I am losing it, I totally am.

[elfs]

Charles Krauthammer has one of those offensive, "ironic" columns today that makes me want to take him in all seriousness. In a sneer-filled column about how Congressfolks have to "satisfy the mob," he suggests sarcastically that:

What we need are a few exemplary hangings [for corporate executives]. Pick a few failed investment firms, lead their CEOs in chains through the canyons of Manhattan... Better still, precede the auto-da-fe -- fire is highly telegenic -- with 24-hour reality-TV coverage of their recantations, lamentations and final visits with the soon-to-be widowed. The ratings would dwarf "American Idol," and the ad revenue alone would make the perfect down payment on the $700 billion.

That's you and me he's talking about, the angry people who need to be given the bread and circuses that will hold us until Congress can get around to the serious business of saving the rich with our money.

Here's a thought: do you remember when the right exploded because Move On aired an ad in which a young mother held her child in her lap and said, "John McCain, you can't have my child?" The ad was clearly aimed at McCain's then-recent lament that implementing the draft would be politically difficult to acheive these days.

Well, guess what? Our government has successfully co-opted your and my childrens' sweat and labor for the next half-century, at least. They did this by allowing irresponsibility in every layer of the financial market. Why aren't we all utterly furious? Have we all absorbed the message that we're powerless in the face of this crap?

Daniel Larison at the American Conservative

McCain will have us on tenterhooks on a daily basis wondering whether he will call for impeaching the Supreme Court or bombing Uruguay and he will denounce anyone who questions his proposal as a selfish and corrupt villain, and while Obama might adopt equally awful views he will do so more slowly and allow the rest of us time to organize opposition and rational counterarguments that might actually prevail.

Meanwhile, David Brooks is totally high!

If McCain is elected, he will retain his instinct for the hard challenge. With that Greatest Generation style of his, he will run the least partisan administration in recent times. He is not a sophisticated conceptual thinker, but he is a good judge of character. He is not an organized administrator, but he has become a practiced legislative craftsman. He is, above all — and this is completely impossible to convey in the midst of a campaign — a serious man prone to serious things.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Not a sophisticated conceptual thinker (does that mean he acts on whims, unsupported by reason?) and not an organized administrator (does that mean he'll overlook important things because they'll fall by the wayside, in exactly the ways that organized administrators prevent via their excellent organization?) - I wouldn't hire the man to run a small business, not to mention a biggish country that was recently an empire.

Empires need both reason and organization. Ex-empires, doubly so.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm just trying to figure out how one can be "a serious person" and yet run so "unserious" a campaign as McCain/Palin.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I'm not being facetious when I say "that depends on the meaning of 'serious'".

I think that 'serious' has become one of the increasingly many dog-whistle words that no longer are used in the first (or fourth, or fifth) dictionary definition but are, rather, repurposed by a group of people that has as its goal the usurpation of power.

The function is somewhat similar to the way a computer virus would replace the function of one command or filesystem path with another. It *looks* like you're renaming files, you're actually deleting root.

And that's what this does: it deletes the core of a democratic society, because democracy relies on an informed citizenry, and the viral mind processes rely on keeping the citizenry as far from informed as they can.

You see a huge amount of this in religion-based cults. For example,my ex-mother in law confused the phrase 'give testimony' once, which led to terribly amusing results - the cop did NOT get what he was expecting! And the use of words like 'father' and 'home' gets truly twisted (not to mention 'science' and 'theory').

The thing I don't see is this: once language and the definition of words have been usurped as a mechanism by which to grab power, how can a country remain a democracy?

[danceswithlife]

How can he be a good judge of character when he picked Sarah Palin to be his vice president? When he has lots of lobbyists as advisers?

[(Anonymous)]

People I know are furious. I know more folks writing or calling their reps (including me this morning) than on any issue I can remember. Across a much wider swath of political positions. And much more vehemently.

And every single person I know said something in the range from "ABSOLUTELY HELL NO" to "Not if it resembles anything proposed thus far or has the number 700 billion in it."

The vote today suggests they hear the fury of the American people and don't know what to do. It's a trick question -- there is nothing they can do that will spare them the people's wrath, because we've finally said "not on our backs" but we're certainly not sending them flowers and votes when the contraction pain moves from Braxton-Hicks to the real thing.

And like labour a hundred years ago, the only way to survive is to breath through it and hope you're lucky. There is no C-section for this.