Utter Rove...

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Rage Against the GO Palin...

I was crowd surfing down First Avenue outside the Target Center in Minneapolis after the RATM show when the texts started pouring in. I guess I was going to have to tune into the Palin speech after all. Margaret seemed to be in the throes of another scotch soaked bout with delusion. My little half brother, Bertie Ernesto, twisted in a Naderian Madness, was madly texting corrections to the filthy lies promulgated by the moose-dressing hockey mom. Even the poor, bent Heeb, Wild Bill, who I haven’t seen since he embedded himself in the McCain campaign, was a froth in reactionary bile; luridly swerving through Vaginal Christ Metaphoria and Reagan filmography.

“Sacre’Poutine, boys! I’ve got to go! Let me down! The business of Political Writing is at hand!”

My ears still ringing from tunitis, I made my way to my rooms at the Graves 601, and sat down with a half coffee, half rye to watch the youtube, to see what everyone was upset about.

Ah yes, I realized, the American reaction to the success of an enemy. The bowel shattering crunch of an opponent’s home run. An especially bad ache when mixed with politics, a bio-hazardous Petri dish of economics and moral values. This is a most unwelcome occurrence for the Democratic population, anxiety-ridden and just wanting all this to be over, wanting their team to win so they can stop this eight years of hand-wringing and get back to the Netflix queue where they belong.

There’s nothing the Democratic faithful wanted more than a nervous, flighty backwoods hickette up there on the stage, clutching a Gideon in one hand, a Glock in the other; what they got was a confident, self-assured, Rovian trained Veep Candidate. A bulldog. An attack force and one painted in a true blue collar small town patina. What can I say? I don’t like it any more that you. But getting the thongs in a hizzy, mi bras, ain’t going to do it.

The first thing Dems need to do is keep their heads about them. Nothing Palin said, her stinging barbs at Barack, Michelle, or Joe, the seizing of her personal narrative back from the grasps of the national media was meant for them (outside the schaudenfruede any good GOP wonk gets watching liberal monkeys start the poo flinging). If you must, visualize that there were hundreds upon thousands cringing as you oooed for fifty-six minutes last Thursday. Nothing you can do about that. It’s battle time and reacting to the reactions of a bunch of republicans is like kvetching that Baphomet isn’t getting fair airtime at St. Patrick’s on Sundays.

There’s plenty of time for Lil Sarah to fall down. The media really hasn’t had a chance at her yet and the sooner they drop the business of babies having babies the better. Stick to experience (she doesn’t have any), stick to values (hers are evangelical Christian; she can and will be caught here), and most of all, stick to John (not as good with the teleprompter) McCain. Take the battle to him and the Dems should be fine.

Palin got a chance last night to wrest control of her narrative and sell her story. She did it well, she did it for her people. Not all of it was true or accurate (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/04/ap-attacks-praise-stretch_n_123771.html) but that’s a little beside the point when you’re in the church of GOP.

Boring Baby Blues in the Twin Cities

Good Lord. No wonder the press is in New Orleans. Up here in Minneapolis-St. Paul it’s like the cast of F Troop running the show (seriously, no? Imagine GWB as Ken Berry accidentally sneezing himself into office! Nom dieu! Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman as York and Agar). But really, the “Country First” and “Service” platitudes and the cornflower blue backdrops only dulled beside the droning and ridiculous speeches of America’s Top Old Farts.
So much more going on, I’m going to skip next door to see what Ron Paul’s up to, and then, tomorrow night I’ll have to choose between Rage Against the Machine and Palin.

It will be tough.

Alright, so that happened!

Sacre’Poutine! What's happened! That goddamn Tropical Douchebag Fay has kept me soaked to my Ray Bans, car-less, without credit cards, and a nasty, rum-soaked case of neural trauma, but you can watch all about that on Dateline sometime in the fall! In the meantime, nom dieu! I may have missed the Democratic Convention, but I sure didn’t miss my mark with McCain! Sarah Palin! I saw this coming in June, my little fleas!
Don’t question for one second the devious, insidious machinations of the Republican Party, true believers! Neither deceive yourselves as you watch that soccer mom delivery of her acceptance in Dayton! It is shrewd and calculated and all but Guarunteed to give Obama and Biden a run in the next 66 days! This was no cynical ploy to snap up disaffected Hill Chicks. Palin, herself, is the very embodiment of the Undecided Voter! Not the kind who’s pouring over the campaigns, scouring the RealClearPolitics, raising their voices in dingy bars; she IS the ultimate soccer mom, creeping to the polls between picking up Tommy at hockey and dropping off Sally to pick out a dress for her Daddy-date later that night, not about to get bogged down by the tainted bore of Policy while pulling the lever for family values! She's got tremendous appeal for the type of Voter who believes watching Kevin Costner's 'Swing Vote'counts for getting informed.
And working class white males?! Hell’s balls, this is a former beauty queen, lifetime NRA member, pro-life gal who’s been married to a union card carrying steelworker who was her high school sweetheart and with her is raising a veritable brood of like minded DNA vessels! Short of picking one of the Matco Tools calendar models, could there be a better salve for the poor crackers clinging to guns and god?
It’s a risk, though. Though you can see the sharpened nails of Darth Rove slipping into the hand puppet that is an energized McCain, crashing news cycles like the Joker in The Dark Knight, it seems pretty clear the Democrats are making a better claim than they have in almost a decade to doing what it takes this time. I must admit that my faith in Obama was overly influenced by his Mad Hatters (Haters?) and feared the Worst (Sebelius, Kaine, Edwards (John or Chet), or Bayh), but he has really come through. Biden cracks the ridiculous, unnamable code of change and brings the campaign working class respectability, foreign policy cajones, and a whole lot of teeth. He will chew Palin up like the soft underbelly of an antelope (barring her presentation of a loaded assault weapon at the debate).
I see they let Kerry speak in Denver. That was nice of them.
Alright, fuck it, I’m back. Somebody book a flight for Minnesota. I’m not going to miss this one!

The O Files: They want to Believe...

Margaret’s drinking had come down a bit since the demise of the HRC campaign. She’d also stopped wearing so much yellow, but that’s another issue altogether. When she appeared at my hotel room door at three am, Famous Grouse on her breath, a Marriot tumbler pinched in her right hand, I knew something was up.
“I was attacked!”
“Ma puce!”
“By a Canadian.”
“Then it could not have been that bad, mon cheri. Come in.”
“It was unreal,” she said as she splayed herself over my sleep-tussled sheets as I cracked the mini-bar. “A law professor from McGill. I was minding my own business, downstairs, having a nightcap after a seminar on the Founder’s Constitutional Intentions with regard to War Powers. He approached me at the bar, innocently enough, over a comment I had made about Nixon’s attempted veto of the War Powers Res. Blah, blah, blah, by the time we got to the campaign it was pretty clear where he stood, and frankly, Pierre, where I stand, too. So, I felt comfortable telling him what I’m telling everyone one: ‘I’m for him, but I don’t adore him.’
“That was all it took. It was like his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he was in some inner-psyche warfare, battling the demons at Armageddon.”
“Was the race card pulled?” I asked, handing her a cold scotch rocks.
“It was.”
“They should print an actual card; one with two sides, each stipulating the advantages to be gained by its appearance depending which side you are on. If it is not produced, it cannot be deduced!”
“These people are madmen, sweetie; this swarthy FC maniac was enraged that Republicans would suggest that He pulled it with the Dead Presidents thing and then flip around, with a finger in the air and say that the Clinton people were at work, coaching the McCain staff on dirty little tricks. They’re still mad at the Clintons! It was inchoate madness! I was scared to ask what he thought about Paris and Britney.”
“I thought once the primaries were over,” I said with a giant sigh, cracking the seal on my own mini-gin, “they would turn and focus. But with McCain fumbling the are like Caged Animals, these Obamaniacs, on a strict diet of Raw Red Meat laced with Methamphetamines, their only instinct is to fight and kill in the name of the Holy One. They are Bashi-Bazooks!”
“My dear, Froggy Nuck friend, it was so emotional. It was like he wasn’t even talking to me; he was coming from a place deep inside him. He kept saying how Barack has tried to be white his whole life, asking me if I knew what that was like. If I knew his pain.” Margaret hoisted herself onto her side, sipped of the drink. “There is something inside these men’s psyches, and it is men, mostly, that want to believe in something again. They want Camelot back, the world is not good enough the way it is. And this a Canadian! Jesus, Pierre, will it end after the election?”

Sickness falls over the Diamond!

Sacre’Poutine! The Dread is settling in! Indeed, now with only three wins separating the Yanks from first place and teetering on the precipice of a sweet and delicious sweep of the infernal Sox, I face the malevolent evil that is Jon Miller and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball! Nom Dieu, that man hides Nothing of his contempt for America’s Champion and his dirty, oral love of the Sox of Boston! Nonetheless, and though I have sworn I would not watch the coverage of the battle of Armageddon if Miller was doing the play by play, I will endure tonight because this, my friends, is the turning point; the moment we can all look back to and say the high tide of evil has begun to recede!
It is worthy to note that, since Barry Goldwater took the stage and swore allegiance to Satan and all his works back in 1964, donning the mauve, bengaline cassock of modern conservatism, the Yankees have failed to win a World Series ring during a Republican Administration. You think that’s coincidence? Fatto putain! Now, with the dawn of Obama, the presumptive national leader, it will be that the real champs will return the Universe to order.
Another curious note: the maddening success of the Batman! Is the nation’s embrace of Ledger’s amoral, capricious force of nature somehow at odds with the fierce adoration of the Presumptive Democrat? Are we just hungry for charisma, never mind the message? Are we really that banal, or is it that somewhere, just below the skin of our modern psyche we understand that all is Lost and there is nothing that we can do about it?

Get it? Do you get it? I don't get it. Oh, wait, I think I get it.

Satire? In a word? Yes. In two words? Absolutely yes. Nom’d’fucking ‘Dieu! It’s the New Yorker! You put a truncheon in some of these people’s hands and we’ve got the SS up and running again, you liberal scoundrels! Thought police! You bastards! This was not the cover of the New Republic or the Drudge Report home page! As New Yorker founder Harold Ross put it to his investors, it [the magazine, you dolts!] was not edited for ‘the little old lady from Dubuque.’

And it would never have found its way into her clammy little hands, and those in the filthy sties of the impressionable Right, were it not for the lefto-Facists in the Holy One’s camp, screaming up and down the cathedral arcade about offense and bad taste. Were these same primrose goose-steppers in Code Orange over any of covers the NYr has done with Bush over the last eight years?

Sacre’Poutine! I am glad at least that Remnick has the perspicacity to defend the cover. “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are…The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are... We've run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.”

From Voltaire to Heller and beyond, the destruction, inversion, subversion of Sacred Cows is what’s separated us from the demagogues and the fundamentalists; it is what keeps us from those same reactionary impulses to stymie and suppress the freedoms of others. Remember when the Monkey One once said ‘There ought to be limits to Freedom’? I get the feeling, you know, that it is the same impulse that drives these NeoLibs to Shush and Knuckle Rap.

Why not take offense, not at the content of a Bernie Mac joke as he warmed a $2,300 a plate Obama crowd, but at the fact the joke was CLEARLY unoriginal and OLD? Let’s be real here.

And when will the O Campaign stop constantly stopping to explain itself?

No Joke, people, you cats have got to stop taking yourselves so seriously.