The rise of Andrea Horwath, Ontario's new most powerful politician

It took a decade longer than I thought it would, but everyone in Ontario finally hates Premier Dalton McGuinty as much as I do. I never suggested that we were especially quick on the uptake.

My province has a quirky relationship with the Liberal Party. Until very recently, we would regularly give them a sizable chunk of the vote federally, but rebuked the provincial party at every possible opportunity. As a matter of fact, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario governed uninterrupted from 1943 until 1985, which I believe is a record in a democracy.

Of course, the PCs started a nice little civil war that has consumed then ever since. Mike Harris won two elections against nobodies, but antagonized virtually everyone else during his years in power. With the exception of Harris, the right-center battles within the provincial Tories have killed the party's chances of forming a government. The Ontario Progressive Conservatives have basically become the federal Liberals; stupid, consumed with a thirst for fratricide and unelectable.

Then they elected Tim Hudak, perhaps the dumbest motherfucker ever, as leader. Just last fall he managed to blow a huge polling lead and, in the process, piss off every faction of the party. The only reason that he wasn't immediately shitcanned as leader is that McGuinty's Liberals had been reduced to a minority at Queen's Park and the party is broke, managing to get the party in deeper debt than the Grits and the NDP combined.

This proves that the entire party has a bad case of the stupids. If they sent Hudak directly into hell, the Tory caucus could have supported McGuinty without shame for a year or so until they could beg Christine Elliott or Frank Klees to be a real leader. After too many years and too many lies, there's no real possibility that McGuinty will rebound in popular esteem. It would have been a perfect shot at rebuilding and living to fight another day, so the PCs had no other choice but to fuck it up.

No sooner did the legislature resume than Hudak announced his intention to defeat the government at the easliest opportunity, thereby destroying himself and his party in an election that both are almost genetically incapable of winning. If an election were called tomorrow, within five weeks, the Tories would fall behind NAMBLA in the seat count.

So hungry was Hudak to be publicly humiliated for the second time in less than a year, he pissed a perfectly good opportunity to look like a serious adult, and maybe even further what passes for his agenda.

You see, Dalton McGuinty introduced a giant nothingburger of a budget a couple of weeks ago that looks like austerity if you squint really hard and punch yourself in the nose really hard, but actually only slows the rate of growth somewhat. Just like Stephen Harper's federal budget of the same week, it was make-believe fiscal responsibility.

Ontario voters (like voters everywhere) are self-interested, demented fuckheads who like the idea of reducing deficits more than they do its actuality. They love calling the tune, but head to the bathroom the minute the piper comes around to get paid. Balanced budgets, I'm told, are a top priority, so long as taxes aren't raised or program spending cut in any meaningful way. Roughly translated, that means that no one really cares about balancing the budget, except in theory.

That's why I despise the people a whole lot more than I do the politicians. The only exceptions to that are politicians like Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Dalton McGuinty, Stephen Harper and almost every Republican since 1992. They tell you that you can have it all without anyone getting hurt, which is a monstrous fucking lie. And because assholes like that get elected, we get the governments we deserve.

Tim Hudak's strategy was to go out there and say that McGuinty's imaginary (and pretty unpopular) cuts weren't deep enough, but also not too deep for the Tories to promise more tax cuts that would baloon the deficit before any possible growth could occur. This would compete with McGuinty's platform that his imaginary (and pretty unpopular) cuts were just right.

In a general election campaign, that would create a scenario where the pro-imaginary austerity vote is split two ways, allowing the only party that opposes austerity to benefit in highly unpredictable ways.

And that brings me to Andrea Horwath and the provincial NDP.

Horwath has turned out to be a much better politician than either McGuinty or Hudak. She listened to the government's presentation and basically said, "Nice minority government you have there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it." She then laid out demands for a 2% tax increase on individual incomes over $500,000 and selected increases in program spending. Otherwise, we'd all be going back to the polls again, just seven months after the last election.

All things being equal, I'm surprised that Howath bothered bargaining with McGuinty at all. Her proposals turned out to be shocking popular in a province that pretends that it wants balanced budgets, some of them edging over 70% approval, which is unheard of for platforms that dosen't include "free ice cream without getting fat!" She might not have won a majority government in such a campaign, but she might very well have won a minority. I'd bet that she would have taken a significant number of seats from both the Liberals and the Tories if an election were forced.

But there's no thirst for an election out there. These things have been known to backfire, you know. Instead, Horwath decided to negotiate.

It turns out that she won. The chronically evil McGuinty Liberals and their shithead spin doctors are going to pretend that they gave a little to get a little, which is true, until you consider that Andrea Horwath got about 85% of what she wanted and 100% of what she could have realistically could have expected. The Liberals basically decided to live to lose another day. And they will.

Dalton McGuinty isn't in the position that Paul Martin was with his minority. If nothing else, Martin had on his resume the elimination of a huge deficit and the creation of a surplus, which gave him the latitude to deal with deal with the Jack Layton's federal NDP. The McGuinty Liberals, like Stephen Harper, just spent a shitload of money for the sake of spending a shitload of money and have nothing to show for it.

There's almost no way that McGuinty's numbers rebound enough from their current child molestor levels for him to face the people on his own merits. That means that the NDP are going to drag him further and further to the left that there's no meaningful difference. And when there's no meaningful difference between the Liberals and the NDP, there's no reason to not replace a stale, decade old government headed by someone that everybody loathes.

From this day forward, McGuinty is premier in name only. Andrea Horwath is effectively calling the shots now. Every time a confidence motion comes up, she's gonna want more (and reversing corporate tax cuts is very popular right now.) And I guarantee you that the Liberals are going to give it to her for as long as McGuinty leads them.

In no time at all, Horwath is going to be led into the legislature by a naked and leashed Dalton McGuinty, the strap-on dildo with which she made him her pretty little bitch jutting proudly from her loins.

And because he's a pituitary retard who missed the opportunity to cut a deal that would have furthered his agenda, Tim Hudak is going to be left in shadows jacking off like the political peep-show pervert and fantasizing about what could have been if he was more of a man. But don't hate him for it. Hudak was, as Lady Gaga teaches is, born that way.

Her silly economic ideas aside, I'd like to congratulate Andrea Horwath on becoming the effective Premier of Ontario today. More impressively, she did it without making the rest of us do anything silly, like vote on it.

Conservatism and me, part two: The structural seeds of destruction

Earlier I wrote about Allen West and the fundamental historical ignorance of his ilk regarding progressivism and its Republican roots. I only touched briefly on that topic because to go further would veer off from the specific point I was trying to make in that essay. Now, I'd like to elaborate on that point because the almost insurmountable problems facing the United States are political (as opposed to purely economic) in nature and they have their roots in the progressive era.

Because they proudly have no idea what they're talking about, West, Glenn Beck and the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members equate early 20th century progressivism socialism and communism. This couldn't be more ironic in so far as the institutions that allowed for the rise of the Tea Party were created by those very progressives a century earlier. Without the progressives, the modern populists would have been crushed in the gears of the political machinery that governed the United States at the time.

As much as populists love talking about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, they don't understand either very well. For example, the Second Amendment was written the way it was (beginning with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State") because the Founders were unanimous in their belief that the new nation shouldn't have a standing military. This comes up several times in the Federalist Papers.

Being isolationist, they understood that a nation cannot have a standing army without deploying it on a regular basis. They created the United States as a retreat from the rest of the world, not as a military competitor in it. For that reason, the people would be armed and loosely organized in militias that could respond to any threat and disband when the crisis passed.

Aside from being isolationist, the Founders weren't especially democratic. They were all classical scholars and had studied pure Athenian democracy, ultimately finding it unworkable. For those reasons, they created a number of significant checks on the will of the people, including but not limited to, a division of powers between the political branches, the establishment of an independent judiciary and a Senate that was appointed by the state legislatures. In the strictest classical definitions of the words, they were republicans, not democrats.

Of course, there's no telling any of this to your average Tea Party member or Sean Hannity fan. Their famous love of tri-corner hats aside, they actually know very little about the political and constitutional history of the country they can't stop proclaiming their love of.

If you read the Constitution very closely, you'll notice that political parties aren't mentioned. This is because that some of them, most prominently George Washington, loathed the idea of what he called "factions", which impeded and retarded a republic as much as a standing army did. It was only after Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the final time that the first permanent political parties were established.

Because the Constitution didn't envision permanent parties, the parties were able to master the political machinery that the Constitution created and use it to their own ends. The parties themselves weren't any more democratic than were the Founders. Nominations to lower offices were handed out in the famous "smoky back rooms." Presidential nominations were taken care of national conventions, the delegates to which were controlled either by the state legislatures or the party "machines" that controlled a given city or state. In either event, "the people" were several steps removed from the process when they were involved at all, which wasn't often.

In the early twentieth century, the progressive movement began to change that. As I mentioned earlier, the progressives were generally Republicans. The GOP constituted much of the support for the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements and sought to bring more popular democracy into the political process than had existed at any time before in America. The Democrats entrenched as their machines were in the Deep South and urban centers like New York City and Chicago, liked things just the way they were. The progressives and the Democrats despised one another with an intensity that would shock people today.

The ridiculous and borderline retarded assertions of Allen West and Glenn Beck to the contrary, Woodrow Wilson was not a progressive. He was a creation of the Democratic political machines in New Jersey and New York. Unlike both Roosevelts, who came to power in spite of the Democratic and Republican machines, Wilson became governor and later president because of them.

The progressives began to change things before Wilson ran for office. First, created the primary system, in which the people were given a role in the nominating process for the first time. Different factions could challenge the party machines for the first time, although without much success. Until around 1960, the primaries were beauty contests that the mandarins and power brokers in both parties ignored. But during the first half of the twentieth centuries, the primary system spread across the country.

What broke the control of the party machines wasn't the primaries. It was the New Deal. There had been major reforms to the federal civil service in the late nineteenth century, but it didn't apply to the states or the cities. Nor was the government in the welfare business at any level before 1933. Both patronage and welfare were handled by the party bosses. If you or a family member needed food or a job, you went to your local party boss, who would arrange it in return for service to the party machine. When the Roosevelt administration established federal welfare programs, the influence of the party bosses (who FDR hated throughout his career) began to rapidly break apart and, outside of the Daley machine in Chicago, never recovered.

It was only after the breakdown of machine politics that the primaries took on any importance (albeit over the course of several decades.) The primary system, combined with redistricting, played a massive part in bringing America where it is today.

The Constitution gave the power to draw federal House districts to the state legislatures, who also elected U.S senators prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment (which was another gift from the progressives.) Unsurprisingly, the parties made deals with one another to draw the safest districts possible, which continues to this day. But because the nominations and not infrequently the election of candidates to office were controlled by the party machines, there wasn't much in the way of a challenge to the status quo, the progressives themselves notwithstanding.

The conquest of the primary system over the machine politics of old changed that, and activists in both parties slowly took control; the Democratic activists took over their party in 1972 and the Republican activists won theirs in 1980.

Because the system of redistricting made the overwhelming majority of congressional districts "safe" (there are currently maybe 50 truly competitive districts out of 435), the activists in both parties were able to nominate progressively more ideological candidates without fear of losing.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that this has had the effect over time of depressing voter turnout because ideologues rarely represent the interests of the broader - and more centrist - electorate.

One of the dirty secrets of politics, is that political professionals prefer low voter turnout. You can't predict or control what a large number of centrist, unaffiliated voters are going to do. But when an election relies on little more than turning out your activist base, it becomes much easier to predict and control a given race. It makes governing easier too, if only because once elected, you only have to work on behalf of that base.

Without the progressives creating the primary system and the New Deal destroying the party machines, the Tea Party wouldn't exist. Throughout 2009-10, the Tea Party existed only to challenge the institutional power of the Republican Party establishment, taking out as many veteran figures as it could and replacing them with lunatics like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. That wouldn't have been possible before. Had the historic power of party machines been available to it, the Republican establishment would have crushed the Tea Party insurgency into dust. Allen West would be selling life insurance somewhere were it not for the progressives.

It was only after the activists took over the parties that silly issues began to drive the national agenda. For example, neither Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford so much as mentioned Roe v. Wade in public while they were in office. After 1980 you couldn't get Republicans to shut up about it. Even with the American economy headed toward President Reagan's famous "dustbin of history", the GOP has spent the last two months howling about birth control.

Party insurgencies were also made easier by campaign finance reforms, such as McCain-Feingold, which eliminated the soft money the parties needed to maintain their relevance and even the appearance of control. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United effectively replaced the national parties with Super PACs, thereby liberating candidates and officeholders from any party discipline whatsoever.

Having said that, the rise of Super PACs are eventually going to destroy the influence of the activists. Without the national parties are moderating influences, the corporate and union donors that most benefit from Citizens United are going to give only to candidates that serve their interests. And because activists tend to be populist, the interests of corporate and union PACs are eventually going to collide with those of the activists in both parties. Who do you think is going to win that fight?

West and Beck are right, the progressive legacy is ruining America, but they're too dumb to understand that it is doing so principally because it allowed people like Beck and West to exist in the first place. Too much direct democracy was injected into a system that wasn't constitutionally designed to accommodate it, and the structures that were designed to contain it were destroyed over time.

Conservatism and me: What went wrong and where I stand; part one of a series

You might have noticed a theme running through my writing over the last nine years. I'm giving to writing about why everything - but the United States most specifically - is doomed. Given the sheer volume that I've published, there's no shortage of ways to move that theme along. I'll also admit that it's both fun for me and goes a long way in clarifying my thinking.

I thought that I'd take this time to clearly spell out what I think the problems are and where I stand on them. Because I intend to lean heavily on history, I obviously won't be able to do it one post. Also, complicated problems almost never have simple answers. One of the primary threats facing us is that modern politics doesn't allow for recognizing that. Bumper sticker slogans that are supposed to pass for solutions have accomplished nothing other than accelerating the downward spiral.

This will very probably become a multiple-part series that I write over the course of several days or weeks, depending on how busy or lazy I am. My long-time readers will note that I have said much of what I intend to say here before. But I think that putting it all in one place will make things easier for those who have come here more recently.

I'll focus most heavily on American politics generally and the Republican Party specifically. This is because they provide the clearest examples of what went wrong. Furthermore, the transformation of the GOP served as a guiding light for first the Reform Party, and then the Harper Conservatives. Most likely, I'll give some attention to Reform because they reinvigorated populism in Canada at the expense of conservatism.

By no means is the Republican Party solely to blame for the catastrophe that is dragging America into irreversible decline. In fact, until the second Bush administration went about destroying everything in sight, I was a strong supporter of the GOP, although I diverged from them on social issues, which a truly small federal government should have nothing to do with. You cannot believe, as most Republicans do, that the federal government can't deliver the mail but should be a moral example, protect marriage and save people from themselves. Well, you can, as we've seen, but you look like an idiot in the process.

If you read my stuff from 2004 and 2005, you'll find that I broke with the GOP over their endless deficit spending, poorly thought out military adventurism and the strange case of Terri Schiavo. By the spring of 2005, it was clear that those people weren't serious about anything but getting elected, making them no different than the Democrats. In several respects, they become more dangerous than the Democrats.

In my own country, I highlight the fact that most conservative post-war government we've had was that of Jean Chretien. In terms of austerity, balancing the books and avoiding wars that no one has any intention of winning, Chretien's Liberal government was more conservative by several degrees than the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which spent money in ways that would make social democrats like Pierre Trudeau smile. Liberals hate it when I point that out, but it is an inescapable truth.

I'm often called out for exclusively "picking on conservatives", but those who have done so don't understand my motives. I tend to leave liberals alone for the simple reason that liberalism is already mostly discredited. In fact, the liberalism of the 1960s through the late 80s no longer exists in any real way. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien moved the left to the center and, while more leftist voices are still out there, they're mostly marginalized within their own parties.

The NDP didn't rise to Opposition in Canada because Canadians necessarily agree with their socialist positions as much as we wanted an opposition party that will actually oppose things from time to time. The Liberal Party of Canada hasn't existed for any reason other than electoral positioning and bloody infighting since the 1970s. They only won in the 1990s because the Progressive Conservative coalition fractured nationally and split the vote.

But when the Conservatives reunified in 2002, the Liberals were buried under an avalanche of their own self-aggrandizing stupidity and fratricide. As we've seen in four successive elections, even most Liberals are exhausted by and disgusted with the Liberal Party. While everything the NDP believes is wrong, they at least believe in something. In their thieving arrogance and electioneering fiscal ineptitude, the Harper Conservatives have essentially become the Liberals, thereby helping the NDP fill the vacuum the Grits left behind.

I believe that conservatism is the answer. I only differ in what conservatism has become. When the mainstream left moved to the center, the right responded by veering into a fantasyland, largely abandoned its traditional principals and took to their bosoms the worst aspects of populism and liberalism. After the 1992 defeat of George Herbert Walker Bush by Bill Clinton, the GOP stopped being the party of traditional conservatism and instead became a collection of revolutionary populists that presidents like Bush, Reagan and Eisenhower wouldn't recognize.

When Newt Gingrich heralds himself as the intellectual father of the modern conservative movement, he isn't at all wrong. And that, I believe, is one of the central problems facing both conservatism and the United States. Gingrich was among the first modern conservatives to adopt a populist platform and revolutionary rhetoric. And for all of his self-celebrated credentials as a historian, he still doesn't seem to understand that populist revolution is incompatible with what conservatism was for 200 years, nor is it easily adaptable to either a republican or parliamentary form of government.

Gingrich is every bit as important and transformative historical figure as he thinks he is, but for very different and, ultimately negative, reasons. His bad joke of a presidential campaign and his monumental self-regard shouldn't obscure that.

One of the things I should also point out is that many of the negative things that I said about the second Bush administration were echoed five years later by the Tea Party, although they had a far different understanding of where things went wrong than I did. Despite my recent focus on the Tea Party and the invective that I regularly throw at them, they aren't responsible for the drift of conservatism. That started well before the famous (and hypocritical and nonsensical) Santelli rant and the rise of Glenn Beck.

This may only be interesting to me. If so, I apologize in advance. On the other hand, you might learn something or even change the way you look at things, if only a little. Stranger things have happened.

Let's see what happens.

Allen West goes full retard. Again

Until about 10 years ago, the worst thing that you could call a conservative was a McCarthyite, so shameful was the legacy of the gloriously long-dead, drunken junior senator from Wisconsin. The author of that legacy was reviled by conservatives for several decades, even to the point of his name being used as an epithet.

As is true with most things in the last decade, there has been a mighty attempt at historical revisionism regarding Joseph McCarthy by what laughably passes for "public thinkers" in the Republican party (as opposed to the conservative movement) such as Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck.

Aside from destroying innumerable lives for no reason at all, undermining the First Amendment's free association and speech rights, and going a long way in creating the great American National Security State, it's largely forgotten that McCarthy never actually produced any actual communists. I'll grant you that he had innumerable lists of supposed communists but he never went so far as to actually name any, despite repeated threats to do just that. In his six year political reign of terror, McCarthy's investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single person for subversion, communist or otherwise. Not. One.

That isn't to say, of course, that there was a lack of communists to convict in Washington. We now know, as was largely known at the time, that there was indeed communist infiltration of the highest levels of the federal government during the height of the Cold War. It's just that McCarthy didn't expose any of them. In the final analysis, Tailgunner Joe was an opportunist, a drunken demagogue and, most important, an abject failure at what he saw as his life's mission.

You would think that such an appalling record of incompetence and needless personal destruction is something that the modern Republican party would want no part of. But things, it appears, have changed. With Coulter's rise to prominence, most especially with her book, Treason, McCarthy has become almost fashionable in some circles of the GOP and has become mainstreamed with the rise of the Tea Party.

Despite the protestations of their high priests at Newscorp and Freedom Works, the Tea Party and (to a large extent) Fox News aren't conservative as much as they populist. Because of the rise of both, the Republican party itself has become more populist than conservative but it could be the strangest form of populism in American history.

Traditional populism aligned itself with the condition of the "common man" or "the worker", which is why it has, up until very recently, been associated with the political left. Even Reagan-era conservatism had some scholarly bearings. You'll remember that supply-side economics was predicated on the theory of the Laffer Curve. While Reagan's style and rhetoric were often populist, his ideology wasn't.

The Tea Party and the opinion hosts on Fox haven't bothered with ideas like the Laffer Curve in years. I would be stunned to the point of senselessness if I saw evidence that Sean Hannity even knew what it is. Theirs is a populism based on the premise that jiggering the tax code to the benefit of the very wealthy for it's own sake is something that "the common man" should expect will benefit him. This is why Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plans have been front-loaded with tax cuts that dwarf even those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Like populist movements throughout U.S history, it is built on a foundation of  not just ignorance, but proud ignorance. The less you appear to know, the more successful you'll be in a populist movement, which explains Sarah Palin's entire career better than anything else.

Which brings me to Representative Allen West of Florida's 22nd congressional district. Being of a military background, Congressman West doesn't do things halfway. Where people like Palin and Hannity are proudly ignorant, West fetishizes stupidity in a way that normal adults would stop at nothing to hide, but modern politics rewards. Add to that the fact that he's an unrepentant fucking war criminal and you have a natural leader of the Tea Party.

Well, over the last couple of weeks, young Allen has come to embrace his inner McCarthyite with endlessly entertaining results.

On Tuesday, Rep. Allen West spoke at a town hall in Florida. During his appearance, he told the crowd he’s “heard” that up to 80 House Democrats are members of the Communist Party.

The Palm Beach Post reported on the event, adding that West “wouldn’t name names” to back up his assertion. Currently, there are 190 Democrats in the House.

That's notable in so far as even McCarthy himself never went that far. He said that communists subverted the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, not that they were welcomed into them. Nor did McCarthy ever go so far as to say outright that nearly half of the Democratic congressional caucus were actually members of the Communist Party of the United States.

Of course, West's assertion was so blatantly and laughably ridiculous that it couldn't be ignored, except by Fox News and the Tea Party blogosphere, both of whom are as spectacularly dumb as West himself. The only people who took him seriously was the actual Communist Party of the United States, which is insulted that anyone would associate it with something as spineless as the Democrats.

But the Goddamn Liberal Media, which always loves to pick on a retard, pressed the Congressman to clarify his remarks. This is where things went from amusing to hilarious with astonishing speed.

Regarding his original comments, West said, “No, I don’t regret it whatsoever.” He went on to imply that Wilson was a communist who hid behind the label “progressive”

“And I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives. If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration.”

Wow. It's been a good, long time since I've seen something so stunningly, yet beautifully stupid. His comments are ignorance in Technicolor.

First, the idea that progressives are communists was invented by Glenn Beck about three years ago. Like West, Beck uses the terms "progressive", "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably, demonstrating that they don't know anything about any of them. Everything Beck knows about history came from a lunatic named W. Cleon Skousen, who was too racist and paranoid for even the Mormon Church of the 1950s. More sadly still, everything Allen West knows about history, he learned from Glenn Beck.

Second, not only was Wilson not the most progressive of American presidents, he wasn't even the progressive in the 1912 campaign in which he was elected. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was the nominee of the Progressive Party. An honest-to-goodness Socialist, Eugene Debs, was on the ballot that year and won 6%, garnering nearly a million votes.

Allen West won't tell you this (most probably because he doesn't know it) but the progressives were more closely associated with the Republican party than with the Democrats. The most politically successful progressives of the era, including Robert La Follette and Hiram Johnson, were Republicans.

Most Americans don't know this, but the McCarthy era wasn't the first Red Scare in the United States. That actually occurred following the Russian Revolution and America's entry into the First World War. There had been political witch hunts in the U.S before, but they mostly targeted anarchists. Anarchism hadn't yet ceased to be a political philosophy and become a fashion statement for people like Malcom McLaren and the former John Lydon.

Just as Beck and West morph progressivism, socialism and communism into one another, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer bundled trade unions, anarchists, socialists and communists together and went after them with the full force of the federal government. This assault on civil liberties became known as the Palmer Raids, and it was far worse than anything that Joseph McCarthy managed to pull off because Palmer was both competent and sober. Moreover, it was carried out under the supervision of a young man named J. Edgar Hoover.

The Palmer Raids were finally stopped by a federal court judge, who included in his ruling this sentence  "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes."

And who did Mitchell Palmer work for during this American nightmare, you ask? The answer might shock you, especially if you're Allen West.

It was President Woodrow Wilson.

Herman Cain's descent into madness continues

When last we left Herman Cain, we explored the nightmarish landscape of his second Sick of Stimulus ad. More than even the Teutonic exhortations of "Nine, Nine, Nine" during his parody of a presidential campaign, the Sick of Stimulus advertising strategy demonstrates the awful depths of his mental illness. As a matter of fact, I think that it speaks to the fundamental liberalism of American society that he's allowed near children unsupervised.

I have some of the most hardened and cynical readers on the Internet, which I'm actually rather proud of. And even they were shocked by the deranged and depraved imagery that Cain is regularly employing to make some inexplicable point. In a world where folks like Rick Santorum vow to rid America of obscenity once and for all, ol' Herman is bringing snuff movies and animal cruelty to the masses.

Of course, that's not all that Cain's up to. Oh no, dear reader. He's far to diverse for that, and he wants you to know it.

The pizza man is also taking the time to go on televison and insult women.

When asked about the gender gap favouring Obama, Herman had this to say;

 

"Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies, which is what most people disagree with, it's a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public."

If you ever wondered why Republicans make the best boyfriends, now you know. They understand that chicks just aren't that good at paying attention, which liberals can't bring themselves to admit. In fairness, most liberals are gay, so they really shouldn't know that. And there is no Republican authority on the fairer sex quite like Mr. Cain, being married and enjoying the company of at least one mistress. While he knows dick about economics, Herman knows what broads like!

But Sick of Stimulus will always be the great love of his life. Even more than the silken insides of a female employee, he embraces the psychic dissonance that are those ads. He holds them closer to his soul than he can any other living thing. In an almost Brokeback Mountain way, I imagine that he wishes that he knew how to quit them, but he knows that he never will. The ads just spit in their hand and Herman knows that he can never refuse them.

SOS knows the importance of versatility. In their first two ads, Cain and the creepy little blond girl actually took a fish out of water and blasted a bunny wabbit out of the sky. By now the concept is more than a little fucked out. Like most of you, I wondered if the creepy little blond girl had the same depraved indifference to human life that she so callously displayed toward lesser life forms in previous Cain ads.

In the new ad, the Animal Kingdom rises up to exact its beastial revenge on its two-legged tormentors as the creepy little blond girl presides over the inhuman spectacle..



That's right, for the first time in the history of political messaging, someone has been eaten alive by cocks, as opposed to the reverse. Although, it's more than a little perverse to have a pre-pubescent girl there to watch without a trace of human emotion. Maybe, like the women Herman referred to on Fox News, she wasn't paying attention. That seems to be the way things roll on the Cain Train.

As much as I'd like to, I wouldn't think it proper to leave you without sharing one of my script ideas for the next Sick of Stimulus ad. And since I was sad to see the horrifying nerd with the shotgun from the Rabbit ad absent from Chickens, I'm bringing him back.

We dissolve into a shot inside a cramped prison cell. There we find the nerd in the Buddy Holly glasses cowering in the corner between his cot and the bars. He has a blond wig askew atop his head and lipstick smeared across his lower face. His clown-like visage is belied by the tears running freely down his face.

Cut to the creepy little blond girl standing on the other side of the bars, blocking the view of the nerd, but not completely.

"This is American small business", she intones flatly as we hear Buddy Holly whimpering. We see an enormous human-shaped shadow moving toward him on the back wall of the cell.

We cut to the nerd's African-American cellmate. The sleeves are cut off of his orange jumpsuit, revealing scars and poorly inked prison tattoos running up his heavily muscled arms.

Cut to the black predator hanging bedsheets across the bars. From out of the frame we hear the creepy blond girl's voice; "This is American small business under confiscatory corporate tax rates." The sound of a zipper being slowly lowered follows her declaration.

In silhouette, we see the giant cellmate viciously raping the nerd. We hear his screams as his rectum is being torn apart by the dusky marauder. The slender pale victim wants to defend his virtue, but he's so very afraid. He knows that you can't fight City Hall, let alone the huge cock of the IRS. 

"Say it, bitch!", we hear the prison rapist yell.

"I love you, Uncle Sam! You own me! I do it all for you!" Buddy Holly whimpers through his heaving sobs.

"Again, you pussy punk! Say it again!"

"I love you, Uncle Sam! You own me! I do it all for you!" He's now grunting the words as he's wailing from the pain of the assault.

The shot fades to black and fades back in, where we see the sheet covering the bars gone. The black rapist his holding his lilly-white prey to his chest and lovingly stroking the blond wig. The weaker man tries not to cry openly as his master places sweet kisses on the top of head. 

Creepy little blond girl steps into the shot and asks, "Any questions?"

Cut to a close up of the nerd, tears now running down his face uncontrollably, mortified by the fact that his indignity was witnessed by a nine year old girl. How in the fuck did she get into prison in the first place, he wonders. There is no sign of life left in his eyes. He's defeated and humiliated, but resigned to his fate. He knows, now and forever, who The Boss is. And it ain't Bruce Springsteen. This Boss is more like the late Clarence Clemons, except bigger, blacker, and he isn't the one doing the blowing. 

Cut back to creepy blond girl, who repeats, "Any questions?"

Fade into the cliff with Herman Cain and his sweater vest. The Sick of Stimulus logo appears over the sunset.

I really should've stayed in advertising school. It turns out that I'm pretty good at this! If you're a big-time Madison Avenue executive and want to pay me a ton of money to create disturbing imagery and have sex with busty redheaded secretaries, you can contact me at skippystalinATgmail.com or @skippystalin on Twitter. I smoke a lot, drink a ton and pretend that I'm someone I'm not, so I fit right into the Don Draper image that everyone loves so much these days.

I'll make us all rich!

Keystone, Canada and some facts about oil

The first vote I ever cast in my life was for Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative Party in 1988. The federal election was based on one issue, whether Canada should enter into a free trade agreement with the United States. If the circumstances today were the same as they were 24 years ago, I wouldn't hesitate to vote the same way again, but they aren't.

I first wrote about my support of Canada's withdrawal from NAFTA back in 2005. As it happens, the American political system makes it singularly incapable of living up to its treaty commitments. A single senator, or a group of them, can decide that free trade isn't in the economic interests of their constituents and force the administration to violate a treaty.

American presidents like to say that there's little that they can do from stopping their legislature from essentially abrogating a treaty that they themselves ratified. It arrogantly presumes that the other party to a treaty should actually care about U.S domestic politics, which it really shouldn't. A treaty is just that, a treaty. If American lawmakers can't bring themselves to live up to the laws that they've passed (which treaties are - apparently, so long as they don't involve torturing folks), then they have no business ratifying those treaties in the first place.

The fact is that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly violated NAFTA without consequence, most egregiously during the softwood lumber dispute. The United States government essentially stole $5 billion from Canadian softwood exporters, which was ruled illegal no fewer than three times by the NAFTA arbitration panel and the World Trade Organization. As this was happening, the Bush administration also imposed steel tariffs that even they didn't deny were illegal and served no other purpose than a spectacularly failed manoeuvre to win Pennsylvania in 2004.

After the third ruling, President George W. Bush said that the matter needed "further negotiation." This is a fairly unique thing to hear from the American government, whose Supreme Court has held that evidence of actual innocence isn't enough to overturn a criminal conviction, including one that carries the death penalty. Bush, who carried out a record number of executions as governor of Texas, didn't seem particularly willing to negotiate after those convictions were brought down.

For reasons that still don't make sense, Stephen Harper decided to roll over and give the United States everything it wanted upon his election as prime minister in early 2006. Even though Canada won, we still managed to lose. It was tantamount to economic treason, and one of the many reasons that I've refused to ever support the Conservative Party under Harper.

The Obama administration later abused Harper's capitulation by including an illegal "Made in America" provision in their 2009 stimulus bill. However, anyone who has paid attention to the Democratic presidential primaries since 1992 knows that Democrats, especially the more liberal ones, aren't ideologically committed free traders. They're more pragmatic, willing to exploit their union stooges for votes, then go for the real money that free trade provides.

Free trade requires basic honesty to to succeed. Unfortunately, as I said back in 2005, the United States is to honest free trade what Saddam Hussein was to transparent weapons inspections. If Canada weren't run by such nutless wonders for the last decade and a half, we would've withdrawn from NAFTA.

The 1989 Free Trade Agreement made sense because there was no end in sight for America's economic dominance and the country had a reputation of electing adult presidents whose word could be trusted. Neither of the above have been true for at least a decade now. The last president I would trust to stand up to the reprobates in Congress on behalf of a legally binding treaty was George H.W. Bush, and he's been gone for awhile now. The last three American presidents have had trouble abiding by U.S law, let alone international obligations.

Given their history with free trade, the Republican party and their lapdog "conservative" pundits are the last people who should be lecturing anybody about anything. On the other hand, they seem to really enjoy lying and have come to be Olympic gold medallists in it.

Which brings me to the Keystone pipeline project, which is inspiring all kinds of new and breathtaking levels of dishonesty from what passes for the Right in the United States these days.

Republicans think that Canada is pissed at the U.S because Obama temporarily (and anyone who knows anything about politics knows that he's going to reverse himself immediately after the election) deferred Keystone's development. To be fair, Prime Minister Harper is dissembling mightily himself, in ways that I'll explain soon, mostly because he likes interfering in foreign elections.

Because Rupert Murdoch is essentially the foreign-born head of the GOP (when he isn't being distracted with the prospect of prison time in England), his newspapers are an excellent resource to research and debunk the party's talking points.

President Obama must be planning to skip this year’s presidential election and run for prime minister of Canada instead.

Why else, after all, would he be working so hard to help Canada open new markets for its oil outside the US and attract higher prices — even as motorists here are increasingly socked every time they fill up their tanks?

This of course ignores why oil prices are what they are. There are four reasons why everyone is getting gouged.

First, is increased demand, both in the United States and in India and China. Republicans, their rhetoric aside, don't seem to understand that when demand approaches supply, prices increase.

Canadian oil will be on the world market whether Keystone is built or not, so it won't affect price in any significant way. Keystone is the delivery system for a resource, not the resource itself. By the way, where do those people think they've been getting most of their oil for the last decade, anyway?

Then comes the futures market, which responds to world events and trends to determine price. Since the GOP displayed its obstinate refusal to regulate those markets in any way, shape or form in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, it's hard to see how they expect Ottawa to help them.

One of the things that drives market speculation are the continuous threats by Republican ward-heelers to bomb, sanction or otherwise disrupt the Middle Eastern countries that produce most of the oil in the first place. I might be the only person who notices this, but the price of oil was considerably lower before the United States tried to turn the Muslim world into a swarthier version of Kentucky.

Finally, oil is a commodity that is traded in American dollars. Since George W. Bush became president, the value of the dollar has been cut roughly in half. Economists will tell you that when a currency loses value, it takes more of it to buy a product. Of course, Republicans can't tell you that because someone might point out that the dollar crashed and the cost of oil skyrocketed before Obama's election, and that fucks with their narrative.

Two of the major factors in price involve capitalism and the third is controlled by a completely voluntary, if wildly counter-productive, foreign policy. They have nothing at all to do with where you drill, how much, or how much you want to pervert the tax code to facilitate said drilling. And it doesn't have anything to do with Keystone or Canada.

The GOP demagogues out there are pretending that all, or even most, of this oil is destined for American cars, which it isn't.

Look at a map of the Keystone route. Notice that it ends at the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico? Those refineries are there for a reason, teenagers.

You see, the United States used to produce 50% of the world's oil. The oil would drilled, refined, and then shipped to foreign markets. Because building refineries is expensive and an environmental challenge, foreign producers now ship their crude to the Gulf of Mexico, where it refined and either sold in the U.S or shipped right back out.

Even with domestic prices where they are, a good percentage of American oil is still being shipped overseas for world consumption. What makes anyone think that the Alberta tarsands oil - which is mostly refined before leaving Canada - will be any different?

Harper, in Washington, cited Obama’s decision to kill the project, which would’ve created 30,000 American jobs along its path. He said the decision is forcing Canada to look elsewhere for customers.

No doubt, China, in particular.

“The very fact that a ‘no’ [to Keystone and Canada’s oil] could even be said underscores to our country that we must diversify our energy-export markets,” Harper said.

Diversification means new sales prospects for his country and can also allow it to make more money by raising prices.

As Harper explained: Canada takes “a significant price hit by virtue of the fact that we are a captive supplier” to the US — bound by treaty to provide much of its oil to its southern neighbor, even if other bidders are willing to pay more.

But what if Washington won’t take the oil?

“We cannot be . . . in a situation where really our one and, in many cases, almost only energy partner could say no to our energy products."

Harper's position is what is what trade experts commonly refer to as "horseshit."

Obama's not saying "no" to the oil. He's saying no (again, temporarily and for cynical political reasons) to the means of transporting the oil. In the decade since the Bush administration's destruction of the U.S dollar finally made tarsands oil profitable, that oil has been getting to the American market just fine.

As the Prime Minister pointed out in his back-handed and highly disingenuous Rose Garden remarks, Canada is "captive supplier." Or as the New York Post helpfully notes, we are "bound by treaty", specifically NAFTA, which requires us to supply the U.S even if we didn't have enough to service our own market, and it requires us to do so at a discount. Most Canadians are probably blissfully unaware that the same applies to fresh water.

It's an enormous logical leap on the part of Harper, the Post, and GOP dickheads everywhere that refusing Keystone constitutes a liberation of Canada from our treaty obligations. I - and honest people who have a reputation for knowing what they're talking about - can't believe that the NAFTA arbitration panel or the WTO would see it that way either.

Don't get me wrong. I wish that they would because that could be a predicate for Canadian withdrawal from NAFTA once and for all. We would then be able to diversify our economy on the international market and free ourselves from an increasingly bankrupt United States and its atavistic asshole politicians.

Republicans are now doing what the Democrats did for a generation, using a trade agreement that was signed twenty five years ago as a campaign season tool. Well, one of the reasons I originally wanted to get out of NAFTA was because I was exhausted by the Democrats doing that. The fact that the GOP has gotten in on the act means that it's never going to end. What both parties don't seem to understand is that their domestic political demagouging at home has the potential of causing economic instability here.

I also don't remember a choir of Republicans taking Canada's side when President Bush was repeatedly raping us on softwood and steel. That would be intellectually consistent, and that's well beyond your average Tea Partier.

But it is awfully nice to see American conservatives applaud when a foreign leader goes to the White House and very publicly pisses on the shoes of the President of the United States. I trust they'll feel the same way when it happens to one of their guys.


For even more of this electioneering nonsense, please go to Red State and read the ramblings of some guy named Repair Man Jack.

Presented without coment

Ruthlessly stolen from the great Mark Bourrie's Facebook page. Make him your buddy,

Them Bones: The lonesome death of Layne Staley

There was no avoiding the fact that yesterday was the 18th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. It was pretty much everywhere you looked on Internet. And you know what? That's the way it oughta be.

Cobain was an incredibly important figure in music history. Nevermnd changed the industry in ways that even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band didn't. When Sgt. Pepper was released, groups like the Dave Clark Five were still allowed to exist, they just sold fewer records and played smaller rooms.

That wasn't true of what happened in the wake of Nirvana. The hair metal bands that dominated the world before Nevermind didn't just take a hit in the popularity, they almost immediately lost their record deals. Most of them (the obvious exception being Bon Jovi, which was always more akin to Bruce Springsteen with louder drums than hair metal) saw their careers  vaporized forthwith. You can't even find, say, Winger on the back of a milk carton anymore. When was the last time you listened to Skid Row without irony?

Of course this was back when the music business was even worth caring about, which it hasn't been in over a decade. It's almost as if the bullet that killed Kurt went through the wall behind him and took down anything even sort of exciting about music. Cobain's impact, whether you liked him or not, is something that should be remembered and honored.

Because record labels are populated by some of the least creative people on earth,  they went on a binge of signing pretty much anything from Seattle that even remotely resembled grunge. They too wanted to cash in on the popularity of Nevermind, and they would do so in any way that they could. Most of those acts - and most of them were acts - followed the hair farmers into obscurity.

I've already written the best thing that I probably ever will about Kurt Cobain, so I'm not going to focus on that anniversary today.

One of the groups that rose after the explosion of Nirvana was Alice in Chains, who actually turned out to be a pretty good band. Dirt was a pretty exceptional album for its time, and it stands up today. Unlike Cobain, who was always coy about being a junkie and never admitting the extent of his problem in public, Dirt was almost entirely about Layne Staley's addiction. On the other hand, he really liked heroin.

Unfortunately for Staley, journalists are the only people less creative that music executives, so following Dirt, all anyone wanted to talk to him about was smack. As Rick Perry would say, "Oops." Making a record about being a junkie defined him as a junkie for the rest of his life.

Alice in Chains did three proper records and two EPs in six years, which is a a pretty impressive output in an age where major labels demanded three years between albums. That being said, they couldn't tour very much. You'd be surprised how logistically difficult it can be to schlep a singer that can't stand up around the world. The scheduled tour in support of their 1996 self-titled album was cancelled just as it had begun.

Instead of touring, Alice in Chains did an episode of MTV Unplugged  and Layne Staley vanished for the rest of his life. For all intents and purposes, he wouldn't be seen in public after Unplugged. He did a few shows opening for KISS and that was it.To be fair, it must take a significant opiate intake to tolerate being around Gene Simmons for any length of time, let alone every day.

 

Shortly after Staley was taken off the road for good, his ex-fiance died of bacterial endocarditis, a secondary complication of her own heroin addiction, he seemed determined to follow her. He locked himself inside of his Seattle condo and proceeded to do just that.

However, it took longer than anyone expected, five and a half years. In that time, he managed to record about three songs. When the video was shot for his supergroup cover of "Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two" for The Faculty soundtrack, four year old live footage of Layne was used. No videos were shot for the two songs recorded for the Alice in Chains box set that year, nor were there any new pictures in it. By 1999 that cat was gone.

Some people, like Keith Richards, can live fairly-tale lives as junkies, touring the world, making a fortune and writing a great book about it when he was done. Other than the fact that it's illegal and the lifestyle isn't especially good for you, opiates are among the least physically destructive drugs you can take. Their effect on the body (if you know how pure your junk is, which criminalization makes impossible) are neutral, unlike cocaine, tobacco, alcohol, or even marijuana.

For Layne, the entire point of heroin seemed to be to get debilitated. And for those last five years, he stayed as debilitated as he possibly could. By the time he gave his last interview in early 2002, the 6'1" Staley weighed 86 pounds, his skin had no color, and his teeth were rapidly falling out. He readily admitted that he knew that he wasn't long for the world.

"I know I'm dying," he rasped through missing teeth. "I'm not doing well. Don't try to talk about this to my sister Liz. She will know it sooner or later."

Staley, suffering from fever and nausea, told Rubio that his need for heroin was all-consuming, even though the effects of the drug were no longer enjoyable. He added that smack had completely ravaged his system and left him empty and filled with regrets.

"This fucking drug use is like the insulin a diabetic needs to survive," he said. "I'm not using drugs to get high like many people think. I know I made a big mistake when I started using this shit. It's a very difficult thing to explain. My liver is not functioning and I'm throwing up all the time and shitting my pants. The pain is more than you can handle. It's the worst pain in the world. Dope sick hurts the entire body."

The most chilling passage of the interview reads like a suicide note.

"I know I'm near death," he said. "I did crack and heroin for years. I never wanted to end my life this way. I know I have no chance. It's too late. I never wanted [the public's] thumbs' up about this fucking drug use. Don't try to contact any AIC (Alice in Chains) members. They are not my friends."

The last person to see Layne Staley alive was former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr, who was ironically fired by Staley during the Dirt tour for being too fucked up on drugs. Starr himself would be dead of a drug overdose in nine years. He never stopped blaming himself for Layne's death, not having called 911 upon seeing the condition his friend was in.

It took roughly fifteen days for Staley's body to be discovered on April 20, 2002. He had so isolated himself from the rest of the world that the only indication of a possible problem was his accountant noticing that he hadn't withdrawn any money in that period. He was found by police and his mother on his couch, surrounded by his drugs.

After a few days, the decomposition of human remains makes determining a precise time of death almost impossible. Staley had been dead for over two weeks, but the authorities believe that - based on his encounter with Starr and his lack of subsequent bank transactions - he had died sometime on April 5, 2002, eight years to the day after Kurt Cobain committed suicide.  He was 34 years old.

Cobain died a few months before the Rolling Stones started their 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour. Of course, the press couldn't stopping themselves from asking Keith Richards about it, who seemed genuinely exasperated by the question (skip to 9:03 in the linked video.) You might be too, if you suddenly found yourself the authority on dead junkie fuck-ups.

"Somebody should have been taking care of the man" Richards said. "You know, he was obviously a lunatic in the first place. You know, the guy tried to do himself in in Rome. Nobody was there, he bought a shotgun, boom. Hey, maybe he's better off. Who knows? He'd make a lousy plumber."

There are people out there who are determined to do themselves in. That's just a cold fucking  fact. Two of them had their death anniversaries yesterday, 18 and 10 years respectively.

While Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley would've made lousy plumbers, it doesn't make their deaths any less sad.

Meet your likely 2016 GOP presidential nominee

Remember how I spent most of the last three years telling you that Mitt Romney was almost certainly going to be this year's Republican presidential nominee? Oh, how some folks objected to that! The Tea Party, I was repeatedly told, was a game changer. They had changed the very face of the party in Ought Ten and the old rules no longer applied. The tri-corner hat folks wouldn't stand for such an irredeemable squish as their standard-bearer. No siree bob!

It was horseshit then, just as we know that it's horseshit now.

Institutions, particularly supposedly conservative institutions, are resistant to rapid change and they have establishments that protect them with every resource they have. The Tea Partiers figured that they could flip the GOP just as the anti-war McGovernites and the Clintonian "Third Way" types had remade the Democratic Party in their own image. They were wrong, mostly because they're populists and have little idea of what conservatism actually is. I'll grant you that they know what they want it to be, but that's largely a fantasy, not unlike traditional liberalism.

Conservative institutions, like conservatism itself, are predicated on the idea of gradual change. Republicans, who since the unlikely rise and fall of Newt Gingrich two decades ago, have posed as revolutionaries and forgotten that. The party doesn't just change in a few months, or even a single election cycle. It happens slowly, and when it doesn't, disaster looms.

The last time that the GOP seemingly turned on a dime was in the early 1960s. And even then, the change was much slower than people like to remember it. Folks these days think that Barry Goldwater just appeared out of nowhere. This is because a lot of folks really suck at history.

The Goldwater movement took almost a generation to come to fruition. The movement started immediately after World War II, with the Republican triumph in the congressional elections of 1946. During the Eisenhower years, the grassroots became infatuated with first the McCarthy movement, then the John Birch Society. Party wings were built around people like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the left and Goldwater on the right, with Richard Nixon being more or less in the middle.

The party establishment, represented by congressional members, the governors and the remnants of  Ike's reign, were unified in their opposition to Goldwater. But after 15 years of not attending to the grassroots, the establishment had found that the grassroots had been taken over. Because President Eisenhower was such a revered and heroic figure, the center held. But as soon as Ike was gone, so was the center. That trend accelerated after Nixon's razor-thin loss to Jack Kennedy.

There was also no clear anti-Goldwater to stop the insurgency. Nixon refused to run in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Rockefeller was crippled by his divorce. Romney wouldn't run, and Scranton got in too late. The debacle at the Cow Palace was as unavoidable as the ass-kicking Lyndon Johnson handed Goldwater. But that movement built over the course of several years.

Then there's the Reagan Revolution, which also incubated over the course of several election cycles. Folks aren't inclined to remember that 1980 was Reagan's third run at the nomination.

While Reagan supported Goldwater, his subsequent record was considerably to the left of the Man from Arizona's. As governor of California, the Gipper increased social services and signed the biggest tax increase up until that point and the most liberal abortion law of the pre Roe era. Reagan's record, both as governor and president, was well to the left of his rhetoric, which modern Republicans and Tea Partiers either don't know or won't admit.

Unlike in the 1964 primaries, there was no shortage of "anti-Reagan" candidates in 1980, among them; George H.W Bush, Bob Dole, John Connally and Howard Baker. The multiplicity of alternatives had basically the same effect as having no opponent at all. I'm sure that Mitt Romney would be pleased to explain how that works.

The point is that the Goldwater and Reagan insurgencies built over the course of fifteen years. The Tea Party has only existed for just shy of 37 months.

While they did take over the House of Representatives, their caucus has also made it impossible for Speaker John Boehner to manage, which goes a long way in explaining why that fucker is crying all the goddamned time. The Tea Party's nominees also threw away a perfectly good shot at taking over the Senate. Delaware and Colorado were handed over to the Democrats. A write-in candidate won in Alaska, the first time that had happened in a Senate race in nearly 50 years. And Harry Reid, who had no business holding onto his seat in Nevada, did.

The Tea Party has an incredibly mixed record, and not one that made it likely for them to take over the presidential primary process as quickly as they believed they could. Because they themselves are leaderless, and because their patrons are more self-interested than they are interested in the movement, they never got behind a single presidential candidate, preferring instead to move back and forth between congenital losers like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry. When they twice backed Newt Gingrich, everyone stopped taking them seriously.

Oddly enough for a party that describes itself as republican, the GOP is more like a royal family. With the exception of George W. Bush and Goldwater, there is a very strict hierarchy in winning its presidential nomination. And the Goldwater and Bush exceptions exist only because the Republican party was never going to nominate Nelson Rockefeller or Pat Buchanan under any circumstances.

Eisenhower begat Nixon, who in turn begat Ford. Reagan challenged Ford in '76 and lost. Reagan was challenged by Bush four years later and became the nominee in '88. Dole fought Bush for prize in '88 and was awarded it in '96. John McCain fought the good fight against George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded for it at the end of his term. Romney ran second to McCain and he stands as the nominee today.

That isn't a fluke, folks. That's a line of royal ascension. And that's precisely how the modern Republican party is designed to work. The Tea Party isn't going to change that overnight, if they can ever change it at all.

The time has come for me to put on my prognostication hat yet again, which may seem rash, what with the election still being seven months away and all. Or not. You see, I couldn't agree more with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough when he says the following;


               

"Nobody thinks Romney's going to win. Let's just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment -- I've yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won't say it on TV because they've got to go on TV and they don't want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don't care. But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election."

If you look at the swing state polls, Obama is a ahead of Romney in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Yes, it's early. Yes, it's a fairly thin spread. And yes, I expect the numbers to  go up and down some between now and the first Tuesday in November. But I also expect that what we're seeing now is pretty much what we'll see on Election Day.

The economy is improving and Governor Romney is an exceptionally bad candidate with the highest negatives for a challenger in my memory. The primaries hurt him with independents, and his expected flip for the general is going to kill him with conservatives. Besides which, Obama is already president and the circumstances that historically take down incumbents (which I've written about at length before) just don't exist.

So yeah, I really don't think that the establishment believes Willard Mitt Romney is going to be the 45th President of the United States and neither does anyone else. The establishment only wanted him because he won't lose as badly as anyone else in the field would. Barack Obama would skin Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich alive, whereas Romney keeps it within a respectable five points. He'll do better than John McCain did - if only because Lehman Brothers isn't around to collapse again - but that's about it.

That being said, let's look to 2016, shall we? I promise, it'll be fun.

If history is any guide (and I would suggest that it's the best one we have), Rick Santorum is the clear front runner and the presumptive nominee the next time out.

"But what about all of the GOP rock stars who sat this one out?" you might be asking. "What about Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour and Jeb Bush?" To this, I would answer, "What about them?"

With the exception of Jeb - because there's no way that anyone named Bush would be nominated, let alone elected, this soon after George W's disastrous reign of error - the standouts had a clear shot at beating Obama and chose not to. When both the economy and the President's numbers were still in the dumper, all of them made a conscious decision to stay home. Any one of them could've unified the party in ways that Romney can't. And I think they'll be punished for it when they come out to face a weaker, non-incumbent Democrat four years from now.

Back in 2006 Barack Obama had a long heart-to-heart with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle told him that he sat out the 2000 campaign, when his polling was pretty good, because he thought that he'd have a better shot in '04. But then Daschle lost his seat in 2002, killing his chances forever. More than any other single reason, that conversation with Tom Daschle was why Obama ran when he did. He was far more inclined to wait, just like the non-running Republicans later did.

On the other hand, Santorum was the longest of long shots and worked his ass off in a tough year to become the heir apparent. He took the shot and did far better than any sane person had reason to believe he would. Shit, Romney didn't even bother compiling an opposition research file on Santorum before Iowa.

Nobody hates Santorum more than I do (although I hate Gingrich a lot worse), but even I have to respect that. And I suspect that a good number of primary voters are going to respect it, too.

It's important to also understand that the Senator accomplished what he did with zero organization and even less money. For awhile there, he was a credible alternative to Romney, who has nothing but organization and money. Do you think that Santorum won't spend the next four years building a war chest and political infastructures in the early primary states?  It isn't as if he'll have anything else to do. Moreover, the GOP would be crazy not to return to a "winner takes all" distribution of delegates next time, which will heavily favor Santorum because his name identification will be so much higher than everyone else's.

Finally, it'll be Rick Santorum's turn in four years, which is usually the only reason the party needs to give someone its nomination.

Don't get me wrong, even a walking mediocrity like Joe Biden, who will also be approximately 600 years old, will kick Santorum's ass across the country and back again. The only thing Santorum will be able to beat Biden at is talking for a really long time while making himself look progressively worse, something that the current Vice President actually put on a lab coat and fucking invented.

But I actually think that would be a good thing for the party, if only because it would resolve the long, low-level civil war that's making the GOP look like the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Republican civil war, which has been going on since 1992 (albeit with a short break between 2000 and '06) goes something like this; "We lose when we nominate sane people Gerald Ford, George H.W Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney. George W. Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' was an accident that we paid for later. We have to run well to the right of the electorate to win, like Reagan did!"

The only problem with this viewpoint is that it ignores history and its bothersome facts.

Jimmy Carter lost for the same reasons that Ford and the first Bush did, he faced a ruinous primary and (in Bush and Bob Dole's cases) a third-party challenger that took heavily from his vote.) It should also be remembered that '76, '80 and '92 were all very tight races until the very last week of each campaign. None of them were the "gimmie" elections that they're popularly remembered as today.

I'm not going to pretend that "compassionate conservatism" didn't help Bush the Younger beat Al Gore, but it was hardly decisive. This is because Bush mostly ignored Gore, preferring instead to run against the ghost of Bill Clinton's cumstains as the economy slid into recession. And that was decisive, or at least as decisive as losing the popular vote actually can be.

Dole (as I believe Romney will) ran against somewhat popular president in a good or improving economy, making it hard to imagine any Republican beating the incumbent. And John McCain, while running in the wake of an unpopular president of his party and supporting an even less popular war, was still winning against Obama - until the NYSE unexpectedly decided to shed over half its value in a fucking day. That's pretty hard to overcome, especially when you have a chatty moron on your ticket and you happen to be an ancient mariner with a history of cancer.

The fact is that the Red Hots' theory that "running to the right of the electorate" has never actually been tested in a situation where other factors weren't dominant. Barry Goldwater ran a classic libertarian campaign, but he did so mere months after the assassination of a sitting president of the other party. And I've never heard any serious person suggest that either JFK or LBJ wouldn't have beaten Goldwater handily under almost any circumstance.

I was not-so-secretly hoping that the GOP would have put the theory to the test this year by nominating Sarah Palin and getting it over with. Palin would go "full retard", thinking that she's smart while farting in the bathtub, and giving Obama 20 points in the popular vote and at least forty five states in the Electoral College.

The Republican establishment decided instead to give it to Mitt Romney. But they're not helping themselves by doing so, at least not in the long run.  The people that don't know anything about politics (or the American people) will still point at a losing Romney; just as they did Ford, Bush 41, Dole and McCain as a Shining Path Republican who couldn't win an race if they were strapped to a fucking rocket and fired over the finish line.

Well, it looks as if the Tea Party Red Hots of the world are going to get to test their theory in just four years. Rick Santorum is going to go into the primaries as the frontrunner, and Republican frontrunners almost always win the nomination. They'll have their guy endlessly talking about the evils of amniocentesis in what will probably be an even better economy than America has today. And they'll have him doing it against what will almost certainly be a weaker Democratic nominee than Barack Obama is.

I think it will result in the most humiliating loss the Republicans will have suffered since Goldwater, but I could be wrong.  Let's get Romney out of the way and find out.

Let's resolve the issue, once and for all. Let's go full retard!

Treyvon Martin, Politics, the Media and History

I've very consciously tried to avoid opining on the sad and savage saga of Treyvon Martin for the simple reason that I don't know enough about it. I suspect that what I do know isn't going to play out well for his killer, but that's highly speculative. Besides, I'm loath to be on the side of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton about anything. I’d include Spike Lee in that denunciation, but I can’t remember the last time anybody paid attention to him.

On the other hand, I have written about the kind of circumstances that led up to Martin's death repeatedly, and most of you aren't really fond of my views. I took all manner of shit from my American readers when I suggested that the Castle Law didn't give Joe Horn the right to blow away two people leaving someone else's castle, back in 2007. More recently, my Canadian peeps went nuts what I said that someone who needed an interpretor for his trial, as David Chen did, probably shouldn't be in the business of arresting folks. I got into fights for weeks over that.

Look, these Castle and "Stand Your Ground" laws in the United States, as well as the proposed revision to Canadian  laws regarding citizen's arrest, are based on a number of faulty premises.

First, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as willing and able to kill or maim as criminals are. If that's true, society is fucked.

Secondly, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as practised with weaponry as criminals are. If one is smart, one never assumes that one is more dangerous that someone already demonstrably willing to commit a crime is. It'll almost never end in your favour.

These laws are written in such a way that might have the unintended consequence of encouraging criminals to kill you first. It stands to reason that if you know that the law allows you to kill an intruder that the intruder knows it, too. It doesn't take boundless leaps of the imagination to figure how that can work out.

Third, they suggest that average citizens should have police powers, without the training or experience of the police. And the police fuck up more than their share! It strikes me as odd that the same people who decry things like Waco, Ruby Ridge and the more recent G20 Battle of Toronto want everybody to have the legal authority to kill, even when a safer alternative may exist. Worse, they want lethal force as a first option enshrined in the law. And it's incredibly difficult to see anything conservative in that, at least if you're sane.

I'm all for the right of self-defence. However, with that should come a great deal of responsibility. If you're going to take it upon yourself to act like a cop, you should be held to at least as high a standard when you smoke someone. The police usually only go out with guns blazing in the movies, but some people think that those not in the constabulary can shoot first and ask questions later and do so without consequence. 

As far as the Martin-Zimmerman controversy goes, it doesn't logically follow that following someone around,  confronting them, and then shooting them in the chest when they decide to kick your ass - assuming that this is even what happened, itself a leap of faith - constitutes "standing your ground", particularly when you're armed and you're not good and goddamned sure the other guy is, too.

If you think I'm talking crazy talk here, know that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who signed the bill, and the chief Republican sponsor of Stand Your Ground agree with me. 

On that point, I'd be awfully surprised if Mr. Zimmerman thought that Treyvon Martin was armed and decided to follow him around anyway, especially when a 911 operator specifically instructed him not to. It makes eminent sense to assume that Zimmerman believed that Martin was unarmed, or at least that he was better armed and more willing to fire first. To suggest anything else is suggest that either George Zimmerman was stupid, suicidal, or that the neighbourhood watch program has become a  kamikaze  mission without anyone telling me.

Which brings me to the media coverage of the story, which is sixteen kinds of stupid. While it's beyond tragic, it's hard to see how this has become a national story but for America's obsession with race and the continuing Republican descent into eternal victimhood. 

Ann Coulter hasn't always been batshit crazy, you know. I read her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors when it first came out and it wasn't actually retarded. Of course, smart doesn't sell these days, so Coulter made sure that everything she's subsequently written is either laughable or actually demented. Anyone who spends as much time as Coulter does defending the memory of Joseph McCarthy - whose years of investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single communist - shouldn't be taken seriously. 

But, as it happens, saying crazy shit is a great way to get on cable news, and being on cable news is a superior way of selling books to people who don't know how to read. Did you know that both Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly have had multiple bestsellers? Did you know that cable news and talk radio hosts are the only people alive who are worse writers and thinkers than bloggers, who give away their nonsense for free?

It was only a matter of time before Coulter weighed in the Martin-Zimmerman saga, if only because modesty isn't her strong suit.

“I mean it is a lynch mob. This isn’t how we try cases in this country. And you know, the last time you saw this sort of thing on a regular basis was of course again from the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party’s outgrowth, the KKK. So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we get this from the Democrats. They have never bought into the criminal justice system where you have, you know, grand jurors and a procedure where evidence is vetted, and police look at it and prosecutors and grand jurors.”

Just for the record, the last time I was aware of a “lynch mob” going after someone named Zimmerman, Dylan had just gone electric. It’s not a phenomenon you hear a lot about in the news.

Historically, the phrase is very specific to the black experience in the Deep South of yore. It has very real connotations to people who are still alive today. Of course liberal activists shouldn’t have compared the Martin case to Emmett Till, but it should be remembered that Emmett Till would only just be approaching retirement age if he were alive today.

This isn’t unlike Sarah Palin’s appropriation of the conservative “blood libel” in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Because having MSNBC saying nasty things about you is just like the European pogroms against the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Seriously, if you blindfolded me, I wouldn’t know the difference. Actually, that’s not true. Coco Chanel does smell different from incinerated human flesh, if only slightly.

Lookee, I’ve been writing in public just shy of nine years now. And if you went through everything I’ve put out on Al Gore’s fabled Interwebs, you would be very hard pressed to find an instance of me calling anyone a racist. Mostly because it’s nasty, unnecessary, rarely true, and doing so proves that you don’t have a further argument.

Moreover, it’s a tactic pioneered by the Left, who still uses it to great effect on a daily basis. It seems to me that the Right can’t decry the tactic and appropriate it at the same time, at least not while remaining credible. It’s an intellectual twist to stand for rugged individualism while positioning yourself as a persecuted class, which rich, white cunts like Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Coulter herself  like to pretend that they are. These people say - often in the same fucking paragraph - that you should pull up by your bootstaps and that you can't because the government and media are discriminating against you because, of all things, you want a tax cut. 

You know what? I’ll renounce everything I’ve said in the preceding five or six paragraphs if you can give me just one example of Ronald Reagan publicly comparing himself to the target of a lynch mob or a Holocaust victim because of his political opinions. Nor are you likely to find him equating Democrats with the KKK, mostly because he actually was a Democrat during the period in question.

Ms. Coulter, in her comments, likes to point out that that the Ku Klux Klan originated and flourished in what were then Democratic states. What she doesn’t point out is that those states are all Republican now, or why.

I’ve written about the history of Southern politics before, but it could use a re-telling.

Between the end of Reconstruction during the Grant administration and the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party was considered a foreign entity in the former Confederacy. Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education accomplished exactly nothing (because school desegregation only happened under Richard Nixon, nearly two decades later), Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, supported largely by the GOP.

Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act as a matter of principle. He was the furthest thing from a racist – and was one of the first mainstream voices to support gay rights in the 1990s – but he felt that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of interfering with property rights.  It should be remembered that Goldwater was more of a libertarian than he was a Republican.

But it isn’t a coincidence that Goldwater became the first Republican to win the Deep South in a century. Five of the six states that he carried were there, constituting almost a majority of the former Confederacy. LBJ swept Goldwater way in the Western and Mountain states, which were far more inclined to his libertarianism than was the South. Guessing why is hardly a stretch, particularly since the South benefitted more handsomely than anywhere else in America from New Deal liberalism.

I should also point out that Democrat Harry Truman lost a great deal of the South to the Dixiecrat segregationist (and later Republican) Strom Thurmond in 1948. Thurmond, who became a Republican as a result of its passage, also voted against the Civil Rights Act. As a Democrat, Thurmond carried out longest filibuster in the history of the Senate, 24 hours and 18 minutes, against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.  As a Republican, Thurmond voted against the much-less (seemingly) constitutionally offensive Voting Rights Act of 1965.Strom Thurmond never publicly renounced his racial views, but remains a revered figure in the GOP. 

The Republican advance in the South was blunted by Alabama’s segregationist (then) former Alabama governor George Wallace’s presence on the ticket as an independent in 1968. Barring a southern Democrat, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton – who had ambivalent racial records, if you don’t count their liking rhythm and blues – Republicans have owned that part of the country between 1972 and 2008, when Obama surprisingly carried Virginia and North Carolina, and came within eight points of winning even Georgia.

Ann Coulter might like to pretend that America’s few dozen living Klansmen, who have constituency somewhat larger than that of the New Black Panther Party (all three of them), are rabid Obama supporters, but even the most curious sense of history tells you that this probably isn’t so. History would seem to suggest that most of them have Rick Perry bumper-stickers on their Datsuns.

She also ignores the de facto segregation of the North, where Republicans dominated for most of the century in question. Nor was the Klan completely alien there. Indeed, most of today’s most notably racist Christian Identity groups are securely entrenched in the Red States. Am I the only one who noticed that the only black folks killed at Waco or Ruby Ridge were probably government agents?

Yes, the Left – and the Democratic party activists, in particular – are deeply, deeply wrong in ascribing some nefarious racial motive to everything that happens everywhere, particularly given their political history. They didn’t love blacks, as much as understood that they couldn’t form a governing coalition without them in a post- Civil Rights Act era. Life was demonstrably much easier for the Left prior to 1964, as the New Deal proved. Without the “Solid South,” none of it would have been sustained for more than a few years, if it happened at all.  

But Republicans shouldn’t pretend that their hands are clean, either. The Party of Lincoln saw the accidental success of Barry Goldwater’s constitutional stand and attempted to build on it thereafter, and did so cynically.  

In all honesty, I don’t think that America’s obsession with race is necessary a badthing. The United States is almost alone among great countries that have honestly tried to face the truly horrid things that it did to its own citizens, and that’s something that should be commended. It would be a better world if more of us did it. 

But there comes a point where that obsession colors (pardon the pun) everything and accomplishes nothing. Past that point, it divides for the sake of division, rather than unifies. And if you believe that politicians are interested in realunity, you’re kidding yourselves. Division for the sake of division is what decides elections, whether on the Left or the Right.

In a perfect world, the shooting of Treyvon Martin would be a matter for Florida law enforcement and media to decide. It’s only in the hyper-partisan atmosphere, driven largely by cable, talk radio and almost magnificent ignorance that has made it a national racial time bomb at all.

No matter where you stand, do you think that Martin or the Zimmerman families want that?