Die Elitist Scum....

Here is today's volley in the "Liberals are Elitists" scuffle:

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."
-- Karl Rove on Sen. Barak Obama

You know I just don't get it. The guy was raised by his grandparents. He was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, then he represented the South Side as a State Representative. No fat cat corporate jobs. No country club. His wife works at a hospital. He raises two kids and goes to church.

It is somewhat ironic that a political party that has made its bones catering to the needs of America's upper class, whose movers, shakers and major donors come from the upper reaches of corporate America, whose policy platforms are full of moral sideswipes, and whose current presidential candidate has nine homes, can look at anybody and call them an elitist. When something is so obviously contradictory, yet is repeated over and over again, there is something more there.

UPDATE

Thinking more about the "something more here."

Conservatives and Progressives both concern themselves with elites. Progressives worry about a discrete and easily defined economic elite. That is the small (and getting smaller) group of people who control vast amounts of wealth and are willing to dedicate a good portion of it to influencing the public agenda in their favor, gaining control of resources, and protecting their wealth from claims made on behalf of the common good. They are dangerously willing to prove the truth of the adage that "might makes right." If you asked a Progressive to describe the Economic Elite, they would use words like "selfish" and "thuggish."

Conservatives on the other hand spend little time worried about economic elites. As demonstrated above, the elite they worry about is much more amorphous. At various times it involves the well educated, the culturally bohemian, and folks with influence in the media and arts. To conservatives the elite is also secular, comparatively pacifist and populist. As the Rove quote above demonstrates -- and he is certainly not the only example -- conservatives tend to feel that there is this vast other who looks down upon them and snipes about them. For conservatives their elite is particulalrly pernicious because they are "utopian," "don't understand how the world works" or don't understand the magnitude of threats we face. If you asked conservatives to define the elite they disdain, they would use words like "condescending" "unpatriotic," and "politically correct."

What stands out is that the Economic Elite that Progressives fear is easily identifiable and they certainly don't make their desires a secret. The Amorphous Elite that conservatives fear seems to include anybody and everybody. From The Sulzberg family to NASA scientists. From union activists to feminists. From college professors to CNN. From Bill Clinton to Barak Obama. From homosexuals to college faculty. From Atheists to activist clergy.

When the elite you rail against is that big, maybe it is not an elite. Maybe it is just everybody.

Figure It Out

This week the Supreme Court decided that the law of habeus corpus applied to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Almost immediately GOP stalwarts like Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani started in with how this decision puts American lives at risk. Getting by the simple factual issue that the gulag at Gitmo has yielded us absolutely no valuable intelligence, the unspoken assumption here is that as long as we feel our lives may be in some sort of danger -- even vague and unspecified -- we can cut away at our traditions of liberty.

Horse Puckey. This is the thinking of cowards.

As I recall, the entire American project was started by a group of folks who were quite ready to sacrifice their lives in the name of liberty and believed in a government that did not have the right to arbitrarily imprison anyone. As I recall they had some saying about "give me liberty of give me death," they devoted their "lives and fortunes" to their cause. They believed living unfree was something less than living. In other words, the American project was started by, and can only be sustained by people who are not afraid at the possibility of someone getting hurt.

Note to Newt: If you want to defeat terror, stop acting like a scared nancy ready to concede our nation's defining tradition with every little bump in the night. Living in a free society has a lot of advanatges and a few disadvantages. One of them is we are not so able to slip into the security state mode favored by Russia and China. That may make us more vulnerable to terrorist attack. I can live with that trade off.

(By the way, aren't these the same guys who hate the idea of a "nanny state" when it comes to public welfare? Isn't that just a little inconsistent?)

Its Like Crack

Over the last few days the idea of allowing offshore drilling and drilling in the ANWR has gained in popularity. Sen., John McCain has done an about face on the issue as has Charlie Crist. It seems both are convinced it is an answer to our current gas woes. This is wrong and short sighted for several reasons:

Even if drilling were to begin, it would take many years (some say more than 20)for these efforts to hit the marketplace. In fact, the Department of Energy has estimated that expanded offshore drilling would have no effect on oil prices before 2030. That is based on the assumption that actualy drilling could begin almost immediately.

Even assuming we tap some significant oil reserves, it will never be enough, particularly given increased world wide demand, and we will likely be in the same position years from now. Like it or not, oil is a finite resource.

More drilling does nothing to reduce our level of emissions and would likely kill any momentum we have toward kicking the fossil fuel habit.

Fill in here the obvious environmental impact of offshore drilling and drilling in the Arctic Preserve.

I realize we Americans at times appear congenitally unable to stomach sacrifice and thus are drawn -- like moths to a flame -- to short term easy answers. Faced with an environmental crisis and an oil habit that tends to enrich our enemies and skewer our economy, which way will we go?

Were I a betting man, I'd buy some oil stock now. No way we can pass up an idea so short sighted and infantile. You heard it here, Big Oil will get another wet kiss.

Interesting Factoid

From 1989 to 2001, the United States averaged one large-scale military intervention every 18 months, a rate greater than ever before and more than that of any other country at the time. (From America Between the Wars:11/9 -9/11)

This Week In The news

This week, the President travelled to Europe where he made an unexpected concession regarding his own conduct in the Iraq war: "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," Bush said. Phrases like "bring them on" and "dead or alive," he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace." Upon hearing the President's comments, V.P. Dick Cheney immediately dispatched an elite military unit to Europe, where the President was hooded and hussled aboard an unmarked DC-3 that took him to a detention facility in Guantanomo Bay Cuba. There, the President was forced to wear a flight suit and secured to a chair while the entire back catalog on the neo conservative magazine Commentary was read to him by a David Horowitz impersonator. By week's end, Cheney had recommended the President be tried for "treason against himself" and stripped of his membership in the Super He Man Foreign Policy Club.

This week, reports surfaced that Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain may be considering current Secretary of State Condelezza Rice for his running mate. One source close to the campaign noted, " The Senator is attracted to the fact that Rice is seen as smart and reasonable; however she never exercises those gifts in any way that could impede even the most ill thought out venture. I mean, at critical points in the last seven years, Rice has offered only a confident "You Da Man" response. She stood firm in the face of unmitigated mediocrity. She has the whole sycophant-enabler thing down. She could make a great spaniel ... I mean Vice President."

This week, the NYT ran an article asking how race will impact white voters should Sen. Barak Obama win the Democratic nomination. Not to be cowed by the Grey Lady, TWN hit the road to interview some white voters and ask them, "how black can Barak Obama be without losing your vote?" Chuck Long of Dubuque Iowa stated, "As black as he wants as long as he does not try to blame me for anything. I hate feeling guilty and as far as I'm concerned being an American means never having to say your sorry." Lynn Niery of St. Paul Minnesota said, "Not too black at all. I like my politicians more on the pink side. Like that Condi Rice. Why she just got rid of any trace of individuality and fit right in. Could have been Dick Cheney's daughter." Stanley Sizemore of Cleveland, OH offered, "I kind of wish he looked more like black folks I know from television and the movies, you know James Earl Jones, Will Smith, Bill Cosby. " Paul Rentera of Eua Claire ,WI said, "I really don't care. I mean, when Sen. Obama sounds brainy and articulate I am just going to call him a liberal elitist. If he ever tries to go populist, I'll say he is playing the race card. So the guy is not winning either way with me."

This week, Sen.John McCain's campaign released an ad inwhich the Senator calmly reassures Americans that he hates war. Asked if it was a danger sign that his campaign had to convince people that he was not a war monger, an aide to the Sentaor noted, "Not really. We just thought it was a time to start letting American know that John is about more than armed conflict. Even though that is the only part of his biography that we emphasize, and even though it is all the Senator likes to talk about, to the point that he jokes about his ignorance in other areas -- war is not all he is. This is all part of a larger plan to let people know some more about John, his hobbies, his personal life." Asked what hobbies the Senator enjoyed, the aide replied, "Orinthology, leggy blonds, being verbally abusive... mostly guy stuff."

This week, Senator John McCain made another about face and stated that he now supports oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and expanded drilling off the American coasts. McCain previously opposed such efforts. According to the Senator rising gas prices have "forced our hand." Asked to define his approach further, McCain simply offered that "We need to turn the spigots on. I mean, my campaign has not seen dollar one from the major oil companies. A Republican without Big Oil is like.. like .. like somebody being without something they usually have. That and the country needs oil."

Everyone Gets a Trophy, No One Gets Last Place

In the Washington Post today, columnist Fred Hiatt dissects the Senate Intelligence Committee's recent report concluding that the President had misled us into the Iraq war. Hiatt calls this a bogus storyline. According to Hiatt the real culprit in the Iraq debacle is not the Administration's duplicity but the intelligence failure before the war. Hiatt notes that the SIC's report even concedes that there was intelligence supporting the President's view. So let's not pile on the President, let's blame the intelligence community.

Hiatt is both right and wrong.

He is right in the sense that you will never find a case where the intelligence community said "black" and Bush said "white." If that is the only type of deception you recognize, the President is fully vindicated. However, if you put our Commander in Chief to a slightly higher standard of candor, Hiatt's conclusions fall apart. While you will not find any examples of any obvious lie, a review of the record does reveal numerous examples of exaggerations, of choosing favorable interpretation over another, of cherry picking intelligence despite the misgivings of the intelligence community, of relying on superficial intelligence without bothering to dig deeper or ask harder questions, and of just plain fear mongering. Add that to the fact that the "intelligence" we are talking about was largely ordered up by Douglas Feith and V.P. Cheney like a sizzler at a steakhouse, and it is difficult to conclude that the Administration is blameless.

When I read Hiatt's piece, I initially suspected that he is simply trying to shed light on the woeful state of our intelligence community, a situation that could easily be ignored if we just blame the President. The more I think about it, however, the more I suspect that this is really the Washington equivalent of "everyone gets a ribbon and no one gets a black eye." By painting Iraq as some bureaucratic failure and not the product of an undisclosed agenda or poor judgment, Hiatt lets the President and us off the hook. He offers us a bucket of "who knew?" to throw on the accusation that we unlawfully and unjustly went to war. Its an understandable response. Blame means accountability and no one wants accountability on this.

But ultimately, this is a case of "spare the rod spoil the child." We will likely spend the better part of the next decade thinking up excuses and explanations for the last six years that will blame everyone but us and our government. We are like kids trying to explain the broken window and the baseball on the kitchen floor. The wind, the batter, the poor quality of the glass will all be to blame. I am sure this will make us feel better for a little while. But it just postpones the inevitable and more seriously just postpones acceptance of a judgement the rest of the world has already made.

Maybe we ought to just 'fess up and try to fix the window.

This Week in the News

This week, Congress began looking into exemptions from trading limits on oil futures given to certain wall street banks and hedge funds by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The exemptions allowed these entities to buy large amounts of oil futures contracts thus artificially inflating the price of oil over the last year. Previously, only airlines and trucking companies were exempt from the limits on futures imposed by the federal government. Contacted for comment, Douglas Slick of the Petroleum Institute stated, "This is just more liberal claptrap. Are you suggesting that a governmental regulator gave preferential treatment to a small group of well heeled investors that allowed those investors to cash in at the public's expense? Sorry boys, I don't think anyone is going to believe that story. "

This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee officially reported something we already knew: the run up to the war in Iraq was based on lies. The Committee released its official report on the run up to the 2003 invasion and concluded that , ""In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent ... As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed." Republicans loyal to the President immediately pounced on the Report calling is skewed and unpatriotic. Said Sen. Chris Bond, "This report flies in the face of our finest traditions. I cannot begin to tell you how dangerous it is to attempt to tie the use of American power to the truth or some accurate assessment of the truth. Look at it,- Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, the Bay of Pigs, the Drug War. Some of our best stuff has come from convincing the American people that the sky -- or the dominoes -- were about to fall on them. Take that club out of our bag and what are we left with? UN Peacekeeping missions thats what. Humanitarian interventions. Dropping grain and medicine on little platforms with little parachutes from DC-3s Nothing fun. Nothing with any real swag attached to it."

This week, Sen. Barak Obama clinched the Democratic nomination for President, the first African American to win the nomination of a major party. Immediately, the Republican National Committee swung into action and formed the "I'm Not a Racist But" (INRB) working group. According to George Rockwell, the INRB's chair, the focus of the group will be on "voters who understand that John McCain has only a sliver of a campaign and believe that Republican policies have devastated this country, but cannot bring themselves to vote for Obama. They need some way to vote Republican while convincing themselves they are not racist." Asked where the group hopes to get its inspiration, Tolliver responded, "We'll start with some traditional pretexts for racism like states rights. Then we might move into some more subtle areas like suggesting that Sen. Obama might try to exact revenge on white people --We call that the "Wright Stuff' strategy. We are optimistic, white America has been denying its racism for centuries, so there is a lot to work with."

This week, (ok a little while ago but I 've been busy) Sen. John McCain's campaign announced that former Hewlett Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina was part of the Senator's campaign team and inner circle of advisors. Fiorina was the most powerful woman in corporate America until she was ousted by HP Board after an ill fated merger with Compaq and revelations that Ms. Fiorina had hired private detectives to spy on various board members she thought were critical of her. Despite leaving in disgarce, Fiorina received a $42 million severance from HP. Asked if this made Fiorina one of the overcompensated CEO's McCain often rails against, one advisor noted, "No not really.Most of that populist stuff is just for show. I mean, we were critical of the Christian right. Now we play all sorts of tonsil hockey with them. We were against warrantless wiretapping. Now we are for it. We were against lobbyists and then hired a bunch on the campaign. We will not be victimized by principal here. The Senator stands foursquare against the tyranny of principals -- even those he claims to have as is own."

Strange World

It is a strange world and even stranger one for the female of our species. Just ask Hillary. Or Carrie.

Hillary Clinton is rumored to be on the verge of hanging up her cleats. Regardless of what you may think of her, there is no doubt she changed the game. Women aren't in the sidecar anymore. More than anyone else (are you listening Carly Fiorina) HRC gave a face to those millions of women who have been amassing power - corporate, political and otherwise -- throughout America in the last thirty years. She was formidable, resilient, smart and on many issues... right. In fact, she was so formidable, resilient and smart that many of her opponents were forced into leveling the most bigoted and immature slurs against her hair, her supposed sexuality, her age, her marriage and any other detail they could latch on to. She was so formidable, resilient and smart that many say her campaign was only tripped up by her bungling, blotchy, bellicose bedmate Bill. She didn't go away when many would have and in a Readers Digest type of way, she represents the dying of one era and the birth of a new.

Unless Ms. Bradshaw has anything to do with it.

At the same time Hillary's star crested,Sex in the City -- The Movie, opened to a record box office for a romantic comedy. According to the trades, 85% of its opening audience was female. Ok. You can see some symmetry. Chick candidate. Chick movie. Both succeed. Trouble is Carrie and co represent a very different chick than HRC. She was formidable, resilient and smart. The SITC girls ... not so much. They are obssessed with luxury items, boys, love (of the Teen Beat type)fashion, status and .. well.. a bunch of other superficial shit. (I know, we are supposed to dig these women because they are sexual agressors and in control of their lives etc. But isn't that damning with faint praise? I mean they are only as self actualized as Big and Hermes will let them. I am not sure if they are as independent as they are just self obssessed.)In short, they are not very much like HRC at all. They are more like a phase HRC went through when she was 13.

HRC busted a few stereotypes. SITC confirmed a few. If HRC blazed a trail to the future, SITC seems to be laying a tar road to the past.


Puzzling. Both phenomena at the same time. Same gender. Two different flavors. One step up, two steps back. Or two steps forward but in different directions. You tell me.