This is the latest cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. There’s no writing on it – just the name of the magazine. It’s stark contrast to their usual practice of promoting several featured articles on the cover of the magazine. The tone is almost reverential. Look at Obama’s expression – he’s smiling, looking down. It’s a messiah-like posture. He’s a jubilant savior. We are the children.

Inside are two articles on Barack Obama – one an interview with the candidate, the other a report on the people running his campaign.

The interview is mostly pointless – publisher Jann Wenner did it himself, rather than delegating it to his usual political writers. It’s full of softball questions, leaving Barack the opportunity to ingratiate himself to the RS audience by connecting via music. Obama has an Ipod, you see, and as befits any politician who wants to reach out to a wide cross section of voters, he has on it Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker and Coltrane, Sheryl Crow, Howlin’ Wolf, Yo-Yo Man and Jay-Z. That list was probably crafted by his very agile campaign staff. It touches everyone except senior citizens, and no doubt had he gone on we would have learned he has some Lawrence Welk and big band on that Ipod too.

Interview sample:

Bruce [Springsteen] issued a pretty eloquent endorsement of you. What do you think of him and his work?

Not only do I love Bruce’s music, but I just love him as a person. He’s a guy who has never lost track of his roots, who knows who he is, who has never put on a front. When you think about authenticity, you think about Bruce Springsteen, and that’s how he comes across personally. We haven’t actually met in person.

That’s a bit telling – I guess, as with George W. Bush and Vladimar Putin, Obama was able to get a sense of Springsteen’s soul by means of a fleeting impression. It’s an unintended glance into Obama’s soul. I take from it that the man is not authentic, that he is putting on a front. He knows what he is doing. But that’s just my fleeting impression.

One line grabbed me. Speaking of globalization, Obama says

The American people are, I think, congenitally optimistic. Right now, they’re not feeling particularly optimistic about Washington – they’re genuinely concerned about the direction the country is moving in, they’re anxious about globalization and whether we’re going to be able to compete.

(Oh no, I’ve said too much?) Joe Schmeau, auto assembly line worker for GM who has a good wage and health care and retirement benefits, cannot compete with José Schmeauez, Mexican auto assembly line worker who has no health care or pension and barely supports his family. Obama here gives us insight into the insider’s view of globalization. It’s not about making life better for people, but rather about adapting to change, which is defined as a race to the bottom. When Joe and José compete, José always comes out on top down there on the bottom.

Can we compete? Only if we give up what we have. Can we instead help ourselves, protect ourselves? Apparently Obama, like McCain and Bush and Clinton before him, is not about giving us that choice.

It’s a fifty minute interview, has very little substance, and one insight worth gleaning onto – Barack Obama is not different in the matter of free trade and globalization than any of his opponents.

The article on Obama’s staff is also telling, if only in giving us the roots of the Obama phenomenon. Pete Rouse, Chief of Staff, is a long-time Washington insider and comes from the staff of South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle. Campaign Operative Daschle himself was “endeared” to the Obama campaign because Obama contributed $85,000 to his failed reelection bid in 2004. David Axelrod, Bob Schrum’s replacement, has worked for Democratic candidates going back to Illinois Senator Paul Simon. Pete Giangreco, direct mail consultant, is a veteran of six Democratic presidential campaigns. Campaign manager David Plouffe has come from Tom Harkin and Dick Gephardt roots. Alter-ego Valerie Jarrett is a long time associate of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

Obama’s campaign is staffed by old-time liberals. It should come as no surprise that Obama is playing for the center and ditching the left, just as Gore and Kerry did. It should come as no surprise because he is staffed by liberal retreads. We are getting a standard liberal campaign. Even if Obama does somehow pull off a miracle and wins in November, he will arrive in Washington without a constituent base, and like Bill Clinton, will be at ease among Republicans and uneasy with progressives.

As Bill Becker, president of the AFL-CIO in Arkansas, said of Clinton, he’ll pat us on the back as he pisses down our leg. He’s already done some of that, and liberals are doing their usual mating dance, accepting betrayal, internalizing contradictions. They’re good at that.

Steve, who has a little corner of the teapot tempest called “Rabid Sanity”, wrote about Barack Obama’s Social Security plan. As often happens in our haste to write stuff while also leading normal lives, Steve misinterpreted the Obama plan, asserting that he wants to eliminate the Social Security tax for anyone making less than $250,000. In fact, Obama wants to create a donut hole, taxing incomes up to $102,000, then applying no tax between $120,000 and $250,000. It’s a horse designed by a committee, but that’s what politics does to logic.

Steve also goes on to make some larger statements that do well to point out basic difference in right and left-wing outlooks.

For instance, in asserting that those making over $250,000 shouldn’t pay a FICA tax, Steve gives us the trickle-down litany:

Besides, what are they going to do with that approximately $75k anyway? Sure, they might not buy a new car this year causing unemployment in the auto industry, or they may not construct a new house causing further contraction in the construction industry. Or they may not invest it in a company preventing further enhancements to keep the company competitive, allowing all of that business to be speedily and orderly transferred to China. No, the rich won’t miss that money. But we will.

This is the essence of disagreement between left and right economic outlook – those on the right tend to think that the wealthy create wealth and incidentally bestow it upon us as they pursue more wealth for themselves. That’s why conservatives and libertarians lay prostrate before the wealthy classes.

We of the left attribute wealth creation to the sweat of one’s brow, and see it harvested by clever accumulators who have no particular interest in greater good and want only to accumulate more, no matter the cost to their fellow humans.

Another problem with this proposal: Does it change the basic social contract? For instance, at the moment everyone who works pays into the Social Security trust fund and expect to receive money back when they retire. The more you make, the more you are able to draw in retirement. But all workers would receive something more than just the equivalent of Social Security Supplemental Income [SSI], otherwise known as “federal welfare.”

I had trouble just parsing this. But it’s the logic of illogic – Steve is saying that since workers won’t be taxed under $250,000, Social Security becomes a welfare program, which is what the SSI program is. But that’s a step in the right direction – he tacitly admits that Social Security, as structured, is an insurance program. I’ll take what I can get.

This rending of the social fabric that would turn once proud workers into welfare recipients strikes me as appalling. I can only hope that Obama’s comments on his plan carry the same weight as support for Rev. Wright, or NAFTA, or clean campaigning, or campaign finance reform, or . . . well, you get the drift.

Well, that’s it. That’s all he wrote. I didn’t realize on first and second reading how little there there was there. But he exposes a lot of right wing thought. Their basic impulse is to scoff at any program that works in the general welfare. They misunderestimate us – they think we are all individualists who want nothing more what is good for ourselves, no matter the cost to others. This is the ethos of wealth accumulation and why we find this virus rampant among the wealthy.

People change as they grow wealthy – they become protective of their wealth, suspicious of their fellow humans. Because wealth is power, the wealthy often end up in control of government, and find themselves at war with ordinary people. In other countries this has translated into open warfare, torture, death squads, disappearances and imprisonment. In the United States, where our progressive forebears have given us strong laws to protect ordinary people, we have more power. The process is more subtle. Crafty politicians and their servile economists lure us into seductive reasoning to disown us of our best impulses to care for one another. They’ve given us trickle-down, anti-unionism, and anti-welfare. They fight any collectivist impulse among us. If they were honest, they would openly say that they hate unions, Medicare, Medicaid, and of course, Social Security. “Hate” is not too strong a word.

Steve doesn’t go that far. He’s not openly hostile to Social Security, though he is a fellow traveler of the right and does despair of an collectivist impulse. But in fact, people try to fit in larger communities, and we generally try to care for each other. In larger society, this basic familial instinct translates into welfare for the indigent, and health care for all, and a decent retirement for the elderly. These things cost money, and at are odds with instincts of the accumulators among us.

That’s what the right hates about the left. Conservatives want to remake us into self-serving beasts who are indifferent to one another, who let accumulators accumulate, who are at war with our good instincts. It should come as no surprise that people naturally reject right wing individualist philosophy and tend towards the ethos of greater good. It should also be no surprise that the right wing, in the end, backs authoritarian regimes, oppression and torture. They are ridding us of the disease of collectivism, and the iron fist is the cure. They want to remake us, by force if necessary.

Words and phrases that ought to be stricken from politics (I might add to this list and please feel free to add your own):

Locally, we should not be allowed to talk about “Montana values”.

Test your candidate: Without these words, does this person have anything left to talk about? Remove some of those words from the following ad, and what are we left with?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Let’s face it – American politics is not rocket science. There’s damned little that goes on in a campaign that actually translates into policy once an actor (marketed like a box of cereal; the star of 15 and 30 second TV spots) is elected. There appears to be two dynamics at work here:

1. The Republicans are captive of the far right, and McCain has to play to that base to get elected. He is getting more extreme by the day. If he abandons the far right, he’ll lose the fundamentalist Christians, the hard-nosed neocons, FOX News, and the Limbaugh/Hannity crowd. He may have nothing to replace them with. He may be destined to lose save some earth-shattering event, like an attack on Iran, not out of the question with Bush.

2. The Democrats are captives of the Democratic Leadership Council, and are following a tried and failed formula – they appeal to the liberals and progressives in the primaries, and then abandon them in the general, and once elected. Liberals will follow, progressives will bitch. We’re an easy lot to con. In case the metaphor of Lucy and the football hasn’t been used before, I am using it now. I suspect that Bob Schrum is in the Obama mix now somehow.

There’s more at work with the DLC than just (and only apparent) stupid politics. The DLC, financed as it is by powerful think tanks and corporations, is interested in thwarting progressives and holding liberals in its pocket. It is not so much interested in winning elections as keeping American politics sterile – no health care reform, no campaign finance reform, no end to Iraq, tacit acceptance of the Bush agenda, strategic retreat – these are policies that the DLC is set to advance, and if it means that certain elements of the Democratic Party have to be stopped in their tracks, if it means losing elections, it doesn’t matter. Policy is more important than party. These are not stupid people.

One of the most widely read posts I’ve ever put up here was titled “Obama, Lieberman and the DLC“, in January of 2007. I wondered about Obama back then before falling under his spell. Two things stood out – one, the DLC spotted Obama and wanted him aboard, and two, Obama chose Joe Lieberman as his mentor when he entered the Senate.

That’s circumstantial, and it’s going to take a body of evidence to prevail in a debate now about how the heart of the Democratic Party has once again been stolen by its right wing, the DLC. It will be a matter of preponderance of evidence, and it is beginning now to mount. Since Obama clinched, he has backed down on his stance on NAFTA, and abandoned the fourth amendment to the constitution. Those, denial aside, are two issues of huge importance, and he has screwed us. More to follow, I’m sure.

If indeed, Obama is part of the right wing of the party, then let’s all have a good and hearty laugh. So was Hillary Clinton. We were screwed all along!

Liberals are the most squeamish political faction I have ever seen, forever captive of the myth of lesser of evils. They’re afraid to rise up, to demand things from those who supposedly lead them. They castigate and chide one another for failure to follow. Even lefty Thom Hartmann on his radio program says that we have to hope that if we elect a right wing Democrat, he might turn out to be a progressive after all. So far, it hasn’t worked.

Karl Rove understands that if a politician plays to our noble and higher instincts, he will take a thrashing at the polls. American politics is about very smart marketing people packaging products and selling them to a very dumbed down audience. The best we can hope for in such a situation is that a politician is playing the game for show, but playing for real behind the scenes. This is why I wrote what I did before, deluded as I was, that we have to place our hope in Obama. I have a hard time admitting that I’m as susceptible as everyone else to a packaged and marketed politician.

Now is the time to pressure Obama into advancing liberal causes. To do that, we have to bargain. The only way to bargain is to threaten to withhold votes. It’s the only thing he understands. Somehow, liberals have to be able to inflict pain as a consequence of failure to lead. But they won’t. Max Baucus has never been swayed by liberals because he knows they cannot hurt him, and wouldn’t if they could. So too have liberals telegraphed Obama that it’s OK to ignore him. Just win. And then they’ll do what liberals are so good at doing – looking the other way while he carries on with the business of the DLC.

Note in passing: It’s just a blog. I try to remember that. I just linked to myself three times in this post. I’m the smartest guy I know, I guess. By my calculation, there are perhaps 25-100 of us who regularly pass through this and other places, more elsewhere than here. Most do it while they are at work, God bless ’em, so traffic on Friday afternoons and on weekends is light. I like doing it, but always try to stay grounded. It doesn’t matter. Just like those people in the park who fly their toy planes on weekends, it’s a lot of fun, but not one passenger has even been transported anywhere.

A NOTE TO ALL WHO COME HERE:  The following post is meant in jest, as the idea that a viral e-mail can actually “reveal” anything is just about as stupid as the idea that Obama isn’t a citizen.

If you believe this, you’re an idiot.  That is all.

-Steve T. 10/13/2008

The latest viral email making the rounds asserts that Barack Obama cannot be president because he is not a natural U.S. citizen. I got it from a friendly Bozeman conservative – I cannot reproduce the color and large print of the original (these emails are always designed visually to appeal to the sixth graders among us). But here it is in full:

Interesting question: CAN OBAMA BE PRESIDENT ???

It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president after all for the following reason: Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. Natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986.

US Law very clearly stipulates: ‘.If only one parent was a U.S. Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the Age of 16.

Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. Citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the Mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16.

It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen.

As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.

Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia.

Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days, weeks, and months.

The email is debunked here. He’s a citizen because he was born in the United States, the state of Hawaii, the 50th U.S. state at the time of his birth. Anyone born in this country, except for the children of diplomats, is a citizen automatically, by birth. Many would like to change that law, but it is a law, and was at the time of Obama’s birth. End of story.

More interesting is this: Where did this email originate? Who wrote it? How does it get into the “right” hands? (I am a left winger, and I never get left wing viral emails. What’s up with that?) Viral emails are a vital subculture in this land. Much information passes hands that way, much garbage is passed on without verification. If I were running a presidential campaign, and if I were unscrupulous, I would take advantage of the gullibility of ordinary people. I would make sure that untraceable emails like this went out on a regular basis. I would remember the words attributed to Mark Twain, that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

This email is officially debunked. Can’t wait for the next one.

June is by far the best time to be in Yellowstone, except for May. The crowds have not yet peaked, the landscape is still green, the animals still in the lush valleys. Wolves and grizzlies are killing and eating elk and bison babies, and bringing out their own young for viewing.

There’s a regular pack of people who watch wolves, kind of a paparazzi. It is led by an alpha-male, non-ranger-who-dresses-like-ranger Rick MacIntyre. Rick drives a yellow Nissan Exterra that has antennae on top, so he’s easily spotted. And 365 days a year he drives up and down LaMar Valley, chronicling every wolf kill, every pack interaction, every sighting. The wolves are spread now throughout Greater Yellowstone, mostly in the back country. Rick’s job is to foster public support, so he patrols the valley where they are most visible. He’s an excellent PR man, patiently answering every question asked and allowing we the rabble to view the wolves through his spotting scope. (Without one, wolves are nothing more than gnats.)

Anyway, my wife loves following the wolves, knows their names and numbers, and three or four times a year we go to Yellowstone to watch them and the other (lesser) animals. We’re thinking of using our stimulus money, if it ever comes, to buy a spotting scope. That’s how bad it has gotten.

This year is special. Gasoline prices are high, so the Yellowstone experience is not unlike one we had in Canada last year – free of monster motor homes clogging the highways and campgrounds. We stayed at Tower Falls campground this year, and it was filled with – get this – tents. Bear jams were manageable, as cars and pickups can sneak past one another. I counted motor homes in the Tower store parking lot – only one or two at any given time, and of the smaller Cruise America variety – none of the Greyhound class.

Yellowstone is a pleasurable experience again. Keep them gas prices high.

We got off the beaten path, hiking high above LaMar on Specimen Ridge. There were four of us and it was a beautiful day. Our hiking partners were a couple whom we met through mutual interest in wolves, and I knew I was going to like the male half of the couple when I learned that he did not fish. I’ve spent many a dinner party and barbecue talking about three things – the big three: hunting, fishing, and tools. With Martin there was a general interest in intuitive things like politics and history – he said he understood the mechanics of fishing, and also accepted that people catch and kill and eat fish. But fishing for pleasure? Catch and release? He, like me, draws a blank. Gratuitous indulgence for the human, life-threatening trauma for the fish. Nothing there for us.

Martin and his wife Ilona are both writers, he retired from McGraw Hill, where he edited a trade newsletter. That’s all I know at this time, but I look forward to learning more about them. I’m suspicious that Martin doesn’t hunt, and doubt he has a shop full of work toys behind his house in Jardine. If we by chance barbecue with them, we’ll won’t have the big three to talk about. What a pleasure that would be.

We have XM Satellite Radio, and driving through Paradise Valley on the way home, Channel 154, National Lampoon Comedy, was doing nothing but George Carlin. I was delighted (I can listen on ear phones as my wife enjoys her music or even silence). Only later did I learn that they were doing a tribute, that George had died.

That was a blow. George Carlin was the opposite of Tim Russert, the man whose death brought the scorn of proper folks upon me when I didn’t pay homage to his sycophancy. George was a candid observer, and he frankly admitted he didn’t care about us, our species. He thought we were jerks and fools – he delighted in describing the ways we kill and torture one another. He did the comedian’s most important function as well – he could Seinfeld. He reminded us of the little things that annoy us, like the driver whose turn signal has been blinking “since 1955”, etc. But George was more about the big stuff.

Everyone has a favorite George Carlin routine – I prefer to remember him for pointing out the obvious in all of his work – that we butcher and kill one another with ease and take pleasure in it; that necrophilia or torture are unique to our species, and that some among us are so pompous and self-important that they us have taken it upon themselves to “save the planet”.

The planet will do just fine, he reminded us. We are like a virus – we will pass through the system and do some damage, but the earth will adapt and continue on, easily recovering. Right now it is heating up, much as our bodies do when infected by bacteria. That may rid our planet of us, the pest.

In the end, said George, it may be that the earth was using us as an elaborate means to manufacture plastic.

I watched his last comedy special on HBO, and thought he looked more like an old man than ever before and wondered who would take his place when he died. With Russert, there’s any number of fools who will easily slide into the slot of “Dean of Journalism”. With Carlin, there’s perhaps Lewis Black, but it isn’t quite the same. He has the words but hasn’t quite embraced the music.

There was only one John Lennon, one Fred Rogers, and only one Carl Sagan. These are people who brought serious messages to us in an entertaining way. People of that caliber are indeed rare. There will never be another George Carlin.

From Fortune Magazine:

Obama says he doesn’t want to unilaterally reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement: “In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.” During the Democratic primary campaign, Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton clashed over NAFTA as both told voters they had problems with the deal — but Clinton accused Obama of not being as serious as she was about making changes to the trade pact.

From Glenn Greenwald:

Barack Obama got around to issuing a statement and — citing what he calls “the grave threats that we face” — he just announced that he supports this warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty “compromise”:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. . . .

After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act. . . It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -– and the liberty –- of the American people.

There you have it, folks. Democrats being Democrats, backing off important issues, telling us that they really weren’t serious about opposing Bush’s illegal wiretaps or NAFTA. Business as usual.

What next – Obama says he really favors free market solutions to health care? Wouldn’t surprise me.

What’s really interesting about Obama backtracking on NAFTA is the response of some Democrats – “refreshing honesty” they called it! It’s a marvel to watch them fall in line, just as they did with Clinton as Clinton governed from the right after leaving a knife in their back.

Nothing to see here, folks. Business as usual. Move along now.

From an interview with President Bush:

Q: Mr. President, turning to the biggest issue of all, Iraq, various people and various candidates talk about pulling out next year. If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?

Bush: Doomsday scenario of course is that the extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face – it’s bigger than Iraq – it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be part of this global war …

Never mind the hubris, the moral posturing, the blindness. That’s all well documented. Bush is a cold-blooded killer who uses violence to achieve his political objectives. He’s a violent extremist.

That’s well known, though approximately 45-50% of us are in denial about it. What is more interesting to me is an attitude shared by almost all of us – so-called “left” and right alike -that we have to fight “them” over there, or we will have to suffer violence here. It is the height of imperial arrogance – the attitude that we have the right to use lesser beings (of different skin color, religious persuasion, culture) as human shields. So what if Iraqi’s have died by the hundreds of thousands (most of them killed by us)? What’s important is that we don’t have to live with this carnage on our own soil.

Americans seem to believe that they – any “they” – can handle it better. They are less human than us, better able to handle death and gore. They don’t suffer and lash out in righteous anger when someone does violence with impunity on them. They don’t have normal human emotions as they watch their friends and children and parents die.

It’s as if they are not part of us, we of them. We’re detached, like sociopaths.

That’s the kind of attitude that breeds hatred and contempt, the kind of thing that sets us up for special status in the eyes of “terrorists” – that is, those who choose do their killing by more low-tech means than us.

Face it – we’re all killers, we’re all terrorists. And we’re all capable of better things as well. We’re all one. But we Americans have got so much money and so many weapons and we also have this damndable attitude that we’re better than everyone else. The weapons make us better at the killing game, while the attitude allows us to hold them in contempt from our lofty perch. We do more killing, we feel better about ourselves when we do it, and we manage to keep it all out of our sight.

American exceptionalism is a large part of the problem with violence in the world today. If we could join the world, and not set ourselves apart, we might feel some of the pain we inflict on others. In that manner, less of it might come back to visit us, and America would be safer.