Closing argument

For all the spending, talk, debates, events, phonecalls, etc., I fear that, at the end, Barak Obama has failed to make a convincing case to America for why he should be elected President. Which is not the same as saying he won’t be elected. John McCain seems to have hit on his closing argument – not the experience angle, but the “don’t let the Dems control the government or they’ll raise your taxes whatever they promise now” argument. It may not be true, but it’s believable.

So here’s my contribution to the Obama campaign for a clinching final argument. If we elect John McCain, all the dastardly misdeeds of the last eight years – and who can doubt that they are legion? - will never see the light of day and the perps will never get their just punishment.

It’s enough to convince me.

Social Darwinism

There’s a great deal to be said for reading Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. It’s a captivating travelogue, occasionally an adventure story and a chronicle of times past. Of course, it’s most remarkable for Darwin’s insights into the geology and biology of regions he is seeing for the first time and which he is often able to read in ways that others of his time could not, and that most educated people today could not. How many of us take time from our travels to collect every insect that lives in a new place? How many of us even know enough biology recognize what might be interesting? Darwin, at age 25-30 knew more about the world than most of us ever will as long as we live. Plus he had the ability to reject the common wisdom of the wise men of his age.

All of that becomes even more remarkable when you realize that Darwin was profoundly conservative and Anglo-centric in his social awareness. “To hoist the British flag," he wrote, "seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity and civilization.” Time and again he judges the natives harshly from the narrow viewpoint of an English gentleman. The Fuegans, the Maori, even the Tahitians are described by Darwin in almost subhuman terms born of racial prejudice and social arrogance. Of the Fuegans (natives of Tierra del Fuego) he wrote: "These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skin filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world.” Ironically, many of his harshest judgments are rendered from the certainty of his Christian faith. Ironic because, of course, the more curious and adventurous part of Darwin’s mind eventually led him to doubt, and many would say reject his Christian upbringing.

Time to end the other war


Budget cutting? Take a hatchet to the war on drugs, writes Joe Conason in this column in Slate.


Every year we throw away billions on a failed program to punish addicts -- an approach both candidates should know doesn't work. Today we spend well over $50 billion annually at the federal, state and local levels on a domestic war that has never achieved any of its objectives and never will. If either of the presidential candidates still believes that this is a worthwhile investment of our money, despite his own experience, it would be fascinating to hear him explain why.

How much money is that? In our new big-number currency, it come to 150 Iraq-Days. Or if you prefer, $500 per American household. That's a lot of DARE shirts! And it doesn't count all the lives wasted in prison, all the cops who could be out fighting crime, all the other crime that gets financed or fueled by the high price of drugs or the subversion of entire foreign governments by either gangs or terrorists who grow fat on American drug money.

How Reagan became a liberal

Frank Rich has a scary column called The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama that raises the issue of how violent and vigilante the Republican party has become.

McCain campaign recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

This wing of the party of course feels like there's no recourse but hatred and violence because they have learned over the past 20 years to take their cause as a moral mission -- the rise of the better people vs the lazy and shiftless masses -- the patriots of the dollar bill -- the carriers of the true cross, namely that government is the enemy always and everywhere.

Liberals will always be at a disadvantage because at the core of liberalism is the openness to new ideas and the willingness to consider the other's point of view. When you already know the absolute truth, there is no need to consider any other ideas, or even to tolerate those who hold them.

They chant Ronald Reagan's name as a mantra, but his politics would be too liberal today for most of this group.

Palinesque

I haven’t written about Sarah Palin since the convention (OK, I haven’t written about much of anything since the convention due to other factors in my life with a higher priority than blogging), but I was glad to see Steven Pinker’s column Everything You Heard Is Wrong this week because I think everyone has paid entirely too much attention to the Palin phenomenon, as if we all finally got to be judges on American Idol rather than American voters, and far too little about what she actually believes and stands for beyond the winks and nods. Mr. Pinker – oft accused of being in the conservative camp – apparently agrees. Said he:

“Voters judging Ms. Palin’s performance should focus on the facile governing philosophy that is symbolized by her speech style, not the red herrings of accent or dialect.”

That said, I have found the newly coined term “Palinesque” useful over the past few weeks. Not least to describe GW Bush’s flacid attempts at explaining the financial crisis & bailout. It shows that it really is useful to have a leader in times of trouble and also why it’s a bad idea for a president to lie. Did anyone believe a word he said last week? Did he? Or had someone simply propped him up and fed him the lines he was to say regardless of the meaning or relevance– a la Palin at the debate. He was reduced to repeating his bravo performance ante the Iraq war, only this time replacing the mushroom cloud reference with a parallel reference to the Great Depression. And, what do you know, it worked.

Now my real theory of Sarah Palin is that she was not chosen to appeal to women or independents or even blue collar white men. She is a NeoCon parasite implanted in the soft body of the McCain campaign not to save it, but to destroy McCain forever as a serious player in the GOP and to launch her own career as the NeoCon standard bearer of 2012. Time will tell if the strategy is successful (although Part I seems to be well underway). The problem I guess they didn’t consider is that the parasite has emerged bloody-fanged from the husk of the McCain campaign in full public view while still in her larval stage. That hasn’t been too pretty.