'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
1Gasoline at $5, $6, $10 a gallon over the next two years would have been a severe mercy for the United States. It would have forced changes that will eventually be essential: more transit and rail passenger service, a return to our core cities, an urgency to raise fuel economy standards and develop alternatives. At last suburban and exurban living would be properly priced and costly, and the enterprise to retrofit savable suburbia to transit could begin. Foot-dragging on reducing greenhouse gases would have been similarly eliminated.
I don’t think it will go down that way. Oil prices have been dropping in recent days, as I long predicted they would. The decline is because the nation that uses a quarter of the world’s petroleum is seen heading into a nasty recession, which will cut world demand. So prices will drop, and soon we can expect some to start saying the worst is over and we can get back to driving SUVs and other self-destructive behavior.
(I think of a story in today’s Arizona Republic about Lake Powell "recovering," and the ‘Zonies thinking "happy days are here again!" even though their water crisis is unabated — although a State Secret).
Yet the fundamentals haven’t changed. World oil production has either reached peak or will do so in a few years. That means half of this one-time resource will have been extracted and burned off — and it was the easy half, the cheap half. So the remainder will be more costly, and getting it will be more geopolitically destabilizing. So oil will fall a little, then rise more the next time; retreat a bit again and resume its upward climb. The major oil companies and oil exporting nations (which control most of the oil) know this. Most Americans still don’t.
4The corporate media, particularly the electronic division, keeps repeating certain shorthand, whether it’s true or not. One example, on display almost daily, is that "John McCain’s the maverick." I’ve gone to great lengths on this blog to disprove that notion. McCain is a fairly conventional "conservative" who once or twice bucked his party when it didn’t really matter. You can check his voting record. This is no secret.
McCain’s utter hostility to helping the state he claims to represent deal with the problems of rapid urbanization and funding the illegal alien surge that was so profitable to Republican businessmen shows how he will govern domestically. Likewise his "straight shooter integrity" image is shattered by the facts, from the Keating Five onward. (Check the McCain File to your right for more).
Now two more "givens" are in the teleprompter scrips. First is the idea that McCain is a national security expert, ready to be commander in chief on "day one" — Sen. Clinton helpfully said it herself. The second is that McCain is a "Theodore Roosevelt Republican."
There’s just one problem: Neither is true.
2Obama’s win in the Democratic primary showed him to potentially be one of the most gifted politicians in American history. Yes, he gives a good speech — something that is underrated, particularly after the embarrassingly inarticulate George W. Bush. If we’re to have any chance to address the historic challenges facing the country, we’re going to need an inspiring leader at the bully pulpit.
But he also ran a great ground game, outflanking Hillary’s admittedly badly run operation, and showed he could push back effectively against Rovian tactics. After the disaster of conservative government on display everywhere and every indication this should be a Democratic year, why can’t I come out an admit I was wrong about Obama?
I hope I can. Unfortunately, he has several things going against him, which may prove insurmountable. Remember, Michelle said, "this is it, one campaign and no more," or words to that effect. If Nancy Reagan had said the same thing in 1976, no book would be called "The Age of Reagan," however gifted that orator and politician was.
9Let’s get this straight at the outset: Phil Gramm, President-elect McCain’s chief economics adviser, did not misspeak when he said the only thing wrong now is a "mental recession" and America is a "nation of whiners." The corporate media, to the extent they are covering the story at all, are leading with McCain’s disavowal of Gramm. McCain has said the same kinds of things. He also said Social Security is "an absolute disgrace." This is what Republicans believe. Imagine if Obama had said such things?
While McCain is again showing his fundamental dishonesty, and the media are continuing to cover for him, Gramm unambiguously showed the mindset of today’s Republican Party. "Creative destruction" is their mantra, "free markets" their religion. And if you lived Gramm’s life, you might well wonder, "why are people complaining?" The former senator from Texas championed tax cuts for the wealthy, breaks for corporation and deregulation. He was repaid handsomely, most recently with his ties to the giant bank UBS.
Most Americans have paid a huge price. Median incomes have actually fallen in recent years, millions have lost their health insurance, and most average workers are losing the foundation of the middle class: secure jobs at good wages with benefits and pensions. This was partially concealed by the scam of the housing bubble, and now that’s gone. The Republican leaders, who have become wealthy from tax cuts, outsourcing, union busting and community-destroying mergers say, "stop whining."
But will they pay a price in November? I’m not convinced.
2Forgive me if I take a holiday from some of the liberal and progressive hysteria over the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a firearm. But, then, I am a Westerner and a gun owner.
The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government and specifying some of the rights of individuals (indeed, some of the Framers opposed the Bill of Rights because they feared individual rights would be seen as limited to those amendments). If the Framers intended to discuss state militias, the Bill of Rights seems an odd place to do it. It’s meaningful that the amendment is No. 2 behind that wellspring of recognizing individual rights, the First Amendment. One could see how the Framers said, the people have these rights, and here’s how will they be ensured of protecting them.
Remember, these men rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world, and many believed the people should always have the unalienable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government or leave a voluntary union of sovereign states. The Whiskey Rebellion and, most cataclysmically, the Civil War, settled some of those issues. Others were left to the courts.
Yet the ambiguity of the amendment has long been contested. And extreme measures on both sides brought matters to a head, and make the future even more contentious.
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2It’s clear that President-elect McCain will run with this major theme: Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he didn’t serve in the military. For example, when Obama praised McCain’s service and wondered why he refused to support the new GI Bill, McCain shot back, "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his
responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my
regard for those who did."
The "religious test" prohibited by the Constitution has been seriously eroded by modern politics. But what McCain implies is more dangerous still to the future of the nation: that only soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are really qualified to lead the nation, particularly in wartime.
So many contradictions and hypocrisies here. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt were veterans, yet they led the nation in the two world wars. And where was McCain’s outrage over the neo-con chicken-hawks who took draft deferments during Vietnam, notably Dick Cheney (five deferments). Obama was a child during Vietnam. And what of the swift-boated John Kerry?
But the biggest concerns cut to the core of the American republic. They could reveal McCain not merely as a misinformed and misguided candidate, but a potentially dangerous one.
No CommentsHow can we explain the latest Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll that shows only 27 percent of respondents have a positive view of the Republican Party yet the Democratic presidential contenders are, at best, tied with President-elect McCain? Is it the inanity of the corporate media? Is it is ignorance of the American voter, who has been brainwashed to believe the right-wing tool McCain is a "maverick"? The next several months will tell.
It’s surely not a good sign that the nation sits paralyzed before multiple crises while people distract themselves with an evil pervert in Austria and some celebutard girl posing semi-nude in Vanity Fair. The corporate media would not cover this stuff if Americans didn’t tune in, in huge, denial-soaked, distraction-addicted numbers.
Obama must show he is "an average guy" — how’d that work out for us with W? We need a president who is average with Washington, Lincoln and FDR — our crises are that dire. And Jeremiah Wright — must keep that front-and-center. Did Obama do enough? Was he too late? Is he damaged? Has the cow jumped over the moon?
Nor is it a good sign that the "gas tax holiday" of President-elect McCain and Sen. Clinton (perhaps running as his vice president?) has not been laughed off stage. How many ways is this a ridiculous idea? And Yet Obama is the "elitist…out of touch with average Americans" who is the party pooper by refusing to endorse it.
No CommentsBarack Obama partisans must be wishing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had chosen to lay low, so maybe the "preacher issue" would go away, so maybe Obama wouldn’t have to deal with white anxiety over an angry black man. But Wright will not go quietly. He is defending himself and making his case, most recently before the National Press Club. If you don’t watch the entire speech on C-SPAN or a video replay, we don’t have much to talk about.
Wright is as formidable an intellect as he is a "controversial" preacher. He is a preacher of the Gospel, coming from the prophetic tradition…his name is Jeremiah, for goodness sake. If the Gospel doesn’t sometimes make you uncomfortable, you haven’t really read it. If the election is decided on a sound byte of "God damn America" vs. the nuanced and complex message this Jeremiah delivers, then…
Or, as Obama put it in his magisterial address, we could say "not this time." Unfortunately, I increasingly fear that won’t happen. Old habits die hard. Old prejudices. So we will march forward to the McCain presidency. If so, then let Jeremiah say all the things that make the comfortable feel uncomfortable — so it is in the Bible.
It doesn’t matter now. God’s will be done. That’s what Christians pray every Sunday in church, "the most segregated hour in America," many without even realizing what they’re affirming.
Does this Jeremiah have anything to teach us?
2For everyone who was stirred and moved by Barack Obama’s inspiring and intelligent speech this week — one of the finest of my lifetime — I have bad news. He will not be the next president. He may not even be the Democratic nominee. I pray and hope that I’m wrong. But the evidence is not good.
Why? Maybe it will be because, as Matt Bai pointed out in the New York Times Magazine, Obama only wins urban areas with concentrated black voters and states with few blacks — not enough for an electoral majority. He loses in the critical places with real (segregated) diversity, such as Ohio:
What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other
races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually
makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.
The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are
filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of
their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social
friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining
opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage
payments.
Maybe it will be because Hillary Clinton has shown she will destroy the party rather than lose the nomination. Maybe it will be because Obama is such a threat to the community of interests that wants things to stay as they are (no need for conspiracy theories).
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