did, buying infomercial time on most of the major networks (this in addition to his dedicated Obama TV satellite channel, as if that shit weren't enough) really irritates me.  You have to wonder how this would have all played out if he'd stuck to his promise to use federal funds for the campaign (a promise McCain, incidentally, stuck to).  This is just money politics as usual, no?  The guy with the most money always seem to win in America, something McCain and others have been trying to fight for years.

I don't know.  As I've said, I'm sick of the whole thing, and I do not understand the Obama cult at all.  I am so glad to have finally found a show that has not drunk the Kool-Aid. 

I will admit, though, that I do consider First Ladies when I vote (a major reason I did not vote for Al Gore--Tipper is one censor-happy bitch), and I far prefer Michelle to Cindy.  Cindy kind of freaks me out.  It's nothing I can put my finger on, just some eerie robotic quality.  Remember when Steve Forbes was running, and people were freaked out because he doesn't blink?  I think it's something like that. 

Anyway, Campbell Brown:  No Bias, No Bull:  So far, so good.

Apparently in response to that post where I asked what the fuck small-town values are, a good friend of mine emailed me this little article.  I think it makes some good points in a much more clear and even tone than I can usually manage when this topic comes up.  I hadn't ever given a lot of thought to the assumption that there is widespread agreement amongst rural Americans about political and moral issues, and he's right:  There isn't.  If you haven't ever been involved in small-town politics, I wouldn't recommend it.  It's a blood sport, like politics in a big city I would imagine, but on a more personal level because the attacks on your morals and integrity are coming from people you went to school with.  Though most of the polticians who will ever win here are registered as Republicans, there are marked differences among them, and the race for county commission this year has had some ugly moments (the best, by far, was when we received a letter accusing one of the current commissioners of doing "shocking" things at the cemetery; this automatically made me think that the commissioner had either been caught grave-robbing or in an act of necrophilia, or possibly in some kind of witch dance, but the actuality was far less shocking and caused most of us to just sort of shrug).  

But the thing about this particular Republican pander (that small towns are the "real" and "good" America) is that not very many people seem to be buying it anymore.  Eventually, most panders outlive their usefulness, except the "I'll cut taxes" gambit, which Obama is using quite a lot recently (and is probably untrue--he intends to cut taxes, but surely we all know better.  Cutting taxes is part of what got us in this current mess, remember?  Cutting taxes on "everyone who makes less than $250,000 a year" is just not going to fly, but, hey, politicians gotta pander, right?).  Small-town people aren't so stupid that no one out here can recognize this for what it is. 

Unfortunately, Jon Stewart cannot recognize that small-town people can recognize this for what it is.  He was at it again, in a show tonight that was entirely devoted (again!) to Sarah Palin (right, because Obama doesn't ever stretch the truth or pander or get facts wrong or any of that--those are entirely Republican failings).  And, again, when he infers from Palin's speech that New York and Washington, D.C., are "fake America," AGAIN he invokes 9/11.  Like we've forgotten or something.  Like country radio would let us forget even if we wanted to.  That damned Alan Jackson song--makes ya weepy every time, doesn't it?  On 9/11, just like on July 4, nearly every house in my town flies a flag.  Perhaps that isn't the kind of display that New Yorkers would find comforting or even relevant; I don't know.   What I do know is that I have not lived in a small town in the West or in the South that considers big cities to be the "fake America" or where 9/11 is brushed off casually as something that happened to someone else, not America.  Stewart, you ought to be savvy enough to know that by continually playing Palin's increasingly unpopular speeches, you're just pandering yourself--to a much different audience, obviously, but it's a pander nonetheless.  Personally, I find the invoking of 9/11 so often and for such baldly divisive purpose to be off-putting.

But Stewart wasn't done!  No, he decided to go on and imply, as others have done (certainly those bastards at The Stranger, and the Slate guys with their "big-city values are better than small-town values!" crap) that small towns are the main centers of racism and xenophobia in our country.  Oh, that's rich.  This is just too much.  I am sick to death of hearing big-city Democrats describe how there is, apparently, no racism or xenophobia in cities.  How they live in cities precisely because they love all the diversity of color and creed.

Now, usually in the past, except when I'm really inflamed (like after I first read that Urban Archipelago shit), I try to take a conciliatory cant on this subject.  But, for the sake of argument, let's talk about this the way in a nonconciliatory way, just for a minute.  Play along at home.

In cities, there is more racism and xenophobia than there is in small towns for two reasons.  The first of these is that there is just greater numbers of people of different races and ethnic backgrounds.  This leads to greater competition amongst these groups, and competition among racial groups usually breeds more racism, not less.  By "competition," I mean competition for jobs and places at the good schools and so forth.  In small towns (which, by the way, this discussion is currently and falsely presuming are racially homogenous), there tends to be a mere trickle of new people of any color or creed, so when they do come they tend to be more easily and readily absorbed by the community.  This bring us to the second point. 

As far as I can tell, our major urban centers are still fairly well segregated by race.  I think this is mostly voluntary on the part of all groups, and I think it's also mostly subconscious at this point, but nonetheless, it's a fact.  If an Asian rap group--AWA:  AZNS with Attitude--were to ever come out of SoCal now, it would be "Straight Outta Irvine" which sounds markedly less threatening, doesn't it?  Especially since they'd mainly be talking about how their parents only let them choose between engineering and medicine.  (Ahem...sorry.)  In a small town, where segregation is difficult to say the least (and can only happen when the minority ethnic group is sizable enough to do their own thing--it happens in this town, to a very large extent, in that the Mexicans and the whites don't really mix a lot, except at school.  I was just at a high-school function a couple of days ago and was relieved and happy to find that the kids don't seem to segregate nearly as much as their parents do.  Ah, the melting pot.  Um, anyway, back to the point...), you get to know people individually and it's harder to see the individual as a "Mexican" or "black"--as a category.  I've seen it happen in several small towns (my mom always dutifully represents the oppressed minority category of "vegetarian" which isn't easy when you're surrounded by hunters and ranchers.  Still, she is well liked.).  In cities, where there is so much segregation and less chance to get to know your neighbors individually, the potential for racial flare-ups increases.  I mean, it's not like we have big race riots out here in the flyover zone.

To be yet more polarizing, I would go so far as to say that most big-city Democrats want only the diversity that enables them to congratulate themselves for having token multiracial friends or that one gay friend who is an interior decorator or whatever and with the provision that all of these people are essentially from similar backgrounds (middle class, educated) and holding very similar political and moral viewpoints.  If we wanted to be more unfair, we could assert, and not without some justification, that city people mostly want diversity because they just want to eat the food.  I admit it--life without a good curry is a hard life, indeed.  Besides, as William Julius Wilson and others have made a habit of pointing out, many of these big-city nonracists are actually quite racist in terms of hiring practices.

Next, there was an implication that people in small towns only care about the Second Amendment and people in big cities only care about the First Amendment.  Interesting.  Every single American I know supports the First Amendment, including and especially the right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble.  But you're really referring to the religion thing, right?  Most small-town people and most Republicans do agree that the State should not establish an official religion; we just disagree about the interpretation of what that means.  Is hanging the Ten Commandments in a courtroom crossing the line?  Would that be acceptable if it was hung there with quotations about law and ethics from nonreligious sources?  Assuming we agree that the Ten Commandments crosses the line, why must we then agree that putting a manger scene at Christmastime in a publicly-owned space crosses the line?  In what way does that establish a State religion?  If the public manger scenes come dangerously close to establishing an oppressive state religion, then doesn't the fact that Christmas is a national holiday (not to mention Easter) come oh so much closer?  I haven't heard anyone seriously suggest that we should stop having time off on Easter and Christmas, so why, if it is acceptable to take time off for a Christian holiday, is it unacceptable to publicly acknowledge that it is a Christian holiday?  I'm not a Christian, and it doesn't offend me at all. You could certainly argue that since the vast majority of Americans are Christian of some sort or another, Mary on the courtyard lawn merely acknowledges that fact, but I've said before that I think much of the superficial reference to Christianity in public spaces is more an acknowledgement of our cultural history than an attempt to somehow force everyone in this country to become Christian or hold "Christian values" whatever those are.  Why, especially, does this have to be made an issue of in towns where there are no non-Christians?  Why is a "moment of silence" in schools in the morning alleged to violate the First Amendment, since it is nondenominational?

Actually, though, I think the bigger question is:  Why is there an assumption that the far religious right, the few who might support hanging the Ten Commandments in the courtroom, are all from small towns?  The evidence doesn't support that.  The main centers of organization are suburban or even urban (to call places like Colorado Springs "small towns" is especially ludicrous since Democrats routinely cite the "80% of Americans are urban" statistic, which I've already noted is misleading at best), and I hate to point this out, but Salt Lake City is a pretty big city.  It's not New York, certainly, but it can hardly be called small town.

So, if small towners are supposedly against the freedom of religion (and this by no means established, unless you're just a pompous asshole who likes to assume stuff like this), why is it acceptable to the "fake Americans" to be opposed to the Second Amendment?  Why is the Second Amendment held to be of lesser value than the First?  Democrats in general, and certainly big city ones, certainly seem to think it is less worthy of preservation.  It is argued that if the Framers knew what the current situation would be, with all the automatic weapons and gang killings and all, that they wouldn't have included it or would have at least modified, but it's hard to say, isn't it?  What seems to me pretty clear is that they disliked tyrannical governments and wanted to preserve to the people a measure of independence and self-sufficiency and freedom from government interference in their lives that guns did (for them) help preserve.  And, frankly, they still help preserve that self-sufficiency today--at least, they do in small towns, where hunting for your own food is still considered a worthwhile pursuit.  Let's also be honest about the fact that even if we removed every gun of every kind from American cities today, crime in American cities would still be a huge problem.  Even if we assume that all the murders committed with guns would not take place in the absence of guns, we would still have one of the highest murder rates in the world.  Guns make some crimes easier, in some ways, but they don't cause crime.  The socioeconomic factors that Democrats are wont to cite as the causes of crime wouldn't resolve themselves in the face of a total gun ban.  Blaming guns for America's crime problem is as simplistic and facile--and false--as blaming a lack of Christian instruction in public schools.

Again, to a certain extent, I'm overstating things and playing devil's advocate.  I do see the reasons why city people want gun control, but I also think they need to recognize the intent of the Second Amendment (and you can say that religious fundamentalists need to recognize the intent of the separation of church and state clause) and, especially, they need to stop trying to impose these controls on small towns where gun crime is not an issue and guns have legitimate purposes.  I also understand why we don't want the Ten Commandments hanging in our courtrooms, particularly since things like "honor thy father and mother" are so hopelessly outdated.  It is only in our family that kids get stoned for sassing their parents. 

So, can we just give up on this city versus country thing?  The Republican attempts to use it are failing, and Stewart and all the rest should be able to both recognize that and stop the reciprocal "city people are better" nonsense.  Or, if we must continue it, then can we at least be more honest about it--can Stewart admit that, actually, he doesn't give a damn about the Second Amendment and, actually, cities do have more race-based problems than small towns do (I cannot tell that there is any shortage of antipathy toward "illegals" in major urban centers, either)?  Then small-town people will admit that, actually, they don't care that the 0.5% of the American population that practices Islam is offended by Christmas because none of those people live in our town, that's for sure.   

On an only semi-related note:  Did anyone see the election issue of the New York Review of Books?  I read most of the election-related essays and was astonished to find that the two most commonly cited reasons why I must vote for Obama are the makeup of the Supreme Court and what electing him will do for us in the court of international opinion.  The Supreme Court argument is a good reason to vote for a Democrat, I suppose, though it says nothing about Obama himself.  I've already given an indication of what role I think international opinion should have in our election; I think that most of the international opinions are self-serving and ask more of America in terms of maintaining world leadership and so forth than many Americans would care to be responsible for.  In fact, since I'm being argumentative tonight (which is so unusual for me, I know), I'd go so far as to say that some Europeans want us to elect a black president so that they can be seen to support a black leader (of a major industrialized nation) without actually having to elect one themselves.  Unfair?  Possibly, but I continue to be startled occasionally at statements from Europe that are apparently acceptable there but would be considered deeply offensive and racist here.  Democrats, of course, are already prepared in case Obama loses to blame it entirely on racism, because there is no other reason why any person would not support his policies. 

And, sorry, but I'm also sniggering that Europe is already trying to backpedal on their vaunted commitments to lower greenhouse gas emissions.  I guess when the going gets tough, the tough want more coal.  I especially sniggered, completely vindictively, at how the IHT article about it suggested that, if America elects Obama while the EU is backpedaling on this issue, the Americans will once again be poised to take a role of international leadership on this issue where Europe has been flaunting its moral superiority for years.  Ha.  Take that, Euro-sissies!  We're going to kick your ass with wind power.

And, finally, thanks to Congress for bailing out AIG so they could go to England and shoot partridge.  I feel so much better now knowing that you have taken care of the problem for us.  Bastards all around.  Hey, if they shot the partridge from the pear tree, does that mean we don't get Christmas this year?

Robert Reich was on The Daily Show tonight, and he said a couple things that provoked me to hit pause and rant at my husband.  My long-suffering husband, however, just nodded the way he always does whether I've said "The dogs need to be fed" or "The house is on fire"--it's all the same to him.  Not really, but he's not an expressive guy.

Anyway.

The first thing is that Reich appears to blame the current economic crisis solely on bankers and Wall Streeters.  I disagree, though heaven knows I am not an economist. 

The American economy has for years now--even back during the Clinton years, if one is being honest, though things got measurably worse during the Bush years--been based on the notion that everyone can live a life beyond their means.  We are a nation that goes into significant debt so that we can have things that used to be luxuries.  We are a nation that has become very accustomed to the idea of debt, both personal and public (and the public debt is obviously quite different now than it was during the Clinton years).  Americans don't seem to ever think that it will really have to be paid back.  They don't seem to think about what that interest rate is actually going to cost them or what the terms of the mortgage might mean to them in 5 years' time, because we are so used to this lifestyle and also to economic growth (though wages and salaries have not grown as much as our economic growth might lead one to think). 

I'm not trying to absolve the bankers and brokers.  But this was a system that, it seems to me, was bound to collapse.  Debt, personal and private, has to be repaid at some point.  With wages more or less stagnant (when adjusted for inflation), more money was not going to come for most people to save them from the financial decisions they had made.  So the system collapsed.  It collapsed, or so it seems to me--a lowly hausfrau--, because at some point someone realized that, gee, there isn't going to be money to cover these mortgages.  Once panic starts, it can be hard to stop, as we're seeing now.  It doesn't make me feel good that our economy is quite this susceptible to human emotion, but it also doesn't make me feel good that even now that we are in the beginnings of a real and serious crisis (I think), people are still trying to justify the economic lives they were living and are still trying to preserve the fundamentals of the American system in which anyone can afford a vacation to the Riviera--just put it on plastic or take out a home equity line of credit.  That is a system that is corrupt at its most basic level.  I know that anything that smacks of conservatism is way uncool, especially with people who specifically demand a president that went to Harvard (it wasn't Reich who said that...I think it was Jon Stewart's guest the previous night, Richard Lewish, who is insane), but perhaps in terms of the economy, we need to get back to the things that once made the American economy strong:  We made things, and we were thrifty.  Industry and thrift.  It's not such a bad life, really, though it does come woefully understocked with Jimmy Choos.

Also, Reich went on to say that he was worried about people getting close to retirement who have so much of their retirement savings (if they have any at all) in 401(k)s.  I am worried about these people, too, but I am also frustrated by them.  Any financial advisor will tell you that as you move closer to retirement, your portfolio should become more conservative.  Our 401(k) is with Schwab and they put out nice little pie charts telling you that, if you're going to retire in the next decade, just how conservative that should probably be.  So, I'm hoping that most of the clever Boomers who are about to start retiring in droves, have followed that advice and didn't lose too much.  Well, really, I'm also hoping that they will learn to live within the means of a retired person, but that seems unlikely to me, because we are talking about the progenitors of the "greed is good" notion.  America has decided upon a system in which only part of your retirement income will be provided by the government (and, yes, we are all glad that Bush never succeeded in privatizing that) and the other part you are responsible for.  If you weren't following Schwab's pie charts, then you need to take more responsibility for managing your money, because, like it or not, our system is based on a certain amount of individual responsibility in that department.  I understand that many people do not like it and, in fact, want the government or their employer to just take care of all this kind of stuff for them, but that isn't how it works here.  You, as an individual, need to be aware of that and step up.

Or am I missing something? 

This isn't about blaming poor people.  Really, the poorest of the poor aren't responsible for any of this, and it's understandable and generally desirable that working-class people would want to own a home.  We should as a nation evaluate just why our housing has become so unaffordable for so many people--I suggest that the problem is a combination of stagnating wages and the inflated cost of housing.  But we also need to seriously evaluate why we, as a nation, feel we deserve things that we cannot afford and why we feel compelled to pile up debt for things like vacations or handbags or whatever.  Or, you know, wars. 

Anyway, obviously Reich is a very smart man and knows much more about the economy than I do, but I think that his lefty tendency to blame everything on Big Business and make everything the government's fault and nothing the responsibility of the individual (yes, I'm being a little hyperbolic, and I have not read his latest book so I don't know if he addresses this more in there) is causing him to see this somewhat differently from how I see it. 

Industry and thrift, people.  It works.  It's also, coincidentally, the name of my favorite album by the Bad Livers.

I'm beginning to find myself in an unusual position.  I'm starting to come around to the idea of voting for Obama (as opposed to voting third party or just voting against McCain/Palin).  I don't believe for one second those ads that suggest he's going to cut taxes because I just don't believe anyone will be able to cut taxes right now--there is just too much to pay for.  But I think a lot of his positions have become more clear recently.  More importantly, I think he will have an ability to pick advisors who can give him sound, solid advice, and I think he might actually be humble enough to follow it.  I'm not sure it matters how "smart" our President is; I think it matters how smart the advisors and Cabinet are.  To be sure, I still disagree with some of his platform, but I think he is sober (I don't mean in the sense of "not drunk"  I mean in the sense of "not radical.") and has some essential integrity.  I used to think the Obama thing was just a cult of personality, and it still definitely has those overtones.  I also recognize that he's a politician, and he's said some things to pander that he pretty clearly doesn't believe, but they all do that. 

And he hasn't been guilty of most of the things that so irritate me from Democrats.  He has not suggested, and I don't even get the feeling that he's ever thought, some of the grotesquely sexist things about Sarah Palin that Democrats have said.  I am of the opinion, from having watched him quite a lot, lo! these many years of campaigning, that he is not what is usually meant by "elitist," i.e., I do not believe that he thinks his education makes him a better person than other people, even though very many Democrats are elitist and do openly think this, even going so far as to accuse conservatives and Republicans of not reading books or whatever.  I think, frankly, Obama is smarter than most of his fan base, because he's smart enough to know better than that.  I've also been impressed by his repeated efforts to turn the campaign away from the stupid shit nobody except the press cares about, like flag pins and Bill Ayers, and to turn it back to issues.

So, I feel OK with voting for Obama.  I did read some opinion column somewhere that suggested that Obama was probably running this time more to prepare for 2012 then because he really wanted to be president right now, and I think that's why in the beginning, some of his policy ideas were very vague.

But I don't want to vote for the rest of the Democratic party.  I dislike Biden and find him hypocritical; actually, I find Democrats who like him somewhat hypocritical, because he frequently mangles what he's trying to say just as badly as Bush does, only Democrats seem to think it's cute when Biden does it or something.  And Biden has never given us the entirely useful word "misunderestimated."  He did vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, though, the bastard, even though he criticizes McCain/Palin for wanting to inflict their religious beliefs on the country.  Oh, and what exactly was the Defense of Marriage Act, then, Joe?  Hmm?

I don't want to vote for the Democrats in Congress who have sat around doing nothing for these past couple of years, all the while blaming every failure on the Republicans.  I know the blame game is part of Washington partisan politics, but I also think they should have the balls to rise above it once in a while, particularly when the country is in real crisis. 

I don't want to vote for the obviously Democrat-leaning people at Slate and Salon and similar publications that are becoming more and more insulting toward those who do not agree with them.  I don't want to vote in a party that boasts so many members who are such incredible assholes.

But how do you vote for Obama but not the rest of it?  If I vote for Obama, am I seriously going to have to listen to these people for the next 2 years, by which time they may have pissed enough people off that they lose seats in a midterm election.  I mean, let's face it, Obama is winning in large part because a) the Bush years have been disastrous and b) Palin is disastrous.  Neither of those things guarantees the Democrats much of anything, except for probably this election.

It's quite a dilemma.  How do you get a man you think will be a competent president without also getting the assholes who adore him? 

Goddammit, people.  I'm sick of this.  Right now my actual biggest fear about the election is that afterwards Jon Stewart isn't going to be funny anymore.  I don't know if any of you ever liked Dennis Miller or P.J. O'Rourke, but I think something is going to happen to Jon Stewart that happened to them.  It's funny when you make fun of everyone more or less equally.  It's not as funny when you get bitter and pick a side and start focusing your bitter jokes only on the side you dislike.  This will be a sad thing, because I really enjoy The Daily Show.  But Stewart's starting to lose his grip a little.  This election cycle is clearly making him angry; Palin clearly makes him angry.  The fact that his rage leans one way more than the other is starting to show.  Don't get me wrong; I agree with a lot of what he says about McCain, but really?  Really, the best you can do with Obama's performance in the debate is that quoting all those numbers is boring? 

He said the other night, and I forget who the guest was, that he doesn't see what's so great about small towns versus New York, since New York is just like a bunch of small towns, all stacked up on top of each other.  I'm not going to say that small towns are "better" than big cities, but he can't literally mean that they're the same.  Right, Jon?  Because if they were the same, then you could live in one just as easily as the other and the issues in Manhattan would be precisely the same as the issues in Idaho, but neither of those things is true, is it?  People usually have a clear idea about whether they are city people or country people.  I love cities; they're fantastic, but I don't like living in them, and I do not want to raise a kid in one.  I'm not passing judgment on people who do raise their kids in cities, because all it means is that they've decided that different things are important for their kids.  I remember when my son was about a year old, we took him to Seattle, and it was an unholy nightmare.  I love Seattle from the very bottom of my heart, but we had to restrain my son at all times because of the traffic and the bikes and the strangers and the unknown dogs.  Life there would have meant life on a leash for him.  Some people think the cultural activities and access to things like airports are worth that trade; I don't.  So, they live in cities, and I don't, and it's OK that we're different.  It's funny to me that city people think "diversity" means something completely different from what I think it means.  To me, the important kind of diversity is not based on skin color or sexual orientation; it's based on values and beliefs.  I think we need people with different kinds of intelligence, all kinds, and talents and values and beliefs, and I think that we all need to learn to respect each other's differences (notice I did not say tolerate; tolerance is for pussies--respect is more difficult).

Then he had Sarah Vowell on and she said something like, "If the Eastern Seaboard was American enough for al Qaeda then it's American enough."  True.  Did someone say that the Eastern Seaboard wasn't American?  Some Republican operative?  And did anyone take that seriously?  Because, listen, Sarah and Jon:  I realize that we all believe now that Afghanistan and Iraq were huge, pointless wastes of life and time and money, but the soldiers who went off to war because they were told that this was defending their nation mostly come from the red states, from the South and West, and I have not ever heard a soldier complain that defending New York was not what they had signed up for.  I'm sure all the New Yorkers are like, "Well, they're not defending us.  Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11."  True.  But not everyone realized that at the time.  I believe the junior Senator from New York, in fact, voted to invade Iraq.  Am I wrong?  Anyway, fuck off, we know you're America.  Damn, we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese if not for you people, and we're glad to have him.

On the other hand, I'm trying really hard to remember a time when the Smithsonian published an essay that was more full of self-congratulatory twaddle than Joan Acocella's essay (in maybe April or so of this year...hang on...let me Google...found it) about why New Yorkers are smarter than the rest of the nation.  This is, to my knowledge, an otherwise respectable magazine, so jeez, it must be true that New Yorkers really are smarter than us rednecks out here.  Jesus.  If I wrote a piece for a major, essentially nonpartisan magazine about why rural people are smarter than New Yorkers, and I am pretty sure I could make an argument at least as convincing as hers, you think they'd publish it?  Right.

But then, THEN!  Tonight I found this delicious document.  I especially love how he uses a picture of a Code Pink demonstrator at the top, because Code Pink is not an extreme fringe, not at all.  This thing is sure to build the trust of rural, working-class people--just sure to!  I'm going to take a few of the points and respond to them:

I think Karl Marx had some valuable insights into capitalist economies!  He did.  Unfortunately, because of that whole vanguard thing and state socialism, so far every Marxist government has been extremely oppressive and has simultaneously sucked at economic issues.  Adam Smith had some valuable insights into capitalist economies, too, although some of his most valuable are routinely ignored now.

I think Mormons are kooks!  No comment, I guess.  I don't know what to say about pundits who think that comments like this should enter the national dialogue.  I mean, gee, what if we replaced "Mormons" with "gays" or something?  Yeah, it's only OK if it's a religious minority that is mostly white, I know.  Because religion and whiteness have become the fucking cardinal sins. 

The Second Amendment does too allow government to ban handguns!  Well, unfortunately, the Second Amendment does not say that, and the Court has disagreed with you.  It is possible to make an argument that had the people who wrote the Second Amendment been able to see what our country is like now, that they would have made other provisions for regulation of guns.  I'm sorry--this one particularly irritates me because a) the problem with handguns is almost exclusively urban, b) this is part of the Constitution, equivalent in status to freedom of speech and religion and all of that, and c) Democrats bitch constantly, and rightly so, about how certain elements on the right want to enforce conformity to a specific standard of morality, and well, so do Democrats, at least on this issue.  And by the way, I don't own handguns and I don't use them or really want them in our house, especially not with a little kid in the house.  If you take away the initial dependent clause of the Second Amendment, it says pretty clearly that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  Infringed?  I think "banning" constitutes infringement, don't you? 

Promiscuity between consenting adults is good exercise!  And also a good way to have unintended pregnancies and to pass around STDs.  Hey, I don't have a problem with that.

Saving the boulder darter was worth a few thousand jobs!  Well, probably not to the people who lost the jobs.  I'd like to make a few points about this.  The first thing is that the US Fish and Wildlife Service and state Fish and Wildlife services receives a very large portion of its funds from hunters and fishers, two groups that liberals tend to dislike (well, hunters get most of the ire; for some reason people don't see fishing as "killing" or something).  In other words, it is probably not big-city liberal tax dollars that paid for that shit; much of the funding came from the same rural rednecks y'all hate so much.  Probably some of the funding came from the same people who lost their jobs because of it (if any--I can't verify that anyone lost their jobs over this particular fish, but that's what Slate says).  Also, most of the actual research and work was done by the same types of people.  But the main thing about this kind of argument is that in rural areas, the loss of a few thousand jobs can mean the death of an entire region, because those few thousand jobs support a few thousand families who in turn support a whole bunch of businesses large and small.  It's fine to be all gleeful about the death of small-town America, but it brings very real and very serious economic consequences when there are no other jobs available.  I wonder if liberals would be so glib about the loss of jobs in an area of urban poor; from what I've read, I'd have to say that they would not.  Or, really, how would a New York Democrat respond if I was flip and joyful about all those Wall Street brokers losing their jobs? 

If Israel isn't out of the occupied territories in six months, we'll cut off all aid.  I doubt you can find a Democrat running for any political office who would even take this seriously.  I mean, I would personally be OK with cutting off all aid to Israel right now, but this isn't really a Republican thing.  The love for Israel is bipartisan and apparently total.

Higher gas prices are good because they make everybody bike and take public transit like they should!  Ah, yes, I know a lot of people who already believe this.  And I believe it, too--for city dwellers.  The simple fact is that people in rural America do not have access to public transit and frequently cannot reasonably bike the distances they have to travel.  It is not economically feasible to bring mass transit to most of rural America, except possibly bringing back Amtrak between major towns.  I have to drive 45 miles to get groceries; you want that I should do that on bicycle?  Would you?  Of course, we don't have to live out here, I guess, but this is where we can afford a house and anyway someone has to live out here to do the types of work that can't be done in urban areas.  So, the upshot is that high gas prices hit rural drivers who have little or no choice about how much they drive (and also, overall, have lower incomes already than urbanites) very hard.  I can understand that Democrats don't give a shit about that, but it doesn't reassure me in their ability to govern the entire nation that includes rural people as well as their beloved mass-transit-riders.

America's official languages should be English and Spanish!  This is more or less already the case, isn't it?  In every state I've lived in, official documents are available in both languages, and translators are available for free for Spanish-speakers.  I don't have a problem with this, although I don't really see what would be gained by making it official.  I don't see why this deserves an exclamation point. 

Judges should legislate from the bench if they want to. Conservatives do it, so why not liberals?  *sigh*  Do you not understand the Constitution, in theory or in practice?  For one thing, judges are not lawmakers; that is nowhere in their job description.  They are interpreters of existing law.  Period.  For another thing, just because "conservatives do it" doesn't mean it's then OK for liberals, too?  Ever hear that thing about two wrongs not making a right?  Also, the Founders specifically kept the judiciary and the legislative branches of government (and the executive) separate but equal because there are supposed to be these checks and balances.  This means that, in theory though not always in practice, lawmakers make laws and the judiciary judges whether they are coherent with pre-existing laws, namely (in the case of the Supreme Court) the Constitution.  The reason we have this system is to prevent wild swings between extremes; when the Democrats controlled all three branches, for example, we would have legislation that violates pre-existing law in the form of the Second Amendment, and then when the Republicans regained control of the three branches, we would have violations of previously existing laws regarding things like "due process."  If you're going to bitch mightily when lawmakers blatantly disregard court decisions and keep making laws they know will be found to be unconstitutional, then it is somewhat absurd to argue that the real problem is that the courts don't just go ahead and do the same thing the legislators do.  Bloody hell.  This is pissing me off.  Judges should not legislate from the bench, no matter which side they're on.  They are there to interpret the Constitution (or other laws) as best they can.  This is one of the things I most respected about Sandra Day O'Connor; she was appointed as a conservative, but she didn't legislate as a conservative.  She judged as a Constitutional scholar. 

What's so great about the Judeo-Christian tradition?  Haha.  And Democrats wonder why people accuse them of just having an anti-Western prejudice.  It's not that it's so great; it's that it's what we've got.  You can ignore it and deny it and rail against it, but it's still the tradition we've got.  I prefer to take the approach that it's worth being knowledgeable about because it forms the underlying and usually unconscious frame of reference for very much of American life.  Sorry.  It isn't better than other religious or mythological traditions, but it has more to do with the development of our culture.  The Jewish tradition in particular has a great deal to do with our values and belief in charity and compassion.  Is that really something you want to throw overboard just because you dislike religion?  This is a problem with "progressives" and "liberals"--so often they seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  (For mcco's sake I will note that one of the problems with conservatives is that they seem to want nothing to change, ever, which is ludicrous, especially because they often don't seem to mind keeping the bad parts of traditions along with the good.  Fair enough?)

Big-city values are better than small-town values!  And, again, you have to wonder why small town people don't vote for assholes like this.  OK, so what are "small town values?"  Some Republicans have pandered to the people using these terms, but what are they supposed to be?  I don't really know.  I mean, as I've pointed out before, nobody in small towns considers it their business if you keep chickens or hang your clothes out to dry so long as you do it on your land.  So, there's that.  Most of the small-town people I know believe that if you're capable of working, then you ought to be working, and that applies even to kids.  I suppose there is a greater tendency to be religious out here, but I haven't noticed any pressure on those who aren't (I only ever went to church when I was in Arkansas, and that was mostly because there was nothing else to do--nobody in the small towns I've lived in in New Mexico, Texas, Idaho, or Alaska has ever asked me about it or bugged me about it).  I think in general small towns, at least in the West, have a libertarian sensibility.  Are those the things that are meant by "small town values?"  If they are, then what's so bad about them?  And what are "big city values?"  And what's so great about them?  If I have a hard time generalizing about small town values, then how much harder is it likely to be to generalize about "big city values?" 

We're going to need affirmative action for a long time.  I don't know if I have the energy to go into this one in depth, but I disagree.  At the very least, I disagree with basing affirmative action on skin color and gender; if we're going to use the government to promote equality of outcome, then at the very least, it should be gauged on a more diverse set of factors, such as socioeconomic status.  I realize that Democrats don't give two shits about poor white people and certainly not poor white people who are also conservative, and so it is anathema to think that a poor white might get a leg up out of poverty via affirmative action, but you can't be serious about social justice and fighting poverty and ignoring the problem of poor whites, many of whom are rural and face similar problems to urban poor who are often minorities (i.e., lack of access to education, lack of access to jobs, lack of means by which to effect lasting change in their lives, etc.).  Also, I find some of Clarence Thomas's arguments on the subject compelling, and believe me, I really never thought I would say something positive about Clarence Thomas.  Damn.

We're undertaxed. Look at Europe!  I'm kind of tired of looking at Europe.  If the Europeans want the tax structures they have and the government they have, that's fine for them.  That doesn't mean I have to want it.

Many welfare moms kicked off the rolls by the 1986 welfare-reform bill are worse off in their crappy jobs!  I don't really remember what the 1986 bill entailed, but the same thing can be said of President Clinton's 1996 bill.  Of course, some of them are also better off, but it's true that many of them are worse off.  This isn't necessarily a good argument for welfare as it was, though.  I see it more as an argument that America has ceased to do what it was once great at and that was making sure that there were good jobs available even for undereducated people.  Democrats and Republicans alike have supported the measures that have brought us here. 

Broad availability of gay marriage: good. Broad availability of gay divorce: better!  Uh, fine on the first part, but why the second part?  Why the enthusiasm for divorce?  What good, exactly, does divorce do for society or even for most individuals?  I know a lot of people believe before a divorce that they will be happier once divorced, but in my experience, this does not always pan out.  A lot of these people are merely suffering from "grass is greener" syndrome.  It's extremely weird to me that divorce as a general thing is "better" than marriage.  Freaks.

You want to know why George W. Bush was a lousy president? Because he's stupid!  Huh.  I know a lot of uneducated rednecks who could articulate why he has been such a lousy president much better than this.  But it's so much easier if he's just "stupid!" 

The problem with public schools is private schools!  This doesn't even really make any sense.  There are a lot of problems with public schools.  I personally oppose public schools on a theoretical level because I think they are a tool of social indoctrination rather than of actual education, and that goes for all public schools.  Actually, early educators like Dewey were quite clear about that being their goal, but that seems to have been forgotten now.  But anyway, if you believe in public education, the problem you need to deal with isn't private schools.  The problems are:  the ways teachers are "educated" and I use that term very loosely because "education" degrees are a fucking joke, worse than a joke because then we have a bunch of semi-literates teaching our children; the way public schools are funded which guarantees inequality; the emphasis on things like "self-esteem" and "computer and/or media literacy" in lieu of critical thinking and, well, actual literacy; the "experts" who keep passing off total crap like "new math"; the way most schools necessarily teach to the lowest common denominator, or at the very least to the middle, and very bright students get bored and don't live up to their abilities because they have no real way to do so; text messaging during class and parents who won't allow teachers and administrators to take cell phones away from students, but anyway if students are primarily in school to be taught "self-esteem" and how to be a good little worker bee and also to provide a babysitting service for the parents, then I guess they can keep the damn text messaging up because they don't really need to pay attention anyway.  Fie on public education.

Meh.  If I thought that Obama believed most of that shit, I would have VERY serious concerns about his fitness for the presidency.  Oh, right, he's only supposed to respond to the needs and concerns of urban folks.  Fuck the rest of us, right?  Right!  Hey, let's hear it for divorce!  Woo!  Go Europe!  Yay, social indoctrination!  Hurrah for public transportation!  I'm so jazzed to go vote for this program now.  This is going to be sooooo cool.

Sorry for the bitter sarcasm at the end.  I am very tired of this.  For the record, let me unequivocally state that while I do not wish to live in a big city, I don't have an actual problem with big cities or city dwellers.  There were also a lot of points in that essay that I agreed with, but bloody hell.  I'm so sick of all of this.

How do you feel about the $700 billion bailout plan?

Oh, really?  You want to know how I feel about it? 

Let's see, I feel that it rewards people for bad behavior.  This is what people have been talking about with this "moral hazard" shit.  OH, but we can't worry about that now!  Right, just like when a todller throws a tantrum in a restaurant, obviously what we should do is reward it.  He's throwing a tantrum!  He is completely defying every rule he knows is meant to apply to his behavior!  Hey, give that kid a billion dollars!  That will correct it!  Whee!

I also feel that people in the lower rungs of the economic ladder, people who have been increasingly stuck there with stagnating wages and decreased opportunities for decent employment, are going to once again bear the brunt of this.  Yes, this might mean that those of us who have them can keep our houses (well, we weren't in danger of losing ours; we didn't take out a mortgage that we couldn't afford, but many other people in our income bracket and even the brackets above us did), and it might mean that credit is more readily available to help them continue to live lives that they can't afford.  Rather than actually see that our nation once again has jobs, even relatively unskilled jobs, that a family can live off of or that or that the jobs that do exist pay something like a "living wage," we'll just keep giving these people easy credit so that the people who own the credit companies can continue getting rich.  Sweet deal.

I further feel that the entire process was antidemocratic, to say the least.  How many voters out there really know what this $700 billion (plus $150 billion or so in tax incentives, some worthwhile, some not so much) is going to do?  Basically, none, because not even Paulson knows, or if so, he ain't telling.  He hasn't decided what he will pay for assets (last I heard, anyway).  He has said that this is more like a "loan" than a bailout, but he can give no specifics of how or when or how much of this money might ever be recovered.  Voters came out strongly against the first version, without all the "tax incentives" and the House, for once, listened and shot it down.  The Senate, though, completely owned by the fuckers who own and control everything in this country, passed it.  The House was whipped into line, too, and Bush, of course, passed it, but we've known for at least 8 years who owns him.  So, this is business as usual, I guess--government by and for the wealthiest and most fortunate of our nation.  Fantastic.  God, this makes me so proud of my nation and its system of government.  You can't even imagine.

On top of that, I feel that Democrats are being deeply dishonest in blaming the Republicans for deregulation.  Last I checked, some of the deregulation measures that are most correlated with the current crisis were bipartisan and passed during Clinton's presidency.  Greenspan chose not to enforce statutes against predatory lending during Clinton's presidency as well, and I didn't notice Democrats then saying much about it.

Let's see...I also feel even more now than I did before that there is no one in our government who is trustworthy.  I know libertarian-ish people like me are often painted as being merely stingy, like we just don't care enough about other people to give them our money.  That isn't really the point, though.  The point is that a group of people whose express desire is to have power--politicians--are almost inherently, and in our current government almost without exception, not trustworthy.  Why should I want to hand over my money to a group of people who is not trustworthy and will almost certainly squander my hard-earned money on things I want no part of, like wars in the Middle East?  And why, when my husband and I work our asses off to make sure we live within our means, why are we expected now to finance those who recklessly took mortgages, auto loans and leases, and credit card debt that they could not afford?  If they were so irresponsible this time, what assurance do we have that they won't just up and do it again?  Why does this make sense, or, rather, why do some people try to make this a "compassion" issue? 

I'm also pretty sure that this represents the ultimate triumph of the oligarchs over the commoners--not just the stupid redneck ones, but also the urban ones--and I think the commoners will be too stunned and beaten down to properly revolt as they probably should.  Isn't that in one of our founding documents, that when the government has become corrupt, the people should rise up and overthrow it? 

And I don't feel comforted by the almost certain prospect that Paulson will bring in a top Wall Street executive, maybe even an investment banker!, to "fix" this shit, i.e., to hand out cash to his cronies.  I don't feel comforted at all by the fact that our economy can supposedly be ruined by human emotion, i.e., panic.  I cannot take this crisis seriously, because the proximal cause of this mess is a game of chicken.  As long as nobody panics, the game can go on.  But when consumers "lose confidence" and house "values" which were inflated anyway drop, someone with subprime mortgages panics.  Once that guy panics, there is mass panic, like in Chicken Run.  Of course, since we no longer manufacture anything or really offer the world or even ourselves much that is of value, of course our economy is entirely a confidence game.  And for some reason, I don't feel really good about that.

Let me just allow Bill Hicks to speak for me now, because I'm a bit overwrought with all these feelings.  Just substitue "investment banking" for "marketing" although it's relevant to marketing, too.  Come, Bill, cheer me up.

I want to add an irrelevant post-script.  This is probably my all-time favorite Bill Hicks routine.  I have the CD of this, and I've listened to it hundreds of times, and it still makes me laugh.  Laughter:  such a precious commodity.