Political styles

Just saw a clip of Alan Grayson, a Fla rep who’s the Dems’ designated loudmouth. He comes off like one of those top-of-the-minors “hip” comedians who do commentary about celebrities for cable shows.  He’s not bad at it, has some authority and style, but the Republicans would never use him. Their loudmouths are more like car salesmen, brash and definite as opposed to drawling and definite. Whether or not they’re gay, you’re not supposed to think they are, whereas with Grayson gayness is a clear possibility and wouldn’t make much difference to his act.

Clip via TMP.

Ah well

Joe Klein faults Obama's Afghanistan speech:

Ronald Reagan would have done it differently. He would have told a story. It might not have been a true story, but it would have had resonance.

I'd prefer a true story, thank you. Had enough of the other kind last time around.

Am I my crazy politician-author's keeper?

Sullivan links to "an interesting and intellectually honest" post about Palin's book by some kind of Christian winger. The winger thinks the book gives no indication Palin has a "political or governing philosophy." After reading it, in fact, he's pretty sure the ex-gov is minus "the intellectual skills needed to be an effective President." The fellow adds, "Most important, she does not seem to recognize this and shows no sign of getting them." Poor Palin is "sensitive to the charge she is 'dumb,'" he tells us, "but has not been given the tools or the teachers who can help her." He tacks on this troubled parenthetical: "(Has she sought them out?)"

Yet the man still digs the lady: "She seems a splendid person who has lived a remarkable life ..." So the winger must be classified as a critical Palinite, which is quite different from a non-Palinite. The identifying mark of his kind shows up in the "has not been given" comment. Lovers of Lady Dynamite think that not much actually depends on this vigorous, stand-up, take-charge leader of guys and gals ("an effective mayor and governor," says the winger, "an excellent chief executive in Alaska"). For anyone else, the standing assumption would be that intellectual development is impossible without some voluntary seeking after knowledge and understanding; we call it curiosity and having a mind of your own. To a Palinite, this consideration can be at best an afterthought, a dull twinge that shows up in parentheses. Nothing is up to her, no matter how close to home it may lie.

Dig this:

Her publisher did not fact check this book well (if at all). She was badly served by her publisher and editor. People who criticize me for nit-picking her use of quotations miss the point. I am a fan . . . though now a weary one . . . and I found the errors. The publisher had to know that her critics would check every fact.

In short, he found out that this "splendid person," in giving "her side of things," could not be trusted to tell the truth. And he decides that this is the fault of her publisher, who should have hired someone to take the lies out of her mouth like an orderly taking sharp objects away from a mental patient. And why should the publisher have done this? Because otherwise Palin's enemies would have more ammunition to use against her.

Why is that HarperCollins's problem? They're not in charge of her political viability or personal reputation. She is. But a Palinite knows only love, not reason. Sarah is the sun, and her shortcomings are clouds imposed on her radiance from without.

update, I must disclose that Andrew Sullivan also feels that HarperCollins is at fault for not requiring the use of a fact checker. But I think he just has it in for Adam Bellow.

Compare and contrast

A tv reporter caught out a kid who likes Sarah Palin but apparently doesn't know too much about her. The kid has a blog and tells us her side of the story. Her big reason for liking Sarah Palin:

"I like how Sarah Palin will speak her mind, regardless of what the media will say about it.”

A little further down, the kid thinks over various remarks she could have made on air. For example:

Call me crazy but it would have looked pretty bad had Sarah Palin been against something John McCain was against [she means "for"] while they were running together.

At issue is TARP. The kid is against it, and she had no idea that Palin was for it. McCain supported TARP in '08, so Palin, as his veep choice, had to go along no matter what her own views might have been. And, sure, no one could disagree with that analysis. But what happened to speaking her mind?

The kid makes a subsidiary point:

I could have said ... “Hey Norah, have you read the book? She talks about how during her debate prep she was handed a list of note cards that had questions and ‘non-answers’”

You know, that was pretty much my view of the debate also. It seemed to me that Palin really was not saying much of anything. So on what occasions does she speak her mind? When being interviewed by Hannity, I guess. The kid figures that Palin is outspoken because, when talking to conservatives, Palin says the things that conservatives say.

Okay, the kid's just 17. But her blog post has been applauded by the Weekly Standard and other pro-Palin outposts manned by adults. Do they notice this incoherence and gloss over it, or do they share the incoherence and therefore don't notice it?

update, Unhappy Palinites in Noblesville, Ind. Apparently the Great Goose bailed on a bunch of people who had been standing on line (for hours in the rain with their infant children!) because they had been promised her signature on copies of Going Rogue. This link has a sampling of unhappy comments left on her Facebook page. My favorite:

... the real disappointment was the realization that someone you supported and believed in didn’t follow through on the commitment they made.

Pal, if only you followed the news.

Our elusive ideals

Men don't see it as an ideal to be aspired to that we get our way on everything and show no interest whatsoever in compromise and balancing respective interests. Why does the feminist ideal often seem to suggest that is the goal?

Says the fan of George W. Bush ... Because that's from Ace of Spades, the renowned war blogger whose web site has a skull and crossbones (a skull and crossed swords, actually).

A lot of men do see throwing their weight around as an ideal way to live. They wish they could get away with it at the office or on line at the coffee place. But instead they settle for watching action movies and advocating a hardline foreign policy.

One guy who didn't settle was George Bush. He didn't have to advocate. He was able to live the dream and conduct a tough-guy foreign policy that was all my-way-or-the-highway and shut-up-stupid. Ace and the other wingnut bloggers liked that just fine.

Now everything has turned to crap, but the wingnuts can still bitch about that devious wimp, Barack Obama. And about women. Apparently women play too rough.

What?

From WaPo's retrospective on the Scozzafava mess:

"There is a great song called 'Coca Cola Cowboy' and I believe that's what we have here. She was a Republican as long as it enhanced her electability," said Armey, reached while petting a goat at his Texas ranch. "My guess is she made a deal with Chuck Schumer or the White House that will eventually show itself to us."

The "goat" bit is what surprises me, of course.

I say Hoffman

final update,  I said wrong.

*******

The Republican candidate folds. I predict that the tea party candidate will win. This is based on nothing but a few headlines, so call it the recording of a hunch.

Premise: Politically, this is a terrible time to be Republican but not such a bad time to be a really pissed-off right-winger. Republicans per se have got it tough all over; pissed-off extreme conservatives have their spots where they can break thru.

update, Lib blogs point me to this, a Siena Institute poll. Chris Cilizza highlights:

more than 60 percent of Scozzafava backers were self-identified Republicans, meaning that the majority of them are likely to back Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.

The NRCC is promising the tea party candidate a seat on Armed Services; the district contains a U.S. army military reservation, per Wiki.

A writer after my own heart

I never thought I would identify with a member of Obama's crack communications team. But:

... less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead. 

Favreau is Jon Favreau (not the Hollywood guy, a speechwriter) and the speech in question was the big one, Obama's response to the flap over Jeremiah Wright and "God damn America!" It got written in the end, which I hope is a portent. The article is by Robert Draper in GQ, via Sullivan, of course.

Exercises in meme sharpening

If the Republicans can't win, they want America to lose.

My own phrasing, and I hope the DNC sees it somehow. I think that's the ultimate in pithification for the line being pushed here. Also, it probably would have been best if the DNC had made the Taliban parallel a backup talking point rather than the lead.

More advice, this time to the Young Democrats. They have a letter harping on the vote by Sen. David Vitter, a client of prostitutes, against Al Franken's bill to let employees of military contractors use the U.S. court system if they are victims of sexual assault. "What exactly is David Vitter's problem with women?" the letter wants to know. That's subtler than saying "David Vitter hires prostitutes, therefore he hates women." But it's not as good as hammering at the fact that Vitter gave no reason for his vote. List all the common sense points that make the bill a matter of simple justice; leave Vitter's vote as a mystery he refuses to explain. "Dave, at least tell us why" would have primed the reader to say, "I know why" and out would have popped the memory of the sex scandal.

Sometimes not only do you have to avoid drawing connections, you have to let the audience supply one of the dots. Otherwise, as in this case, you wind up looking a bit cheesy.

Argument with my father

"Possibly the truth lies somewhere in between." Do people still say that? When I was a kid you heard that a lot on the tv, always voiced by quietly smiling gray-haired men who were purported to be experts on the political life. From my father too -- if not the phrase, then the sentiment. He was a Democrat but very much a moderate Democrat, and he loved the idea of centrism. He believed you should jab your finger at the midpoint between American liberals and conservatives and figure that would do the trick.  The "somewhere" signified that you didn't even have to hit your target, the line that ran exactly down the middle. Landing in the neighborhood was enough for everyone to muddle through.

But, taken strictly, "somewhere" means nothing but "somewhere." The magic point of rightness doesn't have to be at the midpoint. Maybe it lies two notches away from one of the poles. Or maybe the rightness point doesn't have much of a penumbra and must be pinned down precisely by means of detailed thought and the processing of technical information. Or possibly there's no special reason to take the American liberal and conservative positions as the two poles that keep rightness between them. I'm for universal health care and gays in the military, so in the U.S. I'm quite progressive. But those positions wouldn't do the trick in Europe.

My father had a classic centrist temperament, whereas I see myself as a moderate conservative whose views on political issues line up with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. How do you tell a classic centrist from a moderate conservative? I was horrified by the Lewinsky mess and what the Republicans got up to -- the government was being destabilized because that way one side thought it could score points. My father never even thought about stability. He saw the whole business as a drama concerning an individual, Bill Clinton, who had broken the rules (meaning perjury laws) and now was going to pay.

Two brilliant but nasty right-wing comments

Andrew Sullivan pulls up comments about him from an Ann Althouse thread. I'm reprinting a couple of them here. First:

Here is a human whose sexual desires fight against the flow of life itself. Cursed by a disease that may wither him to a shrub of what he once was, he screams for more attention. It's all about taking down the societal purity the Palin represents.

And:

Please. One ought always to refer to Sully by his true and complete regnal name: Her Divine Majesty Queen Mary Jane Milky Loads, Sultana of Sodom, Governess of Gomorrah, and Empress of All Urania.

You can read the whole thread if you're curious; I haven't. I'm just struck by the viciousness of the selected comments, which Sullivan certainly notices, and by what Sullivan doesn't bother to mention: namely that, at least in these two cases, a remarkable level of writing is on display. I think liberals, as a whole, are usually right but not too good word with words, and that conservatives, as a whole, are deluded and often nasty but gifted with an above average run of verbal ability. The comments above are further evidence. 

That "Milky Loads" passage is a wonderfully crafted verbal sequence; it puts to shame all the prefab orotund rant one runs across nowadays (for example, the vogue a few years ago for gerund strings: "latte-sipping, omelet-driving," etc., etc.). And the "shrub" remark, centerpiece to the first comment, is a killer. It is a beautifully compact and poetic phrase that condenses the whole course of a disease and combines it with a suggestion that the victim is no longer human, that the man or woman is now just a remnant. What a cold, nasty sentiment and how powerfully it's put across. Probably someone with a poetic enough turn of mind might have sat at a bedside and watched AIDS do its work, and then would have thought of the phrase and thereby summed up his or her hatred for the disease and what it caused. But instead a commenter with a poetic turn of mind came up with the phrase simply to express contempt for people who have AIDS.

There's a whole "life/antilife" philosophy at work, as you can see from the rest of the first commenter's remark. Ideas that big cause people to lose what bearings they have, especially when the idea is as much an emotional state as it is anything (and especially when that emotional state is panic). So not only do you get the inhuman nastiness, you also get the heavy-think delirium:

Sarah is a fertility goddess, and that magic power intimidates the death-loving, poo-pounding Sully. He rejects life, life-giving, and life-bearers.

I would guess that statement was half a joke, which means it is half lunacy. The most generous interpretation: some nut thinks modern life is a pageant of symbols being enacted to determine if our society goes pro-life or pro-death, with Sarah as symbol-in-chief for the good side. Either that or the person thinks Sarah Palin is a fertility goddess.

The print will be bigger than my thumbnail

That's all I have to say about Sarah Palin's forthcoming, 400-page book, which will be published four months after she signed the contract. 

Banana republic

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

John L. Perry, a columnist at Newsmax. Perry does say that "a coup is not an ideal option," words so ringing they deserve to be written into the Constitution. And he figures that the officers who (hypothetically, possibly) take over won't be wearing sunglasses. Perry doesn't moon over an Argentina-style coup. "America isn't the Third World. If a coup does occur here it will be civilized," he says. He has in mind something classy, upscale, like in Turkey. The top officers just sit the president down and tell him how things are going to be.  

There's one point on which I agree with Perry: "That it has never happened doesn't mean it won't." Countries become banana republics the way people become fat: while telling themselves that something altogether different is going on. Since the Lewinsky mess I've had the sneaking fear that the US is on a decades-long slouch toward banana status because the right has been so noisy and vicious and so indifferent toward  stability and democratic procedure. Bringing loaded weapons near the president, hogtying the government with a frivolous impeachment proceeding, fantasizing about brave officers running the Commerce Department -- to tell the truth, I find it disgusting. Perry's bio note says he "served on White House staffs of two presidents." What kind of White House would employ someone like that? Well, a Republican White House, and the Republicans are one of our two major parties. That's a frightening thought if you care about keeping your democracy.

Probably we'll never sink as low as I fear. Isn't that reassuring? 

update,  Ed Morrissey and Confederate Yankee, two wingnut bloggers of note, have both repudiated Perry and report that his column has been taken down. On the other hand, I found it easily enough.

CY reveals an embarrassing fact for me: Perry's two White Houses were Democratic. Bad news for my post, good news for the country. Republican White Houses do not incubate coup lovers. And Perry's White House time was so long ago -- during the Johnson and Carter administrations -- that he's had plenty of time to go off on his own crazy tangent. At the end of which, of course, he found a home at Newsmax.

CY insists that Perry "is not a conservative," which seems like a stretch. Newsmax hires conservatives, and conservatives write things like this: 

Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election ...

They [military officers] can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community ...

... They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

The quotes are from Perry's coup column. So, nice try by Confederate Yankee. But I look at it this way: there are wingers who are very, very much against military coups in the US. Good enough.

update 2,  More counter-evidence. An interview with Gore Vidal reminds us of the left-winger's special esteem for Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing antigovernment terrorist. So the right, despite its impressive work in this area, does not have a monopoly on people who want to throw away our stability.

Vidal also sees a coup coming. He doesn't say when but does say why: the general shittiness of the American people, with a mention of Bush thrown in for seasoning.

The writer indulges in some of his usual self-overestimation. On sizing up JFK: "It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life ..." Yeah, right. On himself: "I've never been fat."