Category: Politics

Yay! It’s SuperSize Me Tuesday! A chance for almost half the people in the country to choose the delegates who may or may not go to a state convention, and may or may not relay their choice to the state party mechanism (possibly apportioned by the percentage of votes captured, unless it’s winner-take-all), which may or may not endorse those choices at the national convention, as long as there’s no deadlock in the nomination or some super-delegates don’t override it! Yay! Go Democracy!

(An aside: One idea for increasing voter turnout that has been floated for years is to hold elections on Saturday or Sunday. Wouldn’t that be great? People could throw parties just like for the Super Bowl, go out voting with their friends and relatives, then go home and watch the election results on CNN. Just like Super Sunday! Or else they could sleep in, putter around the house, and watch “American Idol” marathons like they do the rest of the year. Maybe the promise of alcohol would make it work. It might have caused trouble for Andrew Jackson, but today we have designated drivers and near-beer, right?)

I have reached a milestone that should send a shiver through any progressive person, or anyone under 75: I am actually agreeing with the slate chosen by the Chicago Tribune. All except President, that is. Still not sure about that contest, but I agree with their picks for every state and county official this year. Frankly, I’m frightened. Does this mean I now have to harrumph and spit every time someone mentions FDR?

But I’m in the mood to throw out as many officials in Cook County as possible, after their shameless bullshit of trying to pass a sales tax increase that would give us the highest rate in the ENTIRE nation. So that patronage workers can get jobs sleeping in their vans in the forest preserves and sheriffs can pursue suspects from Berwyn into Hinsdale? Sorry, Big Head Todd Stroger and the Monsters will have to figure out another way to fulfill their contracts with Satan.

On the national level, though, I’m stumped. My cynicism runs so deep that if Mahatma Gandhi were running, I’d be skeptical that he was in league with the home weaving-industrial complex. Voting for personality over ideas makes me feel like we’re all in high school again (which we probably are, politics-wise), but with coverage the way it is, it’s almost inescapable. All of Hollywood loves Obama, which is reason enough to vote against him. Leading intellectuals can’t articulate why they don’t “like” Hillary, which is enough reason to vote for her.

(Many people voted for the Imbecile in Chief because they liked him, and that didn’t get us very far. I know many people I like whom I wouldn’t trust driving my car, let alone running the country. Come to think of it, Bush qualifies on both of those counts, too, except for me liking him.)

And for entertainment’s sake, I hope no one in either party gets a mandate from today’s votes. The longer they keep mixing it up, the better I like it (and Obama’s people can learn a few good vicious moves from Clinton’s that will come in handy in the months leading to November). Once a candidate pulls out in front, it’s all over but the snarling and leg-humping.

I vote for Michael Strahan! And Tom Petty! And that ugly chick from the commercial who rubs cashews all over herself! Yow! Talk about Likeability! Go Planters!

So the 6th anniversary of the WTC bombings has come and gone. I didn’t want to write anything about it yesterday, because perversely, it felt better to honor those victims and the firefighters and police who died there with a silent prayer than with some half-baked exposition. When the whole world is beating its chest, it feels more sincere to honor their lives for what they were, than to use them to measure how deeply we can grieve.

That kind of selflessness, of course, couldn’t survive in the swamp that is Washington, and so we had the spectacle yesterday of Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker testifying before Congress, the latest pep talks designed to make it look like progress can be made in Iraq, however glacial and bank-breaking it may be. It’s of course no coincidence that they testified on 9/11, because the White House, in its New-Coke efforts to get us all to see what they see, never passes up a marketing opportunity, however tasteless. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman wrote, as quoted in James Wolcott’s blog:

“The symbolism of getting General David Petraeus to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the anniversary of 9/11 appealed to the White House. It should not have. It is crass.”

Which goes without saying, or should. But the ghouls and marketeers who run the White House wouldn’t know crass from ground glass. What was it Bush told us just after the WTC bombing? That we should get on with our lives, and show our enemies they can’t destroy what’s good about our way of life? Remember what he told us to do?

Go shopping.

No more confirmation was needed for me that W and those pricks in Washington were a step removed from the rest of us. In their eyes, honor equals money, specifically keeping the economy rolling so portfolios remain high and they stay in the graces of campaign contributors. In an enormous application of that “Prosperity Gospel” claptrap, America is good because it is wealthy. And we can be gooder if we just keep getting richer.

Now the memories of the WTC victims are smudgy and threadbare. They’ve been relegated to the status of those people who died at Gettysburg and Bunker Hill, trotted out for rhetorical purposes and chest beating but far removed from the present reality. Only problem is, they’re only 6 years gone. Real lives are still in pain because of their loss, and hundreds of New York police, firefighters and citizens are still sick from what they inhaled in those weeks after the disaster. And all the pledges of federal help in helping NY rebound are so much debris from a distant time. Did even the most cynical among us realize how badly Bush & Co. would screw things up in this country, in the September weeks of 2001? How they’d piss away our goodwill in the world with the invasion of Iraq? Wipe their asses with the Constitution? Exploit our national resolve for justice to keep themselves in power?

I don’t want to go off on a litany of their mistakes here. It’s been said before, and by better writers. I’ll just say it beggars the imagination what they’ve done in the past 6 years, supposedly in memory of the people who died on 9/11. And what will be done in the next 50.

I’m so happy that Sen. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig is thinking of taking back his resignation from the Senate. It’s such a shame that scandals get swept under the rug so fast these days. There’s hardly enough time to enjoy the spectacle, especially when things happen on Labor Day weekend and get lost in the news cycle.

Craig wants to take back his resignation (“I didn’t say cross my heart”) AND take back his guilty plea of the misdemeanor charges in Minnesota. Maybe he made the guilty plea under the assumption that “What happens in Minnesota, stays in Minnesota.” But if he takes back his resignation, is he saying that he really did make a pass in the bathroom stalls? If he takes back his guilty plea, is he saying he DIDN’T do it? Can he get back his committee assignments if he admits that he’s only gay in airports and pledges from now on to take the train?

During our family vacation to Germany last summer, I grew ashamed of my ignorance of the history of World War II. I knew a few of the basics, like everyone else, but how the Nazis actually came to power and held sway over a supposedly civilized nation—that was a gap in my education that made me feel like a complete sophomore.

As the years pass, the upheaval and lasting effects of WWII become just a feature of the landscape. With the exception of the founding of Israel, I’d venture to say that the outcome and results of the war are now taken for granted. Now that East and West Germany are united, what borders are left to dispute, or grievances to fester? The major political and military issues facing us today have their roots in the Cold War and petro-politics, not the Depression and the Great War. And as more of survivors of those times grow old and die, the lessons learned in “A World At War” are lost.

No such weighty matters were in mind a few weeks ago, when I picked up the first history book I’ve read in a long time, The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans. I just wanted a little background information. With so many volumes written about the era, the war and in particular about Hitler, I didn’t want to get bogged down in dates and troop movements and all the things that students of this era love to chew on. (I particularly didn’t want to read one more crappy examination into the “mind” of Uncle Adolph, such as Norman Mailer’s newest. I had high hopes for Stephen Fry’s Making History, but realized after 75 pages that it was packed with cliches, like the crazy scientist and the neer-do-well who will end up going back in time to do one good thing in his life by eliminating Hitler. So much time and ink has been wasted on that ratbag, I think, because we feel there MUST be an objective answer to why he was so evil. To believe that such extensive horror could arise merely from ambition, callousness, and mundane hate is much too frightening, like being able to make an a-bomb from things lying around the garage.)

Evans’ book is great for a layperson like me, who wants to see how the groundwork was laid for Hitler’s rise in the 50-60 years leading up to the war. And while I don’t want to get hyperbolic about it, the book described some unintentional parallels with our own political climate. America isn’t ready to turn into Nazi Germany yet, but it ain’t because we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave. It may be because our political stability and economic power haven’t forced most people to examine carefully how they want their society to run.

I apologize. I said I didn’t want to get hyperbolic, and it feels like I already have. Hard to avoid it when talking briefly about such matters. There are books and books that could be written about whether our country is headed toward real fascism or not, and I’m not the guy to write them. All I’m saying is, The Coming of the Third Reich describes a few situations and attitudes that could happen in any country. Economic uncertainty. Nostalgia for a time when the country was strong and respected, morality was unquestioned, the leader was blessed with divine insight, and a treasonous left-wing enemy was trying to bring the entire country to its knees.

(For an intriguing alternative history of America at a time when these very conditions were in the air, read Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America.)

Probably the most fascinating and chilling phenomenon Evans describes in The Coming of the Third Reich involved the German judiciary in the teens and twenties. Feeling no particular allegiance to the Reichstag parliament, which didn’t appoint them, judges would sometimes deliver incredibly light sentences on men convicted of assassinations, murders and riots. The mitigating factor the judges would consider in these cases was whether the crime was committed “for patriotic reasons.”

Yep, you could start a riot, or assassinate a political rival, or even attempt to overthrow a provincial government, and if a sympathetic judge thought you were acting out of love of the fatherland, you might only serve a couple of months or years in prison.

Something to ponder, as more and more members of the Bush administration get hauled to the witness stand.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but sometimes it can be a handy defense.