I believe the radio host Mark Levin is on vacation and is airing best of programs for the holiday season, as the tedium that I heard seemed to come from just after the election.  I know why Americans hate politics, and I know it from listening to a selection of talk radio.

It’s this bullet point list of what conservatives believe and what liberals believe.  Apparently Conservatives believe in the Constitution, and Liberals believe we ought to burn the thing.  I was unaware of that.  Conservatives will win the day at the end and triumph because Americans are Conservative — God fearing and all that, and it is Liberalism that is dead, I suppose because they don’t have God on their side.

Mind you, I’m catching this in blips, as is typical of any radio listening.  So, I don’t know what comes between that and when a caller comes in, introduced with “Now, we have a liberal on hand!”  Politely, the caller says, “I just think you’ve skimmed over some of the great programs liberals have brought to this nation.”

Mark Levin’s response, and I quote, “Oh yeah?  Name ten!”

It is a curious response, I think, one designed to end any sensible interaction.  I think even the most bleeding heart unreconstructed liberal, without the benefit of preparation (take home test, if you will, as opposed to pop quiz), would stammer somewhere around number 5, in the meantime we’re stuck in the muckety muck of looking at number 2 and 3 of the list.  As it were, I neglected to mention, because I wasn’t thinking much about this, that the caller was clearly black.  So, when I jumped out of this show and rejoined a moment later, here’s what I heard as the end of the caller segment.

“It was DEMOCRAT governors you saw fighting against integration.”

I have heard this before, and it makes my head spin and my teeth hurt.  It is as though we cement the donkey and the elephant into a perma-frost, and take claim of the favoured one for all eternity, never mind that Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson all had to battle the Dixiecrats — the Dixiecrats assigning the word “Conservative” in front of them.  I find it hard to believe that Mark Levin even believes his words.

But change the station and I hear the worst national talk show host on the radio — that being Randi Rhodes of Air America, there, a vaccuous depth-less entity.  Even the better sorts on Air America — Thom Hartmann — are flawed entities.  Thom Hartmann brings on arguments against conservatives activists of various sorts, and tends to rely on a bag of argumentative tricks that become old and would likely be indecipherable if you haven’t heard him explain a facet of his historical views on America.

Turn the radio off, don’t think of putting in a blog entry, and adjust.

I hear the phrase “Genocide Cover Up Day” on KBOO.  Not the first time I’ve heard the phrase and I don’t know how original it is, though it’s interesting that if you type it into google the first items you will see go to KBOO.

In a similar though opposite vein, I see that Lewrockwell.com has, as is their annual want, an essay on how a form of socialism destroyed an early Pilgrim society.  I have to groan, as I have to every year.  Though this one is a little less meaningful than the other annual concept, and a bit more tedious.  I probably should have taken more effort to wash ashore somewhere or other and have a Thanksgiving Dinner with family —

— “Genocide Awareness Day” if you must.  There is an attitude you must take here, which is not to be terribly proud of a country or culture that you have no real control in being a part of.  I recall during the Clinton impeachment watching the mcnews broadcast that is Channel 1 with students at Bill Clinton’s old high school, the one with a sign saying that this Bill Clinton’s old high school, expressing chagrin at being associated with Clinton.  Apparently there is no oral sex happening at the school, and suggestions that such a thing may be happening there are false.  The point being that if you are ashamed of a relation to the president, you cannot have a sign up stating the relation to the president.

I suppose I ate some pumpkin pie off of the corpses of the small pox-ed infused earliest Americans.  If I hadn’t, I would have just had to content myself in waiting as the new faux-culture battle that is the “War on Christmas” begins, under the marshal Control of General Bill O’Reilly, Culture Warrior.  Wal-Mart employees now say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays”.  And thus my revision to this goes:

Macy’s Department Store Wal-Mart Clerk: Thank you. Come again. Happy Holidays. Merry Christmas.
Customer, Crusader for Christmas Secularism: Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.
Clerk: Sure. (looks to next customer)
Customer: No. Christmas. Merry Christmas. Holidays.  Happy Holidays.
Clerk: Yes?
Customer: Merry Happy Fucking Christmas Holidays, asshole. (storms off in disbelief.)

Or something like that.

Well, Have a good War On Christmas, everyone, and I’ll see you on the other side.

My favourite presidential prospective candidate, and the only one I could really firmly stand behind unequivocately, is not running.  Senator Russ Feingold’s stated reason for opting out of a presidential run amounts to “It’s good to be in the Majority”.  I never would have expected Feingold to get terribly close to the White House, but I suppose it would have been good to actually have a candidate out there I would have liked voting for.

The prospecive presidential candidate who I actually thought was going to win the Democratic nomination, and more than likely the presidency, also declined to run.  When trying to figure out Mark Warner’s motives, I can’t help but think his stated reasons are his reasons: a presidential run is a draining experience he didn’t want to do.  At any rate, the Democratic Party is now free to push him and push him and push him to run for the Senate in 2008, and if he declines that he’ll return to run to reclaim Virginia’s governorship in 2009… I… guess.

We’re at a point in the silly season where all the presidential prospective lists include candidates that all indications are are not running — Al Gore — or probably aren’t running — Barack Obama (running for the vice president?).  And we have Chris Dodd and Joe Biden — but that’s a redundancy.

I have this uneasy feeling hurtling toward 2008 that Grover Norquist may indeed be, regretfully, correct, in his assessment:

The Democratic race is already scripted.  New York Senator Hillary Clinton will be followed around the nation by six or seven emasculated senators.  They’ll pretend to run for president while actually auditioning for vice president.

That does leave John Edwards in a curious spot.  I don’t think he can run for the vice presidency again, so getting the presidential spot is his best shot.  I thought he was something of an empty suit in 2004, and I don’t quite know if he’s managed to fill it a bit in the past couple of years.  Until I can get a fuller handle on Bill Richardson (Greg Palast calls Ricahardson not so much a Hispanic American as a Kissinger American — but that’s Greg Palast), he’s the best of a meager bunch.  And he has that advantage over everyone else as not being Hillary Clinton’s obvious running mate since he already served that role.  (You can’t just perpetually be a vice presidential candidate, can you?)

Oh wait.  I forgot Mike Gravel.  Or I guess I did.

I am the Director of Communications for the Gravel for President campaign. I can only tell you not to underestimate the US Senator who singlehandedly ended the draft with a lone five month filibuster, risked his career and going to jail for reading the Pentagon Papers into the Senate record and arranging for their publication. With the Internet and all of its tools, Senator Gravel will become a major contender. Stay tuned.

Or so says Elliott Jacobson.

Any omission of John Kerry’s name is entirely intentional. IMHO, One of the more forgettable >Public Servants< of this generation.  (My response: Any more or any less forgetable than the Republican Presidential candidate for … say… 1916?  (No.  Wait.  Charles Hughes was the last bearded major party presidential candidate.  I think.)

There’s seems to be about a 1 in 4 chance that the Max train’s ticket machine will be broken in one way or another such that I am unable to purchase a ticket.  When I look at the screen and see the words “Dollar Bills Not Accepted” flashing, all I can do is shrug, and just jump on the next train.

I’ve done that before, and will likely do that again.  But yesterday was the first time I’ve ever jumped aboard the Max after being unable to buy a ticket where the Fare Inspectors were on board (they’ve switched their predictable schedules away from “Fridays and alternate Mondays and Wednesdays).  I caught my eye to them immediately upon boarding and told them “The Machine’s broken.  It won’t accept dollar bills.”

Such was the scene that they went down the aisle, looked at everyone’s fare, and came to me and decided to lead me off the train and have me purchase the ticket at the next stop.  That’s fine by me, of course, but what annoyed me was this statement.

“We don’t normally let people do that, but…”

Which begs the question for me, “What?  Do you generally just give people the whatever amount the fine is as punishment for the city’s machines not functioning correctly?”  Or “Am I supposed to thank you for such a thing?”

It’s all part of the lousy fates of the Universe, I suppose.

There’s plenty of cognitive dissonance to go around toward everyone with the new Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. 

Steeped in military culture, he spit upon John Kerry and goes forth with a macho swagger.

He was the prototypical Angry Vietnam Vet, convinced that the hippies and the campus radicals had stabbed him and his band of brothers in the back while they were fighting in jungle, then spit on them when they returned home.

If you’d told me twenty years ago that John Kerry would eventually run for president, I would have expected Webb to be in there Swiftboating with the best of them.

The same military culture that had him railing against Kerry has him as a foe against Bush.  Understand, I don’t fully understand where the demarcations of a fruitless war in Iraq and a fruitless war in Vietnam are, but I guess Webb does. 

Webb makes the same case in arguing against the Iraq war. George W. Bush “has no feel for military culture,” Webb says. Instead the president is surrounded by “theorists who have never been on a battlefield, who have never put a uniform on, and who are looking at this thing in a totally different way from people who have had to worry about their troops.” Webb seldom misses a chance to point out the military record, or lack of it, of Dick Cheney. If Cheney and the theorists had some military experience, he says, they would never have tried “putting a Judeo-Christian military system in the cradle of Muslim culture.” This is Webb’s second ingenious bit of jujitsu: By his logic, the war in Iraq isn’t an assertion of American power, but another disastrous symptom of a country gone soft, the feckless gesture of a superpower brought low by wusses.

Understand, if this is a political jujitsu, it is a jujitsu that is endemic to basically all of Bush’s political enemies.  You can look at war protest signs and see the references to the bulk of neoconservatives’ lack of military experience while marching us off to war.  “Chicken-hawk” … wussy who struts.

Webb’s trick is to adapt this history of white folk to the categories of contemporary multiculturalism. He turns liberalism’s assumptions of ethnic grievance and victimization to the service of people who, in more conventional accounts, have themselves been seen as the victimizers. Webb rails against “the wielders of cultural power such as Hollywood, academia, and major media [who] chip away at the core principles that have defined the traditions and history of [Scots-Irish] people.” And now his people are fighting back. “In a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation. My culture needs to rediscover itself, and in doing so to regain its power to shape the direction of America.” Using diversity dogma to put the white man back on top–it is a marvelous inversion.

It also underlies the economic populism that allows Webb to slide edgewise into the mainstream of today’s Democratic party.  He says he was moved to run for the Senate when he saw “the breakdown in our society along economic lines.” He has come to rescue his people–the poor whites who (along with poor blacks) have been the chief victims of globalized turbocapitalism. In every speech he cites the same statistics: “Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies pay zero corporate income taxes,” he says. “When I was 24, the average CEO earned 20 times what the average wage-earner did. Today my son is 24, and the average CEO earns 200 times what the average wage-earner does.” He is vaguer on the subject of how to fix this unhappy state of affairs. He supports a higher minimum wage and an end to “corporate tax breaks which cost American jobs.” At the same time, though, he says he supports a cut in the capital gains tax, in case a redneck wants to sell his stocks.

An interesting, and not entirely new dynamic.  I think we can trace the root of the problem to Andrew Jackson, who consolidated the very same poor “Scotch-Irish” behind him in the battle to knock out the Indians and keep slavery.  But understand, when in previous ages “The People” had the silent, in parantheses “(white)” before it, our Weekly Standard writer feels compelled to have the same parantheses for “(along with poor blacks)”.  Thus flails the ethnic divisions impeding the Class War that Jim Webb apparently wants to fight.

As for “allows Webb to slide edgewise into the mainstream of the Democratic Party”, I have noted that the elected 2006 officials just moved the Democratic Party to the left on economic issues.  Perhaps this is more true now than it was as of the writing of this essay.

Steeped in military culture, he spit upon John Kerry and goes forth with a macho swagger.  Steeped in a sort of redneck culture, he comes forth with a Wall Street Journal editorial that places him somewhere to the left of the Democratic Party at large, as the Wall Street Journal editorial suggests.

Charlie Rangel is both over-thinking himself into a corner and is onto something but isn’t quite at a correct point of demarcation just yet.  There are two paths to his argument about the draft — one that the draft will impede congressional war authorization, two — that it will do good for the Youth.

Understand the flaw of the draft as forced moral conscience through self-interest.  Ignore and look past the simple fact that Congress has not declared war since World War Two and has been content to just let the President do what he (she?) may, and in any debate over war we are drum-beated into acceptance that Congress has let itself become irrelevant in initial matters of war.  What good will a draft do?  Charlie Rangel seems to be fulfilling the needs of the John McCains of the world.  McCain, you see, has suggested that we need to send a whole lot more troops to properly fight, and win, the War in Iraq.  When asked the simple question, “Where are these troops going to come from?”, McCain answers with a meaningless panoply of patriotic homilies that tend toward a patronizing “These kids need to understand what’s good for them — and that is to fight this war because Freedom ins’t Free, and they are soft.”

The obvious answer on where to get new troops to deploy into Iraq, to tend to our large permanent bases, is through Charlie Rangel’s draft.  Solution found, the War Machine is fed properly.

The “onto something” is quite simply that there is no reason our education system has to remain the K – 12 and straight into college, if properly groomed, system it is right now.  I don’t quite know what relatively radical and relatively sedate changes I would make to our compulsorary education system, but I understand where the desire to require two years of compulsorary military — or other public service — comes from.  I note that during the Vietnam War, war opponents often suggested that the draft allow Peace Corps service as an alternative.  I imagine that (and other service – oriented agencies — Americorps?) as conscientous good-natured “we can’t force the kids into the military” objections abound.  But I imagine the military service would end up being the default setting for any such arrangement, and eventually America would fall into a quota system for such things, the upshoot being that once again the “Fortunate Sons” have a leg up on avoiding military service, and Charlie Rangel’s thesis falls ashunder.

It’s just a thought burst I have.