Author Archives: Julian O. Long

have we hit bottom yet?

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It’s a reasonable question, what with Sheriff Mike Scott of Lee County, Florida stroking the mob with this gem: “On Nov. 4, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happend! (sic)” The divine Sarah, when she arrived at this rally, would stroke the mob still further by evoking the ghosts of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, claiming Obama’s associations with these men to be proof positive that her “opponent” is not a real American.

Of course. this tactic is designed to play into the racist hate campaign that has been waged against Obama on the Internet since the beginning of his rise to prominence, and there are apparently some voters who might still be persuaded. At least since the Nixon years, a substantial part of the Republican equation has required persuading some Americans to vote against their own economic and political interest. So, nobody should be surprised.

But I always am — surprised, that is. I wish that the Obama campaign had not felt it necessary to bring up the Keating Five. But I suppose that retaliation, or some other evocation of McCain’s complicated past, was required. What’s more interesting than that, though, is the way McCain seems to be trying to reinvent himself, sort of any which way he can. Here are some of Ben Smith’s thoughts about that.

I’d always thought McCain’s great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he’d acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn’t that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

In Halperin’s account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain’s “former relationship with Charles Keating as ‘social friends,'” and called the situation a “classic political smear job on John.”

Dowd also “thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain�s intervention with regulators was poor judgment,” Halperin writes.

But if so, what’s this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?

“Oh c’mon, do we have to?”

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Apparently Spunky Palin is not pleased with Maverick McCain’s decision to move campaign resources out of Michigan and has expressed her displeasure in a quick email. Spunky is also annoyed with Katie Couric, but Mav soldiers on. He is mostly annoyed with Barack Obama, it seems.

Meanwhile the House of Representatives have passed the Wall Street Bailout bill aka The Rescue. Here are a couple of background pieces on the financial crisis — best I’ve seen.

Sarah barracuda

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In the wake of last evening’s vice presidential debate there’s been a good deal of praise of Governor Sarah Palin. She exceeded expectations, no matter those expectations were monumentally low after her performances in televised interviews with Katie Couric. She put Joe Biden on the defensive, though perhaps she merely flabbergasted him as she did me with some of the nonsensical things she said. She returned from the wilderness of media savagery as the authentic Sarah Palin, defending the authentic maverick, John McCain, his vision, and his program of reform. What vision? What program of reform?

I heard nothing in last evening’s debate that convinced me that Palin possesses either intellect or compassion. Her ability to think on her feet seemed limited to a not very trustworthy sense of where she was out of her depth and needed to fall back on a memorized talking point. Sometimes she got the talking points wrong, particularly if there were any long sentences to negotiate, in which case she would immediately jump to the bottom line, or what I guess she took (or had been coached to take) as the bottom line.

To the extent that Palin’s debate discourse seemed informed by ideas, they were not ideas that she owns. In the one place during the debate where she had an opportunity to display some compassion, after Senator Biden displayed some emotion in speaking of his knowledge of single parenthood, Palin retreated to her talking points, picking up on the last phrase of Biden’s remarks; but instead of answering Gwen Ifill’s question about her Achilles heel (I guess she has none) or reacting with any authenticity to what had just occurred, she went back to the Maverick theme, which is about as meaningless a piece of junk rhetoric as there is in our present politics.

Here’s the exchange.

This video illustrates the entire Palin action in last evening’s debate, as I saw it: strategic retreat from the opportunity to utter an independent thought or express an honest emotion, mindless repetition of the talking points she had memorized together with shamelessly inauthentic expressions of loyalty to the McCain brand, and constant attack from her perspective as a putative outsider while flashing a cutesy smile and jazzing up her talk with fake enthusiasm, the pretended breathlessnes, the gee whiz, I’m just a poor country girl stuff. There’s about as much real intelligence there as we normally attribute to the fish that gave Palin her high-school nickname.

wolves, again

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Sharon Shaw has written a too complimentary response to my recent post regarding Alaskan wolves and has directed us all to the World Society for the Protection of Animals petition. Shaw also points out how little attention animal rights gets as an issue, noting that On the Issues doesn’t list it. I agree that there is a lot of work to do, as Shaw says, and think that work perhaps needs to proceed on more than one front.

FactCheck.org has recently done a piece on Palin and the Alaskan wolf hunt that seems to me to beg a number of questions. Under a rubric reading “A wildlife group’s ad attacks Palin for supporting the shooting of wolves from airplanes. She does, but there’s more to it than that,” the scholars at FactCheck.org, whom I normally respect, make an argument which ultimately reduces the moral claims of those who oppose aerial hunting to semantics and personal taste, ignoring the history of the practice and its effect on wildlife as well as Alaska’s role in the Bush administration’s assault on the Endangered Species Act — and ignoring some other important things as well.

I’m not going to try to reply to the FactCheck piece in detail on the merits. A reply from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund (which in fairness I need to say that FactCheck references in a footnote) does that quite well. You can read it here. Rather, I want to make two observations. One goes to the FactCheck argument, itself; and the other goes to method.

First, those of us who oppose programs of “predator control” such as Alaska’s do so at least partly out of the conviction that we humans, the most vicious of all predators, have done irreparable damage to the planet which is our home. For some the ground of that conviction is religious; for others it is based in humanistic ethics or in science. but in no case is that conviction a matter of mere personal taste in convictions — the implication of FactCheck’s “That’s a personal judgment call.” I think it remarkable that FactCheck bends over backwards to honor the reasoning of those in Alaska who defend aerial hunting but doesn’t even mention the reasoning of those who oppose the practice. The effect of FactCheck’s foregrounding the case for aerial hunting and footnoting the arguments from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund is to promote aerial hunting. I’m sure the scholars at FactCheck know this. They are journalists, rhetoricians, philosophers, political scientists, etc.

Which brings up my second observation. If there is anything we have learned from the arguments among scholars during the culture wars, it is that belief in the existence of a neutral territory for the critic is problematic. What is claimed to be neutral territory, upon inspection turns out to be governed by interest. The most honest scholars in the postmodern twenty-first century take positions and acknowledge them. The proposition that the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund’s ad, which is the subject of the FactCheck piece, can be stripped of its emotional characterization so as to reveal its real content is to make a naive fact/value distinction that at bottom is no more than a denial of the valuation that is the core of the ad in the first place.

Here’s my point about method. The idea of the critic as dispassionate, autonomous, and culturally neutral carries with it the idea of privileged access to objective knowledge. That’s an interest like any other. Not that it means we shouldn’t listen to scholars who analyse arguments — we should. But their enterprise is as perilous and prone to error as any other human enterprise. Don’t believe them when they pretend that it isn’t. I think the scholars at FactCheck have made an error here.

I think, perhaps without meaning to, they have preferred the worse cause over the better.