Obama Sea Change

Gary Kamiya is among my favorite writers. Here is a portion of his special inaugural eve story:

Hawaii, for me, will always be the place where I not only survived, but partied in paradise while doing it. I'm still here, and now Obama -- a native son, no less! -- is president. So when Obama takes the oath in the frozen capital city on the opposite end of the country, I will be celebrating twice. And praying that just as I was healed, a sea change will come upon America like a great wave, washing away the last eight years.

Sea changes must go beyond politics. Things rich and strange are not conjured solely out of tax policy and health plans. Beginnings are a time for generosity, for personal dedication. Forty-seven years ago, a young president touched the hearts of his countrymen when he said at his inauguration, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." Today, another young president is calling for the same selfless commitment.

But as we watch the exit of the most destructive presidency in American history, it isn't easy to feel generous. Those of us who have watched in horror as George W. Bush and his accomplices wreaked havoc are torn today between joy and anger, the desire to turn the page and the need to see reality acknowledged and justice done.

I cannot forgive Bush for what he did. With reckless arrogance and blind stupidity, he trashed the country I grew up in and love. He has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands. He exalted greed and selfishness. He spied, tortured and kidnapped. He brought shame to our nation's name.

There must be a reckoning for such grave acts. Unless we acknowledge the grievous damage Bush did -- to the environment, to the economy, to Iraq and the Middle East, to our cherished tradition of civil liberties, to a world that desperately needed a wise and compassionate America -- we will leave ourselves open to making the same mistakes again. Unless we hold those who committed crimes accountable, we will degrade the rule of law, our highest values and morality itself. To free ourselves of the cancer that was the Bush years, we must see it clearly and cut it out.


But clinging to anger, however righteous, eventually corrodes one's soul. You become the thing you hate. You can't get to where you want to go if you are forever looking backward. Like millions of Americans, I have been living with anger and bitterness for much too long. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to finish their great appointed task "with malice towards none, with charity for all." Read it all.

What if Palin Wasn't Hot?

Would Ms. Mooseburger be getting any of this attention, let alone, get picked as a vice presidential candidate if she wasn't "hot?" (that seems to be everyone's take on her). McCain isn't just giddy. He's crushing. Watch a video of their appearances together. I swear he's crushing. He smiles bigger, laughs bigger and is even more tongue tied. I don't think he's just excited that the base is riled up. What about this whole "drill baby drill" thing? The republicans are overheated. There's even a song!
Say Palin looked average. What if she looked like Hillary (who I think is beautiful in her way) What do you think? Would Ms. Mooseburger be getting the same attention? If not, what does this mean?
Gary Kamiya says it perfectly:

Republican strategists have made it clear that the GOP's only chance to win is by reframing the election as a battle of images. And right now, Palin is the pinup queen in that war. She's feisty, she's a mom, she's from a frontier state, she guns down wolves from the air, she's a devout Evangelical, she poses as a reformer, and she insults the Washington elites.

And large numbers of Americans think she's hot.

This latter point cannot be underestimated. Iraq may be a quagmire, a new cold war may be looming, the economy may be tanking and the world may be heading toward environmental doom, but the presidential race may be decided by the perceived doability of the governor of Alaska.

Looks have always played a major role in politics. Nixon lost the famous 1960 debate to JFK because he looked sweaty and devious and, well, like Nixon. John Kerry's resemblance to Lurch, the Addams family butler, probably did not help him. And Palin's perceived babaliciousness, as much as her considerable ability to wield a political hatchet, has brought a spark to the moribund Republican ticket.

Never mind that Palin's absurdly ballyhooed speech at the convention was just a recitation of familiar GOP culture-war clichés, with a disgraceful swipe at "community organizers" thrown in. (Odd -- I thought "big government"-hating Republicans believed in altruism, individual initiative and charity. But apparently they believe in nothing except demonizing their opponents.) Never mind that she is grossly unprepared to be president and was obviously brought in to appeal to women who will supposedly vote gender over issues, and to wield a hatchet in the great veep tradition of Spiro Agnew. Never mind that her claim to be a reformer is about as convincing as the GOP's bogus assertion that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.

...
Right now, Palin has Democrats quaking in their boots -- and with good reason. But all hope isn't lost. For even if this election turns out to be a referendum on the national libido, Palin may scare off more voters than she attracts.

Because to anyone who isn't a true believer, Palin comes across not as a fantasy pinup, but as a dominatrix. And the S/M demographic isn't going to put the Republicans over the top in the swing states.

For the die-hard Republicans who lusted over Palin at the convention, her whip-wielding persona was a turn-on. You could practically feel the crowd getting a collective woody as Palin bent Obama and the Democrats over, shoved a leather gag in their mouths and flogged them as un-American wimps, appeasers and losers. "Drill, baby, drill!" the chant ecstatically repeated by the GOP faithful during Rudy Giuliani's speech, acquired a distinctly Freudian subtext after Palin spoke. The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the base yearned to drill her. (We will leave it to shrinks to determine whether the GOP hardcore has the hots for Palin because she's reaming the Democrats, or because authority-worshippers tend to have secret fantasies of being reamed themselves.) Read the rest cause it's the best read of the day.

Media Lickspittles

Gary Kamiya is now one of my favorite writers.
He has an interesting take on the New Yorker cover and I adore the phrase "media lickspittles" to describe Fox news. I think he's right. Obama supporters are taking the right too seriously.

Salon: After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that "irony was dead." Seven years later, they've been proven right -- but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity -- it's been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering -- but oh so semiotically sophisticated -- left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test. There's no arguing taste in humor, of course, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that those who find Barry Blitt's drawing completely unfunny have traded their appreciation of subtlety and nuance for an instrumental, ends-obsessed, political-unto-death worldview. The prominent blogger Atrios, for example, writes of the cartoon, "It obviously was an attempt at satire, but it fails. It represents the basic stuff that you get from the Right about Obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them." Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven't seen -- oops, I shouldn't have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites -- but I haven't come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.