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How is it that I don’t even own a tele­vi­sion and I know what the Mooninites are? (Well, I couldn’t remem­ber their names before read­ing it, but I knew what they were and where the ref­er­ence came from). I think the whole sit­u­a­tion is really an emo­tional onion.

First there’s the laugh­ter when you real­ize that parts of the Boston gov­ern­ment were com­pletely freaked out by Lite-brites. Then comes the reac­tion from the Mayor and the Chief of Police when they real­ize it’s a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. They had only two real courses to fol­low — laugh it off and let the story dis­ap­pear, or double-down on blus­ter — and chose the over-the-top response of arrest­ing the kids who put the things up. The moti­va­tion for it is obvi­ous: They hung up these lights just to make me look redicu­lous! And a man in my posi­tion can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous!

Then you get angry, since it’s obvi­ously a case of the city gov­ern­ment abus­ing it’s power and hurt­ing the peo­ple who’s job it was to hang lighted plaques at ran­dom high-traffic spots around the city. There’s no way those peo­ple deserve jail time — let alone five years in jail — for what they did, and even the judge in the case knew it. So the mar­keters hold a press con­fer­ence and dis­cuss 70s hair­styles.

Absolutely bril­liant. Watching that press con­fer­ence brought back mem­o­ries of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies to those old enough to remem­ber it (or have seen tapes of it). To those of us who aren’t (or haven’t), we got the a com­plete under­stand­ing of the gen­er­a­tion gap, and how redicu­lous an older gen­er­a­tion can seem to the younger one. The corol­lary to that is the thought that the baby boomers have grown into the tyran­i­cal, self-important fuddy-duddies they used to enjoy piss­ing off. That they have col­lec­tively become Richard M. Nixon. (Of course, that’s not really fair, since it’s doubt­ful that most boomers thought too deeply about the 1960s beyond just the fashions.)

After the glow of enlight­en­ment wears off, I remem­ber one other thing: the kids hang­ing the Mooninite devices are out there shilling for AOL-Time Warner, try­ing to sell movie tick­ets for one ten­ta­cle of a multi­na­tional enter­tain­ment con­glom­er­ate. So yes, I under­stand the six­ties now — it’s been pack­aged and sold back to me.

Glenn Greenwald is dis­cussing the stun­ning hypocrisy of Republicans, as they decry the viciously par­ti­san Democrats for out­ing a gay Republican — osten­si­bly because drag­ging per­sonal sex­ual con­duct into pol­i­tics will drive good peo­ple from governance.

Color me cyn­i­cal, but why is this such a shock? This is the same crowd that spent a large chunk of 1992 decry­ing Clinton’s admis­sion that he was too stu­pid to use a weed bong in 1968 — and then turned right around and claimed that Bush’s arrest for dri­ving under the influ­ence of cocaine in 1979 was OK because he later claimed to have found Jeebus.

I mean, come on. Clinton says he almost smoked weed (“It was Joe’s weed, Dad, and I didn’t even inhale!” fol­lowed by the sheep­ish pseudo-boasts to friends later “…but I wish I had!”), and gets trounced as com­pletely inca­pable of being President. Bush did coke often enough to get arrested for it, but that’s dif­fer­ent, because (like most stun­ning hyp­ocrites and ass­holes) he played the Repentence Card with the Jesus Enhancement (+5).

Meanwhile, the Democrats didn’t really say much about Bush’s coke usage, because they had pre­vi­ously defended Clinton exactly the same way that the Republicans were defend­ing Bush. The Democrats had shame (albeit mis­placed — coke is a hard drug, weed isn’t) and the Republicans had none.

Of course, for that to play a part in the elec­tions, peo­ple have to remem­ber what hap­pened more than a month ago, and let that knowl­edge affect their deci­sions. Which is what the Republicans appear to be count­ing on their fol­low­ers skip­ping this time around as well.

So I’m lis­ten­ing to an older clip from CNN, and I have to say this. To ask George Allen whether he is Jewish or not is a scum­bag ques­tion. The “he’s just a celebrity” excuse is lam­en­ta­bly lame, and I for one got the impres­sion that Arianna Huffington would just as soon the per­son who said it stop help­ing her. However, Ms. Huffington’s defense of the ques­tion as a “test of honesty” — while pass­ing a basic credulity test — does not quite stand up to the exam­ple given by David Frum, that of Clinton’s infi­delity. To my mind, at least, lying about cheat­ing on your wife is at best a few hairs­breadths away from lying about your Semitic her­itage in Virginia, not coin­ci­den­tally because both are done to save your polit­i­cal ass from igno­rant bigots.

Which is the real point about this story: can­di­dates from both par­ties are actively court­ing what amounts to the KKK vote: George Allen calls an Asian-Indian kid a mon­key like it was noth­ing; a reporter outs Allen as a Jew.

It’s the most vile, dis­gust­ing debase­ment of pol­i­tics that I’ve seen in my adult life, and there is no excuse for it. It’s 2006, gen­tle­men, scarcely con­cealed racist crap as an elec­toral strat­egy is like, sooo 1988. As a good friend of mine used to say when con­fronted with that kind of shock­ing, throw­back racism: They still make peo­ple like you?

Apparently so, and they’re still thick as theives in Virginia.

To add a rather quaint, pre-Internets layer to the story, party hacks up here (i.e. the North) are mak­ing hay by paint­ing the other team’s player as a bigot — an obvi­ous embar­rass­ment to their party. So far the Democrats have had bet­ter luck at this than the Republicans, in part because Webb appears to be smart enough to know what “plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity” means — have peo­ple not linked to you actu­ally do the dirty work — whereas Allen’s big­otry tends to come out of his own dum­b­assed mouth.

I started writ­ing this post to point out that the coör­di­nated demands by vir­tu­ally every major nut­case over the New York Times’ reveal­ing the data-mining of bank­ing records via SWIFT—the calls for exe­cu­tion, harass­ment, lynch­ing, etc. — was a clear indi­ca­tion that Karl Rove is no longer a tar­get of Fitzgerald’s inves­ti­ga­tion. The much-vaunted “Fitzmas” is over, and you got a sweater. Huzzah. But then I real­ized that was silly, it sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction.

…sounds like it was cribbed from a uni-dimensional, dystopian sci-fi novel, which really sucks since it’s not fiction…

At any rate, it’s actu­ally kind of humor­ous to watch to Democrats floun­der and the Republicans go insane over the issue. Essentially, the Administration is tread­ing extremely close to fuck­ing with the money with their transaction-tracking pro­gram. I mean, how many rich peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions have their fin­gers in pies they would be embar­rassed to have them in? Monthly dues to the Arse-tickler’s, Faggot Fan Club?¹ A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. Wire-transfers to drug-running para­mil­i­taries who are later impli­cated in a string of dead com­mu­nity and union activists? A copy of the receipt in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Dept. You get the picture.

Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader…

So the Republicans have opened the door to allow the Democrats a chance to suck Capital’s dick, because Capital is now aware that the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Therefore, the goal of the smear cam­paign is to state, quite bluntly, that only a trea­so­nous, objec­tively pro-terror com­mu­nist would note the Republicans are wear­ing braces. Determining how that makes any sense is a task left to the reader.

Historically, how­ever, the chances that any of this infor­ma­tion will ever send some­one wealthy, pow­er­ful, and white to pound-me-in-the-ass prison is nil, regard­less of who is in charge. Clinton may have pun­ished the tobacco indus­try for killing his uni­ver­sal health care plan over the cig­a­rette tax hikes (which we got any­ways) with the 90s law­suits, but that’s a far cry from jail time. It appears the Democrats are either unable or unwill­ing to exploit this fis­sure pub­licly, they could have been caught off-guard by the venom directed at the Times, or they could be exploit­ing it pri­vately. I think the party is refus­ing to dis­close it’s motives pub­licly, because the DLC ulti­mately believes it can get it’s col­lege tuition paid for if it does it pri­vately. As the eco­nomic for­tunes of the U.S. decline (as they must in a free-trade envi­ron­ment), the only recourse the state will have against the pissed-off newly-poor are repres­sion and nation­al­ism, so I think the Democrats are wor­ried about giv­ing up this power now, since they’ll likely need it back in a decade or so.

I fully expect the Democrats will half-ass it on the abuse-of-power scan­dals, and will prob­a­bly end up doing what they say they want to do, if allowed: expand­ing the FISA Court again, to allow for “mass-target” war­rants. If so, I’d expect them to pitch it as a “nec­es­sary log­i­cal exten­sion of rov­ing wire­taps,” even though the abil­ity of the FISA court to issue non-FI-related war­rants in the first place is already a pretty broad exten­sion under the PATRIOT Act. Essentially, I think they’ll take another large step towards a com­pletely secret Star Chamber, and call it a check against the Monarchy.

Targeting America in Iraq in terms of econ­omy and losses in life is a golden and unique oppor­tu­nity. Do not waste it only to regret it later.
Osama bin Laden, December, 2004. (via A Tiny Revolution)

Whatever one can say about Osama bin-Laden, he is not stu­pid. He is smart enough to under­stand that the U.S. has blun­dered into Iraq — and thus smart enough to under­stand that it was essen­tially Bush, Cheney, and their fel­low con­spir­a­tors that did the blun­der­ing. I hope it is widely under­stood that if Gore had taken office the U.S. mil­i­tary would likely not have invaded Iraq, nor would it have farmed out bin-Laden’s actual cap­ture to Afghan drug-mercenaries.

He also likely under­stands that the inva­sion of Iraq has split the French, Russians, and Germans from the U.S. on mat­ters regard­ing the so-called “War on Terror.” All three of those coun­tries have actual expe­ri­ence with ter­ror­ism (Algeria, Chechnya, and the reported stag­ing ground for the 9/11 hijackers).

It is also likely that he under­stands the effects of his first speech to Americans — I would not be at all sur­prised if he also believed that he was partly respon­si­ble for get­ting Bush re-elected. Certainly his last-minute echo­ing of Kerry’s com­plaints about the Bush admin­is­tra­tion pro­vided some peo­ple with the excuse to vote Bush they were look­ing for.

Granted, that is a start­ing assump­tion, but I don’t believe it’s unrea­son­able given bin-Laden’s skill­ful abil­ity to manip­u­late west­ern media into believ­ing there is any such thing as “al-Qaeda”. Yes, that’s right, I said it. There is no al-Qaeda orga­ni­za­tion, and fur­ther­more, there never was. At best there are guys who know a guy, who know a guy, who met bin-Laden years ago. That’s it. People who take up inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism slap the label “al-Qaeda” on it so it seems like it’s big­ger and bad­der — and thus bet­ter sup­ported — than it really is.

The rea­son inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism exists is because ter­ror­ism is — iron­i­cally enough from Bush — the “weapon of the weak.” In case peo­ple haven’t noticed, there are about 5 bil­lion peo­ple who qual­ify as “weak,” which means that the tiny minor­ity of the world who wish to vio­lently attack the sim­i­larly fic­tional entity known as “America” must by nec­ces­sity take up the “weapons of the weak.”

I could con­tinue with the scare-quotes, or wax poetic on how blither­ingly stu­pid it is to have a War on a Type of Weapon (or how declar­ing war on the “weapons of the weak” is triv­ially reforged into what it appears the “war on ter­ror” has become: a war on the weak), but it’s more impor­tant to make the point: Osama bin-Laden likely knows that within the United States he is the “car­toon­ish supervil­lian,” just as George Bush, Jr. is almost cer­tainly a car­toon­ish supervil­lian to much of the Iraqi insur­gency. If he can read “Rogue State”, he can prob­a­bly get a satelite feed or a sam­pling of media clips about him­self. At the very least, he can get a sum­mary of how west­ern media por­trays him.

Change gears for a moment: if Jefferson Davis (pres­i­dent of the Confederacy dur­ing the U.S. Civil War) could’ve par­rot­ted crit­i­cisms of McClellan he saw in north­ern papers and then watch the mon­u­men­tally incom­pe­tent gen­eral stay in charge, why wouldn’t he? If you can use reverse psy­chol­ogy on your oppo­nents, via “their” media, why wouldn’t you?

Of course, you can’t per­mit your­self to assume that bin-Laden is using reverse psy­chol­ogy, because that means he stops being a car­toon­ish supervil­lian and come down to the level of the ordi­nary, manip­u­la­tive shits that most peo­ple run into on a day-to-day basis. Which essen­tially means we’re killed tens of thou­sands of peo­ple, spent hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars, invaded two coun­tries, and gen­er­ally pissed of the entire planet try­ing to catch an ordi­nary manip­u­la­tive shit who hap­pens to have money, a fanat­i­cal take on reli­gion, and a stack of body­bags on his eter­nal tab.

Osama bin-Laden using reverse psy­chol­ogy in inter­na­tional pol­i­tics also drags the entire lofty edi­fice down to the level of ordi­nary humans. The follow-up ques­tion is: Who else among the would-be god-kings is sim­i­larly petty? Could it be that the Bush junta itself is pop­u­lated by ordi­nary manip­u­la­tive shits born into sim­i­larly vast com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal empires? Could they be attempt­ing to use a fel­low manip­u­la­tive shit as an excuse to try and col­o­nize access to the largest oil reserves on the planet, shortly before peak oil — just as bin-Laden is attempt­ing to use Bush to build an “Islamic” Empire?

Though in fair­ness, I sup­pose if you have only ever viewed the world through limo­sine win­dows, it might be easy enough to over­look that there are mil­lions of peo­ple who — by virtue of liv­ing there already — con­sider the oil theirs.

Update: Credited ATR for car­toon­ish supervil­liany crack. Damnable assumptions.