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March 3, 2009 - February 24, 2009

Friday, April 25, 2008

THE WIDENING GYRE. Peculiar things are going on. The falcon is definitely getting mixed signals from the falconer. For example, there are actually two good reasons to watch 60 Minutes this Sunday. When has that ever happened? But if you tune in, you'll get to see Justice Scalia put Leslie Stahl in her place.


Cool. And that's not all. In another reckless move, 60 Minutes is also featuring an interview with the head of the Israeli Air Force, who is given air time to make a point as dead obvious as Scalia's -- that Israel doesn't think Ahmadinejad is joking when he declares Iran's intention of wiping Israel off the map.


Of course, you can expect them to do some CBS-style spinning and misrepresentation, but we know for sure that some of the necessary things do get said on the air -- not on the editing room floor -- by the interviewees. Amazing. (Just remember to change channels before that old bastard Andy Rooney starts squawking at the end of the show.)

Next thing you know, Barack Obama will miraculously agree to appear on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Just kidding. Never gonna happen.


What??!! You don't say! Really?


What do you suppose changed his mind? Could it be the other absolutely unbelievable thing that happened on Fox News this week?


Actually, this kind of turnabout is happening enough on Fox of late to make left-wingers start scratching their heads. Back in January McAuliffe complained about mainstream media bias (?!) to Chris Wallace and even joked with him about Bill Clinton's ugly Fox interview. Then, this week, he was a guest on John Gibson's Fox radio show and utterly trashed MSNBC's Chris Matthews. And McAuliffe isn't the only former DNC chair to start cozying up to the most hated name in cable news. Governor Ed Rendell praised the network in March and again this month, which earned him Keith Olbermann's ultimate plaudit (1:40 in), to which he responded pretty directly on the Charlie Rose Show: "Keith Olbermann should be on the Obama payroll."

It all kind of defies analysis, doesn't it, to hear any Democrats talking this way? It's reminiscent of that terribly ominous scene in Ghostbusters (2:00 in).


Dogs and cats living together. Would that be anything like this?


What the hell is going on? Gingrich is trying to explain it away, but we're inclined to think it's part of some astrological inversion where Mercury is in retrogade and all the houses are misaligned with the planets under a bad rising sign or something. How else would you explain Jenna Bush suddenly -- pointlessly -- volunteering on national TV that she might not vote for John McCain? Or John McCain -- still sorely in need of winning over a recalcitrant conservative base -- going out of his way to slam Bush for a Katrina screw-up most conservatives believe owes more to city and state incompetence than to Washington's?

For that matter, who would have expected that the decisive rebuttal of a Washington Post hit piece on McCain's dangerous temper would have been delivered by arch-Democrat Bob Kerrey? (btw, many hat tips to Hot Air for the above.)

And above all, who out there could possibly have imagined that a New York Times columnist delivering a speech on an Ivy League campus would be physically assaulted as if he were Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan or some doesn't-deserve-to-live scum like that?


Yet in this most extreme circumstance, we can see the beginning of an explanation for the chaos. It's all about the New York Times. For at least a century, the "Paper of Record" has been the linchpin of the intricately interleaved framework of the vast American media-political complex. Everyone from senators to network news producers to small town editorialists to professors and novelists looked to the front page of the Times and its op-ed section for guidance about what was news, what was a legitimate political or social issue, and what didn't count for squat. In a very literal sense, the Gray Lady was the Great Nanny who ordered the way to our current over-protected and hyper-sensitive national culture.

Then she gradually went senile and, frankly, insane. Imposing her will through increasingly inept sons and grandsons, she hired reporters for their color and sex and politics rather than ability, she forgot the meaning of basics like fact-checking and fairness, and she began to embarrass herself in public like a crazy old aunt shouting gibberish in church.

Without her even being aware of it, everyone has stolen silently out of the room. They're loath to admit it, but these days the place everyone looks first to see what's happening is the Drudge Report, where the only criterion for the front (and only) page is sensationalism. If a headline isn't the umpteen-zillionth reworking of "Man Bites Dog," you're out of luck -- unless you can prove that hundreds or thousands have died or maybe possibly might.

"Man Bites Dog" is the approximately correct headline for most of the anomalies we've reviewed here. We've all subtly absorbed the lesson that doing the unexpected is the last way left to get attention in this increasingly silly media circus. So Republicans scorn their own two-term president who has prevented another 9/11 and tilted the odds against al qaeda, blue-chip liberals eviscerate the Clintons for exactly the same attributes they defended tooth-and-claw a decade ago, and everyone everywhere pretends that what used to be called advocacy (and sometimes truth-telling) is some kind of hate crime that gives all decent people a paralyzing anxiety attack. All the also-rans and has-beens and might-be's scramble ceaselessly around with their hands in the air and in each other's pockets, hoping to be the next surprising headline. And, oh yeah, every hack attention-seeker who claims the sky is falling must be some kind of irreproachable saint.

Good God Almighty.

Is this what we want? Is it? It's at least something to think about. Can we really continue in this overwrought, I'm-so-offended, I'm-so-perfect, look-at-meeeeee media hysteria in perpetuity without having some kind of national nervous breakdown? Don't we need SOME adults in the mix? Where might we find them? (HINT: Not at Drudge.) Any ideas?

The New York Times won't be coming to our rescue any time soon in case that's what you were hoping for. Various processes have already been initiated to assess the old gray mare's deterioration with an eye to having her declared incompetent and sent, well, to the glue factory. This is what the Brits call "deep tapioca." Deep indeed. Which may offer some insight as to exactly what kind of glop was hurled at Roger Friedman in his appearance at prestigious Brown University.

P.S. Lest you feel the New York Times is a unique phenomenon, it may help to realize that the London Times is pursuing a similar downward spiral. For just one brief example, here's an op-ed published in that paper by one of its editors (also linked in Drudge btw) who condescendingly observes that America is not ready to elect a black president. Never mind that his dissection of the troubled Obama campaign describes garden-variety political missteps and character issues that could derail any presidential bid. Never mind that the author is a Russian-born London resident whose association with the U.S. could most charitably be summarized as visitor. We're supposed to be impressed with the acuity of his pronouncements on the basis of his superior Euro-intellect. The London Times is also going not-so-gentle into that good night. The one where the lights finally go out, for excellent reasons.

NOTHING STANDS STILL. Thing are moving fast. The Wall Street Journal is imploring us all to begin stockpiling food, only 48 hours after we (as usual) beat them to the punch.

Yes, it's serious. Very serious. Even Bloomberg is sounding the alarm:


What neither WSJ nor Bloomberg is reporting, due no doubt to their mindless thrallitude to the capitalist system, is that casting has already begun for the Anthony Zuiker production, Miami Rice.


According to Zuiker's toadies, the new series will be much sexier and more exciting than CSI Miami, more along the lines of "that old show from the eighties where guys dressed like studs not dweebs, and chicks knew how to get down with a sweet-and-sour takeout dish." The ambiance will be relentlessly high class, because "everyone knows that basmati is just absolutely f___ing IT."

What's especially sinister is that Zuiker insiders are already hinting that the casts of CSI, CSI NY, and CSI Miami will actually be murdered early next season, as bullet-riddled casualties of the new basmati wars, and will be immediately replaced by a range of new shows, including Spanish Rice, L.A.; Gordon Ramsay's London Risotto; and San Francisco Treat. In every case, the new productions will focus on "the deadly life-and-death struggle of exceptionally beautiful people to maintain the world-class quality of their pantries at all costs". And the music will be "f___ing fabulous -- crisp, firm, distinct, and savory. More like it was before American Idol turned pop music into soggy rice pudding."

Yes, we're worried. When Hollywood commits to a new trend as quickly and adamantly as this, it's clear we're looking at a major new cultural phenomenon. Will America be able to survive the "Global War on Nouveau Cusine" (GWONC)? Or will this be one more violent step toward the inevitable comeuppance that's been waiting in the wings, lo these many years, for our stupid, phony palates?

Right now, it doesn't look good.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

THE MORNING AFTER. The candidates, the armies of campaigners, and the mass media task forces are gone now, already descending on hapless Indiana. Pennsylvanians are suddenly alone with the enormous job of recovering from the F5 Primary of 2008. It's a bleak prospect. No matter where one stands, the view is essentially the same -- a landscape blasted and flattened by gales of rhetoric, unending bombardments of broadcast advertising, and swirling vortexes of promises, insults, polls, sound bites, blogs, and ugly photo-ops.


As with any large-scale disaster, there are additional crises emerging as by-products of the initial catastrophe. Every single cheesesteak in Pennsylvania has now been eaten, and there isn't any beer left to wash it down with if you could find one. All the cheap bar-brand liquor is gone too. And Obama staffers drank all the bottled water. Most of the televisions in the state are ruined -- their screens permanently etched with the ghostly image of Barack Obama after nonstop weeks of replaying exactly the same sets of campaign pixels. Most of the arable soil is gone, eroded away by the millions of holes created by yard signs. The telephones have all stopped working, their little ringers blown out by hundreds of thousands of calls from pollsters. The entire network of fiber optic cables has also been burned out by the ruinously heavy traffic of media and political emails. The communication satellites that once served this part of the country are, for the same reason, nothing but dead hulks in space.

Tragically, there seems to be little prospect of emergency aid for the stricken state. FEMA won't help; there's still a Republican in the White House, after all. Governor Ed Rendell is too busy celebrating his candidate's glorious victory to recognize that it has been, for most common folk, not a victory at all but a nightmare of infrastructure destruction. And there are no media left here to tell the story.

We'd send them a sympathy card if there were any address to send it to. If you know of one, let us know.

But the Flyers won. And the Sixers are still one up in their series. Maybe the good citizens of Pennsylvania will find a way to muddle through.

We certainly hope so.

IT MUST BE THE BANKS' FAULT. It's getting bad out there, folks. The Second Great Depression is just around the corner. Unemployment is over 5 percent. Somebody who knows somebody you know is having trouble paying his mortgage. Gas is so expensive that some people are starting to resent their giant SUVs. Others have even been forced to trim their summer vacation plans. And the evil corporate lobbyists who run the economy have already started food rationing.


OMG! Just imagine a worldwide shortage of rice. All those Asian people will starve absolutely to death, and worse, we American victims of the evil capitalist machine that's destroying the global economy won't be able to get any more Nestle Crunch bars, which use puffed rice as a principal ingredient. Stock up now! And don't forget this vital foodstuff:


Are you starting to get it, you opiated proletarian doormats of the bourgeoisie? You better. Time is ticking off the clock even as you're scratching your dumb deluded head.

And don't think the crisis begins and ends with rice. One of the biggest problems has to do with corn. Why? Because all the farmers in Iowa have stopped growing everything else and started growing corn to be used in making ethanol, so our descendants won't die of heatstroke three hundred years from now. Which is good and cool and everyhing, because we all want to save the planet. Problem is, all the corn is going to ethanol, not food, which means that the next thing that'll be rationed is all the stuff we eat where corn is some kind of ingredient. For South Americans that means they'll starve to death, of course, because everything they eat -- from bread to beef -- won't be there without corn. (Unless they can live on ethanol at 8$ a gallon. Maybe they'll still die, but they'll go out singing.)

But for us Americans it's really serious. Which of us would even want to live without this constitutionally guaranteed staple of existence?


Or this?



And that's just the beginning. Do you know what chickens eat? That's right. Corn. We won't have this anymore, either:


We'll all slowly waste away from colds we can't get rid of because there's no chicken noodle soup to clear our bronchia.

Are you terrified yet? They can't do this to us. We have rights. Get to the supermarket right away and buy every package of the stuff we've shown here, pack it away in your fallout shelter, and then start emailing Hillary and Obama to demand that they take all the necessary actions. We want laws. We want programs. We want protection. We want universal junk food insurance.

Today.

A PICK-ME-UP. Pardon me if I sound fatigued. I blogged the Pennsylvania Primary yesterday from beginning to end. Hillary won. Obama lost. Hillary spoke for a few minutes. Then Obama took the stage, in Indiana, and poured on the special magic he is supposed to possess. I tried in vain to see Hillary's victory speech. Instead, every cable news channel seemed to be running and re-running this majestic non-concession speech by Obama all night long.

I'll confess right away that I don't share the universal conviction that he's a great orator. To me, he sounds like an imitation preacher. His whole accent changes when he launches into his periodic rhythms of self-aggrandizing gospel. I see an editor of the Harvard Law Review trying to come off as an inspired backwoods evangelist. I keep expecting him to heal someone. Just for the hell of it. I might be more impressed if he didn't turn immediately into a careful attorney at a deposition whenever there's no teleprompter to feed him his lines. But he does. In debates, he reminds me of every lame, verbose prosecutor CourtTV has televised in its now terminated subversion of respect for the legal profession. In short, Obama the inspirational firebrand leaves me cold. I guess I'm the only one who doesn't see it. Even the National Review and the Weekly Standard are larded with praise for such performances. Is there some obligatory correctness about all this that I've missed again? Probably.

I've honestly been grateful for the less fanciful flights of rhetoric exhibited by Michelle Obama. She seems to come very close to saying what she really means. I've started regarding her as her husband's translator. What is it he's really asking?

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

8:05 am. The air is electric with excitement around here. The polls have opened in Pennsylvania, and all the morning shows have their cameras trained on the action. I haven't actually seen a voter yet, but I've seen a lot of news correspondents bracing for the onslaught. The pundits have checked in on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to declare that Hillary should win by 5, 6, 7, or 8 points but really needs to win by 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11 points to remain credibly in the race. That's pretty clear and definitive, isn't it? Rudy Giuliani has already made the same joke on both CNN and Fox News. Something about a dress. I can see I've got more channel-hopping research to do... I'll be back in a bit.

8:56 am. The cable news channels are still rehashing the same stuff, so I poked around the web a bit. Drudge is building a backdrop for the election campaign consisting of a plunging economy, 5$/gal gas, worldwide famine, and food rationing. That should get the blood pumping for all the agents of change. RealClearPolitics is more sharply focused, with stories on: Obama, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama, Clinton, Obama, Obama, and Obama. Which is a lot like the political commercials have been on Pennsylvania TV in the past couple weeks. Obama even ran multiple ads during one of the Flyers' playoff games this weekend. Hard to imagine that fans of "the hockey" are his best targets for conversion, but who knows?

Late last night, there was an Obama ad on the History Channel or some damn place explaining that we should vote for Obama because every single newspaper in Pennsylvania has endorsed him. This is really hard to figure having watched segments of both candidates' stump speeches most of the morning. Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC was reporting that the issues which matter to voters are the economy, the economy, and the economy. Yet both Clinton and Obama keep saying that the way to fix the economy is to raise taxes on rich people and corporations. Obama wants to double capital gains taxes; Hillary wants to punish high gas prices by charging oil companies a windfall profits tax. They both talk about creating meaningful new jobs.

How does any of this allay the fears of even a moderately self-interested voter? How does government ever "create" a real job that isn't just make-work welfare paid for by taxpayers? How does taking money from the rich and giving it to the government help a single mother trying to pay the rent? How does charging oil companies higher taxes reduce gas prices? Taxes are part of their expenses and when their expenses go up, gas prices go up. How does taking more money from rich people stimulate the economy? Less money in the private sector is somehow supposed to make the economy more prosperous as a whole?

Who really buys this crap? Apparently, all the newspaper editors in Pennsylvania.

11:24 am. Not much news. It seems the news channels are going to stick with their plan of not sharing exit polls. But there is some exit info: Obama has left Pennsylvania for Indiana. That seems a bit extreme, as if he couldn't wait for the very first opportunity to escape from all those small town weirdos he's been trying to placate. Are the few crowds he might speak to in Indiana while keeping an anxious eye on the results back in PA really worth suggesting to Keystoners who haven't voted yet that he couldn't stand a single more minute in their company? I'm sure his handlers know best.

1:02 pm. Sorry I've been gone so long. Got to reading some of those Obama pieces over at RealClearPolitics. Most of them have a very strong line of argument: "There's this, and then there's that, and then again nobody better forget about the other thing." There's one honestly insightful piece in the catalogue. It's here. I also listened to a few minutes of Rush. Unlike all his more polished brethren, he's not mincing words at all. He's called the whole thing: Obama gets the nomination and then gets "creamed" in the general by McCain, although the Repubs will lose enough seats in the Senate and House to give Democrats the votes they need to pass the legislation they want. It's all already a done deal.

So what am I doing sitting here blogging the totally irrelevant Pennsylvania Primary? Following orders. I don't suggest anybody else try doing this, though. Have you ever watched what the cable news channels put on in the daytime? Boring, annoying, sickening muck, mixed in with repetitious you-heard-it-ten-times-before muck and a huge dollop of where-the-F-did-that-come-from muck. An example of the last type -- on the Fox News Channel, three women lawyers, including the host, arguing about whether it's rape if a woman changes her mind during sex and the guy takes a full five seconds to stop. There was no hair-pulling, but all three of them were talking at once several times, and you know what that sounds like. Muck.

You can see why I don't want this primary to be meaningless. I've got a lot invested. And that's why I'm going to go ahead and share this idea with the Hillary camp. It's still not too late to bump the margin up to the 12 to 15 percent edge everybody seems to think would be significant. Here's what you do. Get Hillary a phone hook-up with WIP SportsTalk and all the chief sports correspondents at the Philly TV stations. Have her go live on the air throughout the entire urban area, and promise to use the full power of the federal government to guarantee that Philadelphia will win two major sports championships during her first term. Specifically, that means winning any two of these: the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup, the World Series, or the NBA Championship.

I swear it will work. It's obvious that Democrats believe the government can do absolutely ANYTHING a pandering politician sets his or her mind to. If government can prevent sunspots from warming the planet, make Islamofascists stop hating Jews and Christians by having big friendly meetings in Geneva, and repeal the economic laws that cause cycles of growth and recession, then it can damn sure bulldoze the Eagles to the NFL championship or buy enough officials to secure the Big Kahuna for the Sixers. Philadelphians won't even care how she does it. They're that sick of owners who won't spend the money to be best, players who thank the loyal fans and apologize for the mysterious letdown in the do-or-die game, again, and the permanent also-ran status of professional teams who consistently go to the playoffs and come home losers.

The great thing is that it really is too late for Obama to respond. He's already in Indiana, and the hoosiers he's talking to at the moment wouldn't like it if he dissed the Colts or Pacers by making a counter-offer. Besides, he's already blown his chance. He was right about bitter, just wrong about who. It's not the small town folks in western PA who are seething and clinging to futile consolations. It's the whole damn city of Philadelphia and the rotten, useless, hopeless teams they've clung to for decades without receiving anything in return.

The other great thing is that Philly can't be anywhere near the 115 percent of registered Democrats they normally turn out for an election. Many of them may only have voted once so far today and can easily hit the polls a couple more times before the polls close.

Go for it. If Limbaugh's right, you've got nothing to lose.

2:56 pm. A Sudden Mystery. According to Philly.com, this happened at 2:28 pm:


Is he in two places at once? Or is he, perhaps, following my suggestion from last Tuesday? Can a skillful doppelganger overcome this kind of faux-pas?


Or is somebody making up Obama sightings to conceal his inglorious vamoosing from the fray?

I'm looking into it.

3:11 pm. You know, it's probably time everyone stopped giving Hillary grief about those double-wide hips of hers. She's only packing on the pounds for the common people she loves so much.


Boilermakers and cheesesteaks are by no means the ideal diet for a woman who hopes to be selecting the perfect inaugural ball gown in a few months. Not for the first time this campaign season, I'm actually feeling sorry for her. [Hill: Let's cut to the chase. Eagles and Phillies. That'd bring home all the bacon you need. Sorry. Just a figure of speech.]

4:09 pm. According to MSNBC, the PA Attorney General's office has "confirmed no serious voting issues in Philadelphia." Cool! What a relief. This means that registered Democrats are having no trouble getting into the polling locations, voting four or five times, and then voting -- in accordance with city tradition -- on behalf of all their dead ancestors, relatives, friends, and imaginary acquaintances, as well as any and all Pennsylvania-born felons serving time or completed executions in other states of the union. In a contest as close and crucial as this one, it's exhilarating to know that no corners are being cut. The ever-elusive 120 percent of eligible Democrats voting in Philly is within reach.

The naysayers thought that the retirement of Mayor Street would mangle the city's electoral efficiency. Thankfully, nothing like that seems to be in the cards. Here's an illustration of how it works in the wards of the City of Brotherly Love when all is proceeding smoothly; i.e., Democratically.


Just kidding. KIDDING. It's much worse than that.

5:01 pm. CNN is all over the urgency of keeping voting within strict Pennsylvania laws and traditions. Take a moment to listen to the scrupulously fair voice of the New South as the most trusted name in news tracks the procedures and legalities. (The Cafferty bit at the end is just a bonus for faithful InstaPunk readers.)

5:17 pm. All right. We've entered a dead zone of sorts. Now the cable news channels are beginning their recaps of the day's events, prior to the serious programs that will analyze what we don't know, which are prefatory to the burst of election coverage that will occur when the polls close and all the networks will announce the winner and the oh-so-crucial exit poll results.

It's a good time for wondering. I'm wondering, anyway. Why are Democrats such classic Freudian fruitcakes? They want, they neeeeeed, they have to have a victory in the competition for the presidency of the United States. They've been so single-mindedly in pursuit of this goal for eight years that they've even been compelled to root actively for the defeat of the United States military in a war that crushed a murderous fascistic dictator and offered an old-Democrat-style vision of building an enlightened liberal nation on the ruins of a barbaric, woman-hating cesspool of mass rape, murder, and medieval torture. That's how bad the Democrats wanted to win the presidency.

They actually possessed a clone (admittedly imperfect but determined and savvy) of the only successful Democrat president since FDR (that is RE-elected), and they have chosen -- chosen, mind you -- to trade her in for a rank neophyte with virtually no experience or accomplishments and many dubious associations because... why?

WHY? Their record in the presidency over the past half century is an unmitigated roll of disaster. JFK assassinated and still a figure of epic controversy because of suspicions that his own sexual proclivities, drug use, mob ties, and political recklessness might have implicated him in his own murder. Harry Truman, who flat quit the presidency because he couldn't solve the riddle of Korea. Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the Great Society that destroyed the dignity of African-Americans who had survived slavery and Jim Crow with families intact only to be reduced to "underclass" by the largesse of urban renewal, welfare, and affirmative action. And simultaneously put to the sword an entire nation's trust in the truthfulness of a sworn Commander-in-Chief. Jimmy Carter, who did absolutely everything wrong, no matter what he touched, and acting humble as Uriah Heep, never had the humility to admit a single error. Bill Clinton, who said what everyone wanted to hear, including an intern, and totally failed to anticipate the nature of an extreme external threat to the security of the United States, despite a clear warning at the exact same site where the shit finally hit the fan.

And after all of this, it is THEY who are aggrieved, cheated, betrayed, and persecuted. They fume and rage and curse and accuse and suffer because the American people have shown a persistent reluctance to put them in charge of the nation's highest office. THEY are the smart ones.

So the question is this. What is so smart about a party that insists on nominating the worst possible candidate any party has put forward in a century? Obama is inexperienced compared to a former First Lady??!! His wife is a sullen, resentful beneficiary of exactly the racial policies the Democrats have assured us would heal the black-white divide. His preacher is a prosperous mockery of what it means to be a Christian. His parents were both avowed Marxists. His own life is a dream come true of expensive private schooling, Ivy League college, and ultimately privileged legal education that nevertheless left him feeling embittered about being born in the only nation where a 34-year-old can write an autobiography without having accomplished something notable first and become a millionaire in doing so.

How can the Democrats possibly think we would elect such a, well, punk to be president of the United States? (Trust us this much. We know something about punks. And Obama is a punk. But not in a good way.)

We at Instapunk have never been fond of Hillary. But she's a known quantity. She'll do her best to transform the Democrat Party into the equivalent of the Brit Labor Party. Given the chance, she would probably fail at that. That's the American Way. Then she'd retreat to doing the best she could, given that the ideal is out of reach.

Obama is a totally unknown quantity. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows how far he would go, how deep his hatreds and insecurities are. He's the most dangerous man alive on the American political scene, and this is the person the desperate-to-be-elected Democrat Party has blindly chosen as their man on a white horse. It's insane.

The Democrats are insane. Do you want to know why Bill Clinton has become a loose cannon, red-faced, explosive, and unpredictable? This is why. He has shown the Democrats their only possible route to competing on an equal basis for the presidency. And they'd rather destroy him and his wife than take his advice.

Of course, Obama might still win. In that case, God help us all.

7:07 pm. The cable newsies are starting to drop their hints and show off their production values. CNN has a big set with a big map that makes Wolf Blitzer look like a discount undertaker in his baggy little black suit. MSNBC has Keith Olbermann hairsprayed to a fare-thee-well (but fat as a tick -- Lord!) and Tim Russert who's having a hair day as bad as Cyndi Lauper always did when she was a star. Fox News is dropping little nuggets of non-information from its exit polls: 69 percent of "urban voters" going for Obama, 58 percent of "gun owners" going for Hillary. Late deciders going for Hillary. College-educated going for Obama (Geez. Isn't that a sorry commentary?) White for Hillary. Black for Obama. Color us astonished.

Lou Dobbs is being a disingenuous ass, pretending to be objective and sympathetic to both candidates. Olbermann is trying not to be an ass. Since somebody might actually be watching this time. Russert looks as off-kilter as his hair; he doesn't seem to know who he should be for or how to slant his coverage. Blitzer still -- still -- thinks he really is an objective, impartial journalist. Right now he's talking about "possible voter irregularities." In Philadelphia??!! Of course, the authorities will sort it out. It's not like there are any Republicans around to make it a case of impeachable treason against the unexpressed will of illiterate Americans. Or whatever.

They're just twiddling their thumbs. Come 8 o'clock, they'll all leap like sharks into their one true mission in life, telling us what we're supposed to think about what maybe happened in Pennsylvania.

Now Bill Schneider is weighing in. He's quite ebullient. And Jeffrey Toobin is there, sounding very chirpy. Maybe Obama is doing better in the exit polls than anyone is letting on. Wouldn't that be just fucking GREAT?

Insane.

I'll be back at you when the real results start falling through the media Pachinko machine.

8:18 pm. Exit poll overload. Race itself too close to call. The news networks are all covering their asses now because they don't trust their own exit polls, which historically have over-favored Obama and under-favored Hillary. They think it's racism. It's never occurred to them that all the media-driven polls might reflect resentment of media rather than black people. None of the trends is surprising, and none of the breakdowns can be fitted into a sum that makes mathematical sense in terms of total votes. They're going to make us wait for actual vote counts. What an odd idea.

Obama is winning the affluent, black (92 percent), young, highly educated, and deeply crazed voters. Hillary is winning the white vote (men and women both), seniors, union members, and under 50K a year in income voters. Maybe Obama has close to 50 percent of Democrats based on these demographics, but which set of demographics would you rather have on your side in a general election? I'm just saying.

Interestingly, it turns out that the party which so despises the electoral college uses exactly the same kind of vote apportionment in its delegate assignments. Winning in Philadelphia, which aways goes Democratic in general elections, earns far more delegates proportionally than winning anywhere else in the state. Political democracy, I guess, is as relative a term to Democrats as morality, patriotism, and supporting the troops. They mean by these terms exactly what they choose to mean, given what is most convenient at the moment.

Brit Hume has just conceded that exit polls suggest Hillary is winning by 6 percent, although he also conceded he doesn't trust the exit polls (as I've inferred above.)

It's going to go on like this for a while. When real vote counts begin to add up, I'll post again.

If it matters.

Which maybe it doesn't. It's just been reported that a single mother in Indiana saw a vision of Obama in a slice of buttered toast. Half of South Bend is lined up at her door waiting to bear witness.

Hell, what do votes matter when you're as close to divine as Democrats can accept?

8:45. Fox News has just projected Hillary the winner. Based on exit polls. That they don't trust. Cool. I'll still be back later.

10:09 pm. Hillary is now leading 56 - 46 with 48 percent of the vote counted, but 85 percent of the Philly vote counted. Which means her winning margin could still climb to 10 percent or better. The pundits on the news channels have all had tremendously intelligent things to say about what it all means. Here are a few sample comments:


I doubt if I can improve on those. It's been more than fourteen hours now since I started this damn fool project. I know that both candidates will have some blah blahs of their own to add later on, but I'm done.

And so to bed.

P.S. The Philadelphia Flyers just beat the Washington Capitols in the seventh game of their playoff series, in overtime, after inexplicably failing to play hockey for most of the three regulation periods. Did Hillary make the deal we suggested after all? Under the table? That would be so like the Clintons, wouldn't it?

Probably nothing to it. I'm just saying. Flyers over the Capitols. The Washington Capitols.

P.P.S. Okay. Too keyed up to sleep right away. If you're having the same problem, here's an excellent edition of the always brilliant Charlie Rose Show on a topic that has nothing whatever to do with Hillary-Obama (h/t BlueSuedeViews).


Good night all.

Monday, April 21, 2008

RENASCENT BARBARIANS. I was surprised this morning to discover that both the Drudge Report and RealClearPolitics.com had already moved on from the Pope's visit. The final day of campaigning before the Pennsylvania primary is clearly too fascinating to put aside for a moment, even though everything that could be said about it has already been said hundreds of times.

But I predict there will be more lasting impacts from the Pope's mini-tour of the east coast than from the PA primary. It's just that those impacts won't be easy to count or weigh. I'll mention a few of them here, and I'm sure you'll think of your own as well.

Christianity. The scoffers can't be impressed, but most Americans believe in God and recognize goodness when they see it. Brit Hume referred yesterday to the "beatific sweetness" of Pope Benedict. That was my own overriding impression of the 81-year-old man, fragile, vulnerable yet strong, who presided over a whirlwind of events that would have exhausted most people a third his age. He seemed to be continuously present, sharing his being with enormous crowds and individuals while also appearing to take it all in -- the liturgy, the people, the settings, the symbols, the meanings -- like a sponge. He knew that something deep was happening to the Americans who witnessed him, and he knew that something deep was happening in him. There was, quite appropriately, an air of spring about the proceedings, the renewal of old life after a long winter. It's not a surprise that it happens. What's surprising is the beautiful freshness of each new blossoming.

I think Pope Benedict's visit took everyone by surprise in this way. There are a lot of Roman Catholics in this country, and I'm sure they're more energized by their faith this morning than they were a week ago. There are also a lot of non-Catholic Christians in this country, many of whom are formally and theologically opposed to the papacy (as you can sample in the comments here), but at least a part of most protestant truculence about the pope has to do with the fact that he is the indisputable leader of Christianity in the world. (Not to be flip, but he's the NY Yankees of clerics; hence the aptness of the location of yesterday's mass.) For all but a few gnostic cults, he is the head of an ancient and sprawling family with many cadet and renegade branches, all of whom are nevertheless descended from the same source.

It therefore matters to all Christians who the Pope is, what he says, and how he interacts with us and the world. And when he is admirable and devout in his faith, we can all be proud of him. If we can dispense with denominational pride and jealousy, we can also admit that there is no single other Christian whose prayers at Ground-Zero would mean quite so much. When he is humbled and moved and stricken by the experience, he affirms and helps heal our own pain. That is what happened in the pit of the Towers yesterday. He spread his mantle over all of us and poured balm on such sores as this:


America. There's been a lot of America bashing in the years since 9/11. From the mideast, from Europe, and even from our own fellow citizens, much of it centered on the nation's role as the last but most potent outpost of devout Christianity among the world's major powers. Our exceptional "clinging" to religion when all the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe are virtually empty is supposed to make us backward, buffoonish, dangerous, stupid, and even contemptible. The fact of our continuing religious faith makes it easy to ridicule our lonely prosecution of the war on terror as a crusade launched from a Texas trailer park

Who knows what the Pope thought before he came here? He may have had as wrong an idea about us as we obviously had about him. Since his election, our own mass media have continuously portrayed him as a stiff reactionary academic, a cold and remote placeholder to fill the office while the College of Cardinals searches for a real successor to John Paul II. We learned differently by having the opportunity to see Pope Benedict in action. Why were his eyes so alight throughout the masses and meetings with real Americans? Was it because he, too, had been fed a load of nonsense about who we are? And because he had suddenly discovered that the river of faith flows here more powerfully and less polluted than he had been led to expect?

The Old World may be running out of faith, but we should consider the possibility that it isn't because they're smarter but only because they're exhausted with life itself. We're still the hope of the world because we still want to live, and we still believe life has meaning, as well as individual value. That's why it's doubly important that the Pope prayed at ground Zero. He affirmed that something very terrible had indeed been done to us and that the pain of it is amplified by the fact that we do care so much about every life.

Age. The Democrats and the MSM are readying us for an assault on John McCain's advanced age, which is supposed to make him obsolete, weak, and irrelevant. Pope Benedict drew huge audiences of young people who got to see a vivid example of the fact that age can also bring wisdom, authority, perspective, humility, and irreplaceable gravity. No, John McCain cannot be assumed to possess all these qualities because he is only ten years younger than the Pope, but he may merit a second look from youngsters who have never previously been taught to respect their elders.

There is another kind of age that matters, too. The Roman Catholic Church just proved (again) that it is still possesses mighty if intangible power in the world, even after two millennia that have seen the rise and fall of innumerable other institutions and empires. What does this mean to us? That the power of a beneficent idea can survive if it perseveres and chooses to rebuild and renew itself rather than destroy itself in penance for the mistakes and even crimes that any sufficiently long-lasting entity will commit. The church has not done this by recasting itself as its own opposite or dividing against itself into competing strains of vengeful vandals. It moves, however slowly, to accept responsibility for its own errors, corrects them, and renews its commitment to the core of its values. Pope Benedict could have made token acknowledgment of the sex scandals that have so scarred the American church and moved on. Instead, he brought the subject up with every audience, declared the responsibility of the church to care for the victims, and described the process for making sure it doesn't happen again. There's a lesson here for all institutions, including nations. Always preserve the animating idea and treat failures to live up to that idea as failures of individual people and systems, not of the animating idea. Never cease to aspire.

Obama. Perhaps not in tomorrow's primary, but the papal visit is going to hurt Obama in the general election. He, more than any other candidate, should have made an appearance at one of the events. Christians of all denominations have just been reminded of how much older their faith is than all of the grievances that drive the Obama campaign, which will further aggravate the effect of his remarks about Americans clinging to religion because the job market is bad. Further, the striking sensory phenomena of the Pope's visit -- the gorgeous choirs and singing, the reenactments of ancient liturgy, the sweetness and manifest love of the Pope himself, and the humble awe of the various audiences -- will contrast discordantly with the YouTube rantings of Jeremiah Wright and reverberate for months and years to come. Obama needs to be seen as a Christian, not the muslim of his name or paternity. At a single stroke the papal visit has made it clear that Wright -- and by implication his favorite parishioner -- is far closer to the warrior mullahs of Iran than to the Vicar of Christ on earth. As are the secular crusaders like Bill Maher who wish to demonstrate Obama's goodness by savaging the evils of traditional Christianity.

Maybe RealClearPolitics will get around to considering these intangibles on Wednesday, after the most important political event in the history of life on earth.

XOFF NEWS. According to unnamed sources close to the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Atkinson is fiercely envious of the adulation Pope Benedict received on his American trip and is planning a similar visit of his own.

Schedules are still preliminary, but the American leadership of the Church of England -- The Episcopal Synod of New England Country Clubs -- is reportedly organizing a series of Evening Prayer services that will be held this fall, hopefully in time to help Barack Obama win election to the presidency of the United States.

A brief mission statement for the trip has already been drafted (subject to revision, of course) and says in part:


Individual venues have yet to be finalized, but church officials are hopeful of arranging their biggest events at the Newport Polo Club, the Nantucket Yacht Club, and -- in a rare gesture of exceptional outreach -- the Phladelphia Cricket Club. Hundreds are expected to attend.

************DEVELOPING************

ORDERS. Orders from the Boss. Since I live in the Delaware Valley. I'll be liveblogging coverage of the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. All day tomorrow. Please don't tell anyone. Starting at 8 am or so.

Friday, April 18, 2008

 

Funny Enough. The Pope arrived in the United States, so Bill Maher decided to blast the Catholic Church from his little HBO pillbox calling the Pope the author of the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church and a former Nazi.

I could call Bill Maher names, but that's not very instructive and Mr. Maher's comments betray a very old and very deep American prejudice against the Catholic Church. It's seen in a colonial children's game called Hang the Pope and continues on to this very hour (visit CatholicLeague.org and review the past few years' of press releases). When a Catholic Church was constructed in South Carolina in 1873, the local paper referred to it as “a papist fortification for the troops of an enemy.”

So, Mr. Maher is nothing new.

Had the Catholic Church taken pedophiles and homosexuals among its ranks to a dungeon in the Vatican and beaten and starved them to death you can hear the hue and cry that would go up about the barbaric institution. As it is, the hue and cry is about the complicity with and encouragement of sexual predators by the barbaric institution.

You see, any stick will do when bashing the Catholic Church.

What is the real problem? In a word – incarnation.

The incarnation is what sets Christianity apart from all other religions. It is in the name of Jesus Christ as Emmanuel – God with us.

The ancient Greeks could not tolerate this violation – their world of perfect forms coming down and being corrupted by flesh and blood. It was simply impossible.

The incarnation is also a scandal for other religions that don't like mixing the divine with the human.

Incarnation is carried across two millennia and very close to your home by the Catholic Church as it asserts that it is an institution created by Jesus Christ to perform His work on the earth among men. This work is to be performed by men. Its visible, earthly, flesh and blood leader is the Pope who is protected by the direct supervision of the Holy Spirit to speak unerringly on faith and morals and her priests are empowered to bind and loose on earth with the authority that their actions on earth will be honored and binding in heaven.

It is with this level of incarnation that the Protestants take their leave. For them it is okay that Jesus Christ is God become man, but for God to work and be among men in the form of an institution with a telephone number, an address, and a website? Impossible. For Protestants and others alike, there are just too many bad Popes; too many bad Bishops; too many bad Priests; too many bad Catholics – they're just so, so, so – human. Disgustingly human. And, accordingly, cannot be divine.

So the protestations against the Catholic Church are, at their root, protestations and absolute revulsion at the thought of the incarnation. God cannot be here for here is too base, too defiled, too absurd, too unjust, too unfair – too human.

Consider – it isn't that all the faults and all the horrors you see aren't there, it is that they are there and they are part of the message of Christianity. It is that God is here – as close as He can get to man – and that you can actually get close to Him – as close to Him as you dare.

Welcome to the United States, Pope Benedict.

BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL. Quite unbelievably, some of the conservative bloggers are actually debating whether or not Obama gave Hillary the finger in the clip above. Like Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:


What a crock. All you need do is listen to his patter immediately afterward. He is deliberately saying nothing -- a series of slow, throwaway phrases designed to give the audience an opportunity to enjoy and extend the impact of the gesture. In this instance, he's no sanctimonious preacher but a standup comic milking a dirty joke.

I also loved Morrissey's bottom line answer to his own question about damage: "Probably not, although it’s not exactly classy. In fact, it might have a charm all its own, a warmth and humanity that certainly doesn’t come out when Obama debates."

Please. Charm? A gesture that could only be considered subtle by a junior high-school boy? Warmth and humanity? What would Morrissey call mooning the principal from the windows of the team bus? A miraculous moment of shared spiritual communion?

All of this against the backdrop of the Pope touring America, where "warmth and humanity" were exhibited not by a crude gesture symbolizing sexual penetration at a political rally but by the quick kiss of an infant's forehead during the recessional from a solemn high mass.

Just because a lot of us may have felt like flipping Hillary the bird from the sofa in front of the TV doesn't mean we want a presidential candidate to do it, slyly, in public, in reaction to the first time he hasn't been treated worshipfully by the press in attendance.

There is a difference between public and private behaviors. Yeah, most politicians have had their unguarded moments, including Repubs like Cheney and McCain, when a mic caught them delivering an F-word or equivalent to the face of someone who had angered them deeply. Doing it from a public platform and not even face to face but like a sneak at a distance is infinitely less acceptable. What would our mass media be talking about today if Pope Benedict had made public reference to Bill Maher's slanders and scratched the papal nose with his middle digit? Well, they probably wouldn't be talking about anything else, not even the midwest earthquake.

Think about it. Consider the appalling amount of personal and absolutely vitriolic abuse President George W. Bush has taken in the last seven years. What sort of stampede of condemnation and disdain wouldn't have followed such a juvenile response by the Commander-in-Chief to the equally juvenile assaults he has been required to endure? (Just today, Drudge reports that Mayor Bloomberg is 'excited' about electing an 'adult' president. So maybe GWB should rise to Obama's level and flip one at NYC's incredibly pompous figurehead?) It may be unfortunate for some to think about, but one of the principal responsibilities of the man or woman who occupies the most powerful leadership post in the world is to be a glutton for punishment. They are required to take everyone's meanest, dirtiest, and most vengeful shots without responding in kind. In simpler terms, they have to be real grownups, even more than most of us grownups can manage. What they can't be is little shallow snots who react to a cheap shot or two like a 15-year-old cheerleader who goes all Old Testament on her MySpace page when a BFF steals her boyfriend.

Ed Morrissey should be ashamed of himself. Oddly enough, one of the story links at Hot Air today might help him put this in perspective. It's about a YouTube clip by twenty-somethings intended to make us realize that John McCain is older than dial telephones (not really). Except that there's also reference to the real average age of those who are responsible enough to vote consistently.

I may not like Hillary, but she's a grown woman. In comparison, Obama seems like a self-obsessed Y-Gen chick.

HAIL OH HAIL. We read Wade Pelham's post about the long history of anti-Catholicism, and despite the opening subhead, it just didn't seem "funny enough" to us.

We feel like Otter in "Animal House." What's called for here isn't a nuanced theological discussion but a "really futile and stupid gesture on somebody's part." You know. Ad hominem. Almost nothing whatever to do with the Pope and Catholicism and Nazis. Because what Maher said didn't have anything to do with those things either.

Faithful readers will recall that we outed him almost exactly three years ago as a SCAM. Part of that outing was publishing the fact that he was the son of a Jewish mother and a Roman-Catholic father. (He's also basically a midget, but we'll leave that out of it for now.) So why does he have a mindless hatred of Roman Catholics and a scarily constant paranoia about Nazis lurking in the weeds waiting to do him in?

ONE... TWO... THREE... FOUR... got it yet? Oh!!! He's a screwed up little prick who hated his father and had a weird love-terror-victim response to his relationship with a mother expert at suffering and smothering.

It's rumored that he's going to apologize for calling Pope Benedict a Nazi, but not for what he said about RC-ism as a cult of child molesters. Hmmmm.

Why the one and not the other? After all, we covered the abundant evidence of Pope Benedict's Nazi past here at this site. There's hardly any need to back off on that count. But apologizing for something -- anything -- makes you a kind of martyr. The persecutors are already lining up.


Would Mommy be proud of her little (um, very little) baby for his martryrdom in the name of a (quasi)religious cause? Would it make him feel, for once, that he was standing on a point of principle as opposed to pandering for laughs with the crudest possible jokes an untalented Cornellian could devise in the process of trying to piss off his hated father on national television?

Sure she would. Mommy always loved her little halfwit sociopath. It was Daddy who always knew better than to approve a vicious pint-sized monster just because his own cursed semen was involved.

Work it out, Bill. Maybe somebody out there actually admires you. But even the people who slap you on the back know you're a creep they wouldn't want anywhere near their own private lives and beliefs.

Aaaaaah. That feels better than all the religious rhetoric. A lot better. Which almost rhymes with Otter.

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