Monday, July 30, 2007
The Simpsons Movie
A. O. Scott had it pretty much dead-on in the Times: it's as good--and little better--than a very good episode. Not quite a "Treehouse of Horror" or a "22 Short Films About Springfield" (which Scott mislabels as "32," thinking of Glenn Gould) or the one where Homer eats the five-alarm chili and needs to find his spirit guide, a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash who says one of the best lines in the whole series, "I'm just your memory, Homer. I can't provide you any new information." Let alone my three personal non-Sideshow Bob favorites, the one where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies, the one with the Stonecutters and the casino episode with Marge's gambling problem.
There was nothing like that. Other than seeing Bart's dick, there was nothing especially memorable about the film, certainly not on a catchphrase or character development level. I also share Scott's complete disappointment that Patty and Selma weren't in it at all. The animation was pretty rad, with the helicopters depositing the dome and the interior of the NSA standing out as particularly textured.
I'm not arguing that the film was an exercise in pure cashing-in, but rather pack it with visual rewards to lifelong fans with good observation skills or who've watched dinnertime reruns for more than a decade, the movie was slanted suspiciously heavily towards themes and characters from the earliest days, from the height of Bart merch and before the show really hit its mid-to-late '90s peak. Thank Christ there weren't a million guest voices, at least.
The skateboarding scene, Flanders as a do-gooder neighbor rather than an uber-Christian, the inclusion in crowd scenes of season one figures as stripper Princess Jasmine or Barney's Bowl-a-Rama, Maggie's prominence (and, if you stuck around through the credits, her 'first word,' which was already 'dada' in the episode that shows her birth) -- it all adds up to creative control being turned over to marketing types who don't actually watch the show but whose memories reach back to the marketing bonanza of 1991. In essence, it's as if people who wanted to reproduce the 'success' of the Simpsons when it was a runaway phenomenon guided the entire process, and the writers and animators who hammered out an insane quantity of satire before the Simpsons devolved into a vehicle for celebs to play themselves. Other than almost-too-easy references to "the four states that border Springfield," the film should have taken the show's total disrespect for continuity further, rather than cramming in hallmarks of the 'glory days' (from the perspective of a network executive keen on profit). No "Simpsons" fan wants to admit it, but the show isn't actually a ratings gold mine. It was the 56th most watched show in 2005-2006, tied with the ignominious "America's Funniest Home Videos." So we have this weird result where the movie catered unnecessarily to the most philistine taste, to the people who grind out shit like this or stuff "Ay Caramba!" into Katie Couric's mouth when the Bart float bobs down 5th Avenue in the Macy's Parade.
So, it was funny. Hillary as VP under Scratchy is funny. Albert Brooks is always funny. The drunks running into church when the God-people run into the bar was very, very funny. But it should have been made eight or ten years ago, because waiting this long forced it into a time warp where it feels like it was made sixteen years ago. And why they never look into who lives next door, on the side that isn't the Flanders', is beyond me.
There was nothing like that. Other than seeing Bart's dick, there was nothing especially memorable about the film, certainly not on a catchphrase or character development level. I also share Scott's complete disappointment that Patty and Selma weren't in it at all. The animation was pretty rad, with the helicopters depositing the dome and the interior of the NSA standing out as particularly textured.
I'm not arguing that the film was an exercise in pure cashing-in, but rather pack it with visual rewards to lifelong fans with good observation skills or who've watched dinnertime reruns for more than a decade, the movie was slanted suspiciously heavily towards themes and characters from the earliest days, from the height of Bart merch and before the show really hit its mid-to-late '90s peak. Thank Christ there weren't a million guest voices, at least.
The skateboarding scene, Flanders as a do-gooder neighbor rather than an uber-Christian, the inclusion in crowd scenes of season one figures as stripper Princess Jasmine or Barney's Bowl-a-Rama, Maggie's prominence (and, if you stuck around through the credits, her 'first word,' which was already 'dada' in the episode that shows her birth) -- it all adds up to creative control being turned over to marketing types who don't actually watch the show but whose memories reach back to the marketing bonanza of 1991. In essence, it's as if people who wanted to reproduce the 'success' of the Simpsons when it was a runaway phenomenon guided the entire process, and the writers and animators who hammered out an insane quantity of satire before the Simpsons devolved into a vehicle for celebs to play themselves. Other than almost-too-easy references to "the four states that border Springfield," the film should have taken the show's total disrespect for continuity further, rather than cramming in hallmarks of the 'glory days' (from the perspective of a network executive keen on profit). No "Simpsons" fan wants to admit it, but the show isn't actually a ratings gold mine. It was the 56th most watched show in 2005-2006, tied with the ignominious "America's Funniest Home Videos." So we have this weird result where the movie catered unnecessarily to the most philistine taste, to the people who grind out shit like this or stuff "Ay Caramba!" into Katie Couric's mouth when the Bart float bobs down 5th Avenue in the Macy's Parade.
So, it was funny. Hillary as VP under Scratchy is funny. Albert Brooks is always funny. The drunks running into church when the God-people run into the bar was very, very funny. But it should have been made eight or ten years ago, because waiting this long forced it into a time warp where it feels like it was made sixteen years ago. And why they never look into who lives next door, on the side that isn't the Flanders', is beyond me.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The War on Terrour as a Diet
Glenn Greenwald notes, the limit of neoconservative reflection the conduct of the war is sloganeering. Jonah Goldberg of National Review called for the US to be more "ruthless" in prosecuting the war(s). When asked to clarify, he said he didn't mean a "dogged, merciless belligerence," but a "single-minded determination to win." There we have it: the blueprints for victory. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, when asked what our strategy in Iraq ought to be, replied, "Win."
Greenwald focuses his post mostly on the noxious and inaccurate comments the extreme right makes about war opponents: how they're seditious traitors, how criticizing the war architects is unacceptable, how liberals should be executed to set an example, etc. With the caveat that anecdotal quotations shouldn't be used to indict an entire political movement, the unanimity of mind among prominent war supports does indicate a sort of hive mentality. Greenwald lampoons the substance-free macho posturing perfectly:
Thus the war is basically framed as if it were a diet, where sheer will and determination can see you through to the goal of slipping into a new Iraq to be the prettiest neocon at the party. Considering the Manichaean nature of our political discourse--specifically, the unquestioning assumption that "us" are "good" and anything we do, no matter how horrible, is perfectly justifiable because "them" are "evil"--this is especially pernicious. It applies the verbiage of individual moral struggles to the macro level of the nation. Citizens are asked to sacrifice nothing, but must identify completely the conduct of the war with the ordinary difficulties of everyday life. The message is that this war on terror is effectively permanent, we will live in a low-grade state of emergency that is subject to periodic flareups for the rest of our lives, but at the same time, victory would be just around the corner if you people would just shut up for six months, stop "emboldening our enemies" with your shrewish bitching and hold out for the glorious outcome we're on the precipice of unveiling.
Even worse, this sets up the post-Iraq plan of attack for the right. When we withdraw from Iraq, no matter how obvious and overdue it is, they will shriek about how we've castrated ourselves in front of a region whose culture only understands domination and the use of brute force. To withdraw is never evaluated against prudence or rationality (to say nothing of the ridiculous cost, $400 billion so far) but only a metric of humiliation where it is once again Us or Them feeling the iron boot. That we would do it to ourselves stupefies conservatives, because it's a one-dimensional, implicitly gendered dynamic to them. The liberal desire to humiliate America requires a purge because criticism of the Bush Administration's diktats confuses ordinary citizens, saps their reservoir of mute cheer and, by revealing the plumage of effeminacy to the manly Muslims, imperils the entire war.
Actual strategy need not enter this calculus; the entire predicate of the Surge is "troops + more troops = victory tomorrow." That's the sum of Pentagon planning. If tomorrow never happens to become today, it's only because our will must have flagged (due to the liberals) in our faith-based endeavor. When the President is convinced he talks to God and God to him, it makes those liberals even more treacherous; they operate outside of God's divine plan, eroding the national character of a country blessed by the Almighty. It's God's will; it should be your will; you should will yourself to refrain from speaking out against your president because the success of the war depends on having the stomach to endure Guantanamo just a little longer, because we're so close to a victory in which there aren't any more terrorists.
As for "emboldening our enemies," that meme really ought to sputter out by now. I don't see how people bent on total destruction of a country can be any more emboldened by this point, nor do I think "embolden" is even a word, except ironically, the way "decider" and "misunderestimate" now are. But to Joe Lieberman, every Democratic attempt to rein in the lawless extravagance of our imperial fiasco adds more fuel to a fire that can grow hotter and hotter, forever. Did you know that Muslims are capable of infinite emboldening, if given the opportunity? One of these days, Harry Reid is going to sponsor a bill that will push the Islamic universe towards a quantum singularity where they all blow themselves up and take space-time with them.
In the meantime, we need to stick to the diet. This country has a real obesity problem.
Greenwald focuses his post mostly on the noxious and inaccurate comments the extreme right makes about war opponents: how they're seditious traitors, how criticizing the war architects is unacceptable, how liberals should be executed to set an example, etc. With the caveat that anecdotal quotations shouldn't be used to indict an entire political movement, the unanimity of mind among prominent war supports does indicate a sort of hive mentality. Greenwald lampoons the substance-free macho posturing perfectly:
By "single-minded determination to win," does that mean we bomb more indiscriminately, forget about ethical restraints, break the law, re-instate the draft, raise taxes to pay for a larger military? Who knows. He won't say. They never do, because their real goal is to sound tough and avoid admitting error ("the Iraq War isn't a failure; not at all. We just need to stiffen our spines, take the kid gloves off, and commit ourselves to a single-minded determination to win"). |
Thus the war is basically framed as if it were a diet, where sheer will and determination can see you through to the goal of slipping into a new Iraq to be the prettiest neocon at the party. Considering the Manichaean nature of our political discourse--specifically, the unquestioning assumption that "us" are "good" and anything we do, no matter how horrible, is perfectly justifiable because "them" are "evil"--this is especially pernicious. It applies the verbiage of individual moral struggles to the macro level of the nation. Citizens are asked to sacrifice nothing, but must identify completely the conduct of the war with the ordinary difficulties of everyday life. The message is that this war on terror is effectively permanent, we will live in a low-grade state of emergency that is subject to periodic flareups for the rest of our lives, but at the same time, victory would be just around the corner if you people would just shut up for six months, stop "emboldening our enemies" with your shrewish bitching and hold out for the glorious outcome we're on the precipice of unveiling.
Even worse, this sets up the post-Iraq plan of attack for the right. When we withdraw from Iraq, no matter how obvious and overdue it is, they will shriek about how we've castrated ourselves in front of a region whose culture only understands domination and the use of brute force. To withdraw is never evaluated against prudence or rationality (to say nothing of the ridiculous cost, $400 billion so far) but only a metric of humiliation where it is once again Us or Them feeling the iron boot. That we would do it to ourselves stupefies conservatives, because it's a one-dimensional, implicitly gendered dynamic to them. The liberal desire to humiliate America requires a purge because criticism of the Bush Administration's diktats confuses ordinary citizens, saps their reservoir of mute cheer and, by revealing the plumage of effeminacy to the manly Muslims, imperils the entire war.
Actual strategy need not enter this calculus; the entire predicate of the Surge is "troops + more troops = victory tomorrow." That's the sum of Pentagon planning. If tomorrow never happens to become today, it's only because our will must have flagged (due to the liberals) in our faith-based endeavor. When the President is convinced he talks to God and God to him, it makes those liberals even more treacherous; they operate outside of God's divine plan, eroding the national character of a country blessed by the Almighty. It's God's will; it should be your will; you should will yourself to refrain from speaking out against your president because the success of the war depends on having the stomach to endure Guantanamo just a little longer, because we're so close to a victory in which there aren't any more terrorists.
As for "emboldening our enemies," that meme really ought to sputter out by now. I don't see how people bent on total destruction of a country can be any more emboldened by this point, nor do I think "embolden" is even a word, except ironically, the way "decider" and "misunderestimate" now are. But to Joe Lieberman, every Democratic attempt to rein in the lawless extravagance of our imperial fiasco adds more fuel to a fire that can grow hotter and hotter, forever. Did you know that Muslims are capable of infinite emboldening, if given the opportunity? One of these days, Harry Reid is going to sponsor a bill that will push the Islamic universe towards a quantum singularity where they all blow themselves up and take space-time with them.
In the meantime, we need to stick to the diet. This country has a real obesity problem.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Faggot Panic
What the fuck is this, 2004? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Family Values Institute (red alert) has written a screed decrying the emergence of triple-parent family unit, an outgrowth she traces directly to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and gay adoption.
This is how she starts in: Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That Old Testament-esque allusion to the very firmament of the universe trembling beneath our misguided experiments with the divinely-mandated natural order is a pretty tired trope. The hideous immoral deviant that is a lesbian mom is enough to make the whole world buckle apart.
Her big beef is with a Pennsylvania court's finding that a child may have three legal parents: two lesbian mothers and the biological father, all equally obligated to support their offspring. Unsurprisingly, Marquardt's language refuses recognition that both women could be mothers--she coins the ungainly co-parents--but oddly, nowhere is the word father to be found. There is a sperm donor who is a friend of the couple, but that's it. Here's a conservative who's willing to delegitimize this family more expansively than just casting aspersions at the unity of two women.
So apparently this ruling constitutes yet another in the escalating series of mortal wounds liberals and the LGBT community care to inflict upon Civilization itself (in the name of procreating, natch). In other Western nations, there have been legal moves to institutionalize family structures with more than one parent, and this is Badforthechildren. Marquardt "pre-empts" the possible refutation of her paranoia by arguing against a simplistic "three is better than two, right?" line of thinking, comparing the polyparent situation to a divorce.
When you only tepidly endorse gay marriage to begin with, it's frustrating to have to defend it, but comparisons of building a family with dissolving a family are just too facile. It just doesn't make sense unless one is convinced from the start that there is some metaphysical dimension where rules come from and man+woman=the way it's always been, in which case there's no arguing with you because you have God on your side and that's all there is to it.
She writes: We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation. Is it the court intervention into the sacrosanct nuclear family, the State-sanctioned social engineering that she finds so repellent? Because responsible parenting can't possibly be at odds with exposing children to "different values, beliefs and ways of living." Unless you want them home-schooled, away from the evolutionists. Obviously that sort of talk boils down to "gay parents will manufacture gay children, which we certainly don't need more of." But this is hardly a case where a normal heterosexual couple's ideals for childrearing have been infiltrated by the homosexual agenda--everyone involved is a consensual party, going to court to seek governmental legitimacy for their complex and previously unaddressed legal situation. They're not suing each other. There is no acrimony. It's not a divorce. Kids won't be shuttled between different houses by jealous parents or held hostage to their petty disputes. The only example of "different values" is Marquardt's idea of what morality is versus the lesbian lifestyle.
And even if there is a divorce involved, divorce exists. Gay people exist. With gay marriage will come gay divorce, which conservatives will cite as further proof that gay people are evil, when it's actually proof that gay people are fallible. Having three people claim parental status is, in a sense, a logical continuation in the relaxation of anachronistic bigotry that passes for the government's approach to marriage. Straight divorce can and ought to lead to the same outcome if the circumstances merit. The nuclear family has been saddled with responsibilities far beyond what it's capable of. It doesn't necessarily take a village, but reality can't be governed by a sentimental reference point to some fleeting and largely mythical postwar gender paradigm wedded (if you will) to biblical morality. At least Marquardt doesn't wonder about a man marrying a goat.
She concludes by tying the well-being of children to a dual-headed household, with no empirical evidence. Just one study about divorce being bad. (Of course, she doesn't speak a word against divorce, let alone its high occurrence in red America). This is the most frustrating thing about conservatism: you can say whatever you want and make assumptions all over the place because God's got your back. You can be as authoritarian as you want, and any attempt to adapt to cultural changes becomes nefarious "social engineering" and can be plotted on an axis of our eventual ruin. Just like when vitro fertilization begat a race of amoral cyborgs who can't love, legally recognizing three parents when there are in fact three (or four when there are four) is tampering with the Divine Plan. The earth is quaking because gay people may have found a way to make more of themselves. We grant the people to want to have children parental rights at our peril.
This is how she starts in: Sometimes when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That Old Testament-esque allusion to the very firmament of the universe trembling beneath our misguided experiments with the divinely-mandated natural order is a pretty tired trope. The hideous immoral deviant that is a lesbian mom is enough to make the whole world buckle apart.
Her big beef is with a Pennsylvania court's finding that a child may have three legal parents: two lesbian mothers and the biological father, all equally obligated to support their offspring. Unsurprisingly, Marquardt's language refuses recognition that both women could be mothers--she coins the ungainly co-parents--but oddly, nowhere is the word father to be found. There is a sperm donor who is a friend of the couple, but that's it. Here's a conservative who's willing to delegitimize this family more expansively than just casting aspersions at the unity of two women.
So apparently this ruling constitutes yet another in the escalating series of mortal wounds liberals and the LGBT community care to inflict upon Civilization itself (in the name of procreating, natch). In other Western nations, there have been legal moves to institutionalize family structures with more than one parent, and this is Badforthechildren. Marquardt "pre-empts" the possible refutation of her paranoia by arguing against a simplistic "three is better than two, right?" line of thinking, comparing the polyparent situation to a divorce.
When you only tepidly endorse gay marriage to begin with, it's frustrating to have to defend it, but comparisons of building a family with dissolving a family are just too facile. It just doesn't make sense unless one is convinced from the start that there is some metaphysical dimension where rules come from and man+woman=the way it's always been, in which case there's no arguing with you because you have God on your side and that's all there is to it.
She writes: We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation. Is it the court intervention into the sacrosanct nuclear family, the State-sanctioned social engineering that she finds so repellent? Because responsible parenting can't possibly be at odds with exposing children to "different values, beliefs and ways of living." Unless you want them home-schooled, away from the evolutionists. Obviously that sort of talk boils down to "gay parents will manufacture gay children, which we certainly don't need more of." But this is hardly a case where a normal heterosexual couple's ideals for childrearing have been infiltrated by the homosexual agenda--everyone involved is a consensual party, going to court to seek governmental legitimacy for their complex and previously unaddressed legal situation. They're not suing each other. There is no acrimony. It's not a divorce. Kids won't be shuttled between different houses by jealous parents or held hostage to their petty disputes. The only example of "different values" is Marquardt's idea of what morality is versus the lesbian lifestyle.
And even if there is a divorce involved, divorce exists. Gay people exist. With gay marriage will come gay divorce, which conservatives will cite as further proof that gay people are evil, when it's actually proof that gay people are fallible. Having three people claim parental status is, in a sense, a logical continuation in the relaxation of anachronistic bigotry that passes for the government's approach to marriage. Straight divorce can and ought to lead to the same outcome if the circumstances merit. The nuclear family has been saddled with responsibilities far beyond what it's capable of. It doesn't necessarily take a village, but reality can't be governed by a sentimental reference point to some fleeting and largely mythical postwar gender paradigm wedded (if you will) to biblical morality. At least Marquardt doesn't wonder about a man marrying a goat.
She concludes by tying the well-being of children to a dual-headed household, with no empirical evidence. Just one study about divorce being bad. (Of course, she doesn't speak a word against divorce, let alone its high occurrence in red America). This is the most frustrating thing about conservatism: you can say whatever you want and make assumptions all over the place because God's got your back. You can be as authoritarian as you want, and any attempt to adapt to cultural changes becomes nefarious "social engineering" and can be plotted on an axis of our eventual ruin. Just like when vitro fertilization begat a race of amoral cyborgs who can't love, legally recognizing three parents when there are in fact three (or four when there are four) is tampering with the Divine Plan. The earth is quaking because gay people may have found a way to make more of themselves. We grant the people to want to have children parental rights at our peril.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Impeachment
As this overly long but still accurate article points out, Bush's unpopularity (defined as the percentage of poll respondents who state they disapprove of his conduct) has exceeded that of every president since polling began, except for Nixon's during his last days, and even then, only by a point. Margins of error and the prevailing winds of any given day produce different figures, but Bush is generally at 26% positive, 66% negative. Conservatives might blame the immigration bill and Bush's (somewhat surprising) refusal to demonize a vast swath of the American population, but rational people know better.
Glenn Greenwald and the contributors for DailyKos frequently muse about the identity of the "dead-enders" who cling tenaciously to their president inerrant. Apparently a quarter of the sentient public constitutes a basis of rump support that will stand by the glorious leader forever--as long as all the scandals and failures plow forward in the same predictable, unidirectional way. As long as the cliff we drive off of is Mt. Surge and not Mt. National Health Insurance, the GOP base will never renounce their support for the resolute war leader, whose complete lack of interiority is for them his paramount virtue. That means that one-quarter of the US population will not only tolerate but actively cheer a record of lawlessness and radical abuses of power. (This is the segment Rudy Giuliani is courting, hoping his authoritarian fear-mongering will get another quarter of the electorate to forget it's not 2002).
For a dozen reasons, a goodly proportion of the media continues to take the Bush Administration's statements at face value. That Tony Snow glided so effortlessly into his new role as White House spokesman from his old one as...auxiliary White House spokesman for Faux News doesn't even get much of a mention anymore. But the New York Times which created the position of public editor partly in response to its gullible and cozy reporting of pre-war Iraq intelligence now has in reporter Michael Gordon a Lieberman-esque zealot crusading for war with Iran by uncritically regurgitating military machinations about that country's stealth involvement in the insurgency. Joe Klein of Time and several Washington Post columnists also do their best to cheer on the neocon wet dream, functioning more or less as a collective Maureen Dowd to the self-style conservatives' Ann Coulter. Rather than make extraordinary, inflammatory statements as Coulter does about Democrats, they subtly, even cattily, reinforce Republican talking points about the war, its architects and its inevitable end by continually framing opponents as quavering surrenderistas who lack the steely courage of manly men like Fred Thompson or the guileless Scooter Libby, whose ardent love of country rightly ought to have trumped any verdict pronouncing guilt for whatever felonies.
This miasma of dynamics has produced a climate where talk of impeachment has bubbled up towards a critical mass, wherein it is no longer the province of the fringe (Lyndon LaRouche; Dennis Kucinich, maybe) and may now be the pet cause of the vanguard.
It's not just the progressive blogosphere anymore. Television gasbags can fudge the numbers, but supporters of impeachment now number almost forty percent of the general population, with greater strength among the young. We're apparently caught in a parallel dimension to 1998, when in spite of weak public support, a Republican congress impeached a president for 'crimes' that are tragicomically pathetic compared to the systemic collapse of government as an institution charged with executing policies for the sake of the national good.
The media, for their part, operate more like the fawning coterie of Versailles than a check on governmental abuses and lies. It is only the relentless criticism from progressive bloggers that has forced the clubby Washington correspondents' pool to re-evaluate its place vis-a-vis the people who are supposed to be their amiable adversaries, with noted discomfort among many national reporters at the prospect of attending the ribbon-cutting at the new White House press room--a purely ceremonial event, dedicated to the ritual of news management, at which Bush did not even take any questions. Still--they supported a commutation/pardon for Libby, lied and said most Americans did too, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that they will fight impeachment tooth and nail, because loyalty is the king of virtues in Washington and one does not let one's own fall.
In any case, there are multiple objections to impeachment, many of them good. The best one is that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and you need 66 to remove someone from office. So barring his death, Bush will remain as president until January 20, 2009 (meaning a mind-boggling 18 more months of this shit). The prospect of President Cheney is less than appealing, and the feasibility of some kind of double impeachment strains credulity. Purging the entire cabinet in some kind of mass sweep would be delicious, but even more dubious. Entering a pattern where opposition parties impeach the sitting president would siphon off a lot of energy from 'real' matters, like health care. And not to be a cynic, but the damage is done: Iraq is a conflagration that may actually become a full-on genocide, the Supreme Court might as well have Roger B. Taney sitting on it, and the timid Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything but submit toothless, Third Way-style adjustments to the war's conduct for the inevitable veto.
However, the crystallizing irony is that impeachment exists for a reason, and if not now, when? The most frustrating thing about power-worshiping media practices is the naive and giddy belief in the endless elasticity of the Republic. The people in charge and their ideological cohorts are incompetent and morally bankrupt, they are draining the government to finance their imperialistic boondoggle, their psychotic musings on "how we should have done more to kill 18-35-year old Sunni men" or how war with Iran is the answer are truly terrifying, and--most of all--they don't give a shit about the rule of law. They politicize every government agency, they lie and dissemble when questioned, concealing their tracks, pardoning their foot soldiers and evaporating public trust in government. This is how empires fall from within.
One can envision an easy future where a nuclear attack on a US city triggers a chain of events that makes the current perpetual state of emergency analogous to the relation between Clinton's crime(s) to Bush's. The Constitution is literally suspended, the full brunt of our military might is turned on the enemies within and the media-industrial complex's corporate paymasters self-censor any possible critiques. These cliches are sophomoric for a reason; it is entirely possible. Impeachment must always be viewed not as payback against Bush-as-inarticulate-tyrant or Bush-as-enabler, but as the final, almost desperate, gesture against the total corrosion of a system designed more than two centuries ago as the superior check on the ability of the powerful to rewrite the rules and then break them anyway.
We can demand an immediate withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, or that Harriet Miers comply with a subpoena or that Bush stop the practice of signing statements. None of the above will happen, and the template is now secured: future presidents can invoke terrorism as a justification to do whatever they want, get the media to acquiesce with almost no effort, and use their years in office to appoint with impunity a judiciary composed of like-minded people who will vet and validate their decisions. Thus will the 'American experiment' (as it were) dissolve into a new normality. The next half-century depends on Justices Stevens and Ginsburg surviving for another year and a half, and for our political class to align itself with the rational three-quarters of the population who oppose the war, if not the growing plurality who can no longer tolerate this.
Glenn Greenwald and the contributors for DailyKos frequently muse about the identity of the "dead-enders" who cling tenaciously to their president inerrant. Apparently a quarter of the sentient public constitutes a basis of rump support that will stand by the glorious leader forever--as long as all the scandals and failures plow forward in the same predictable, unidirectional way. As long as the cliff we drive off of is Mt. Surge and not Mt. National Health Insurance, the GOP base will never renounce their support for the resolute war leader, whose complete lack of interiority is for them his paramount virtue. That means that one-quarter of the US population will not only tolerate but actively cheer a record of lawlessness and radical abuses of power. (This is the segment Rudy Giuliani is courting, hoping his authoritarian fear-mongering will get another quarter of the electorate to forget it's not 2002).
For a dozen reasons, a goodly proportion of the media continues to take the Bush Administration's statements at face value. That Tony Snow glided so effortlessly into his new role as White House spokesman from his old one as...auxiliary White House spokesman for Faux News doesn't even get much of a mention anymore. But the New York Times which created the position of public editor partly in response to its gullible and cozy reporting of pre-war Iraq intelligence now has in reporter Michael Gordon a Lieberman-esque zealot crusading for war with Iran by uncritically regurgitating military machinations about that country's stealth involvement in the insurgency. Joe Klein of Time and several Washington Post columnists also do their best to cheer on the neocon wet dream, functioning more or less as a collective Maureen Dowd to the self-style conservatives' Ann Coulter. Rather than make extraordinary, inflammatory statements as Coulter does about Democrats, they subtly, even cattily, reinforce Republican talking points about the war, its architects and its inevitable end by continually framing opponents as quavering surrenderistas who lack the steely courage of manly men like Fred Thompson or the guileless Scooter Libby, whose ardent love of country rightly ought to have trumped any verdict pronouncing guilt for whatever felonies.
This miasma of dynamics has produced a climate where talk of impeachment has bubbled up towards a critical mass, wherein it is no longer the province of the fringe (Lyndon LaRouche; Dennis Kucinich, maybe) and may now be the pet cause of the vanguard.
It's not just the progressive blogosphere anymore. Television gasbags can fudge the numbers, but supporters of impeachment now number almost forty percent of the general population, with greater strength among the young. We're apparently caught in a parallel dimension to 1998, when in spite of weak public support, a Republican congress impeached a president for 'crimes' that are tragicomically pathetic compared to the systemic collapse of government as an institution charged with executing policies for the sake of the national good.
The media, for their part, operate more like the fawning coterie of Versailles than a check on governmental abuses and lies. It is only the relentless criticism from progressive bloggers that has forced the clubby Washington correspondents' pool to re-evaluate its place vis-a-vis the people who are supposed to be their amiable adversaries, with noted discomfort among many national reporters at the prospect of attending the ribbon-cutting at the new White House press room--a purely ceremonial event, dedicated to the ritual of news management, at which Bush did not even take any questions. Still--they supported a commutation/pardon for Libby, lied and said most Americans did too, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that they will fight impeachment tooth and nail, because loyalty is the king of virtues in Washington and one does not let one's own fall.
In any case, there are multiple objections to impeachment, many of them good. The best one is that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and you need 66 to remove someone from office. So barring his death, Bush will remain as president until January 20, 2009 (meaning a mind-boggling 18 more months of this shit). The prospect of President Cheney is less than appealing, and the feasibility of some kind of double impeachment strains credulity. Purging the entire cabinet in some kind of mass sweep would be delicious, but even more dubious. Entering a pattern where opposition parties impeach the sitting president would siphon off a lot of energy from 'real' matters, like health care. And not to be a cynic, but the damage is done: Iraq is a conflagration that may actually become a full-on genocide, the Supreme Court might as well have Roger B. Taney sitting on it, and the timid Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything but submit toothless, Third Way-style adjustments to the war's conduct for the inevitable veto.
However, the crystallizing irony is that impeachment exists for a reason, and if not now, when? The most frustrating thing about power-worshiping media practices is the naive and giddy belief in the endless elasticity of the Republic. The people in charge and their ideological cohorts are incompetent and morally bankrupt, they are draining the government to finance their imperialistic boondoggle, their psychotic musings on "how we should have done more to kill 18-35-year old Sunni men" or how war with Iran is the answer are truly terrifying, and--most of all--they don't give a shit about the rule of law. They politicize every government agency, they lie and dissemble when questioned, concealing their tracks, pardoning their foot soldiers and evaporating public trust in government. This is how empires fall from within.
One can envision an easy future where a nuclear attack on a US city triggers a chain of events that makes the current perpetual state of emergency analogous to the relation between Clinton's crime(s) to Bush's. The Constitution is literally suspended, the full brunt of our military might is turned on the enemies within and the media-industrial complex's corporate paymasters self-censor any possible critiques. These cliches are sophomoric for a reason; it is entirely possible. Impeachment must always be viewed not as payback against Bush-as-inarticulate-tyrant or Bush-as-enabler, but as the final, almost desperate, gesture against the total corrosion of a system designed more than two centuries ago as the superior check on the ability of the powerful to rewrite the rules and then break them anyway.
We can demand an immediate withdrawal of soldiers from Iraq, or that Harriet Miers comply with a subpoena or that Bush stop the practice of signing statements. None of the above will happen, and the template is now secured: future presidents can invoke terrorism as a justification to do whatever they want, get the media to acquiesce with almost no effort, and use their years in office to appoint with impunity a judiciary composed of like-minded people who will vet and validate their decisions. Thus will the 'American experiment' (as it were) dissolve into a new normality. The next half-century depends on Justices Stevens and Ginsburg surviving for another year and a half, and for our political class to align itself with the rational three-quarters of the population who oppose the war, if not the growing plurality who can no longer tolerate this.
