Month: August 2008

If A Nose Grows In The Forest…

by dday

…and nobody in the media is there to hear it…

Last night, John McCain, he of the Pinocchio problem, retold the story for the Saddleback Church congregants about his time in the Hanoi Hilton (John McCain is very reluctant to talk about his POW experience), when a guard loosened his ropes and, later, on Christmas, drew a cross in the sand, in solidarity with McCain the prisoner, a simple expression of faith. The crowd loved it.

McCain has been telling this story since at least 1999, in his book “Faith of Our Fathers.” In 2000 he told the story and it involved the guard drawing the cross with a sandal. I guess the stick was better for the visual of the ad that ran this year:

Now there’s the revelation that the story of the cross is remarkably similar to a possibly apocryphal story attributed to the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. There are a number of Christian books that tell a similar tale about Solzhenitsyn’s redemptive moment with a drawn cross. Here’s one from 1997:

Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.

[From Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

Here’s the same story in a 2002 book. And here’s another from a book in 1994, which could be the original source. It seems to have spread like an email forward, and most authors source it to Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, though it’s unclear whether the story actually appears there. But it was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn’s death this month. I can’t find McCain referring to this story before 1999’s Faith of Our Fathers, not even in this incredibly detailed account of his POW experience for US News and World Report published in May 1973.

It’s entirely possible that this type of scene happened at a prison camp more than once, and there are differences between the two stories (in McCain’s telling, the drawing is performed by a guard; in Solzhenitsyn’s, it’s a fellow prisoner). The similarities could be entirely coincidental. This is not something you can prove or disprove.

That didn’t matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That’s what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore’s serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.

Here’s my point. I don’t actually care about stuff like this. I find it much more relevant and vital that McCain was quicker to begin the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 than even Bush and Cheney, or that he believes in his personal grandiosity so much that he imagines skirmishes on the Russo-Georgian border to be world-historical events that demand action, or that his health care plan would literally cover about 5% of those currently uninsured, or that he wants to continue Bush’s policies of inequality by cutting taxes massively for the rich, or that he thinks anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn’t rich, and on and on. Stories about politicians embellishing parts of their personal biography for dramatic effect are fairly routine and show little more than that they’re… ambitious politicians, looking to connect emotionally with voters to gain an advantage. Remember how Ronald Reagan convinced himself that he served in World War II? Hillary Clinton’s “sniper fire” in Tuzla? Barack Obama’s book actually admits that characters are invented and time compressed. So this is nothing new. And I wish ALL of it were ignored, because the thin strand connecting these gaffes and exaggerations to the actual character of the nominee is tenuous at best.

But the media goes ga-ga for this kind of stuff and offers little else, for the most part. I’m pleased that CBS is going to do 35 long segments on every aspect of the candidates’ policies this fall, but let’s face it, that isn’t going to drive the debate of the chattering class. They are uniformly uninterested in the issues, and they would much rather obsess over minutiae and speculate about character, whether the candidates “look Presidential” or “have what it takes” to win. In the LA Times today, there are two articles that speak to this. One is a critical review of broadcast news by media critic Mary McNamara:

SO MUCH has been said about the media’s handling of this campaign that it’s almost embarrassing to address the topic. But after watching hours, days, weeks of it on television, the cry of anguish cannot be suppressed: For the love of all that is holy, how did one of the most important presidential races in history, between two men who embody such disparate political possibilities, wind up looking like a montage sequence in a Will Ferrell movie?

“Bias” has been the watchword, but watching the nightly news loops, it seems less like bias than just plain old fear. Fear of missing the moment, of boring the viewers, of relying on the old-model thinking — who, what, when, why, where — while everyone yawns and returns their collective attention to their new iPhones.

“No, no, wait,” news outlets seem to shout like desperate screenwriters in a rapidly deteriorating pitch meeting. Nevermind those boring old proposed policies or the contradictory voting records or any of that stuff, look at this, you’re going to love it, it’s The Big Reveal.

Indeed, this is a major component of how the news media covers modern campaigns. The other way is through horse-race discussion, taking those gaffes and nuggets and bits of character effluvia and judging how they will “play” with core constituencies. The latest practitioner is Chuck Todd, and he comes out and admits that he’s a sportscaster:

Less than an hour later, Todd sat in a third-floor studio for his only practice run anchoring on MSNBC before the conventions. It was his first time behind the desk, and he anxiously checked with the floor director throughout the hour to make sure he was getting his cues right. “This is big-boy TV now,” he said.

The Miami native wasn’t looking for a television career when he first arrived in this city as a student at George Washington University, already fascinated with politics. “I thought I wanted to manage a presidential campaign,” he said. But after working on a few races, including Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential bid, he decided “it was more interesting to do it as a sport than trying to be a hired gun.”

Here’s the thing, though – in the case of the Village, it’s more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys. The refs are always against his team and the other guys are always cheating. Their draft pick is forever the savior of the franchise and the free agent they let go was a bum anyway. They give you the “inside story” without ever being critical of the guys who write the paychecks.

If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that’d be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.

I’m focusing on this gross double-standard in the comparison between Gore and McCain because I think it’s the most salient example and it shows to what extent their thumbs are on the scale. And when there was a perception on the other side of the aisle that the media was too liberal, they mounted an effort to relentlessly criticize them to make sure their perspective was represented. I don’t necessarily want a perspective represented; I’d like to see campaigns covered with a reliance on facts and not fiction, substance and not style. But if continuous, vigilant criticism is what’s warranted, well… have laptop, will travel.

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Setting The Table For Armageddon

by digby

Where do they get these crazy ideas?

Arab world sees Bush’s response to Georgia-Russia crisis as hypocritical

The U.S. president should be ‘too ashamed to speak about the occupation of any country, he is already occupying one,’ one observer says.

President Bush’s condemnation of Russia as a bullying intimidator in the Georgian conflict struck a hypocritical note in a Middle East that has endured violent reverberations from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and where the sharp White House rhetoric against Moscow echoes what many Arabs feel in turn about the U.S.

Many in the region are angered by what they see as the president’s swaggering style and frequent veiled threats of military force. His administration has been accused of alienating Muslims and instigating turmoil in a misguided war on terrorism.

At this point the single most important hallmark of American conservatism is hypocrisy. This, after all, is the man who stole an election and then invaded a country that had not threatened us in the name of spreadin’ democracy. You just can’t get any more hypocritical than that. (Well, actually you can — how about using febrile rhetoric about torture and “rape rooms” while operating his own torture regime and concentration camp. The list could go on.)

Meanwhile, little pitchers have big ears:

Georgia, Russia took a path of belligerence and bluster

Russia supported separatists and distrusted Georgian leader Saakashvili, whose mocking attitude and head-long rush to embrace the U.S. made matters worse.

These last few years have done grave harm, in more ways than we can imagine right now, to global stability. The US went out of its way to upend the delicate post war agreement against wars of aggression with this misbegotten Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It was an error of epic proportions. And it exposed something very ugly about us at the moment when we had the chance to transcend our own past sins and become an evolved, modern superpower devoted to international law and cooperation. Instead we proved ourselves to be no more responsible or mature than any other third rate empire with a chance to kick ass and prove its strength through brute violence.

This was a post partisan choice. The Democrats did not, as a whole, choose to fight this impulse. Most of them probably didn’t want to. But there are degrees of aggressive, blustery, belligerant hypocrisy and there is nobody who exemplifies it more than John Mccain, who makes even Bush look calm and deliberate by contrast.

This article should scare anyone with half a conscience right down to his or her marrow:

Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of a McCain Doctrine

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “This is war,” he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

Now, as Mr. McCain prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination, his response to the attacks of Sept. 11 opens a window onto how he might approach the gravest responsibilities of a potential commander in chief. Like many, he immediately recalibrated his assessment of the unseen risks to America’s security. But he also began to suggest that he saw a new “opportunity” to deter other potential foes by punishing not only Al Qaeda but also Iraq.

“Just as Sept. 11 revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand our freedom,” Mr. McCain told a NATO conference in Munich in early 2002, urging the Europeans to join what he portrayed as an all but certain assault on Saddam Hussein. “A better world is already emerging from the rubble.”

Frankly, I find that scarier than Dick Cheney, who I don’t think actually believes (or cares) about a “better world” just one that’s safe for multinational corporations. Bush is a vacant child who parrots talking points that make him feel like a man. McCain actually believes this drivel:

To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

“He has the personality of a fighter pilot: when somebody stings you, you want to strike out,” said retired Gen. John H. Johns, a former friend and supporter of Mr. McCain who turned against him over the Iraq war. “Just like the American people, his reaction was: show me somebody to hit.”

Whether through ideology or instinct, though, Mr. McCain began making his case for invading Iraq to the public more than six months before the White House began to do the same. He drew on principles he learned growing up in a military family and on conclusions he formed as a prisoner in North Vietnam. He also returned to a conviction about “the common identity” of dangerous autocracies as far-flung as Serbia and North Korea that he had developed consulting with hawkish foreign policy thinkers to help sharpen the themes of his 2000 presidential campaign.

Just what we need. A president whose first reaction is: “show me somebody to hit”.

I remember writing a long time ago that John McCain is the man George W. Bush was pretending to be, right down to the flight suit. The Real Thing is actually far more dangerous than the cheap imitation. If he wins this thing, we could find ourselves in a very, very serious crisis, of both economic stability and national security —- and very likely of our government itself. This man is unstable.

The funny thing is that I don’t think the Big Money Boyz expect the Republicans to win this election so they didn’t think there was much danger in putting Buck Turgidson on the ballot. You can’t help but wonder if they are having some second thoughts about allowing for even that slim possibility.

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Leaving A Man Behind

by dday

When Phil Gramm called the United States a “nation of whiners,” despite the controversy and John McCain’s claim that he would now be up for Ambassador to Belarus you absolutely knew that he would be back on the campaign trail and in McCain’s inner circle in a matter of weeks. This has nothing to do with McCain, it’s part of the axiom that there is nothing a true conservative can do to get thrown overboard. Gramm wasn’t rejected, he was expressly defended by a host of right-wing pundits (“Technically, being that we haven’t exactly seen two consecutive quarters of negative growth, those half a million workers who have lost their jobs ARE whiners!”), and after a brief cooling-off period, he returned right back where he started:

But associates say the senator still dials up former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who forfeited his title of campaign co-chairman after a controversy over his remarks that the United States is “a nation of whiners” and is merely in “a mental recession.”

Current and former advisers say they still consider Mr. Gramm, now UBS investment bank vice chairman, a top prospect for treasury secretary in a McCain administration.

Consider the contrast between the Gramm resurrection and Wesley Clark’s situation. I hate to make an equivalence between Gramm’s asinine remark and Clark’s perfectly acceptable and rational one, but both generated controversy, such that it is, and the reaction to that controversy from both parties reveals something profound: conservatives rally around their own, while Democrats are fearful and have no problem dropping them.

General Wesley Clark is not attending the Democratic National Convention. I was told by General Clark’s personal office in Little Rock that he would not be attending.

Clark was informed by Barack Obama’s people that there was no reason to come.

General Clark has been given no role of any kind at the convention.

Rubbing salt in the wound even more, the “theme” of Wednesday’s Democratic convention agenda is “Securing America.”

(I don’t think we totally know what happened behind the scenes here, Clemons’ report has shifted once or twice, but clearly the Obama team didn’t exactly welcome Clark to Denver, although there’s still time to make room for him.)

This is the difference between a party that stands for something and one that stands for nothing. I find the “something” Republicans stand for to be abhorrent, but Gramm certainly spoke a truth as conservatives see it, and while it appalled a lot of people, the party wasn’t going to excommunicate him for it. When Clark says, correctly, that getting shot down in Vietnam is not a qualification for President per se, Democrats get nervous, so worried are they of being perceived as disrespectful of the military (but not of NATO Supreme Allied Commanders, I guess), that they tell him to take a walk.

The worst part of this is that this is a nation of second chances and short-term memories. Marv Albert still commentates for the NBA, fercryinoutloud. Democrats are always playing this game eight or nine steps ahead for no reason. You don’t have to necessarily stand by a prominent surrogate no matter what, but the first instincts here are obviously completely different.

If John McCain wants Phil Gramm to be the compassionate face of conservative America, I’m all for it. But this is really about a party caring for their own. Once again, Democrats have let fear rule them.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Dancing in the dark: The Killing of John Lennon and Control

By Dennis Hartley

This week, I’m taking a look at two “small” films of note that you may have missed which are now available on DVD. Both films fit into a genre I like to refer to as “Rock ‘n’ Noir”; that twilight confluence of the recording studio and the dark alley, if you will.

There is a particularly creepy and chilling moment of “art-imitating-life-imitating-art-imitating life” in writer-director Andrew Piddington’s film, The Killing of John Lennon, where the actor portraying the ex-Beatles’ stalker-murderer deadpans in the voiceover:

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.”

Anyone who has seen Scorcese and Shrader’s Taxi Driver will instantly attribute that line to the fictional Travis Bickle, an alienated, psychotic loner and would be assassin who stalks a political candidate around New York City. Bickle’s ramblings in that film were based on the diary of Arthur Bremer, the real-life nutball who grievously wounded presidential candidate George Wallace in a 1972 assassination attempt. Although Mark David Chapman’s fellow loon-in-arms John Hinckley would extrapolate even further on the Taxi Driver obsession in his attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981, it’s still an unnerving epiphany in Piddington’s film, an eerie and compelling portrait of Chapman’s descent into alienation, madness and the inexplicable murder of a beloved music icon.

Piddington based his screenplay on transcripts of Chapman’s statements and recollections, and focuses on the killer’s complete break with reality, which ultimately culminated in John Lennon’s tragic murder in December of 1980. The story picks up in the fall of that year, when Chapman (Jonas Ball) was living in Hawaii and reaching the end of his emotional rope. Fed up with a life of chronic underachievement and a lack of any sense of purpose, he lashes out at his hapless wife (Mie Omori) and domineering mother (Krisha Fairchild). He is obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; he re-reads the book over and over, until in his own deluded mind, he has transmogrified into the story’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, on a mission to seek out and denounce all the “phonies” of the world. He quits his job and takes the first of two fateful solo trips to New York City, where he finally gleans his “purpose”-to kill his musical idol, John Lennon, for being such a “phony”. His twisted mission is postponed after he attends a screening of Ordinary People, which somehow snaps him back to his senses. Sadly, his creeping derangement did not stay dormant for long, and we all know what transpired.

Ball is quite convincing in the role; in fact he is so convincing that it will be interesting to see if he can avoid being typecast as a brooding psychopath in future projects (Steve Railsback still remains synonymous with Charles Manson to me, several decades after his creepy channeling in Helter Skelter.) To their credit, the director and his lead actor do not glorify Chapman or his deeds, nor on the other hand do they portray him as a boogie man. He’s an everyday Walter Mitty- gone sideways and armed with a .38. The film is a fairly straightforward docu-drama; what makes it compelling is Ball’s edgy unpredictability and the equally moody, atmospheric cinematography by Roger Eaton.

I can see how boomers like myself, who perhaps have the most sentimental attachment to the Beatles, would have an inherent revulsion for reliving this horrible milestone in our lives; I suspect that to younger viewers, the film’s subject matter would seem less morbid and of more objective interest. Clearly, there is an audience for this subject, because there is yet another film out about Chapman called Chapter 27, starring a porked-out Jared Leto (I have not seen it; it played the festival circuit last year and is due on DVD September 30).

So what is the point in lolling about in a madman’s head for nearly two hours, some may ask? And isn’t giving attention to this loser who was a “nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth” (the movie’s tag line) just rubbing salt in the wounds of Beatle fans everywhere? Well, perhaps. Then again, it is part of history, part of life. Movies are art, true art reflects life, and life is not always a Disney movie, is it?

I never realized the lengths
I’d have to go
All the darkest corners of a sense
I didn’t know
Just for one moment –
hearing someone call
Looked beyond the day in hand
There’s nothing there at all

-from” Twenty-Four Hours” by Joy Division

1980 was a bizarre yet pivotal year for music. The first surge of punk had come and gone and was being homogenized by the marketing boys into a genre tagged as New Wave. The remnants of disco and funk had finally loosened a tenacious grip on the pop charts, but had not quite yet fully acquiesced to the still burgeoning hip hop/rap scene as the dance music du jour. What would soon become known as Hair Metal was still in its infancy; and the inevitable merger of “headphone” prog and bloated stadium rock sealed the deal with Pink Floyd’s cynical yet amazingly successful 2-LP “fuck you” to the music business, The Wall (the hit single from the album, “Another Brick in the Wall”, was the #2 song on Billboard’s chart for the year, sandwiched between Blondie’s “Call Me” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic”). MTV was still a year away from killing the radio stars.

The time was ripe for something new; clearly, there was an opening for a new paradigm. For me, there were several key albums released that year that definitely lurched in that direction. They included Remain in Light by the Talking Heads, Sandinista! by the Clash, Black Sea by XTC, Sound Affectsby The Jam, and Closer by Joy Division.

Joy Division was a quartet from north of England way who formed in the late 70s. They mixed a punk ethos with a catchy but somber pop sensibility that echoed the stark industrial landscape of their Greater Manchester environs. Along with local contemporaries like The Fall and The Smiths, they helped seed what would eventually be referred to as the “Manchester scene” (brilliantly dramatized in the outstanding 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People). I remember being truly blown away the first time I heard Closer; in particular I was struck by the haunted baritone of lead singer Ian Curtis, who had a Jim Morrison-like way of chanting his dark, cryptic lyrics in such a manner that they really got under your skin. Like Morrison, Curtis’ touchstones as a songwriter seemed to draw more impetus from the likes of Conrad and Blake than Leiber and Stoller. It was more of an invocation of the soul, as opposed to merely “singing a song”. Tragically, by the time that album had been released, and its memorable single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was playing on the radio, Curtis had passed away, at the age of 23. Distraught over his deteriorating marriage and the chronic health problems stemming from a severe epileptic condition, he hung himself in his flat in May of 1980. There is a general consensus that side effects from the myriad of anti-seizure medications he was taking at the time had contributed to elevating his depression and feelings of despair. The surviving band members regrouped, dusted themselves off and mutated into a more radio-friendly synth-pop outfit called New Order (and the rest, as they say, is history).

I know that doesn’t exactly sound like the makings of a feel good summer movie, but I can’t heap enough praise upon Control, first-time director Anton Corbijn’s highly impressionistic dramatization of Curtis’ short-lived music career. Based on the book Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, a memoir by Curtis’ widow Deborah, the film (shot in stark black and white) eschews the usual biopic formula and instead aspires to setting a certain atmosphere and mood. Corbijn, known previously as a still photographer, actually had a brief professional relationship with Joy Division. He snapped a series of early publicity photos for the band, several of which have since become iconic to fans. On the DVD commentary track, he says the decision to not shoot in color was based on the quirky fact that all existent film clips and photos of Curtis and the band are in black and white.

The film is fueled by a mesmerizing performance from its star, the relatively unknown Sam Reilly (who ironically had a bit part in the aforementioned 24-Hour Party People playing Mark. E. Smith, lead singer of The Fall). He avoids merely “doing an impression”, opting instead for a very naturalistic, believable take on a gifted but tortured soul. The fact that Reilly is also a musician certainly doesn’t hurt either (all four of the actors portraying Joy Division actually did their own “live” singing and playing). He admirably holds his own against the more seasoned Samantha Morton, who plays his long-suffering wife. I think Morton is one of the finest and most fearless actresses of her generation; she just keeps getting better and better. Her character in this film reminded me of the type of role Rita Tushingham used to tackle head on in classic British “kitchen sink” dramas of the 1960s. In fact, the intense realism that Reilly and Morton instill into their portrayals of a struggling young British working class couple, along with the black and white photography and gritty location filming almost make this film an homage to classics of that genre like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger and The Leather Boys. Even if you are not a fan of the band, Control is not to be missed.

Chorus of the damned: King Creole, Sid & Nancy,The Doors ,Stoned , Gimme Shelter, Derailroaded: The Wild Man Fischer Story,You’re Gonna Miss Me : A Film About Roky Erickson , Bandits, Streets of Fire, Hard Core Logo, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Rose, Last Days,Pink Floyd – The Wall , Stardust, Velvet Goldmine, Rock & Rule , Phantom of the Paradise, Strange Days,Crossroads, Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson

Previous posts with related themes:

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Kurt Cobain: About a Son

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I Love You More

by digby

The Saddleback congregation applauded Obama very nicely. But as I hear this (California!) evangelical audience cheering McCain far more wildly for everything from offshore drilling to gay marriage to taxes and clapping for every tired old stump line like it’s the first time he’s said them, I really have to wonder whether this “outreach” is going to add up to anything.

I know it’s a small sample, but as Warren points out, social conservatism is not just about religion, it’s a”‘worldview” and McCain is the one who shares it, not Obama.

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Mainstreaming Crazy

by digby

The Jerome Corsi book seems to have been effectively rebutted by both the campaign and Media Matters. But I think that there are a couple of important things about this aren’t being explored as fully as they might be.

Tim Ruttan in the LA Times, with a good take-down of Corsi and the book, explains the book’s theme this way:

Corsi is frank about his motives for writing “The Obama Nation.” As he told the New York Times this week: “The goal is to defeat Obama. I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

That’s clear enough from the text. You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.

That really hits all the highlights of the underground (and not so underground) campaign against Obama. It could only appeal to people who are willing to believe, for whatever reasons, that these things might have some basis in truth — presumably those for whom some combination of his name, the term “black Muslim,” Jeremiah Wright and “liberal record” add up to that incendiary image. But the job of a book like this isn’t necessarily to get people to buy the book, but rather to legitimize some of these existent themes by having it be publicly discussed. It’s another way of getting out the word, that’s all. They don’t care if the media is refuting it or not — after all it’s the “liberal media.” Why would anyone think they would tell the truth? In that respect, regardless of the factual pushback, they have already succeeded.

Indeed, they’re “debating it” right now on Lou Dobbs. Dobbs just made the point that none of the “attack” books about John McCain are on the NY Times best seller list like Corsi’s book and that must tell you something. Mission Accomplished.

But there is something even more salient, I think, which Rutten mentions in passing. He points out that Corsi is actually quite the fringe character, a nut who associates with 9/11 truthers and racists. But then there’s this:

“The Obama Nation” was written and printed because major American publishing houses have decided that there’s money to be made in funding right-wing boutique imprints modeled after the Washington-based Regnery, which has made a small fortune stoking the hard-right furnace with combustible prose. Corsi’s book is published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster, which hired right-wing political operative Mary Matalin to edit the imprint. Random House has a similar imprint in Crown Forum, and Penguin Group USA has Sentinel. Their business model — and this is all about business — is predicated on the existence of an echo chamber of right-wing radio and television shows willing to promote these publishers’ products — however noxious. Beyond that is a network of conservative book clubs and organizations willing to place the sort of advance bulk orders for controversial books that will guarantee them a place on the bestseller lists.

It’s just that sort of order that made “The Obama Nation” No. 1 on Sunday’s New York Times bestseller list, and essentially “laundered” Corsi onto the respectable broadcast media’s guest list.

Rutten says this is all about making money, and I don’t disagree that there’s probably some money to be made by the wingnut welfare recipients in the food chain. But money isn’t the motive of the people who buy those books in bulk. They are making an investment in Republican politics. And the most telling thing about it is that one of the most mainstream Republican figures in the country — so mainstream that she regularly appears with her Democratic operative husband on Meet the Press with their two daughters at Christmas time — gave her imprimatur to a book written by a known delusional, right wing racist. On that side of the dial the separation between the mainstream and the violent fringe isn’t even one degree.

Dave Neiwert has, as you all undoubtedly know, written reams about how the right mainstreams its extremists. And this is one case where I think it’s come fully to fruition, right out in the open. Corsi is not just a right wing ideologue. He’s a full fledged nutcase, and yet he was hired by a major publisher, “edited” by a star GOP villager, to write an incendiary book of lies about the Democratic presidential candidate. They aren’t even trying to keep their fingerprints off this thing.

In fact, the default position among Democrats, Republicans and the media is that the only kooks in the country with whom it is unacceptable to be professionally or financially involved are on the left. And “the left” is defined so broadly that it includes groups like MoveOn and Vote Vets. The right, in contrast, has fully integrated even their extremist fringe into the mainstream and everyone accepts it.

Sure, people are saying that Corsi’s book is full of holes. So what? It’s “out there” and it’s getting more press every day. And in all of that, nobody’s calling out Mrs Carville on the fact that she shepherded these extremist lies into the mainstream. (Or her husband, for that matter.) Yet MoveOn taking out an ad that has the word “Betrayus” in it is worthy of a congressional censure.

As long as the villagers are in agreement that the only people who are truly beyond the pale in American politics are on the left, then this will continue. Mary Matalin will still be considered a perfectly respectable person by both the “right” and the “left” (as if there’s any discernible difference among the cognoscenti) and there will be no professional or social repercussions. Meanwhile even staid, old organizations like the ACLU suffer from the myth of being some sort of far left fringe organization and Democratic politicians run for cover when the right wing publicly “tars” them with guilt by association.

This is an ongoing problem that we see being played out once again in a national election. And I don’t think the progressive movement has fully come to grips yet with just how powerful this image of scary left wing freaks still is in the national imagination — or how thoroughly the right’s extremist views have been accepted by the political establishment. It’s something that needs to be addressed in a much more cohesive way.

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Feel The Excitement

by digby

CNN has a countdown clock going for the Rick Warren faith forum and the best political team on television is doing a “pre-game” show.

Apparently, people all over the country are so excited that they are gathering in front of the TV counting the minutes until they can hear these two professional politicians make canned remarks about their religious beliefs.

Or not.

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Head Fakes

by digby

I have to say that I’m really losing interest in the VP race at this point. It’s always tedious, but this year has been especially excruciating. (Kerry chose on July 6th, 2004.) Here’s the latest teaser from Jonathan Stein at Mojo, with what I agree is probably the real story:

Reportedly, John Kerry is being considered as Obama’s VP. I’m not buying it. This has to be a series of headfakes from the Obama campaign, right? Creating media speculation on different options — one week of Bayh, one week of Biden, one week of Kerry — keeps people talking about the choice for almost month. And ultimately, they can find a better choice than any of those three, meaning that even if the actual choice is flawed, people will still say, “Whew. Better than the other options, anyway.”

There’s more to it, though, I think. The Obama campaign has been very good at rolling out announcements for maximum dramatic effect. All those primary endorsements were tightly held until just the right moment. So, I think there’s at least a possibility that it may be a better choice (whoever that is) than we are all currently fearful it might be, even on the merits. It’s very hard to imagine that choosing Bayh or Kerry would be dramatic and I think it’s pretty clear that when it comes to stagecraft and tempo (if not their politics) they go for the drama.

I’m hopeful it will be someone that will galvanize the race and get everyone excited going into the convention. The race could certainly use an energy boost.

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More Pinocchio McCain

by dday

This is the kind of ticky-tack nonsense that defined the 2000 election.

Walter Isaacson asked John McCain about McCain’s inexplicable love for ABBA. McCain played the POW card:

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972.

That would be a two-week story on Al Gore, with much chortling to be had by all.

Not to mention the all-timer, a combination of lying and pandering that went down the memory hole so fast you couldn’t even see it:

While visiting Pittsburgh, John McCain said that while he was captured, he really loved the Steelers! The 1967 Steelers were 4-9-1. (thanks to Scarce)

“When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information… I named the starting lineup, defensive line, of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates!” — Sen. John McCain

McCain also said the same thing about the 1967 Green Bay Packers. McCain was a POW from late 1967 to early 1973 […]

In McCain’s best-selling 1999 memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain writes:

“Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.”

In 2005, A&E ran a movie version of “Faith of My Fathers.”

And McCain discussed that precise clip on CNN.

The actor playing McCain, asked to name the men in his squadron, says: “Starr; Greg; McGee; Davis; Adderly; Brown; Ringo; Wood.”

Cut back to real life. The CNN anchor asks McCain: “For those who don’t know the story, were those NFL football players?” “That was the starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers, the first Super Bowl champions, yes,” McCain responded.

It would be irresponsible not to speculate that the accumulation of these lies and exaggerations bespeaks a craven personality that cannot be trusted as a world leader.

Cokie, take note. (lol)

…by the way, John McCain is extremely reluctant to talk about his POW status. Discuss.

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Dazed And Confused

by digby

I got this from the Obama campaign earlier today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 15, 2008

Resident of The Villages Chosen to Go Backstage with Barack at Convention in Denver

Which resident, I thought? Cokie? Broder? Sally Quinn? And why is the campaign so proud of it?

Reading further, I find that it’s actually an elderly Republican woman who lives in a retirement community called “The Villages.”

Whew. There are Village Elders and Village Elders. This is the good kind.

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