Beyond 'Coming Together'

I apologize for the late start.  Scooter the cat didn't come in last night until 3a.m.

     The Iowa caucus set into motion a curious self-reinforcing feedback loop of inspiration -- that an African-American political leader could win an important primary contest in a Wonder Bread state, and that all Americans (especially white Americans) could "feel good" about living in a country where such a thing is possible. This is an understandable sentiment. Whatever else Americans have been conditioned to be lately -- blubbery, debt-crushed, tattoo-etched, Jesus-haunted, multiply-addicted TV zombies -- a residual kernel of fairness seems to persist underneath all that cellulite and avarice. Catching a glimpse of our formerly better collective selves, we seem moved to discover that it's still there, although the element of self-congratulation gets tiresome quickly.
     In any case, it was satisfying to see Barack Obama whip Hillary Clinton's entitled, presumptuous ass in Iowa last week, and by a very healthy margin. All other things aside -- like, what he actually thinks about the state of the nation -- Obama is a more reassuring figure than the Lady Macbeth-like former first lady, with her retinue of policy earls and thanes, and the creepy figure of her Mac-husband ever-grinning upstage.
     I could get behind Obama, if it comes to it, but these days another feeling dogs me -- that we live in a nation where a lot more people than just Hillary Clinton need to get their asses whipped (and then some), and I like John Edwards a bit better in the role. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, John Edwards made an appeal to the audience that just seemed more reality-based to me than Obama's platitudes about bringing people together.
     Edwards seems to recognize that there are some people -- like the health care executive he cited who retired from his job with over $100 million in the policy-holders loot -- who don't deserve to come together with anything except a grand jury. Edwards is willing to gaze past the kindergarten emotions of primary politics and see the stupendous ugliness and unfairness of a land that is being sucked dry by corporate vampires. I believe he will righteously kick their asses, and that they need to get their asses kicked, so I'm more inclined to support Edwards. I believe he means it, too.
     I was impressed that night by the TV commercial that followed Obama's speech. The commercial promoted a hydrogen car that General Motors is pretending to develop. It was very slick, of course, since GM can get the best TV production talent money can buy. It featured a light-skinned African-American man (not unlike Obama) playing a sort of Mr. Science Teacher role among a flower-strewn meadow full of schoolchildren with a modest GM sedan at the center of the picture. Mr. Science Teacher was telling the kids how this new GM wonder car would run without any nasty gasoline, and out of its tailpipe would come nothing but pure clean water, and wasn't the future-according-to-General-Motors a fabulous thing! It was all very heartwarming, except it was complete mendacious bullshit. GM will never produce a commercial line of hydrogen-powered cars, and America will never set up a supporting infrastructure of hydrogen production and retail fueling stations. And GM knows all this.
      General Motors deserves to have its ass kicked for misleading the public so shamelessly. I think Edwards is the only candidate who would kick their ass. I'm not quite sure how he would do it, or what he would say, but here's how I suggest he should frame the issue. "General Motors, can you take some of the money and human capital that you devote to misleading the public about hydrogen cars, and see if you can apply it instead to producing some decent up-to-date rolling stock for the US railroad system, which we have got to get up-and-running again -- or I WILL KICK YOUR ASS." Something like that.
     I can see Edwards dealing effectively with Wall Street, too. As president he would probably find that there are some agencies all saddled up and ready to ride, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and certain offices within the US Department of Justice, which could be motivated to ask some of the questions that various boards of directors have overlooked for some years now -- such as. . . how come Mr. Disgraced Executive is backing up his Lincoln Navigator to the loading dock of Acme Banking and Trust, and piling in sacks of the shareholders' money (after presiding over $10 billion worth of losses in acting as counter-party to an illegal trade in his company's own engineered fraudulent securities. . . ?
      So, these are some of my own dark thoughts coming out of Iowa and heading right smack into the New Hampshire primary. I'm reasonably confident that Hillary will stagger out of the Granite State with a stake through her heart. I hope Edwards can stay on his feet long enough to make make a run going into the SuperDuper gauntlet of primaries that follows. He may even condition Obama to toughen up some and realize that bringing people together (to be chumps and saps for the ghouls who sell them Cheesburgers) is not the sovereign remedy for what ails Clusterfuck Nation.
     I don't much care for the moment what happens among the Republicans. Their party is doomed. They're the Whigs of the 21st Century, and their grandees will be remembered in the same way that we revere William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore (whose birthday is tomorrow, by the way -- NY State employees take note!). It's been fun following the adventures of Huckabee, but only in the way that it was fun following Elmer Fudd as a six-year-old.
   

 

 

Comments

[greenbeans]

I think getting candidate A or candidate B for president is going to be like getting beat up on the east side or the west side of town.

[greenbeans]

That said, I like Edwards.

[Rudi]

Come on everybody, link your blogs on the Wiki. The Spectacular Policy Wiki.

Do we stay in this unindexed, linearized format using mostly pseudonyms because we don't actually want to discuss anything to conclusion? I'd say now is the time if ever there was one.

[SolubleFish]

Dave, duly noted.

Rudi what's wrong with taking these comments and making a searchable archive in which comments could continue to thrive over the long stretch of time, as opposed to being swept into the past? Meanwhile here is where the more immediate week to week conversations would still take place. The only other option I see would be to change this here somewhat annoying Typepad format.

[Rudi]

olubleFish:

JK has not yet contacted me. It would be a bit rude to expose the full text of every comment, I think, to Google indexing (an effectively irreversible operation) without some sign of approval. But I do have the data and can publish the accompanying text once there is sufficient buy-in. I have taken the liberty of publishing the URL's because somebody from the community requested it years ago and I think the information is high-value enough that it's worth it. If JK objects to any of this, I'll fix it according to his specs.

I am not willing to rerun the scripts each week though, as they were not designed that way it would be impossible. This is my volunteer system administration and website publicity improvement. I hope this tool I created for you all is useful.

[2020Vision]

Well it won't be the first or last meaningless commercial that the Detroit "Sultans of Spin" produce:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NYnNoWCu44

The only good thing about this one is the sound track.

[Mike Symmetry]

Kucinich believes Edwards is in bed with Wall St. Here is an excerpt from the last Kucinich for President email I received:

In answer to your questions about why I didn't support former Senator John Edwards on the second ballot in Iowa: I have serious concerns about his connections to a Wall Street hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. While attacking others for accepting campaign money from Washington lobbyists, he is up to his ears in money from Wall Street special interests.

Do some research on Fortress Investment Group. They're expanding their investments to include casinos and horse racing, according to Wikipedia. Maybe it's Edwards ass that needs to be kicked...

[SolubleFish]

In the debates Edwards emphasized that he had never voted for lobbyist or special interest groups. If what Kucinich says is true it would make him a liar. But I don't think getting behind Obama, as he suggests in places where a vote for him would not count, is any better. Perhaps the two are as I originally thought both career politicians willing to tell the public anything to get elected.

[SolubleFish]

What you are effectively saying Rudi is to take the discussion elsewhere just based on a few technical improvements. Does that sound very reasonable?

[Gary49er]

Sorry for going off topic again, or is it?

http://www.spaceandscience.net/id16.html

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm

What think we??

[SolubleFish]

Rudi, is Dave your new PR agent?

[Rudi]

Yes! Because we can build a much better and bigger info-thing there! In programming, they call this refactoring, and it's done every time code grows by a factor of two or so usually. This blogs three-year history in the comment section has about 55,000 comments. Most of them quietly ignored.

[Dr.Doom]

Thanks for that GM video link, 2020Vision. I just about cried watching that. Very emotional for me. The obvious message is to be upbeat about the future, about the way GM and the country has always done it, and wants to continue to do it. It's hard to admit there are limits, that there is an end to everything under heaven (cue The Birds: Turn, turn, turn). Things will never be the same. Hope we can just muddle along, probably for awhile...

[Lurkerlu]

No one that could or would kick some ass will get anywhere near the white house. And if someone does get in and not follow orders, there are ways to deal with that. The whole process is corrupt to the core. I dread having to hear about this farce ad nauseaum for the next 10 months.

[SolubleFish]

Maybe I should move to Mexico or Central America after all. Anyone coming?

[SolubleFish]

I am in agreement there Lurkerlu. I always said if anyone like Dennis Kucinich got in office he might last a few days then we would only be reading about him in the news in the past tense.

[EastCoastShock]

I would much rather have Edwards kick the collective ass of the fat cats and CEOs that are running this country into the ground than have Obama "compromise" and sing Kumbaya with them by the fire.

[ethanol4u,gas4me]

“I don't much care for the moment what happens among the Republicans. Their party is doomed.”

My dad, a registered Republican who hates Bush (and Huckabee), favors Edwards out of all the presidential hopefuls. So yes, the Republican party is certainly taking on water. But does the other (branch of the) party (the party that sanctioned what happened over the past few years) stand for anything at the moment? The big Democratic idea of today is giving healthcare to everyone. Hmmm... Federal debt. Social Security. Weakening economy. Peak oil. Healthcare for everyone. And a free Hummer too.

Mr. Gibson stated during that last presidential debate that “The next president of the United States may have to deal with a nuclear attack on an American city... The best nuclear experts in the world say there's a 30 percent chance in the next 10 years.” That would really keep the party going. Got a vehicle you can’t fuel? A mortgage you can’t pay? Well, shut up. This is war. We’ve been nuked and we don’t know when the next one will go off. And just think about those whiny foreigners who think we shouldn’t get all the oil. “Hey? You wanna get nuked too? That’s right. Shut up.”

Everyone can agree that the nuking of a U.S. city would be a good thing. We just have to decide on which one. That’s something I would vote on! The selected city needs to be non-vital but big enough that it’s nuking would have a real “umpf” factor. My first thought is New York. But there’s nothing more tasteless than a bad sequel. I would suggest Vegas. After all, they hate us for our sinful ways.

[SolubleFish]

Edwards Reconsidered, by Normon Solomon: http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/48615

[oneEyeOpen]

Sweet-fucking-Jesus! John Edwards? John MOTHERFUCKING Edwards? John Edwards couldn't kick James Howard Kunstler's ass.

[OilMonkey]

"Obama might turn out to be a decent president - he certainly would be better than Huckabee - but at the moment the evidence provides little support beyond factors that matter inordinately these days, such as that he is young, good looking and half black. This is the sort of thing music producers look for in boy bands. Choosing a president is supposed to involve some deeper concerns.

"Besides, there is nothing about Obama that gives him a copyright on hope and, if you really want change, then logic would point you to John Edwards. But our politics have been subsumed by the values of television and so we continue to look for an American Idol instead of an American President."

- Sam Smith, American Idols and American Presidents

http://prorev.com/2008/01/idols-and-presidents.html

See Also: Obama Reality Check

http://prorev.com/2008/01/obama-reality-check.html

[bud4wiser]

Time out - no President can be effective with the present two-party power structure in place on a truly independent Congress.

Although the current crop of sound bites are interesting, no one candidate can or will change the Senate Seniority System or House Committee processes.

Of course, I guess the "hope" could be that we either get a President that keeps things from getting worse, and somehow manages to shed enough light on all the roaches in government to spark the "beginnings" of reform.

My own pet project, make all Congressmen spend 800 hours per year in their home district offices and set up lotteries as to who will get to meet with them. Leaving them all in Washington just makes it easy for lobbyists.

Washington, is an elaborate ruse for bribery - we have telephones and video conferencing now - we should act like.

[SolubleFish]

The Oil Drum in US News & World Report: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/beyond-the-barrel/2008/1/7/the-oil-drum-100-a-barrel-quickens-the-beat.html

[Mark]

What surprises me about the GOP is how all the contenders are lining up to prove how right wing they are. WTF? Of all American voters what % are hardcore, Christian right wing, terrified of OBL being behind every "bush" types? I mean if Mitt "Forget Everything I Said or Did in Mass." Romney thinks he's going to win by pandering to the "right" he's crazy. Then of course their's Rudy 9/11 G. Even most Republicans I know are sick of the fear thing. That is why Mr. Huckleberry and Obama are doing well. Me, I'm with JHK: Edwards.

[SolubleFish]

Yes, the corruption is as old as government itself. Remember the movie Mr. Smith goes to town, with James Stewart? It seems only the naive could stumble into Washington and expect to make much difference. And of course that is in an overly optimistic movie with a happy ending.