I was ten years old, and knew nothing of presidential politics. But somebody famous was coming to Billings. (Previously, the town was captivated by a visit from the Lennon Sisters.) To see the face, the features, and to connect it to that man on the TV screen who did all those important things was enough to set me in awe.

Billings didn’t have ramps for loading and unloading passengers. They debarked onto the tarmac and walked into the terminal. When JFK’s plane landed, there was a throng of us, and we surged forward to meet him. I imagine there were security people all around him (although in those days the Secret Service did not guard presidential candidates), but I wasn’t aware of any. No one stopped me from getting close to him.

I was two thirds of the height of the average spectator, so I was not going to see over any heads. I used my size to my advantage, working my way under and around people, making it to the front of the crowd. I could see him as he walked towards us, smiling, his eyes looking off in the distance, only somewhat aware of us. I poked my hand between the grownups, and held it out. We never made eye contact. We shook hands. Only one of us was aware of the importance of that event.

Three years later I would think of that handshake in a different light. But touching him that day was enough to fill my young heart with joy.

Interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week, penned by Karl Rove. Rove, it appears, is such a fan of John McCain that the two of them ought to go to California and tie the knot. It drips with idolatry.

If Rove is saying it, then it must be strategy – to build McCain into this model of personal character that will contrast him with the Bush Administration (and Clinton before him).

Anyway, listen to Rove, as he talks about McCain’s daughter:

… 1991 Cindy McCain was visiting Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh when a dying infant was thrust into her hands. The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life, so Mrs. McCain brought the child home to America with her. She was met at the airport by her husband, who asked what all this was about.

Mrs. McCain replied that the child desperately needed surgery and years of rehabilitation. “I hope she can stay with us,” she told her husband. Mr. McCain agreed. Today that child is their teenage daughter Bridget.

This about seals it for me. I’ve seen a lot of hypocrisy, and politics itself is blatant hypocrisy. But, if I’m not mistaken, there was a push poll in the 2000 McCain/Bush race in South Carolina that asked voters what they would think of John McCain if they knew he had a black child out of wedlock. We’ll never know for sure, of course, though it certainly leaves hints of Karl Rove’s aftershave.

Bridget, if I’m not mistaken, is that “black” child (she’s Asian) he had out of wedlock.

Thanks Karl. You lift us all up.

There are a couple of interesting exchanges going on in our (quite small) blog world. I am peripherally involved in both.

One was initiated by Carol at her blog Missoulapolis. She quotes Mike Huckabee speaking at the National Rifle Association convention, where, when hearing a loud noise off-stage, says

That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He’s getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he — he dove for the floor.

I’ve debated elsewhere that racism is part and parcel of the right wing, but that they are too smart to come right out and say things, so they speak in code. So allow me to translate Huckabee’s words:

That was the nigger, Barack Obama. They are scared shitless of white guys with guns, man. You point one at them, and they hit the floor and say “Please suh! Please suh!”

I made the comment that Huckabee had a tinge of “cracker” in him, an epitaph for poor racist southern whites. I was immediately attacked for stepping over the line, of denigrating Huckabee, and using foul language.

I should have spoken in code, like they do. I should have said “Anyone for a Ritz?”

The other debate is over at Left in the West, where Anna put up a searing and emotional defense of Hillary Clinton, claiming that she’s the victim of misogyny. She claims that it all boils down to male resentment of a strong woman, though she admits that sexism may not be the only reason that Hillary is losing.

Marie Cocco rightfully calls out the Democratic Party for their refusal to address the way Hillary Clinton has been treated. To me, this is the biggest hurdle I’m going to have to overcome before I can enthusiastically get behind this party again. …I’m going to have a hard time forgetting this, and it’s not because it was directed against Hillary Clinton personally – it’s because her treatment, and the party’s refusal to stick up for women, will have a chilling effect on Democratic women in the future who might want to run for president. They have no reason to believe that the party will be there for them when they encounter the type of sexism that Hillary Clinton has dealt with during the 2008 primaries.

It’s a mixed message, and I think in her denial that sexism is making Hillary lose, she’s really saying that it really boils down to sexism. And I take issue – how dare she set aside all of the real and important reasons to vote against Hillary Clinton, and instead hurl epitaphs at us.

I commented:

You’re so sure you’re point on that you’re looking for every little thing and blowing it out of proportion.

A lot of people don’t like Hillary. I don’t like her. I didn’t like her husband. It has nothing to do with gender. It’s totally about them being Republicans at heart, and corporatists. Hillary has raised virtually all of her funds by “bundling”, or shaking down corporate executives, and yet she has the temerity to say she’s going to represent us when she gets to DC. Same with Billo.

You’ve posted here a lot, but you seem blind to issues and stuck on the gender thing. Get over it. She’s got flaws. Big ones.

Read on if you want. She doesn’t put up much of a defense other than to say “Obama too! Obama too!” Yeah – she speaks to my deepest fear, that Obama is not genuine either. But she hides from the obvious – that those of us who oppose poseurs claiming the mantle of “liberal” have reason to resent DLC stalwart Hillary Clinton, as we did her husband, Billo.

Jay chimes in afterward, hurling the “m” word at us again. This is basically what I did to Huckabee – looked for a base motive, seeing through the veneer. Maybe he is on to something. Maybe not.

I don’t like Hillary. I think I have very good reasons not to like her. She is divisive, and seems willing to stop at nothing, even destruction of her own party, to fulfill her ambition. Would it be different if it were, say, Ralph Nader who was running a quixotic campaign to the finish line, doing untold damage even as he knows he will lose in the end?

People might claim that he let ambition get the best of him. It’s destructive, it’s all about ego, they say. Indeed.

I come from conservative roots, and as I passed from right to left, reflexively adopted feminism along with other left wing rallying points. But over time I began to see feminists in a more objective light. They tend to demand more for less, and to call out the “m” word when they don’t succeed where they think they ought to succeed. It may be hard to be a woman in a male world, but something else is going on – no matter your gender, you’ve got to be really, really good to succeed (George W. Bush aside), and it is too easy to claim misogyny when failure occurs. Look to thine own self for the reasons.

Anna, and Jay, and Hillary need to take a good long look at Hillary. I have seen the darkness of her soul, and am glad to see her lose – not because she is a woman, but because she is blindly ambitious and willing to assume any public persona to achieve her destiny. She’s not one of us.

That is why I oppose her. And Billo. They are a curse upon our party.

We believe that targeting innocent lives to achieve political objectives is always and everywhere wrong. So we stand together against terror and extremism, and we will never let down our guard or lose our resolve.

Does anyone else notice that whenever they talk about innocent lives and terror and extremism, they are always talking about them? But when you count the bodies, it’s like a mountain on one side, and a small mound on the other, and it is always innocents, and the mountains of bodies are always people killed by us. Israel dispatches innocent civilians with abandon while labeling its enemies terrorists, disappearing them and putting them in secret prisons and confining them to ghastly compounds like Gaza; building walls through their territory and stealing their land. Yet it’s always them. They are the bad guys, while we are somehow accomplishing good with all of the oppression and violence we can muster, including torture.

It’s nonsense. I mean this in utter seriousness, I am not merely calling names: George W. Bush is a violent extremist; he should have been impeached, and the world will be safer when he leaves office. Just sayin’.

As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

These days, when the tanks roll across borders in illegal invasions, it is American kids doing the driving. Bush might have the right historical analogy. He just has it backwards.

Enough. There are times when I can hardly stand to hear that voice and the constant stream of lies.

Pity we have to go to a fake news outlet to get the news and hard-hitting interviews we should be getting from regular news. These two videos contain about six more minutes than was broadcast on the Daily Show.

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.thedailyshow.com posted with vodpod

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.thedailyshow.com posted with vodpod

Edward Abbey was fired as editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, after printing the following Denis Diderot quote on its cover:

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

He attributed it to Louisa May Alcott. I don’t know if the firing was due to the misattribution, or to the content of the quotation.

I want to get caught up in it all, I want to believe, but I know on some level that it is all a fiction. Barack Obama is cautious about committing himself to issues. He’s long on charisma, and he’s roping in a public that is starved for a real leader and that is accustomed to politics stripped of issues. The American media culture is perhaps the shallowest and most submissive to power that has ever existed since Marconi. We have so little to brag about.

But I find myself drawn in to the Obama cult because he is giving the Clinton’s a good how-to, keeping Hillary out of power and consigning Bill to the trash heap of ex-presidents. There’s some validation in that. (Side note: Ralph Nader claims that Obama knows what is up, understands the issues in depth, but is engaging in “protective imitation”, I assume to minimize negative news coverage.)

Truth is a little more sobering. Most political power in this country exists outside the federal electoral system. Just one example of a powerful and unregulated force in American politics: the major news outlets. They have more say over who our next president will be than any other single body in this country. They are uniformly owned by large corporations, and while their primary purpose is to create investment return for stockholders, they also decide what is an issue, what is not. They can ignore anyone they please, and do so, openly and brazenly. They can talk about fluff and minutia and put us to sleep. They can talk horse race 24-7, and ignore substantive issues. And they do.

The media consists of a few pretty faces on TV, along with beat reporters for major newspapers, but there is far more to it than that. What we don’t see are the editors and publishers of those newspapers, and the board rooms of the corporations that own NBC and CBS, etc. Fox may be blatantly biased, but there is a conservative tilt to other mainstream outlets too. It’s very difficult to get a true progressive on the air, whereas conservatives highlight every major news show and the editorial pages of most newspapers.

The complaint now among Democrats is that John McCain is getting a free ride, while Obama and Clinton are being closely scrutinized. In true American fashion, few people could tell us where any of these candidates stand on actual issues. Instead, the news media has chosen to focus on peripheral issues, like Obama’s pastor and Hillary’s 3 AM ad and he-said she-said sound bytes. They are also excellent accountants, working hard to count them delegates. Notice how none of this affects who will deliver health care or get us out of Iraq.

So we get weird election results – Reagan elected in 1980 and 1984, even as the electorate opposed his legislative agenda. Same with Bush – his war, his opposition to social programs is wildly at odds with public opinion, yet he apparently still drew slightly less than 50% of the vote in 2004. Issues that are important to most voters are not important to the elite, therefore we don’t get a serious discussion.

This may be a natural outcome of a media that has to worry about making money for shareholders, and therefore worries about entertaining viewers more than informing them. It could also be deliberate – a way to shield a candidate who has very unpopular stances – John McCain. It’s Reagan all over again – he’s polling in the high forties, yet the issues that he has taken a stand on are directly at odds with public sentiment. People like him because he is a “maverick”, a war hero, a nice guy – none of that is true, but nothing to the contrary will ever see light of day in major media outlets.

Given the ownership of the media by conservatives, I assume that John McCain will continue to get a free ride, while pesky and unimportant side issues will dominate coverage of the campaign. And like in 2000 and 2004, Americans will vote with little knowledge of actual candidate stances on issues after having been assaulted with barrages of 15 and 30 second propaganda spots.

The only question that I ask is this: Is it us, or is it them, that causes this? I say that when elite consensus is at odds with public opinion, that our media deliberately fall back on fluff and trivia in the place of real news coverage. I say it’s them.

I repeat uncritically the following excerpt from Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch (If Cockburn was an office holder and I did this, I’d be a journalist!):

Back in 1979, Tim Hermach, a new leader of the Native Forest Council and breathing the righteous fire of Eugene, Oregon, was a businessman seeking commercial advantage. In 1979 this search took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his associate Tookie McDaniel said the swiftest way of getting a certificate of origin necessary for a rebar (reinforcing steel for construction) deal was by conferring personally with the new governor of the state.

In short order, a dinner was arranged with young Governor Bill at the Little Rock Hilton. Tim recalls that they were scarcely seated before Bill was greeting a pretty young waitress in a friendly fashion, putting his hand up her dress while announcing genially to the assembled company, “This woman has the sweetest c— in Little Rock”.

Tim, an Oregon boy by origin, tells us that he listened with burning ears and mouth agape as Bill talked of womanhood in terms of astounding crudity. Badinage notwithstanding, some business was transacted. Hermach tells us that Governor Bill, “very openly, nothing shy about it, said words to the effect that our end use certificate would cost about $10,000,” said transaction being of a personal, informal nature. “Since ours was a $2 million deal, we didn’t care,” Tim recalls.

Governor Bill also informed Hermach that they should go to the Stephens Bank the following day to complete all necessary arrangements.

These transactions concluded, Governor Bill repaired to the Hilton’s nightclub with boon companions, where they cavorted lewdly with sundry flowers of Little Rock before repairing to bedrooms in the upper regions of the hotel.”

Several questions come to mind – if it was a bribe, why do it at a bank, where it might be traced? Was the Arkansas press really that compliant or blind? And why the brazenness with strangers? Wasn’t he worried about word getting around of his true nature? And, of course, where was Hillary? Was this the night she threw the family china at him?

But the story resonates becuase it fits with others told by others about Bill, a lech and backalley sleezecat. In the same issue of Counterpunch, which is not available online, Douglas Valentine, whose father was a World War II POW who suffered enormously, writes about John McCain’s real war record, and his collaboration with the enemy in Vietnam and the special treatment he got as a POW. Valentine claims that McCain was never tortured – far from it. He worked with the Vietnamese, did their radio spots for them. He wonders if his monstrous temper is a result of monstrous guilt. There are veterans who knew McCain who are trying to get this message out now, but unlike the Swiftboat veterans, we won’t be hearing much about it. McCain gets a special pass.

As did Governor Bill. With Bush being so bad and all, Clinton’s reputation has undergone a Doris Day-like makeover (she was a retroactive virgin), and Democrats especially are remembering him for all the things he wasn’t – a fighter for progressive causes, a small ‘d’ guy. And it helps to remember here that these stories, Richard Mellon Scaife aside, have followed him throughout his career, and throughout it all, a woman stuck to his side. There’s an agreement at work there, and both benefit, and one decided that a career was far more important than a marriage. Ambition, like seeping water, crumbles foundations.

And throughout it all, a compliant press has allowed it all to happen. Just like John McCain now, Bill Clinton got a free pass.