Damn the Enthusiasm Gap, Show Up at the Polls

Apparently some “progressives” would rather chew off their own balls (and, what’s worse, unleash brainless wacko pitbulls like Palin, Gingrich, DeMinted and that fruitcake in Nevada to chew off MY balls) than pass up an opportunity to say “I told you so.”

Here what some thinker at Salon wrote yesterday: "It would perhaps help, now, if the White House took responsibility for the ‘enthusiasm gap' itself, instead of blaming liberals for it. It might also help if they went back in time a year…and proposed some sort of massive infrastructure and jobs program, back when those things could've helped the jobs situation enough to make the forthcoming Democratic blood bath less inevitable."

A couple of points.

1) Whether it’s Obama’s fault or the writer’s, we don’t have a time machine and won’t develop one before election day.

2) All we’ve got now is election day.

3) The blood bath the writer seems to be looking forward to is “inevitable” only if people decide it’s inevitable. At this writing Real Clear Politics has 37 House seats too close to call.

4) There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

5) In case you missed number 4: There is a significant difference between Obama and Rand Paul.

6) If the Salon writer (bloviating from the imagined security of a paying job) thinks 10 percent unemployment is bad, wait till he/she has to experience 35 percent.

People making this argument seem bent on talking themselves into the Alamo just to be able to insist (posthumously, it would be) that somebody remember them.

And they want take you and me with them.

I’m not going. I’m voting Democratic. Enthusiastically.

Mid-Term Election Rage Reaction Redaction

What’s the difference between a hobby and a hobbyhorse? I think it’s a matter of whether or not you’re able to let the thing go. A hobby is a pastime, a hobbyhorse is an obsession.

People are creatures of habit. Some habits help get us through hard times by allowing us to navigate through the turbulence on autopilot, but it is generally better to try to base behavior on realistic awareness of what is happening around us rather than programmed reactive patterns of thinking.

Unfortunately, few of us escape childhood without developing habits that, while very useful in helping us cope with the peculiar circumstances of life in the home we grow up in, often are blocks to happiness later on in life.

You don’t have to go any further than the comments posted after online blogs to see the effects of people getting gummed up in balls of nasty emotions. What people refer to as the polarization of American politics to me seems more like watching the entire population of the country falling in slow motion down an enormous flight of stairs, tripped up by ropes they’ve wrapped around their own emotional legs.

Frighteningly large numbers of people are nursing habitual anger and resentment, self-medicating themselves with rage directed outward to escape—God, I don’t know what. Lack of love? Overpowering feelings of isolation? Fear of their own feelings of powerlessness? Fear of their neighbors? Fear of their own shadow?

Whatever the origins, the habit ain’t healthy. I say round up these people and get them all into 12 step. What’s the addiction? Are they rage-aholics? Politicaholics? Wing-nutaholics? Anxiety addicts? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t.

In any case, I’ve become convinced that nobody is going to win the mid-term elections this fall. A USA Today poll last week found two-thirds of those surveyed describing themselves as “angry” about conditions in this country, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.

It looks more and more certain that most people will vote no this fall, and that is bad news. If this is a nation of rage-holics, this election will play out as the fullest national expression yet of the classic reaction of angry addicts of all stripes to all of life’s setbacks—“I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”

This country is trapped in addictive reaction. That defines the hair-trigger defensiveness that sends people into a rage at any challenge to the way they’ve been doing things. It’s what turns couples counseling into an argument designed to prove to the therapist that the other partner is the real crazy one, rather than a search for ways to get out of such knock-down-and-drag outs when they explode in the privacy of the home, where there’s no referee around to make the final call.

Therapy—and the coming to serenity and peace that the therapist and client together should be working to achieve—has nothing to do with who gets kicked off the island, who gets fired, who’s the last man standing. Right now in America, nobody’s interested in serenity, and nobody’s playing by the rules. The therapist is nowhere to be seen. The ref has thrown up his hands in disgust and left the playing field.

We’re in the middle of a spastic, thrashing, hysterical free-for-all that will throw a lot of people out of office who may not know what we should be doing about this mess, and replace them with people who almost certainly will not know what to do.

Most people who go to the polls will be there to vote against what we’ve got. Not enough people will be there to vote for what we might have. We’ve got plenty of no votes; what we need are more people willing to vote yes.

Fear Itself: How to Make It Through the Recession

The latest numbers show unemployment in the U.S. up to 9.9 percent. Economists say it’s the result of previously discouraged jobseekers returning to the hunt inspired by news of incipient recovery poised to sweep across the country.

Meanwhile, the stock market plunges down five big stories before hopping up one, scared investors pour into the bond market, and Europe teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.

Above all, this stuff has been going on two years or so now, and a lot of people have been out of work that whole time. Credit cards are maxed out, foreclosures continue, and retirement savings are about gone in many households.

How long can we hold our breaths waiting for better times? When do the hobo jungles reappear? What do we tell the kids? How are we expected to keep from just freaking out?

It can be done. You don’t have to whistle a happy tune, imagine pennies falling from heaven, declare happy days are here again and believe that wishing will make it so.

We’re not even looking for happiness as an ultimate goal here. We’re just after a way to maintain our composure and not collapse into quivering blobs of anxiety. We just want to remain functional enough to be able to think rationally and come up with a plan that might lead us out of our personal quagmires.

And just as that state of composed functionality is what’s required to be able to change our physical circumstances, it’s also what we need to grab and hold onto any peace at all, in bad times or good.

Because, whether or not it seems like this in times of physical want, what really matters in the long run is how you’re doing inside. America came through the Great Depression physically without ever emerging spiritually. Despite Greatest Generation nostrums about money not being everything, when our fathers and grandfathers got back from the war they acted like it was all that mattered. They threw up shopping malls and suburban sprawl, turned the countryside into a parking lot, and settled back on their sofas to watch commercials interrupted occasionally by sit coms.

There was a brief, failed rebellion in the 60s against the materialist, conformist spiritual swamp we had fallen into, followed by five decades of miserable reaction.

Now this second great economic crisis may be giving us a second opportunity for regeneration. I doubt that a lot of people will seize the moment with the gusto they should, but maybe you, sitting there reading this, can do something really good for yourself, and for the people around you who have to deal with yourself.

Rather than losing yourself in anxiety, panic, and every-man-for-himselfism, concentrate on what you can do next.

Don’t freak out over some imagined final disaster falling upon you and your loved ones next week, or next month, or five years from now; focus instead on what you can do right now. The next step is not only the most important one you can take to start changing things, it’s also the only thing you can do right now. The next step is all you’ve got.

Delay taking it and you just increase the odds of future calamity.

The fear comes from all the things that you can’t do anything about, because they lie in the future and you’re here right now. Let the future go. At this moment you can do nothing about it.

Believe in a power that is there to take on the fear when you decide to let it go. Then let it go. Then take the next step.

Democrats: Pass Health Care Reform or Go Home

Huge majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress have now voted for comprehensive health care reform. Whatever the public thinks about health care reform, most Democrats have gone on record in favor of it.

Given that very uncomfortable fact, what can they do about it politically?

What would George W. Bush do? This is the guy who started as a political mediocrity, won a contested election in the Supreme Court, invaded the wrong country in retaliation for 9-11, experienced the steepest crash in the approval polls in half a century, and still did a full eight-year term as president.

Did he do it by saying he was sorry? Ever? No, he did by sheer brass. For Bush being president meant not having to have a majority, or doing anything right, or subscribing to evolution, or global warming, or Copernican astronomy, for that matter, and it never had slightest thing to do with saying you’re sorry.

This is the nature of politics right now. Superhuman cosmic obstinacy is how the Republican Party manages to veto laws with 41 votes out of 100. They hold their breath till they turn purple, and pass out, and die if necessary, but live or die they get what they want.

Do people like Evan Bayh think he’s going to hold off these sharks by apologizing for his vote on health care? By begging the voters of Indiana to forgive him for going astray? No way. He’s already checked into the Alamo and the Republicans aren’t about to let him out.

The Democrats can go down simpering like weenies in November. They can stand by their convictions and pass health care reform and possibly still lose. But it’s guaranteed that the only way they can escape the Alamo they now occupy is to stick to their guns and fight their way out.

Haiti and Limbaugh

When will I hear a Republican repudiation of Rush Limbaugh? As I watch the news about people continuing to die in Port-au-Prince tonight for lack of medical supplies, I reflect that Rush Limbaugh is telling people to not contribute to White House-run efforts to save lives. He says we cannot trust the Obama administration to exhibit common decency. A classic case of projection, I suppose. For people like Limbaugh, the disaster in Haiti is not a real event, but rather more grist for their sick ideological mill.

There is a special place in hell waiting for this man, and most of us have known that for a long time.

But my question is, when am I going to hear a Republican voice telling this evil, evil man to shut up and go away?

Cheney Accepts the Nobel Prize for Natural Selection (But Obama Should Have Won It)

Two of the most powerful Americans in recent history just delivered pronouncements on war and peace that not only addressed the topic at hand, but revealed a lot about their outlooks on life, religion, and survival of the fittest.

Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are popularly portrayed by the liberals as embodying the choice between fear and hope, and by conservatives as embodying the choice between strength and weakness.

Personally, I think the conservative juxtaposition is a lot more skewed than the liberal, but both oversimplify the differences between the two men’s positions. If you can read Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize as simply his latest elaboration on the theme of “Yes, we can,” then I suspect you haven’t yet come down from the high of November 2008.

If you read Cheney’s latest blasting of Obama’s response to Muslim extremism as nothing but the crazed, discredited bleatings of a foreign-policy dinosaur, I think you underestimate the degree to which his viewpoint can be supported by rational calculation.

Sure, Cheney is a wacko coot, but the method behind his madness was summed up in the 17^th century by the rationalist French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “Pascal’s wager,” as it’s called, famously decreed that given that we can’t be sure about the existence of God, the rational bet is to believe. If He doesn’t exist and we believe, then we’ve just wasted a lifetime of boring Sunday mornings in church; if He does exist and we bet he doesn’t, we burn for eternity in hell.

Cheney believes in the hell to pay at the hands of terrorists not taken seriously. If, in the process of avoiding that hell, we end up torturing a few innocent people or attacking countries that don’t harbor terrorists after all, then so be it. Better to be paranoid with blood on our hands than to be toast.

Cheney stands foursquare with our ancestor cavemen who judged that unexplained rustling in the bushes at midnight to be a wolf, rather than the ones who dismissed it as the wind. In those instances in which it really was a wolf, the paranoid cavemen survived to pass on their genes to millions of God-fearing, wolf-fearing, gay-fearing, French-fearing red-state voters.

Obama’s rather chilly defense of war in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize was hardly the testament to wishful thinking that Cheney sees in the administration’s foreign policy, but it was genuinely hopeful in its insistence that mankind possesses the rationality required to figure out the difference between the wind in the bushes and the wolves, and devise rational, practical responses to the wolves.

Obama said in that speech, “I face the world as it is, and I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of men and the limits of reason . . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”

Given the coexistence of these truths, Obama laid out “practical steps”—fostering agreements among nations, supporting human rights, promoting international economic development—he said could lead to an “evolution” of human institutions toward peace. He borrowed the idea and the word from John F. Kennedy, but, as he used it, it could have come directly from the mouth of Darwin.

The idea was that rational, step-by-step improvements in the exercise of international relations could be successful, and by succeeding could be replicated, replacing the paranoid lashing out at every stirring in the bushes that Cheney champions and that failed so miserably in the Awful Aughties.

Because, despite the urge toward global paranoia that persists in the American populace, it really did fail us badly under Bush and Cheney. People around the world came to hate Americans. We were behaving like the Germans in World War II, killing indiscriminately in the hopes of shocking and awing our enemies into submission. It didn’t work. It bred disgust among our friends and increased resistance among our enemies. It lost Republicans the last election.

Obama doesn’t say we have no enemies. He doesn’t tell us to surrender to them. He advocates the use of force against them. But he suggests that it is possible not only to do so in a measured, controlled, discriminating way, but to simultaneously work effectively to promote peaceful solutions to conflict and problems that can eventually become part of an evolution toward peace.

And in doing so, he advocates the replacement of fear with hope.

Pass Healthcare Reform So the Republicans Can Repeal It

It’s not often that I get the urge to give advice to the loyal opposition. For one thing, they are so obnoxiously disloyal, not merely as a matter of conviction, or even emotional gut revulsion at policies they dislike, but strictly from a coldly calculated tactical decision to derail the smooth workings of the government for their own political gain.

They’ve decided to gum up the national works and blame it on the Democrats.

They propose no alternatives to Democratic initiatives: their alternative is NO. Whatever it is, as Groucho Marx sang in the movie Horsefeathers, they’re against it.

On health care reform the tactic has come dangerously close to working. The longer the apparently interminable debate has dragged on, the lower support for reform drops in the polls. The present system is in trouble, it has to be changed now or the country will suffer, and the Republicans have decided to let the country suffer in order to see the Democrats fail.

Why offer help to people who are this creepy, and who seem to be getting what they want by being creepy?

I don’t know. They come up with such interestingly perverse reactions to reality that I have an almost irresistible urge to sign up as their life coach. I think, “These people really need help, but exactly how could anybody go about helping them?” It would be like trying to push someone’s buttons whose buttons are hooked up to an inner circuitry designed by Rube Goldberg.

For example, at the same time that they’re doing their calculating Richard Nixon machinations to get what they want no matter what the consequences, they retain a blissfully childlike belief in ideological notions that threaten all the fruit of their cold calculations. It’s a weird combination of ruthless effectiveness and bumbling naivete.

It leads them to repeatedly oppose any government action, based solely on the all-American fear of having the government do anything, even when it’s pretty clear, to even a slightly objective observer, that the government action is going to end up being wildly popular.

What political mileage does the Republican Party possibly get out of wanting to privatize Social Security, for example? None, nada. Will they ever drop this notion that most people realized was stupid somewhere around 1943? No, never, because to do so would be to deny the fairy tale of inevitable government fallibility.

So, yes, the Republicans are smart to oppose healthcare reform, and oppose it to the hilt. People are scared of hospitals, they don’t want to die, they don’t like the present system, but they’re even more nervous about any changes that involve the government. The longer you draw out the process of change, as the Republicans are doing, the less likely it is that change will happen, and the more likely people will be to blame the Democrats for not achieving the change they need and want and fear all at once. Perfect tactic for where we’re at right now.

But what do you do if healthcare reform passes? There’s a bunch of really smart Republican politicians, including Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, who say that if reform passes this month, the party should back repeal in November.

Who knows? In the fall of 2010, before reform is really in place, that might well work. But if healthcare reform is still in effect in 2016, the Republicans might as well back the repeal of the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Social Security as well. There’s a whole bunch of good ideas initially opposed by Republicans that the wisest among them have eventually embraced. That’s how a black man became head of the Republican National Committee.

If healthcare reform passes and people actually have enough experience of it by the fall to actually like it, the Republicans would be nuts to run on repeal. Party principles are useful to guide a political movement, rally the faithful, and even attract the undecided. It’s important to have an idea of where you want to go.

But the Buddhists have a principle for personal enlightenment that I think can also be valuable for mass political movements, particularly ones as dysfunctional as the Republican Party: don’t believe everything you think.

Talk Nice to the Conservatives

Some of my best friends aren’t necessarily Republicans, but I’ve recently had opportunities to discuss public policy with conservative acquaintances and family members. Because of the pre-existing relationships with these people, both sides make Obamian attempts to find common ground and not let discussion degenerate into in-your-face scream fests.

In one case we were talking about climate change, in the other health care policy, and in both instances I found these people espousing views so far to the left of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as to be immediately suspect.

Climate change has made formerly safe conversational gambits such as “Hot enough for you?” potentially dangerous. Having slipped into this area accidentally with my friend Dean, I decided to plough straight ahead, and told him I guessed he was perfectly at home with the heat.

“You know, don’t you, that I’m a long-time proponent of a carbon tax,” he replied.

“Me, too,” I said, “except it’s too straightforward to ever be passed into law.”

“Exactly,” he pounced, delighted to have coaxed me onto common ground, and proceeded into a 15-minute diatribe against cap-and-trade. I listened patiently. The longer he went on about it, the more I began to suspect that he wasn’t so much in favor of taking the most direct action against global warming, as he was against doing the one thing that had the best chance of actually happening.

Miami will be under water before any American Congress passes an anti-carbon initiative with the word “tax” in its name. It struck me that Dean is in favor of a carbon tax like he’s a stalwart proponent of rocket service to Jupiter—if it smooths the conversational waters, why the hell not be in favor of it?

Similarly, at another friend’s house liberal pundits came on the TV talking about how the health care bill was a giveaway to the insurance companies and Congress should junk the whole thing and start over. My host, a veteran of the ballot-counting brigades that descended on Florida in 2000 to save America from a Gore presidency, declared that the pundits on the tube were exactly right, and that what the country needed was a European-style single payer system.

“Right,” I said to myself, but not out loud, “and that’s the reason you’ve been voting Republican for 20 elections, to make sure we enjoy the benefits of a government-run health care system as soon as possible.”

Both of the talking heads on TV agreed that Obama had wimped out on health care, and while one guy said we should just go back to the drawing board (“If the Democrats lose control of Congress for six or 20 years, maybe they’ll learn not to kowtow to special interests next time they’re in power”), the other wasn’t so blithe about the political effects of failure this time around, and said the Democrats should hold their noses and pass the bill, public option or not.

“That’s what I think,” I told my in-law. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t keep going, though I had to bite my tongue to hold back. The Republican Party right now is in the hands of people who believe Obama is a foreigner trying to euthanize their grandmothers, and they’re handing away House seats that have been safe for Republicans forever (namely the one in upstate New York) if their nominee doesn’t happen to be as unhinged as they would like him to be.

Democrats should leave this kind of self-destructive behavior to the Republicans. The health care fight is about health care, and that matters, but it’s also about who runs the government and—given what a disaster a return to Republican government would be—that really matters. I’m glad my friends on the right claim to care about a safe and sound environment and the right to health care, and I’m happy to talk nice right back at them. But in the privacy of the voting booth, saving my own sweet ass continues to come first with me.

Gay Agenda Threatens to Devour Houston

According to my dictionary, an agenda is “a list, plan, outline, or the like, of things to be done, matters to be acted or voted upon.”

Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? For years, I had thought an agenda offered about as much excitement and fascination as a 12-hour-long Powerpoint presentation. The word said, “city council meeting,” “flies buzzing interminably around a light fixture,” “the bailiff has gone to sleep and so has my fanny.”

Little did I realize all those years that an agenda was a thing of danger, like a concealed weapon, a conspiracy, a secret, ominous plan concocted by the forces of evil to seduce the kids into child prostitution, to kidnap the family dog and return him to my home as a double agent eavesdropping at the bathroom door and taking clandestine dumps in my houseslippers.

The word has fallen victim to the polarization of politics, highjacked by negative campaigners of all persuasions and transported out of the school board meeting into the paranoid fantasy world originally peopled by “fellow travelers,” “dupes,” and “pinkos.”

Once a brand name for boredom, now an agenda is tool of deception wielded by apparently benign but actually sinister agents attempting to slip a fast one by an unsuspecting public. Behind a candidate’s public platform is the real plan for subverting all our cherished ideals and poisoning our precious bodily fluids.

Are you scared, worried, anxious, insecure? You’d better be, because that seemingly charming candidate in the political commercial is really hiding a oozing, pus-filled, stinking agenda that will only become revealed when it’s too late to save yourself from its contagion.

Like Lennie in Of Mice and Men dying to hear about the rabbits, phobes of all stripes have come to expect and even yearn to be told about the agendas that will be sprung upon them, confirming all their worst fears.

Nothing fascinates and frightens Americans like sex, particularly sex that’s beyond the pale of majority behavior. That’s why Houston, our fourth-largest city, now finds itself in the grip of agendamania.

Annise Parker is running for mayor of Houston. A former city council member and city controller, she says she stands for the kind of things common to the old-fashioned, city council-style, safe-but-boring agenda—she wants responsible spending, she favors job creation, she’s against crime (I want to know when is some candidate going to show some courage and come out for encouraging crime).

But Annise Parker is gay. She has a female life partner with whom she is raising two children. Remarkably, in past campaigns, and in the present mayoral election until it went into a run-off, this was not an issue.

No longer. Local fundamentalist organizations have mobilized against Parker’s candidacy. The Houston Area Pastor Council has declared her an “open advocate of a gay agenda.” It says Parker will try to re-establish domestic partner benefits for city workers, even though she has said she has no such plans.

So great is the connotation of hidden evil conveyed by the word “agenda” that you can use it to make up your opponent’s agenda for them, falsely call it a declared plan, and when your opponent denies it, it looks like part of her perfidious scheme (“You don’t think she would admit it, do you?”).

The run-off election takes place Saturday, December 12. Parker has an open agenda to win a majority of the votes. We’ll see if she gets away with it.

Peace Prize

The Peace Prize established by Alfred Nobel (who also invented dynamite) will be picked up this week by Barack Obama (who is also running two wars in the Near East). Altogether a thing that makes you go “Hmmm” about guys who make things go “Booom!”

Want Change in Afghanistan? Wait 18 Months

When it comes to Afghanistan, President Obama delivers on his promises. In the 2008 campaign, he vowed to undo what he considered the Bush administration’s neglect of the Afghan war and take the fight to the Taliban, calling it “a war we have to win.”

In February of this year he sent 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. This month he upped the ante again, committing another 30,000 troops to the conflict, which will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000.

Newspaper accounts indicate he believes the surge of troops in Iraq begun in 2006 by the Bush administration worked, and he wants to apply the same strategy in Iraq.

Many people who believe, as I do, that this country has essentially become addicted to war—if not against the Russians then against the Vietnamese, if not against the Vietnamese then against the Iraqis, if not against the Iraqis then against the Iranians, if not against the Iranians then against the Afghans—are despondent at this turn of events.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and others pointed out this week, a lot of liberals bet the emotional farm on Obama and, regardless of his consistency of opinion and action on Afghanistan, feel betrayed and angry at his failure to pull out now.

Me, I’m taking the longer view, if for no other reason than that politically there’s no other option available. The country is effectively split down the middle on Afghanistan, and because of the weight of opinion, history, and money backing war in this country, the tie goes to the warmakers.

This country doesn’t pull out of wars easily. Put the troops in action overseas, and any movement to bring them home becomes a failure to support the troops, with heavy suggestions of weakness and even treason. We’re a country born of war, with a long history of fighting and winning wars, and have been since World War II the number one military power in the world.

Perhaps more importantly, military contractors, the industries that build the weapons systems used by our armies, have learned how to make sure the maximum number of jobs are dependent on continued military appropriations. When these companies learn how to parcel work on particular weapons systems out to a variety of key congressional districts spread across the country, ensuring the widest political backing for the programs possible, then you have weapons makers running the government. Once you’ve built the biggest war machine on earth, it’s hard not to use it.

So why is there any hope at all, long-term or short-term, for a change in Afghan policy?

Even if Obama is deluded now in relying on a surge in Afghanistan, the fact remains that his latest moves do represent change from the positions and policies he laid out in the past. In March of this year Obama backed outright defeat of the Taliban and creation of a stable democratic government in Kabul.

Obama is now telling journalists that he regrets that decision because it led his commanders to view the mission more “expansively” than he intended. Now he says all he is after is ensuring enough stability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda.

Where before he signaled a readiness to do what it took to build a democratic Afghan central government, now he’s talking about giving up on the corrupt Kabul government altogether if necessary and dealing mainly with more reliable local governments.

Where before he seemed ready to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed to beat the Taliban and set up democracy, now he is pushing his commanders to surge up as fast as possible in order to be able to get out as fast as possible.

It took George W. Bush six years to decide that Rumsfeld’s war on the cheap in Iraq was a failure and adopt the surge there, and even then it seemed as if he preferred to pretend that there was no change in policy. To admit there was a change would have meant that there was something wrong with what he’d been doing in the first place. Being George W. Bush, as we know, means never wanting to say you’re sorry.

If you choose to argue that Obama isn’t changing enough, OK. If you think Obama is trying to have it both ways at once, simultaneously advocating advance and retreat, fine. But you can’t say the guy has barricaded himself in the Alamo here. Next to Bush he looks as bendable as a reed, slippery as an eel, similes critics on the right have been using since he was inaugurated.

This guy will change if he sees a reason to do so. Whether we surge for 18 months or not, I believe Afghanistan is going to look pretty much as hopeless then as it looks right now. I believe it will be apparent at that point to everybody but the nutcase right that something’s got to give.

Precedent indicates that this guy is willing and able to recognize when change needs to happen and do it. I’m not relying on Obama to do the right thing now. But I’m not willing to bet against him doing the right thing in 18 months.

Red State Rag

My state, Tennessee, has the fourth most regressive tax structure in America. That's the report of the 2009 edition of Who Pays, the annual analysis by the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Ecomonic Policy of the distribution of state and local taxes across income groups in different states.

The poorest 20 percent of people in Tennessee, those families making less than $17,000 a year, paid 11.7 percent of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 3.1 percent of income paid by the richest 1 percent of families in the state—families making $414,000 or more a year. This means that the share paid by people making less than $17,000 was nearly four times greater that that paid by people making more than $414,000. In Tennessee the middle 60 percent of the population paid 7.6 percent of income in state and local taxes, more than twice the rate paid by the richest of the Tennessee rich.

As you may have guessed from these numbers, there is no income tax, progressive or otherwise, in Tennessee. Sales taxes make up most, about 70 percent, of total revenues. The state sales tax on food is 5.5 percent; obviously, such necessities are going to take a much bigger bite out of a $17,000 household budget than a $414,000 one.

Clearly this is obscene.

The fair thing to do would be to lower the sales tax, drop the tax on food, and add a progressive state income tax. During the 25 years I’ve lived here, there has been an almost continuous argument over doing just that. Generally the argument doesn’t get too far beyond the word TAX. At that point we are immediately get in tea party territory—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore, don’t tread on me with your big government European socialism—and the discussion is over.

Of course, what this tea party amounts to is 80 percent of the population shoveling their early retirement and their kids’ college education and the vacation in Florida and their daily bread into the harbor, while a tiny group of people making more $414,000 stand on the dock and laugh at them.

If it were just the bottom 20 percent of the population getting screwed here, it would be easier to understand. As we’ve seen in the health care debate, compassion is not a significant political motivator. Nobody above the poverty level, middle class or rich, really cares about the people on the bottom who get shafted the most. We don’t care if they die with no health coverage, we don’t care if they pay taxes that could be going to food and rent. They are the unwashed “them” and they don’t vote and they don’t count.

More interesting is the 60 percent in the middle who are essentially shafting themselves. I live next door to people who get up every morning and start thinking of new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. More often than not these schemes involve shooting me in my feet as well. This is why I’m interested in how these people think.

But I would suggest that what goes on in these people’s brains should be just as important to those who don’t live next door to them. The past year has amply demonstrated that even when the red states lose an election, they can still call the tune for everybody in the country. The majority does not make policy; who makes policy is the guy who casts vote number 60 to cut off debate in the Senate. He can shoot you in the foot, whether you live in Knoxville or Boston or San Francisco.

So, yes, to protect yourself, you first build a majority on your side, and then you build a supermajority.

When was the last durable supermajority? Around 1936.

What do we do while we wait for 1936 to come around again? We make compromises. We sit down with our neighbors and try to talk them down from their ingrained hysteria. We listen to what they have to say. We make the best deal possible, we keep plugging, we do pretty much what Obama is doing right now.

Fond Memories of the Kennedy Murder

The other day at church we had a meeting of what we call our "small group ministry" before the regular service. This is a kind of touchy-feeling session the first and third Sundays of each month of about eight people from the congregation designed to encourage bonding and community with the bodies that are sitting in the next pew in church.

In principle I approve of bonding and community, but in practice I'm not sure that I'm really built for it. For example, we recently filled out a list of questions meant to help reveal our inner selves to our neighbors--what was your childhood ambition, your wildest dream, your proudest moment, your first job, favorite movie, inspiration, soundtrack of your life, etc.

Sometimes I feel safer keeping my inner self tucked away in my innards--Dylan said it; "If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

I was a bit quirky but safe enough on some of the questions; childhood ambition--"President of the United States," favorite movie--"Duck Soup," first job--"getting my act together." You can read the whole list a couple of blog entries ago, if you want.

But where I got into trouble was "fondest memory." What popped into other people's heads was the puppy they got for Christmas, playing baseball with their dad, their mother singing in the kitchen. What popped into mine was the Kennedy assassination.

I was asked by the group to explain. First of all, I told them, that event certainly cured me of my childhood ambition. And indeed, generally, what I like most in life, and about my baby-boomer childhood in particular, are those moments that pulled the rug out from under me, that upset the apple cart, that made me wake up and think.

Imagine you're 13 years old, you've watched 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver in a row and in the first five minutes of the 56th episode, Wally walks into the living room, reaches under the sofa cushions, pulls out a shotgun, and blows Ward Cleaver's head off. Then your own father switches off the TV, turns to you and says, "Well, son, you saw what happened there. What do you make of that?"

At the time, few people gave a straight answer to that question. Mrs. Kennedy, refusing to change her bloody dress, was probably on the right track. "Let them to see what they've done," she said bitterly.

Generally though, what people made of the event (those who didn't break into applause at the news) was a bunch of bullshit. There were lame comparisons between Kennedy and Lincoln, the Warren Commission was convened to report that everything was OK, and we went on into Vietnam.

Certainly at 13 I was pretty much in tune with these reactions. But as the Sixties unfolded, and the bullshit kept hitting the fan and getting sprayed across the room like the President's brains, year after year, again and again, it became clearer and clearer that reality was a lot less like the programmed safety of the first 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver and more like the totally unexpected, disturbing, and astonishing uncertainty of the 56th.

The home of the free and the land of the brave was a bit like what it was billed to be, but also a lot like a chaotic, violent banana republic. My childhood was pleasant, but my adulthood would be more complicated and difficult. Life was good, but suffering was inevitable.

Illusions are pleasant, but dull, dishonest, and dangerous. As a country we've spent the last four decades trying to put the lid on the Sixties. That's what the Reagan and Bush years were all about. Me, I remember the murder of John F. Kennedy, and I remember it fondly.

Afghan from Iowa

Hamid Kazai, following a finding by UN-backed investigators that nearly a million of the votes cast for him in the Afghan presidential election were fraudulent, has decided that he has not won a majority of the vote after all, and must stand for a run-off election November 7.

So what’s a million votes or so gone wrong? If the man wins in November, he’s the head of a legitimate government, right? And if there’s a legitimate government in Kabul, doesn’t that mean there’s something to fight for here, something a bit more substantial than shadows and dust to grab hold of and shape into an alternative to the Taliban?

Why are we even having this discussion? Having backed corrupt warlords in poverty-stricken Third World settings going back six decades to Chiang Kai-shek in China (remember Chiang Kai-shek? Syngman Rhee? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? Nguyen Kao Ky? Big Minh? Little Minh?), why should we think this approach is a winner?

Even if Karzai isn’t a hollow substitute for a truly national leader who’s been installed, certified, and propped up by piles of outside guns and money, that’s exactly what he looks like, particularly after he’s been caught stealing hundreds of thousands of votes and has his Western handlers force him to give the election back.

Essentially we’ve got this guy saying, “Oops, I guess that was a sleazy, brazen power grab. Now I’ll run again, this time not as Al Capone, but as George Washington.”

And this is the rock we’re going to build a strategy around? Maybe Afghanistan will never be a real country. Maybe General McChrystal is just looking for a guaranteed 30-year gig. Maybe al-Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan.

Definitely the Taliban are crazy, vicious, fundamentalist authoritarians, but they’re the local boys, and at this point, Pashtun or not, Karzai might as well be the candidate from Iowa.

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.

Pre-Postmortem

Just when did the Obama administration end? Was it was when he lost Saturday Night Live? When Chicago lost the Olympics? When people forgot his dog’s name? When John Boehner emerged from the President’s meeting with Republican senators on Afghanistan this week and said nice things about him?

It’s hard to be president, particularly of a country with the attention span of a may fly. Having elected this guy to clean up an enormous mess, we promptly forgot the enormous mess, until, apparently, we noticed it again several days ago—Look! There’s a recession! Hey! There’s two wars going on! Yikes! Crazy people hate health care reform! Wow! Republicans don’t like Democrats!

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Barack Obama.

Is this the same Barack Obama who discovered insulin, designed the Chrysler Building, fathered three United States Senators, swam the English Channel? This guy looked pretty good last November, and here we are, 11 months later, and still in deep doo-doo.

As meaningful health care reform looks more doable day by day, the stock market rises, the recession bottoms out, it’s hard to look past Jon Stewart and SNL. Yes, Afghanistan could be a nightmare and the banks are still underregulated and global warming is probably a long-term disaster and no one will do anything about energy conservation in the near future. The ointment is teeming with flies.

But that’s how we came to pick this boy wonder in the first place. Things were so fouled up that, hey, how could he do any worse than the people we’d already tried?

Not exactly a high benchmark for success, but good enough for America, I think. Maybe Obama is struggling, but I say don’t shoot him yet.

Anger Management for the Socialist Slayers

How angry are you? Are you mad as hell? Are you mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore? Are you locked, loaded, and determined to stop socialism dead in its tracks?

Right-wing populist rage is in the news. Shout-downs of supporters of health care reform have been heard from local town halls to the halls of Congress, together with the more restrained commentaries of conservative pundits and congressmen expressing weak disapproval of the public outbursts, but insisting that the anger is real, justified, and politically potent.

Watching all this, you can't help being reminded of earlier "days of rage" in the late 1960s, another watershed period in our political history. Then the anger came from the left instead of right, from radical opponents of the Vietnam War.

In October 1969, protesters organized by the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fought the police in the streets of Chicago. This was more serious and violent stuff than what we've seen this summer and fall from the right. But the depth of feeling is similar and the gun-toting patriots who have shown up at anti-Obama rallies have not been subtle about what use they would like to make of their right to bear arms. The Oklahoma City bombing in the '90s, as well as the violent attempts to suppress the civil right movement earlier, demonstrated that anger from the right can bear fruit just as crazy and deadly as anger from the left.

The apologists for the current ugliness cite the million of "murdered babies" lost to abortion and more the tenuous threats posed by Obama's "government power grab." The point they end up making is remarkably similar to that made 40 years ago by apologists for radical, anti-war violence: "We agree with their goals but not their tactics."

I don't know if that's a valid moral stance in either case, but I do know that politically it is very difficult to draw a line between goals and tactics. What matters politically in these arguments between left and right is the people in the middle, the 40 percent or so of the electorate who define themselves as independents, and who decide elections.

Confronted by extreme tactics by either the left or the right, the people in the middle tend to forget the goals that seem so moral to those who feel driven to do anything to achieve them. If you act crazy, the people in the middle think you are crazy, you and your goals both, and they want nothing to do with you.

That's why Martin Luther King's nonviolence ultimately trumped George Wallace's ugly defiance in civil rights. That's why the "revolution" of the '60s radicals resulted in 40 years of dominance by the right.

Obama is right about one thing, this really is a watershed moment in American politics. What happens in the next couple of years could tell us who will be running things for the next couple of decades.

Whatever happens to health care reform, and however genuinely outraged the right may be, it needs to take some courses in anger management. The conservatives might take as an exemplar their Great Hero, and how he came to power.

After all, the defining moment of the 1980 presidential debate and of that whole election, when Carter said Reagan was going to wreck Social Security and Medicare, was not an image of Reagan turning purple and shouting, "You lie!"

It was Reagan's simple, politically masterful grin and shrug, and the genial, "There you go again."

Auld Lang Me

Resolutions, schmesolutions. This New Year I'm relying on evolution for real change in my life. There's never been a meaningful change in my life that wasn't forced on me by circumstances at the point of gun.

My biochemistry major son would scoff at this idea. This budding scientist, know-it-all, and dedicated Darwinian has contempt not only for the creationists but the Lamarckian heretics, theorists who believe species can change in a lifetime and pass on the changes to their offspring.

This is like believing giraffes happened when a zebra ran out of grass and was forced to nibbles buds in the treetops, the boy genius scoffs. He says natural selection works nowhere near that fast.

Well, having watched this kid progress from knowing everything about his bedroom at the age of five to everything in the universe at the age of 19, I'm not so sure about that. It's like when someone breaks up with their lover and tells me, "We just grew apart," as if nothing beyond the angle of their planting caused them to cross paths in the first place, and nothing about the way they collided affected them in the slightest for good or ill.

When I married my 4'11" wife I did not immediately feel myself beginning to shrink, but my mind quickly lost the ability to bring forth the word "short" and developed an almost instantaneous predilection for "petite." For a while I would get on my knees to make eye contact, but my waddling freaked her out—she had no stomach for hot penguin love—and over time it became unnecessary. Like the zebra with his head in the treetops, my body adjusted to the demands of nature.

OK, maybe I didn't literally lose 12 inches of height. But at this time of year I do not reminisce about old times or old acquaintance as much as old long me. I'm a shape shifter, we all are, inside and out. I liked the old me, but he and all his body parts are long gone, physically, psychologically, and forever changed by time and circumstances.

Siamese twins don't become Siamese distant cousins. But you can bet they make profound individual accommodations to live with the ties that bind. Subjected to the trauma of 9/11, America quickly embraced torture and domestic surveillance; threatened by the menace of economic collapse, she voted for a black president.

The George W. Bushes of this world hold on relentlessly to their preconceived notions and existence. But throw a shoe at them after they've maintained that unremitting grip for eight long years, and you'll find that even they have learned to duck.

Drowning the Cat

My wife tells me I have tickets to see Randy Newman next Wednesday, the 15th. I just realized that means I will miss the final debate between Obama and McCain.

The surprise is that I find myself relieved at the prospect. Right now this election has come down to drowning the cat, and it's not going to be a pleasant spectacle. The continuing market meltdown (minus three hundred points in the Dow Jones today) and the increasingly bad news in the economy in general (E-Bay is laying people off!) put the McCain campaign in terminal jeopardy.

You don't have to watch McCain too long to realize that gracious loser is not a role he will play comfortably. Mr. Anger clearly expected this to be his year and in the last debate seemed to be astonished that people were making him stand next to this weenie Negro for an hour and a half and actually have to explain why we should hand the War Hero the scepter that he'd earned in the North Vietnam prison.

Consider the fact that McCain wants this so badly he forced himself through the public humiliation of hugging the miserable draft dodger President who stole the office from him in 2000 by claiming he had fathered a black baby. That's how bad he wanted to win this thing.

Now all we can do is watch this bitter coot writhe, scream, spit, bite, and gasp for air as his ill-conceived and spastic campaign is mercifully held beneath the water in the toilet until it finally ceases to be.

It's not going to be pretty. So I'm going to see Randy Newman, for a helping of healthy bile. 

Big Lie, Little Facts, Bigger Truths

I feel isolated by my problem with lies. No one seems to care about lies, particularly lies by politicians. People expect lies from politicans, and fall back on reliance on what John Feehery, a Republican strategist, recently referred to as "the bigger truths."

Quoted in the Washington Post, Feeherty said, "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

The bigger truths outweigh the little facts, particularly when they will put your candidate in office. 

Of course, bigger truths in most people's moral universe are arrived at by examining all "those little facts" closely and arriving at conclusions based on those facts.

For example, since most people had never heard of Sarah Palin three weeks ago, most people conclude, as Feeherty does, that she is new. Similarly, when we look at Alaskan opinion polls with high ratings of Palin's performance as governor, most of us also agree that she is popular in Alaska.

When, however, we look at the fact that she did not, as the Republicans claimed, stop the Bridge to Nowhere, and that rather than battling such projects she was an avid promoter of $200 million in earmarked pork for Alaska, most of us would not agree with Feeherty that she could by any contortion of the truth be called an "insurgent."

In the matter of Palin's "insurgency," the Republicans respected the traditional connection between little facts and big truth only so far as they realized that they would have to make all the little facts lead to the bigger truth they desired to put in the heads of the voters.

So they made them up.

But obviously, for  Feeherty and for McCain and for the vast majority of most Republicans in the country this election season,  a "big truth" is not actually certified on the basis of the little facts, but by how far and wide you can disseminate it before the fact checkers get to it.

Spread the big truth wide enough fast enough, and the little facts become irrelevant. Once you get the desired big truth "out there," as Feeherty explains, the case is closed. To hell with the little facts.

Obviously, the big truth is simply the flip side of Goebbels' big lie. 

Most people in print are even more squeamish about comparing Republicans to Nazis than they are about calling them liars.

Maybe they're right to be squeamish. These people are only doing what politicians commonly do to get elected.

When you consider how many people have died for fairy tales like the weapons of mass destruction, though, you start to miss the application of morals to politics.