Leaving the people behind

(Palin) held a meeting as governor three days after giving birth. “I just put down the BlackBerrys and pick up the breast pump,” she said of her life as a working mother. The Times

In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment. (...) Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end. Camille Paglia - Salon

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I think that Camile Paglia has hit on something.

Sarah Palin seems to embody something we could call "frontier feminism" or "working class feminism" and the question that Democrats should be asking themselves is why somebody whose husband in a United Steelworker is a Republican, because the Democrats have gotten lost somewhere.

In the Rooseveltian days when Norman Rockwell painted "Rosie the Riveter" no woman like Sarah Palin would have ever been a Republican.

What is this "frontier or working class" feminism?

There is a feminist joke that outlines it pretty well; it says that Ginger Rogers danced everything that Fred Astaire did... wearing high heels and going backwards.

The great songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller got a good grip on it with Peggy Lee's classic, "WOMAN":

I got a twenty dollar gold piece says
There ain't nothin' I can't do
I can make a dress out of a feed bag
And I can make a man out of you
'Cause I'm a woman
W O M A N

Paglia quotes the 1905 obituary of a frontier woman:

Abigail Becker

Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

My own grandmother Seaton gave birth to my two Uncles in a gold mining camp in northern California and then was a farm wife in Iowa before Roosevelt brought electricity to the farm. Three boys, a homestead, no washing machine, a coal stove... she was small very pretty with black hair and flashing black eyes and played the guitar and sang things like "Annie Laurie" and "Little Brown Jug" in a sweet voice. When she was a young thing she was so pretty and coquette that a jealous and jilted suitor took a shot at her with a pistol through the family dining room window and only thanks to the window glass, the bullet went off course and she only got a superficial wound on her arm. She loved William Jennings Bryant and FDR. Frontier women.

There is this from the Washington Post:

After just a week, Palin is as popular as either Obama or McCain. White women in particular express favorable views of the Alaska governor, according to a newly released Washington Post-ABC News poll. Positive ratings of her spike to 80 percent among white women with children at home and among white women who are evangelical Protestants.

The percentage of white women with "strongly favorable" opinions of McCain jumped 12 percentage points from before the parties' national conventions. And nearly six in 10 white women in the new poll said McCain's selection of Palin increased their confidence in the decisions he would make if elected. In the Post-ABC poll, it is white women who helped McCain erase Obama's late-August advantage and seriously cut into the Democratic nominee's lead as the one who would bring more needed change to Washington.

Republican adviser Juleanna R. Glover calls Palin "the future of the GOP," and that was certainly the consensus at this stop in Ohio on Tuesday. McCain and Palin performed a ritual of Republican politics, speaking from a stage in front of the Golden Lamb Hotel, billed as Ohio's oldest inn. More than 5,000 guests filled the streets, packing it as fully as it had been four years earlier, when President Bush made the same stop.

But this event was more reminiscent of the Clinton campaign earlier this year: Mothers held their young daughters on their shoulders to catch a glimpse of Palin. Women held up pro-Palin signs and wore "I Love Sarah" stickers. One sign read "Working Mom 4 Palin." Another: "Strike Oil with Sarah." And another: "Outspoken Conservative Moms for Palin."Like other women in the crowd, Baron, the home-schooler from Maineville, Ohio, expressed frustration that feminism and women's issues have seemingly been owned by Democrats whose values she does not share.

Julia Burns, 72, a Republican from Lebanon, cut in: "Men had better jump back. Women are going to take over. We're sick and tired of playing by men's rules. We're coming out of the ground, and they had better move out of the way."

The Democrats have gotten lost. How can you have a "people's party" without the people and without their values? DS

From NATO to ONAN

Subtle metaphor of the current American political discourse

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The American presidential campaign is talking about everything but the central question facing the United States: it's rapid decline as the world's hegemonic superpower and the enormous dangers facing the United States and the world if America tries to maintain that fading hegemony.

This "primary contradiction", which could cause millions of lives to be lost and result in unimaginable chaos and impoverishment, is ignored except, perhaps, when presidential candidates suggest increasing military spending or promise to reassert American "leadership".

Both "solutions" are like a terminal cancer patient planning next year's summer vacation. An insane waste of precious time.

Today, I've posted excerpts from two important articles on this theme by John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and my favorite political commentator, William Pfaff.

Please read them very carefully and be prepared to discuss:)

We are back to great-power politics, shifting alliances and spheres of influence. The difference is that the west is no longer in charge. With their different histories and sometimes sharply conflicting interests, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states are not going to form any kind of bloc. But it is these countries that are shaping world development at the start of the 21st century. The US - its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing - is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonizing about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony. Deluded about its true place in the world, the west underestimates the risks of intervening in Russia's near abroad. Russia's weaknesses - demographic decline, cronyism in the economy and a seething sense of national humiliation - are well known, but western vulnerabilities are no less real. Our leaders bore on about Russia needing us as much as we need Russia. In fact, despite a recent blip, investment in Russia is a byproduct of the global market that will continue for as long as it continues to be profitable, whereas Russian energy supplies can be curtailed at will by the Russian government. Economists will tell you the country is too reliant on oil. But the world's oil reserves are peaking while globalisation continues to advance, and Russia stands to gain from any international conflict in which supplies are disrupted. Again, the west needs Russia if the Iranian nuclear crisis is ever to be defused peacefully, and without Russian logistical cooperation Nato forces will find it even harder to bring the aimless, unwinnable war in Afghanistan to any kind of conclusion.(...) Clearly, with the exception of some in "old Europe", our leaders do not know what they are doing. The grandstanding of David Miliband and David Cameron in Ukraine illustrates the point. Blathering about national self-determination and territorial integrity, they seem not to have noticed that the two principles are normally incompatible. Self-determination means secession and the break-up of states. In the Caucasus, a region of multi-sided national enmities, it means a wider war and worsening ethnic cleansing. The stakes are even higher in Ukraine. Deeply divided and with a major Russian naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, the new state will surely be torn apart if an attempt is made to wrench it from Russia's sphere of influence. The country would become a battlefield, with the great powers irresistibly drawn in. Playing with Wilsonian notions of self-determination in these conditions is courting disaster. John Gray - Guardian

__________________

The United States has been invading troublesome Caribbean and Central American neighbors since the mid-19th century. It was what the U.S. Marine Corps did for a living – Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Ronald Reagan absurdly invaded Granada, officially to save American students from dangerous Cuban airport laborers. The senior George Bush invaded Panama to seize President Manuel Noriega, a former employee of the CIA. It has never been explained what those two invasions were really about. There were (widely publicized) clandestine operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All this has been taken for granted as the Monroe Doctrine at work.(...) Today the world’s only expansionist ideological power is the United States, aggressively pushing everywhere, persuading, promoting, and even invading countries for “democracy.” It wants to make everyone democratic “like us,” which in the end means to do as we want them to do. The ideology is meant to be generous, but it is a generosity devoted to the control of energy resources, raw materials, trade, and finance. This makes the U.S. the expanding and aggressive nation in the world today, the one with a “global ideology,” with military power to back it up. This frightens people. When the power doesn’t work as intended, as in the Caucasus, it makes other people frightened, the ones who have bet on the U.S. to advance their own agendas. That is what is changing the geopolitical map. William Pfaff

Meanwhile the American voters play with their dollies. DS

FT's Clive Crook explains Democrat''s genius for losing elections

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In tune with some of the things we have been talking about for the last few days, I wanted to share an article from the Financial Times columnist Clive Crook with you. Crook, who has been very supportive of Obama for most of the campaign so far, has some very interesting observations about the Democratic genius for losing elections. Here are some excerpts from his column:

This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it. Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude.(...) Because it was so unexpected, Sarah Palin’s nomination for the vice-presidency jolted these attitudes to the surface. Ms Palin is a small-town American. It is said that she has only recently acquired a passport. Her husband is a fisherman and production worker. She represents a great slice of the country that the Democrats say they care about – yet her selection induced an apoplectic fit.

For days, the derision poured down from Democratic party talking heads and much of the media too. The idea that “this woman” might be vice-president or even president was literally incomprehensible. The popular liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose act is an endless sneer at the Republican party, noted that John McCain’s case for the presidency was that only he was capable of standing between the US and its enemies, but that should he die he had chosen “this stewardess” to take over. This joke was not – or not only – a complaint about lack of experience. It was also an expression of class disgust. I give Mr Maher credit for daring to say what many Democrats would only insinuate.(...) Voters in small towns and suburbs, forever mocked and condescended to by metropolitan liberals, are attuned to this disdain. Every four years, many take their revenge.(...) The Palin nomination could still misfire for Mr McCain, but the liberal reaction has made it a huge success so far. To avoid endlessly repeating this mistake, Democrats need to learn some respect.

It is ironic that, among leading Democrats the only one who seems to fully understand what Crook is driving at is the born aristocrat Howard Dean. DS

Why so many Americans are so religious

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If we were looking for ways of defining the United States of America, one of the first things that would strike us would be the paradox of its deeply rooted institutions inhabited by constantly uprooted people.

America's constitutional government has provided its citizens with perhaps the longest lasting, least questioned and most stable political environment the world has ever experienced. And it is inhabited by surely the world's most deracinated, rootless, and often unhappy human beings.

What is rooted?

I remember the case of a small village in England, where they discovered an abandoned medieval cemetery with no burials later than 800 years ago. They took DNA samples of the skeletons unearthed and than compared them to those of the contemporary villagers and it turned out that the village schoolteacher was a perfect match for half the graveyard! "Identity" is just something you are born with in most of the world; wars, revolutions, the changing of frontiers or a string of constitutions don't affect it.

That is what our ancestors left behind when they emmigrated to America. Americans often seem obsessed with researching their family trees and so a lucrative business has grown up around the search for "roots". A Spanish friend, who had lived in the states, once remarked, "I can see they might be interested, but in my case, my family has always farmed in the same valley in Asturias and if you went to the parish church, I suppose you would find that Pérezes have been marrying Gómezes and Gómezes marrying Pérezes and baptizing the little Pérez-Gómezes for the last 500 years... What a bore!" Perhaps the Byrds of Virginia could relate to that, but most Americans cannot. It has been 300 years of "so long it's been good to know ya". People uproot and move across the continent for a better job and familiar landmarks disappear with no other thought than for their cash value. Schumpeter calls "creative destruction" what Joni Mitchell calls "they tore down paradise and put up a parking lot".

If we add to that the American divorce rate, the amount of single parent homes and the mobility of the population, then the number of comforting and familiar points of reference -- outside of the Contitution -- surrounding the average American are precious few.

This takes us to the how the economy works.. I have read that something like seventy percent of the US economy is based on consumer spending. To move all that stuff, people have to be made dissatisfied with what they all ready have or who they are. Making people dissatisfied is called "marketing", a science which Americans invented and which they practice more successfully than anyone. I'll quote my standard rant on this:

The entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure.

Americans are hardly ever away from a voice that tells them that they don't measure up to some impossible standard of perfection. The message is like the song by The Who, "all in all you're just another brick in the wall" ...unless you buy what the voice is selling.

This takes us to religion. The basic message of Christianity, especially the Evangelical variety, is that Jesus died in great agony on the cross to redeem those who believe in him, out of pure love for each of them, one at a time, although they have done nothing in particular to deserve this, the most precious of rewards.... and it's free... an "unlimited offer".

This means that a person who has been "born again", no matter if they are fat or have bad breath or don't have a high pay grade are beloved and unique in the eyes of the central figure of Western civilization. Some may not think this is so special but they might admit that it is a culturally more grounded reason to feel special than because the brand of underwear they have on reflects their "unique lifestyle".

That is why, despite much of the grotesque tackiness and fanaticsm of some of it, that, at the risk of sounding condescending, I find the Evangelical movement filled with such promise, because it alone, even without knowing it, is the only serious rebellion against the "unhappiness principal" that drives American capitalism. Joy can be found for free... this is positively "un-American".

That is why I think that some sort of "liberation theology" is finally going to the only idea or movement that is going to change America. I'm sure that most of the Evengelicals that were attending the Republican convention would be horrified to know that British Socialism has its deepest roots in the Baptist and Methodist chapels of Wales and the industrial north of England. But there is no reason to believe that someone who drove the money changers out of the temple is a fan of Ayn Rand's.

I think that America's deeply rooted institutions are now in conflict with out modern globalized economy or as Joe Sleeper says:

obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

There has to be found or be created, an overlap between American progressives and the Evangelicals. That is why I say that we need a new William Jennings Bryant.

Why American religion, which was often populist and defended the poor and the oppressed, has become so right wing is something to take up in future posts. DS

Sarah Palin and the primary contradiction

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Jim Sleeper, over at TPM, has written a very fine post on the Palin effect.

In it he touches on some points that have interested me for some time and which I often write about. In this post I would like to quote Mr. Sleeper and riff on some of his themes.

To begin with he says:

(...) if you didn't sense last night how deeply Sarah Palin channeled some of the country's deepest, most powerful currents of pent-up indignation and yearning, you don't sense the trouble we Democrats are in. (...) Rhetorically, she was the anti-Obama,. She was stirring precisely because she was so artless, matter-of fact, and "American" -- with no cadences or grand, historic resonances, but with plenty of mother wit and shrewdness. Credit her as much as the speechwriters.. The two currents she tapped (...) were riptides of deeply wounded pride and groping loyalty, a yearning for vindication of something that is not to be disparaged at all.

The first such riptide was unleashed by Palin's and Giuliani's accounts of John McCain's career-threatening commitment, a year ago, when his campaign was hopeless, to an American military victory in Iraq, Right or wrong -- and I think it was wrong -- it was a commitment grounded in an uncommon courage that will be dismissed as stupidity only by smart-asses who really want to lose this election.

The second current was tapped by Palin's own grounded, calm confidence that "ordinary people's" common sense - her kind, and a lot of other people's - is what it takes to pull this country through its converging crises.

(...) For some reason, courage and generosity never showed McCain what they showed Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s -- the true dangers of our military-industrial juggernaut in a world where corporations are more powerful and corrupting than states and where the biggest threats to liberty are no longer taxes-taxes-taxes, and the strongest defense of liberty is no longer what now passes for "national security."

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

About all this, they haven't a clue. To find one, their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand, and therefore we may lose the election.

I think Sleeper's mention of Eisenhower is especially fine. To underline that reference, let me quote from Eisenhower's well known speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Today the situation is much worse, but can you imagine any major American political figure, either Republican or Democrat daring to use such language?

Let us have another look at this wonderful paragraph from Sleeper's post:

Trapped into making war for laissez faire, conservatives such as McCain and Palin can't reconcile their yearning for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

This is the center of the whole question, but Sleeper fails to note that neither Obama or Biden or any other major American politician will confront this truth head on or even obliquely. The Democrats are as much a part of the problem, warp and woof, as the Republicans are or ever were.

If Sleeper's paragraph is a masterful summing up of America's central problem. The left should obviously ask "what to do?", which is the question that the left exists to ask.

Obviously the answer is that we should try to change the reality described in the paragraph. The devil, of course, is in the details. Where to begin?

When you organize your days activities, for example, you might make a "to do" list and put the items in order of importance.

One the most useful tools for a political strategist is Mao Tse-Tung's "On Contradiction". Before you laugh and turn away. I suggest you read this quotation from Professor Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), writing about the errors of American foreign policy in the Financial Times:

Mao Zedong, for all his flaws, was a great strategic thinker. He said China always had to deal with its primary contradiction and compromise with its secondary contradiction. When the Soviet Union became the primary contradiction, Mao settled with the US, even though it involved the humiliation of dealing with a power that then recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate ruler. The west must emulate Mao’s pragmatism and focus on its primary contradiction.

Therefore, if America's domestic "primary contradiction" is what Sleeper calls:

obeisance to every whim of global capital, which is abandoning Palin's small-town America and Obama's urban America, a capital whose injustices and consumer palliatives are subverting our republican institutions and character.

And Eisenhower defines as:

this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Then it follows that following Mao's pragmatic logic, the American left much seek allies on the right in order to confront the primary contradiction. The issue of American jobs being outsourced abroad, for example, is something that could find a broad base of agreement among many Democrats and Republicans.

"Compromising on the secondary contradictions" is very painful, it involves leaving cherished principals waiting at the door while the primary contradiction is being attended to. If American militrism and the military industrial complex are seen as the primary contradiction, than something as dear to the hearts of Democrats as Roe Vs. Wade might have to be sacrificed in order to fight it. (Full disclosure: I personally am in favor of women's freedom to choose. As a man, however, I think my opinion is, in fact, irrelevant.

While we are at it, I would ask, why are so many working class and lower middle class Americans so fired up about abortion?

Some commentators in the press have criticized Governor Palin for carrying her youngest son to term when she had been informed that he would be born with Down's Syndrome and at the same time, giving birth to such a child is a strong selling point for Palin throughout much of that America that once voted Democratic. This is an issue where people feel deeply on both sides.

My own theory of this relatively recent impassioned interest in the "right ot life", in a country that approves of the death penalty, ties it directly to the new economy.

The argument for aborting a fetus with Down's Syndrome would be that he or she could not live a useful and productive existance and would thus be a burden on its parents and society.

Do you think that if you were a small town American with just a high school education or only a couple of years in a community college, that you might possibly have cause to identify with such a child? Could we say that great masses of what were America's most productive citizens today might be classed as having "special needs" or being a burden on society?

One of the most interesting things that Mike Huckabee said in his campaign, that showed that interesting things are moving under the surface of American Evangelicalism, was that many "right to life" people only seem interested in children before they are born, once they arrive than it's devil take the hindmost. I consider that one of the most important things any politician of the right has said in a long time. There is some important common ground here.

Let's close with another quote from Jim Sleeper's wonderful post:

their folksy common-sense, defiant courage, and religious faith are more necessary than some of us acknowledge or even understand.

Amen. DS

Another clarification

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I think another teeny, little clarification is in order.

I favor the Republicans this year, because I want them to be left holding the bag.

From a geopolitical point of view, the last couple of years have been like the run up of a roller coaster: You know, the TOCK... TOCK... TOCK...... TOCK that comes just before the wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

All this has been building up for a long time and it not just George W. Bush, Bill Clinton was also a lousy foreign policy president and a lot of what is happening with Russia and with Israel/Palestine today is his fault... we are talking about sixteen straight years of bad decisions and bad policy, which are now coming to a head.

The next four years, whoever is in charge, lots of the chickens will hatch or come home to roost and much of the shit will hit the fan, the mortgage will be foreclosed, or any other metaphor that describes for you the ripening of poisonous fruit. It is very possible that NATO will break up, Mexico may collapse and its entire middle class move north and that even the Israelis may end up looking for a new best friend.

Whoever is in charge is going to get blamed for it all.

Even if Obama were half the statesman his supporters think he is, which he most certainly isn't, there is practically nothing that he could do by now to dodge all these coming disasters and humiliations; they have been built to last with loving care over some time.

Whoever it is, it's going to be "They lost Iraq... They lost Afghanistan ...they lost the Ukraine... They lost the Baltic republics ... They lost Mexico"... Maybe even, "they lost Israel". Frankly I would prefer that the Republicans carried that end of empire can around their neck for all time and not the Democrats... as richly deserving as they might be. Four more years might just get it. It will be good for the world and even better for the USA... in the long run, but the voters won't like it one bit. So I hope for their sake, but especially for the sake of America's working people that the Dems lose this one.

The reason being that sooner or later there is going to have be some serious social legislation passed in the USA: bread and butter stuff like free day care centers for single working mothers with tiny children and huge drug rehab programs to empty the prison system... stuff like that... Might have to sell Abu Dhabi a carrier battle group to pay for it all. The Republicans are never going to do any of those things and if the Democrats are left holding the bag for the collapse of America's empire, then those things are never going to get done... ever.

So I'm rooting for crazy old John and the beautiful Sarah... they'll do fine for madly paddling as the canoe goes over the dam. DS

Pallin: Huckabee with tits?

(Andrew Halcro, who ran as an independent against Palin, said that debating Palin was an exercise in frustration.) "She has a way of walking in a room and filling the room with her presence, so people suddenly forget about their concerns about health care or education or anything else." LA Times

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Ever since I was a kid my birthday, which falls today, September 2nd, almost always coincides with going back to school or work... lifelong, hardly a cause for celebration.

Exactly like when I was a miserable little schoolboy, today is just another day: up at seven and hit the line.

I got a nice present from my wife though, the Egyptian novel, "The Yacoubian Building". It's a beautiful book and was the basis for a beautiful film of the same name. I highly recommend them both.

Back to the business at hand.

____________________________________

Today, I'm working on my Saturday, "dead tree" column, which will be about Russia and I'll probably be posting with some of the material I'm working up on the subject over the next few days. I'm a bit pressed for time, but I'd like to write about the firestorm that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate has produced.

I have been surprised by the virulence of it all, the truly savage, hysterical, Rovian type abuse, an outpouring of sexist, personal and ad hominem attacks that only Barack Obama has had the sense to distance himself from. Something that does credit to his intelligence.

Why so much hostility?

The answer if pretty simple in my opinion, this lady is a monster politician and unless they destroy her and her story before she is really out of the gate; catch her in the political nasciturus stage as it were, then she is going to do to Barack Obama, exactly what Barack Obama did to Hillary Clinton: take the candy right out of his mouth.

This brings me to a question that I keep coming back to over and over again:

Why can't the Democrats, who are supposed to be the "people's party", come up with candidates that connect solidly with "deep" America.

How is it that Sarah Palin is the one who isn't a millionaire, the one who went to a state university, who was a commercial fisherman, (fisherperson?) served on the PTA and whose husband carries a steelworker's union card? Why is this formidable, working woman a Republican?

Why is it that the only Democrat that seems acutely aware of this problem is a born aristocrat like Howard Dean?

To paraphrase the demon Rumsfeld, you go with the working class you have, not with the working class you would like to have.

America's working people are in need of health, education and welfare, but they are also social conservatives. They are religious. Their rejection of much of contemporary life is bringing together Protestants and Catholics for the first time since Luther nailed his stuff to the door.

Why should this automatically be a force for reaction?

There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus Christ that intrinsically supports economic liberalism, military adventures at the expense of health or education or connects in any way with the beggar thy neighborism of the disciples of Ayn Rand.

Why are America's working people so socially conservative and religious?

In my opinion, not because they are "bitter", but because they are terrified.

During the Republican primaries I wrote a couple of pieces about Mike Huckabee's Evangelical populism that received a lot of kind attention. Out of laziness, or pressed for time, I'll quote myself:

The entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. What, despite all its grotesque fanaticism, is truly healthy about all this Evangelical, rapture, mishegoss is that it is a real rebellion against the basic, inhuman tool of the system... Its unhappiness factory.

(...) Of course many of the same old vultures feed off this rebellion, in the same way that they feed off all the other unsatisfaction, but this is a true rebellion for all of that.

(...) Why are so many of the poor of America, white and black, socially conservative? Because without a welfare state, the only institutions that offer any comfort or protection are the church and the family. The family is the first welfare state. Here is Spain where we have a welfare state and a fine public health system, the traditional family is still in place. In the hospital system this means that the operations are fantastic, but the nursing is deficient, because normally the patients are surrounded by solicitous family members carrying bed pans etc and nurses only come around if patient suddenly takes a turn for the worse. In the USA there is no welfare state and the family is also under heavy pressure from the system.

Poor people are terrified: frightened people take comfort where they can. A divorced waitress with two kids who has to take them to an emergency room to treat their asma can't be criticized for being a "Left Behind" enthusiast. There is no better country than America in the whole world to be rich. It is probably the only country in the world where the rich are loved. Conversely there is no worse country in the world to be poor. Of course these people are paranoid, the system literally hates them.

I find any rebellion of the "lower orders" in the USA positive per se. I start from the premise that it is really the poor, the sniggered at, the excluded and the disadvantaged -- what are called the "lower classes" -- that have to be the protagonists of any authentic change. Up till now, all the "struggle" is coming from the top against the down.

What is new is that now it is America's lower middle classes, once the envy of the entire world, that can't pay for health and education any more and find themselves losing their homes and being pushed toward pauperization.

You have to start from where you are.

Perhaps the only thing that the white, black and Latino populations really have in common is their fear and their faith in Jesus.

There has to be rebellion for anything to happen and the culture of the people has to be taken into account. The lower middle class and poor people of America are religious and we have to start from there.

You don't believe in any of it?

If you are truly progressive and want to change the system, then you should say like Henry of Navarre, "Paris vaut bien une messe".

Like Howard Dean, I believe that America's progressives have to make their peace with evangelical America and find defenders of the "little man" that vibrate in the same cultural key as they do. Where is a contemporary William Jennings Bryan? It is absurd that a credible case can be made that the Democrats are elitist. DS

Thought for the day

Mirror, mirror on the wall

"What the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray "Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things are all right, after all." Someone like Bush." Bradley Burston - Haaretz

David Seaton's News Links

Counting chickens before they hatch is something most of us do all the time. Unhatched chickens are so much fatter and tastier than what finally pops out of the egg. I fear that many Democrats are succumbing to that temptation today.

Because of Bush's personal unpopularity it is easy to jump to the conclusion that voters have had an epiphany and that now their hearts and minds are in the progressive camp.

Here are a few things to mull over.

It should give pause to think what astounding levels of stumbling incompetence and how many years of it was needed to bring Bush's ratings to where they are today. It should give pause to think how much Kool-Aid was eagerly drunk before the slightest gag reflex kicked in.

It should give pause to think that Dick Cheney, who makes Richard Nixon look like Macaulay Culkin, has never, in eight years, been in danger of impeachment.

Like a monk with a Zen koan, progressives should roll around in their minds how a lifelong foul ball like Bush was ever nominated in the first place for the world's most important job and how he got reelected when all of today's disasters were easily visible.

The answer to these questions might be that the majority of Americans were always in agreement with what Bush was selling; that they were totally untroubled by the moral implications of things like invading countries that had never harmed or threatened them, or torturing prisoners or wiretapping, but have only come to detest Bush's obviously incompetent execution of those policies... never the policies themselves.

Despite having a larger proportion of university graduates than any other nation on earth Americans give most of the world the impression of not playing with a full deck. Remember that Noam Chomsky (may he live a hundred years) always says that if Americans studied politics with the same attention and sophisticated knowledge with which they study sports it would change the world.

Americans didn't used to be so stupid, once upon a time they were able to follow the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. What exactly has happened to the American brain since then must be very complex.

At the bottom, I think it is because there is a fundamental contradiction between America's republican institutions and its elite's, imperial, hegemonic, obsessions. I have the feeling that it was decided (perhaps by an unspoken consensus) that the only way to preserve America's institutions and to try to rule the world at the same time was to mentally castrate the American population.

The problem is not really Bush, we should be grateful that his abysmal incompetence has allowed us to see how our system actually works, grateful for the mirror he holds up for us. No, I'm afraid that the problem is with Americans themselves: by their fruits ye shall know them: the people themselves will or wont finally change the politics, it will never be the politicians who do it.

The future looks rather frightening, to say the least. We have seen that the American people can tolerate Dick Cheney and yet simultaneously be enchanted by the empty rhetoric of Barack Obama. It follows logically that America's future probably holds a politician who combines the heart of a Cheney and the mouth of an Obama... Hopefully he (or she) will be as incompetent as Bush. DS

Hand of God?

David Seaton's News Links

“I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” (Michael) Moore said, laughing. “To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities – at the top of the Mississippi River.” Business & Media Institute

That's one way of looking at it, but I just read this over on CNN:

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will not attend the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, because of Hurricane Gustav, White House press secretary Dana Perino said Sunday.(...) A senior McCain source said Saturday that officials were considering turning the convention into a massive telethon to raise money for the Red Cross and other agencies to help with hurricane aid. "He wants to do something service oriented if and when the storm hits and it's as bad as it's expected to be now," the McCain source said. They are also hoping to get McCain himself to a storm-affected area as soon as possible. McCain had suggested to a Fox News interviewer that the convention could be suspended if it seemed that a festive gathering was inappropriate in light of the destruction the storm may bring.

So, it turns out that the hand of God will keep both Bush and Cheney from attending the convention... Don't you think that keeping those two politically poisonous individuals away from the convention is something McCain would have been down on his knees praying for?

You bet!

And wouldn't you say having the entire media fixed both on Gustav and the Republican convention 24/7, that this is a God given opportunity for McCain be all over the news cycle and to look, proactive, competent, compassionate and presidential?

A chance for McCain at the scene of one of Bush's greatest disasters, to be "McDifferent" and not McSame?

If I were an Evangelical, which thank God I'm not, I would gather from all this that our Father in heaven is mightily pleased with McCain's Veep pick. DS

Sisyphus: back on the rock pile

David Seaton's News Links
Dear readers, I am back from a richly deserved rest and find myself hot to trot.

Having been totally away from the net, I have a little catching up to do.

I'll try to have something up by Monday the first of September, probably about the war in the Caucasus... too early to tell.

I had a nice vacation, read a couple of good books and watched our young tiger cat have in his first summer in the country, where he earned the titles, "Hammer of Field Mice" and "Destroyer of Flies". Aside from watching eagles and enormous buzzards circle the sky, I did little else.

It's good to be back. Which is really what vacations are all about. DS

Sisyphus rests

"1948"
Eleonore Weil

David Seaton's News Links
This, barring unforeseen events, extremely unforeseen, will be my last post till the beginning of September. On Friday I will begin one of those month long, August vacations that southern Europe is famous for. I'm going up to the mountains to sleep and to read and to walk and to sleep some more.

I won't even read the papers except on weekends, however, I'll be going into a town to a cybercafé about once a week or so to check my mail and I'll moderate any comments here at the blog then. so, if you send any, be patient.

Going away for a month is something I look forward to as a columnist, but dread as a blogger.

As a columnist, I am glad to be relieved of the pressure of my weekly deadline, but as a blogger I feel like Sisyphus rolling my rock up the hill, building readership month after month, only to watch it roll back down the hill in August as many regular readers of News Links, finding nothing new posted, finally drift away... never to return (sniff). This is the story my tracker told me last year and I imagine it will be the same story this year too. So, in September I shall take up my rock and follow Sisyphus... again.

Therefore, to those of you regular readers who drift away, never to return, ciao, it was nice to have you, que te vaya bonito.

For those who do remember to return in September: thank you very much for your persistence and loyalty.

I decided that if there had to be just one set of images to last a whole month the best thing I could do would be to put up a little exhibition of my wife, Eleonore Weil's, latest work in Photoshop. She is a very experienced and talented artiste peintre and she has been working very hard recycling her world into this new medium, as she would like to try her hand at editorial and advertising illustration. I think her stuff is really good. You'll say I say that that's because I'm her husband, but believe me, it's more the other way around.

Who knows, among the summer visitors there might be someone who'd like to send some work her way and the rest of the visitors will get some eye candy.

Neat, huh? That's just a little sample of what she is doing.

Have a nice summer and I hope you'll find your way back to News Links in September. DS

Failing to rewind

David Seaton's News Links

People are all like, "whaddya, whaddya?"

"David, are you endorsing John McCain?"

No, not really.

I thought that the best possible candidate for president this year was Al Gore.... and I still think so.

First, because I consider him the "President in Exile". He won and we were all robbed.

Gore was against the war in Iraq and probably he would have paid attention to the CIA report on Bin-Laden that Condi and Dubya ignored. Much of what has been bad in these eight years, including stiffing Kyoto and torturing prisoners, would surely have been avoided had Gore been installed in the White House in January 2001.

To top it off, Gore is now a Nobel Prize winner. He is universally recognized as a person of "vision" with real live, clearly stated, well known, credible, unflipfloppable positions on some of the most important issues of our time.

Electing him president this year would have been the closest thing to rewinding history I can think of and a true, unmistakable message to the world of the repudiation of George W. Bush and all his works.

Al Gore shouldn't have had to even run for the nomination this year. He should have been drafted at the convention in an act of acclamation with everybody applauding everybody like the sort of thing that the Bulgarian Communist Party used to be famous for.

I understand that some people find Al Gore dull. To those people I suggest they buy a video game and press the buttons till they grow hair on their palms.

As to Barack Obama.

When the Democratic field was narrowed down to Hillary and Obama I had trouble believing how decadent it all was. A "dynastic wife", like Sonia Gandhi or Cristina Kirchner running against a fairy tale. The winner to run against a semi-crippled, septuagenarian of questionable temperament.

This in a country of 300,000,000 people, the richest, most powerful nation on earth, a country that thinks itself "a light unto the nations", a nation of fabled ice-cream.

This is not to deny Barack Obama's talent. Not since Ferdinand Waldo Demara has anyone gone farther with less reality to back him up.

If he had ever been the successful governor of an important state or even the mayor of a big town or done something difficult and dangerous in his short time in the Senate I could buy this. But no.

Who knows, Obama might have made a good Veep on Gore's ticket and after eight years in that office, he would have had an easy, natural shot at the presidency. As it is, if he loses this year simply because people don't want to vote for a "question mark", it is going to set back race relations in the USA by decades. There won't be a black person in America that will ever believe that Obama lost for any other reason than because he was black.

But, that is still no reason to put the atomic bomb in the hands of a "question mark".

So, no, I am not a big fan of McCain's, but he seems real to me.. "The last man left standing". I don't think Dennis Kucinich is going to get elected in a write-in campaign, so I guess that leaves John McCain. DS

Barack Edsel?

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Barack Obama’s Berlin bounce is fading. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 42%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 48% and McCain 45%. Both Obama and McCain are viewed favorably by 56% of voters.(...) Obama enjoyed two very strong nights of polling on Thursday and Friday. His lead grew to six-points for results released on Saturday (see recent daily results). However, polling on Saturday and Sunday showed the candidates much closer with single-day results similar to polling from before the Berlin speech. Obama earns the vote from 77% of Democrats, McCain is supported by 82% of Republicans. Unaffiliated voters are evenly divided.

David Seaton's News Links

It simply isn't happening.

Barack Obama was received like a movie star in Europe and John McCain has had what everyone considered his worst week ever, chock full with fluffs and nonevents. Bloomberg's description is perfect:

Obama's eight-day trip to the Middle East war zones and Europe was almost perfect. The Democratic candidate looked and sounded presidential and reassuring, while avoiding missteps.

The contrasts, often unfairly, with McCain at home were stunning. One looking vigorous in a helicopter over Iraq, the other in a golf cart with former President George H. W. Bush -- 155 years of age between them.

...and yet the polls aren't moving.

I titled this post "Barack Edsel", because I'm actually old enough to remember the Ford "Edsel".

It was the classic, textbook case of an enormous marketing blitz designed to sweep the nation, that didn't sweep.

The father of a friend of mine bought one, neither he nor his kid ever lived it down.

For those of you too young to recall the Edsel fiasco, this is how Wikipedia describes it:

The Edsel was introduced amidst considerable publicity on "E Day"—September 4, 1957. It was promoted by a top-rated television special, The Edsel Show on October 13, but it was not enough to counter the adverse public reaction to the car's styling and conventional build. For months Ford had been circulating rumours that led consumers to expect an entirely new kind of car when in reality the Edsel shared its bodywork with other Ford models.

My reading is that at this time, with the economy in the tank, two wars going badly and Maliki shilling for him, Obama should be at least 20 points ahead of McCain.

I saw the other day, that at this point, Jimmy Carter had a 30 percent lead on Gerald Ford. Obama, on the contrary, has the slimmest of leads and hasn't broken the 50% barrier. (cough, sputter, putt, putt)

Contrary to what many think, I believe that the "undecideds" are looking for the merest excuse to swing to McCain. He can fumble and flub all he wants and it doesn't touch his numbers, but any serious gaffe or "October surprise" will sink Barack Obama like a stone.

It seems to me that McCain would have to be found wandering around Washington confused and unable to find his way home to lose this one. DS

Ich bin ein hawaiianische Chicagolander

The recently arrived-at conventional wisdom that by releasing troops from Iraq, the dire situation in Afghanistan will somehow magically improve also requires a more rigorous scrutiny. McCain and Gates are talking about deploying an additional 10,000 soldiers or three combat brigades there; Obama would send two. That would take total US and Nato force levels to, at most, 82,000 troops, plus 145,000 Afghan army and police of varying reliability. But to attain a lasting improvement in security while creating critical breathing space for reconstruction and institution building, a much larger presence may be deemed necessary. General Dan McNeill, a former Nato commander in Afghanistan, has estimated 300,000 well-trained, disciplined security personnel are needed. Some US counter-insurgency experts say an additional 150,000 fighting soldiers are required. These huge numbers should give pause, especially to Obama. Having opposed the Iraq quagmire and scored political points for doing so, the Democrat is in danger of putting his name to another escalating foreign military adventure that while arguably more justified, is just as likely as Iraq to go badly, bloodily wrong. Simon Tisdall - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
It's true: Barack Obama reminds one of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The grace, the glamor, the "soaring" rhetoric; it's all there.

The ecstatic Berlin crowds (the "extras") complete the picture.

I loved JFK... I was only sixteen when he got elected, I was heartbroken when he was killed. American politics have never recovered from that trauma.

However, part of my growing up politically was to sadly discover that JFK was probably the worst president of my lifetime. Much worse than Jimmy Carter, even worse than "The Decider" himself.

And paradoxically, part, probably the greatest part, of what made JFK so bad, was how well he spoke.

He literally talked the United State of America into Vietnam.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge—and more.

How do you like them apples?

Of course, we found out that we couldn't "pay any price" or "bear any burden" (although we could get a hernia trying) or "meet any hardship" or "support any friend" or "oppose any foe"... Nothing like it...

It was all bullshit and it cost the lives of a couple of million South East Asians and 50,000 Americans and it ruined the dollar and ruined American politics.

If there was any lesson the American people should have learned, it was that one.

Hot off the wires:

This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.(...) People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time.(...) It is in pursuit of those aspirations that a new generation - our generation - must make our mark on history. People of Berlin - and people of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us build on our common history, and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world.

How do you like them apples?

If you stop and think about it, isn't it wonderful, truly God's gift to Americans and to the people of the world at large, that George W. Bush is such a lousy speaker?

Because, have no doubt:

I come before you to say, that this is our time.

This is the moment.

People of Berlin and of the world.

This is the moment...

The moment, that when, and if, this young and brilliant man gets elected President of the United State of America,

That will be the moment, proud citizens, that our time will have come... again... to talk ourselves into some mighty deeeeeeeeeep and righteous shit sir... and that's a natural fact. DS

Sri Sri Radovan Karadzic

Radovan Karadzic

The infamous fugitive, long charged with war crimes, was not in a distant monastery or a dark cave when caught at last, but living in Serbia's capital. Nor was Radovan Karadzic lurking inconspicuously, but instead giving public lectures on alternative medicine before audiences of hundreds.

He was hiding behind an enormous beard, white ponytailed hair topped with an odd black tuft, and a new life so at odds with his myth as to deflect suspicion.(...) The fatigues-wearing leader of the Bosnian Serbs was unrecognizable in a guise that was part guru and part Santa Claus. As Dragan Dabic, the former psychiatrist worked for years in a clinic in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, practicing alternative medicine. He even lectured on videotape at local community centers, in an open and active life that would appear to be an extraordinary risk for one of the world's most wanted men.

"For an older person, he had very many interests," said Maja Djelic, 28, a Belgrade resident who, like Karadzic, wrote for the magazine Healthy Life. She said they also met for coffee and conversations, about acupuncture and the Internet, at a café called Biblioteka in central Belgrade. Karadzic, she recalled, was very interested in improving his Web site.

"He said, when being introduced, 'My name is Dr. Dabic, but call me David,' " she said, adding that the two met last November. During an interview Tuesday, Djelic referred to him as Dr. David, not Karadzic.

"He was really friendly and really open and had a way of speaking with people," Djelic said. She said that he did not speak with a Bosnian accent, and that he seemed like a valuable member of the small alternative-medicine community here, not someone who could have been the force behind the notorious Srebrenica massacre and the deadly siege of Sarajevo.

"I still don't believe it's the same person," she said, though the editor in chief of the magazine confirmed in interviews with numerous news outlets that Karadzic, under his assumed identity, had written for Healthy Life. IHT

David Seaton's News Links
I have been intensely interested in oriental religions and philosophy since I was about ten years old. I must have been one of the youngest kids in "Greater Chicagoland" to have ever read Lao Tze, Suzuki, Alan Watts or the Upanishads, but I confess that despite, or perhaps because of my lifelong, passionate interest in things spiritual, I've come to be wary of almost anyone who might be classed as "New Age" or a spiritual faddist. You know, one week it's yoga, next week reiki, week after that shiatsu or ayaguasca. Like G.K. Chesterton said, people who don't believe in anything end up believing in everything.

That's why I laughed out loud when I read that Radovan Karadzic had disguised himself as a guru and nobody around him ever caught on... No flies on this mass murderer. A perfect disguise.

There are no surroundings imaginable that are as uncritical or less "judgmental": where intense and skeptical scrutiny is more discouraged, than the ones "Dr Dabic" immersed himself in. No safer place for a cynic to hide.

Taking a cue from the article above, I sought out Karadzic's web page (BTW, how many mass murderers do you know that have their own web page?)

Now, my opinion of Radovan Karadzic, up till now, has been simply what I had read in the papers and online when he was doing his mass killing: impersonal reprobation, and a special dislike of his old haircut.

However, just a moment ago on visiting his web page, I came across this collection of "Dr Dabic's Favorite Chinese Proverbs", in English, and they really gave me the creeps. Here is the lot:

10 favorite ancient Chinese proverbs as selected personally by Dr. Dabic:

• Behind every able man, there are always other able men.

• Teacher opens the door, but you must enter by yourself.

• A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion.

• He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them.

• If your strength is small, don't carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don't give advice.

• A flawed diamond is better than a common stone that is perfect.

• Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.

• If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, teach people.

• You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

• The one who gives up his own, should dig two graves.

That last one makes you believe in the devil, doesn't it?

Even the devil can quote scripture.

And what murderous, self-regarding, inhuman vanity hides behind, "A flawed diamond is better than a common stone that is perfect?"

Every proverb in the list is filled with sinister nudges and winks.

How he must of cackled to himself when lecturing to his rapt audiences.

If I ever thought that Karadzic was simply part of Hanna Arendt's "banality of evil"; just another gray, Eichmann-like brick in the wall of the 20th century's mass produced savagery, it disappeared when confronted with Dr Dabic's insolent narcisism.

They say that Karadzic has asked his jailers for a shave and a haircut.

When the barber has finished, that will be the end of the Dr Dabic incarnation. Requiscat in Pace. DS

Going out on a limb: Is it going to be Bobby Jindal?

McCain is seeking a way to wrest the headlines back from Obama and there is some media speculation that he could announce his choice of vice-president this week. He is due to visit New Orleans on Thursday, an unusual location given that Louisiana is not a battlefield state, and that could point to Bobby Jindal, the governor of the state, whose relative youth - he is 37 - and Asian Indian background could be a counter to Obama. McCain's Louisiana visit coincides with the centrepiece of Obama's overseas visit, a speech in Berlin. The columnist Robert Novak, who has good contacts among Republicans, said a decision on vice-president would be made this week. The Guardian

David Seaton's News Links
It looks like McCain is going to try to finesse Obama's "World Tour", by timing his Veep nominee to coincide with it.

I would like to go out on a limb and make a prediction. It´s either going to be Sarah Pallin or Bobby Jindal.

Sarah Pallin would be interesting, she is a wildly popular governor and is so beautiful that it is not even sexist to say so: it only reveals a certain latent heterosexuality on the speaker's part.

Having said that, I don't think it will finally be Sarah Pallin, because the Hillary women who are not going to vote for Obama, are not going to vote for Obama, because they are not going to vote for Obama, and Pallin wouldn't draw one single female vote more out of that group.

I think it is going to be Bobby Jindal.

If McCain chooses Jindal it would be a master stroke.

As a person of color Jindal can run against Obama in ways that McCain can't and his lack of experience is no problem as Obama has set the bar very low on that point.

In fact it could be argued that Jindal has much more actual experience in administrating than either Obama or McCain. He also has strong economic creds among conservatives. Precisely what McCain lacks. He is "modern", witty, socially conservative, a child of immigrants... Brilliant student, Rhodes Scholar... the works.

As the governor of Louisiana he is also a person of color who Southern whites feel comfortable with; also a Catholic, he is a perfect fit for the blue collar Reagan Democrats... And to top it off, if the Republicans are looking for a way for white people to vote against Obama without feeling racist, Jindal is the key.

I think his being a southern governor, an economic whiz (former McKinsey consultant, etc) AND a person of color is practically irresistible... The story of his parents as immigrants plays well to the American Dreaminess ... and to complete the picture, he has a beautiful wife, straight out of a Bollywood film.

Some Democrats, of all people, consider Bobby Jindal too young.

Jindal is a baby, but in the same sense as Obama (if compared to McCain). Jindal is apparently a fiscal conservative cult figure, with a proven record of cost effectiveness. Compared to Obama he has massive experience in actually administrating things. Jindal's main thing is that he is young, smart and dark of hue (sound familiar?) It allows folks who are not convinced by Obama to vote McCain without feeling guilty for having voted against a person of color.

They can vote against "The Audacity of Audacity" without feeling racist.

Many still think McCain will pick Mitt Romney because of his economic credentials, but I don't think it will be Romney because as a Mormon, the social conservatives don't trust him, and independents find his manner distasteful. A McCain-Romney ticket would just look like another bunch of rich white men.

Besides, Mitt Romney would be too boring and wouldn't make much of a media splash. Media splash is very important because it obvious that the media are trying to black out McCain.

Jindal's would splash like hell. He has got most of the Obama media pluses but a much clearer ideological profile. Whether or not you like that profile is another matter. But at least he has a firm point of view.

I have no clear view of Obama except that he really would loooooooooooooove to be president and will say and do anything to get there.

And there are a lot of very suspicious characters, like the NYT and the TV networks, who would also say and do anything to help him.

Why is this?

Because, frankly I think the system is now in panic mode.

As I see it, Barack Obama is the system's "political lightning rod", a man whose mission is to draw off all the progressive energy that is building up in US politics and in one single, brilliant flash, conduct it harmlessly into the ground.

Personally "my inner Lenin", rather than see all that energy wasted, would prefer it kept in the darkening clouds for a rainy day -- and there are some mighty rainy days on the way.

Don't I want "change"?

Of course I do, but it would have to be "change I can believe in"... not a chump's change. DS