cheese it, the cops!

positive attacks

say you are a floridian who is completely sick of being bludgeoned by vicious campaign commercials by mitt on newt and newt on mitt. it's easy to express yourself by voting for someone else. do. because otherwise it will never end. it won't even ever not get worse.

disconnect me

one of my fave phrases in campaign coverage/debates etc is 'negative attacks.' that said, there is a distinct difference, a disconnect, between negative attacks and positive attacks.  

excellence

i don't think any better op-ed columnist than ross douthat is working today. that one's thoughtful, more measured than i would be on a similar theme (perhaps that's not saying much), and right.

weaponize ebola now

davos provides an excellent argument for getting weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists worldwide, and that will be the first priority of a sartwell administration.

mediocre monarchy

it would be amazing to see obama propose something fresh. tax the rich? ok, tax the rich: ain't gettin no further this year than last. really, our politics is frozen where it has been since the new deal: tax the rich, no don't etc. regulate, don't. government is your friend, your enemy. i don't know: give me something, anything. you've got all these supposedly smart people, but they can't think of anything, maybe cause they think in herds or parties. who speaks for the middle class? dunno, really, but i know who speaks for the mediocre ideas. shit is boring. let's say creativity is lacking. it'll be the same little catch-phrases, produced mechanically. that's one thing about newt; even the little dose of something fresh he provides is thousands of times greater than a figure like obama or the clintons etc. i don't know that you can really give people hope and be utterly without imagination. obama ought to put on a tape of last year's speech and hit the sack.

the only really watchable part of a state of the union is the red-carpet phase: walking in, shaking hands, scanning the supreme court, the joint chiefs, whatever emblematic peasants michelle will be dragging along. it is our most monarchical moment.

sophocles in happy valley

you often hear the term 'tragedy' used to mean almost any bad thing. but aristotle could have used joepa rather than oedipus as his model.

mindless destruction

blogging for the first time from my new place: a little one-room schoolhouse in adams county, pa.



 

obviously i am less of an obama fan than most of the people around me, even the disillusioned, perhaps, though i did vote for him. i hope that i have a chance to vote for paul this year, as i did in 1988. for example, i oppose an individual mandate to buy health insurance. but i have to say that these repubs are jacking up the rhetoric to insane levels, and that this level of rancor is itself destructive. so watching the tea party congressman wilson on msnbc: 'i truly believe that he is destroying the country.' gingrich (typically): 'sometimes when you listen to obama talk, you wonder what country he can possibly be talking to.' this is vicious hyperbole and it just cannot help anyone accomplish anything except (they must think this) getting elected. i would say that it shows clearly that the people who speak it don't have the truth or the best interests of america uppermost in their minds. also i don't actually remember this level of rhetoric before, as brutal as some of these campaigns have been. soon it will be 'execute obama for treason'; already it amounts to that. i'm pining for the palin era, when things were remarkably civil: "how's that hopey changey thing working out for ya?" suddenly it looks painfully nice.

journalism's last moment

daily beast: exclusive! newt's ex-wife's lawyer on his narcissism. now i would say few of us would really be satisfied to be portrayed in the media by our ex-spouses. (mine - one of mine - just sold a book including an account of our break-up; i intend to ignore it unless pressed, then launch the nukes, or at least the blog posts.) but your ex-spouse's lawyer?  christ, tina, that's your idea of journalism?: a first-person account of somebody's marriage by a person who is actually being paid to eviscerate the person she's writing about? your ex-spouse might be bitter, might have what you take to be a distorted view of events, etc., but at least she's going to be more or less sincere. this is more like hiring lady gaga's producer to review her next album.

testicular atrophy

you'd think that the volatility of the situation would give even dan balz pause. but no.

A week ago there were six candidates still standing in the GOP race. Now, though technically there are four — the others being former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) — the Republican race is now the two-person contest that many once anticipated. 

look ten minutes ago these people were saying that it was all over and romney was the nominee. i guess they just sit around their hotel rooms nodding at each other as they declare the winner in advance etc. believe it or not, i think there is some possibility that santorum could still be the nominee. more rich-boy slop from romney and you can stick the fork, and of course newt can self-immolate at any moment. the evangelical community is still crystallizing around santorum; they are not going to find romney or gingrich congenial at all, ultimately.

you know on espn they always focus on 'predictions'; their experts always have to declare who is going to win each game, right up to gametime. almost always, they just predict that the fave will win. i love, say, dick vitale predicting the final four; at any given moment he just takes the top four teams in the poll and then reveals dramatically that they're the best teams in america. see, that's 'expertise': mumbling or yelling what everyone else is saying: the safety dance

so, balz, what say we wait and see what happens?

sc

9:51pm: i think for the many leftists who have been disappointed with obama, newt's claim that a second obama administration will be 'unimaginably radical,' and his constant claim that obama is a radical leftist, will be deeply puzzling.

9:45pm: also he's running against food stamps incessantly. i happen to know the woman who runs the food stamp program; a better-hearted, sweeter, harder-working person you will never meet. i imagine that as jessica dodges the projectiles and firebombs, while also trying to keep people from starving, she may be just a bit disconcerted, or even a bit pissy.

9:41pm: newt: 'i believe this capaign will come down to american exceptionalism against saul alinsky radicalism.' i could never have imagined that someone would be running for president against saul alinsky in 2012. one thing i can guarantee: saul would be proud.

8:52pm: santorum has the cutest wife, by a ways. that is how i pick a candidate.

8:50pm: we'll see if this is the pin that pops the romney balloon. also i will say this: the longer it goes and the more divided it is, the better it is for paul, who has a delegate-accumulating strategy, and who could get leverage and speaking time at the convention etc. i think ultimately his idea is to turn the republican party into the libertarian party, which would amount to a radical reconfiguration of the american political scene. that would be in many ways a more important accomplishment even than being elected president: leaving libertarianisnism as an enduring mainstream current in american politics. well, no doubt the repubs are going to have to get younger somehow, and more diverse. i think ron wants to leave rand with a platform from which he will be heard.

8:43pm: that newt has more lives than a hindu cat. though i am not necessarily eagerly anticipating the gingrich administration, i am very happy to see romney not only get beat, but stomped.

etta and johnny

it's remarkable that etta james died almost simultaneously with johnny otis: they showed the hybrid vigor of miscegenation. they almost seemed to want to switch races, with etta going all blond and stuff and johnny preferring to be photographed with his face in shadow, so he could pass. i do think etta was at her best as a pop/r&b singer rather than in the straight blues.

the associated press: "James had been suffering from dementia and kidney problems, and was battling leukemia," while her husband and kids went to war over her estate. dude, that really, really sucks.

getting your ass kicked on national television

must be hard. i'm watching john king debriefing the open-marriage fest last night. as gingrich and then the crowd slapped him around, king looked like he was absorbing body blows. today he was visibly bitter, ragging on gingrich for using the age-old political ploy of turning against the media. ok but he ought to have acknowledged that gingrich did it with consummate skill. people today were saying he had his answer ready, but just one remarkable thing is that his responses obviously weren't canned; he directly responded to the particular ways king formulated the questions.

honestly i can relate to newt's whole schtick except the doing-callista part.

but who is the malcolm?

i think of mitt romney as the reverend doctor martin luther king jr., jr., of inanimate objects. it all started when someone left a fob in the living-things-only section of the stretch hummer. ever since, inanimate objects have become more and more obdurate, more opaque: in short, more free. waxworks may not dream, but they make fewer mistakes.

and 3

one way parts of history are sometimes narrated is as an expansion of the categories of things that can be owned. maybe nomadic tribes don't think you can own land. maybe we developed ownership for what's under the ground or bits of the atmosphere or expanded ownership or sovereignty over the waters etc. pretty soon we'll be staking claims to interstellar space, or to pieces of the past and the future or something. now, it is not clear that the expansion of what can be owned is an unalloyed good. the idea of ownerhip in abstract objects such as ideas, words, musical tones and so on might seem obvious or inevitable. but what if the situation started to reverse and we started to delete items from the list of things that can be owned?

sopa 2

one basic question to ask about sopa-type stuff: what aesthetic climate is produced by a corporate intellectual property model of 'content' or arts creation? so, warner bros. can't spend $100 million on sherlock holmes unless they can protect their copyright. but every dollar spent on special effects in sherlock just made the bombastic emptiness more bombastic. really, you can ask beyonce how great big record companies (as parts of huger conglomerates) are for artists and perhaps she will enthuse. go back and ask the average even modestly successful musician in 1990 what he thinks about the artistic effects of giant record companies and who made the money. then just ask the average professional musician; he got dicked by some record company. he never got heard. he got signed. he recorded and it never saw the light of day and he didn't even own the masters. you know, ask john  grisham. but then ask a hundred comparable novelists who never happened onto the little-bitty gravy train. ask yourself, on average, how good, how interesting, how bold, the average shimmery pop song is, how really good the average hollywood blockbuster, the average bestseller, the average sit-com, etc. it just has not served most artists or most experiencers of the arts well at all. these companies suck money out of the arts; they don't nurture them or broaden participatiion.

in short, under the trad intellectual property model there are too few artists who are promoted too heavily: too much money directed at too few works and producers. the budgets are so big that only a few works can be made, and much of the money is spent to manipulate an audience toward those few works or outlets. all of that necessitates assertion of ownership over digital or textual or sonic structures. the arts are conceived by giant corporations fundamentally as hierarchies with a few huge stars at the top. great stuff has emerged, even so, and there are, it is true, things a filmmaker can do for $100 million that she couldn't do for 1. but your chances are better of getting a good movie making a hundred movies for a million each rather than one for 100 million, and that 100 million is a temptation to corruption and bombast and pandering. we need to start thinking in terms of millions of producers finding their own audiences, and artists need to remember why we are artists. i hope, not for the small possibility of the huge prestige score, but for the intrinsic meaningfulness and satisfaction of the work.

sc debate

9:07: santorum's working man/manufacturing thing would do well in a general election (the social stuff less so). he actually said 'we're not going to solve these problems by reducing taces for the wealthiest people.' it really would be bizarre moment for a wholly corporatist president like romney.

8:47: gingrich had his tax return released during the debate, and cnn bit: 'this just in!' he just let john king skewer mitt on his (newt's) behalf. how can someone this diabolically excellent also make such colossal errors or run so far off the rails so often? really, when you get right down to it, rather a fascinating personality. there's no doubt at all that, just as he says, a gingrich/obama campaign would be the best tv.

8:15pm: [ok i'll do a bit.] newt just absolutely kicked the shit out of cnn, bringing down the house and forcing the other candidates to agree. 'open marriage. would you like to respond to that?' 'no.' (pause) 'but i will.' then it's 'despicable' and 'appalling' that cnn would lead with 'trash.'

left-right op-ed

ok here's an op-ed version of my anti-leftright thang:

 

Ditch the Left-Right Spectrum

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The left-right spectrum is the means by which we habitually understand political positions and the politicians who advocate them: as, say, progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative, reactionary. I propose that this way of thinking about the terrain is incoherent and that it makes little sense of political realities.

   Ron Paul is often described as a ‘rock-ribbed conservative’ or as being on the right-wing edge of the Republican Party. Rick Santorum is described the same way. Paul favors maximum individual liberty and a small military dedicated to defending our own borders. Santorum favors legal enforcement of religious morality and a very large and active military with a worldwide presence.

    Now, these positions are approximately as opposite as they can be, and in a number of respects both Santorum and Paul are (slightly) closer to President Obama than they are to one another. Any taxonomy of political positions that throws them into the same category is, to put it mildly, inadequate.

    The left-right spectrum as a way of accounting for the political terrain originates in the struggle between communism and fascism in early twentieth-century Europe. These ideologies regarded themselves as opposites, and the left-right taxonomy was invented in part to express their self-image as being located at far-distant ends of political space.

    Retrospectively, we can see that what the positions had in common was at least as massive as their differences. Even if their rhetoric was almost wholly distinct, the realities they created were strikingly similar: totalitarian systems that in a number of cases pursued policies of ethnic cleansing or genocide, massive systems of detention, confiscations and command economies. They endorsed regimes of total censorship enshrouded in total secrecy, cults of personality dedicated to achieving liberation through extremely thorough oppression.

   Obama and Mitt Romney are both raising massive amounts of money from Wall Street, and they would both (like previous presidents of both parties), put the American economy into the hands of once and future Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup executives. Whomever is elected (other than Paul), you can bet that the federal government will grow every year, and in roughly the same ways.  And so on.

    In many respects, watching them attack one another – harshly and continuously - is merely puzzling. Whatever the disagreement is about, it doesn’t seem to be about fundamentally different political or economic visions.

    And in contemporary American politics, not only are the left and right much closer than they think they are, but both mainstream liberalism and mainstream conservativism are incoherent positions.

  The right falls apart around the notion of liberty. Santorum, like many a conservative, bases his whole political posture on the American tradition of freedom and individual rights. Then he asserts and that the government ought to be able to tell you whom to marry or what you can ingest or how you can be permitted to reproduce.

   The left falls apart around the notion of equality, which it proposes to pursue by a continuous growth and multiplication of government bureaucracies and the resources they command. In other words, the basic idea is to enhance equality by an ever-more pervasive and extreme hierarchy of power.

    So distorting is the left/right lens that Paul – easily the most consistent of contemporary mainstream American political figures – is himself regarded as incoherent by the left and by the right. That, I propose, is because each is an intellectually random farrago of mutually incompatible doctrines.

    Perhaps consistency is not really what we need in practical politics. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are politicians, not logicians, and it will be said that we want practical solutions to real problems, not some sort of abstract philosophical rigor. However, contradictions are impossible to realize in reality, and the success of conservatism or of liberalism would also be the destruction of its underlying principles and motivations, just as was the case for communism and fascism. Every victory for either is also its own defeat.

    At any rate, I propose that the American left and the right are social formations or affinity groups or demographic segments rather than political positions. They are like, and are related to, matters such as your region and race, where you went to school, whether you live in an urban or suburban or rural context, what car you drive, where you shop. The left and the right are social groups enforcing the identities of their adherents through peer pressure embodied in their mechanical rhetorics.

     Of course, we’ve accounted for our politics in terms of left and right for so long that it is hard to imagine another structure.  But we had better start working one out, if we want to understand politics in this election cycle, or even if we just want our own political positions to make sense.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science and philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

 

my mom got me a subscription to the new yorker as a gift. i've never loved the mag cause i'm not very interested in poetry or 'literary' fiction, and i find the whole sort of irritatingly middle-brow, like: let's pretend to be intellectuals when we're actually just uppermiddleclass wannabes. plus also i would say that within the writerworld it's kind of irritatingly peckingorderish (man i'm in portmanteaumode this evening). the whole publishing world is ordered into this incredible hierarchy of prestige, with all these supposed artistes trying to claw to the tiny summit. i actually think the cause of literature would be well-served by the destruction of the high-end nyc publishing world as a whole, which is one way to see that intellectual property should cease. (on the other hand, i really dig the criticism at the back.)

but what i really object to is the excruciatingly conventional politics: just a constant rehearsal of leftish cliches delivered in the absolute knowledge that every single reader agrees on every single thing. well, the last thing you want to do is belong to a group like that: the thinking is over at that point.

the perfect embodiment of this is hendrick hertzberg. i'd rather read, or perhaps eat, beige wall-to-wall carpeting. here he is this week on ron paul, and really it's as though a whole demographic wrote this. it did. "Paul, whose batty-grandpa personality and oddball melange of pacifism, anarcho-libertarian radicalism, and crackpot economics attracts and equally eccentric congeries of Tea Partiers and bong partiers, has done Romney no discernible harm." again, so befuddled is hertzberg with the wackily incoherent yet utterly unimaginative ideology of his set, that he cannot recognize even rudimentary logical consistency when it slaps him silly.

sopa etc.

update: whoa it's amazing to watch congress collapse on this. what if google and wikipedia and reddit wanted world peace?

just to be clear: i support piracy with regard to artistic and intellectual 'property.' 

moral corruption

i didn't watch the debate last night. perhaps i grow weary. or perhaps i just love college basketball inordinately. but ron really is something. obviously, newt was going for the race-bait. (and newt, answering paul's obviously anti-christian idea that we should apply the golden rule in foreign policy, 'quoted' andrew jackson: 'the enemies of america? kill them.' like: say for example there's an indian tribe in florida harboring fugitive slaves. slaughter as many as possible, especially the women and children, and turn the rest over to slavers. we need to return to our glory days, when we served as a moral beacon to racists, rapists, and genocidal psychopaths everywhere.) anyway below is a summary of paul last night. pull the circle to 4:30 and listen to his remarkable rap on race and criminal justice. can you imagine that this is a republican candidate? do you see what cowards presidential candidates commonly are? even if they believed something like this, even if they thought hundreds of thousands of people were suffering because of systemic racism, they would not say that to a group of south carolina conservative voters. look, that isn't just political necessity, what we should all expect: that is actual evil caused by overweening cowardice. 'tailor your message' sounds reasonable. but these people tailor their message about actual matters of life and death. i propose that anyone who does that simply be disqualified on the grounds of deep moral corruption. finally there's someone on the debate stage who actually shows that. he's not showy or self-righteous; he just says what he actually thinks. that should be the absolute minimum we require in a leader. instead everyone seems to think it's disqualifying.

all together now

a couple of highlights from today's nytimes op-ed page. 

krugman demonstrates again why you shouldn't send an economist to do a writer's job: '“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire.' if you know that a sentence (by which i mean krugman's whole sentence, not king's per se) has already been written a thousand times, or is has been a cliche among assistant principals for decades, you should give it a miss in your column and resolve to write your own material instead of plucking it from the cloud of socially-approved yapyap. and you know what? it's really an excellent refutation of itself: a nice demonstration that king is now just a cliche whose words we recite like automata.

egan argues that the tea party was a fraud because they never really wanted to 'govern.' cf. proudhon:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. 

only a 'daft, grandfatherly skinflint' like ron paul wouldn't want all of that for everyone.

 

stormy times

watcha readin, crispy?

re-readin before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus, by rick perlstein. it's work i deeply admire and that fills me with a sense of my own inadequacy. the research is unbelievable: there are tens of thousands of facts: every page bristles with them. and in the course of setting the context, perlstein gives crisp, smart summaries of all sorts of national and international events of the period, from civil rights to the history of anti-communism, to the cuban missile crisis, to the free speech movement in berkeley, etc. but with all of that, the book also has narrative shape and momentum and a light touch in the writing that keeps you reading. not only that, but though i'd say it's pretty evident that perlstein doesn't share goldwater's politics, he's fair about barry and more or less everyone else even as he can be brutally critical as well. as you may know, i wrote about goldwater as one of my heroes in extreme virtue. that would be a better book if i'd had before the storm when i wrote it.

if you're wondering how i could admire barry goldwater, i might say that the thing i hated most in american politics circa 2000 was its pervasive falsity: the empty focus-grouped catch-phrases, the manufacturing of a perfectly polished jive persona over a massively flawed human being like, let's say, clinton or gore. (let's just say that mitt's reminding me why i was pissed off.) well searching for the opposite of that, one must land on barry, who actually hated the whole process and was always saying precisely the wrong thing. just to take a random example: when reporters showed up at his ranch for his announcement that he was running, he said that he was there to announce that his daughter had been knocked up. during the campaign, he specifically told each audience what they didn't want to hear: you know he'd travel to tennessee and start into selling the tva. he drove his own advisors ape with this sort of stuff. well, one reason for all this was that he didn't actually want to be president, which is a pretty good qualification to be president.

in x-virtue i was clear that goldwater's opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill, which outlawed segregation in public facilities including businesses, helped make him the tool and hero of racists, though actually goldwater expressed anti-racist and anti-segregation convictions throughout his life, and had integrated his own department store.

perlstein documents extremely elaborately two things which i didn't have on board: (1) goldwater's campaign was very possibly the most incompetent ever run by a major candidate in a general election; he ignored every person on his staff or party who had any expertise and surrounded himself with drinking buddies from arizona. from the smallest details to the biggest matters of strategy, the campaign fucked up everything and pretty much alienated everyone who wished it well. (2) lyndon johnson's campaign against goldwater was quite possibly the very dirtiest in the history of american politics, under the auspices of...bill moyers. indeed he had the full nixonian plumbers thing going, including some of the same plumbers, such as howard hunt.

however, hunt in 1964 was the director of domestic covert operations for the cia. that is, moyers brought the total resources of the government - start with the irs - to bear to destroy goldwater. 

Moyers was instrumental in pioneering an innovation in presidential campaigning: the full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit. The Johnson "Anti-Campaign" was an all-star Democratic team, including Daniel P. Moynihan of Labor; White House counsel Myer Feldman; the assistant postmaster; the assistant secretary of agriculture; labor lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder; a claque of top D.C. lawyers; the Pentagon's Adam Yarmolinsky (one of the Admistration's strongest liberal voices); even Clifton Cooper, the CIA liaison to the White House. 

goldwater supporters in the business community and elsewhere reported getting personal calls from johnson, saying that he was reading their tax returns right then and they were very interesting. the moyers op got up a very elaborate program to create the narrative that goldwater was literally insane, and had various psychiatrists diagnosing him as paranoid and schizophrenic and psychopathic, and then by hook and crook and blackmail getting this stuff into major newspapers and magazines and the work of the main political columnists for the main newspapers in the country. they orchestrated a campaign to get various professors to call him a fascist. they tried to screw up his events and even his travel in a hundred ways. etc etc.

and even though goldwater did lend fuel to the fire of the daisy commercial and many other spots suggesting that he would lead the world into nuclear holocaust with his belligerent anti-communism, it is worth pointing out that during the campaign johnson manufactured the gulf of tonkin pretext to dramatically escalate the war in vietnam, and that the admistration was engaged in many covert forms of escalation including massive bombing of civilian targets, explicitly intending to keep the reality secret until after the election. johnson is portrayed by perlstein as governing from a place of massive personal insecurity, as a boozer with bipolar disorder. in other words, johnson was what he tried to portray goldwater as being.

 

 

 

 

the art of sucking

what i like about this is not that it skewers tebow, who has after all been sent to save a wretch like me. what i like is what it shows about david bowie. fallon's singing is overwrought yet flimsy.the outfit is ridiculous. however, the lyrics are much better than bowie's (admittedly that would be hard to avoid), the singing no worse, the fashion sense less palpably pointless. of course bowie and tebowie more or less share the same 'melody.' it's as though bowie built a magnificent palace of suck in which every single detail sucks royally, but in which the whole sucks exponentially more than any of the constituent parts.

rate the nations

after an exhaustive and of course irrefutable quantitative analysis, our research team has arrived at the following strictly scientific conclusions: the united states of america is the 741st-greatest nation the world has ever known, with the 876th-most-heroic military. as you might expect, the hittites finished first, followed closely by the mongol khanate. the latter got bonus points for being the funnest nation in history, which admittedly is not saying much.

pardon me?

this deal where haley barbour pardoned myriad felons, including murderers, is quite astonishing, and he seems to have done it without explanation. this is the former chairman of the republican party we're talking about, a rock-ribbed conservative in one of the nation's most-right states. when you think of mississippi, you're more likely to think of prison farms - with charlie patton singing the blues - than forgiveness. were i cnn or the washpost, i'd be sending a little squad of reporters, instead of trying to cover the thing from texas. there is a big story here, and many many little ones (the stories of the criminals and of their victims, etc.). 

dang.

9:35pm: the notion of huntsman sure is more compelling the reality. however, i can get behind term limits for congress; seems like everyone should be getting on that. if you're not running against congress this year, you're a chump.

9:05pm: james carville was great on romney's speech. 'did you see how all his kids were wearing white shirts? and his wife had a white blouse. and his signs were white. the whole thing is perfectly designed. the speech was good, and he read it well. not like iowa; romney can't speak off the cuff. he can't call an audible.' paul, speaking right now, is just the opposite. totally comfortable and just intensely himself, charming with his total anti-charisma, which is what i'd be looking for in a leader. i think he's still growing in this thing; the rhetoric is getting sharper and the appeal broader.

8:49pm: you know, last time round the chorus of cw pundits said that ron paul had a hardcore base of support at around 7%, but it could never go beyond that. he was at 20 in iowa, looking to be 25 in nh. now what's funny is that the conventional wisdom is never really wrong. so even as his support triples or whatever - as the numbers change, the jive never does: well he's got a hard core of support, but he can't get over that ceiling at 10, then 15, then 20, then 25. let's just go on to 60 or whever and dismiss him again at his inauguration.

8:34pm: in his victory speech, romney just said he will make the federal government smaller. i will bet you absolutely anything that in a romney administration, federal spending will increase every year. "i will insist on a military so powerful, no one will ever think about challenging it."

8:32pm: fox projects romney "by double digits." right now the lead over paul is 35% to 25%, with 21% of precincts reporting. course they might know more about who has and hasn't reported etc, though i think hanover (where dartmouth is) has not reported.

this romney thing is really bumming me out. cnn projects he wins new hampshire at the dot of 8, when the polls closed. i will continue watching, though. i remember hillary's late surge in '08.

hamp

watching santorum and gingrich just now on morning joe. santorum is unbelievably likable and sincere. i guess i just have no idea how romney could be a viable candidate: we need to stop rewarding automatism. one thing i really admire about gingrich; he's more or less the only presidential candidate i've ever seen who will straight-out admit mistakes. so he said that sitting down on that couch with pelosi was 'the stupidest thing i ever did.' now, i doubt that. but most of these people would have a gigantic self-justifying rigamarole. they asked him about romney's 'i like firing people' thing, and, even as he's trying to make romney pay in a sheer act of vengeance, gingrich says: you know, that was taken out of context and i agree with the point romney was making. so i hope no one uses that kind of crap in a negative ad. wait. what? even pundits with total distance from the proceedings were working out a way to use the thing: well, he didn't mean something bad. he meant something we all agree with. but he ought to understand that things will be taken out of context, so saying that was tone-deaf etc. this is ridiculous. if you know what he meant and you agree with what he meant or it was a trivial point, then you can't attack on that basis. but at any rate, that is exactly how you assess the credibility of someone: newt said what it was against his interests to say. that is amazing in this context, which is just soaked in jive, where palpably you can't believe what people say. people say gingrich has 'character' issues; he just displayed much more character than the rest of the field, at least in respect to trying to say what's true.

opposite of obvious

just one more observation on the left-right split as represented by people like frank or robin: perhaps it seems obvious that it is in the interests of poor people to have an extremely powerful and pervasive state; perhaps it seems obvious that it is in the interests of rich people to have a tiny powerless state. however, looking at the thing squarely, this is the opposite of obvious. it seems obvious because people keep repeating it or always conceive the terrain this way. but it's just wackily false with regard to reality. who needs the state more: you know, robert rubin or rodney king? the idea that robert just wants to be left alone while rodney wants to be constantly entwined in police and welfare programs seems rather odd. or: which of these people needs to be left alone, and which coddled or beaten? when the state leaves robert rubin alone, he'll be broke. when it leaves rodney king alone, he'll have better brain scans.

now tom frank or corey robin believe that the road to equality is the non-stop growth of a hierachy of power: the state is the representative of the poor. now, what in the world could be the empirical basis for a belief this ridiculous or even contradictory (create equality by distributing power hierarchically)? i figure they must have been brainwashed by george soros or something, or that they're still hypnotized by marxism. i don't know how to relieve their ignorance and mental illness; perhaps we can institute a bureaucracy to supervise their little prep schools or something. we need to train people like that more carefully in critical thinking.

thomas frank

speaking of the reactionary mind, i was listening this morning to thomas frank, who has a new book called pity the billionaire, trying to explain the fact that the country moved dramatically right during the economic downturn, culminating with republican victories in 2010. frank deploys the robin-type (see below) (and commonplace) conceit - conservatism is merely the defense of economic privilege. from there the argument runs mechanically: so an average-type person who is a conservative is voting and advocating against their own interests. so the position is irrational (that's what rationality means). so it can only be the result of the average person's ignorance, manipulated by the evil forces of power. frank is writing a book, in other words, to explain the (to him) otherwise unaccountable fact that people actually do disagree with the politics of himself and his circle, which are, it seems, self-evidently true.

now this is a pathetic style of argument for a number of reasons. it merely assumes that frank's positions are true; indeed, one might say that it is the opposite of an argument; it has less than no rational weight. what it means is: anyone who disagrees with me is, obviously, deranged, ignorant, or evil. not only does that beg the question, it constitutes an a priori destruction of the very possibility of having an argument: that is, you begin with the premise that no one can rationally disagree with me, thomas frank: you begin with a sheer set of slanders on your opponents' intelligence or attribute their disagreement with you to their personality disorders or the alleged fact that they've been brainwashed. obviiously, listening to people like that is ridiculous or useless or actually dangerous. you refuse to take the people whose opinions you are discussing seriously as human beings or as potential partners in dialogue.

and this style of argument bespeaks the insularity of the people that make it: evidently they are talking only to themselves. obviously, it cannot be intended to persuade, only to insult. that it represents a kind of elitism is an undertstatement: not only do i get to diagnose your poltical opinions as a mere disorder, i also purport to speak in your interest, on your behalf. try getting that into comportment with leftist egalitarianism, and you've really got an impressive mess. that you could speak this way to and about people, and then be puzzled that they find your attitude almost unbelievably arrogant, pompous, self-righteous, and dangerous to their interests as they themselves construe them, is rather astonishing.

frank says what he finds as laughable as anything is that tea partiers took to referring to academic and washington elites (well, and wall street bankers) as 'the ruling class.' to people like frank, it's self-evident that such people are not the ruling class, which is the capitalist ownership class, because the left still hasn't made it out of 1848. but really this 'ruling class' business is complicated, isn't it? and if you don't think that, say, poor people can be abused or disempowered or dispossessed by agents of the state, your universe is theoretical. there are overlapping ruling groups in the economy and in the state.

that is precisely why tea partiers and occupiers could find common ground, which is an impossibility for people like frank who, laboring under an ideology, regard the left=right split as fundamental, and hence tea party and occupy as opposites. but the left/right, state/capital spectrum never had much purchase on reality, and certainly does not now.

please smack romney

even two days is enough time for a transformation in nh, where first off the polls lag and second are unreliable. i think what you might end up with is again a three-way dead heat. you know a lot actually turned on those eight votes in iowa; were romney to lose, even by eight votes...ron was very disarming in that debate, and i think romney was exposed; gingrich has performed this function even as he fouls out. for that matter, huntsman was better than usual and you get a vibe that he might finish better than negligible. votes for huntman could come straight from romney.

9:43am:'live under the laws of which they pass'! it's no accident: somebody perhaps wrote that for perry. maybe an intern.

9:39am: it's kind of amazing to hear gingrich and santorum praising themselves for their ability to engage in bipartisan compromise. i vaguely recall the 90s, when they were among the most combative and gratuitously provocative figures in one of the most partisan eras of american politics.

9:17am: when tom brocaw retired, nbc did an inverse american idol to find the least descript person, a sheer human blank to dispense bromides in a mumble: plausibly enough, they landed on david gregory. did you know that elections are about choices?

9:15am: news flash. rick perry or a replica is still running for president! of the united states of america! but why? how?

9:11am: newt is whipping up on romney for the 'pious boloney' of the latter's self-serving autobiography. romney is palpably insincere - entirely full of shit. the reason he didn't run for re-election as governor was because he had accomplished all he wanted and decided to become a citizen again.

rick v ron

the way the msm is setting up the contest, santorum is trying to crystallize as the 'conservative alternative' to romney. but ideologically, the contrast is between santorum and paul; really they are exquisitely poised on opposite ends of the 'right': legislating religion and feeding the military machine vs individual liberty and isolationism.these are just as opposed to each other - or are moreso - than either is to obamism.