Marching in Horse Puckey

When the Rowan County Marching Band returned to Morehead from the Steve Beshear inaugural, they had a certain smell that wasn't the smell of success.

Instead, it was horse puckey.

Contrary to my daughter's sanguine expectations, the Rowan County Band was not allowed to dodge the horse puckey from the "equestrian units" as they marched in the parade. Not that such permission would have helped. Because several other bands marched before the Rowan County band, the horse poop had already been stamped on and spread all over the road before the Viking musicians got there.

As a result, there was no way to avoid stepping in it and stepping in it a lot.

I heard that Steve Beshear gave a great speech about the need for bi-partisan spirit in the state capital. However, I'm afraid that he's going to find himself stepping in horse-puckey all the time because the Republican leadership likes playing "chicken" much better than it likes bi-partisanship.

Girl Dodging Horse Poop

Tomorrow, my oldest daughter is going to be playing alto sax for the Rowan County High School Marching Band as they march for the Steve Beshear gubernatorial inauguration in the Kentucky state capital of Frankfurt.

According to Katy, the band director told her that it would be an "equestrian parade" and that members of the band would be able to get "out of step" to avoid the horse patties on the street. That band director's a great guy.

So, that will be my daughter out there--playing sax and dodging horse poop. Who says the teen-age years aren't fun--at least for the kids.

For parents, it's another story. We'll have to get up at five to wake her up.

Glenn Greenwald and the Future

THE PASSION OF GLENN GREENWALD. Of all the liberal bloggers, Glenn Greenwald of Salon is the one I respect most. Reading Greenwald's blog almost daily, I especially appreciate his ability to engage in "liberal outrage" without looking weak or whiny. What makes Greenwald especially effective is that he saves his highest levels of outrage for "the bankrupt elite" and Democratic politicians instead of the Bush administration and the right. Not that Greenwald won't bore into conservative apparatchiks like Harvey Mansfield and Frank Gaffney, but it's Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, Joe Klein of Time, and Senators Jay Rockefeller, and Diane Feinstein who outrage Greenwald the most. As Greenwald demonstrates on almost a daily basis, the Bush administration and their neo-con allies didn't launch the Iraq War, commit crimes against humanity, torture prisoners, corrupt the Justice Department and cover it all up by themselves. They did so with the support, protection, and prior knowledge of Democratic leaders, "liberal" pundits, and the so-called liberal media. In fact, key Democratic politicians like Rockefeller and Feinstein continue to fight a rear-guard battle on behalf of the Bush administration. In many ways, the same is the case with the mainstream media as well. Magazines like Newsweek and Time are still giving prominent gigs to the neo-cons who brought us the war in Iraq while continuing to shut out liberal bloggers like Greenwald.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE. However, I don't believe that Greenwald has a full grasp of the implications of his journalism. More Tomorrow

Are Conservatives the Equivalent of Child Molesters

One of the persistent complaints of the right-wing is the bias against conservatives in academia. In an op-ed piece for the increasingly right-wing Washington Post, Villanova political scientist and registered Republican Robert Maranto claims that Republicans are disadvantaged on several levels. Maranto believes that he himself lost a job at a "prestigious research university" because he had mentioned that he was planning on voting Republican. He also reports on research which indicates that "conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology."

Sympathy for conservatives is not a regular feature of Red State Impressions. But Maranto could have had a case if he had framed it differently. For example, I agree with Maranto that "a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas." There are times when I've had a liberal/left ideological monoculture in my classes and I've been bored to death by it. Likewise, I organized several forums on the war in Iraq and often wished that there were more conservative professors on campus who could make the pro-war case. Once I even had to state the evangelical case myself on a church/state panel because nobody else in the group had any sympathy for the evangelical point of view.

But conservatives are largely to blame for the problem themselves.

When I started graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1976, graduate students thought that half of the political science faculty were Republicans. All of the Republican faculty I knew were pretty moderate and they seemed to be Republican primarily because of their misgivings about the welfare state, support for the Cold War, and doubts about feminism, and race policy. Most of the Democrats on the faculty seemed fairly moderate as well. There were a few people on the left and I studied with all of them because I was on the left myself. I still am. But on the whole the UNC political science faculty was a moderate group.

Since 1976, the left has been strengthened in many humanities fields. The advent of African-American studies, feminism, gay-friendly perspectives, and interest in global studies brought a number of bright young leftists into academics. So did excitement over new methodologies and points of view that were emerging on the academic left including Frankfurt School Marxism, the new social history, deconstruction, Foucauldian genealogy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. Most important of all, left-wing scholars wrote a continuous stream of compelling books and articles that resulted in a general shift of the humanities to the left.

That's not the case with political science where the bulk of professors are still moderates who are suspicious of people on the left, dismissive of new methodologies like Foucaudian genealogy or deconstruction, and generally ignorant of the pervasive focus on "race, class, and gender" in other fields (although political scientists do write effectively about African-American politics).

The issue with political science is that conservativism has moved so far to the right that the moderate professors who might have considered the Republican Party in the past now identify themselves both as Democrats and liberals. We have three junior political scientists in our department who are very moderate in their beliefs (conservative compared to me), but see themselves as "liberals" and vote Democratic or for Nader because they are now repelled by the right-wing which they identify with the Republican Party.

There are other problems with conservatives. Conservatives don't bother to learn any of the new critical methodologies in their fields but haven't worked out compelling alternatives either. Consequently, conservative scholarship has little appeal to anyone who is not already a committed conservative. As a result, the work of conservatives often has a dated quality to it that makes conservatives unappealing as students, job candidates, tenure candidates. In my senior seminar on African-American Thought last semester, one conservative student was uncomfortable with the whole idea of African-American Thought despite the tremendous writing of Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and others. However, the poor student could only write a research paper comparing Martin Luther King to conservative icon Leo Strauss under the assumption that King was a generic thinker rather than African-American per se. I felt bad for the poor guy by the time he had gone through three drafts even though the work on King was pretty good. Unable to make Leo Strauss either more interesting or less rigid, he had a difficult time making the comparison interesting either.

Conservatives also have severe problems with being outside the moral mainstream of academia. Although the claims of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and gay rights have become part of the conventional moral wisdom of our society, the political right-wing is still trying to roll back the clock to the 1920's and Calvin Coolidge. As a result, moderates and liberals both inside and outside academia view conservatives as reactionary and bigoted. That's probably why one of Maranto's friends reported that people at his university treated him "as if I had become a child molester" after he became a Republican. Given that the Republicans have identified with the right-wing and that the right-wing holds many moral views that are repugnant to most non-conservatives, it follows that people in academics would treat him as though he were fundamentally immoral.

The knee-jerk moral hostility to conservatives in academics is reinforced by the right-wing's warmongering, defense of torture, and increasingly by their rejection of science. Like a lot of Americans, academics are looking on conservatives as fundamentally immoral people.

If conservatives want to re-establish themselves in academics, they will either have to rejoin the moral mainstream of the United States or produce compelling new work that shifts the consensus of various academic fields back to the right.

I don't see either of those things happening anytime soon.

Tim Russert Must Be Reading RSI

During Tim Russert's interview today with Rudy Giuliani, he asked Giuliani whether a hypothetical presidential mistress would receive Secret Service protection.

Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that police, not the former New York City mayor himself, had decided his then-girlfriend Judith Nathan needed publicly-funded security during their extra-marital affair . . . . He bristled when asked by interviewer Tim Russert if a hypothetical presidential mistress would rate the same level of protection, saying a Secret Service detail "would not be appropriate" in the absence of a credible threat.

That should be hypothetical presidential "mistresses." Once someone gets into the mistress game, there's no reason to limit themselves to just one. Followers of RSI will know that I posted about hypothetical Rudy mistresses a few days ago in my "Rudy's Next Mistress."

Maybe Russert or the people who do his work for him are following RSI.

Memorial for Greg Goldey

The Memorial Service for Greg Goldey was at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Lexington today from 2-4:30pm. Bernadette Barton and John Henney gave very moving speeches and there was a lot of focus on Greg's family as well as his participation in Buddhism. Shelley Heinz of the Buddhist Center presided over the service while Greg's brother spoke from the point of view of a Christian minister. In general, there was an undercurrent of tension between the Buddhism of Greg's last years and the Baptist faith of Greg's family in Nicholasville. Greg's political radicalism also got a lot of mention. He was an impossible guy to capture in one bottle.

Greg's wife Connie spoke eloquently about the love of the people who had visited, cooked, and laughed at their house while Greg was ill in relation to the pain of losing him. That formulation almost precisely captured my own struggles during the service. What I found was that all of the love that the people in the church had for Greg made the pain of losing him even more severe. Not being a Buddhist, a Baptist, a Mormon, or even a Unitarian, I couldn't find a way to think my way toward a reconciliation of that dilemna.

And that will have to be good enough.

How We Know God Loves Hillary

According to a Newsweek poll, Mike Huckabee has surged to a 20 point lead over Mitt Romney in Iowa. Huckabee thinks that what explains his recent climb in the polls is the action of a "higher power"in the earthly sphere. For Huckabee, the bottom line in American democracy is not "we the people" as stated by the Constitution, it's the wishes of God.

Rejecting the rational human calculations of his own identification with Republican evangelicals, good-humored campaign style, and economic populism as explanations for his increased popularity, Huckabee believes that God is putting his chips squarely on the Huckabee square.

But why?

Huckabee has a very medieval and profoundly Catholic concept of how the world works. He believes that "literally thousands of people are praying" on behalf of his campaign and that their intercession with God has resulted in God favoring his campaign and supporting him.

What about the other Republican candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Ron Paul?

It follows from Huckabee's views that God must not only be ignoring the candidacies of the other Republicans, God must actively be working against them. Perhaps Huckabee thinks that God hates most Republicans even though he favors Huckabee. There's nothing to object to in the first part of that statement. Given that the Christian god disdains wealth, insists that people love their enemies, and values the poor, depressed, and suffering over the happy and secure, it should be obvious that God hates the Republicans.

The only question is whether God is making an exception for Huckabee or not.

I don't think so myself. If God is doing anything, he's favoring Huckabee as the weakest and weirdest Republican candidate for the general election and thus ensuring that the Republican Party as a whole is going to lose.

In other words, Huckabee's rise is solid proof that God loves Hillary.

Romney Looks So Presidential, he should

play one on television. In fact, that's all that Mitt's Romney's speech attempted to do today. It tried to make him look presidential. Here's an account from John Dickerson of Slate.

When Mitt Romney gave his speech on religion in American life Thursday in College Station, Texas, he brought everything but the presidential seal. Introduced by George Herbert Walker Bush, the last popular Republican president, he stood in front of a row of American flags and faced a bank of cameras worthy of a celebrity murder trial. Leading up to the address, his campaign had released pictures of his arduous speechwriting process, exactly as the White House does before the real president gives the State of the Union address.

What Dickerson doesn't grasp is that "looking like a president" was eighty percent of what Mitt Romney was trying to get out of the speech. Romney's argument for the Republican nomination boils down to urging Republicans to view Romney as the strongest candidate because he's not corrupt like Giuliani, not lazy like Thompson, not stupid enough to free a dangerous rapist like Huckabee, and not principled enough to buck the right like McCain. Besides, with his hair, smile, and fitness, Romney just looks like a Republican candidate for president. So forget that Mormon stuff and learn to appreciate flip-flopping. Romney is selling himself as the best looking Republican out there.

This blog dumps on Romney a lot and he's back in fifth place in the national polls. But Romney has a fighting chance to win the Republican nomination and he'd have to be considered the favorite if the battle goes to the convention.

If not, Romney has a future in front of the camera. Maybe he could do Planned Parenthood commercials.

A Short Road to Mass Murderer

As is well known from the news reports, a 20 year old named Robert Hawkins opened fire on a mall outside Omaha, Nebraska and killed eight people while wounding five before killing himself.
My general reaction to mass murderers like Eric Harris and Cho Seung Hui is that they're assholes who express their assholeness through mass murder.

Perhaps that will ultimately be the case with Robert Hawkins as well. But Hawkins formulated his determination to kill in a way that calls us to think about the particular pressures of our society.

Maruca-Kovac [a woman Hawkins had been staying with] found what the 20-year-old had left in the home: A suicide note, in which he said he was "going out in style," and that he'd never been anything in his life but after Wednesday he would be famous. Armed with a rifle, Hawkins went to the sprawling upscale Westroads Mall, filled with shoppers three weeks before Christmas. The Omaha World-Herald reported that he had a military-style haircut, a black backpack and wore a camouflage vest.

The problem is this. We live in a society where corporate CEO's on average make 375 times their lowest level employees creating a tremendous gulf between the extremely wealthy and the middle and lower-middle class. In many ways, the distance between the rich and the rest of us is best represented by the cult of celebrity in which the lifestyles of those who actors, actresses, and rock stars serve as embodiments for wealth and extravagance of the upper 1/2% in general. The other characteristic of the class system is that everyone who does not obtain wealth, status, or any of the other markers of "success" are pushed into thinking themselves to be "failures," "losers," "morons," and idiots.

This is where Robert Hawkins appeared to be. Having been kicked out of his parents' home and fired by McDonald's for stealing, Hawkins believed that "he'd never been anything." For the students at my university, that means that Hawkins was a "dumb-ass." At the same time, it's also clear that Hawkins measured himself against the celebrity system and ached to make up the gap between his own extremely humble status and the people "at the top." That's because Hawkins went on to claim that "after Wednesday he'd be famous." Who did Hawkins mean by "famous?" Evidently people like Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Brad Pitt. Evidently being "famous" was a lot better than being Robert Hawkins.

There have been an enormous number of hierarchical societies in human history and I doubt that any of them produced as many mass murderers as the United States is creating these days. One reason is that the United States has a rich iconography of violence-- Colombine, the police, the military, gangs, hip hop, and a dozen other genres--through which guys like Robert Hawkins can imagine themselves as filling the gap between not being "anything" and being "famous." If someone like Robert Hawkins can kill enough people, he can be as famous as Eric Harris or Timothy McVey and he dressed up in a military haircut and a camouflage vest to represent himself as an ersatz soldier on a mission.

So what do we do? From my point of view, if we want to have fewer mass murders like Robert Hawkins, our society will both reduce the gap between the super-wealthy and the middle and stop the relentless humilitation of those who fail. We could also stop being so excited by the violent imagery that people like Hawkins use to bridge the gap.

For better or worse, stopping mass murderers like Hawkins involves becoming a different and better society.

Did Bush Want To Attack Iran Because of the NIE

For those who don't know, the "NIE" is the National Intelligence Estimate and yesterday the Director of Intelligence released an NIE which revealed that Iran had stopped their efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2003.

Today, the mainstream media and liberal blogs are filled with commentary on how the Bush administration knew about the NIE on Iran for at least six months and probably more than a year before it was published. The point of Wolf Blitzer and the liberals bloggers is that the Bush administration kept up the policy of threatening to attack Iran's nuclear facilities even though they knew that Iran was not attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

For the critics, it was the Iraq WMD issue all over again.

But I think it's worse than that. In fact, the Bush administration did not just maintain their previous policy in the face of the information in the NIE. Rather, President Bush, Dick Cheney, and others in the Bush administration significantly increased their pressure on Iran and seemed to be pushing for a military strike before the end of Bush's term.

In my opinion, it's pretty likely that Bush and especially Cheney were pushing for a military strike before the public release of the NIE made it clear that Iran was very unlikely to ever become a nuclear threat.

In this sense, Cheney would have been motivated to attack Iran as a way to preempt the NIE--in other words, preempt the truth. In my mind, that would be the war crime of a "crime against peace," the kind of war crime for which the Japanese leadership was prosecuted after WWII.

Iraq: From Collapsing to Failing

Concerning the current state in Iraq, Juan Cole writes "how much longer can Iraq limp along as a failing state before it really begins to collapse?" And he's basically right. The situation in Iraq is still tremendously fragile. The political situation has not improved at all and it's even doubtful that current military progress can be sustained after the surge ends in April.

Still, some added insight can be gained by reversing the terms "failure" and "collapse." By the time the surge started last January, Iraq in fact was "collapsing" into profound anarchy. The government was almost entirely dysfunctional with much of the Iraq military and all of the Iraqi police in the hands of militias. Sunni Anbar province in the west was characterized by a three corner brawl between tribal insurgents, global jihadis, and the Americans. The Shiite sector in the southeast was falling apart as Shiite militias made war on each other and the Americans with weapons imported from Iran. Making the situation even worse, the weakness of the central government and loose structures of the militias encouraged the development of criminal gangs which magnified the terror and insecurity of everyday life.

The situation was perhaps worst of all in Bagdad where all factions combined to create a Hobbesian nightmare where life was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." American troops, American mercenaries the Iraqi government, Sunni militias, Shiite militias, global jihadis, and criminal gangs all operated with impunity and nobody dominated the action. It was the worst of all possible worlds.

Given the horror of the situation, what the surge did was bring Iraq back from collapse. Leading elements in both the Sunni and Shiite populations decided to step back from the pit of anarchy. Tribal leaders in Anbar recoiled at the Taliban-like society that global jihadis were trying to implement and became allies with American troops. Likewise, Moqtada al-Sadr stood down his Mahdi Army. Even the Iranians seem to have pulled back a little. The Iraqi state was still failing but it was no longer in such a nightmare of collapse.

The presence of American troops allowed the tribal militias to gain a firm upper hand in Anbar. Likewise, the American military has also walled off a lot of the Sunni neighborhoods in Iraq so that car bombers can't get in. The price for so much "security" is tha residents from the neighborhoods can't get out and customers for local businesses can't get in. American forces have managed to impose security (quite a military accomplishment by the way) but haven't come close to creating the "stability" needed for the freedom of movement needed for real commerce. In fact, Iraq still seems closer to falling apart again than it is to establishing any kind of real stability or forward movement.

That's why it's very much legitimate for Cole to still refer to Iraq as a failing state.

Some Quick Thoughts on Greg Goldey

Solace. I've gotten a lot of solace from looking at what's written for the "In Loving Memory of Dr. Gregory Goldey" group on Facebook. Benji Conner, I believe, was the one who started it up. Thanks.

Buddhist Service. Mary and I went to a small service for Greg at the Buddhist temple in Lexington. Given that I have a bad cold, the fact that the Shambhaya Center was freezing and that we were expected to remove shoes was a very bad sign. And then they brought out the incense to get my allergies going. But I warmed up to the service because it was great. People told stories about Greg and got out their feelings about Greg's illness and death. In my own thinking about Greg, I was affectionately remembering how grouchy and complaining Greg could be while he was healthy. Knowing that Greg was kind of annoyed when I started wearing ties again, I wore a one of my brightly colored ties to the service--just to annoy him one more time for old times sake.

Not a Fan of Buddhism. I'm not a big fan of Buddhism and didn't know how important Buddhism had become to Greg over the last four years. But the people at the Temple were extremely nice and I was glad to learn a little bit about their rituals and chanting. Even though I'm not a Christian and have come to the conclusion that Christianity is weird, I value the lovingness and generosity of Christians like the lovely Mrs. RSI. I found the same to be the case at the Buddhist center.

New Experiences. As the coordinator of the government program, I presided over a moment of silence for Greg at our meeting this morning. Not being a religious person, I had never initiated such a thing before and I felt strange and incompetent--like I was floating in space--the whole 20 or 30 seconds I kept my eyes closed.

Hopefully, that gave Greg a good laugh wherever he is.

Let's Eliminate the Iranian threat

The big news for today was that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the Iranians decided to stop working on nuclear weapons in 2003.

Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley believes that the Iranians stopped because American sanctions and other pressure worked. That seems unlikely. If American sanctions worked so well, the Iranians would have stopped working on enriching uranium.

But they clearly haven't even though the Iranians won't have enough enriched uranium for a bomb until at least 2010-2015.

It's more likely that the Iranians gave up the idea of nukes after American overthrow of Iranian enemies like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Why go to all that bother after the Americans had eliminated their two biggest enemies?

Which leads me to the following conclusion.

If Bush wanted to eliminate the Iranian "threat" altogether, he could invade Israel and overthrow the Olmert government. Even better, that might bring out the apocalypse that the right is looking for.

But would the Israelis welcome us as "liberators?"

Of course, the Iranians might have stopped working on nuclear weapons because they could see how badly the occupation of Iraq was going.

Fred Thompson Working Himself Down In Polls

People complain about Fred Thompson being lazy. But there's good reason to think he's over-doing it. When Fred was not doing any campaigning at all, he did a lot better in the pollls. From Aug. 7 to Aug. 26, Fred averaged 18% in the national polls and he was happy to tell everybody that that was without doing anything. Now that Fred is busting his butt and campaigning at least 2 or 3 days a week, his poll numbers have sagged down to 14.2.

Obviously, Fred's working too hard for his own good and needs to cut back on his campaigning. Addicted as they are to "Yankee Politics," the New York Times doesn't "get Fred."

Mr. Thompson’s performance at the debate capped a weeklong period in which he held only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” rally last Saturday in a small room at the back of Sticky Fingers, a barbecue restaurant in Summerville, S.C. There was no music or food. There were not even chairs, and so some 100 voters there to see him had to stand for three hours before he arrived.

Given that Fred's campaign had been "too busy" to set up music, food, and chairs, it should be evident that Fred shouldn't have scheduled the event at all. Perhaps Fred's sliding in the polls because he's "over-scheduled."

In fact, I believe that Fred should give up on this weekly campaigning altogether and limit himself to one appearance a month. That way, neither Fred nor his campaign organization will be overly taxed and they won't look so bad to voters.

With Fred, it's the less work the better.

Black Bloggers Identify Taser Nation

There has been a great deal of uninformed comment about the invisibility of African-American bloggers, mostly by white bloggers who don't trouble themselves to read the work of African-American bloggers. One area where black bloggers are way out in front of black bloggers is the increasing use of tasers as a torture device by American police. Here's Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report:

A country that employs torture as an instrument of national policy should be expected to do the same on the local law enforcement level. The reverse is also true. The United States, with its long legacy of subjecting society's "Others" to systemic violence, now elevates pain to a kind of universal principle, spreading torture and "rendition" as institutionalized components of its global offensive. Now the domestic legacy and foreign policy combine to trickle down upon previously immune white citizens, in the form of Taser-torture. Tasers, once defended as life-saving alternatives to police use of deadly force, have become weapons of arbitrary, sadistic choice. The circle of pain is complete.

The most prominent example of the "trickle down" of Taser torture to American whites is the incident of Utah policeman Jon Gardner zapping white motorist Jared Massey with 50,000 volts of electricity because Massey wouldn't sign a ticket for speeding that he wasn't legally required to sign anyway. The whole incident was captured on video and distributed on YouTube. The only thing that Massey was being to Officer Gardner was annoying. Yet, USA Today reported that the Utah Highway Patrol found Gardner's conduct to be "lawful and reasonable under the circumstances." In other words, the highway patrol is saying that Utah policeman have a right to torture anybody they want anytime they want unless the torture is even more egregious than what happened to Massey and captured on video.

Surprised There Aren't More Hostage Situations

My main reaction to the hostage situation at one of Hillary Clinton's campaign offices is surprise, and gratitude, that there aren't more such incidents. In the U. S., we have a potent mix of troubled individuals, a violence-soaked popular culture, pervasive pornography, and easy access to weapons and explosives. We not only have a high murder rate but a seemingly constant stream of serial killers, serial rapists, fantasy killings, and other bizarre crimes. Given that there are also continual reports about terrorism, it's surprising that more people haven't adopted terrorist motifs to express their longing for violent revenge and fame.

New Hampshire hostage taker Leland Eisenberg seems to be a good example of what I'm talking about. He claims that he walked into the campaign office with a fake bomb taped to his chest because he was frustrated over his inability to obtain mental health care.


Hillary Clinton believes that account, but I do not!! It sounds too pat, too contrived, and too closely correlated to Hillary Clinton's reputation on health care to be true.


Certainly, Eisenberg is a guy with a lot of long and short-term troubles. He was apparently homeless at the age of twenty-one, accused a Catholic priest of abusing him, and served a 10-12 year prison sentence on a rape count. More recently, he had been arrested for "driving under the influence and stalking" and his wife was divorcing him because of his heavy alcohol consumption, verbal abuse, and threats. That's a load of problems. Nevertheless, it seems like Eisenberg was more frustrated by his lack of fame and celebrity than by a lack of mental health care. Or at least, he was coping with his sea of troubles by trying to become famous. The day before he walked into the Clinton campaign office with a fake bomb strapped to his chest, Eisenberg told his stepson to be sure to watch the television because he knew that he himself would be the center of televised terrorism drama the next day.

It's that convertability of personal breakdowns and traumas into efforts to seek fame through terrorist behavior that's worrisome in the Leland Eisenberg case. I'm glad it doesn't happen more often.

RUDY'S NEXT MISTRESS: THE HIT REALITY SHOW

I have an idea for the next big reality television hit--Rudy's Next Mistress. The premise of the show is that a national television or YouTube audience would select Rudy Giuliani's next mistress in the same way a national audience chooses the next American Idol. In the first round of the competition, women from all over the country would send in (tasteful) videos in which they explain why they want to be Rudy's Next Mistress and how well they match up with America's Mayor. After a panel of Rudy Giulini's best buddies cut the number of wannabe mistresses down, the final 12 contestants would be brought on national television to make their pitch to Mr. Giuliani before the television/internet audience and a distinguished panel of judges that would include former Senator Gary Hart, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and Ms. Monica Lewinsky. Given their high level experiences with either courting political mistresses or being a political mistress, the members of the panel can be expected to make the most entetaining comments possible. Still, the ultimate deciders for Rudy's Next Mistress will be the American people themselves.

If Rudy Giuliani is elected president in 2008, the producers of Rudy's Next Mistress would expect President Giuliani to introduce the winner at the same ceremony where Mr. Giuliani was sworn in as president. Perhaps the winner could swear to do her best to uphold the traditions of presidential mistresses like Marilyn Monroe during her term in "office" and pledge to marry President Giuliani if he and his current wife Judi Nathan Giuliani should get a divorce.

The benefits to being Rudy's Next Mistress would be tremendous. Most of all, there's the honor of being the escort and bedmate of the future President Giuliani himself. All the pundits agree that Rudy Giuliani is a "man's man"--the kind of man who would stand up to Hillary Clinton, attack Iran, flaunt his friendship with mob-connected guys like Bernard Kerik, and keep a priest accused of pedophilia on his payroll. More important, Rudy Giuliani is the kind of man who treats a mistress like a queen. When Giuliani visited Judi Nathan's condo in Southampton, he took his security detail with him. Just think how impressive Rudy Giuliani would be when he visits a presidential mistress accompanied by his Secret Service guards, mobile communications center, and nuclear football. And Rudy's Next Mistress will look pretty impressive herself when she's sleeping with him in the Lincoln Bedroom. Monica Lewinsky gave Bill Clinton blow jobs in the dark corners around the Oval Office. Rudy's Next Mistress would be giving her blow jobs under the beneficent gaze of Honest Abe himself. Now that's class.

Rudy Giuliani would be generous with the resources of the federal government as well. When he was mayor of New York, Giuliani assigned police officers to drive Judi Nathan and her family around the city despite laws against using public property for personal purposes. "She used the PD as her personal taxi service," said one former city official who worked for Giuliani." Isn't that romantic?

If Giuliani was willing to be so generous to Judi Nathan while just a mayor, just think how loving he would be to a presidential mistress. People don't realize the depth of Rudy Giuliani's commitment to his mistresses. Liberals created a lot of ethics rules and laws to control the behavior of public officials, but Rudy Giuliani is glad to defy those rules and laws for the sake of the women he loves. By refusing to kowtow to all those "ethics," Rudy Giuliani shows that he's tough enough to do what it takes to take on the Islamofascists. If Rudy is man enough to stick it to the liberal media and the do-gooders at ethics "watchdogs" like Common Cause, he's man enough to stick it to bin Laden as well.

That's why it's important that the American people choose Rudy's Next Mistress. Given the importance of Rudy Giuliani's mistress in the war on terror, we can't leave the selection of Rudy's Next Mistress to chance.

Will Rudy's Next Mistress Fly on Air Force One

If we know anything about Rudy Giuliani, we know that he's good to his mistresses. It was reported months ago that he used to tryst mistress Judith Nathan at the counter-terrorism command center that he had placed in the World Trade Center. Having sex in the nerve center of the city's war against terrorism must have been the thrill of a lifetime for Nathan.

No wonder she married him.

Today, Brian Ross of ABC reports that Giuliani also provided a car and a security detail for Nathan while she was his mistress.

Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

But what does this matter? Don't we know that Giuliani's a megalogmaniac, that he's corrupt, and that he doesn't think the law applies to him?

The answer is yes.

But we don't know how Giuliani is going to transport his next mistress if he gets elected president. Of course, Giuliani could use Air Force One to transport the next Judy Nathan around after he gets tired of this Judy Nathan. Maybe this would be his chance to join the Mile High Club as well.

But I suspect not.

Air Force One is a Boeing 747. Talk about an unsexy, out of date model of a plane. No! I see Rudy as taking his next mistress around in real style. Besides Mike Meyers already did the 747 seduction bit in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Rudy would want to find something really special for his next mistress. After all, she might become the next Mrs. Rudy after Judy Nathan.

Information on Greg Goldey Services, etc

After I received an inquiry from Sasha Triplett (Hi Sasha!) in Louisville, I thought it would be a good idea to search out some information on services for Greg Goldey and addresses to send cards and letters.

Greg's immediate funeral services will be private. The (tentative) plan is to hold a public memorial service for Greg on Saturday, Dec. 8.

Memorial Service, Saturday, Dec. 8, 2pm,
Unity Universalist Church
3564 Clays Mill Road
Lexington, KY 40503

If plans change, I will post the change.

Greg's family would prefer donations to their Buddhist temple in lieu of flowers. The address of the temple is below.

Shambhala Center of Lexington
315 W. Maxwell St
Lexington, KY 40508

phone: 859-225-4183

Finally, people should send cards and letters concerning Greg to his wife and children at the address below:

The Goldey/Hardesty Family
25 W. Hickman
Winchester 40391

Death of Greg Goldey

Greg Goldey died last night at 2:11am. I got to visit him yesterday afternoon. It was a tough situation because he was already struggling to breathe, had a hard time staying in focus, and was seeing a lot of people. But Greg was more than willing to see the friends, relatives, and colleagues coming to his house because he was concerned for them and their feelings. It must have been a long hard day for him to know that he was dying at the same time that he was so intensely connected to so many people.

Greg had always been a good guy and I always liked him. But that in fact was underestimating him. The way Greg conducted himself while he was terminally ill with cancer was noble in the best sense of the word and I've come to look up to him as a human being and a man.

It's horrible that he's gone.

Are Whites a Race?

One of the things that drives me crazy about "race talk" (to use a phrase from bell hooks) in the U. S. is the the way that white writers write as though African-Americans were the only race. Aren't whites in the United States a race as well?

Gary Kamiya's Salon article on "Is Race Dying" is an example in point. Kamiya claims that "it's hard to believe that just a few years ago, issues of black vs. white dominated the national discourse."

But Kamiya poses whites as passive to invisible to this discourse. For Kamiya, the most important contributions of whites to discussion about issues of race in the United States are guilt and politeness.

The great breakthrough of the civil rights movement, sadly, failed to erase the subtlest and most powerful barriers: internal ones. Whites learned to acknowledge the history of racism, foregrounding their own racial guilt. That was necessary but insufficient. It resulted not in racial enlightenment but racial politeness.

That might be true for liberals, but liberals aren't the only white people. Perhaps Kamiya is not aware of the tremendous amount of right-wing campaigning in opposition to affirmative action, hate crimes legislation, school desegregation, gun control in inner city areas and other racial issues. Conservatives have also been relentlessly promoting a "color-blind" within which any kind of black self-awareness or collective black self-assertion is viewed as the equivalent to segregation. In this way, conservatives have been arguing that the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a lot of hip hop music are just as racist as Bull Connor while he was whipping black demonstrators or George Wallace barring the school doors at the University of Alabama.

In fact, Kamiya seems to be sympathetic to the conservative point of view.

According to a recent NPR/Pew poll, 37 percent of blacks agreed with the statement that blacks today are so diverse they can no longer be considered a single race. Among the youngest respondents, aged 18 to 29, a staggering 44 percent agreed.

This is extraordinary. More than a third of the blacks who responded, and almost half of the young blacks, have rejected the cornerstone of American racial politics: black racial solidarity. If the poll is accurate, the most emotionally charged and immutable racial truth, the one-drop rule, is no longer sacrosanct for a large number of black people.

For Kamiya, anything that breaks up "the cornerstone of American racial politics: black racial solidarity" is a tremendously good thing and that's the case whether he's discussing whether blacks view themselves as a single race, the "values gap," or the increase in the bi-racial population of people like Barack Obama and Tiger Woods.

But African-Americans have always considered themselves an extremely diverse group or even a number of groups that were brought together by the scourge of white racism. The efforts of many light-skinned blacks to differentiate themselves from the more darkly hued were observed in turn of the 20th century New Orleans. Spike Lee portrays the same thing in School Daze. Likewise, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X wrote of the religious and ideological distinctions within the African-American population during the sixties and contemporary black writers have been denouncing the lack of political activism among the black middle class for years.

And Black people would be even more self-differentiating if they didn't have to face stereotyping, job discrimination, and police violence from the larger white population. But Kamiya doesn't comment on the relentless racial stereotyping of American television, movies, music, the fashion industry, and the news media. He also doesn't mention the mountains of racial jokes circulating abound black people. Kamiya doesn't ask why the steretyptical representation of black people is so important to white-owned and run media corporations or predominately white audiences. If Kamiya had asked such questions, he would have found that whites have a racial consciousness as well and that white racial consciousness has been a powerful factor in American politics for decades.

Yes, Virginia. Whites are also a race--a relatively unified race on racial issues. And black people will remain relatively united as long as that is the case.

An Update on Greg Goldey

Greg Goldey is in the last stages of his cancer. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.

Romney's the Man?

Josh Marshall at TPM has graphs on Romney's steady rise in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Perhaps Romney wears well on Republicans. Maybe, he just looks presidential. Or maybe Republicans are deciding that he looks like the best of a bad lot.

Trent Lott and the Waning of Primary Racism

FAREWELL TO THE DINOSAUR. Trent Lott announced his retirement from the United States Senate today. He'll be leaving effective at the end of this year or the beginning of 2008. Lott's significance in American politics is that he is one of the last racist political figures who engaged in the direct promotion of white supremacy. Lott not only expressed a sense of pride in Mississippi's vote for segregationist Strom Thurmond back in 1848, he also was extremely active in promoting the memory of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and promoted the Council of Conservative Citizens as a replacement for the old white Citizens Councils. Wary of being fully identified with the cause of racism in the post-civil rights era, Lott was circumspect in his efforts for the cause of white supremacy. But he regularly reminded people that his loyalties lie with the primary racism of slavery, segregation, and opposition to integration.

Speaking at a 1984 convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Lott declared that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." Asked to explain his statement in an interview with the extreme rightwing publication Southern Partisan, Lott said, "I think that a lot of the fundamental principles that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important to people across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party... and more of The South's sons, Jefferson Davis' descendants, direct or indirect, are becoming involved with the Republican party."

A THOUSAND SECONDARY RACISMS BLOOM. But Lott's passing from the political scene has mostly symbolic significance. The weight of political racism has passed from the "primary" segregationism racism of Lott, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond to various forms of "secondary" or indirect racism. Shelby Steele's critique of Barack Obama as untrustworthy because he's "black" in the sense of being part of the black community is one example of "secondary racism." Steele is not making the direct claim that whites are superior to blacks. Instead, he's arguing indirectly that the politics of black culture make any (non-conservative) black person a suspect candidate. As an advocate of color-blindness, Steele's arguments about Obama are similar to the arguments of William Bennett and others who argue that black culture is handicapped by "race-consciousness." Conservatives have come up with a barrage of indirect racist arguments against affirmative action, school desegregation, and attempts to stop racial profiling among other things. Secondary racism rules on the right.

RACISM LOSING ITS WAY? One of the things that is happening to the Republican Party is that they're losing access to the narratives of secondary racism. Where the Republicans used to campaign against "black crime," affirmative action, the "ghetto drug epidemic," hip hop influenced popular culture, and other "black" phenomena, they've largely been unable to develop a racial narrative in opposition to African-Americans for the 2008 campaign. While hardly out of sight, the racist thrust of Republican campaigning has shifted from blacks to Mexicans and Muslims. They've also been careful to promote pedophiles as the new "other" in American society.

But none of these themes has the same appeal as secondary racisms used to have. It would be a mistake to view white voters as being less racist than they've been in the past. Think of the mountain of racial jokes and stereotypes directed by whites to black people in this regard. It seems, however, that the Republicans dipped into the well of racism one too many times with the publication of the campaigns against affirmative action and the publication of The Bell Curve during the 90's and have run out of good ideas for playing on white racism without seeming "racist." Political racism seems to be losing its grip.

Maybe that's why Trent Lott is leaving the Senate. He might know that the game is up.

Shelby Steele Hates Black People

There have always been African-Americans who share a fundamental perspective with white racism. When they look at the American racial system, what they first see are faults, falseness, weakness, and depravity among other black people. I imagine that these were the kind of people who gave the famously racist Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo 5% of the black vote in one of his elections. Maybe Bull Connor would have pulled a small percentage of the black vote in segregated Birmingham as well.

The black neo-conservative Shelby Steele is well-known in The Content of Our Character for anchoring his analysis of race relations in a perception of racial manipulation by black people. Steele starts out the book with a story about a dinner party in which a black professor employed comments on race to make the white guests feel uncomfortable and guilty. Steele's starting point for his thinking about the racial system was not the persistent racism, disproportionately high poverty levels, or the pervasiveness of racial stereotyping. What fascinated him instead was the way that blacks "gamed" whites into feeling uncomfortable or guilty. Largely sympathetic with white people like myself, Steele wasn't interested in the ways that whites "game" race when we evaluate African-Americans in our jobs, tell jokes or stories about black people, or talk about black people when they're not around.

Now Steele has a book out on Barack Obama and it isn't surprising that Steele focuses on the "mask" that Obama adapts as a black man appealing to white voters. According to David Broder's largely sympathetic review:

In "A Bound Man," Steele makes the case that Obama has adopted "a mask" familiar to many other African-Americans, designed to appease white America's fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace a nonthreatening black . . . Steele likens Obama's success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the earliest of the crossover heroes he calls "Iconic Negroes" was Sidney Poitier. And it reminded me that in his political biography of Obama, author David Mendell reported the reaction of a focus group of liberal, North Shore (Chicago area) female voters, middle-aged and elderly, when shown a videotape of Obama speaking in his 2004 Senate campaign. Asked who Obama reminded them of, the answer was "Sidney Poitier."

Steele doesn't seem to ask himself about the "masks" adapted by white politicians like Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or Hillary Clinton. He also doesn't inquire about the extent to which the persona that anybody presents to the public isn't a "mask" that hides at least as much as it reveals. According to Erving Goffman, "the presentation of self in everyday life" involves the creation of a "front" through which "information about the actor is given off through a variety of communicative sources, all of which must be controlled to effectively convince the audience of the appropriateness of behavior and consonance with the role assumed." If Steele were going to discuss the "masks" of politicians in any kind of objective way, he would ask how political figures use self-presentation to "convince" their audiences concerning their personal appeal and their fitness for office and then investigate the extent to which Barack Obama's being black leads him to create a different kind of "mask" from other politicians.

Instead, Steele focuses on Obama in a way that creates an impression that Obama is uniquely manipulative of his public presentation and unlike the more racially honest white politicians who dont' seem to put on such a front.

"The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead," Steele writes. "To 'be black,' he has to exaggerate black victimization in America. ... Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties -- achievement gaps, high illegitimacy rates, high crime rates, family collapse, and so on -- in the old framework of racial oppression."

In other words, "racial identity" or being black in the way that other black people are black makes Obama fundamentally dishonest about race. For Steele, black people are such a problem that he wonders if a black guy like Obama can be honest enough to be president.

I don't have a window into Shelby Steele's soul, but I'd call that hating black people until proved differently.

Hillary Doing Well in Kentucky

A recent Survey USA poll has Hillary ahead of Giuliani by 4 in Kentucky. That sounds about right. Kentucky Republicans are in the dumps as a result of Republican governor Ernie Fletcher's big re-election loss and the generally low opinion of George Bush. Giuliani also rubs religious conservatives the wrong way as a result of his pro-choice views.

As a result, Hillary looks pretty good.

The Hillary Punching Bag Meme

It looks like the mainstream media game has switched to one-upping Tim Russert. Now that Russert has "gotten" to Hillary Clinton with his immigrant driver's license question in the Philadelphia debate, media figures are now rushing to figure out ways to "get" to Hillary Clinton.

It seems like the hot new strategy for tearing at Hillary Clinton is to portray her as a washed-up punching bag.

Here's Thomas Schaller of the Baltimore Sun:

So which political victories, exactly, is Hillary Clinton touting? Has 15 years of ending off Republican attacks made her a powerful, partisan heavyweight or a beleaguered punching bag? John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama dare only to flirt with such questions.

Actually, Schaller's only flirting with the question as well. He certainly makes no argument concerning how Hillary has been "beleaguered" or how she's been a punching bag. Hillary's case for fighting the Republicans is that she was an integral part of the team that brought the Clinton administration back from the dead after the 1994 debacle and that she emerged as a stronger figure as a result of the impeachment controversy. Schaller's tries to deny Hillary any credit for the Clinton administration's defeat of Gingrich and the Republican revolutionaries by claiming that the Clinton's won as a result of Republican over-reaching than anything else. But that's absurd. Given that the Republicans over-reach as a matter of principle, every Democratic victory of the last 13 years has come against Republican over-reaching.

Schaller also has nothing to say about the unique alchemy by which Hillary became a more appealing figure as a result of the impeachment scandal. Not only did Hillary's approval numbers soar, but it was as a result of impeachment that she started to look like a possible presidential candidate. Far from being a punching bag, Hillary Clinton's combination of policy expertise, tenacity, determination, temper, and ability to both dish out and take a punch started to look "presidential" when people saw that she was a "stand-up woman."

But none of this is significant to Schaller. He doesn't care any more about whether Hillary actually is a punching bag than Russert cared about immigrant driver's licenses. The point is to find the theme around which the mainstream media can rally in their efforts to "get at" the Hillary Clinton candidacy.

John Ellis does another permutation of the Hillary as sad-sack by creating an analogy between Hillary and Richard Nixon.

Like Nixon, Senator Clinton is widely disliked. Like Nixon, she cannot be made warm, even by a modern-day Roger Ailes. Like Nixon, she is a politician whose resentments are always close to the surface. And like Nixon, she is a politician about whom her peers have real doubts. But also like Nixon, she is intelligent and diligent and determined and tough and she has been through hell and back . . . . She knows that it's like to get her head kicked in every day, day after day after day, for months and years on end. She endures.

That was the whole point of the 1968 Nixon campaign narrative. He wasn't perfect by any means, but he was formidable and he endured. It's a narrative that fits Senator Clinton's campaign like a glove. For reasons either right or wrong, Americans will elect their first female president only when they are convinced that she is the tougher of the two (or three) choices. She won't be inevitable until we believe she is as formidable as Tricky Dick.

Talk about terrible advice. Who would portray themselves or their candidate as someone who "knows what it's like to get her head kicked in every day, day after day after day, for months and years on end." But Hillary Clinton is smarter and better than that. If people attacked me like the right-wing attacked Hillary, my head might have gotten kicked in. In the final analysis, my skin isn't thick enough for politics. Hillary was more like the powerhouse tailback who is stronger in the fourth quarter after 25 or 30 carries. Despite taking a pounding, she's ready to overpower the opposition rather than cave in herself. This is what the debates have shown. Hillary Clinton has considerable personal warmth, lots of savvy, and an ability to take the heat and come out looking better as a result. That's why her lead was getting up to thirty points before she stumbled in Philadelphia.

The "Hillary as punching bag" idea is the latest in a long line of themes employed by the media to derail Hillary Clinton's candidacy. There was the Hillary and the baggage of "the Clinton era," Hillary as "unelectable," Hillary as "polarizing," Hillary as being "too unpopular on the left," and Hillary as overly "dynastic." Hillary Clinton has falsified these stereotypes by turning in solid performance after solid performance during the Democratic debates. My bet is that Hillary's performance will keep the "Hillary as punching bag" theme from gaining traction as well.

But that doesn't mean the MSM won't try again.

Simple Gifts and the Sweet Life

Today, my family and I spent Thanksgiving with Mrs. RSI's brother Tom and his family down the street from us in Morehead, KY. Our two children were there along with Tom and Molly's four children who had come from Minnesota, Lexington KY, and New York City. Mrs. RSI's cousin Laura and her daughter Nina were also down from New Hampshire with a son and his girlfriend coming in from Cincinnati as well. Bucking the trend toward focusing on Christmas, Halloween, and Valentine's Day, Mrs. RSI's family have made Thanksgiving their favorite holiday and wanted to share it as widely as they could.

As was the case with most American families, Tom and Molly don't make much overt reference to God in their holiday festivities, but they do make a point of singing the following Shaker song.

Simple Gifts

'Tis a gift to be simple
'Tis a gift to be free
'Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place
just right
We'll be in the Valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we will not be ashamed
To turn turn will be our delight
'Til by turning, turning we come 'round right

Repeat refrain

Ah! Liberals! Have to love them for their goodness. Tom and Molly also asked everybody to write down something that they were particularly grateful for.

I wrote "the sweet life." My colleague Greg's health is deteriorating and its a horrible thing. But I can also see the warmth and good will of all the people who are helping to care for him. In fact, the beauty of the group that's formed around Greg's care is even more striking than the destructiveness of the cancer. I can't think of a place where the sweetness of life is more evident than the Goldey house in Winchester.

Despite the sorrows involved in Greg's illness and Noelle N'Diaye's arrest for wanton child endangerment, working at Morehead State is also a wonderful thing. Recently, I told one of my students that life was sweet for people who could figure out ways to make a living for coming up with new ideas. Afterwards, I realized I was right. Being a college professor is a great thing for me because I can make a living out of the ideas I develop.

And I come up with new ideas all the time.

Finally, the person who most makes for a good life is Mrs. RSI. When someone you love and respect is also a huge turn-on, life with them is about as sweet as can be.

I could go on, but I am very grateful for the sweetness of life on this Thanksgiving.

"Giuliani Time" Starts for Whites

When New York police officers rammed a plunger up the rectum of Haitian immigrant Albert Louima in August 1997, they crowed to Louima that "this is Giuliani time . . ." I was reminded of the Giuliani cops when I saw a video of a Utah police officer "tasing" a quarrelsome white driver named Jared Massey he had pulled over for speeding. When the guy decided to argue about speeding rather than sign his citation, the police officer made him get out of the car and then poured 50,000 volts into him with his taser. What makes the officer Giuliani-like is that he believed he had a right to torture the driver because he thought the man was annoying. The Giuliani police in NYC thought they had a right to torture anybody like Albert Louima for any reason they wanted. The same is the case with this police officer in Utah.

The other Giuliani element was the vaunting over the guy he had tortured. When a second officer arrived on the scene, the original cop laughed that the man "took a ride with the Taser" while the second officer put in his sadistic two cents by adding "painful isn't it." The boasting is important. In Rudy Giuliani's world where power, strength, and masculinity are established through military attacks, torture, and threats vaunting over opponents is an important way to represent the distance between your strength and their weakness. In the case of the cops and Albert Louima, their bragging represented the distance between their power as police officers and white men and Louima's powerlessness as a Haitian immigrant. The Utah cops were sharing their sense of power when they laughed about the guy who was tased.

Liberal blogger Digby formulates the incident in terms of the erosion of constitutional rights.

Police in the country are now allowed to torture speeders by the side of the highway in order to get them to comply. The only difference between this officer slugging the speeder in the stomach and putting 50,0000 volts of electricity in him is that the latter doesn't leave any marks. The intent, the pain and the goose-stepping authoritarian message are exactly the same.

Word to the wise. Do not ever question the police, no matter whether they are violating your rights, ignoring the constitution or breaking the law. It is perfectly legal for them to torture you on the spot if you do.

I'm feeling so free I can hardly breathe.

This is a place where Digby and I disagree. In fact, being able to count on not being arbitrarily arrested, being framed for crimes, or tortured has always been a privilege of white people, and fairly respectable white people at that. This is something I realized when I had an incident where a local University police officer pulled me over for running a stop sign. The original charge was bogus because the stop sign was a new sign. Then, the officer started adding on charges for not wearing a seat belt, not having registration, proof of insurance, and threatened to put me in jail for those even though none of them would even result in a fine. On top of that, he wrote up my court date for an hour before court even started.

In the end, the stop sign charge was diverted and I got my paper-work in order which meant that all the other charges were dismissed.

But I also had an epiphany when I asked myself what would have happened if I had been black? Or a poor man? Or a student? And the obvious answer is that it would have been worse, perhaps a lot worse if I had been a black guy. When the prominent African-American writer Cornel West was arrested for driving in the wrong neighborhood and protested that he was a theology professor, the cops baited him with the n-word. I'm sure they would have been harsher than that with a black guy in Morehead.

That's the significance of the Utah case. What's changed is that the police have expanded "Giuliani time" to well-dressed white guys with nice wives and little babies.

The police have never hesitated to refuse to recognize rights, defy the Constitution, or break the law when dealing with large parts of the American population. Now, they're extending their abuses to nice white people as well.

"When did God Come into Thanksgiving?"

That's what Mrs. RSI asked when I told her about the conservative effort to "bring God back into Thanksgiving.

As always, Mrs. RSI is right.

Newt Gingrich argues that "historically, Thanksgiving is about renewing the bond between Americans and their Creator. It's a time when we are reminded that our rights come from God and that we have responsibilities to God as free citizens." (Gingrich, Winning the Future, Nov. 20, 2007)

Given the association of Thanksgiving with the harvest, it would probably be more accurate to say that Thanksgiving used to be about forgiving god more than thanking him. It's the same with harvest festivals all over the world. Of course, there is the conventional "thanking" of god for the blessings of the harvest. Who doesn't know the religious routines of their societies? But people were primarily congratulating themselves for bringing in the harvest after long summers and autumns of backbreaking labor and constant struggling against the droughts, insects, parasites, floods, frost, and heat.

And who brought about all of those difficulties? God!!! For sincere Christians like the Pilgrims, the difficulty of producing food begins with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Genesis and it's always been believed that god punished human sin by bringing about the natural disasters that traditionally made farming so difficult.

That's why harvest festivals like Thanksgiving always feature a big banquet. Much of what Thanksgiving dinner celebrates is the triumph of people over god or the gods and humankind's reconciliation with divinity at the moment of their triumph over nature.

Much of what Thanksgiving was about the generosity of spirit in sharing food and other bounties of the season, and part of that generosity is extended to god as well.

It's kind of touching in a way.

Of course, now that the United States is no longer an agricultural society, the holiday of Thanksgiving is even less connected with gratitude toward the Christian god than it ever was. Mrs. RSI and I are in our fifties and neither of us have heard about god in relation to Thanksgiving outside the forgettable conventions of saying grace. Thanksgiving was always about taking time off from work, relaxing, enjoying family and getting ready for the even bigger holiday blow-out of Christmas.

And that's the way it should be.

As for god, I don't believe in a god or any other kind of divine presence. But if there is anything divine in the world, I'll be in a very forgiving mood after dinner.

Soft Edges of the Second Civil War

There have been times when I've thought that the United States is in either a pre-civil war state or a kind of low-level second civil war. Having rejected much of American society, the right-wing is engaged in a series of cultural and political wars against black people, Hispanics, gays, popular culture, public schools, higher education, science, and liberal whites.

Oh, and I forgot Muslims.

It's not like the rest of society hasn't responded either. The response from the rest of society has not been as cohesive and determined as the right-wing "war on America," but the level of activism against the right is rising. The left blogosphere has risen as a significant locus of liberal activism. Suburban voters around cities like Philadelphia have changed their political allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party in reaction against social conservatism. Personal animosities toward conservatives are also hardening. I've seen surveys indicating that the number of atheists is growing as a result of hostility to the religious right. Likewise, there are reports of scientists being blackballed for supporting creationist viewes. Battle lines are hardening and the American social and political system is becoming more brittle as a result.

Ron Brownstein has published a book entitled The Second Civil War to explore the conflict. A columnist for the LA Times, Brownstein is probably the most acute observer in the national pundit class. However, the excerpt from The Second Civil War in The National Journal is disappointing. Like Jonathan Chait, David Broder, and every other bubble-brain in the mainstream media, Brownstein postulates an equivalence between the political right, and liberal bloggers because both sides are 'highly partisan." For Brownstein, the right and left are locked in a death grip that will inevitably be salvaged by a "return to the center."

But the analogy is almost entirely specious. Brownstein focuses on Tom DeLay's 2006 resignation speech from the House of Representatives and the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas that year. However, Tom DeLay was a majority leader of the House of Representatives who was at the center of a vast web of political power, financial resources, and media clout. A blog with about 500,000 hits a day, Daily Kos is hardly comparable to DeLay. Daily Kos might still become the focal point for an expansion of left-wing activism. The right-to-life movement certainly served that purpose for the right during the 1970's. But the rise of Tom DeLay was an outcome of thirty years of conservative activism while the liberal blogs might represent the initial thrust of progressive activism that ultimately results in the liberal version of Tom DeLay in the 2020's. But progessive activism is still a long way from matching the institutional strength, integrated media structure, and political savvy of the the political right.

There may be a civil war developing in the United States, but the difference between Tom DeLay and Daily Kos indicates that most of the conflict is still being initiated from the right.

The End of Thanksgiving as We Know It

Conservative religious figures want to put the "thanks" to god back in Thanksgiving. But they don't understand that Thanksgiving is being swallowed up by Christmas and Halloween altogether.

Lots of commentators notice that the Christmas season gets longer and longer and that's very much the truth in Morehead, KY. Walmart's had their decorations up for weeks, people are setting up Christmas trees, and our town's Christmas lights were strung up last weekend.

But Halloween is getting longer as well. Pumpkins and scary costumes are now out as early as September 1. In fact, I spent years fighting with my ten year old about her desire to buy a pumpkin in early September and finally got her to wait until Oct. 1. That's more than four weeks before the actual holiday.

Christmas and Halloween seem to be converging as well. In fact, the major Christmas decorations started going up as soon as Halloween decorations were taken down.

To the contrary, I can't remember seeing any Thanksgiving displays at the local stores. It seems like Thanksgiving is getting squeezed out by the other holidays.

But why?

Obviously, it's money. As the biggest commercial event of the year, Christmas obviously outshines Thanksgiving at the cash register. But Thanksgiving turkeys can't match up with Halloween costumes, candy, and extravagant Halloween parties either. As the more profitable holidays expand in national awareness, Thanksgiving shrinks into a fairly empty warm-up for the Christmas season.

But there lies the problem. If the Rev. C. Albert Mohler and Congressman Roy Blunt want more God in Thanksgiving, they're going to have to figure out a way to inject a lot more mammon into the holiday. Who says God and mammon don't go together?

Hillary Takes No Crap From Rove

Unfortunately, I can't be part of the current left blogospheric re-evaluation of Hillary Clinton. I endorsed her last March. But Karl Rove has an article in Time that makes me feel even better about her candidacy. According to Rove, he inherited Hillary's old office when the Bush people moved in and told a story about Hillary's office containing the only full-length mirror in the White House.

Rove acts all innocent about this petty little incident, but it's evident that he told the story to score "condescension points" on Hillary as a women who (naturally) would be overly concerned with her appearance.

How did Hillary respond? Rove states that "the senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn't put the mirror there."

Of course, Rove tries to create "plausible deniability" by denying that he had said that Sen. Clinton had placed the mirror in the office. But who's he kidding? He knew what he was doing just as much as Hillary.

For Rove, this demonstrates that Hillary Clinton is "hard" and "brittle." But I have an alternative interpretation. What Hillary demonstrated was that she didn't like Rove and wasn't going to take any of his condescending crap about her as a women. The Democratic Party has too many people who are willing to be buddy-buddy with the Karl Roves and Mary Matalins of the world. If the Democrats need anything, they need more Hillary Clinton types who let him know exactly what kind of jerk they think he is.

Score one for Hillary.

Of course, none of that stopped Rove. He kept telling the story at Republican events and she reminded him once again that he was an asshole.

So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she'd heard I'd repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.

I'm voting for Hillary anyway, but that's still the kind of thing I like to hear.

O'Hanlon, Kagan, and Some Good Old Homoerotic Warmongering

"Hey! Loverboy! Isn't it time we invaded Pakistan?"

One of the interesting developments of the last few years is the enhanced homoeroticism of heterosexual guys. Straight college guys used to bond over football, beer, and fish stories of what they might have done with whatever "chick" they picked up the previous weekend. What made all of this "erotic" is that a lot of guys found that the primary pleasure of having sex with women was telling the "other guys" about it. It was the bond with their male friends that counted. As for the women involved, they were mostly thought of as sluts if they were remembered at all.

Now, the same kinds of college guys are taking the homoeroticism up several notches. No longer limiting themselves to the warm feelings of male companionship, they're simulating gay sex with each other when they aren't talking non-stop about masturbation or sharing porn stories. Movies are picking it up too. The recent hit Knocked Up has a scene where Ben responds to a phone call from a woman by simulating sex with his guy friends. Once again, the main point was the primacy of Ben's affective bond with the other guys with the sex serving as an affirmation of that bond.

I was reminded of simulated sex and homoeroticism more generally when I read today's New York Times op-ed by Michael O'Hanlon and Frederick Kagan. The whole article is about the manly bonds develop when liberal (O'Hanlon) and neo-conservative (Kaplan) foreign policy experts and discuss their deepest feelings about American military operations in Pakistan.

According to O'Hanlon and Kagan, it's necessary to send American troops to Pakistan now because the problem will be too big if Pakistan is allowed to collapse completely.

The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size. Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

Even though O'Hanlan and Kagan start modestly enough by proposing an American special forces operation to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons. But the excitement of planning another American intervention into a Muslim country is so exciting that they eventually go orgasmic.

First, O'Hanlon and Kagan deploy the "crack international troops" at their fingertips:

For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico; but even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate. More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act. The price for rapid action and secrecy, however, would probably be a very small international coalition.

Actually, neither the UN nor anyone else has international minutemen standing by their black helicopters waiting for orders that could bring them to Pakistan "within days of a decision to act." Consequently, the only way that this scheme makes sense is if one can imagine O'Hanlon and Kagan sharing the military fantasy in the same way that college guys go to strip clubs in groups or like to share Jenna Jameson sex toys. Even if they don't lead to orgasm, the sharing of military fantasies is a way for liberal and neo-conservative warmongers like these guys to bond together in a pleasurable and meaningful way.

But why let "crack international troops" have all the fun? Why not show the Pakistanis what real Americans are made of?

A second, broader option would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership. This would require a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations.

Given that plausibility is not exactly high on O'Hanlon's and Kagan's list of priorities (exactly what Western powers or moderate Muslim nations would commit troops to this kind of operation?), one has to admit that they are deploying "a sizable combat force" mostly as a way to increase the pleasure of their partnership. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, in the final analysis, O'Hanlon and Kagan should be congratulated for their restraint. The logical endpoint for these kinds of military fantasies is the orgasmic spasm of wiping out large sections of the Pakistani population. But O'Hanlan and Kagan limit themselves to controlling the major Pakistani cities in a surge-like strategy of securing the center before moving out to the periphery. And I'm sure the authors believe that it's precisely that kind of self-discipline that distinguishes foreign policy professionals from Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and other ideologues.

Foreign policy might be about sex, but pros like O'Hanlon and Kagan know how to stop before the whole thing blows up.

At least they think they know.

Rudy's Post- Machiavellian Moment

At last night's 25th anniversary of the odious Federalist Society of right-wing lawyers, Rudy Giuliani spoke of America's "mission" to save the world.

It was this nation that saved the world from the two great tyrannies of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism," he said. "It's this country that's going to save civilization from Islamic terrorism."

According to liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald, Giuliani's "messianic fervor" is an example of "the paranoid style" that Richard Hofstetter identified as a major flaw in American politics. According to Hofstetter:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

But Greenwald's analysis assumes that Giuliani actually believes what he's saying about saving civilization from Islamic terrorism. But I don't know why would we think that? Does Giuliani actually believe that Islamic terrorism is a threat to civilization? Promoting fear of terrorism as a way for politicians to get elected, forward their policy preferences, and govern in their own style is very different from believing that terrorism is that much of a threat. Giuliani's mostly trying to get elected. Instead of "defending civilization," Giuliani views foreign policy in terms of Michael Ledeen's idea that "every ten years of so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." In fact, the core of Giuliani's campaign strategy is to show off his toughness for a right-wing audience that craves belligerence and confrontation. As a result, it's highly likely that Rudy Giuliani's emphasis on "defending civilization" is primarily a way to display his carefully cultivated macho.

And how would Rudy Giuliani "defend civilization" against Islamic terrorism? Would it be through patient strategies like hunting down Osama bin Laden, finding ways to isolate jihadis from larger populations, or appealing to moderate Sunni opinion?

Not on your life!

The "Rudy" way would be to bomb the crap out of Iran, engage in more torture, maintain the "extraordinary rendition" policy, run roughshod over constitutional rights and the separation of powers in the United States, and bully Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. Far from "defending civilization," a Giuliani administration would be an orgy of actions that defied the norms of Democratic politics, morality, and law. In other words, Giuliani wants to show his toughness through constant defiance of the political norms of Western civilization and views the war on terror as an opportunity to attack the basic institutions of Western political life. Appealing to a right-wing audience that has little more love for Western civilization than Osama bin Laden, Rudy Giuliani promises to turn his administration into a bastion of conservative counter-culture.

This brings us to Machiavelli. One of Machiavelli's major recommendations to the prince was to maintain a balance between being willing to violate those norms in practice in order to secure the state and appearing to uphold those norms to avoid being hated.

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.

Unmoored from civilizational values as they've developed in the United States, voters on the American right expect Republican candidates to not only act in dishonest, inhuman, and immoral ways but to also appear to be immoral. In this way, the right is creating a post-Machiavellian moment (with apologies to J. G. A. Pocock).

And Rudy Giuliani is trying his best to create that appearance of immorality.

Smearkrieg No. 11---The Slime Machine Gets a Work-Out

Hugh Hewitt speculates that the push poll campaign attacking Mitt Romney for his Mormon religion, Vietnam draft-dodging, and other sins "was concocted by either extreme anti-Mormons unaffiliated with a candidate or a left wing 527."

In fact, there is some reason to suspect that the calls might have been pushed by a left-wing group. Unlike most right-wing smearing, most of what was said in these phone calls has some connection with reality.

Among the questions the caller asked was whether the person receiving the call knew Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney's faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.

The idea that Mormons "believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible" doesn't ring true. But the rest of these claims are well-known to be accurate. If the smear is a left-wing smear, it's because the smear writers did not claim things like "Mitt Romney spent five months in an insane asylum while on his draft-dodging mission to France" or "did you know that Mitt Romney is a suspect in five Salt Lake City murders from the early nineties?" The smear guys don't even accuse Romney of being a pedophile. Why's that? Real right-wing smearing has a lunatic edge and a joy in lying that might be missing from this particular attack.

Ultimately, however, this smear has to be seen as the work of the right.

The company that placed the calls, Western Wats, works routinely with Republicans. Western Watts did phone operations for Bob Dole in 1996 and "spread negative messages about Democratic candidates in a House race in New York and a Senate race in Florida" during the 2006 campaign. Western Wats has also made calls in the past for The Tarance Group, a Virginia company that is now working for the Giuliani campaign. It seems doubtful that Western Wats would want to risk their GOP clientele by doing work for a George Soros group or other people on the left.

But why such a lame, mostly truthful, smear then?

I've concluded the organization behind the anti-Romney attacks must have started the campaign to get their smear-writers some work. Like everybody else, smear writers need to practice to reach the peaks of excellence needed for high-stakes performance. GOP related organizations must realize that the Republicans are going to be relying heavily on their top smearing operations in the coming holy war against Hillary Clinton. So they gave their top attack dogs a little work-out by unleashing them on Mitt Romney.

As smears go, this one wasn't particularly effective. Obviously, they need the work.

The Backbone Temptation

The dynamic between the Bush administration continually works to tempt the Democrats into developing real backbones. Anytime the Democrats show a little spine, the Bush administration immediately confronts them with veto threats and then eagerly follows through. They've already promised to veto the Iraq funding bill with withdrawal deadlines that passed the House or the FISA bill without telecom immunity that came out of the Senate judiciary committee. Sooner or later, the Democrats in Congress will succumb to temptation and develop real backbones.

Dividing Up the Helpful Hillary Attacks

As a Hillary supporter, I believe that all of the recent attacks on Hillary have been good for her campaign. The Hillary team needed to be toughened up and the Philadelphia debate, the waitress tipping pseudo-controversy, and the planting questions foul-up have done it. It wasn't like Hillary and her people are as soft and lazy as Fred Thompson. But the Hillary candidacy needed more pressure from her opponents than they've been generating and the Philadelphia debate provided more pressure.

Likewise, the candidate herself needed to be surprised and pressed during a debate. Tim Russert did her a favor with his wedge-sniffing question about drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. The Republican media apparatus is going to be working overtime to come up with surprise wedge issues that will be tough for Hillary to fence. She needs to start doing a better job of responding on the fly now.

Finally, Team Hillary needed to see some of their systems fail. The whole planting questions thing is an embarrassment. Hillary staffers should have been aware of the phony press conference problem in the Bush administration and avoided any effort to appear to be doing the same thing. Howard Fineman claims that Hillary is overly controlling. That's absurd. What candidate outside "hard-working" Fred Thompson doesn't go all out to control their presentation and their media coverage? But the Hillary team has been too good at it for their own good. They needed to see the system fail so they could make changes.

Speaking of Hillary attacks, it's useful to categorize the types of attacks that Hillary's been getting as a way of helping her deal with them.

1. Principled Policy Attacks--She gets criticized from the left on her Iraq war vote and her vote for the Lieberman proposal on declaring parts of the Iranian government as terrorist organizations. From the right, she receives principled criticism for her her health care proposal, stands on the Iraq War, and other issues. None of the principled policy attacks have done much to dent Hillary's candidacy. This is because most of Hillary's policy positions track well with public opinion.o with the driver's licenses for illegals question. Drivers licenses for illegals is not actually a significant issue and Russert certainly doesn't care about it. But he was able to sniff out a wedge. Russert's wedge-sniffing did not have much immediate impact on public opinion, but the mai

2. Wedge-Sniffing Policy Attacks. By "Wedge-sniffing," I mean formulating criticisms in such a way that Hillary either has to take an unpopular position on an inflammatory issue or is induced to waffle. That's what Russert was trying to do with the driver's licenses for illegal immigrants question. Russert could care less about the issue, but asking the question was a way to make Hillary look bad. And it worked. There wasn't much popular response, but the mainstream media has been able to make Hillary's uncertain response into the equivalent of John Edwards' $400 haircut and Barack Obama's comments on Pakistan. In other words, Russert was able to reduce Hillary to equality with her opponents.

3. Tabloid-Style Attacks. Media chit chat about Hillary's cleavage and whether or not she tips waitresses is all geared toward generating tabloid style gossip around Hillary Clinton as a way to attack her candidacy. None of the tabloid-type stories has had an impact yet, but generating tabloid material on Hillary is an area that holds a lot of potential for media entrepreneurship.

4. Process Criticism. This is another rich area for potential criticism. Hillary Clinton has to deal with process issues of handling the media, organizing events, conducting herself around other candidates at debates, and managing appearances at campaign functions. Given the impromptu theater involved in all of these activities, "managing the process" is a rich area for criticism. Media critics can pounce on mistakes, but they can also criticize candidates and events for being too well-managed or too tightly controlled. Generally speaking, Hillary gets attacked for the latter.

More Tomorrow.