We may not have John Edwards to kick around anymore – though that hasn’t stopped us from putting the occasional boot into his backside, has it? – but he did leave us with a paradigm that remains useful in surveying the political landscape circa November 2009. Forget, for the moment, Edwards’ rhetoric about the rich and the poor, and focus instead on the two wildly disparate narratives about the nation’s politics that have emerged over the past 12 months. On one side are those are still living in Bamalot, who see slow but steady progress toward fixing enormous problems in the economy, health care and foreign policy; on the other are those who see nothing but dollar bills flying out the windows of the Capitol. On one side are those who remain quietly, but fiercely proud of what America accomplished last autumn; on the other are those who loudly trumpet their conviction (or who put up with people who remain convinced) that the president himself is not an American.
On Tuesday, in a couple of states, one side sat contentedly on their asses and did nothing; the other harnessed themselves into an angry, energized mini-electorate that drove to the polls and turned their governors’ mansions from blue to red.
There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.
So, yes, the dichotomy was ironic – but it was also a nice metaphor for Tuesday’s outcome. Obama’s voters, feeling like they did their job last year and remaining pretty happy with the way things have gone since then, stayed home and watched TV, while the unhappy folks dragged their butts to the polls and changed the status quo. Such is democracy in America – particularly in these off-off-year elections, when the voters of New Jersey and (particularly) Virginia love to send Bronx cheers to the party in power. (more…)
Which $161 million man? Now, there’s a question that could only refer to the Yankees. The one I’m talking about is CC Sabathia, the team’s most recent nine-figure pitching purchase, who has already shut the Angels down twice in this ALCS. But I could also be talking about first baseman Mark Teixeira, whom the Yankees plucked off the Angels’ roster last offseason for $180 million and who has repeatedly robbed his former teammates in the field this week (though his offensive numbers are pathetic). Of course, I might otherwise be talking about Derek Jeter, who’s nearing the end of his own $189 million contract. And as for Alex Rodriguez … well, he’ll earn $161 million in about the time it takes me to finish this column.
Well, what, exactly? What has been accomplished with this brief minuet of misplaced ambition and swift smackdown? For one thing, Rush’s media profile clearly has bumped up an extra tick, as if he needed it – though he’s clearly sought it, considering his eagerness to sit down for an interview this week with the sworn enemy of all conservatives, the NBC/MSNBC juggernaut. (Maybe he felt the sticky, Nyquil-inebriated breath of Time cover boy Glenn Beck down his neck.) Meanwhile, the NFL suddenly – and, for the most part, unwittingly – has found itself politicized, with the usual crackpots insisting over the past week that they would never watch pro football again if Rush got the team (or if he didn’t, depending on whether the pot was cracked on the left or right side). “I will NEVER go to a game OF ANY TEAM, WATCH ON TV, OR LISTEN ON RADIO to one more NFL game EVER,” wrote one typical rantboy, apparently convinced he could bring down the monolith all on his own. Just in case you were wondering which side this all-caps screamer was on, his message twice dared the NFL to “exhibit bias” against Rush’s “equal right” to buy a team. (Thus we arrive at a third result, this one inevitable: Conservatives now have one more reason to feel aggrieved, and one more excuse for twisting the language of civil liberties to suit their agitation.)
One might think I have better things to do than take personal offense when one of these anonymous hatefests appears in my inbox … but, no, I can never seem to let these things pass without a response. Sometimes I offer a reasoned debunking of whatever bilge is contained in the diatribe, but too often I crank up the flamethrower and launch a torrent of my own uncivil rantings. The latter was the case recently, and as soon as I hit “send” I regretted my contribution to the coarsening of the national dialogue … even if it was just between myself and a friend.
Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.
Mind you, I’ve got no sympathy whatsoever for those staffers who offered all sorts of untoward advice to a couple of right-wing David O. Selznicks pretending to be a pimp and a ho engaged in human trafficking. And the fact that similar scenarios played out in a couple of different ACORN offices suggests an organization with some serious boundary issues when it comes to dealing with the more illegal and/or despicable aspects of inner-city life. (I don’t care that surreptitious videotaping is a nasty thing to do, and I don’t want to hear about entrapment. Is there no clause in the ACORN training manual stipulating that staffers might occasionally use the simple phrase “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave”?)
The fact that we reached this point at all is a tribute to the Republicans’ obsessiveness, and their well-rehearsed ability to keep picking at a scab until it finally bleeds. Indeed, the ACORN brouhaha – in which years of fruitless attempts to tar the group with allegations of voter fraud have finally resulted in a scandal that has nothing whatsoever to do with votes or elections — is a slightly (but only slightly) less tawdry rerun of Ken Starr’s progression from Whitewater to Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky. That, too, was a relentless quest to pin something – anything! – on an institution whose very existence offended the right wing.
The “ACORN” acronym didn’t become a household word during the Bushies’ 2004-06 PR campaign – perhaps because ACORN’s reputation was sufficiently high, and the importance of its activism to America’s inner cities sufficiently well established, that the Bush administration itself steered more than $14 million to ACORN over its two terms in office. It wasn’t until after the U.S. Attorneys scandal had helped shame Rove and Alberto Gonzales out of the White House — and until an African-American and former community organizer had become a leading candidate for the presidency – that Republicans latched onto ACORN as a symbol of the sort of … how to phrase this delicately … black hooliganism that Democrats were counting on to wrest power from its rightful (and Right-full) owners.
Compared to all that, it seems an afterthought to mention that during the last election cycle alone, ACORN registered 1.3 million new inner-city voters. But as far as Republicans are concerned, voter registration may as well be all ACORN does, because it has the most immediate impact on their electoral prospects. Since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, it has been no secret that Republicans are desperate to drive down the African-American vote By Any Means Necessary. In 2000, those means included purging 50,000 registered voters off the rolls in Florida – a key element in Bush’s “victory” there. In 2004, those means included Ohio’s Republican secretary of state arranging for far too few voting machines in African-American precincts, resulting in long lines and thousands of voters either turning away in frustration or being locked out of their polling places at the end of the night. All of that doesn’t even take into account robocalls that lie to inner-city voters about changes in the locations of polling places or in the dates for voting; rumors that are planted about police looking for parole violators at the polls, and documented cases of “security guards” being paid by the GOP to intimidate black voters; and, of course, the Republicans’ repeated efforts to impose enhanced voter-identification requirements without providing poor people with sufficient means to obtain such IDs.
Of course, none of that has mattered to Beck and the other Fox News blowhards, who diligently search for fresh meat for the baying teabaggers. They’ve kept up their attacks, and finally they’ve found a way to document an ACORN impropriety. And … nobody’s surprised. Nobody’s surprised because the relentlessly bad press ACORN has received over the last year – for no good reason except Republicans playing politics – had left it, even before this month, with a soiled reputation and few vocal defenders. The American public, which famously can’t even place Iraq on a map, knows nothing of ACORN except what the Republicans have told them (enabled, of course, by the mainstream media, which played the voter-fraud allegations for considerably more than they were worth last fall). And when ACORN employees finally did do something worthy of those attacks, Democrats overreacted in a craven effort to save themselves from being tarnished along with the group.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5506652c-618d-4c01-851d-74fcb1920759)
Here at Popdose and throughout the Western world, this week’s (admittedly consumerist) Beatlemania revival has offered plenty of opportunities to reflect on their music, their influence … the astounding greed of their record label over a 45-year period … (Did EMI really have to sell the stereo and mono mixes separately, particularly considering that every album from Please Please Me to Revolver was short enough that they could have easily crammed both versions onto a single CD?) But as long as we’re sitting around dissecting the effects of the remastering process on “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” or tapping colored buttons in time to the scrolling visuals on the Rock Band version of “Revolution,” we may as well pause to marvel at the historical import of the Beatles’ efforts – and John’s in particular – to use their stardom to advance causes and engage in social commentary. In this, as in their music, they created a template that has been imitated and amended by generations of celebrities in their wake, for better and for worse. 
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” 
All of us on both sides always knew Kennedy was there, the embodiment of an extraordinary legacy who forever seemed to be grasping for his fair share of it, and coming up just short. But without a scorecard of Senate votes, we couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, he was accomplishing all these years – apart from courting tabloid drama, getting his name bandied about by right-wing jackasses scraping for a direct-mail buck, and presiding over one family funeral after another. Such is the burden of being a senator – even a high-profile one – rather than a president.
As if we needed any more evidence, the events of the last several days leave no question that the Republican Party has removed itself from the mainstream of political discourse. It doesn’t matter who the president is – Obama, or Hillary, or Jesus Christ himself (whom we all know would be backing single-payer). The small minority of Americans who still call themselves Republicans (hovering around 25 percent) have driven into insanity’s ditch, and are spinning their wheels furiously … not to pull themselves out, but to dig in deeper. The orchestrated assaults on town-hall meetings across the nation this week do not – cannot – reflect the GOP as a whole, but they’ve showcased the party’s public face: a tiny, frightened (and frightening) group of people, bought and paid for by special interests, who are hellbent on stifling the nation’s policy debate by hijacking the get-togethers with vicious invective and then shouting down any attempts to move intelligently past their outbursts.