Exhibit 1.4.7

Things

* You definitely need to check out the new The Literary Review which is really beautiful and full of great work and also a couple of [SPOILER ALERT]s. You can actually read those online, but then you'd be missing out on the rest of the fantastic stuff and that would make you, I hate to say it, some kind of idiot. Don't be an idiot.

* There are also some [SPOILER ALERT]s in the new Copper Nickel which--and this isn't just talk--is also beautiful. Seriously. I don't get it. We feel very lucky to have the pieces in two very cool journals. Or at least I do. I don't know how Laura Eve feels. Let's go ask her.

* I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel good about my thoughts on Rick Perry so quickly proving themselves accurate. Or maybe that's not what happened. I don't know. The important thing is that everyone seems to have realized he's an idiot (probably because he didn't read all the way through his literary journals). Bush overcame it. Can Perry? Something tells me he can't. Romney it is (which is actually maybe scary though the John Kerry parallels would be both eery and reassuring).

* "Hey, that final baseball day sure was crazy, wasn't it?" - everyone.

* And yes, yes it was. Look for more Royals thoughts soon in the rare SPM-other blog crossover. And by rare I mean it's never happened and I'm surprised anyone asked.

Exhibit 1.4.1

Debate Thoughts

Because you didn't ask.

* Perry was Perry. He's strong on the economic stuff where he's got his talking points down, but anyone watching through the end could see his obvious weaknesses on, well, everything else. He's just not good at speaking off the cuff and his best bet in the general is to achieve something like a Kerry-Bush dynamic and cast the president as an out-of-touch blowhard. Man, that's a steep hill as Obama isn’t Kerry and we’ve already had a Bush. So it remains: Perry is really, really bad when he leaves his comfort zone. His comfort zone, by the way, seems to exist between him and the coyote he's currently hunting in his mind.

* He’s got a huge problem with Social Security, by the way. Rather than back down from the ideas in his stupid, stupid book, he doubled down. Someone needs to work up the spine to tell the governor that the only problem people have with Social Security is that it might not be there. “Fixing” it is one thing, saying it shouldn’t exist is another. And by another I mean insanely unpopular.

* Most telling moment of the night was one that most probably didn't stick around for but will surely get a lot of play on the left: the crowd’s kneejerk cheering Perry's execution total. I wouldn't overreact to this--we could probably come up with some pretty terrible applause lines that would fly at a Democratic primary debate--but that there will be no rightwing repudiation of this is one of the things that has to have mainstream Republicans worried. I mean, where can you go from there? Unless the Republicans are willing to go full on The Running Man, you’ve got to think they’d rather this not be a party plank.

* And that’s really the underplayed narrative of their field (if it’s possible to have such a thing in this political climate). They aren’t just for killing 234 murderers—another terrible, out-of-date but not entirely unjustifiable position—they applaud it. Without prompting. In the middle of a sentence. Spoken by a journalist. We should recognize what they were really applauding was their support given what they suspected was going to be (something they would perceive as) a “gotcha” question. But that’s what makes this so problematic and the party’s prospects so dim as long as they pursue this path. Suspicion of the media. Suspicion of what are quickly becoming mainstream values. And, this is the problem, suspicion of anyone who would deviate from those values. Honestly, if they’d followed up that question by asking all the candidates, “Do any of you have a problem with governor Perry’s execution record?” would any have been brave enough to raise their hands? Of course not. But that’s not the bad part. The bad part would be if someone asked why the other governors hadn’t executed more.

Because here’s the thing: once you’re so paranoid that you can’t accept any deviation from a set of beliefs without it being a threat, you start to form a cult around those things you believe. Some tax cuts are good? Then all tax cuts are good. Government spending is bad? Then government shouldn’t spend on anything. Executions are good? Government should execute as many as possible.

And this, actually, isn’t that unusual of a position for the extremes of either party (though I think it’s a little more typical of rightwing thought whereas the left usually has some level of perceived [if not entirely real] nuance), it’s that this thought has somehow become the norm of the party in the last two cycles. It’s actually hard to overstate how impossible seeming this would be for modern Democrats. Imagine if Bernie Sanders suddenly got to dictate the terms of the debate the way Jim DeMint does? We' be thrilled right up until we started losing every election. Then we'd be less thrilled, I imagine.

Anyway, it’s fascinating here because of what it will mean for the general election. Conventional wisdom says these ideas can’t possibly win a national election, electoral college or no, economy or no. Conventional wisdom says these are fringe candidate ideas. And yet here we are cheering them before they can even be spoken.

* I’m writing this while playing online chess in a coffee shop. It’s amazing nobody has looked at my computer and punched me in the face.

* So, quick summary: any Republicans concerned with actually winning an election have to be moving to the Romney camp about now. He looked good and, to be honest, I was a little afraid of how he might match up with Obama given the president's considerable struggles. Which is not to say Republicans wouldn’t happily settle for Perry, just that those electability questions loom nearly as big for him as they once did for Bachmann.

Exhibit 1.3.23

Rick Perry

Politics. Why not.

So, as a current Texan--god, I hate that--I've got some thoughts on Rick Perry. They're not particularly revolutionary, but I sense a lot of my non-Texan, liberal friends are suddenly scared of Mr. Perry which, frankly, they probably should be. He's terrifying.

At first. And that's sort of the genius of him, really. He cuts a swaggering and invulnerable figure in Texas and as a national candidate, he really seems uniquely suited to take on the president--religious, Tea Party-approved, perceived to be anomalously successful economically over the last few years, and, perhaps most importantly, folksy and headstrong in a way that contrasts wildly with the president. So why did major Republicans make a renewed push to lure a Chris Christie or a Paul Ryan into the race immediately after Perry entered? O, right, there's the little matter of him being exactly like George W. Bush only, somehow, worse.

That might seem unfair. Perry is, after all, his own man, yet one can't listen to him speak without immediately thinking of our 43rd president. It's almost bizarre how identical Perry-the-candidate is to Bush-the-candidate. All the policies are the same—and, again, sometimes worse—only this time Perry doesn't have to bother with wrapping himself in some moderating blanket like "Compassionate conservative." That's good because he probably wouldn't be able to pull it off half as well and bad because, well, Perry's still got to convince the rest of the non-Tea Party world to vote for him.

And this is where anyone concerned with Rick Perry should calm down. George W. Bush remains wildly unpopular and, as much as anything else, this should put a damper on his general election hopes. You might think it's superficial, but it's a real issue for Republicans and they know it. All the conservatives who now claim never to have liked the second Bush are obviously ready to move on in the cause of anyone-but-Obama, but for the rest of us, a serious Perry campaign would mean asking hard questions about the last administration and whether or not we're willing to risk a return to it. And then there's this: George W. could come off as a common man, Rick Perry--far more common in background and education--comes off as an arrogant bully and a substantially less intelligent one than our former president.

Watch:

This is not to say a Perry campaign is hopeless (anything but). The president has done more than enough to make himself vulnerable, and his best hope seems to be to convince the country that the Republicans had it out for him and were willing to sacrifice the country to take down his presidency (pretty much true). Will he be able to do it? Probably. Or maybe I just don't think this country is yet willing to risk another dick swinging Texas Republican. O, sure, we might say we want it now, but once the general election rolls around, it's hard to see how hardline positions about never raising taxes and social security being a Ponzi scheme are going to get one to 50% of the vote.

In this sense, Romney is still the Republicans' best choice (though I'm starting to think his nomination over Perry might risk a Tea Party-backed 3rd party candidacy from someone like Bachman), but it seems increasingly unlikely that he'll be the nominee when no Republican seems to actually want to vote for him. Establishment Republicans seem all too aware that Perry is going to be the candidate non-insiders rally around--and that's why he's different from late entries of bygone days like Fred Thompson and Wesley Clark--and they want another option. It's not that Perry doesn't have the best chance of winning out of the current field, it's that they're afraid the current field might top out at 46% of the electorate.

Looking at polls, a couple of things seem clear. No one likes Republicans and no one likes the economy. Weirdly, people still like Obama, at least personally (although they may be beginning to separate his performance from his personality), and it seems like the only candidate who could beat him would somehow have to make the case he or she can fix the economy and not be an ideologue. This, obviously, is where Perry fails, at least at the moment. Smart Republicans know that his gender is not going to make him immune from the Sarah Palin treatment and dumb ones think he can win with the Tea Party alone.

And who knows, maybe he can. Obama has to find a better reason to bring out his voters again than 'I'm not an idiot and the other guys might be.' But Perry might actually tip the scales too far. God knows there are plenty of liberals who are going to hear him talk and think of G.W. At the point, it becomes anyone but him, and then you might see a left as invigorated as the right.

This is why Ryan and Christie are such attractive candidates to Beltway Republicans. They have all Perry's positives (perceived economic credentials, Tea Party-approved, vaguely presidential) and none of his negatives (neither seems like a Multiplicity-esque 5th generation George W. Bush clone). Ryan is obviously the lesser of the two but even still, he'd give mainstream Republicans cover to avoid a Bachman or Perry candidacy. Tim Pawlenty badly miscalculated when he decided to veer hard right (or maybe he just didn't see Bachman coming from his own backyard) and Huntsman, God bless him, seems close to agreeing with everyone else that he should really be a Democrat (points to him, however, for being the only non-major contender to realize that courting the Tea Party is a fool's errand with Bachman [and now Perry] around). So it's only Perry that seems like a legit option, and a legit option he is.

In an open election, he might even justify some of the fear he's been producing, but, then again, in an open election, he'd definitely have to beat Chris Christie and a slew of other more mainstream challengers. Without those more electable options, he's running for the title of "least obviously retrograde" which, in this climate, might have a shot. After all, 30% of the people would probably rather die than vote for Obama which might mean a lot except that 40% will probably feel the same way about Perry once they get to know him.

Of course, Perry--like Bush before him--might find a way to moderate himself in time for the general election, but it’s important to note that Bush never had to swing nearly this hard to the right. More than that, of course, is that Perry doesn’t want to moderate himself (you’ve got to think his advisors hate the fact that Perry published a book full of radically hard right positions [flat tax!] back when he didn’t think he’d be a candidate and now has to carry those ideas into this election).

So maybe Obama does end up facing something like a Perry-Huntsman ticket (which, though I highly doubt it would happen, would be the smartest pick Perry could make. He’ll probably find some elder Republican with economic and foreign policy credentials). Is that the worst case scenario? Not really. Even a moderate VP pick isn’t going to soften Perry up enough for the general populace, and his economic ideas are a tough sell, no matter what he claims to have done in Texas. And this remains the most important point: even with this economy, George W. Bush wouldn’t be able to beat Obama in ’12. Why would a dumber, more radical imitation?

Exhibit 1.1.23

Umm...

I'm firmly on the side that believes violent political rhetoric is a problem because it lowers the discourse, is unworthy of the officeholders, and conflates valid philosophical disagreements with war, not because such rhetoric--no matter how reprehensible--is likely to be responsible for any particular action. Still, I think today's Kansas City Star headline is maybe a little problematic:


I know we're dealing with a headline written by some editor and not political speech but still--nobody saw a problem with this? And I don't just mean because of what happened this weekend, I mean because of perhaps the biggest news story to come out of Kansas in the last decade:

"Abortion Doctor Gunned Down at Kansas Church" -- Fox News

Yep, that was less than two years ago, and the bill referenced in that headline is in direct response to this doctor's practice (despite his, you know, terrible and cowardly murder by a zealot).

Shockingly, the headline has been changed to "Conservatives Push Plan to Restrict Abortion" for the online version of the article.

And so, yeah, I think some of the reaction to the Arizona shooting has been a little tasteless by some of the left (and doubly so by certain defensive voices on the right), but I don't think we can fault anyone who says that maybe all of us--politicians, media, people who like to argue while drinking like myself--might want to step away from certain language and metaphors for a time with the hope we leave them behind altogether.

Exhibit 27.16

This Seems Relevant

Calculations by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and other independent fiscal experts show that the $1.1 trillion cost over the next 10 years of the Medicare prescription drug program, which the Republican-controlled Congress adopted in 2003, by itself would add more to the deficit than the combined costs of the bailout, the stimulus and the health care law.

From this New York Times article.

It's a little bit of a cheat as the health care bill actually reduces the deficit (due to spending cuts and tax increases) and so much of the bailout got paid back--plus the stimulus and bailouts were both one-time expenditures, not things that ostensibly benefit us for 10 years--but it seems like the sort of thing your average Democrat might want to mention every so often.

I know it's old hat by now, but it continues to be depressing how poorly the Democrats articulate their vision and successes. Like most us of, I don't want politics to be a debate contest instead of an arena where legitimate disagreements are resolved, but damnit if the people I (mostly) agree with are going to play this game, I suppose I at least want them to play it well.

It's unclear if the Democrats think they still live in a world where people trust the media to correct false narratives--not that I believe there ever was such a world--or if they really are so insecure in their own opinions that they feel it necessary to respond inarticulately to the 35 to 50 percent of people who will never vote for them anyway.

I mean, is it really so hard to defend the stimulus? Your opponent says spending, you say jobs. The end.

The rhetoric is on your side (jobs beats spending beats scissors). The facts are on your side (unemployment would be higher without it). History is on your side (1932). The world is on your side (most major economies did some kind of stimulus and, not surprisingly, the more they did the better they came out of the recession).

Now, I realize you're not going to want to stand up in front of your opponent who calls the president a socialist and say we needed to do what China did, but would it really be so much worse than the equivocating and the apologizing?

Exhibit 27.7

Answers

Okay, so we can all agree that this is fake, right? If it's not, I'd feel bad posting it, but the question "Should I get the abortion that my cat is recommending?" settles it for me.

(In case you're curious, I stumbled upon this Yahoo Answers article while fact checking a moment in a student's story. Yes, fiction workshop makes me want to clear my browser's cache. Let's move on).

Best lines from answers to this question:

* To begin with, don't listen to your cat.

* Why would you murder your baby because your cat thinks it's a good idea?

* I'm sorry to say, and not trying to be mean or anything, but don't listen to an animals opinion.

* Lose the cat (or at least declaw it).

* But if you really love your fiance, as i think you do cause you said yes to marring him.

* My grandma's father's cat ate a bird my great-grandfather liked more.

* Cats generally know best...take the feline's advice and terminate asap.

* I think your cats needs to be put in her place! HER POLITICAL VIEWS ARE IRRELEVANT!

* Just let your cat perform the abortion.

* Source: degree in human behaviour; animal behaviour; and personal experience.


O, and don't worrying about answering this question yourself. It's resolved.

Exhibit 26.8

Barack Obama and LeBron James




(I had a very long drive and, given how the flipbook passing of corn rows can no longer hold my imagination, I had time to think about this sort of nonsense. I did not, apparently, have enough time to consider how silly it would be to actually share these thoughts. As always, I'm sorry).

Over the two weeks I spent in New York, the most passionate lamentation I heard concerned voting for Barack Obama. The speaker's objection was to the president's handling of the country's various wars though it just as easily could have been the conceived watering down of the healthcare reform bill or the somewhat weaker than desired new financial regulations bill or the failure to extend unemployment benefits or the situation in the Gulf or... You get the idea. There seems to be a growing sentiment that the Obama presidency has been a disappointment if not an outright failure because a lot of people were casting their votes for an uncompromisingly liberal administration. That this White House has been so willing to extend many of George W. Bush's foreign policy priorities, that they've repeatedly negotiated behind closed doors with big business to weaken their two major legislative accomplishments, that they did not immediately shut out BP from responding to the Gulf disaster, they they kowtow to conservative Democrats who are undercutting their goals...well, a lot of his supporters feel like he's turned his back on them.

Which brings us, ridiculously, to LeBron James. The second most heartfelt regret I heard regarded James moving to the Miami Heat--effectively deciding to take a backseat to Dwyane Wade in order to form a super team--and how the speaker had, only the day before, loved LeBron James. James, instead of taking the Michael Jordan/Larry Bird/Magic Johnson root and trying to systematically destroy and humiliate one's biggest competitors, decided he'd rather join forces, choosing, at the cost of removing himself from consideration as the greatest player of all time, to play with his friends. It's a stunning decision, one that has basically turned James from the most popular player in basketball to maybe the most hated (at least outside of South Beach), and it feels like a betrayal.

And I guess what I thought about as I drove through, I don't know, Iowa, is how the disappointment in both cases is all about how we project certain qualities on public figures they are telling us explicitly they don't have. And we do this selfishly and childishly and, more than anything, historically. It's just easier for us to compare one figure to another when there's little else to go on. A great many of Obama voters thought they were voting for bizzarro-George W. Bush, a leftwing ideologue who not only reverse all the profoundly objectionable Bush-era policies but be as equally aggressive as the former president in checking off as many items from the party's wishlist as possible. And we thought this not because of anything Obama said during the campaign (though he certainly didn't mind anyone thinking that either) but because after the last eight years any Democratic candidate couldn't help but be seen as Bush's counterweight. Despite all the talk of bringing Washington together and moving beyond partisanship, we thought we were voting for exactly partisan politics only our partisan politics.

Similarly, James confuses us for having occupied a space in our consciousness that he never occupied in real life. All we heard about him since the time he was in high school was that he's the next Michael Jordan. Everyone was excited by this--fans, the NBA, even LeBron James (he wore the number 23). Well, at some point, LeBron James realized he's not Michael Jordan. In a vacuum, he may be a better basketball player, but he hasn't got Jordan's competitiveness (or at least his selfishness), and everything he's done since he's been in the league suggested as much (deferring too much, not taking over playoff series, seeming as interested in becoming a billionaire as in winning titles, etc.). And when he finally makes the decision to focus on winning, we're furious because it doesn't fit in with the role we'd given him. He's supposed to be the next Jordan not the next...well, there we go again. Pippen? James Worthy? LeBron can't just be LeBron, at least not yet, because we have no idea who LeBron is. We'll decide that when he's out of the public eye, right before we've defined him for good, facts be damned. We'll do the same thing with Obama (look at the way Republicans talk about Reagan with little regard for his actual politics).

We are simply too removed to be able to form deep understandings of figures willing to complicate our drive to define them (I'm not at all interested in implicating contemporary culture for this, if anything these sort of projections were much worse before mass media). And so LeBron will win shared championships just like Obama passed a middle-of-the-road healthcare bill, but nobody will be completely happy because they don't fit the narratives we've settled on. So we'll come up with new narratives around their equivocation and compromises, at least until they give us reasons to change our mind. Meanwhile, there are the George W. Bushs and Kobe Bryants of the world who act so completely as we expect that there's something shameful in the relief that, though we may not like them, we understand them.

Exhibit 24.16

A Political Post

Ah, I remember when I used to do these back before this blog became 10 posts a month, most of which somehow include a manifestation of my hangups about my basketball deficiencies. Well, here we go.

Healthcare reform must pass. No, not because of the poxed masses or whatever heinous things insurance companies do. Those are good reasons I'm sure--hell, they're great, important reasons--but things have moved beyond that. Specifically, things have moved somewhere lower, somewhere pettier. The rhetoric has moved to such ridiculous extremes that it's trumped the content of the bill itself. The most important result of passing the bill at this point is not any tempered reform of our broken system but the deflation of millennialist rhetoric which somehow equates benign measures like outlawing the rejection of coverage based on pre-existing conditions to Stalinism. Two examples from the last week:

* Healthcare bill an affront to God
* Ramifications of healthcare reform will be like great war of Yankee aggression

So healthcare reform must pass because of Mondays.

If both the House and the Senate approve the bill this Sunday and Obama signs it on Monday, then a week will go by and it will be Monday again. Then another week, another Monday. And then months and months of Mondays will go by and most people's coverage won't change at all, the deficit will be (slightly) reduced, bearcats won't be performing surgeries, the system will be flawed but better, and Monday Monday Monday.

I don't think it's possible to overestimate how silly so much of the talk from the right will look after each passing Monday. None of this is to suggest that the sentiment is going away--or that it isn't, at least in some cases, heartfelt--but only that Democrats need to be aware of how damning their failure would be. It puts this sort of ridiculousness back on the table for every major issue facing the country. Immigration reform = Losing the "real" America. Reasonable federal education standards = Maoist indoctrination. Wall Street oversight = Collectivization. It's going to be like the post-1993 Clinton years + crazy.

Whereas letting the continued existence of the world and America put such apocalyptic rhetoric in the proper context is reason enough to pass the bill no matter its content. O, the right is not going away and nor should they--and no matter what the Democrats will take some lumps in November--but this is the administration's only chance to make them play in something resembling good faith. Rallying the troops with 3-corner hats and talk of revolution works great now, but 100 Mondays after the bill passes, Ma and Pa Whitey aren't going to run into the streets to yell about insurance exchanges and medicare reimbursement rates.

Mr. Beck and the like can never be proven right--that's the power of their position--but they can certainly be proven wrong.

Exhibit 22.24

Afghanistan

It's always fun when you get to hear a speech that you can say with a fair amount of certainty will be played for tragic irony in movies a generation from now (I imagine it playing on an iPhone as Forrest Gump III kisses a girl dressed like Miley Cyrus as he graduates from the University of Phoenix). Which is not to say it's the wrong decision--I certainly wouldn't know--just that it is so clearly the only tenable one that the best anyone can hope for is understanding of that fact. There's no longer any real criteria for success and there may never have been--democracy! O!--but eight years later it seems silly to imagine we can just up and leave without consequences for ourselves let alone the men (and especially women) of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it's equally silly to imagine that bullets in the service of a corrupt government will make anything better.

Which is why we get to again have speeches about exiting that somehow announce major troop escalations. Afghanistan is not Vietnam but it is not Iraq either. The "success" of "the surge" there would seemingly be irrelevant in this discussion but there's no denying it's attractive to ignore those distinctions. On the one hand you have the possibility of some protracted withdrawal that would attempt, pointlessly, not to lead to the fall of the government and regional instability and on the other you have the dream of just a few more months with a few more troops and...

It's easy to see the good that might be done. It's easy to see how no one else is willing to take responsibility for the world and feel like you have to. It's easy to see the odds of Islamabad's collapse following Kabul's and have your hand forced by terrifying hypotheticals.

Who knows. To paraphrase Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, "In Afghanistan, the choices are frequently narrow."

Exhibit 20.3

From this interview with Jeb Bush:

Does the [Republican] party need to change or de-emphasize its positions on abortion or gay marriage?
No. No, I think those are important issues to not shy away from. And I don't think that's the reason why suburban voters have migrated to the Democrats. I think it's the economic issues. We have not been able to explain why these timeless conservative principles matter in 2009.


So basically Jeb Bush was asked if he was ever going to be president and answered, "No."

My issue is not with his specific policy positions--for what it's worth, strategically I don't think there's much point in Republicans capitulating on abortion and forward thinking politicians on the right should take a libertarian position toward gay marriage--but with his statement that economic issues are why these voters have migrated to the left. If Jeb Bush actually believes that, he's a moron. And since he and almost everyone else who claims to speak for the Republican party actually does seem to believe this, I think they may have finally reached the nadir. At this point, they've dug so far, for so long beneath the real world it's likely that a generation's eyes will never readjust to the light.

These suburban voters he thinks he knows have spent the last decade buying their furniture at Pottery Barn and being told they need to shop at Whole Foods. They've bought houses with granite countertops in subdivisions that have names and home owners association fees. They spent the affluent years that recently ended driven--whether naturally or as the result of good marketing--toward a kind of worldly sophistication. Now, it's obviously a very shallow sophistication, but I think it's important to realize that this isn't 1970s Orange County we're talking about anymore. These suburban dwellers who used to be the most reliable Republican voters because they were financially secure, white, and were afraid someone was going to take their swimming pools away are now people who worry about the environment, work and live among (or at least watch on the television) all sorts of minority families (including gay ones), and believe shopping at Bed, Bath, & Beyond instead of Wal-Mart somehow constitutes an acceptable value system.

They eat humus.

Whatever world Jeb Bush is imagining when he talks about middle-class voters does not account for humus. When these people voted for Republicans, they knew no gay people, drove Cadillacs, and cooked out of a Betty Crocker cookbook. They were capital-A Americans and this was their power. But the desire for isolation that drove them to the suburbs is A) no longer possible and B) out of style. Now, these voters are demographically diverse, live in cities, and have the benefit of cable television and the Internet. Their world is immeasurably bigger than what Mr. Bush remembers (or imagines).

They are not going to unlearn the knowledge they've gained. And it is both boomers and affluent Gen-Xers here. They want good design, they want good food, they want good lives. Their primary desire seems to be comfort and there's nothing less comfortable than hate. Hate means wars, it means pro-ignorance, it means attacking people they share a cul de sac with. And here's the part where the former governor should pay attention: the hatred section of the Republican party's platform makes them more uncomfortable than the economic wing of the Democratic pary's platform. It's not even close. Hell, after the last administration, the Democrats were nearly the pro-wealth party for economic reasons alone last election (though that party is probably over).

So the idea that economics alone can bring these people back is insane. Many are already economically incentivized to favor the Republicans (or think they are). What else can you do? Sure, being a little bit competent and actually governing by the principles the party expounds would help, but what's done is done.

These suburban voters are educated and successful and it would take some truly radical economic policies to get them to overlook the fact that it's acceptable for Republican presidential candidates to raise their hands and say they don't believe in evolution (I'll do us all a favor and not even talk about Sarah Palin). And no, returning tax rates to where they were under Reagan does not count as radical or 'socialism' or whatever boogeyman they want to throw out there.

Jeb Bush and Michael Steele and Mike Huckabee need to learn something from the advantage they've enjoyed among rural voters who vote against their economic self-interest when they vote Republican but do because of God or guns or whatever. For exactly the same reasons--though with opposite value systems--suburban voters will willingly and gladly vote for the candidate that might tax them more if it means voting for the world they want to live in. They're picking Bed, Bath, & Beyond over Wal-Mart again, and if you think rolling back prices alone is going to bring those voters back, you don't have any business running a party let alone a country.

Through more diverse and nuanced media and society's inevitable and consistent movement toward a more permissive culture, we've entered a period where--with the exception of abortion--social issues are going to be table stakes for a majority of these voters. If you can't pass a certain threshold of tolerance, you aren't going to get their votes. No matter how "timeless" these conservative "principles" are, being the anti-science, -gay, -people of color, -sex education, etc. party is going to take your name off the ballot for these voters. They aren't single-issue voters as much as they are voters who demand a base-level of decency or, at the least, an understanding of and respect for contemporary values.

But, hey, things will change. Maybe the economy stays bad or terrorism becomes a more important issue again and old-school Republicans like Jeb Bush get lucky. Maybe they can sell deficits as an evil, people will forget who took us away from a balanced budget, and these voters will again worry about protecting their own wealth. Maybe immigration can find a foothold and casual racism drives people to the right. Despite the monolithic portrait I'm painting, these highly stereotypical voters are only going to slightly favor one party over the other anyway. There will certainly be Republican presidents and congresses again. But they're not going to come soon or be led by people like Jeb Bush unless they take off the blinders and learn from the last election. For god's sake, the Republicans just got done proving they can't run a country, why do they think they can stop time?

It goes without saying, but among all voters the demographics only get much, much worse as time goes by. And as voters in the next 10-20 years don't remember Ronald Reagan, hate George W. Bush, and aren't inclined to vote for a 1950s value system that isn't coming back organically, how exactly is an economic philosophy that hasn't exactly been proven to work going to change their minds?

I'm no expert, but it seems to me the obvious direction for the right is becoming socially libertarian as opposed to socially liberal (but more or less ending up in the same place) and articulating that as a philosophical difference that traces itself to the earliest days of the country and informs every aspect of their platform (small government, isolationist, socially permissive, personal responsibility, religious freedoms [but for everyone] etc.) It certainly doesn't mean listening to nutjobs like Ron Paul, but in the right hands I think the Republicans could have a strong and simple message that places them squarely in the 21st century. The left's philosophy will be messy by definition, and the right should take advantage by offering something coherent and clean. They'd still have problems with health care and the environment and religious conservatives would complain, but those voters are the ones holding the party back anyway. Cut them loose and they'll come back. What you don't do is change nothing or follow reactionaries like Glenn Beck or root for the country to fail.

What you don't do is think what won in 1980 can win in 2012.

And on a personal level, what you shouldn't do is write about politics. Damn it. I just can't quit you, self-righteousness.

Exhibit 19.5

The Supremes


I love Supreme Court nomination hearings. I only barely remember watching some of Clarence Thomas's, but that was all it took. Unfortunately, they've never been that explosive again--or involved a would-be justice allegedly describing pornographic films--but they're still fun.

We're a month or two away from Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings and unless something more shocking than her diabetes comes up, it's looking like it will be a cakewalk. She's clearly no Harriet Miers--or Clarence Thomas for that matter--and so far the arguments against her can basically be summarized thusly:

* She might not be smart - This is unrelated, but Clarence Thomas hasn't asked a question during oral arguments since February 2006. Just saying.

* She too smart and therefore, as a woman, sort of a bitch - Something tells me this argument isn't going to win anyone over.

* She's racist - ?

What's clear at this point--other than one political party apparently having decided to add Hispanics and women to the list of groups they don't want votes from--is that Sotomayor is sharp and aggressive and proud of her heritage (as she should be). The same could be said of Justice Alito who spoke quite proudly about his roots as the son of Italian immigrants at his confirmation hearings.

(Also interesting is that Alito and Sotomayor share an identical educational trajectory - undergraduate degrees from Princeton and then law school at Yale where both were editors of the Yale Law Review [Alito graduate from law school in '75, Sotomayor in '79]. Remember how everyone said Alito was an unintelligent, affirmative action case? Oh, right, that never happened).

What's so sad and predictable about the identity-based attacks on Sotomayor is that it was the last administration's actions that forced this nomination. Somehow by floating Alberto Gonzalez's name and briefly nominating the unconfirmable Miers, we all shrugged our shoulders as two more male whities were confirmed and the court grew even less representative of the country. Poor Ruth Bader Ginsberg has spent the last few years looking like she's about to Pelican Brief a colleague or two herself if things didn't change. Obama really had no choice but to nominate a woman and, with no guarantee of getting to select a second justice (though it's likely), a minority woman was as inevitable as it was the right thing to do.

Which is not to say Sotomayor doesn't deserve her spot--she's done more to deserve it than just about anyone currently on the court from the looks of things--just that it's unfortunate a nominee who will make the court look more like America gets criticized for those very qualities. Where the right is wrong is in assuming those are the qualities that make her weak when the truth is exactly the opposite.

Oh, and she saved baseball. So there's that.

Exhibit 18.12

On Switching Parties

(I haven't done any political posts since the election. Consider this a shameful, one-time revival. I apologize).

Obviously I'm happy with Senator Specter's decision though it's important to note that in practice it won't mean nearly as much as we think as long as Franken isn't seated and some moderate Democrats like, oh, let's say Nebraska's own Ben Nelson, insist on throwing their weight around. Not to mention that fact that the senator already votes blue on a number of key issues and the one issue you might expect him to now come out in favor of--the Employee Free Choice Act--he's already said he will continue to oppose (we'll see).

Which means we might not see Senator Specter sticking around past the election in 2010. There are a whole lot of Pennsylvania Democrats, many of them union members, who will need to vote for guy they've spent decades voting against without any incentive for changing their minds. In other words, the only person happier than Harry Reid today is Ed Rendell who basically came back from lunch to find a senate seat waiting for him. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has said they won't support any primary challenges to Specter but if a popular Democrat like Rendell wants to enter the race, there's nothing they can do about it.

(Rendell's just an example. I doubt he runs now--he's a party-line guy--but there was talk of him before Specter's defection).

Honestly, unless Specter really does move to the left, it probably won't even take that great of a candidate. I don't know anything about Pennsylvania politics--here's how much I don't know: I initially misspelled Pennsylvania there--but it's a pretty safe bet that 100% of people who voted in the last Democratic primary didn't vote for Arlen Specter. Some surely came around in the general election, but against any credible opponent, Specter is going to have to cobble together a majority of voters starting near zero. One would think any well-funded yinzer who supports EFCA would be even money against an 81-year-old ex-Republican who stands on the wrong side of what will likely be the electorate's key issue.

This is more or less always the rub with switching parties which is why it so rarely works, at least for anyone who expects to get reelected (even Jim Jeffords, who would have been a hero for switching control of the senate in 2001, decided against running for re-election as an Independent or a Democrat). It highlights the sad truth of our system of government: for as much as we might like politicians to vote their conscious and do the right thing regardless of party, the intricacies of governance are such that the letter next to a name really can be more important than the name itself. And if the people of Pennsylvania want a 'D,' presumably they'd prefer a capital D to a lowercase one.

Maybe Specter will move to the left. Maybe--and hopefully--the Democrats won't be so quick to purify the party as their competition. Maybe Specter's cancer comes back and none of this matters. But for the moment it looks like this is going to hurt Republicans more than this helps the Democrats. As of 2010, the holder of that seat was either going to be Arlen Specter or some random Democrat and that's still the case today.

As for the Republicans, well, what can you say? This one has to hurt, but anyone dancing on their grave should remember the state of the Democratic party in 2004 and how quickly they bounced back. Still, the fact that a 30-year member of their caucus left because he was going to face yet another primary challenge from a right-wing operative who has no chance of winning the general election...well, it's an issue. I'm no expert, but it seems like they should be taking what they can get at this point instead of shooting everyone in the foot until only Rush Limbaugh and Pat Toomey are left.

At a time when even a state like Iowa seems fairly blase about allowing gay marriage--as if it's the most boring thing in the world when 10 years ago there would have been riots--their rush to force out moderates like Specter is inexplicable.

It comes from a play that what's left of their party would rather ban than see, but it's a lesson they need to learn: The world only spins forward.

Exhibit 15.22

I once had a liberal professor try to convince me that George F. Will is one of the good guys, one of the conservative commentators that, though I might disagree with him, should be taken seriously as a political thinker. Like this professor, finding those on the other side of issues that are as sincere and honest about their political beliefs as I try to be about mine, is important to me. For the professor, George F. Will became his nemesis, sort of a Rommel to his Patton, someone he could test his ideas against, all the time respecting his "enemy" more than many of his allies.

I supposed I believed the professor--or just couldn't find anyone better in the intellectual wasteland after the Limbaugh-ization of conservative thought during the Bush years--and so started treating Will as the best of the available conservative columnists. Not that I sought him out, mind you, but just about every newspaper I've ever subscribed to has run his column and my parents get me a subscription to Newsweek every year, so Will has just always sort of been there. I don't usually agree, but most of the time I can tolerate him.

His final column on the Bush administration is something else though. Some choice moments:


*"Furthermore, some, and perhaps many, Americans probably are alive today because persons conspiring to commit mass murder were thwarted by the president's ferocious focus after 9/11."*

Fair enough. Probably not true, but I'm fine with having this be the up-beat tenor of the closing days of the administration. Still, this is hardly the redemption Will thinks it is considering Bush was president before 9/11 and this cuts both ways. He certainly doesn't deserve all of the blame but nor does he reserve all of the credit for the lack of attacks since then.


*"The administration's failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina were real but secondary to, and less shocking than, the manifold derelictions of duties by the governments of Louisiana and New Orleans."*

Really? I mean, I know no one did great here, but, um, really? You don't think FEMA's failure--which, I should remind everyone, IS A FEDERAL AGENCY THAT EXISTS SOLELY TO HANDLE SUCH EVENTS--messed up at least as much as the city of New Orleans? It's embarrassing to pretend that any major metropolitan area, let alone even a small town, should be expected to handle a mass evacuation and then be able to house all of its citizens who return to find their homes destroyed.


*"On the other hand, among Bush's excellent legacies, gifts that might keep on giving for decades, are two justices—John Roberts and Sam Alito."*

Now this is just being a jerk, George F. Will. Funny though.


*This one is the really killer: "Within the lifetimes of most Americans now living, today's media-manufactured alarm about man-made global warming might be an embarrassing memory. The nation will then be better off because Bush—during whose administration the embarrassing planet warmed not at all—refused to be stampeded toward costly "solutions" to a supposed crisis that might be chimerical, and that, if real, could be adapted for considerably less cost than will be sunk in efforts at prevention."*

Look, I understand that as a conservative he's honor bound not to believe in global warming--fine--but this has to be one of the dumbest things committed to paper recently. That's not even considering the clunky language ("embarrassing planet?" "crisis that...could be adapted?"). Mostly it's stupid because Will's argument here is that George W. Bush was right to spend no money in developing new energy technologies because, you know, that worked out so well for American automakers. Besides, even outside of global warming, there a dozens of good reasons for the American government to seek to advance technology that doesn't leave us dependent upon a finite resource controlled by the very people Will thinks want to kill us.

There are real arguments to be made here, but Will refuses to make them. There are good reasons why the Kyoto treaty is stupid so long as it doesn't include any restrictions for China and India--which is not to say I wouldn't vote to ratify it myself--but at this point there's very little about contemporary environmental policy that's so objectionable you can write it off even if you don't believe in global warming.

There's a bit of a strawman argument here. Will seems to think that George W. Bush was fighting off hoards of tie-dye wearing hippies who wanted energy rationing and building freezes when the reality is that he was fighting off market-driven solutions in favor of adopting a 'drill, baby, drill' mentality. Why would George Will possibly be against a free market cap-and-trade system? American workers, politicians, and, most of all, businesses are now looking toward energy technology as the industry that is going to decide the fate of the country through the next century, yet were supposed to be happy that our president spent his years trying to destroy the arctic in order to fuel our SUVs? The problem here is not that George Will (and, so he thinks, George Bush) doesn't believe in global warming, it's that Will is praising the president for doing something we know for a fact was a disaster both environmentally and, more important to men like Will, economically.

And the worst part is that the former president was stampeded toward solutions. He was the key figure in creating an alternative to the Kyoto Treaty that included some of the "developing" nations left out of the older treaty. Now, we can debate whether or not the new partnership is effective or if its goals should be mandatory instead of voluntary, but it's certainly an acknowledgment by Bush that there is such a thing as climate change. I mean, it's in the title of the organization he started for Christ's sake.


In fairness to Will, I should mention that the rest of the column is not nearly so flattering to Bush though mostly its another elegy to what "real" conservative believe and how it was conservative politicians who failed rather than conservative ideology. Enough has been said about our former president and there's certainly no reason to relive his years in office here, but I just found Will's tortured tribute important for anyone thinking we're going to get a new day in politics. As the handwringing has already started up at Fox News--good god, he didn't use a Bible during his second oath!--it's only a matter of time before we're reminded how much some have at stake in keeping these imaginary divisions in place.

Exhibit 15.19

Exhibit 14.15

Why Bobby Jindal is not Barack Obama

So I can't let politics go, not yet, not like this. Bear with me for one more chance to play pundit before the news dries up and I have to get my presumption off by playing Civilization IV on the computer and writing 1,400-word posts about how that Kublai Khan is misallocating his resources by decreeing a stately pleasure dome.

There's been a lot of talk about where the Republicans turn now that the old guard has failed and the new guard runs the gamut from crazy (Palin) to stupid (Palin). Anyone looking to gloat about this should remember identical conversations in 2000 and 2004 when it seemed like the Democrat's Vietnam generation produced a series of boring, self-loathing leaders incapable of winning over enough "real" Americans to beat even the most incompetent of Republicans. Four year election cycles offer the parties a long time to rebuild themselves, and I think one of the most important lessons of 2008's election is that the elongated campaign season opens up the presidency to younger, lesser known politicians by providing approximately 938 months of television coverage in which American can decide a candidate is good enough simply due to his or her continued existence.

Speaking of good enough due to his continued existence, it's Bobby Jindal! He's been in Iowa recently and the talk among the more hopeful conservatives is that he's going to be the Republican's very own Obama. They seem to think this because:

1) Bobby Jindal is brown. Not the same brown, but a brown. That will do, apparently.
2) Bobby Jindal is young. This is irrefutable.
3) Bobby Jindal has a funny name (yet isn't a secret Muslim. Even if he was, the people who care about such things won't care about such things as long as he's their secret Muslim).
4) Bobby Jindal is smart. This is irrefutable.

Political parties kill themselves by playing these superficial games of guess the zeitgeist. It's how 9/11 and the Iraq War led to the misguided choice of war hero John Kerry, completely ignoring how his patrician demeanor undercut his raison d’être and left him spending the campaign defending his service to a man who spent the war stateside. That Vietnam service, no matter how stellar, wasn't a reason to elect a president was clear to everyone except the Democratic Party who could never quite figure out why their candidate who seemed to have all of the needed characteristics of the moment, couldn't beat the clear incompetence of the incumbent.

Which brings us to Jindal. His trap is similar to Kerry's though probably deeper. That he is another smart, young minority might lead the Republican Party to forget that the last two of those qualities are net negatives and the first is often times construed as one (though, admittedly, usually by the Republicans themselves). Even if his position was exactly like Obama's, pretending that his election would somehow be as meaningful--even after Obama takes office--is silly. Most Americans know nothing about the Indian-American experience whereas Obama's election was the culmination of a struggle that has existed since our nation's founding. That is not to say it wouldn't be another meaningful win--certainly the image of the two men debating alone would be powerful--but that seeing analogies where there aren't any is a good way to lose.

Ultimately, Barack Obama won this past election not because of any of those characteristics he shares with Jindal but despite them. For the 40% of the country that saw him as a symbol of hope due partially to his atypical race, name, and history for a candidate, at least another 10% had to be talked into him based on policy and personality, and Jindal faces those voters with an argument that runs counter to the direction of the country. Outlawing abortion without any exceptions? Teaching creationism in schools? These two issues alone are going to make Jindal a tough sell in a number of conservative states let alone socially moderate swing states like Florida and Colorado.

And, as with Kerry, even those bullets on the resume that seemed like such a good idea are bound to fail Jindal when connected with the actual person. Unlike Obama, Jindal actually does have a religious background that will trouble his base. Converting from Hinduism to very strict Roman Catholicism is hardly a selling point to the megachurch set. So too he's less by-the-bootstraps symbol of American opportunity than he is another scion of privilege and money, not exactly the promise-fulfillment narrative of Barack Obama. And, perhaps most obviously, he appears much less comfortable in his own skin than Obama. From his religious conversion to forgoing Piyush for Bobby to his inconsistent use of folksy mannerisms depending on his audience, he's much more John Kerry/Mitt Romney than Barack Obama/George W. Bush/Bill Clinton (you might notice something the latter have in common).

Still, he's got an impressive resume, seems to be a fairly competent governor so far, and is said to be quite impressive in person (of course, the same things could be said of Romney). Jindal's struggle will be to moderate himself to match the electorate. Unfortunately, if the Republican Party's ardor only goes skin-deep, no one will force Jindal to do that until he's nominated and they realize that the public doesn't want a less compelling "Obama" over the real thing, let alone a retrograde one. Jindal's time may come and in a party bereft of better choices, he certainly looks pretty good four years out. But it's a temptation built on a desire to compete with a moment that's already happened. Jindal should look at this past year's election as opening a door for him (and millions of others) that many thought permanently closed but think very carefully about whether or not he wants to run against the man who opened it. Making his party feel more relevant and less uni-raced is not a good enough reason.

Exhibit 14.2

In honor of the election, some political stock photography.


Congressman Wilson was having that dream again, the dream where the microphones were finally coming for him, the dream his psychiatrist said had phallic overtones, the dream he liked to tell the congressional pages about when he took them to get frappuccinos.


Who would have thought a person who ran on an authoritarian platform of creating a shadow army would be the first politician to actually live up to their promises. Still, Chancellor Paine does some good things, too.


"Sometimes, Bob, I don't even know why they have us protecting these balloons armed with comically oversized walkee talkees."

"It's not our place to question it, Roger. We volunteered to supervise the prom, and supervise the prom we will."


This photo could be used with any number of headlines, but I'm pretty sure all of them end in "Sex Scandal Exclusive!"


They laughed when Kwik Shop supervisor Ronald Vote announced his candidacy for mayor until he showed them the town ballot box on election day. What's the worst that could happen, they said.


Well, who doesn't want an army, they muttered anxiously, all too aware that Mayor Vote's taxpayer-funded army consisted of 5 or 10 assault rifles he carried with him everywhere.


When he claimed a 12-year-old girl as his Secretary of War, everyone agreed this was going to a weird place.


Things didn't get better.


Just creepier. Much, much creepier. Nobody liked Mayor Vote, but what could they do? All efforts to oust him from office ended in disaster when they urged the town to get out the Vote.

Exhibit 14.1

Election Post-Mortem

Imagine my surprise when I went to watch Fox's new hit drama Fringe and instead found myself looking at Shepard Smith. Hope for change: Fulfilled. Hope for answers about a series of mysterious events known only as "The Pattern": Dashed.

I'll have more to say about Obama later, but I wanted to go into some of the mechanics of this election a bit on the Republican side. My question at the moment: Did McCain ever have a chance? Certainly his surrogates had been playing up the 'nobody expected us to even be competitive in this environment' angle in the last week, but since they weren't competitive at all, it does beg the question. My guess: No. At least not with the flawless campaign Obama ran. In the end, McCain probably would have needed a major gaffe to derail the electorate's clear preference for a Dem, but I do think he could have taken steps to make such a gaffe more likely or at least put Obama on the defensive. Here's what I would have suggested to McCain:

Spend every waking moment during the extended Democratic primary shoring up your conservative base in the quietest way possible. Do whatever it takes to convince the Colorado Springs crowd that you're one of them even if you aren't going to be talking about their issues. Get a Jesus tattoo if you have to. Make it count because...you're never going to talk about their issues. Put on a turtleneck to cover up the Jesus tattoo and become the McCain of 2000 just as Obama is seizing the nomination. Immediately and publicly renounce Bush while announcing a radical reform agenda and make Obama respond, especially on issues like immigration and energy independence. Name Lieberman as your running mate a week or so before the Democratic Convention to make that the topic of conversation and give conservatives time to get over it before Minneapolis. Take the aggressive move of naming some people who would be in your cabinet and use those names to shore up the base (Palin as Secretary of Energy?). Continue to hammer the agenda and make it even more radical. Promise a fundamental rewriting of the tax code, stuff like that. Hope the Obama campaign takes the bait and attacks the agenda as impossible then wait until just before the debates to announce you'll only serve one term and will govern by doing the right thing rather than the electable thing. Frame this as part of the overall anti-Obama argument based on experience and ambition. Leave all other negative attacks alone. Leave the press alone. Hope for a gaffe.

To me that seems like a strategy that, while perhaps no more likely to win, at least allows McCain to lose not only with his legacy intact but with a clear impact on the future of his party. In any case, there was a way for McCain to be a "maverick" not with his V.P. pick and not as a hollow label, but as a man leading sweeping, bipartisan reform of government. That's an image that plays across demographics (which McCain's campaign was far too obsessed with) and could have created excitement to match Obama's if not in depth than at least in scope.

I really think that the Republicans could have learned a thing or two from Ron Paul in this election (as funny as it sounds) and tried to manufacture their own grassroots movement around reforming Washington, libertarian social policies, and populist economics. Finding a coherent narrative somewhere around the bi-partisan ticket, the one-term promise, and McCain's experience as a reformer, shouldn't have been too hard. But by taking the low road with the silly personal attacks, an irresponsible VP pick, endless fights with the press, and a "Joe the Plumber" economic plan, McCain not only doomed himself but also his party. Instead, the fundamental transformation that is going to have to take place in order for the Republican party to stay competitive in national elections gets put off another four years. This country isn't getting any whiter, boys, maybe it's time to start getting real on immigration. Or, you know, find a set of policies that in any way appeals to post-Vietnam generations. I think these issues go will beyond skin color, so if conservatives are hoping Bobby Jindal is going to be their Obama in 2012, I think they're in for disappointment but I've been wrong before.

In any case, we should all remember that John McCain loves his country deeply and while he ran a bad campaign, he is a good man that many on the left, including myself, admired as a politician until recently and will continue to admire as an American hero. He was on the wrong side of history last night but that doesn't do anything to diminish his sacrifice. Personally, I hope and expect that he will be a key player in righting this country now that he's free from capitulating to his, and his party's, worst instincts.

And the final nail in the Republican's coffin came this morning. Here's a very gracious Bush on Obama's victory.

Except for when he oddly veers into talking about protecting America, I thought this was a compelling, genuine speech from a man who doesn't seem to understand why people don't like him anymore but who, if nothing else, knows history when he sees it.

Exhibit 13.27

President Barack Obama.

Exhibit 13.26

Election Predictions

Electoral Vote Count: Obama 353-185¹
Percentage of Popular Vote: Obama 53.2
Percentage of Winner over Loser: Obama +6.9%
Democratic Senate Seats: 58 (including Sanders and Lieberman)
Time of Concession Speech: 11:35 (Eastern Time)
Dolphins (-9) vs. Seahawks: Seahawks²
Olivo vs. Buck: Olivo (apparently)
Sign of This Blog's Decline: Brett Photo
Percentage of Emails I'm Responding To: 30%
HTML I've Learned in the Last 10 Minutes: Superscripting
Time I'm Leaving Work to Go Watch Results: 4:40³

Feel free to post your own predictions in the comments.

¹ Obama wins Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, but loses Indiana and Missouri.
² Don't get me wrong, I think the Dolphins win that game, but should they really be giving nine points? Seems like they're begging you to take the Seahawks but, well, I still would.
³ Joke!⁴ I'm staying until five, boss, honest.

⁴ Totally not a joke.

Exhibit 13.21

Okay, so this is the last Lincoln Journal Star letter to the editor I'm posting (unless I want to give the state treasurer a piece of my mind), but it just so happens that good friend Aaron Hillyer chimed in on the UNL-William Ayers debacle on those hallowed pages and it should be brought to your attention. The unfamiliar can catch up on the details here.

So as long as the people I know cease to be so stubbornly civic-minded, I'm going back to the more important work of writing about celebrities that are ambiguously related/married.

Also, I should point out that they shamefully gave Aaron's exceedingly well-written and considered letter the dumbest possible title.

• 
  Canceling makes it worse
  
  In the increasingly legalistic and regimented culture that pervades the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I would have welcomed the perspective of Professor William Ayers, whose civic and scholarly work has always been informed by an intense desire to combat the absolutism that characterizes dominant political and social trajectories in America.
  
  During my four years of teaching in the UNL English Department, I have often shown a documentary film, “The Weather Underground,” which tells the story of the revolutionary movement Ayers was once part of. The film develops a productive historical, political and social context for the avant-garde literature and theory we often read in my classes. It has provoked students to articulate rich narratives of the possibilities for dissent in their own lives, while also providing them with the opportunity to consider the political and social paradigms that are stifled by the increasingly monocultural media and pedagogical discourses of our times.
  
  For example, the film discusses the cold-blooded police assassination of Fred Hampton, a young African-American revolutionary leader whom not even one of my students had heard of before watching the film. I can see why such an event would become the object of suppression for those complicit with American absolutism, just as I can understand how the same people would threaten retaliation for the mere appearance of Ayers, who wasn’t even going to speak about his revolutionary past.
  
  But silencing words or, in this case, preventing the appearance of a person because that person’s mere presence may remind us of a past event only indicates the productive potential the oppressors anxiously attribute to such words or events in the first place. The task at hand, then, for us in the UNL community and for those everywhere around the country, is to finally harness this potential in order to rid ourselves of the systems that make our lives increasingly unlivable.
  
  Aaron Hillyer, Lincoln

Very nice work, Aaron. You know it was a good letter when it gets responses like this one:

Bob wrote on October 28, 2008 5:49 pm:
"Due to the ignorant Universary and the stupid LJS thats what you get. Its time to replace the newpaper that we have here."

Well played, Bob. Your move, LJS.