'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
8The news story begins, "Has Janet Napolitano lost her mojo?" And I am thinking about how the older core readers, loyal but constantly abused by the newspaper, are wondering, "What the hell is a mojo?" In any event, it continues:
Unthinkable even a year ago, the question is circulating among some of
the governor’s watchers at the Capitol. They’re struck by an
administration seemingly put on its heels by a stumbling state economy,
rash of key staff departures and, most recently, the disqualification
from the November ballot of her two most favored initiatives.
What was unthinkable until Monday was that the Arizona Republic would ever print anything even mildly critical of the governor, aside from the dreary sameness of the protected Republican political op on the editorial page. Napolitano was close friends with former publisher Sue Clark-Johnson. This, along with the Republic’s war against having experienced journalists consistently cover state government (or any beat), ensured that the governor would be treated with something like uninformed reverence.
The reality is that Napolitano never stood astride state government like a colossus. The faded "glory days" mentioned in the story were neither glorious nor had much to do with her. Nor did she have "absolute dominance" over the Legislature. The reality is more complex, and more interesting.
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No CommentsLet me begin my convention observations by saying: I don’t trust the media. Whatever the Democrats and Obama do, it will be "the wrong thing" per the corporate media narrative. He still hasn’t "sealed the deal" and "closed the sale." He "lacks specifics" — a lie — and if he provided more, they would be instant red meat. If 75,000 people in the stadium hear one of the great speeches of our time — as happened in Philadelphia on the race issue — it will be swept away by the coiffed broomheads of television pundits.
As Michelle’s speech confirmed, the Obama’s have done everything the "conservatives" demand of black folks — and they’re still "foreign." He’s a celebrity — that’s bad. Americans "don’t know who he is" — as if they know who the hell John McCain is. He’s "not one of us" — as if that has any meaning in an America of diverse life paths, or that a former POW, longtime right-wing capo and rich consort of a beer heiress is "one of us." "One of us" is a stupid person, as the media would have it — because, after all, education and the ability to speak in complete sentences = elitism.
The best way to watch the convention is on CSPAN, so you hear all the speeches, not merely the prime-time ones that are filtered and "interpreted" by the bubbleheads. Of course, most Americans don’t do this. So they watch the prime-time spectacle as the Democrats try, again, to figure out how to beat the Republicans. Somehow eight years of misgovernment on an unprecedented scale isn’t enough. Nor is the obvious failure/scam that is "conservative ideas" in action. The right has wrecked the country and yet the presidential polls, if they are to be believed, show Obama struggling to stay even.
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2President-elect McCain’s inability to recall how many houses he owns fits into a larger and more troubling pattern. The problem is not just that he is an out-of-touch rich guy.
This is the candidate who repeatedly confused Shiite and Sunni — all the while trumpeting his expertise on the Middle East. At one point, his sock puppet Joe Lieberman had to whisper the facts in his ear. He couldn’t tell Sudan from Somalia. He kept talking about a nation that hasn’t existed for years. Iraq and Pakistan share a border, the senator wrongly said, and the Sunni awakening happened ‘after’ the surge (edited out by CBS). He said he didn’t know much about economics, then denied saying such a thing. He spoke of a withdrawal timetable one day, then denied saying it later. He volunteered Cindy for a topless contest. Then there was the stupendous dead space and mumbling when he was questioned about claiming Obama was playing the race card. He claimed he walked through Baghdad without body armor or protection, etc., etc. Most of this has been captured on tape.
What’s going on? Neither obvious answer is comforting. He’s either going senile as he nears 72, or he’s lying and unprepared on critical issues without realizing how easily this can be caught in a YouTube era. (Whether the duhs and ignos — those ‘undecided voters’ and angry Clintonites — will care, is another, depressing matter). Either one of these answers should disqualify him for the White House, particularly because so many of his misstatements, confusions and subsequent lies come about issues where he claims superior experience and judgment.
But next consider all his flip flops, over torture, warrantless wiretapping, tax cuts, Social Security, abortion rights, engaging with Hamas, nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, offshore drilling, etc. Once the presumptive nominee, he said Social Security was "an absolute disgrace.’ His chief economic adviser and likely Treasury secretary called Americans a ‘nation of whiners’ and said the recession was in our heads. This from a rich man who helped deregulate banking, profited from it, then profited again from the current deregulated banking crisis. Soon after McCain reversed course to support drilling, oil industry contributions poured in.
The above is not a disjointed laundry list. When we combine it with McCain’s obvious mental fatigue, the really disturbing picture comes clear.
5I’ve heard several stories about John McCain’s "tough stance" over the Russian-Georgian conflict on NPR, how it helps burnish his "national security credentials." Similar stories appear elsewhere in the supposedly liberal media. Rarely in the same story do we hear or read that McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann is also a well-paid lobbyist for the nation of Georgia. The "liberal" New York Times snuck this fact into an inside story under the innocuous ("don’t bother to read me") headline: "In Split Role, McCain Adviser is Sometimes a Lobbyist."
Were the situations reversed, this would be a scandal of the first magnitude for Barack Obama. But, as I have noted before, the corporate media and corporate rulers of America have to take him out. So here is one more way to do it. Forgive me for being cynical — after two stolen presidential elections, the serial scandals of the Bush years, secret energy task force, etc. — but are we seeing a new cold war ginned up to benefit McCain?
Where is our ‘liberal’ mainstream media on reports of Karl Rove meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, soon after the Georgian leader met with Condoleezza Rice in July. Hello?…Any curiosity? The White House has denied that Rice gave a green light to the impulsive Georgian president. Ah, but I remember all those color-coded "threat" warnings being raised and "high profile" terror arrests that went nowhere during the 2004 campaign. They succeeded in scaring enough people to make it a close enough election to steal.
McCain could win just because enough voters won’t cast a ballot for a black man, but the oligarchy apparently isn’t taking any chances. As usual, the national interests of the United States are cast aside.
10In his book, American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips wrote about the new phenomenon of fundamentalist religion in driving American policy, including U.S. military adventures in "the Middle Eastern Bible lands." He goes on: "The
rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank
with any Shiite ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections
mark the transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in
U.S. history."
That this remains true was clear from President-elect McCain’s kissing of Rick Warren’s ring at the suburban megachurch over the weekend, to the rapturous applause of the Orange County "conservative" congregation. The "maverick," in his desperate effort to get elected, mouthed all the Republican culture war theocratic platitudes. "Paris is worth a mass," as Henry of Navarre said. Now it comes out that McCain may have violated the "cone of silence" and known in advance the questions to be asked. That Obama went into this hostile environment at all is to be commended, I suppose. That he gave thoughtful answers will not help him at all with the anti-intellectual, know-nothing "Southernized" (to use Phillips’ word) American electorate.
I write "I suppose" about Obama because of those stubborn words in Article VI of the Constitution: "…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
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2Even a cursory knowledge of 20th century history tells us that little countries spark world wars. Thus, we had Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia in World War I and Czechoslovakia in World War II. But that’s not quite right. Trouble in a little country must be combined with foreign policy blunders by great powers. Thus, if Britain had made its intentions more clearly known to the Kaiser in 1914; if Britain and France had marched on Hitler the moment he remilitarized the Rhineland (German generals issued orders to retreat if the Allies acted; some hoped it would give them cause to topple the Fuhrer).
Let’s not take the analogies too far with the fast-moving events involving Georgia and Russia. But it was chilling in the U.N. Sunday when the Russian ambassador responded to U.S. complaints that Moscow was seeking "regime change" in pro-Western Georgia. "Regime change," he said, "is purely an American invention."
The consequences of eight years of disastrous Bush policies are growing. There’s no nice, non-partisan way to put it. This is the bunch that has been in charge — commandingly so. As the Soviet, er, Russian ambassador made clear, the American departure from our nation’s historic policies into the preemptive war and "regime change" beloved of neo-cons is the nightmarish gift that keeps on giving. Pots are calling kettles black.
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