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I grew up in a small town (Billings, a “city” by Montana standards), and live now in a town of 40,000. Fortunately, Bozeman is a college town, and is a little more cultured than most towns of comparable size (though the movies “Religulous” and “W” are not playing here – and will not). Nonetheless, our local paper is a right wing rag, and the letters to the editor are filled with right wing tripe, to wit:

We’re in Trouble if Obama is Elected

Do you people realize that we are going to be in trouble is Obama gets into office? He talks very big and they are all lies. He plans to take our guns away from every one of us.

Biden is just as bad as Obama – he listens but tells lies. … McCain believes what is right, and he and Sarah Palin both believe in the United States of America.

We need God in the Pledge of Allegiance which has been there many many years. … Think about our gas, as we have plugged wells in Montana that could be opened and drilled. … Either Obama’s wife or someone down the line on his side is an atheist.

Of course, I chose that letter because it is so dumb. But the smart letters are not much better. I’m not saying that Percy Ingersoll, who wrote the letter, is a dumb person. But he suffers from something very common in small towns: narrow outlook. He sees very little of the big world, his frame of reference is very small. Therefore, he has reduced the campaign for president to things that fit into his small town mind – guns and God.

Hatred is very common among us. It was hatred that fueled the invasion of Iraq. It’s hatred that fuels racism, homophobia and xenophobia. Hatred is as common as hydrogen, and we humans need to be very careful about stoking it. It needs to be quarantined, like harmful bacteria. When it escapes, we suffer.

Small town people, with small town minds, tend to be narrow in focus. Their hatred is not nearly as damaging as that which emanates from Washington, DC. There hateful people have access to sophisticated weapons and have armies at their disposal. Millions of people have died because of Washington’s big-town, highly developed hatred. Here in small towns, feelings get hurt, yard signs get removed, movies get censored. It’s fairly innocuous.

But we all hate just the same. What Al Jazeeera has done with the YouTube clip above is to focus on small town hatred. But it’s everywhere. John McCain and Sarah Palin are engaged in deliberate and mindful stoking of hatred. They are doing it to gain votes. Their behavior is contemptible.

Bachmann is old news, I know. But have you ever experienced this? You’re driving down the highway, and another driver passes you at very high speed, and later you see that he has been pulled over and ticketed. Feel vindicated? I know it’s petty, but I got that feeling when I watched this broadcast …

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… but then learned this:

The last few hours have been nothing short of astounding. Since Congresswoman Michele Bachmann appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball earlier tonight, there’s been a deluge of support unlike anything we have seen. We are so grateful to the Daily Kos community and others who’ve sounded the alarm on Bachmann’s extremist, shameful rhetoric and pitched in with whatever they can to help end her tenure in Congress.

Our phones haven’t stopped ringing. Many have called in to say they’re sorry they can only send money and wish they could be here to help. We want you to know what a difference your funds are making and that, thanks in part to your help, we are confident that we will be able to win this race. We are preparing to get out the vote on an unprecedented scale, and with supporters like you we will have the resources we need to get the job done.

I am both hopeful and humbled at the reminder you gave me tonight – that in our country’s darkest times, it is the strength and belief and action of ordinary Americans that ultimately brings about the change we need. From the hardworking folks in Minnesota’s Sixth District to all of you: we are proud to have you on our side.

Future Congressman Tinklenburg, due to Bachmann’s appearance, has raised almost $500,000 in one night. I see that red light flashing as I drive by, carefully doing the speed limit.

I’ve always thought of Peggy Noonan as a gifted writer, but not a great thinker. She was the one who put inspiring words in the empty spaces of Ronald Reagan’s mind. It’s always been a curiosity to me that we credit people who read lines with having written those lines, of having had those thoughts. Sarah Palin at the Republican convention, we now know, could no more have penned those words as a monkey could sit down at a computer and write a sonnet.

And when Ronald Reagan spoke, Peggy supplied the words. And we all pretended that it was Ronnie. Willing suspension of disbelief, I guess. Politics as a stage show.

I just got done reading a piece by Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (Palin’s Failin’) that gives me pause. She’s more than eloquent. She is deeply thoughtful, insightful and honestly reflective. It’s not that I agree with her that Sarah Palin does not measure up – of course I do. It’s the depth of her perception, and her basic honesty in saying things that her base will not like.

There has never been a second’s debate among liberals, to use an old-fashioned word that may yet return to vogue, over Mrs. Palin: She was a dope and unqualified from the start. Conservatives and Republicans, on the other hand, continue to battle it out: Was her choice a success or a disaster? And if one holds negative views, should one say so? For conservatives in general, but certainly for writers, the answer is a variation on Edmund Burke: You owe your readers not your industry only but your judgment, and you betray instead of serve them if you sacrifice it to what may or may not be their opinion.

Noonan uses a high-profile platform to talk to her base about things they know but do not talk about. Sarah Palin is not qualified to be vice president. She’s not qualified for much of anything.

…we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for? For seven weeks I’ve listened to her, trying to understand if she is Bushian or Reaganite—a spender, to speak briefly, whose political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy, and whose foreign policy is shaped by a certain emotionalism, or a conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality…. But it’s unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn’t think aloud. She just . . . says things.

Noonan, of all people, has to give Palin the benefit of the doubt. Yet she’s lost her resolve. She’s a Republican – the column I cite was written to declare that John McCain had not lost yet another debate. And she’s tried – she’s given her seven weeks when most of us checked out at the Katie Couric interviews.

This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts. … No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can’t be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush’s style the past few years, and see where it got us.

Christopher Buckley, son of William F. and a successful man in his own write, recently endorsed Barack Obama. The result was predictable – he had to leave National Review, the powerful conservative magazine his father founded. It remains to be seen now what will become of Noonan. Will she join Mr. Buckley in the abyss?

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism. … At any rate, come and get me, copper.

Indeed they will. Come to the force, Peggy. Leave the Dark Side. We can use your voice.

Excerpt from an interview on Democracy Now! with Paul Craig Roberts:

JUAN GONZALEZ: In some of your articles, you reject a view by some Democrats that this is the end result of a deregulatory fever that began in the Reagan administration, and you point to a more recent aspect of this. And you point specifically to decisions that were made during the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration in 1999, 2000 and 2004. Could you elaborate on what those particular key decisions that were made?

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Yes. First, just let me say the Reagan administration didn’t do any financial deregulation.

In 1999, in the Clinton administration, they repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. This was the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial from investment banking. In 2000, they deregulated all derivatives. And in 2004, Hank Paulson, the current Treasury Secretary, who at the time was chairman of Goldman Sachs, he convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to remove all capital requirements for investment banks, and thus they were able to drive up their profits by amazing leverage. For example, when Bear Stearns finally went under, it had $33 in debt for every dollar in equity. So this is an amazing leverage. And it’s amazing that all reserves against debt would have been removed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. So, the whole thing is reckless beyond imagination. Now, they claim that they had new mathematical models that assessed risk and that they didn’t need these reserves. Well, that was all a bunch of hooey, as we now see.

Like many of us who saw last night’s love-fest, the Al Smith Dinner in New York, I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance. They were making nicey as McCain’s campaign had initiated a hateful and venomous robocall campaign to brand Barack Steve Obama a terrorist. I suppose they’re all professionals, and view any attempt to cajole the unwashed into buying a product as fair game.

So Glenn Greenwald has a nice piece, Poor John McCain: Forced against his honor to run an ugly campaign, over at Salon. (It will only be there for a while before it rolls off the page.) He talks about another disconnect – that a man who is running such a dishonorable campaign as McCain is really an honorable and decent guy. The man has a loyal pack of sycophantic journalists following him, and they are totally forgiving of his wretched behavior. He’s generally avoided hard questions – he did face them last night on Letterman. (Odd thing about our culture – it’s the comedians who are doing the journalists’ work.) And Greenwald links to an obscure news station in Maine where a local reporter grilled McCain. A local reporter – the guys and gals on the Straight Talk Express are busy kissing his ass.

Tim Dickinson did a hit piece on John McCain in Rolling Stone that I thought was a bit over the top. Mainstream journalists will tut-tut such work, and yet let slide all of their own fawning over McCain. It took Dave Letterman to ask him about G. Gordon Liddy, a Maine reporter to confront him with Sarah Palin’s deficiencies, and the women of the View to point out to him that his campaign commercials are lies.

In the meantime, Greenwald writes about Time Magazine’s Ana Marie Cox (who says “I adore the guy”), who sees all that is going on around McCain, yet exonerates him personally, as if he is not responsible for the ugliness, lies and deceit of the McCain campaign.

What McCain’s reacting to, is something that other Republicans are reacting to, is the kind of ugliness of the criticisms [towards] Obama. I think McCain in his heart of heart wants to win this fair and square. He wants to win this because he’s the better candidate. He doesn’t want to win this because people think Obama is a Muslim or is a terrorist or he’s not really American. He wants to win this on his own merits. It upsets his sense of fair play — to win — to think that the support he’s getting is because of what he thinks are bad reasons. . .

Somewhere between Rolling Stone and Ana Marie Cox is the real John McCain. I hope that somewhere out there is a journalist willing to find him. As always, true journalists are in short supply, and down low in the food chain.

I’m late on this – a take on the vice presidential debate from Michelle Goldberg, an American writing for the British Guardian. With acidic wit, Goldberg easily disassembles Sarah Palin. Examples:

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

[After announcing that she wouldn’t be responding to the questions asked] … she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity. It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don’t even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of “average Americans” who they both venerate and despise.

Goldberg suggests that the force of Palin’s personality is such that she can avoid answering questions and at the same time make it seem as though she has said something intelligent. The antidote is to read her words rather than listen to them:

Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? … My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

So see? She’s basically the same person in the debate as she was when Katie Couric interviewed her.

Goldberg takes it home:

None of Palin’s children, it should be noted, is heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq, and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described “fuckin’ redneck”. Palin is a woman who can’t even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn’t show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

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Here’s what John McCain said in the debate last night about ACORN:

We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

In psychology, this is known as “projection“. In politics, it’s “cover fire”. Republicans are in the process of cleaning out voter rolls nationwide, removing as many Democrats as they possibly can. Much of what they are doing is illegal, and we will learn the details after the election, just as we did in 2000 and 2004. We got just a taste of it here in Montana when Republicans sent out 6,000 voter registration challenges in Democratic-leaning counties.

They are doing it right out in the open, and so have called on their legions of bloggers and talk radio hosts to cover their backs – to distract attention from their activities. They are leveling accusations at Democrats, and are using ACORN as the marshmallow for toasting. That’s the reason behind McCain’s hyperbole.

ACORN is a group that attempts to register poor people to vote. These people tend to vote Democratic, and so are natural enemies of the Republicans. Frankly, I doubt their efforts yield much – in my one run for office in 1996, I carried hundreds of voter registrations to the court house. But these people tend not to show up on election day. They aren’t really paying attention. So ACORN is probably not terribly effective.

ACORN pays people to get voter registration cards, and hires people who are otherwise not gainfully employed. So it naturally follows that some of these ne’er-do-wells will cheat and make up names. Mickey Mouse turns up, as does Tony Romo. ACORN is required to turn in all registration cards they gather, and so they flag the suspicious ones, and fire the people responsible.

In other words, they are innocent of any wrongdoing except registering people who might vote Democrat. That’s their real crime.

But beyond that, ACORN is just a scapegoat. The Republicans are focusing attention on that group while they go on with their nefarious business of scrubbing voter rolls, merrily breaking laws as they go. They are the real criminals, the real people who are “destroying the fabric of democracy”.

That’s not hyperbole.

News anchors were flustered last night when focus groups handed yet another debate victory to Barack Obama. Wasn’t John McCain forceful? Didn’t he make his case? Didn’t he confront Obama about William Ayers? Wasn’t that a good line about running against George Bush? (It was.)

Watch this – it’s where rubber meets road:

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Ronald Reagan was perhaps the first president to utilize the television medium effectively. He was a master – the fact that he was first an actor made politics a cinch for him. He projected warmth and sincerity. He was the Roy Hobbs of politics – The Natural.

When we watch TV, two streams are coming at us – audio and visual. But the audio is secondary. We can filter words, but images control. They go straight to our brains unfiltered. John McCain keeps losing these debates because he fidgets, looks angry, rolls his eyes, and has kind of a goofy smile. Obama, on the other hand, is calm and collected. He could be reading the phone book – he’d still win.

Each debate is free advertising for Obama – he projects intelligence, warmth, sincerity, calmness. Maybe he is none of those things. It doesn’t matter. All he has to do is show up. When news anchors throw up their hands in frustration over McCain’s inability to win a debate, they’re letting on that they don’t understand their own medium. But news anchors are basically actors, like Reagan. They ought to understand this debate business better than they do.

Then there’s FOX News. It’s an angry network, and must have an angry audience. Interviews are contentious, people constantly talk over one another. It’s news anchors are openly partisan. The network averages about eight million viewers, but is pretty much stuck at that number. The rest of us have been exposed to it and steer clear.

FOX viewers are likely the partisans that flock to debates and yell angry words at speakers. FOX keeps these people in constant agitation, as do Limbaugh and the other talkers. These are the people who were urging McCain to show his fire, to get angry, to confront Obama.

They’ve had their way now. McCain got angry, confronted Obama. And he got his hat handed him. And Obama did it with a calm smile. It appears that Obama, like Reagan before him, understands the medium and how to use it.

McCain is not TV material. He’s a bad actor. He’ll never “win” a debate.

With twenty or so days to go, it appears as though Barack Obama is poised to take the White House. But twenty days is an eternity in politics. Anything can happen – we could attack Iran, Osama might turn up, or people might discover that Obama has a knocked-up teen-aged daughter, which would be unforgivable for a black man.

I am often critical of Democrats, and they are so often worthy of criticism. They can be pale imitations of Republicans; they too-often agree in principle with Republican positions on taxes and war. Bush’s agenda could have been stopped if we had a genuine opposition party. But the Democrats didn’t put up much of a fight.

Bill Clinton, now a born-again liberal, governed as a Republican for his last seven years in office. He got his fingers burned on health care, and thereafter behaved himself. I often bring up the fact that 500,000 Iraqi kids perished on his watch. But it doesn’t register – a typical Democrat reading this paragraph will only see white spaces. 500,000 kids starved, malnutrition and preventable disease. The man in the tailored suit attending cocktail parties did this to them. Ah, the banality of evil.

But I did read something over at Counterpunch that caught my eye – I’ll quote and then cite:

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

The author of those words? Noam Chomsky. I never thought I’d see words like that from him. What next? Ralph Nader joins the party?

Barring election theft, always real possibility when votes are counted in secret, it appears as though we are in for a few years of Democratic rule. Republicans will go into lock-down mode, and will do all in their power to make governing impossible. It will be a fight.

Our job as citizens is to keep the pressure on them, to remind them that they are supposed to be somewhat progressive, to hold them to liberal standards. It starts on November 5th. We cannot afford what we had while Clinton was in power: a Democratic snoozathon.

If by chance I awake on that day to find that Sarah Palin is Vice President, I’ll be reminded what musical satirist Tom Lehrer said in 1973: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize.” If bimbo Sarah Palin assumes high office, the word “absurd” will no longer have meaning.