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[Disclosure: I dropped a day’s pay on Obama’s cam­paign about a week before the pas­tor thing hap­pened, and hope I never feel com­pelled to write about this elec­tion again.]

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.”

God damn, god damn, god damn.

But not all of them are focused on bor­der con­cerns. If you talk to the Minutemen long enough, the sub­ject of immi­gra­tion inevitably floats to the surface.

“I see the nation descend­ing into poverty, philo­soph­i­cally, and part of it is ille­gal immi­gra­tion, a big part of it,” says a twen­tysome­thing young man named Eric, who declines to give his last name. “It’s also out­sourc­ing, increas­ing cor­po­rate power, exces­sive cor­po­rate power, that kind of stuff. What I can do here, since I’m so close to the bor­der, is help out with the immi­gra­tion issue.” His fiancée, he says, can’t under­stand why does it. David Niewert, Borderline Personalities

So this par­tic­u­lar Minuteman is con­cerned about the glob­al­iza­tion of cap­i­tal, and the “we all see it but pre­tend it isn’t star­ing us in the face” future eco­nomic down­turn in the U.S., and he chooses to do his part by stomp­ing on brown people.

God damn, if that isn’t the stu­pid­est thing I’ve ever heard. Way stu­pider than heal­ing crys­tals and intel­le­gent design.

The alter­na­tive is the stuff about cor­po­rate power was thrown in there because more peo­ple care about out-of-control, legally un-accountable cor­po­ra­tions than they do brown peo­ple, and “Eric” is sim­ply talk­ing up the same bait-and-switch that got the word “Socialist” stuck in the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”.

Glenn Greenwald had a post up a cou­ple weeks ago decry­ing Germany for bring­ing charges against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes. I think some points are required:

1. If the German gov­ern­ment wants to impli­cate itself in the pros­e­cu­tion of alleged war crim­i­nals, they are cer­tainly able to do so. The fact that the crime did not take place on German soil is imma­te­r­ial. Government rou­tinely claim juris­dic­tions over crimes which take place out­side not only their bor­ders. No one dis­puted the power of the U.S. gov­ern­ment to detain sanction-busters dur­ing the 1990s. And no one would today even raise and eye­brow at the Indonesian gov­ern­ment appre­hend­ing a ter­ror­ist while he waited fro a con­nect­ing flight, halfway between the nation where he plot­ted attacks and the nation where he intended to carry them out. To let him get back on the plane due to the tech­ni­cal­ity that none of his crimes were con­ducted in Indonesia would be a travesty.
2. The German gov­ern­ment has as much inter­est in pros­e­cut­ing those accused of crimes against human­ity as does any other state. They have such an inter­est because they are mem­bers of human­ity. That is in fact the point of the term “crime against humanity” — a crime which is so obscene as to make the entire species its vic­tim. If one believes that overblown then one must cease using the term “crime against humanity.”
3. Finally, and most impor­tantly, the exact word­ing of the Geneva Convention does grant Germany the right to do what it is doing. It says point-blank, “any such per­sons” not “any of your citizens”.

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.

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.