Allow me to clear my palate.
I have just read a penny-dreadful, Ned Buntline of a “review” — a sort of compare and contrast of two texts — that is the most pretentious, psycho-babble-filled yammering that I have — as a compensated literary critic for, lo, these thirty two years — ever bloody read. Purportedly, these effete ravings of a pseudo-intellectual mind unschooled in human nature, and yet, by virtue of his having READ books by humans, believing himself to be an expert on the homo that is sapient, are to illuminate the soul of an author, whose opacity only increases in direct proportion to the scrivener’s tenacity: what seemed at first an interesting mystery ends the long and long and LOOOOOONG essay/review/maundering with the author in question opaque even to himself.
That’s some kind of world’s record in the discipline of addle-pated sophistry.
And no, I’m not going to expose you to the biohazard that I’ve just decontaminated from.
No. Never. Absolutely not.
Oh, all right. It’s the vomitous piece in The New Republic, “Invisible Man: Why Barack Obama Can’t Speak Honestly About Race” by David Samuels.
But if you read it, you’ll be SORRRRRRY.
And, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald might just be the tonic, carefully deconstructing what journalistic balance is, in the time of the plague. Er … now. Which saves me the trouble of noting how the mainstream media, from David Gergen on the Colbert Report fer chrissakes, to Peggy Noonan on Hardball to just about anybody who ISN’T a Faux Nooz scumbag (they’re in the septic tank for McCain) uses false equivalence to accuse BOTH campaigns of going “negative.”
Er … John McCain was “palling around” with a convicted banking felon WHILE he was committing his felonies — which included the largest failure in US banking history to that time.
Barack Obama was “palling around” with Chicago’s “Citizen of the Year” for 1997 decades after he was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical response to the Nixonian excesses (like the Kent State massacre) of the 1960s.
The former is relevant and legitimate. Obama didn’t take his family on vacations, free of charge, several years running at Ayers’ private Carribbean estate. McCain didn’t either: he took them at Keating’s Carribbean estate.
The Reich-wing Republithuglicans have successfully managed to equate your grandmother with Charles Manson. (Manson committed crimes; your grandmother got a parking ticket, therefore Manson=your grandmother).
Worse, the amoral and immoral, unjustifiably snobbish and oh-so-jaded press are sniffing, in that high moral dudgeon usually reserved for “sex” stories, about how “negative” the “smear” campaigns from both campaigns are. How AWful! (Sniff, sniff: pecksniff.)
McCain = smear campaign.
Obama = legitimate discussion of a legitimate issue in McCain’s legitimate past.
Sorry.
But this is the most dangerous time.
I heard Rush Limbaugh arguing that the debate was a tie, the clearest and surest measurement that McCain lost. If even Limbaugh realizes the futility of arguing that Cranky McWanderpants “won” that debate in any sense, then you KNOW he lost. (No matter WHAT Caribou Barbie says.)
Faux Nooz insta-pollers rated the debate at 86% for McCain, 12% for Obama, which only indicates that Faux Nooz is the exact opposite of what we call “voter education.”
The stock market dropped another 678 points today, or 2771 points in a week, and it’s too bad it wasn’t a Friday. Now every Ma and Pa Kettle in the country with money in the market will try to cash out. Too jittery to “stay the course,” I’ll predict. Friday may well be a very very ugly day in American economic history.
They call them “panics” for a reason, folks.
Worse, the McCain campaign is becoming desperate, and the Rove vote-stealing machine is kind of creaking into the light of day (or did you think that the ACORN “scandal” was significant in any way OTHER than as a smoke screen? From little ACORNs are mighty oaks hallucinated.)
And here’s what Hemingway knew about bears:
There’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded bear.
(Unless you’re in rhino country, in which case there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded rhino.)
Either way, the McCain camp is wounded, and bearing their racist teeth.
It is very clear that McCain is PHYSICALLY disgusted with Obama. His behavior in the first debate, on the Senate floor and in the second debate make that blatantly obvious. He has said nothing about the “Kill him!” or “he’s a terrorist!” screeches at his rallies. And, as Joe Biden noted today in more polite language of “Say it to his face,” John McCain, big shot war hero and “straight talker” is too much of a pussy to say publicly what he wants to say about Obama, so he hides behind feminine skirts.
Skirts that we’re supposed to give deference to, even as the most foul, UN-Christian slurs come out of their painted faces. (And has anyone noticed that ALL of the McCain surrogates these days are women, because, evidently, it’s OK for a White Woman to say awful things that no White Man can get away with. Like the grinning ghoul, Ms. Botox Rictus, the creature that has never taken a dollar that WASN’T handed her directly or indirectly by Charlie Koch?)
the death rictus of Botox®
Worse, McCain not only can’t control his visceral reactions to Obama, he can’t even acknowledge them. Question: is it to give the old “coded” wink to his racist base?
Worse, he’s been dealing in outright lies as fact check after fact check reveals. You literally can’t trust anything that he SAYS these days. But nobody’s asking the proper question:
Is he lying intentionally? That would mean pretty much what we’ve all assumed. Or is he lying UNINTENTIONALLY? (i.e. he MEANS it). That would mean something far worse.
Frankly, I don’t think John McCain has the superhuman stamina for the job. I am afraid (and would not be surprised if) John McCain may well collapse onstage in the following few weeks. Because of the torture, McCain is at least a decade older, physically, than his 72 years. And it shows at times. Sure, he’s a fine member of the Orange race (his skin color when he gets some R&R), but very often, the strain of the campaign is etched in the face of an old, cranky man who’s increasingly out of touch and prone to horrific borderline PTSD gaffes, like yesterday’s
“My fellow prisoners.” (McCain Loses It: Calls Americans ‘My Fellow Prisoners’)
The Party of Lincoln, meantime, is the party of disenfranchisement, with a special emphasis on disallowing and purging black votes.
Selma, Alabama. How they love your good old days.
John McCain, you are a pile of living shit who has dishonored our flag, our nation and your own life.
In less than four weeks we’ll see if the Republicans can thwart the will of a clear majority of Americans for the third time.
But there will be blood if they do.
And that’s why this is the most dangerous time.
Oh, and David Samuels, pretentious pseudo-critic at the New Republic, are you the price that Goldfarb and Kristol demanded to call off their attack dogs after bullying Franklin Foer, TNR’s editor, into turning his back on Scott Thomas Beauchamp, his own writer?
Kind of like William Kristol was given that gig at the New York Times, even though he works full time for the Times’ sworn enemy, Rupert Murdoch?
McCain is a wounded bear right now, capable of anything.
First a shower to get the stench out of our noses.
THEN: courage.
