For anyone really interested in understanding, or at least really trying to understand, some of the Tea Party folks, the video interview below is a really good one. It was done by the website theyoungturks.com, and the guys who made it have a good laugh at what this woman had to say. Rather than unpacking her comments and trying to understand where she was coming from, instead they only come off like self-righteous, yuck yuck jerks. But if you really listen to her, she’s not a nut or a crazy. She doesn’t always make sense as you’ll see if you take a few moments to check it out. But if you do, bear in mind that it’s a lot harder to do a spontaneous, on camera interview for folks like her who are not experienced than you may think. Words don’t always come out right and trains of thought can get jumbled. But let’s look at what she actually said.

To the question “When did America lose her honor,” she replied “a very long time ago…but I was sleeping…and not paying attention.” Depending upon what your definition of “honor” is, and whether or not it’s “lost,” she nails the larger point exactly. All of our current problems- 100% of them- have been many years, decades, in the making (Bill Clinton sowed the seeds of our Wall Street Meltdown, for example). She says that she didn’t notice because her life “keep rolling along,” and this is true of almost all of us. As citizens the vast, vast majority of us all basically tuned out and ignored what was going on around us, from the banks to corporate corruption to dodgy mortgages to jobs being exported and all the rest. Instead we focused on bigger cars and newer gadgets and leaned ever harder on our own credit cards. As citizens we not only let the swine run the trough, we kept our own snouts in it too, and now we’re getting the bill and it’s shocking. Ben Franklin would be ashamed of us and rightly so.

To the question “What woke you up?” her answer is of the sort that sends the MSNBC crowd howling- “Reverend Wright.” She says that she can’t be convinced that President Obama did not go to Wright’s church for all that time without buying into Wright’s “God Damn America” philosophy. This single idea is not unreasonable. Any political candidate who sat in Jerry Falwell’s church for twenty years should be held accountable for that church too. The reality is that Obama rarely went to that church and probably didn’t pay much attention to what was going on there, which is something he no doubt regrets now. He almost certainly only joined that church because it was a political powerhouse and without Wright it’s unlikely that any of us would know Obama’s name today. He wasn’t exactly seeking out the Good News.

But next, in what seems at first to be a thoughtless contradiction, she claims that Obama is really a secret Muslim, which for many people is the turn off switch for listening to her. But if you really do listen to her, you find that she is not “a hater.” She even goes so far as to say that if he were a Muslim that would be fine as long as he were just open about it (It’s unlikely that she actually means this even saying it shows that she is not just bitter and nasty). The smug interviewer makes great hay from the contradiction between Obama being a “Wright follower” and a “secret Muslim,” but if you take a moment and think about it you can see what this woman is really trying to say.

Without knowing what her own religious views are, though if she was at Beck’s rally it’s highly likely she considers herself “a Christian,” it shouldn’t actually be that surprising that she conflates the radical Reverend Wright with radical Islam. What she hears from both sounds like anti-American demagoguery- from “God Damn America” to “America is the great Satan,” and all the rest of it. For her and so many like her, neither Wright nor Obama espouses what at least a solid quarter of this country, if not more, considers “Christianity,” Wright, because he is clearly an extreme radical, and Obama simply because he doesn’t say anything about Jesus or faith at all beyond the standard presidential boilerplate. Obama does not go to church, any church, and is never seen with a prayer book, singing a hymn or anything else. Unlike Clinton, he doesn’t even try to bullshit it.

What is at the heart of this woman’s words is confusion and fear and we should all relate to that. While we can argue that hows and whys, she is not wrong that the country is in serious and deep trouble. She is right to be scared and it’s to her credit that she has gotten up off the couch to do something about it even if it’s only going to a rally. What is troubling, however, is that like so many of her cohorts she is conflating our economic mess with increasing ethnic diversity and acceptance. That hard times divide people is an all too common theme throughout History across the globe but the reality is that the argument that our diversity makes us stronger does not resonate with people like this woman who are losing their financial power because it’s just not true for her in her world- which she shares with more and more Americans every day. She doesn’t see the top notch heart surgeons, the scientists and inner-city cops of all difference backgrounds and religions. Instead, “diversity” for her has become a code word for “illegal immigrants” and “welfare queens” and people who will sue her if she says the wrong thing. Like a lot of Americans who would never use “the N word” in their own lives she may well resent being told that she can’t use it if she wants to keep her job. Like all of us, she is looking for someone to lead us out of this mess, or at least make a good show of trying.

Clearly at the top of the list of Obama’s biggest mistakes was not to wear a love for Jesus, old school, on his sleeve. His skin color aside, had he done this- bullshitted it as he would have no doubt had to- he would not be facing anywhere near this level of malevolence. During the campaign he was aware, and even lowered himself to so porcine and grubbing a figure as Rick Warren in order to get some Jesus cred. But it was a one night stand and Warren’s Hawaiian shirt, cheese on toothpicks, self-help book brand of Jesus hucksterism was not what people in Middle and Southern America recognize as authentic anyway. It is ever his opaqueness, his seeming lack of a core, that bedevils his relationship with the American people and will almost assuredly result in a one term presidency. It is this opacity that makes so many feel leaderless and adrift at best and highly suspicious at worst. It the vacuum of this opacity that is so easily filled with all of this conspiracy horseshit and thus far Obama has been Dukakis-like in his inability to counter it.

So, yes, the woman in this video makes some confusing statements and the “secret Muslim” stuff is clearly not rooting in anything resembling the truth. But she is not stupid and she is not crazy, and most of all, she is not sitting on her ass. She says: “I think we are truly a divided country, I think that both parties are corrupt, and that each of us has a responsibility to ourselves, our children and this country’s future to pay attention.” She certainly has got that right!

People in America are pissed off, no doubt about it. And rightly so. The America we thought we knew feels like it’s falling apart- and that means all of us not just those who can’t abide a black president. From the run away deficit to Katrina to the bank meltdown to the oil slick filling up the Gulf of Mexico, corruption seems rampant and nobody seems to be able to do anything right anymore. None of us are happy, save a handful of bankers, and few are optimistic about the future. But forget the politics, let’s just talk about good ol’ downright stupid for a moment- and the problem stupid presents for us all.

Is anyone really surprised to find out that Wall Street firms were engaged in shady deals that reaped billions of dollars? No, of course not, but when the average American feels his own pants getting pulled down, he gets upset and grabs a pitchfork and a torch. The reality is simply that our most sacred political agreement has been breached. The age old American axiom- that we don’t really care if government is a grab bag for cronies and corporate interests who line their pockets as long as we, the average American, can hang on to enough of what we earn to live at a basic level of security and consumer comfort. The great problem with a pissed off public is that, untrained as they are in how things really work, they cannot navigate the complexities of solutions and are lead by those who simply call for hanging and burning. That is where we are today and the great problem is that those voices of leadership are, for lack of a better word, stupid.

In one of her speeches during the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin scoffed at wasteful government spending projects like research into fruit flies. As most anyone who took High School Biology should know, and as anyone in the science field will tell you, fruit flies are one of the most valuable subjects for scientific research available because their life cycle is so fast. They are heavily used in genetics research among other things. It was a really stupid thing to say and what’s more damning than just her saying it is that no one on her staff apparently had any clue either. Even if you excuse Ms. Palin for not knowing this herself, as a potential president, she should at the very least have someone around her who does have a clue. But she is stupid surrounded by uniformed.

But the rightly oft-ridiculed Ms. Palin is not alone. Last week Rush Limbaugh told his radio audiences that the oil pumping out into the ocean was not really that big a deal because, like the ocean itself, oil is part of the natural world and nature would absorb it. As Bill Maher noted, mercury is also part of the natural world but you don’t put it in your Cheerios. Crude oil, of course, is not found in the ocean and nature has gone to great lengths to keep them separated. It was an amazingly stupid thing to say and shows just how lacking in basic education Mr. Limbaugh also is.

Remember Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal? He was the Great Brown Hope for the Republican Party for a few minutes until he sashayed into a video performance like a stylist during Fashion Week. Homophobia aside, while the less than macho aura was problem enough for the Republicans, Mr. Jindal also, in that same speech, railed against $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.” “Instead of monitoring volcanoes,” he opined, “what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington.” This comment was worse than either Palin or Limbaugh’s because, ignorant of basic science as those two are, coming from the very state where poor planning created the most notorious disaster this century, you’d think he’d be among the last to ridicule disaster planning. It was a stupid thing to say.

And then there is the increasingly pathetic specter of John McCain as he ransoms his dignity in the face of a challenge to his senate seat from a Neanderthal who can do nothing but mimic. Never known to be a towering intellect, the 2008 presidential campaign revealed an intemperate, scatterbrained airhead with an appalling sense of judgment. This was a person who, with no understanding of the history and dynamics between Russia and its former state Georgia, nevertheless when a conflict broke out rashly proclaimed that American’s “were all Georgians now.” When it turned out that the Georgians themselves initiated the conflict to try to manipulate NATO countries, McCain looked…well, stupid. But there is a pattern here. He made a great show of “suspending” his campaign to return to Washington as the financial crisis unfolded only to sit slumped in a chair with the dumbfounded look of a student facing a test he had no clue about.According to the book Game Change, rather than getting a briefing on the drive from the airport to a meeting at the White House, he instead talked on the phone for an hour about dinner plans and then turn to his briefer at the last minute as he was getting out of the car and asked “what do I kneed to know?”

What ties all of these dimwits together is not conservative or right wing politics. What they all share is the idea that political success is simple and that it’s tied to nostalgia. They think the way to get people’s votes and to win elections is by promising to take them back to the good ol’ days when life too was simple. That is the really stupid idea, because there is never any going back televisions with four channels and dial telephones. The naked reality is that human existence is far more complicated, for good and not so good and that going forward will be difficult but it will also be complex as all progress invariably is. Following pissed off simpletons and hotheads waving pitchforks and torches who don’t understand science ain’t gonna lead any of us back to the past, mythical or otherwise. New Orleans will never be the same and the millions of Spanish speaking immigrants ain’t going anywhere. Our days of being the big, bully, “exceptional American” pig around the world also need to be over if we are going to survive. We are all going to have to learn to live on, and with, less.

It’s understandable that the realities of today’s world, and our diminishing place in it, will cause grief for many Americans who used to view the world as two camps- fellow Americans and those who wish they were. The world is equalizing whether we like it or not and the sooner we all move on from the anger and denial stage towards the bargaining and accepting stages the better it will be for all of us, and more importantly for our children. Stupid won’t get us there and the longer we listen to stupid the harder it will be for all of us.

For all of the jokes and snickering about Sarah Palin and her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, consider this. Girl is getting paid and in a major, major way. For her 45 minute appearance at tonight’s “Tea Party Convention” she will drop a check for $125,000 into her back account. That’s more than she made in a year as governor of Alaska. With an entry fee of over $500, however, the event will be light on those who are actually supposed to constitute the whole “tea bag” movement, the regular Joes and Janes who drive their flag adorned camper vans filled with “Obama the African Lyin’ King” posters from protest event to protest event. Instead it’s a conference for high rollers who want to associate themselves with the movement people who won’t actually be present, let alone represented. It will be like calling an event a black empowerment conference and hiring Jesse Jackson to address a room full of rich white people who want to look like they care. But girl is getting paid and in a major, major way.

Then consider her book. It was written to sell to all those folks in the camper vans and their ilk who consider her a leader and want to hear what she has to say- or rather want to hear her say what they want to say and are sure she wants to say too. But, given her notorious inexperience with the written word, she had Lynn Vincent, a features writer for the uber-conservative World Magazine, write it for her. We can’t know what Vincent’s deal with Palin was, but we can bet pretty safely that it’s a paltry percentage of Palin’s reported $7 million haul.

Lastly, consider her gig at Fox News for which she’s clearly also getting a very fat paycheck. Fox and company are probably smart enough to know that Palin’s value is in direct correlation to her scarcity. The more she’s on the screen, the less valuable she’ll become and they must know that it’s only a matter of time before she’ll say something mind blowingly stupid that will blow her whole deal. Fox’s answer to Rachel Maddow she is clearly not, but she obviously knows this and has zero interest in wading through policy details or masterbating into a microphone for three hours like her pal Limbaugh.

But perhaps she and her snowmobile husband have figured all this out too? Perhaps, after having been through it once and being a national laughingstock, they have zero interest in running for a public office again. Perhaps they know the smart play is to cash in as much as possible while she’s hot enough to command these big checks and before she is relegated, as she most surely will be, to the Ross Perot/Monica Lewinsky pantheon of “used to be’s.” Until then, girl is going to get paid and in a major, major way.

So who’s the real idiot here?

It was bound to happen. In the ever intensifying jockeying for leadership position in the moribund Republican Party someone from the whackjob wing was going to go too far and it was bound to be Newty. Rush, of course, runs his foaming pie hole for the three, fun-filled, hours in the day he’s not putting actual pie into it, and his game is ratings so he’s always going to say outrageous stuff. Sarah Palin is holding her breath like a fangirl who somehow got into the Gossip Girls VIP party and is trying not to blow it and Romney doesn’t have the imagination to come up with anything any zestier than fast food ketchup. Newty was always going to be the one to tank in public because he’s the one who is so convinced of his own righteousness and genius that he doesn’t feel the need to think before he speaks.

Newty showed us all just where the nutty tipping point was when he came out this morning and apologized to Supreme Court Justice candidate Sotomayor for calling her a racist (he actually used the term “reverse racist,” which makes as much sense as calling Obama a “reverse president” but which he and Rush nevertheless must have thought was somehow more moderate). By doing so he suffered a huge blow to whatever Quixotic, Goldwater-falling on the sword, dream he had of running for president because he acknowledged the electoral poison he put in his own well.

First and foremost, Newty is not one given to apologies and the fact that he did it shows just how intense the pressure on him was- and it wasn’t the hapless Michael Steele (whose call it’s doubtful Newty would even take), it was the serious, actually elected office holding wing of the party. These are the folks who are looking at re-election campaigns, and who wield the big check books, and who are trained in polling math. They know that Newty and Rush are loudly signing an operatic death scene for their party and every day that passed with the two of them occupying center stage brought the curtain lowering closer. Until Newty stepped in it.

The happy reality of America today is that, while most of us remain what Nixon called “the silent majority” the ground has significantly shifted under our cultural feet. Even a few years ago, Newty’s comment would have scored the intended points with the Republican base but done little more than roll the eyes of the rest of us. While his words no doubt resonated with those who drink from jugs marked XXX and have names for their guns, the rest of us understand the ever more integrated world we live in- and we don’t hate it. Every day that passes, and every day that hating others becomes less popular makes Newty look like a Mississippi sheriff trying to hold off reality with a fire hose.

Newty and his cohorts embody ugliness and his apology signals that the rest of his party, at least those with real power, don’t want to be associated with it anymore. They may actually be on the mend.

Also posted at Newsvine

During the 2008 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton famously used the image of a telephone ringing in the middle of the night to serve as the ultimate test of Barack Obama as a leader, with the implied suggestion that he was certainly not up to it. In reality, when such a single call does come into the Oval Office, more often than not, it does not bring huge decision moments- but importantly- if it does, the president has many around him with far more experience and knowledge on the subject to advise him. For example, if military action might be required, the president himself is not versed enough on military operations to come up with his own. He will ask for recommendations, and 9 out of 10 times, follow them (one great exception, thankfully, being John Kennedy’s decision not to follow his military advise to invade Cuba). The point being that most of the time world events happen, while hard choices will certainly present themselves, for the most part, courses of action, alliances, etc, are pretty much predetermined. A president will certainly be unfairly judged by the success or failure of those decisions, as Carter is forever seen as a wimp because of the failure of the hostage rescue mission. Once they are launched, these outcomes are far beyond a president’s control. Such presidential decisions are simply a roll of the dice.
But the true tests of a president are not the decisions made in the heat of crisis, but those that are made in the calm and quiet solitude when he himself is in possession of the facts. Lyndon Johnson’s decisions to push for the Voting Rights Act and to escalate the war in Vietnam, or John Kennedy’s apology to the nation after the Bay of Pigs disaster, or George W. Bush’s call to launch a war in Iraq did not happen instantly or because of late night phone calls. These decisions were deliberated long and hard and showed the mind and character of the men who made them. The true test of anyone is when what the do when what is right may be not only inconvenient or hard, but potentially devastating. That is where Barack Obama is at this very moment with regard to allowing prosecutions of Bush Administration officials who broke the law. He has, in fact, the hardest presidential decision to make in almost a hundred years.
The reality is that his predecessor and his administration knowingly, and egregiously broke the law in a naked, cavalier way before the eyes of the whole world. This was not some sort of gray area of finance or tainted campaign contributions which can be obfuscated to the general public. This was torture and war crimes and EVERYONE understands that. The very same eyes around the world that were so appalled by the pictures of Abu Ghraib are now on us all to see what we do about it- what “America” really means.

The problem for Obama, just a hundred days into his presidency, is that doing what is right- allowing justice and evidence to go where they will unfettered by political consideration- would very likely dominate the news for the next year and so inflame an already painfully divided nation as to render it paralyzed. The whole country would be captivated by the spectator sport of seeing how high the actual justice would go, especially given that this is not Watergate and we all already know who the villains are and what they did. It would become like Jaws, with us all watching to see if the shark gets caught in the end except that a very vocal and well funded twenty percent of the country would not only be rooting for the shark, but going for political broke with everything they have to save their name. Given that they control a major network, Fox, and the majority of “talk radio,” it would redefine the term “media circus.”

President Obama- and ignore all the blather about this being anyone else’s decision- is going to have to decide if we are indeed a nation of laws, and that no one is above those laws. We all know it’s not true, that wealthy people get away with more and get lighter sentence when they do get caught. There were virtually no prosecutions for the Savings and Loan fiasco that cost us all billions of dollars, and there are yet to be any indictments for the massive Wall Street frauds we all know happened, yet our prison cells are filled with poor people of color whose crime is smoking and selling weed. But inconveniently for Obama, because of it’s graphic images and global profile this will become the test of American integrity in the world. To be fair, it is a test that almost no other country could ever muster the courage to face, but that is never the measure of leadership. The cure- prison time for the offenders- would be invaluable to not only our standing in the world, but the future of our politics. Future administration’s would think long and hard about breaking the law, and it would mean the almost certain demise of the reckless, cowboy strain of the Republican party that has so damaged us all- if not the national party itself. But after so many revolutions and catastrophes- from the election of the coolest black dude in the country as president to the collapse of Wall Street, the all but certain death of the American car industry, and seemingly on and on, could this national patient take another round of chemotherapy? The answer is, it has to. It simply has no choice.

The one aspect of President Obama that continues to confound his detractors, and what really does make him so different, is how secure his is in his own skin, and how patient he is when it comes to politics. It’s the gift of the long view, something that is absent from most politicians who are too busy nursing grudges and pursuing vendettas around their immediate offices. That’s how American politics works for the most part, and why Obama is such a very different animal. If the GOP wasn’t in bad enough shape right now, few of them realize that Obama has them in a boa constrictor’s grip with the Bush Torture Memos, and he is very slowly squeezing them. The only question, seriously, is how bad does he want to do them. If he wants, he can crush them like the wadded paper his predecessor used to spend his days launching towards the wastepaper basket. The only one who gets it, and feels the pressure, is former Vice President Dick Cheney, which is why he is mounting his defense on Fox News, the only place he can without being asked questions he can’t answer without inviting a subpoena.

Consider the scope of the problem for the the GOP. The Bush Administration is nakedly guilty of war crimes. That’s not a left-wing rant, it’s simply the truth and they all know it- and they knew it at the time. As former State Department policy representative under Condelezza Rice Philip Zelikow’s Foreign Policy article shows, there were clear and dissenting voices within the White House who alerted the Administration to the gross illegality of their ideas- the fact that these were indeed criminal activities. The fact that the Bush Administration took pains to try to round up and destroy all copies of Zelikow’s memo speaks without question to the fact that the knew how damaging their airing would be. Instead of a terrorist embattled administration united in the “war on terror” it would be very clear that there were people inside who were calling this what it was- torture- and that the voices of prudence were shouted down by the most radical faction in the building. And so, the Republican Party now is being squeezed by two problems, the moral one and the political one (and yes, sadly, the two are not always the same). It’s the political problem that poses the most dire storm clouds.

When President Obama released the four “torture memos” that so graphically detailed the gruesome level of “enhanced techniques” that the Bush crowd was allowing, if not even encouraging, he was like a referee tossing the basketball up in the air to start a game. He was not inserting himself as a player, but simply tossed the ball out for the forces in Congress who want to pursue investigations and prosecutions and the Republicans who are now forced to play defense. If congressional hearings to get started, or if a special prosecutor is named as seems all but likely at this point, with midterm elections a year and a half away, Republicans have to ask themselves long and hard how they want to play this. Given not only how viscerally disturbing this will all be, but how seriously fucked up the day to day running of the Bush White House was, they have to know that once this starts to unravel it’s going to be a jawdropping media circus. One by one, more and more indefensible arguments, conversations and memos are going to be uncovered, and each one will be yet another paper cut in the Republican Party. Will Republicans really want to go to the voters defending Bush and Cheney as the “party of torture?” Or will they do what most have already done regarding Bush’s budgets- abandon ship and join the rest of us. But either way, if Obama wants to he can slowly squeeze the GOP elephant over the next year and a half, but he won’t kill it. He needs it to be weak but alive in four years, rather than face an energetic phoenix that would have to replace the vacuum it left.

Yesterday, on ABC’s This Week, Newt Gingrich previewed a likely Republican strategy for 2012 by again venting his frustration and criticism of the Obama Administration’s apparent inaction in the face of a wide morass of international challenges. Somali pirates, North Korea’s missile launch, Iran’s advance towards nuclear weapons were all bully’s on the beach kicking sand into the skinny Obama kid’s face to which he was too much of a wuss to respond. It was the “Democrats are soft on national defense” theme song being struck up again and for a party on the verge of regional extinction digging up the old hits makes perfect sense. Actually reinventing themselves around the contemporary world is a daunting challenge indeed for people who question Evolution and whose base believes in the power of prayer and can only order food from menus with pictures on them.

What Newt had to say makes for good sound, just the way George Bush sounded good to American ears shouting into a bullhorn at Ground Zero that “the people who did this will hear from us soon.” The problem is that while it makes the Yahoo’s stomp their feet and yell “Fuckin’ A,” the reality is that both men are totally, and unquestionably, full of shit. “Those that did this” never heard diddly squat from George, who was, as they say in Texas, “all hat and no cattle.”

When you look around us, we do not see the America of the last generation that defeated the Nazi’s and the Imperial Japanese in the world’s greatest war. We are certainly well enough armed, and could quickly become well enough manned and motivated if another similar enemy ever materialized, but that is clearly not going to happen. Conventional warfare between countries is not over because people all of a sudden decided war is bad, it’s just over because it makes no more sense than opening veins and bleeding people to cure them. Conventional war is too costly, kills too many people, and worst of all makes too much of a mess that has to be cleaned up at great expense to the victor. What does make sense in the 21st century, as anyone who’s been awake has witnessed, is guerilla and insurgency- and terrorist- tactics. It’s really not that complicated, it’s just like the Olympics. If one country totally dominates an event people look for others they can compete at. If you have no chance in the 100 meter hardware and uniformed soldiers event, you try the bomb hurling. But just because we can’t find anyone to compete in our event doesn’t mean the Olympics ends.

So what does this mean?

It means, quite simply, that there is really nothing we can do about North Korea’s missile or Iran’s nuclear program. Nor could Harry Truman be reasonably accused of “losing China to Communism” as he was- but he let that foolishly egg him into jumping into the Korean mess. The reality that Newt and others who grew up in the immediate post-war era can’t get their mind around is that we are only 2% of the world’s population and we can’t control the other 98. Back in the 1950’s, with the world’s premiere military and economy, and the smoke still clearing from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we were the big swinging dick in the world. But like most big swinging dicks, we over reached first in Korea, then Vietnam and then in Somalia and then in Iraq, the doozie of them all. The reality is that we have become the world’s Kevin Costner. We still think of ourselves as an Oscar winning movie star, but everyone else only sees Waterworld and The Postman and other smaller, but no less disastrous efforts. While it’s true that we do many good things- Tsunami relief and AIDS work, nevertheless, our name has become synonymous with military foreign policy disaster and rightly so. As George W. Bush learned, we are no longer the big kid on the playground who can just threaten to beat the shit out of any other kid who pisses us off. While most of us are loathe to admit it, we’ve been publicly beat now not once, not twice, but THREE times. Our threats now ring as hollow as a homeless on a park bench punching the air which is why the Iranians and North Koreans- the the Somali pirates- dismiss us as they do.

So, like Kevin Costner, Newt and the rest of us simply have to ratchet down our self image. We are simply not capable of the big budget production number anymore. We can’t really do anything about Kim Jung Il and the North Korean regime, or the Iranian nuclear weapon. We could try to bomb them or sanction them or yell at them through a bullhorn, but none would produce any result any more than taking a knife and scraping off a poison oak rash. As the Obama Administration will hopefully soon figure out in it’s equally futile attempt in Afghanistan, all we get-over and over- is a bloody mess.

There are times in our lives when really obvious axioms become, well, finally obvious. Such a moment happened to me some years back during a rally at UC Berkeley over “Affirmative Action.” The main courtyard was filled with angry protesters shouting, waving signs and all the rest of it. Once particularly vocal protester was only a few feet away, and out of curiosity, I asked him just what he thought “Affirmative Action” was, or what it should be. After first dolling out boilerplate drivel about equality and all the rest, he confessed that he didn’t actually know. But, he said, that didn’t matter because that wasn’t really why he was there. The real reason, he told me as he produced a clipboard, was to get signatures to demand that the United States give California back to Mexico. Not even sell, but just give it back. It was one, needless to say, of the better laughs I’d had in some time but it also illustrated the obvious fact that this protest, like most of them, was not at all what it might look like. It was not the manifestation of public sentiment, it was simply a turd magnet.

Today in London we are seeing this writ much larger, and quite frankly, even more ridiculous. There is certainly a serious issue on the table with the global economy, and rage against the bankers is real, no doubt. But the folks filling the streets near the Bank Underground Station are not normal citizens upset about the banks. They are the lunatic fringe taking the opportunity of someone else’s party to get drunk (notice in the image at left, for example, a large banner of a panda, the logo of the World Wildlife Fund). We are talking about “Anarchists,” a rich assortment of clueless losers who promote the total breakdown of society, which is a reality that would horrify them should it ever happen. Awoken too were the old “Socialists” who once proudly carried the banner of Marxism in a variety of re-invented and watered down forms. Transgenders against the war in Iraq have also made an appearance as had hundreds of others who can’t pass up an opportunity to dress up in costumes or to show up hoping that their “passion for justice” will get them laid. Or, of course, both.

The lesson here is clear. Governments need to avoid to this sort of hooliganism by keeping any single issue from swelling up enough to get anyone out in the street in the first place. Once that happens it simply opens the door for the flotsam and jetsam of splinter nutcases to join the party. That is, of course, easier said that done because governments have to make unpopular decisions sometimes, and events routinely envelope them. It’s going to happen, and these events make for great television so they will continue to be covered ad nauseum. But we should never be confused about what we’re seeing. These protests are not the voices of the people, they are the clusterfucks of the disenfranchised lunatic fringe and should be treated as such.

Surveying the field of potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012 it looked as though there was only one serious contender to President Obama’s re-election chances, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Bright, ambitious, articulate, experienced as a congressman and a governor, Jindal looked to be in pole position to take over his floundering party. His competition, the inflatable Ken doll Mitt Romney, Christian Whacko Mike Huckabee and the mentally incontinent Sarah Palin, are all poised to be blown past by anyone who can speak in complete sentences and not make 75% of the country laugh out loud. Jindal looked to be the Porsche in the race of Ford Fiestas…until last night’s nationally televised “coming out party,” his rebuttal to President Obama’s first major speech before the congressional joint session. Instead of looking like the future of the Republican Party, Jindal fumbled the ball in embarrassing fashion and served himself up as a main course to be feasted upon by the Jon Stewarts, Bill Mahers, Steven Colberts and SNL’s of the world who have been so starved for material of late. From his ill-advised entrance, where he sashayed like an American Idol contestant about to embarrass himself with a Madonna number, and his stilted teleprompter reading, to the laughably outdated content of his speech, Jindal looked more like a guy running for student body president than national office. In a word, “lightweight.” He’s “the Beav” of the party.

Small men have never had an easy time in American politics. With the sole exception of George McGovern, the taller man has never lost a presidential election. By walking to the podium last night, with his suit unbuttoned, the thin, diminutive governor looked like he still shops in the Boys Department and made Micheal Dukakis look like Mike Tyson. Optics are not everything, of course, and once in place, a good showing on the speech would have been redemptive. Instead, he did the one thing you can’t do in American politics- read folksy. Folksy is very effective, as Sarah Palin’s popularity attests, but it can’t be read from a teleprompter. “Aw shucks” stories about the local sheriff or the lady in the diner have to come across authentically which takes a skill that, to put it generously, Mr. Jindal needs to work on. And, given that he is the son of immigrants from India, and that his main audience is the lilly-white Republican base, he’ll need twice as much skill to make folksy work. It won’t be easy for him to wear safety goggles or to hold a can of Pabst and spit chewing tobacco without looking ridiculous.

But the most surprising thing was the actual speech itself. Instead of an up-and-comer who was going to re-invent what is clearly a broken party, Jindal simply trotted out the same old hackneyed Republican dog and pony show- government off our backs, less regulation, tax cuts as the salvation, etc. Instead of new leadership and vision it’s as though Jindal has either not been paying attention or he just thinks that same ol’ bullshit will sell over and over. It will, of course, with the Limbaugh base but 15% of the population won’t win nationally. The most likely plan simmering in his wee little brain is simply to push all his chips out onto the table, including passing on some of the stimulus money, and bet that he can point to the inevitable boondoggle and claim it was all a failure and a waste of money. It’s a gambit to counter the devastating reality that, for the second time in the last hundred years a Democrat has had to marshall the forces of the government to save Republican capitalism from itself. To do this, he is also betting that his communication skills will prove better than Barack Obama’s. Good luck with that Bobby…

The calculus for this latest cabinet debacle for the Obama Administration is easy enough to understand. With so much else going on, and with Commerce Secretary being such a B List gig, after the other fiascoes they just needed to put a warm body into the seat and New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg fit the bill. A thoroughly undistinguished senator finishing up his third thoroughly undistinguished term is just the sort of non-entity that makes for a good pick. The Administration fills a tedious spot no one wants and the schmuck gets to work in the White House and look like a big shot. Win-win, you’d think. Except for one thing. Gregg is a Republican. As has become nakedly obvious, the Republican Party has drawn a line in the sand and is throwing all of its might to avoid anyone crossing over to join the Obama party. There is little they can do to stop someone like Robert Gates or Ray LaHood, men of stature and reputation, from joining Obama’s cabinet, but a sadsack like Gregg was easy. Gregg’s explanation today, claiming that his “philosophical difference” was too great to overcome was truly laughable. Really? As if this wouldn’t have been the first topic on the table from the first minute this came up? That’s getting out of a pool by complaining that it’s wet in there.

What we do know is that the reason Gregg was considered in the first place was because he “reached out” to the Administration. We know this not only because Obama’s Press Secretary said it today, but because there is literally no other way Gregg would have shown up on the radar. He had clearly, and wisely, decided he was not going to run again to keep his senate seat in a state turning more blue every minute and rounding out his career in the cabinet probably sounded like a nice finish. So he made the phone calls. The folks on the other side of the phone, after looking his name up in the senate guide to see who he was, and who had just been so burned by Daschle probably saw a gift- fill the dreary seat, and get bipartisan credit to boot. What happened next was likely a combination, of pressure from Gregg’s party not to play ball and someone in the Obama Administration making it clear to Gregg that he would forever be a second class citizen. After a lifetime as a droopy B Leaguer living under the buttcheeks of Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell, it’s hard to imagine that would be too hard for Gregg to accept. More likely is that he was “got to” by a party that is shivering with insecurity and has decided to counter the president’s civility and charm with hardnosed opposition on every front. The offer of a nice, fat lobbying gig was probably all it took to shake Gregg loose, and best of all, to deal Obama yet one more cabinet embarrassment. It looks like Obama is going to learn the hard way that there is indeed a Red State America and a Blue State America, and that the Red Staters are up to do everything they can to, as Rush Limbaugh said, see that he “fails.”

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