Dear Conservative Politicians: Please Don't Defend Fascism, Okay? Thanks.

The rap on me is that I'm often seen as being too hard on conservatives and don't defend them nearly enough. My view is that I'd be more than happy enough to defend them if they chose to do something that's actually defensible once in a while. That'd be pretty great.

But one thing I'm not going to do is destroy my own credibility of self-esteem by giving my stamp of approval to things that are stupid, offensive or stupidly offensive. That makes me a pretty shitty team player, I know.

One of things that I decided early that I wasn't going to associate myself with is the recent conservative (and particularly the Glenn Beck, Breitbart asshole, Tea Party variety of conservatism) revisionist history that paints fascism as a left-wing ideology.

That's actually part of a larger trend in modern conservatism, which refuses to recognize any of its evils, either ancient or recent. Watergate, for example, is an inescapable reality, so Tea Partiers point to Richard Nixon's creation of the Environment Protection Agency and establishment of affirmative action to paint him as a liberal and thereby absolve conservatism of his sins. Of course, that ignores the fact that every Republican in America vigorously defended Nixon until the last minute, but whatever.

Look, just because The National Socialist German Workers Party had the word "socialist" in it did not mean that the Nazis were left wing. They decidedly were not. Because fascism, first in Italy, then in Germany was a response to the rise of communism, Actual communists and socialists didn't do especially well in either regime. They were largely killed or imprisoned before the fascists went after the Jews. In fact, fascist anti-Semitsm was largely predicated on the canard that communism was a Jewish ideology, which is pretty hilarious when you consider that they also believed that the Jews controlled all of the banks.

The fascist economic model was a command economy, to be sure. But it wasn't an example of the people controlling the means of production, which is a foundational tenent of Marxism. Fascism was the partnering of government with big business, and business did very well indeed under that arrangement. The folks at Krupp, for example, only pretended that they were victims of persecution after the war.

It's also important to remember that fascism was premised on expansionist wars of conquest. Even in Western capitalist democracies employ command economies in wartime. One can make a very credible argument that in spreading their production facilities into every congressional district in America, defense contractors have created a virtual form of fascism. The United States government therefore cannot effectively review its interventionist foreign policy without immediately throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. Defense contractors also operate on a "cost plus" model, which guarantees profits regardless of cost overruns and inefficiencies. This is one of the reasons that President Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Fascism is nationalist, while socialism and communism decidedly are not. The latter two movements are internationalist and believe that nationalism impedes the advancement of the ideology.

Having said that, just because conservatives shouldn't lie about fascism doesn't mean that we should run around defending it. And it's particularly regrettable that no one gave Silvio Berlusconi that memo.

Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for “having done good” despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe on Sunday held Holocaust remembrances.

Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month's election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.

I never thought I'd have to say this out loud, but not only should you not defend fascism, it's the height of bad manners to do so at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony. People get awfully touchy about that sort of thing.

“It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then,” Berlusconi said of Mussolini's support for Hitler. “Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it.”

Berlusconi added that “within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good.”

Berlusconi ignores a couple of important facts in his apologia of fascism.

First, Il Duce was the senior partner in Europe's fascist alliance, having come to power almost a full decade before Hitler did. Hitler looked to Mussolini for support, but was not taken seriously. It was only after the militarization of the Rhineland that he became Hitler's second banana.

Second, the Italian fascists were engaged in a war of conquest long before the German invasion of Poland, having attacked Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935. Mussolini also intervened on the side of the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Berlusconi seems to imply that Mussolini feared a German invasion of Italy had he not allied with Hitler which is nonsense. As we have already seen, the Italian Fascists were no strangers to foreign aggression. Moreover, the German high command had absolutely no respect for Italian forces, seeing them as more of a hindrance than anything else.

Yes, there was a German occupation of Italy, but that came only after Mussolini was dismissed and arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Berlusconis's assertions to the contrary aside, the Fascist Italians were racist almost a decade before the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, endorsing a policy eerily similar to lebensraum. As early as 1920, the future Il Duce endorsed the taking of lands from the "inferior and barbarian" Slavs. Throughout the 1920s, long before the Beer Hall Putsch, Mussolini spoke about the "hierarchy of races." While it's true that the Manifesto of Race wasn't enacted until 1938, the seeds of it were always present in the Fascist movement.

As you might imagine, pretty much everybody's pissed at Silvio right now.

Reactions of outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.

Berlusconi's praise of Mussolini constitutes “an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy,” said Rosy Bindi, a centre-left leader. “Only Berlusconi's political cynicism, combined with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship.”

Italian laws enacted following the country's disastrous experience in the war forbid the defence of Fascism. A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint on Monday to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.

It should be noted that defence of Fascism is one of the very few things that Silvio Berlusconi isn't currently on trial for. He was convicted of tax fraud last October and is currently on trial for prostitution and statutory rape. If nothing else, it's pretty impressive that a 76 year old man can be the one-man crime spree that Silvio is.

Even more incredible is the fact that Berlusconi's People of Freedom party is running second in next month's national elections. With one-third of the electorate undecided, there's a very real chance that he can be elected to a record fourth term of office, just 15 months after having resigned.  Being that he's Berlusconi, he's made several differing and conflicting statements on whether he would be premier if People of Freedom wins the election.

One thing that People of Freedom has going for it, and this goes to Berlusconi's political genius, is that it's populated with wall-to-wall hot chicks, recruited mostly from his television empire. Imagine if, say, Vanna White was Senate majority leader in the 1980s. Italy is well on its way to having its fourth government like that. Were it not for the fact that she's Czech, Denise Milani would be the ideal head of the Italian government.

And that's probably the way it should be. If you live in an ungovernable country with a criminal prime minister, you might as well have an aching hard-on to distract you from your impending doom. If the government can't meet your needs, you should at least be able to jerk off to it. That only seems fair.

Joe Biden is a Big Fucking Deal

It used to be that Democrats underestimated Republicans to their detriment. Eisenhower, they said, was lazy and not very bright. Nixon was sweaty, shifty and a two-time loser. Reagan was an amiable dunce. The first Bush was wimp and the second a classic case of nepotism. And the Democrats lost to all of them, in some cases by devastating margins.

Since 2004, the tables have turned rather dramatically. Instead of acknowledging just how badly the GOP ruined America's foreign policy and economy between 2000-'06, they chose instead to underestimate their opposition. In this, they remind me of no one as much as the Democrats during the tail-end of the Johnson Administration.

"It doesn't matter how unpopular LBJ and the war are," they told themselves. "There's just no way that the American people will elect Richard Nixon." If that sounds familiar, it should. That's almost exactly what Republicans told themselves in 2008. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they doubled down on their wishful thinking last year, with even more catastrophic results.

Much was made of Barack Obama's resume, as if that actually mattered. If experience was all it took to win a presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman would have faced Obama last fall instead of Mitt Romney. Not only was Huntsman a much more effective and popular governor, he had vast foreign policy experience that Romney didn't.

That's why conservatives should start taking Vice President Joe Biden seriously soon. He's almost certain to win the 2016 Democratic nomination and I'd give him better than even odds of ascending to the presidency.

"But what about Hillary," I'm sure you're asking. Well, I don't think that she's going to run for several reasons;

First, history tells us that the nomination is Biden's for the asking. The last three Democratic vice-presidents - Gore, Mondale and Humphrey - all won it, despite strong challengers. The last vice-president to run for the nomination and lose was Truman's, Alben Barkley in 1952, and he was practically a corpse when he announced.

Second, the Clinton legacy is something to be protected. Losing to the first serious African-American candidate for the nomination is one thing. Losing to Joe Biden, which she almost certainly would, is quite another. It may well be that Chelsea wants to run for something someday, which would be complicated if her mother decides to become Harold Stassen.

Third, Hillary is just a terrible national candidate. Yes, she was elected to the Senate twice, but she did it in a deeply blue state and beat two nobodies. Her presidential campaign was notable for the infighting within it, which was more focused than the goal of winning the nomination. And beating an incumbent vice-president is considerably more difficult than winning an open nomination.

Fourth, she's seen how much money her husband has made since leaving office, and she'll be leaving the State Department at least as popular Bill was when he left the White House. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Hillary has been talking to Colin Powell about how lucrative the private sector can be for a popular former secretary of state. Why damage that by running for a nomination she's unlikely at best to win?

Look, mocking Joe Biden is a lot of fun. I get that. I do it all the time. The difference is that I'm not running against him.

Also, as Ezra Klien points out in Bloomberg this morning, Biden is increasingly seen as a serious player;

In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He’s the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who’s on a nickname basis with many of the world’s most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.

Yet just a few days before he was giving dating advice on C-SPAN2, Biden again proved himself perhaps the most effective member of the Obama administration. He reprised his role as the White House closer, the guy who can cut a deal with the Republicans after everyone else has failed. In the end, Biden got Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to strike a deal that the White House was happy with. That’s something neither Obama nor Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had achieved. And it wasn’t the first time. Biden also helped close the 2011 deal that lifted the debt ceiling and the 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts in return for fresh stimulus.

Biden’s skills as a campaigner are also considerable. According to Nielsen, his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention won better television ratings than the addresses of either Bill Clinton or Obama (or Republicans Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, for that matter). His debate performance against Ryan bucked up anxious Democrats and arguably stanched the bleeding from Obama’s hapless initial appearance against Romney.

Republicans would do well to study Biden's performance in his debate against Ryan. Paul Ryan was presented as the GOP's most serious thinker, and Biden managed to dismiss him as if he were a contender for vice president of his junior high school class instead of the United States. And the chances aren't good that the Republican Party will put up a nominee even as smart as Ryan in four years.

Therein lies another serious problem for Republicans: The GOP's ongoing civil war.

The Tea Party and the Religious Right maintain that when the party nominates sane people (Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney,) they lose. Of course, they forget that George W. Bush ran well to the left of the party's platform and won twice.

Those elements of the party control enough of the primaries that, if they manage to work together, they can deny the nomination to someone actually capable of beating Biden. Jon Huntsman and Chris Christie seem to already be disqualified for the nomination, and I can't see another Bush being nominated anytime soon. Between his performance as Romney's vice-presidential nominee and his vote for last week's fiscal cliff deal, I'd suggest that Ryan is out, too. If someone like Marco Rubio stays on the Tea Party right, he can't be elected. But if he moves to the center, he can't be nominated.

Then there's the party's "next in line" tradition for the nomination, which heavily favors Rick Santorum. But Santorum would be crushed everywhere but the Deep South, and there's a very real chance that he'd lose the Carolinas and possibly Georgia, especially if Biden picks a Southerner as a running mate.

Republicans have also adopted the old Democratic playbook that cost them seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. In 2008, McCain had to run to the base so hard that he couldn't move to the center after the convention. And last year Republicans started playing the old Democrat game of "kill the frontrunner," which made Romney all but unelectable in the fall. It should also be remembered that almost all of Obama's attacks against Romney were first deployed by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry during the primaries.

When I look at a hypothetical election, I look at the likeliest winner and ask myself "Who's going to beat him?" Combine that likely scenarios and conditions, and you'd be surprised how often it works.

It's almost unthinkable that President Obama will leave office anywhere near as unpopular as either Bush did, although I can't see him having approval ratings like Reagan or Clinton did. If Obama starts 2016 with a job approval of about 45%, that puts Biden way ahead of the GOP, who are almost certain to have another ruinous primary. Since I believe this economy is "the new normal," employment and GDP growth numbers will only have to be slightly better than they are now for the Democrats not to be hurt too badly by them.

Then there's the Republican brand. The Tea Party penchant for nominating unelectable Senate candidates is going to cost them their third consecutive clear shot at that body in two years. There's also a better than even chance that they'll lose more House seats when they historically should gain a lot of them.

And that goes to the single biggest problem conservatives had last year: Their outright refusal to recognize reality. They managed to convince themselves that they couldn't lose against Obama when the history and the facts told them something very different. When they didn't rationalize away evidence contrary to the narrative, they ignored it completely or ascribed it to some nefarious media plot.

Every instinct in my body tells me that they're going to the same thing in a race against Joe Biden. And I can't see how that ends well.

Why Sandy Hook Changes Nothing

Since Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut there has been an almost constant chorus about how the tragedy is a "game changer" in America's gun politics. Some of the calls for reform have actually been quite moving, such as MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough's just this morning.


If you don't know anything about the American government or society, you might actually believe that "nothing will ever be the same." Sadly, that isn't going to be the case. There will be no fundamental change in America for several reasons.

As I explained yesterday, this isn't about guns, movies, video games, or even mental health. It's about something fundamental to the American character that leads them to resolve conflicts with violence. Even English-speaking industrialized countries with ready access to weaponry don't have anything close to the homicide rates of the United States.

That's well beyond the capacity of a government, even the world's most powerful government, to solve. Yes, you can incarcerate even more of your citizens - and the United States already has the largest prison population in the free world - but that does nothing to address the underlying issue. Were it otherwise, American criminal justice would have done away with this ugly phenomenon decades ago. Instead, it has gotten worse and the victims are now first graders.

One of the reasons that I have no faith in anything changing is something that we've already seen. Too many Americans are casting blame at their government, which I suppose is to be expected. But that ignores that in a constitutional republic, you don't just get the government you deserve, you get the government you vote for.

And what the American people have voted for couldn't be clearer. Over the last 50 years of federal elections, the re-election of American incumbents has been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 97%. In every election all one hears is constant clamoring for change, but voters never actually mark their ballots for it.

That's not the fault of the government, the politicians, the law, or even the money in politics. That is a perfect representation of the intellectual, physical and moral laziness of the voter. Unless and until the people start accepting responsibility for what their country has become, dreams of change will remain precisely that, dreams.

If people are unwilling to change their government in a fundamental way from time to time, what right do they have to believe that their government is ever going to change anything at all? The politicians rightly know that they risk nothing by maintaining the status quo, so what reason do they have to do anything but that? "Hope and change" is a slogan, it is not an agenda.

I remember how 9/11 was supposed to "change everything," too. However, it didn't take long for people to rail against the security measures put in place to prevent it from happening again. The modern attention span is virtually non-existent. No matter how terrible the tragedy, no matter how brutal the carnage, people will put it out of their minds as soon as their daily routines are negatively impacted.

Change starts with the people. Expecting the government to change absent the will of the people is little more than wishful thinking.

But there are practical challenges Washington would face.

Here's an interesting fact, which reinforces something else I noted yesterday;

There are an estimated 270 million guns in the hands of civilians in the United States, making Americans the most heavily armed people in the world per capita. Yemen, a tribal nation with no history of strong central government or the rule of law, comes in a distant second.

Even if the political will existed to do something meaningful, numbers like 270 million are too large to reasonably do anything about. The American military couldn't even begin to disarm an Iraqi insurgency, even without the inconvenience of the Bill of Rights getting in the way.

Let's assume that you could get an effective gun control ban through Congress, which I don't believe that you can. That would almost certainly only affect the manufacture and sale of new weapons. There would still be 270 million existing guns out there in America.

People still own perfectly functional firearms from the Civil War, which was a century and a half ago. How long do you suppose that a modern AR-15 is designed to last?

Not only does the Sandy Hook massacre not "change everything," it won't even change the United States Senate.

The Senate was deliberately designed to frustrate passionate calls for immediate change. The Founders knew that good rarely comes from the inflamed masses, but lasting damage to a constitutional republic often does.

A gun control bill might actually the pass the Senate. I'm not discounting entirely the idea that it will. However, I can assure you that it will be so gutted that it will only give the appearance of doing something, a legislative phenomenon that the Senate specializes in.

Always remember that there was an assault weapons ban that looked like it accomplished something during the Clinton administration. It, like the bill likely to be introduced soon, was written by Senator  Dianne Feinstein.

The practical effect of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 was as follows;

That law banned 19 specific types of semiautomatic weapons – guns that reload new rounds of ammo automatically – and magazine clips that could hold more than 10 rounds.

It also banned guns with at least two "military-style features," effectively eliminating 118 models, according to this 2004 University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the DOJ's research arm.

Despite these limitations, critics of the law say, people could still get their hands on semiautomatics.

The U Penn report suggested that semiautomatic weapons could maintain their essential functions even if gun makers got rid of the "military-style features" banned by the 1994 law.

The report found the assault weapons ban "targets a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons' operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal."

For example, after the ban, gun makers marketed "legalized" versions of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which was exactly the same as the outlawed version, but came without accessories such as threaded barrels.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, also made that point when speaking to PBS in 2004. The government only sought to limit guns containing certain "cosmetic features" such as a bayonet mount, according to LaPierre.

"The guns have been marketed the last 10 years without the cosmetic accessories," he said. "The same guns have been there for the past 10 years."

And, under the ban, gun enthusiasts could buy any semiautomatic they wanted to – as long as it was made before 1994. (emphasis in original)

Were I to make an educated guess, I would say that any new bill will closely resemble the 1994 law. And that will make it meaningless. After all, there were a number of mass shootings - including school shootings - with assault weapons between 1994 and 2004, when the law expired.

On the other hand, threaded barrels will probably disappear again. And that will probably be enough to make most people feel better.

The assault weapons ban only made cosmetic changes and primarily existed to make Democrats feel good about themselves while providing the American people with the illusion of reform.

It's notable that the National Rifle Association didn't challenge the '94 ban in court. Senator Feinstein said yesterday that they didn't because they knew the ban would be upheld. One of the Supreme Court's staunchest conservatives, Antonin Scalia, has also said that such a ban would likely survive judicial review.

But the fact is that the ban wasn't challenged because it was exactly what the lobbyists wanted. Why would they want to draw attention to the fact that it was entirely cosmetic and fundamentally changed nothing?

I'm about to tell you something that isn't just an important thing to know about democracy, it's the only thing you need to know about democracy.

You don't matter to your representatives a tenth as much as the lobbyists do. Why should you? After all, the lobbyists are usually former staffers or colleagues of your representative. There are far deeper relationships there than you'll ever share, even if you ignore the money and political support involved.

If you look at the innards of any "major reform" over the last 30 years, you very quickly come to understand that they not only don't do what they advertise, they don't do much of anything at all, except serve the interests of an impacted lobby somewhere. They lobbyists don't usually win, folks, they always win. And as long as the revolving door between government and lobbying is allowed to exist, they always will.

So does Sandy Hook "change everything?" Not even close. A lot of people will make a lot of noise and make a huge display of rending their garments until the funerals are over, at which point business as usual will resume. Then there will be another Sandy Hook, perhaps with even younger victims, and the process will repeat itself.

As I said both yesterday and in this post, I don't think that any ban is going to be especially effective for the many practical reasons that I listed. But you will probably get a sideshow of people appearing to do something to placate you for maybe six weeks.

Here's how I know that nothing is going to change in a serious way. Because your democracy is what you make it, and nobody is particularly interested in their democracy. Learning how your government works and why is hard, often tedious work, which is why very few people bother doing it.

What I haven't seen anyone point out is that this is so much bigger than Sandy Hook. This is about everything your government does. If you leave it to the politicians and their lobbyist cronies to stop the next Sandy Hook, you're guaranteeing that there will be another one. And another one after that. Just as there will be another massive bank failure that takes down the economy, there will be another Sandy Hook.

And people will look everywhere except the one place they should look first: the mirror.

My Official Prediction for Tuesday

 

So, here it is, folks. This is my official prediction of how I think things are going to look Wednesday morning, barring endless recounts or some unforeseen disaster occurring in the next four days. It'll be 286 Obama - 252 Romney.

 

I'm not as comfortable with this map as I should be, but not in a way that you probably expect. There are four states that even I'm uncomfortable with my calls on: New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida and Colorado. Three of those I gave to Romney because most of the state polls that I've read have them leaning that way. I awarded Obama Colorado based on nothing more than a gut instinct, which could very well be wrong. And he could lose Colorado and still win, such is his cushion. With the exception of Colorado, where I've had a doubt, I've given the benefit of it to Romney.

 

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were upsets in any or all of states. Because I was so unsure of the first three of the four, I went with (very) loose polling averages in them. But it's entirely within the realm of possibility that one, two or all three could go blue. I also have a feeling that Arizona might be closer than anyone suspects, but I have no serious current evidence there to change my call on it.

 

If you're the "early to bed, early to rise" sort, look at what happens in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia. If Romney wins one or both of the first two (and if he wins one, he'll probably win both,) I'm wronger than I've been in my life and this is a Republican blowout. In that event, Romney will easily take Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, very probably Minnesota and maybe even Nevada. I don't realistically see that happening (although my good friend the Tiger on Politics does,) but it could.

 

The same applies if Obama wins Virginia. If he wins that, Florida might very well go with it, bringing his Electoral College total to an ass-kicking 338.

 

New Hampshire, being New Hampshire could flip from my prediction without indicating a trend.

 

For three years, I've been saying that Mitt Romney was the only Republican that would keep this election even reasonably close. But even I didn't think that he'd make it as close as it is and he deserves a great deal of credit for that. Make no mistake about it, if Romney loses, the Tea Partiers will go ape on him, rather undeservedly. None of their favorites would have been anywhere close to impressive electorally as Mitt has been. If Santorum or Gingrich were the nominee, I'd be devoting this post to deciding whether Obama breaks 400 Electoral College votes.

 

By my estimation, the House of Representatives is going to look pretty much like it does now. The GOP will probably lose two, but no more than seven seats. Even if Romney wins, he won't have much in the way of coattails. Isn't gerrymandering great?

 

The Senate, on the other hand, is going to be a Republican disaster. For the second consecutive cycle, they're going to blow a sure thing. Were it not for Tea Party challenges leading to the nomination of full-bore psychopaths, they could have possibly taken control of the upper body. But they didn't and they're going to fail to pick up Missouri and actually lose Indiana as a consequence. By pissing off Olympia Snowe to the degree that they did, they've lost Maine. It also increasingly looks like Scott Brown is going to lose in Massachusetts, which is too bad. I like him.

 

The Democrats went into this year defending an impossible number of seats in a hostile environment following 2010. But through sheer GOP incompetence, they'll almost certainly hold their losses down to two, possibly three seats.

 

And that should tell you everything you need to know about the Tea Party. Yes, they're an almost impossible pain in the ass, but they demonstrably can't carry state-wide elections outside of very narrow circumstances. And if they can't do that, they won't win a presidential election anytime in the near future. At some point, then, you need to ask what purpose these people serve.

 

Anyhow, it should be a much more interesting night than I thought it was going to be 40 days ago.

 

 

Map lovingly stolen from RealClearPolitics (which lets you make your own, because it's fun!) And my deepest gratitude goes to The Tiger on Politics for helping me copy mine here. That man is a godsend. If you think I'm wrong about everything, you should definitely read him on a regular basis.

Why I (Sort Of) Hope Romney Wins

Over the last few weeks we've seen what is perhaps the clearest example of just how full of shit Republicans are.

Remember how through September you couldn't avoid hearing about "skewed polls" that were part of a direct conspiracy to suppress Mitt Romney's vote? Whether you tuned in Fox News or read practically any blog, you heard about it 24-7. Not only was it wildly annoying, it was impossibly stupid.

Then Romney won the first debate (in as much as you can "win" one of those silly spectacles,) and viola, we're now in the third consecutive week of not hearing Republican whining. Instead, those assholes are doing victory laps because their guy is seen to be winning in the national polls. They're still wrong, but it beats the constant pissing and moaning like liberals.

As you'll see, I'm incredibly consistent. I said in public that the national polls mean shit in a presidential race when Obama was ahead and I'm still saying they mean shit. Because the presidency is decided in the Electoral College, the state polls are the only ones that matter. And the state polls aren't being overly kind to Mitt Romney, especially in Ohio.

The president has had a pretty consistent lead in Ohio's "poll of polls" and without the Buckeye State, Romney's path to 270 is incredibly difficult, whereas Obama's isn't. Without Ohio, Romney has to come from behind in a number of different states where he hasn't maintained leads or has been stubbornly tied throughout his national surge. The way I see it, Obama is still the heavy favourite to win. As a matter of fact, I'll go out on a long limb and predict that the president is reelected with roughly 300 electoral votes. It could be as low as 280, but it could be as high as 320.

There's been a lot of talk over the last week of Obama winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. I think that's unlikely to point of not seriously addressing because that only happens about once a century and has never happened to an incumbent president.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be hilarious. After listening to Republicans lecture everyone about the primacy of the Electoral College, I'd really like to see them marching in the streets like Al Sharpton. That would make me smile.

Of course, it doesn't really matter who wins because America is fucked either way. Even if Obama had a serious budget plan (which he doesn't,) he isn't going to have a Congress willing to pass it. And the Romney-Ryan plans are nothing short of a fantasy. There's no way that it'll accomplish what it's suppose to even if it was enacted, and there's no hope that it'll ever be enacted.

An Obama second term will look a lot like the last two years have, with nothing getting done until the United States finally defaults on its debt and the universe implodes. A Romney Administration, on the other hand, will be the funniest thing imaginable, at least until the United States finally defaults on its debt and the universe implodes.

Willard Mitt Romney hasn't exactly been a profile in courage through his life, given as he is to saying whatever whoever's in front of him wants to hear. That means that his chances of standing up to the vicious shitheads in the House Tea Party caucus and introducing a sane plan that could pass a Democratic Senate are virtually zero.

The plan that he's touting - major tax reform - isn't going to pass either house of Congress. The cuntish and evil lobbyists that control both parties aren't going to allow the elimination of high end tax loopholes which, by themselves, don't come close to paying for an across-the-board rate reduction; and nobody's going to vote for the four big middle class deductions that actually would.

If there's one universal rule about politicians, it's that they'll always vote for cotton candy for everybody. That being the case, I can see Romney peeling away the three or four Senate Democrats necessary to reverse the Byrd Rule and pass the enormous tax cuts through reconciliation, but not the deduction repeal that pays for the mess.

When Romney reinvented himself as "Moderate Mitt: King of the Reasonable Cats" on October 3rd, he specifically said several times that he "would not pass a tax cut that adds to the deficit." But like everything else about the Romney campaign, this is an example of almost majestic lying cocksuckery.

You see, Republicans generally and the Tea Party specifically don't believe that tax cuts ever "add to the deficit, despite decades of mathematical evidence to the contrary. Even though it's never actually happened before, they think that tax cuts will stimulate enough growth to not only pay for themselves, but the trillions in new spending that they'll also pass.

Not only has Romney promised $2 trillion in new military spending that no one's actually asking for, it's important that the Tea Partiers are actually becoming politicians. It's easy for them to take a stand on spending when the opposition controls the White House and their proposed cuts have no realistic chance of passing. But when they have a pliable puppet like Romney as president (and Grover Norquist has said in public that the GOP only needs a "rubber stamp" in the Oval Office,) it's more likely than not that they'll be exactly the same spending machine that Bush's Republican Congress was.

One of the iron laws of politics is that voters only like fiscal discipline in theory. That is to say when someone else's spending gets cut. So, yeah, the poor will probably get gutted but the big-ticket middle class entitlements will either stay as they are or actually expand, just as they did under Bush. If you think that the proposed Medicare and Social Security plans are going to pass, you're kidding yourself, especially when they're put in legislative language and the real transition costs are laid out in black and white.

The same goes for promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. If you think that's going to happen, you're either an idiot, you haven't been paying attention, or you hope Romney's lying. Mitt has said on numerous occasions that he'll keep the parts of the Affordable Care Act that everybody likes, which happens to be most of it. He only wants to get rid of the individual mandate that pays for it.

Simply put, if you elect Romney, the Tea Party effectively ceases to exist. A President Romney would presumably like to be reelected and the fucking Teapers lacked the balls to invent themselves before President Bush was safely exiled to Dallas. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that these idiots will stand up to a president of their own party.

Watching the self-declared "fiscal hawks" on Fox News and in the jerk-off blogosphere revert to form and justifying the deficit marathon that Romney and Tea Party House creates would be the funniest thing I've ever seen. Watching them  spend between two and four years blaming an underperforming economy on Obama, as calling Obama out for doing the same to Bush is going to make me smile.

Look, I get that well over half of my American readers are going to vote for Mitt Romney and I'm not delusional enough to pretend that I'm going to change anybody's mind. But I guarantee you that what I described above - or something very close to it - is going to happen in the event of a Romney presidency.

And watching that will be worth your voting for him.

On Senator Joyce Fairbairn

Anyone who has seen Alzheimer’s up close (and, at this point, I would imagine that almost everybody has) knows just what a cruel disease it is. It effectively kills a person years before they physically die and causes the patient's family untold anguish. Alzheimer’s is among the very ugliest things that can befall a human being and anyone who suffers from it, and especially their families, has my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

The date of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost wholly irrelevant. A diagnosis merely creates an opportunity for treatment that might slow the destructive progress of the disease. But the decline of patient's facilities is apparent for months, and often years, before that dreaded diagnosis comes. As Monica Crowley recounted in her book Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, Richard Nixon commented on Ronald Reagan's apparent befuddlement more than a year before Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As a matter of fact, President Nixon died almost six months before President Reagan's final letter to the American people was written.

As much as some people would like to pretend differently, the story of Senator Joyce Fairbairn isn't about Alzheimer’s. It isn't even so much about Senator Fairbairn herself, despite the wishes of certain partisans to make it so. More precisely, it is about how politics is often crueller than even Alzheimer’s.

Canadians were told last week that Senator Fairbairn was declared legally incompetent in April, and a declaration to that effect was signed by her party's leader in the Senate, James Cowan. Such a declaration would prevent Joyce Fairbairn from buying or selling a home or stock, or testifying in a trial. I can't imagine that she would be legally allowed to drive a car. It did not, however, prevent her from voting in the Senate.

By the point that someone is declared legally incompetent from dementia - something that doctors and judges decidedly do not do frivolously - they often don't know where they are or why they're there. People that they've known their entire lifetimes are strangers to them. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my grandmother spent several years thinking that I was my grandfather, who died about six months before I was born.

Being taken to the Senate chamber every day and sitting there must be a terrifying ritual for the Ms. Fairbairn. God only knows what air travel to and from Alberta must out her through, Remember, this is a woman that requires 24-hour-a-day constant care. And in her moments of clarity, she is very likely tortured by what's happening to her by being reminded of the honourable office that she holds to this day and her inability to carry out its duties. I cannot possibily imagine what this must be doing to her, despite having seen it in close proximity myself.

When I first heard the story, I wondered to myself why the Senator was still in office. If her disease progressed so rapidly that the declaration of legal incompetence was a shock to her and the Liberal Party, that would be one thing. It would also be highly unusual, since Alzheimer's - a slowly degenerative disease - almost never works that way. I suspected that something deeper, and more darkly political was afoot.

In this morning's National Post, Jonathan Kay confirms my suspicions.

“Jim Cowan [is] a serious guy who was appointed to the Senate Liberal leadership by Paul Martin,” he told me. “He has no control over the Senate Liberals, because the most active are Chrétien appointees who have nothing but contempt for the Martin gang. So even if Jim wanted to do the right thing, my bet is the Chrétienites … insisted that [Joyce Fairbairn] be kept in the Chamber despite her illness. They are [allegedly unprincipled individuals] who sent a member of Joyce’s staff to her house every day; to bring her to work when they knew she was ill. All this not to help her, but to delay [Stephen Harper] from appointing another elected Alberta senator to replace her. Watch what happens next. They will try to claim she is on ‘sick leave’ for the next two years. Just another way to [delay] the pick, and use her office budget to hire staff to work on party politics.”

“Their game now,” he added, will be to “attack the nasty Tories” for making an issue of Fairbairn. “These guys have no shame.”

He also added that “the PMO is urging us to keep quiet, because they fear the Liberals will find some way to blame us.” Thus his refusal to let me use his name.

According to this veteran Conservative Senator, Fairbairn’s saga has been going on at least since 2009. Since then, he says, “we [Senators] have been quietly asked not to challenge Joyce in Committee or the Chamber, because she wasn’t well. This game of being ‘nice’ has been going on for too long.”

Kay's source, it should be noted, is "a veteran Conservative Senator," so his motives might be less than pure. But it certainly conforms to how politics works. And I include in this the allusion to "being 'nice.'"

This isn't, according to the Conservative Senator, a matter of party politics, at least not entirely. It's a continuation, in the most inhumane way imaginable, of the Chrétien-Martin civil war within the Liberal Party of Canada itself. That makes this story even more repugnant than it otherwise would be. And it would otherwise be plenty repugnant.

It seems logical to conclude that Senator Fairbairn is being kept in office for no other reason than that the Liberals want to hold her seat for as long as possible. My foreign readers should know that the Canadian Senate is an body appointed by the Prime Minister, in this case the Conservative Stephen Harper.

Of course, that only delays the inevitable. Under Canadian law, Senators are required to retire at 75, which Senator Fairbairn does in the fall of 2014, well before the next federal election. Harper will name her replacement, sooner or later. Until then, her staff is literally dragging her across Ottawa and sometimes across the country. And at any given time she might not know who those people are, where she's being taken, or why.

But there's money involved. Even if Joyce Fairbairn is on medical leave, the Grits will continue to be allowed to exploit her office budget to the party's political ends. And that's truly despicable. A political party that can't get along with one another is using a desperately ill woman for money and politics. This might be one of the more personally awful things that I've heard about in politics. And if Jonathan Kay and his Conservative source are correct, this has been ongoing since sometime in  2009, not this past April.

But it gets worse. Because Liberals are Liberals, they're hiding their own conduct behind the shield of Senator Fairbairn's savage suffering. Their more rabid partisans are threatening to exploit the frailties of Conservative MPs and Senators should anyone treat l'affaire Fairbairn with anything other than complete silence.

To that I say, "Good."

I haven't voted for the Conservatives in well over a decade, and everything about Harper's governance has affirmed the correctness of that decision. I carry no water for them whatsoever. If anything, the Tory insistence on becoming the Liberals causes me to hold them in even greater contempt than I hold the Grits. And I wasn't sure that I was capable of that.

More importantly, the people need to know if their constitutional representatives, whether elected or appointed, are in any way impaired from carrying out their duties, either physically, ethically or morally. An uninformed democracy isn't a democracy at all, and we're plenty uninformed without some insider code of silence that prevents us from knowing everything we should.

You might recall that I didn't share the conservative (large or small "C") outrage when Public Safety Minister Vic Towes' divorce pleadings were leaked by a Liberal staffer. That's exactly the kind of thing the people should know about those at the very top of the legal establishment of the nation, especially when they consciously compare their political opponents to child pornographers.

As a Manitoba Cabinet minister, Towes was responsible for naming judges to the bench and he presumes to become a Court of Appeal judge himself. And the Conservatives who were outraged by the Towes story are themselves hypocrites, given the fun they had with the story of Jack Layton's massage parlour arrest in the 90's, which was almost certainly leaked by the Liberals.

I'm of the opinion that Adam Carroll (aka Vikileaks) and Anonymous performed a valuable public service. If the Liberals want to seek "vengeance" by exposing lawmakers in situations similar to Senator Fairbairn's, I'm actually okay with that.

But I know they won't. They'll report seeing a Member drunk in a bar or doing something that in no way impairs their legislative duties. The Liberals (and in fairness, the Conservatives increasingly) are masters of false equivilience.

I have yet to see anyone, anyone at all, treat Senator Joyce Fairbairn unfairly except the Liberal Party of Canada. To keep her in Ottawa when she's been legally declared unable to fulfill her constitutional duties is nothing short of a national disgrace. And to do it for reasons of political advantage and money should tell you everything you need to know about the people doing it. This has nothing to do with Senator Fairbairn and everything to do with the political apparatus that surrounds her.

At this point, I would normally go on a 300-plus word, wildly entertaining rant about why the Liberals no longer deserve to exist. Today, I don't have to. Their actions make my argument far better than I ever could.


Update - 4:19 PM: Ah, I see it's already begun. I do hope that this column names names, gives dates and cites specifics, allowing those involved to defend their reputations in a court of law against its author and the media conglomerate that publishes him. If the column doesn't do that, then you again know everything you need to about the author and publisher.

It's very probably yet another chickenshit attempt to defend the indefensible without having the courage to do it honestly, instead relying on blackmail.

Of course, the coulmn could cite dead politicians, cleverly protecting himself and his publisher from libel action. I wouldn't expect anything less.

OPSEC Hypocrisy

There's nothing more adorable than partisan Republicans running around screaming about leaking classified national security information at this late date. You really just want to ruffle the hair on their little pin heads and congraulate them for learning to lie like adults.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that you have to like these kinds of political leaks, although I often do approve of unauthorized leaks. For example, I have yet to write anything condemning Wikileaks or classified operations (such as the NSA's then-illegal domestic surveillance) winding up in The New York Times.

I'm not a big believer in the idea that you can have a secret government in a democracy. I recognize that some things need to be classified, but those instances should be few and very far between. If the government can't proudly admit that it has done something, it should almost always avoid doing it.

Republicans were horrified when President Obama publicly acknowledged that the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossedegh in 1953. Of course, any American who was interested already knew that the CIA had done it, and it did sort of shape the history of the region from that day forward, but it made the United States look bad.

And that's where one of the primary dangers of the classification culture lies. Did you know that, for just one example, the American government continues to classify documents from the First World War? I somehow doubt that there's any real danger of the Kaiser or the Austro-Hungarians using that information to the detriment of America's national security, but try convincing Washington of that. Not long before his retirement, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal book on the tens of millions of documents that have been unnecessarily classified and the culture that breeds.

When something can be easily classified, you find that everything can be. In November of 2001, President Bush amended the Presidential Records Act with Executive Order 13233, which made access to records by historians (begininng with the Reagan Administration's) virtually impossible. 13233 extended the same protection to vice-presidential records, as well. In a directive to the US Archivist, Bush explained that he might "may claim a constitutionally based privilege" over the records. And Executive Orer 13233 was above and beyond the usual classification process.

Classification can also be a gateway to criminal behaviour by presidents. The aforementioned NSA program was clearly illegal under both the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1978 and the National Security Act of 1948. But it was classified, so there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Even referring the matter to the House Judicary Committee for impeachment proceedings could very well have constituted a federal crime.

Operation Stellar Wind almost created a constitutional crisis of another kind in 2004.

There were internal disputes within the Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. In March 2004, the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that the program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed, where Ashcroft lay semiconscious, to request that he sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. However, Ashcroft was incapable of signing the document. Bush then reauthorized the operation, over formal Justice Department objections. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller, Acting Attorney General James Comey, and many prominent members of the Justice Department were prepared to resign over the matter. Valerie Caproni the FBI general counsel, said, "From my perspective, there was a very real likelihood of a collapse of government." Bush subsequently reversed the authorization.

Simply put, the entire top echelon of American law enforcement could have resigned overnight and not been able to tell the public why. That would have made the Saturday Night Massacre seem mild in comparison and would have crippled the government in the middle of two wars.

You can even argue that Watergate itself was a result of extensive secrecy within the Executive Branch.

Most scholars believe that the scandal began with the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. But the memoirs of both President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, show that Nixon wasn't concerned about it. Nixon had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the Vietnam War through the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The material Ellsberg leaked, Nixon thought, would only embarrass his lifelong enemies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

But Kissinger pointed out to Nixon that they were involved in sensitive and highly secret (so secret that even Vice President Agnew wasn't aware of them) negotiations that would lead to the "China opening." Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, according to Kissinger, wouldn't deal with an American president who couldn't keep his own secrets. It was only then that Nixon set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to his resignation of the presidency. He created the "plumbers unit" that famously broke into the Watergate, but only after a "black bag" job at the office of Ellsberg's Los Angeles phychatrist.

Granted, it should be noted that by the time the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Nixon and Kissinger were illegally wiretapping, through the good offices of J.Edgar Hoover, several journalists and members of Kissinger's own staff in relation to other leaks. No one was fired, let alone prosecuted, for those leaks, although they did greatly complicate Kissinger's own confirmation as Secretary of State.

Secrecy, classification and leaks are the way Washington does business and has for generations. You may not like it, but there's very little getting around it.

What I find problematic is the Republican Party's new-found obsession with integrity when it comes to national security-related information. And that's where the Special Operations  Political Action Committee enters our discussion.

 

Even though the above video is the creation of fevered GOP hacks, I encourage you all to watch it, if for no other reason than it's hilarious. Former Navy SEAL, Ben Smith in particular might be the most transparent hack on the face of the earth.

Actually, sir, Obama did whack Osama bin Laden. You know how I know that? Because if the operation went sideways and a bunch of SEALs get killed instead, he alone would have been blamed for it. Ask Jimmy Carter how that works. So spare me the sanctimony, you prick.

Before I go further, I should state my opinion on the bin Laden operation. When Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign that he would go into Pakistan to get him, I joined Hillary Clinton, John McCain and, yes, even Mitt Romney in thinking it was a fantastically bad idea. I still think it was a bad idea because we may not know the real consequences of it for several more years. The Pakistanis are unpredictable folks, and they're pretty much going to be running the show in Afghanistan after the rest of us get out. Humiliating the ISI may yet have consequences that outweigh the benefit of putting a plug into bin Laden's noggin. And President Obama will be held to account for those consequences, as well.

First, almost every accusation that OPSEC PAC makes has been carefully disassembled by Peter Bergen, who knows more about al-Qaeda than almost anyone else on the planet.

Second, Obama might not have had to announce the bin Laden attack if the SEALs didn't crash their own secret helicopter. Does anyone think that the Pakistanis would have kept that secret for them after a foreign military invaded one of their heavily populated cities? Really?

Third, Republicans sure react differently about retired military speaking out against their civilian masters depending on which civilian masters are being spoken out against.

The Night of the Generals was as instructive as anything possibly could be. In 2006, a number of retired senior military and policy advisors publicly called for the resignation (or firing) of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the growing debacle in Iraq. These were incredibly serious people with centuries of experience between them. Some were close personal friends and ideological allies of Rumsfeld himself. Nobody in the OPSEC PAC rises to the level of rank or experience as those who participated in the "Generals' revolt" of 2006.

Practically every Republican house organ compared what the generals were doing as something akin to treason, "preening" for the "Leftist press" and the "defeatist" mainstream media. Of course, as soon as President Bush did fire Rumsfeld, those criticisms went down the memory hole.

At this point, I should bring in some more history.

For example, we know that President Bush very selectively declassified the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to further the case for removing Saddam Hussein. The declassification was selective in that it gave the impression that America's intelligence community was unanimous in its assessement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Left out of the declassification was the fact that the intelligence branches of the Air Force and the Department of Energy dissented. The community also had a much lower level of confidence in the findings than the administration presented them as having.

Then there was the deliberate leak of Valarie Plame's identity as a CIA operative. We now know that the intial leak came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who admitted the leak immediately to investigators. But there's hardly a journalist alive who would run a story like that with only a single source. Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff (and Counsellor to the President) Scooter Libby and Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff - and political consigliere - Karl Rove helpfully confirmed the Armitage leak. In Libby's case, it was confirmed to several reporters, including Tim Russert and Matthew Cooper.

Upon Libby's conviction in relation to the Plame leak, President Bush committed what I consider to be a disgraceful act in commuting his sentence, which most Republicans applauded. But even that wasn't enough. In the closing days of the administration, Vice President Cheney, again supported by innumerable Republican partisans, repeatedly asked the President to pardon Libby outright.

While we're on the topic of the selective outrage over national security leaks, there's a story just today that highlights it.

The author of a recently announced insider account of the raid that killed Usama bin Laden has been identified to Fox News as a 36-year-old former Navy SEAL Team 6 member from Alaska who also played a role in the high-profile rescue of an American captain kidnapped by Somali pirates.

The book, "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden," is set to hit shelves on Sept 11. It is penned under the pseudonym "Mark Owen," according to the publisher, but multiple sources told Fox News his name is in fact Matt Bissonnette, 36, of Wrangell, Alaska. Bissonnette could be exposing himself to legal trouble, as the Pentagon has not vetted the account.

The tell-all book also has apparently upset a large population of former and current SEAL members who worry about releasing information that could compromise future missions. One Navy SEAL told Fox News, "How do we tell our guys to stay quiet when this guy won't?" Other SEALs are expressing anger, with some going so far as to call him a "traitor."

Because the bin Laden raid was actually a CIA operation that was carried out by the SEALs, not sending the manuscript of "No Easy Day" to Langley for security review may (or may not, the structure of the hit makes it legally questionable) a federal crime.

But you know what else is a crime? Knowingly revealing the name of someone who participated in two classified operations, which "multiple sources" did and Fox News ran with. Moreover, they very helpfully told the extremists who might want to exact revenge, where he lives.

Of course this, like other national security leaks that  don't help the GOP politically, is registering very low on the Republican Outrage Meter. Why, I'll bet that Sean Hannity doesn't devote 1.100th ofthe time to the leak of Matt Bissonnette's name as he did to ball-washing OPSEC PAC and their retarded theories of how life really works.

And that's why these people can't be taken seriously. Fox News, along with innumerable blogging morons, can't throw around classified names while still presenting themselves as Patriotic Protectors of National Security.

Well, I guess that you can. but you expose yourself as being nothing better than what you accuse Barack Obama of being: a partisan glory hound that holds the fortune of his own party above that of the national security of the United States.

In the end, OPSEC PAC and it's birther leader, should be viewed for what it is: a ridiculous (if well-financed and connected) Republican joke.

Italian Democracy and the Fall of America

There are any number of things that you can say about Italy's once and future prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. That he's a throwback to the Gilded Age,  a walking monument to monopolistic self-dealing and a perfect example to children everywhere of just how far personal and public corruption, combined with an almost awesome contempt for the administration of justice, can get you.

Even the most cursory reading of Berlusconi's biography very quickly reveals just how ballsy he is. For example, when the judiciary decided to call him out on his almost Olympian levels of criminality, he passed a law immunizing himself from, prosecution while in office. Then he publicly shit-talked prosecutors and judges for years at a time. Everything about him is reminiscent of Boss Tweed of the fabled Tammany Hall, with the important exception that Tweed eventually went to jail.

Of course, none of this prevents him from being a hero, or even mitigates that heroism in the slightest. If, like me, you believe in nothing quite as much as the healing power of poontang, then it naturally follows that you should want portraits of Silvio Belusconi on your money.

These days the former prime minister is most famous for his Bunga Bunga parties, which feature assorted showgirls, a wide range of whores and the occasional teenaged Arab belly dancer. These are reputed to be almost epic Roman orgies, filled to overflowing with the sort of degeneracy that would make Caligula beam with pride.

Berlusconi's single greatest achievement is his understanding of what democracy has become and how he exploited it to his own gain. A media mogul, he would take the hottest girls from his television shows and run them as parliamentary candidates for his People of Freedom party. Understanding that hot and incompetent parliamentarians is always preferable to the homely and incompetent variety, the Italian people made Silvio the longest serving prime minister in Italy's post-war history.

Americans generally, and Republicans in particular, have tended to look down their noses at Italy in recent years. They see it as an entitlement society governed mostly by out-of-control banks and superficially maniacal politicians. This, they assert, has caused Italy to collapse into a heap of moral and financial bankruptcy.

To this I would respond by asking "and this is different from the United States how?"  As a matter of fact, the very same Americans who condemn Italy's state are the very same people that created a mirror image of it at home. I know that Republicans like to pretend that the years 2001-'06 didn't exist, but what they did during that period - the tax cuts, the wars, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D - remain the single biggest drivers of American indebtedness. More than anyone else, they created the fiscal Rome that's poised to fall on the rest of the world economy.

If nothing else, at least Berlusconi gave his people a bunch of fantastic tits to look at while he was doing it. While whatever thinking Silvio did during his terms of office was seemingly motivated by his wallet and his groin, George W. Bush wasn't exactly famous for thinking at all.

Democracy has become a ridiculous caricature of responsible governance throughout the Western world. So why shouldn't it at least have the most beautiful jugs, tightest little asses, and wonderfully groomed crotches that we the people can possibly put on it?  If you think that either Barack Obama, Mitt Romney or anyone in Congress is substantively better than Berlusconi's parliamentary army of uber-whores, you're not just part of the problem, you are the problem.

Substance was murdered, dismembered and buried and a shallow grave like a forgotten hobo by style during the Kennedy Administration. In the subsequent half century the people have been so manipulated by political consultants, television talking heads and their own abject stupidity that they've taken to believing that style actually is substance. Barack Obama is running entirely on the fact that he's a Horatio Alger character and Mitt Romney's only serious qualification for office is his money and the fact that he's what presidents look like in comic books.

How is that substantially different from Berlusconi taking a former dancer and dental hygienist and ensconcing her in office, especially when she'll continue to pimp for him during her tenure? At least that's entertaining, while what drives the outrage machines at Fox News and MSNBC is just annoyingly boring and only barely ranks at the bottom of America's problems.

The GSA blowing a few hundred grand in Vegas is what passes for a scandal in modern America, mostly because the people are too lazy and proudly ignorant to realize that the real outrage should come from the policies that everyone agreed about over the last thirty years. Of course, that'll never happen because the people won't bother until it's too late.

The unappreciated genius of Silvio Belusconi is that he recognized what democracy actually is these days, so he stuffed it into a bikini, out it on a trampoline and used it to further his own interests. Americans might laugh at that ... until they remember that their most recent vice-presidential nominee abandoned her office to become a realty TV star while she was still hot enough to profit from doing so.

Nicole Minetti might yet be driven from office in Lombardy. But as the perfect representation of the American Dream, I see no reason why she shouldn't become the next President of the United States. Sure, she's isn't 35 years of age or a born American citizen, but the Constitution hasn't meant all that much for decades now.

She might not be any better than Obama or Romney, but she could hardly be worse. And if nothing else, people might actually start paying attention to their government again, if only to see its nipples get hard.


Pretty much everything here was ruthlessly stolen from the great and good What Would Tyler Durden Do

The Ballad of Dick and Sarah

In case you haven't been paying attention for the last several decades, former Vice President Dick Cheney is a nasty fucking piece of work. He's easily the most dangerous person to have inhabited the executive branch since at least A. Mitchell Palmer or J. Edgar Hoover.

There's no shortage of people who'll tell you that Richard Nixon was, but there's also no shortage of people who don't know what they're talking about. For all of Nixon's malfeasance, he was continually frustrated by the bureaucracy and ultimately betrayed by his own co-conspirators.

That wasn't true of Cheney. Having learned at the feet of his mentor, the master of bureaucratic infighting, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney bent not only the bureaucracy, but even the Cabinet and the President of the United States to his will throughout the first Bush term. Anyone who's interested in seeing multiple examples of how he did this should read Barton Gellman's invaluable book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

It was only in Bush's second term; when the unmitigated disaster of Iraq had become clear, the Valarie Plame scandal that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and conviction, and the 2006 off-year elections that ended 12 years of Republican rule in Congress, that the vice president's influence waned supplanted by that of Condoleeza Rice, Josh Bolten and, finally, Bob Gates. In his recent memoir, Cheney himself tells of a National Security Council meeting regarding the possibility of a preventative strike on Iran. The vice president was the only official present in favour of one.

That hasn't stopped Dick from being an all-around asshole, though. If he reminds me of anyone, it's former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau in his retirement. Like Trudeau, Cheney believes that there's really one guy qualified to hold and exercise power, which would be him. And like Trudeau, Cheney won't shut the fuck up about it.

However, for the last four years, Cheney focused himself on undermining the Democrats generally and the Obama Administration, in particular.

That's changing. Now he's focusing his fire on the 2008 ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.



Now, it's an open secret that Cheney and McCain have a longstanding hatred for each other. And, to be fair, Cheney's remarks are much more of a shot against McCain's judgement than they are against Palin. But most folks aren't going to see it that way, and the last few days have shown that they haven't.

Cheney's attempt to sew himself to President Ford's legacy is also worthy of comment. Firstly, as then-White House Chief of Staff, Cheney wasn't principally responsible for the 1976 campaign, James Baker was. The selection of Bob Dole after Nelson Rockefeller was dumped from ticket was a campaign decision, not a White House one. And that's especially true given the very real possibility of a brokered convention resulting from Reagan's challenge for the nomination. We also now know that Ford told both Bob Woodward and Tom DeFrank that he thought that Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had lost their fucking minds in the Bush Administration.

His criticism of Palin is odd, as well. If he had said that Governor Palin was a whiny retard, consumed with identity politics and who shouldn't even be allowed in the White House as a goddamned tourist, most reasonable people would have agreed with him. Instead, he focused on her readiness to be president.

I'll grant you that anyone who got higher than a C in high school civics was more prepared for tthe presidency than Sarah Palin. As a matter of fact, Lisa Ann is more ready to be president than Palin was or is.

But the Republican litmus test is usually "executive experience," and that's something that Dick Cheney himself was profoundly lacking in. He went into government almost immediately after college. His positions as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense were administrative, policy was decided at a higher pay grade than his, especially in the Ford and first Bush Administrations. He was the first and only member of the congressional leadership that I'm aware of who held Congress in open contempt. Cheney didn't actually run anything until he went to Halliburton when he was 54 years old.

The second I saw Cheney's remarks on Sunday morning, I know the real fun was going to start. McCain blew Cheney off rather gracefully and with no shortage of humour on Monday morning. But Palin is famous for her inability to keep her mouth shut, and for the rather unorthodox things that come out of it when open.

On Monday night, she unloaded.



That interview is nothing short of hilarious. Neither of those broads could have been more delusional if they were stuffed full of magic mushrooms and horse tranquilizer.

Let's get one thing straight right off the top. Sarah Palin came by her "86-87% approval rating" as governor the old-fashioned way - she fucking bought it. In her first year in office, she jacked up the royalty the state takes from the oil companies and gave every man woman and child in the state $1,300.  A family of four got $5,200 in free money from Sarah Palin's "spreading the wealth around." Given that, it's sort of an indictment that her approval wasn't at 115%.

Moreover, after the 2008 campaign, she couldn't quit as governor - for reasons that no one fluent in the English language can understand to this day - fast enough.  Actually, that's not true. She wanted the fast, easy money that only the freakshows of reality TV and Fox News can bring.

The Van Sustern interview reinforced the single most prominent quality of Palin: her utter denial of personal responsibility for anything. That was something I first noticed in her mostly unreadable book It's All Nicole Wallace's Fucking Fault, but it's a theme that she hasn't let up on and one that her Fox cohorts continually enable. Remember, this a woman who characterized a query about what newspapers she read as "gotcha question" and therefore Katie Couric's fault. And I actually dare you to find someone more inoffensive in journalism today than Katie fucking Couric.

For a century the GOP portrayed itself as the party of rugged individualism, but they just can't stop embracing self-declared victims of everyone as their standard-bearers. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never pissed and moaned in public about the "lamestream media." But the overwhelming majority of modern conservatives actually want to present themselves as a put-upon underclass while at the same time saying that they're the only ones capable of leadership. While she didn't invent it, Palin embodies that.

Far be it from Greta to break the former governor of her delusions. She cites polling from before the collapse of Lehman Brothers that's supposed to show how entirely made of awesome Sarah is. But those numbers are misleading.

First, the "Celebrity" ad - released just before the Democratic convention - softened Obama's numbers, as even the Obama campaign admitted after the election. It was the only thing that McCain did to panic them throughout the entire campaign, and it denied them a convention bounce. It was even worse because Obama's "Greek pillars in a fucking football stadium" played directly into the narrative of "Celebrity."

Second, Palin energized the Democrats every bit as much as she did the Republicans. Campaign manager David Plouffe details that in his book The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. Much was made of the fact that the McCain campaign raised some $3 million within 24 hours of Palin's convention speech. Plouffe revealed that Obama raised just as much from liberals that hated her, especially liberal women. No one healed the hurt liberal chicks suffered from Hillary Clinton's loss quite like Sarah Palin.

Third, she committed the cardinal sin or any vice presidential candidate: she made herself the story. Palin can bitch all she wants about the "lamestream media," but it was her singular determination to be unprepared for the Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews that changed the narrative from her being an "exciting Maverick" to someone that might actually be a moron.

Van Sustren  makes the snide and incredibly counter-productive assertion that Cheney "isn't afraid to say things about the women," citing his "little slap at Condolezza Rice." Instead of hitting back on that, Palin lets it reinforce her "Poor, poor Sarah: Victim of sexism" narrative.

Look, if women want to play the "defenseless little girl" who can't take a "little slap" victim role, maybe it's better that they stay out of politics entirely. You don't achieve equality by changing the rules of the game to better suit your strengths. You change your strengths to better suit the rules of the fucking game. I'm annoyed beyond words when liberal women take that manipulative route, but I actually despise it when conservatives do it.  To quote Palin herself, she should "man up" or shut the the fuck up. Nothing is more disgusting than conservative victimology.

And you know what?  If you want to play the victim yourself while preaching rugged individualism for everyone else, you're a hypocritical cunt, regardless of your gender. For the last four years, I've listened to Republican assholes decrying "sexism," even though they were often the same people who made sixteen years worth of jokes about Hillary Clinton, and sometimes even Chelsea.

The "poor, put-upon Sarah" act is further undermined by her twice mentioning Cheney's "misfires," a half-clever reference to his blowing giant holes into Harry Whittington. To my mind, that almost equalled Palin's deeply offensive and wildly stupid "blood libel" spectacle after the Gabby Giffords shooting in it's sleaziness. You either get to play the victim or go for the easy shot to the balls, but you don't get to do both.

Everybody who knows anything about Dick Cheney knows that he isn't a sexist, he's a misanthropist. To know love requires having a heart, and spent the better part of a year being plugged into a wall like a friggin' smart car precisely because he didn't have one. After leaving office, Cheney wouldn't keep quiet about his disagreements with the president he was supposed to loyally serve. Why in the fuck does anyone think he wouldn't give a half-wit like Sarah Palin "a little slap?"

Palin failed miserably at re-branding herself as the face of the movement when she had a very clear shot at doing so. She could've taken a year or two to have learned something about the issues and become a serious spokesperson for the cause. Instead, she went for the easy money and became a more fuckable Snooki instead. And even that glory is fleeting. She's increasingly marginalized in the Tea Party and you don't even see her on Fox News as much as you used to.

Cheney's got bigger plans. He was around for the fall and resurrection of Richard Nixon, and I think he has something similar in mind. He knows that after pulling off the almost impossible task of being less popular than George W. Bush, he won't make many gains in popular esteem. But he very much can re-invent himself as a power within the party.He's working with the Romney's vice-presidential selection team for that very reason. If Romney wins, the reasoning goes, Cheney might find himself a consigliere of sorts in a Romney White House.

But even there, Cheney will fail in the eyes of history. Nixon thought much bigger than that. After his resignation, he picked a very few issues - all related to foreign policy - that he chose to care about and work with any president that would listen on them, regardless of party. It's only in the last few months that we've learned just how close Nixon had become to Bill Clinton.

Nixon lived for just shy of twenty years after resigning. There's little chance that Cheney will. It's actually a shame that Cheney is devoting the time left to him to public partisan politics instead of doing what Nixon did, furthering issues that he cares about. Very few people know more about the mechanical operation of the executive branch than Dick Cheney does. He could be an invaluable resource to future presidents of both parties, but he's almost adamantly insisting on being a failed political hack.

In that, he and Sarah Palin aren't all that different.