Matt Taibbi is (as usual, and in spite of his ridiculous humping of Hunter Thompson’s legacy) repeatedly correct in his assessment of American politics as a bunch of ninnies totally incapable of seeing elephants in living rooms. Conversely, Taibbi and myself are instead part of Generation Meta, and tend to be more engrossed by the mental gymnastics required to avoiding seeing elephants inside living rooms than the elephants themselves.

Proving Taibbi’s point (again), Obama is currently attempting to “limit the damage” (changed to “limiting fallout”) for paraphrasing “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” to a well-heeled audience in San Francisco.

Choice quote from the Taibbi article (mainly because it’s still relevant in this latest mountain-out-of-molehill): “It’s also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders.”

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.

But that’s all old-hat, really. What I want to concentrate on is the fact that the “new Russian military intelligence HQ” has a giant oldskool Batman logo on it’s floor:

Now that’s just awesome.

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.

Politically, I think the U.S. wants to attack Iran shortly after the mid-term election, but I have an itching suspicion the military won’t be ready in time. In which case a Democratic victory may provide some friction—though not enough to stop another war.

And, for the record, America is in such a state culturally that Mutual Assured Destruction is presently considered the measured response among the political class—thanks for voting with your fetuses, freaks.

Meanwhile, another 10 million people slid into poverty this year. Those already in poverty were (unsurprisingly) pushed even lower down. The wealthy are throwing the middle class off the ladder by the hundreds of thousands, and they knock others off in a mad scramble not to hit bottom, who in turn knock those below them off the ladder, and on down the line until the number of families living in their car swells some more. A few souls from the middle classes don’t even bother to scramble and choose to swan-dive instead—much respect, thump thump.

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.

The paranoid, cynical, haven’t-slept-in-a-week side of me thinks the stories were planted as part of a last-ditch effort to frighten the North Korean government into calling off the test (for technical reasons, naturally). Of course, that side of me also thought they were crazy enough to try shooting the missiles down (primarily because most of the stories ran along the lines of “let’s attack a nuclear power”, albeit totally nonchalant about the prospect), so it’s also entirely possible I’m just low on sleep.

…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.

John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, added, “This is a perfect international Kabuki dance. The North Koreans may test a missile that they will have no idea will work in the real world and the United States has a missile defense which we have no notion whether it will defend against the North Koreans. It is perfect symmetry.” Reuters, US Activates Missile Defense Amid N.Korea Dispute

Funny how most Kabuki dances cannot possibly end up with Seoul a lake of fire and Pyongyang a sea of glass.

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.