h/t to Mike F. for noting that the Paris Review now has their legendary author interviews online, as irresistible to a writer as a ball of twine to a kitten. Oh, and warning, SALTY LANGUAGE AHEAD. If this makes you cry, please read no further.
The time now comes finally to move the book. I have dawdled enough. But it has been a good thing. I don’t yet know what the word rate will be. That will depend on many things. But I do think the hour rate should be fairly constant. I am about finished with these long and characteristic meanderings.
I know exactly what he’s feeling as he writes those words.
The problem is that there is so much that I could say about this election, but no reason to say them: to what point? to what purpose? This weekend will be a soupçon of “gotcha” beginning with the idiotic Gawker “exposé” of Christine O’Donnell’s drunken unconsummated Halloween.
The dictionary usage for soupçon is apt:
Definition of SOUPÇON
: a little bit : trace
- Add just a soupçon of salt.
- the book is filled with cynicism and sarcasm, along with a soupçon of existentialist angst
French, literally, suspicion, from Old French sospeçon, from Latin suspection-, suspectio, from Latin suspicere to suspect
First Known Use: 1766
But soft. What’s that I hear you whisper, Gentle Reader? “What’s he talking about?”
I’m talking signal to noise ratio here, kiddies.
The amount of sheer White Noise is astonishing. (Or, in the case of the Left, the Pink Noise.)
That idiotic attempt to smear Christine O’Donnell, for instance. Considering that the only thing it might garner is sympathy for likeable but utterly nuts Ms. O’Donnell (Our very own Barking Moonbat of the Month), and the tepid quality of the torrid tale, one can only stand aghast or agog that anyone in their right mind published it. Virtually every “commenting” blog on Memeorandum is either a Rightie Kerfluffer™ or an Old Guard Media outlet.
Pink Noise.
And the screech that Bill Clinton asked Kendrick Meek to stand down in the Florida Senate race (where he’s polling at 15% in a three-man race) in favor of sitting governor Charlie Crist, purged from the GOP, etc. so that Crist might defeat Marco Rubio, another “Tea Party” (whatever that means) candidate. Fine. It is a Hobbesian choice, but in the heat of the moment, and feeling his personal self-esteem invalidated, Meek is loudly braying that he’s In The Race To Stay.
Well, what the hell did we expect? In a society almost entirely based on the validation of “look at me” me has got to come first, and not take a bullet for the Team.
All the commenting media? Old Guard “professional” press, sometimes known as the MSM.
White Noise.
So, what’s the point of trying to say anything?
Sarah Palin and the original corporate Tea Party organizer and the Tea Party Express IV have all come together in another phony political kabuki theater drama, all the disparate strains of the “Tea Party” dog and pony show finally on the same bus, but the Narrative is too well entrenched, and too much navel lint has been observed in the two year long psy-ops we’ve been dispirited and disheartened with by a steady Chinese Water Torture drip drip drip of “tea party” and “huge Democratic losses” all goddamned year.
And the Old Guard press that’s commenting on the Bill Clinton/Kendrick Meek story just laps this crap up like it was ambrosia.
Ironically, as ambrosia was said to grant immortality, in this case, the crap they’re knocking back has exactly the opposite effect.
Beware, Dead Tree media, lest “tree” fall out of your sobriquet.
Jeebus. It took Obama two frigging years to meet with five top liberal bloggers.
I have had the opportunity to scan a vast number of Tea Party Express internal documents relating to the firing of Mark Williams, the departure of Deborah Humphreys and Sal Russo’s at times astonishingly hostile statements. But there is no point in writing such a story. The “Cruising to Alaska” story uncovered by Kenneth Vogel of Politico is the second smoking gun he’s found, and the silence this time is every bit as deafening. Even the crickets aren’t showing up.
Because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
Jesus Fucking Christ, you media assholes. You’ve found endless time for a goddamned year to fucking tell ME how the election’s going to turn out, and analyzing the after effects, and otherwise moving furniture and hanging pictures on the walls of your castles in the air, but when any REAL news shows up you DON’T HAVE TIME FOR IT?
What? There’s not a single Brenda Starr or Lois Lane with the moxie to get out there and bust this story open like a cheap piñata? OK, fine.
Here in Oregon, Peter DeFazio speculates off the top of his head that mystery “hedge fund manager” Robert Leroy Mercer might be stealth funding astroturf “Concerned Taxpayers of America” because DeFazio proposed taxing (1%) trading transactions to pay for the Wall Street bailout, and every lazy ass excuse of a reporter instantly says “yuh!” and reprints it as gospel truth.
I’ve spent a lot of time running down and detailing the whole machinery that Mercer runs and the political machinery he is a gear in. What’s frightening is that both involve targeted “investments” to corner markets economic and political.
If they use their computers to target investments, why do we assume they’re not engaged in a computerized, targeted attempt to maximize the number of congressional seats they (and we’re talking the employers, not the lackeys, like the GOP incumbents) own? The evidence suggests EXACTLY this.
Hey! Did anybody notice that George Soros, Robert Mercer and Foster Friess are all big hedge fund managers? The richest men in America got that way by betting on Wall Street and then cashing in their chips to play at the political table. Left or Right, they are outright trying to buy our votes. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. Mark Bloomberg and Jon Corzine. Mark Huffington in California a few years ago.
Sam Zell buying the “the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher, with ten daily newspapers and commuter tabloids including Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and The Morning Call, among others.” (Wikipedia). And running that chain into the dirt. “On December 8, 2008, faced with high debts related to the company going private, Tribune filed for bankruptcy… It was the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry.” (ibid.)
It’s offensive, no matter what the political ideology of the High Rollers is. This should never have devolved into a battle between THEIR zillionaires and OUR zillionaires. We The People have the vote (for the nonce). But if we refuse to exercise that franchise then, inevitably, we’re all just franchise employees.
Look: when 50% of the population has to live on 2.5% of the gross domestic product, they ARE franchise employees, working for peanuts.
We might as well just change the motto on our coins from “In God We Trust” to “Would You Like Fries With That?“
Here’s a bunch of pricks who won’t vote to extend unemployment in the worst economic disaster since the Depression (I grew up in the era of having to hear adults’ Depression stories). And decided to kill middle-class tax cuts, rather than give up tax cuts on the wealthiest bastards ever seen on Earth. Have held up over 400 bills passed by the House of Representatives, and everybody is mad at the DEMOCRATS.
I could try to warn you about what kind of electoral hell the jukes and kallikaks* of the New Know-Nothings — the “No-Nothing” party, as in, “May I put a piece of coal in the stove, Mr. Scrooge?” and the answer: “NO. NOTHING!” — are trying to buy us.
But the signal to noise ratio is just too crappy to bother.
Microencephaly
[* And did anyone notice that 2010 Nissan Juke? Considering that the "Jukes" of the "Juke and Kallikak" study represented inherited criminality (as opposed to Kallikak inherited mental retardation), I suppose it's apt. Just waiting for that 2011 Honda Kallikak. With the "sport" package, of course.]
They’re selling our country right out from under us, and the Old Guard and the blogosphere just keeps picking at the same old belly button lint.
They COULD be out there reporting, but no, they’re endangering the employee of the Boy Scouts of America whose shirt was borrowed for Halloween.
Seriously. How batshit crazy is that?
The Republicans are already crowing about what they’re going to do when they’re all committee chairpersons and Speakers of the House.
Nobody’s seen this kind of pre-electoral triumphalism since Thomas Dewey’s campaign honchos started buying houses in the Washington D.C. suburbs before the 1948 election. Nobody’s seen this kind of naked corporate muscle since William McKinley’s robber baron class a century ago.
Like I told you at the beginning, the Koch machine is going for a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and by their mantra ye shall know them: “limited government and tax and spending cuts.” You know: “Your mortgage isn’t my responsibility.”
But kicking them darkies out of Nevada and Arizona and California, that’s Big Government’s responsibility, and no fencing price is too dear.
Oh, dear.
So what the hell can I say that will make a tinker’s damn worth of difference? The commercial carpet-bombing has begun. The only thing to do is head for the bomb shelters.
Glad to see that the Koch brothers are finally sort of kind of beginning to get their due.
One article in the New Yorker and a couple pieces in the New York Times, and it’s national news. But years of an army of researchers blowing the whistle = nada. Scary just how controlled our national media was and still IS. By just a few “opinion makers.”
Don’t think about how in 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Gary Webb uncovered the CIA’s massive cocaine/crack smuggling operation back during Ray-Gun and Bush the Smarter, and how the New York Times and the Washington Post put the screws to the gutless San Jose Mercury News, who lickspittled the Eastern Media and banished Webb to covering PTA meetings in the suburbs. In 2004, he blew out his brains with a handgun.
Or, how Dan Rather was immolated in full view of the national media for reporting the true story of George W. Bush’s “cuts in line” to get into the Texas Air Guard and out of Vietnam. Walter Cronkite even came out of retirement to piss on Rather (squaring a personal grudge rather than defending the threat to his profession.)
They are my Kitty Genovese. So don’t wonder that I harp on them so often.
Bad enough to not cover the actual news, and do one’s actual job. Worse to become a quisling journalist, a syndicated Fifth Columnist, ushering in teh “Good German” happyspeak of the people who are gaming our electoral system the same way they game their poker bets in Las Vegas. (Betcha didn’t know that Heather Sue Mercer’s fellow World Series of Poker pal at the Bellagio in Las Vegas this year was none other than Robert L. Mercer, her dad.)
And now I hear my congressman (Peter DeFazio) lecturing ME about the Kochs. Lord, what a world.
The Koch pseudo-Libertarians really ARE trying for a hostile takeover of the GOP. Nobody noticed that Koch associate and fellow Cato board member Howie Rich’s man in South Carolina, GOP state chair Katon Dawson, came within seven votes of RNC chairman in 2009, losing out to Michael Steele only on the final ballot. And they were grooming Mark Sanford down there before that hiking accident.
They are STILL (and now openly) trying to buy South Carolina legislative seats.
Hey, look at this. We’ve got five more candidates, including the first two House candidates and lieutenant governor nominee Ken Ard, who have accepted money from a Howard Rich shell corporation or one of his flunkies. It can’t be possible that one would be so hard up that they’d accept money from a guy who has made no bones about basically buying the General Assembly? Someone who only speaks in columns and to people who are friendly to him? It’s something we’ll never understand. Anyway, here’s the next group….
There’s an army of bloggers down there covering it, but neither side seems to be prevailing. Weird.You’d think that in South Carolina, of all places, the simple, localist mantra “He’s from NEW YORK CITY!” would be sufficient to turn Howie toxic. But I suppose that the testimony of green sheets with pictures of dead presidents and treasury secretaries and printers has turned the tide towards tolerance for Brooklyn.
Toomey gets his senate shot in return for honoring “Term Limits” and serving as President of Club for Growth.
Koch and Tesoro and some other Texas oil company (Valero. Nice HQ building) openly flood zillions of bucks into the California “no, we’re too broke not to pollute!” ballot proposition and hire Madison Avenue and Hollywood to show all that it’s the “workingman” who is being benefited.
And the money gushing down the secret sluices is straining the rusting rivets that weren’t designed to handle that amount of corruption.
Because, if you’re the cat, and trying to make sure your services are needed by letting the mice guard the cheese while you “take a walk,” don’t be surprised if all the cheese is gone and there are suddenly a LOT more mice than you had anticipated.
Full employment for propaganda mills and “political professionals.” At least THAT sector of the economy is expanding.
We’ll know on Tuesday.
Meantime, I’m sorry, but it’s just pointless to do any meaningful investigative reporting right now.
I won’t even bother with the final, crushing irony of this shrieking Festival of Mendacity: the selfsame candidates running on “smaller government” and “local control” are running the most expensive campaign in U.S. history, all financed by a national apparatus, sending out-of-district money into all those “local” races.
A “bottom-up” campaign financed from the top down.
Just plug your ears, hunker down and pray for a glorious Wednesday morning. And pray that the American people are a soupçon smarter than the fuzzy navel swillers suspect.
Courage.
[NOTE: THERE IS NO FIRST PART.]
==================
UPDATE: Perfect timing. This came in as a perfect grace note to this post. ( h/t Kevin R .)
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> “Nobody’s seen this kind of pre-electoral triumphalism…”
I do recall some from Karl Rove, before the election in 2006. And some about the inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton.
For what it’s worth.
I understand your point, Anna. But I’m talking about degree, not doctrine or spin-doctoring.
Gloating has always been with us. I’m talking about massive, wide-spread “The election is already over and WE WUN!” and “This is what we’re a gonna do now that we’ve WUN.”
Followed with the pseudo-sagacious and hoary talking heads of the Punditocracy shaking their shaggy skulls and agreeing on the hypothetical “reality,” without ever, ONCE, suggesting that there are multiple probable (and some improbable) outcomes. To them, evidently, this election has been over since February and we merely await the confirmation of the voters.
We haven’t see that in my lifetime, and not since the 1948 election (which didn’t quite turn out as pompously predicted.)