By the way, I'm not entirely sure anyone is reading this. But lest any readers, imaginary or real, get the wrong impression: if I could, I would have as much reader-response feedback mechanisms as possible, discussion logs and comment buttons. As it is, I'm not only technologically ignorant but terminally indolent as well. Dulce far niente...

Why liberals persist in pointing out that right-wing attacks are incorrect after the slurs have already been slurred is one of the fundamental questions of early 21st c. political campaigning.

William Saletan, who is usually spot on, exemplifies this trend with a meticulously well-researched, perfectly near to pointless piece in Slate today. We have got to get it into our heads that the accuracy of a charge is nowhere near as important as the longevity, vitriol, and target of it.

We've got incumbents with seats just as safe as those of Tom Delay, Tom Feeney, or Tom Tancredo; what the Barney Frank's, Kenneth Meek's, and Jan Schakowsky's of the Democracy need to do is get a little crazy now and again. If we had prominent Dems rolling around calling out the corruptions petty and grand they see all around them, pushing rumors like the Perry affair as hard as they could, relishing discussion of the planeload of Saudis spirited out of the country in the week after 9/11 and the Bush family's storied Nazi connections, then we would have something.

It really is mind-boggling, this petty contempt for democracy on display in the political press' mass reaction to 11-M... Even the Grey Lady offers up the inexplicably biased

At the same time, the White House and its allies tried to halt any notion that other nations might be tempted to follow Spain's example of bending to terrorists.

I mean, that's so boldly kow-towing to GOP talking points and teenage chauvinistic fantasy it made me think it was an honest mistake, in a paper whose mistakes are never honest, and whose truths are almost always accidental. The Michael Massig article is one long recitation of what's painfully obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention, and for that is totally refreshing.

"Power comes from the barrel of a gun" - Mao

Bush & Co. are, in their own petty vulgarian way, millionaire Maoists. They (along with countless video games and Risk boards) have convinced a huge part of my country that you if you just break enough stuff and kill a sufficient number of enemies you can plant pretty much whatever you want in its stead. And so with Iraq we've unleashed a flood of events the architects of our war policy had never foreseen, primarily because they were living out their own post communist-turned-anti-communist-turned-neo-con-crazy fantasy life, by which the burden of freedom born so tirelessly by America would land on Baghdad with the shock of a bunker buster and the awe of an American flag covering Saddam's sculpted head.

This incessant repetition 'Socialist victory = sneaky Al Qaeda triumph' is really, truly infuriating. The PP lost so dramatically not because of the bombs but because of the lies that followed them. The transparent political calculation behind blaming ETA, to the extent of manipulating the Security Council into a quick resolution improperly blaming the Basque nationalist group, sent Spanish people on to the streets Saturday and to the polls Sunday.

By the way, has no one in the US media taken notice of the fact that tens of millions of Spaniards managed to vote with paper ballots without problems with chads or fears of Rovian mischieviousness...? It's a telling sign of our national fantasia that high-technology (computer voting!!!) solutions are ipso facto not only correct, but expedient, just, and forward-thinking as well. As with so much, the Spanish people are pointing the way forward for a progressive strategy to counter Bush, one that is credibly anti-terrorist and credibly transparent about the real sources of terror. I think very few people in the American political media world realize right now that Zapatero will put forth every effort to arrest as many people with ties to radical Islamist cells, finance, family members as he plausibly can. He'll lend substance to the progressive argument that fighting terror means fighting Al Qaeda, not occupying Iraq. Or so one hopes...

The full horror of 11-M, as the conservative Spanish press is now dubbing the train attacks, only hit me when in the midst of remembering small details about Atocha - the silly indoor rainforest, the security guys checking out travelling girls, the endless cafecitos sipped by anonymous businessmen - I realized that the only equivalent in the US would be the PATH trains exploding underneath Penn Station. If this was the work of Al-Qaeda, not ETA, as both the method and the timing of the attack would seem to indicate, then perhaps the center-right government that wins tomorrow's elections will have to labor under the cloud of having initially and consciously misinformed the populace about the source and meaning of the bombing, and will not become, as Charles Kupchan suggests in Salon.com, a kind of pale euro-version of Bush's America, with right-wing politics and xenophobic distrust elevated to patriotic imperatives.

Masons With Balls

Well, I guess everyone already knew that John Kerry, presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States, and George W. Bush, presumptive President of said States, are both Bones and Skull-men. Now I learn that Dana Milbank, one of the few reporters of prominence willing to beat around the Bush administration, is too...

I mean, I know it's colorful and all, but doesn't this secret society business put anyone off, even a little bit? Not to piss on JFK or W.'s nigh-constitutional right to be proud members of 'secret' societies, but isn't that the kind of aristo chumminess Our Founding Fathers purportedly saved us from?

Favorite McClellanism of the week:

From the March 1 White House Press Briefing...

Q Thank you. Can you describe what the United States knows about the conditions under which President Aristide left Haiti? Do we know, did he leave of his own? Was he forcibly --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, that's nonsense. I would just say -- I've seen some of the reports. Conspiracy theories do nothing to help the Haitian people move forward to a better, more free and more prosperous future.

Loverly, captain... just as the word 'forcibly' rolls off the tongue, Scotty beams up the Darth Vader of conversational bludgeons, the scarlet concept of 'conspiracy theory.' These two words distract even the most intrepid social critics, forcing them to deny that their stories are categorically possible before they press on with the details of how, say, the CIA might be interested in carving out revenue streams from illegal drug sales to finance covert wars against unfriendly regimes... the only cool thing Frederic (yes, no damn k) Jameson ever wrote was that conspiracy theory was the only way of totalizing thought left to late capitalism (and he meant totalizing in a good way, like Lukacs, grasping a totality, not in the bad way, like motherfucking Adorno and that French dude). And in that he was right. Go read V., if you're out of work or beset with leisure; TP endores this Jameson fella's ideas.

[first prize goes to the reader who guesses correctly the country I have in mind... is it Panama? Haiti? Nicaragua? {disclaimer: reader will not receive prize}]

I'm a graduate student at New York University. I study American history, really slavery, capitalism, and how the antebellum state was a whole lot stronger than most historians make it out to be (if it was 'strong' enough to foster genocidal violence against most all Indians east of the Mississippi while maintaining a nation of millions in chains making the cotton that made New Orleans factors and New York shippers and London bankers rich, then well that seems pretty durn strong to me). I'm curious about how piracy and gambling reflect an 'underside' to good ol' legitimate free-market capitalism that gets played as an opposite when it's actually a foundation. And wonder whether or not the fact that most all the white middle class in America got played like simps by the tech crash has anything to do with the current fashionable interest in texas hold 'em and celebrity poker. Liar's Poker, indeed.

Well, since I'm prohibited from posting pictures, by orders of the Blogger directive, I'll have to content myself with links:
This is me in Delft
This is me smoking in Michigan

This began in a moment of fiery ambition wrought by the Dean campaign circa late fall 2003. Now that history has consigned the good doctor to its dustbin, we now lack a certain something called 'purpose.' At least Dean had the good sense to midwife - dialectically, of course - a new breed of progressive politics out of the barren waste of the DLC and its pet consultantocracy. [I get a dollar for every ugly new word from the crawfishing sugar daddies at Merriam-Webster; thanks, Jim!] Where to go now?

Or the content, as yet