Y’all may know of my less-than-appreciative feelings for Mitt Romney. Here’s a video clip of him being challenged by an AP Reporter. For those of you under the age of, say, 23, this may be a foreign concept, that of a television reporter doing their job.
I’m trying to stay politics-neutral, but this cuts across party lines.
Last night, the Democrats handed the most important primary of the year to Barack Obama, a black man. That’s history of the best kind.
Last night, the Republicans handed the same primary to Mike Huckabee. That’s great too, and here’s why:
After 8 years of Bush/Rove campaigning under the evangelical banner, there are many who equate the Christian movement in America with bad people. And that’s sad. I’m not a practicing Christian by any means (or a practicing anything), but I cringe whenever my friends attack someone for being ‘religious.’ It’s not inherently a bad thing. Mike Huckabee is an actual ‘compassionate conservative,’ which is why he doesn’t have to use it as a slogan. Everybody knows it. And whatever his more extreme views, compassion is good. He won’t win the nomination and he won’t become President, if only because his foreign policy intelligence is substandard (and there are other reasons, even faith-based one) but it’s nice to see him win Iowa on the basis of being a decent person against Mitt Romney — the only person who I will say is disgustingly unqualified to be President and a phony in every possible way — give me him a hundred times over. The Iowa voters made good choices.
In last night’s CNN/YouTube debate, Mitt Romney said he waited 87 long years to celebrate a Red Sox title. I wonder why he waited until 2005.
As for Giuliani, I think the AL/NL divide goes back to when the leagues were smaller, so I don’t have an issue with it. I think there was a lot more league pride when there were fewer teams.
All this talk about General Petraeus got me thinking about Dr. Zaius.
Fantastic article on Giuliani in the Times magazine.
In The Ethics of What We Eat, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, the authors describe the nightmare conditions of the American chicken industry, focusing on chicken giant Tyson foods, animal cruelty and its commercial pollution of the “Delmarva Peninsula” — the tract of land composed of Delaware, parts of Maryland and Virginia. The conditions are horrible enough that Tyson Foods did not cooperate with the authors, nor did most of the large meat processing corporations profiled in the book. This code of silence is driven, it seems, out of self-preservation: the mode of production is horrifying enough that the company fully understands the consequences of exposing its operation to the world would be catastrophic. Yet, they seem fine with this arrangement. Why? Because you like cheap chicken and they like money. That appears to overwhelm any ethical concerns they have for the livestock they are raising and killing, often in spectacularly incompetent fashion. The authors, quite refreshingly, don’t recommend vegetarianism as the only ethical solution to this dilemma: they simply implore the reader not to buy chicken from these people, and cite some producers who operate their farms under humane conditions.
The “big” chicken industry looks, to me, a lot like the Chickenhawk industry that roosts about 100 miles away from the Delmarva Peninsula, inside the Beltway. There’s bloodletting, a lack of simple decency and a code of silence that protects the structure — even though those at the top of the pecking order they know what they are doing is wrong, and opposed to the fundamental values of our government. They just don’t care. Worse still, they have an army of bird-brained Chickenhawks who think they’re part of the plan, and they get treated well — plenty to eat, comfortable life — right up until they step out of line. Before they realize, their throats are cut, and they’ve been replaced. A few of them actually survive the throat-cutting process — much like, horribly, many chickens survive the throat cutting process and are left to bleed to death — and they also bleed to death on the grandest stages, giving ineffectual testimony before an astonished Congress that, like the small number of ethics-conscious food consumers, is powerless to stop the bloodletting.
Actually, that description may not be fair to the Bush Administration. The administration and its cronies are far more effective at silencing the troublemakers than big chickens, which resorts to such wonderful measures as electrocuting them, scalding them, and when that doesn’t work, “stomping on them, beating them, running over them on purpose with a fork-lift truck, and even blowing them up with dry ice ‘bombs.'” Sounds lovely. Now listen to what happened to Russell Skoug.
In an incredible, eviscerating article for Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi describes “The Great Iraq Swindle,” the grab-bag of millions upon millions of dollars in defense contracts gathered and executed by the most incompetent people this side of the Washington Generals. In fact, we ought to call them the Washington Generals. The Washington Generals, according to Taibbi, were so callous with their disregard for American taxpayer money that they used $100,000 in rolled $100 bills as a football. (And that was one of the confirmed accounts). He estimates America has spent $500 billion on the war and $44 billion on the Iraq recovery effort, an effort so botched that the tally is embarrassing to completely recall. “And what did America’s contractors give us for that money?” he asks. “They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches.”
But that’s not all they did: they also fucked Russell Skoug. Taibbi recalls how Skoug, working for the private contractor Wolfpack, was tasked with fixing Humvees as part of his duties on the ground. It is beyond the point of our story that Skoug had no previous experience repairing Humvees: one day — actually, September 11th, 2006 — Skoug set off across Iraq to find repair parts when the U.S. Army vehicle in which he was traveling was hit by a bomb. He was airlifted to a hospital in Germany and back to the United States, whereupon his employer tried to deny him the medical insurance claims to pay for his injuries. Nevermind that Wolfpack was required to provide medical insurance in a war zone, Taibbi writes, Wolfpack CEO Mark Atwood let Skoug go with some pittance payments and scolded his wife when she tried to recoup the hospital bills, which totaled over $500,000. Confronted with this, Atwood refused to speak to Taibbi, saying, “I just want some peace.” And you thought they were cruel to the chickens.
The worst part about all this is that, despite this callous regard for their own followers, Cheney, Bush, et al. have no shortage of hens clucking away at their heels. Last night, I was watching The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Judy Woodruff was conducting a debate on the Alberto Gonzales “legacy,” a hilarious ludicrously-phrased topic, with Michael Greenberger, a former justice department official in the Clinton Administration, and Noel Francisco, a partner at the Jones Day law firm (which represents R.J. Reynolds) and former associate counsel to President Bush. Over Greenberger’s polite objection, Francisco painted a rosy picture of the Gonzales era, saying that history would judge him fairly:
I really do think that, once we have the distance of history between us, the American people and history will look at the attorney general and look and see that he made the right decisions and the president made the right decisions in combating the war on terror and combating this new and dramatic threat to our country.
He was saying this about Alberto Gonzales. Just a reminder from the Think Progress blog:
– It was Alberto Gonzales, not Congress, who fired attorneys for political reasons.
– It was Alberto Gonzales, not Congress, who gave the White House political team unprecedented power to intercede in the affairs of the Justice Department.
– It was Alberto Gonzales, not Congress, who allowed his department to illegally hire attorneys based in part on their loyalty to the Republican Party and the Bush administration.
– It was Alberto Gonzales, not Congress, who dissembled and misled about the administration’s spying activities.
– It was Alberto Gonzales, not Congress, who lied in stating that all Bush appointees would be Senate-confirmed.
Oh, did I not mention that Francisco, like former White House spokesman/part-time Nantucket resident Ari Fleischer, blames Congress?
I don’t care who the attorney general was. I think you would have seen the similar thing going on regardless of who the attorney general was. The issue might have been a little bit different, but they’d still be trying to come out with a scalp.
Just repeating the party line: it’s the Democrats’ fault. Always the Democrats’ fault. That’s how you move up the pecking order. You can be as smug as you want (watch Francisco or Fleischer for examples), callous (Rumsfeld teasing reporters who challenged him during the beginning stages of the war) or plain incompetent (recall Gonzales’ “I don’t recall” fiasco from his Senate testimony), as long as you keep moving forward and, never, ever deviate from the plan, and you will be fed. This is classic chicken behavior. In The Ethics of What We Eat, Singer and Mason describe how egg-laying hens “are like fans at rock concerts in that they have a mob mentality. They will crowd all over each other to get into a particular nesting box, although the one right next to it—which is identical as far as he can tell—is empty.”
The worst part about this war, as filmmaker Charles Ferguson said on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago to promote his incredible film No End In Sight, is “the emotional and intellectual blindness of the people that did this;” the inability to see the error of their ways, and the chance to fix things through a slight change of course. They won’t go to the other nesting box. Jon Stewart recently said that the worst part about this war is that the people who are least responsible for it feel the worst about it, and vice versa. As you go through the massive the pecking order, it’s shocking how few people have broken with the administration for the far easier path of telling, and acknowledging, the truth. Like the men in charge of “big chicken,” it’s not that we’re actually dealing with chickens. We’re dealing with cowards.
My brother sees them everywhere. He lives in Arizona — a state as red as the desert floor — and he’ll be driving on the highway when he’ll see a hand-made, spray-painted banner along the side of the road reading simply “Ron Paul.” This happens, he says, all the time. On the campus of his alma mater, Arizona State University, he says that among young Republicans, Ron Paul is the cool and standard choice for the 2008 Presidential nomination.
That’s why videos like this make me so angry. To boil it down, CNN anchors are playing some silly game where they ask a Democratic and Republican college student who they think will be the nominee for their respective party in 2008. Thankfully for us, neither of these students is dumb enough to answer such an idiotic question — and, naturally, they are mocked by the hosts. The Republican says she would vote for Ron Paul, leading the female CNN host — Kiran Chetry — to stop her mid-answer and ask if there are any “top tier” candidates she would support because Ron Paul “doesn’t have a chance.” When the Democrat won’t specify a candidate, and says that any Democrat would be better than President Bush, the male host — Rick Sanchez — asks her if she would “vote for Porky Pig” simply because he was a Democrat.
As I said earlier, kudos to the students for not giving into this crap. This is the line of thinking of the hosts:
a) Have college students on the program to ostensibly get their views.
b) When those views don’t conform with the mainstream, challenge them.
c) When they don’t back down, mock them.
Of course, the problem is how the “mainstream” is defined. The implication here is that Ron Paul is not a “top-tier” candidate because he hasn’t raised enough money — the unspoken, fallacious idea being that the reverse is also true. Aren’t we supposed to judge candidates based on their ideas? The Republican student — Laura Elizabeth Morales — does just that, saying:
“You’ve got Giuliani out there, who’s really an anti-gun Republican who’s going to lose a strong base, especially here in the South. And then Mitt Romney kind of flip-flops on his issues. John McCain, I think, is pretty much just ‘out,’ but we really need a strong, solid conservative…”
… which appears to be a well-thought-out argument, and certainly one not worthy of being mocked. When Rick Sanchez virtually asks the Democrat student, Rachel Moore, if she considers who the person is at all when voting — seriously, what kind of question is that? — she deflects him with far more grace than he deserves.
But back to Ron Paul for a second. For all the hubbub of Rudy Giuliani’s supposed torpedo of Paul at the May 15th debate over 9/11, look at these results of the debate as voted on at MSNBC.com. Notice anything? Certainly, this doesn’t conform with the glowing tabloid-cover reports we got here in New York City of our former mayor’s performance — the nation, or at least the nation on the Internet, thinks Paul blew Giuliani (and everyone else) away. Now, I’m willing to admit that these results are likely skewed somewhat toward Paul because he is popular among young voters, who are disproportionately represented on the Internet, but it’s the fact within the fact that matters: Ron Paul is extremely popular among young voters. (The video is one of the most-viewed on YouTube, almost certainly for this reason). No one on the left, not even Dennis Kucinich, has the sort of “outsider/young voter” cache that Paul has. This is probably because “top-tier” candidate Barack Obama steals a lot of it.
It’s pointless to argue over whether these CNN anchors are clueless about Paul’s popularity on college campuses, as they clearly are, but the greater point here is that we make a literal mockery of the electoral process when we ask what the average voter “thinks” will happen — we need to ask them what they think. That’s how good ideas are spread, and that’s what this process should be about. Rick Sanchez, Kiran Chetry and the producers at CNN who promote this type of crap ought to be ashamed of themselves. Sadly, they never are.
There’s an article in this week’s Sports Illustrated about the Roger Federer versus Rafael Nadal rivalry, differentiating it from rivalries where it’s impossible to root for both sides. Federer and Nadal are both so likable, the article states, that it’s not like those nasty contests — Duke/UNC, Red Sox/Yankees, Hillary/Rudy — where you really can only pick one side or the other, and there’s no middle ground.
That line of thinking — that there’s a Hillary vs. Rudy “rivalry” — is another reason that, despite what I see as a lack of substance for Hillary, she leads national polls, as does Giuliani. I think that, to some degree, Americans may not be actually okay with Hillary Clinton (perhaps they haven’t thought it out quite yet), but they’d be more than excited for a Hillary vs. Rudy showdown in the general election. It would be exciting and vicious, with the left’s reigning hero (B. Clinton) going against the right’s reigning hero (of 9-11), in a New York-style throwdown. It’s the stuff of an easily-to-follow narrative, a manifest destiny continuation of the aborted 2000 Senate race, in a country where nuance doesn’t fly — just ask Barack Obama, who’s been skewered for speaking like a human being during debates.
Of course, all of this plays into the theory that the Republicans want Hillary to be the Democratic nominee because she’s beatable, and if Hillary is the nominee, Giuliani is the only one that can beat her. She would wipe the floor with Romney. She really would. But there’s always the distinct chance that Giuliani screws up, and Hillary takes the election home. It would be attack vs. standing firm, and the first one to budge would lose. Even I think it would be fascinating, and probably the most fascinating election I can remember, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to vote to make it happen. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, being a good campaigner won’t make someone a great President. I just think, with the Hillary vs. Rudy hoopla, a lot of Americans have forgotten that. They’re more excited about the race than the destination. And it’s the destination that really matters.
I saw a friend this weekend who is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and for the exact reason which I discounted here last week — that she is Bill Clinton’s wife. This particular friend, an honest-to-God-old-school Texas Democrat, is a strong advocate of politics as a (tug-of-?) war where you maximize every advantage you have for the sole purpose of fucking over your enemy, whom you despise. To use a sports analogy, it’s like a Yankees/Red Sox type of thing; he thinks it’s not enough to support one side — you have to HATE the other side. He takes every Karl Rove- or Dick Cheney-orchestrated maneuver personally, every Rumsfeld “unknown known” right in the stomach, every Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzalez fuckup right to the kidney. He HATES Republicans, all of ’em, every last one. I know a few and they’re not so bad (!), so it’s harder for me to get up the urge to step on their collective throats. But I understand.
Anyhow, he’s voting for Hillary Clinton. And why is he voting for Hillary Clinton?
“Because after eight years of this fuckup president, there’s no better revenge than putting the Clintons back in the White House. You re-elected George Bush? Fine. Well guess, what? The Clintons are back. Load up the U-Hauls. Yee-haw, motherfuckers.”
This discussion/wonderful tirade opened my eyes a bit to how visceral the pain is for card-carrying Democrats these days. I’m not sure I agree with him enough to follow his lead — I think a better “fuck you” would be a better president than Hillary — but I definitely see where he’s coming from. I do think it would be a great “fuck you” to have the Republicans to have the virtual picture ofd Bill Clinton just chillin’ on the White House grass in a lawn chair, drinking iced tea and waving to passersby — you know, giving the job as much attention and GWB does now. But it’s going to take a bit more for Hillary to get my vote.
There are six “fucks” in this post. Seven now. Yikes.
I think as the election progresses, there are going to be a lot of political posts. Presidential elections fascinate me.
There was an article in The New York Times yesterday about Hillary Clinton’s letters to a pen-pal in college. They heavily excerpt the letters, and I can’t help but think that Hillary Rodham sounds a LOT like Lisa Simpson, who in fact, became President in one forward-looking Simpsons episode.
“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me. So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”
“Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially.”
“Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals? How about a compassionate misanthrope?”
“I’d play out in the patch of sunlight that broke the density of the elms in front of our house and pretend there were heavenly movie cameras watching my every move.”
For what it’s worth, sounding like Lisa Simpson is a good thing, despite my “Major Problem” from last week.
Bryan Joiner 