As with so many other things, the answer can be found in Bill and Ted.
She was a deeply thoughtless and incoherent woman, but she was briefly the anointed representative of a tribe; and amidst her incoherency, she occasionally uttered the ritual phrases of her tribe; and for these things they blessed her.
(This is the last thing, I hope, I will ever write about this person. But see Dahlia Lithwick's astute Slate piece if you really crave more.)
About a week ago, I moved on to worrying about what happens after.
We face astonishing problems. The scale of the missed opportunities and bumbling mistakes and grave moral sins our nation has committed since 2000 boggles the mind. When I think back to how America felt in 1999, when I was graduating from college, how full of thrilling promise and possibility, and when I consider where we are today, I wonder if some colossal prank has been played upon me by the universe. Welcome to adulthood, boy; now watch this bright and shiny world of your youth rust and rot with corruption from top to bottom.
So, eight years later, here we are. But where is that? On the net, I see pictures and videos of massive cheering crowds; everywhere I read of hope, and a barely contained undercurrent of relief, sometimes exultation. Suppose that the election goes as all these people wish. What's going to happen, really?
In all likelihood, the Democrats will hold not only the Presidency, but both houses of Congress. And K Street and Wall Street have seen this coming for some months now. Meanwhile we see the Republican Party both discredited and divided against itself, abandoned by virtually all those who would provide it either the moral fiber or the intellectual rigor to reform itself. I suspect it will be a long time in the wilderness for Republicans.
And far from being exultant, I am stone cold sober about what this means. It means that anybody who wants to have power or influence for the next few electoral cycles already knows that they need to get close with the Democratic Party. It means that the fate of the nation will hang on how well the Democratic Party's immune system neutralizes the parasites drawn by that power: the legions of influence-peddlers, along with amoral narcissists of all stripes burning with ambition and nothing else. Does this make you optimistic? If so, you haven't been paying attention to Congressional Democrats for the past two decades.
Meanwhile, consider what will happen to the Republican opposition. For nearly half a century, the plutocratic Republican leadership has been carelessly cultivating the jingoistic, theocratic, and crypto-racist elements of American society for political advantage. What has emerged is a stupid, snarling, egotistical beast, twenty-odd percent of the electorate that is confused, bitterly angry, fearful of change, utterly disconnected from reality, and boastful of a national patrimony that it sees as exclusively its own. I find it hard to imagine what this beast will become as increasing political marginalization and economic upheavals feed its resentment. The twenty percenters will not shrivel up and die; they will stew in the juices of their rage. How will that rage transform them?
All in all, I fear that we will soon witness some truly ugly times in American politics, of which the current campaign is only a foretaste.
Now, my fears are not predictions. I'm merely stating possibilities. I still hope that all my anxieties are misplaced. But nonetheless these are the anxieties that plague me. If you're worried about the election, put those worries aside; they're hardly worth the trouble. Far bigger potential problems lurk beyond it.
"Maverick."
I mean, come on. How many times can you use the same damn word to flatter yourself before somebody revokes your license? It's not only self-aggrandizing, it's monotonously, vacuously, and conspicuously self-aggrandizing:
It's become like a cartoon character's catchphrase. "Doh!" "Hulk Smash!" "Good grief!" "We're mavericks!" Somebody buy these people a thesaurus. For the sake of my sanity, if nothing else.
p.s. Gwen Ifill is (still) terrible. Still spends half her questions recycling D.C. press memes. Still incapable of asking a probing factual followup to a pile of talking points.
(Previously: other words I could do without.)
I bear no affection for the wingnut train-wreck, but I found that one statement reasonable, and perhaps even irreverently witty.
I mean, everyone knows that the Vice President has no day-to-day Constitutional* powers whatsoever. The VP's tie-breaking powers are rarely called upon — Cheney and Gore did it once every year or two. As for assuming the office if the President dies, that hardly counts as something for the VP to "do every day". And that's the end of the list of enumerated powers. As far as I can tell, the only reasonable argument that the Vice Presidency should even exist is that it discourages political assassination by an opposition party that controls the House of Representatives.
Basically, what I'm saying is: I, too, wonder what exactly a Vice President does every day. Modern Presidential administrations have generally crafted a meaningful role for the VP, but it's never been written into law. It seems technically possible to discharge the office of the Vice Presidency while lying on the beach sipping margaritas, waiting for your party to page you for a tie-breaking vote once a year.
There is, of course, the minor matter of that other page, which is the main reason you want someone who's qualified. But if you were a politician who wanted to accomplish things — and especially if you wanted to do so on your own terms, rather than as a surrogate or adjunct for a President with whom you may frequently disagree — it seems entirely reasonable to refuse the Vice Presidential nomination on the grounds that it's a powerless office. Politicians have done it before (most famously Daniel Webster, whose rejoinder "I do not intend to be buried until I am dead" is a favorite of history buffs, and which all politics junkies know nowadays because it was quoted by John Hoynes on The West Wing).
Not that Palin evinces any such instincts. She accepted the nomination.
* The fact that Cheney has unconstitutionally assumed all sorts of other powers is an entirely different matter.
If you're reading this, you're probably not someone who tends to give this Presidential administration the benefit of the doubt; but just in case you are, watch this Daily Show segment discussing the recent ABC news revelations on how our leaders were intimately involved in the details of planning torture sessions.
Look at the expression on Rice's face when she answers the reporter's question at the end, and ask yourself whether you can call this thing that speaks a human being, rather than some lower order of fleshy automaton.
...the illuminating aspect of the source of this expostulation being that Dante, after suffering nonstop abuse from Randal up to the point of the outburst, remains his steadfast buddy for the remainder of the film.
The relationship to the conversation related in this post of Ezra Klein's is left an exercise for the reader.
Item One: McCain presses the flesh with Katherine Harris.
Item Two: McCain's to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University; he didn't have much to say when (previously) Tim Russert questioned him, and he's got scarcely more to say to Jon Stewart. Notice, however, his repetition of the same, lame talking point about schools that disallow military recruiting. Note to Sen. McCain: there's a difference between speaking someplace where you disagree with a single policy (don't we all disagree with at least one policy of any given school?), and speaking at an institution whose entire raison d'être is promulgating fundamentalist offal.
But of course, both of these events are merely symptoms of McCain's infection by a single deeper disease: the virulent sickness of the modern Republican Party, which marries corruption, fundamentalism, and autocracy into a veritable holy Trinity of political evil. Americans (and especially the press) find McCain appealing in part because his existence appears to tell a particular fictional story that resonates with Americans: that of individual integrity, wherein (cue the deep-voiced movie-trailer voice-over and portentous pseudo-symphonic backing track) one man's struggle to overcome enables him to transcend all labels or institutions. People like McCain because this fairy tale permits them to indulge in an illusion of government without or beyond politics --- politics being, of course, that grubby business whereby groups of people bang out actual law that actually influences people's lives.
(Actual politics and policymaking is distasteful to pundits in particular because (a) it involves messy compromises among competing interest groups, (b) it requires serious thinking, often involving attention to detail and some mathematical competence, and (c) one can only devise coherent policy when guided by some coherent set of ideas about what animates and justifies social relations, i.e. an ideology. And, of course, the vast majority of pundits (a) hate any compromise involving concessions to interest groups other than fiscally conservative upper-middle-class professionals like themselves, (b) hate having to think carefully about anything other than the scintillating intricacies of their own self-important insights, and (c) hate any ideology other than the dominant center-right consensus, which pretends to be non-ideological.)
So, then, McCain's behavior of late merely demonstrates the truism that effective institutions are greater than individuals. And, of course, the Republican Party is an exceedingly effective institution, from its ruling clique's point of view. Deep structural features of modern Republicanism --- the admixture of influence-peddling, toxic ideology, and willful ignorance that knits together the Party of Reaction --- hammer aspirants to national office upon the hard and ruthless anvil of national politics, molding them into ass-kissing panderers to the worst tendencies of Homo americanus. McCain would not be where he is today if he hadn't conformed to the Party's needs when it really counted, and he will rise in power to the extent that he continues to deform under the blows of that same chastening hammer. Anyone who believes otherwise is deceived.
Crooks and Liars points to Tim Russert's evisceration of John McCain's pandering ass. It's so satisfying to see this "straight shooter" try to spin himself out of the holes he's dug for himself through his words and actions.
Now all I want is for the New York Times or WaPo to point out, in a "news analysis" on McCain's Presidential ambitions, that a Senator hasn't won a Presidential election in a long time. Funny how this factoid gets whipped out within nanoseconds whenever the subject's a Democratic Senator running for President, but never for McCain. Liberal Media strikes again.
(This is a bit late, but it's been sitting in the drafts queue since Sunday night.)
I'm not exactly a fan of David Brooks. In fact, if I were him, I'd be mortified to have had my byline attached to the analysis (to use the term loosely) that he's been cranking out at the Times. I mean, I would be depressed, in the clinical sense; I would literally have difficulty getting out of bed and looking in the mirror in the morning.
But: his Times Magazine cover article from this past Sunday is thoughtful and, at times, even astute. Brooks does fall prey, in section III, to the fallacy of confusing word and action --- the full cheapness and emptiness of Bush's campaign rhetoric hasn't really sunk in --- but I grit my teeth and soldiered on past that section, and found the remainder of the article worthwhile.
(I can't help but think that Kinsley's smackdown back in May has had a delayed effect: the article's blissfully free of "shopping lists" and "clever coinages". A few jokes and fearless generalizations remain, but they're quite bearable --- jokes are only bad when they replace substantive thought, and generalizations, in a magazine-length piece dealing with subjects of great complexity, are inevitable, and not even necessarily undesirable.)
I don't agree, necessarily, with the program Brooks outlines, but a Republican Party like the one Brooks envisions would be better for America, in every sense, than the one we have now. Even though it would be wrong about many things, it would be wrong in a much less poisonous way.
Unfortunately, Brooks vastly underestimates the degree to which the modern Republican Party is a blood pact between crypto-racists and plutocrats. The epitome of the modern Republican Party's soul is George W. Bush's speech at Bob Jones University in 2000. We still live in the shadow of the Nixonian Southern strategy, and we most likely will remain there until the death of the last white man who hit puberty before the civil rights revolution. The Party of Lincoln died four decades ago.
Nevertheless, we would be a better nation if the zombie strutting around in its clothes were to regain its soul. So, I dearly hope, against all reason, that people who agree with Brooks take control of the Republican Party. Right after the Democrats kick Republican ass this November.
UPDATE: Via Mouthpiece (and dug up by my NJ buddy & Plastician extraordinaire Perrystroika) comes this startling admission by David Brooks to a Boston Globe reporter:
[Christopher] Buckley worries that, somewhere, someone is more prolific than he. He even knows who that someone is: David Brooks, New York Times columnist, book writer, magazine contributor, and PBS talking head. "He's in every issue of The Atlantic Monthly, then he's on the TV show, and he gives speeches on the side," says Buckley, sounding overmatched. "I'd like to know what he's on."
Returning my call from a taxicab -- "I'm just finishing off a piece right here," he jokes -- Brooks is a tad sensitive about his Stakhanovite literary output. "I'm slightly embarrassed," he admits. "It suggests a high level of hackdom." So what is he taking? "Nothing chemical, it's mostly psychological," he explains. "I would explain my high productivity by my desperate loneliness and my pathetic sadness that causes me work to extreme lengths to fill the hollow void that is my life."
So it appears that Brooks is, in fact, depressed, in a clinical sense, and does have difficulty getting out of bed and looking in the mirror in the morning. Somehow knowing this makes him so much more tolerable. (Though, as Perry suggests, he might be under the (mistaken) impression that he's joking.)
I'm pretty fucking sick of all this Swift Boat Vet b.s. that's infesting all the blogs I read. It's been thoroughly debunked and basically I wish it would just stop. Nevertheless, I will add one post noting that Regnery Publishing, publisher of the the SBV book, is bankrolled by white supremacists who, among other things, want to organize a whites-only online dating website (MSNBC/Newsweek article).
But not all of their activities are quite as silly. Regnery sponsors The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist journal whose editorial staff includes such charming characters as Samuel Francis (whose column was dropped from the Washington Times after he made racist remarks before a meeting of American Renaissance, which is roughly to anthropology what the Journal of the ICR is to evolutionary biology).
Of course, as has been well-documented, Bush has not dissociated himself with this group, its ads, or its publisher. Far from it. (J. B. DeLong piles on.) But we should expect no less from a candidate who spoke at Bob Jones University on the campaign trail in 2000. It's a common Republican talking point that _______ (fill in name of Democratic politician here) will do anything to get elected. But this is a classic case of projection: it is, in fact, Bush who will stoop to any level, ally himself with any faction no matter how grotesque or unsavory, in order to get elected.
Bonus link: Nick Confessore on other exploits of Regnery Publishing.
There seems to be a widespread belief that academics and researchers in the hard sciences and engineering are, on average, more conservative than academics in the humanities. This may be true, if only because humanities academics tend to be pretty far to the left. However, the oft-repeated suggestion that hard scientists tend to tilt conservative because they work in fields with more objectively verifiable facts and standards is both false and a non sequitur. Scientists may be more conservative than humanities academics, but they're still pretty liberal. As Nicholas Thompson reports in a recent Washington Monthly, Republicans have been gradually alienating scientists for four decades:
The split between the GOP and the scientific community began during the administration of Richard Nixon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, protests against the Vietnam War captured the sympathy of the liberal academic community, including many scientists, whose opposition to the war turned them against Nixon. The president characteristically lashed back and, in 1973, abolished the entire White House science advisory team by executive order, fuming that they were all Democrats.
...
By the mid 1990s, the GOP had firmly adopted a new paradigm for dismissing scientists as liberals. Gingrich believed, as Nixon did, that most scientists weren't going to support him politically. "Scientists tend to have an agenda, and it tends to be a liberal political agenda," explains Gingrich's close associate former Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pa.), the former chairman of the House Science Committee. In 1995, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House committee dealing with global warming, called climate change a "liberal claptrap." In interviews with The Washington Post in 2001, Texas Republican Tom DeLay dismissed evolution as unproven, said that we shouldn't need an EPA because "God charges us to be good stewards of the Earth," and denigrated scientific Nobel Prize winners as "liberal and extremist."
No party that panders to creationists while scoffing at Nobel Prize winners can honestly claim to be the party of science and hard-headed, objective thinking. Even top Republican strategists believe that, as a voting bloc, scientists are so liberal as to be a lost cause.
Now, people with business degrees, on the other hand...
(Via TAPPED.)
p.s. While I'm at it, I may as well point out Tim Lambert's examination of junkscience.com (via Crooked Timber), a site that purports to debunk junk science by, among other things, running guest commentary by prominent creationist lawyer Philip Johnson. The proprietor of junkscience.com, Steve Milloy, is an "adjunct scholar" at the Cato Institute, a well-funded and highly influential conservative/libertarian think tank. On the Cato interview linked above, Milloy states proudly:
Explanations of human evolution are not likely to move beyond the stage of hypothesis or conjecture. There is no scientific way - i.e., no experiment or other means of reliable study - for explaining how humans developed. Without a valid scientific method for proving a hypothesis, no indisputable explanation can exist.
The process of evolution can be scientifically demonstrated in some lower life forms, but this is a far cry from explaining how humans developed.
That said, some sort of evolutionary process seems most likely in my opinion. But there will probably always be enough uncertainty in any explanation of human evolution to give critics plenty of room for doubt.
That loud hacking sound you just heard was the sound of someone coughing up whatever shreds of intellectual integrity he had left in order to pander to the right. It's a sound that's all too familiar to scientists who hang around with conservatives.
p.p.s. UPDATE: NY Times reports:
More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.