AZspot

I have mixed feelings about the big dust-up over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The heavily favored Republican candidate, Scott Brown, is a no-tax goober and former Cosmo pin-up boy (no, really) who comes across as Mitt Romney without the “Klaatu barada niktu” quality; he claims to fall somewhere on the more reasonable end of the “pro-lifer” scale and loves to talk about his eagerness to serve as a loyal soldier in the fight against health care reform. And he has been aided immeasurably by the flagrant incompetence of the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who seems to have never expected to find herself in anything resembling a real race. There are plenty of reasons for not wanting to vote for Coakley, though for me, the deal-breaker is the role she played in extending the suffering of Gerald Amirault, one of the many victims of the wave of day care sex abuse scandals that swept the country in the 1980s and early ’90s as part of the larger Satanic-abuse/recovered-memory hoax. I hate to sound like a single issue voter, but anyone who had a toe in any of these prosecutions—and thought Coakley came into the Amirault case lately, she waded in at least up to her waist—belongs under a jail somewhere, not in elected office. At the very least, Coakley, like the prosecutors and judges who fight the release of men who DNA evidence has cleared of the crimes that placed them on Death Row, and even insist on the guilt of men who DNA evidence has exonerated of their crimes after they’d been executed, believes that keeping up the pretense that the system worked is more important than maintaining the standard, often cited by no less an authority than Jack McCoy as the cornerstone of our legal system, that it is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that a single innocent man be convicted and imprisoned. Phil Nugent ☀

The Bush years should be—will be—remembered as the country’s moral low point since the end of slavery, a time when an inane little man with no qualifications but his family connections lost a democratic election, was appointed to the job of leader of the free world anyway, by his father’s old cronies and party colleagues and with the complicity and approval of the press, and then proceeded to spend his full term ignoring the needs of the country and its people while using the time to instead order up legal rationales for an imperial presidency dedicated to the justification of torture and wars of choice, while creating a climate of fear that was meant to provide a reason for all of it. It was a horror show, and for those of us not of boundless faith, there were moments during it when it felt as if it would never end and that the most rotten people in America had succeeded in permanently reshaping the country and its values to make a better climate for their lizard skins. This all must have been dismaying to the many people in Europe who love what this country is supposed to stand for, who have a special place in their hearts for its history and its stated ideals and principles, and who were especially saddened, in 2004, to see a man voted back into office as recompense for having been caught wiping the Constitution and his own beloved Holy Bible with his diarrhetic ass. Phil Nugent ☀

The stated objections of Joe Wilson’s son to Carter’s scolding of his old man should help spinners on either side depict the exchange as a family feud between a couple of hillbillies. It’s worth remembering that Wilson used to work for Strom Thurmond, and that after Essie Mae Washington-Williams publicly acknowledged, after Thurmond’s death, that she was his daughter by a black maid that the 22-year-old Thurmond had impregnated when the woman was 16, Wilson was quick to denounce the woman for having sullied his mentor’s reputation. He later apologized, because these patterns repeat. But it’s hard no to think that it says a lot about a man’s mindset and values that, when he reflects on the fact that a powerful colleague had a daughter he kept a secret for most of his life while devoting much of his career working hard to deny her the basic human rights befitting a citizen of this country, he can’t contain his anger at the daughter he sees as an inconvenience who has stained a great man’s name because she had the poor grace to be born. Thurmond was part of a generation of politicians who, on the single most important and the most clear-cut moral issue of their time, disgraced themselves and proved themselves to have souls made of shit. It would seem to be a no-brainer that anyone who managed to be wrong on the issue of whites-only drinking fountain should never be trusted to decide anything else, but a lot of folks like Thurmond managed to have long careers and be treated with deferential respect after desegregation became the law of the land, even as having opposed the Vietnam War was being cited as reason enough to accuse people of treason thirty years after that unpopular war ended, even people who’d earned the right to criticize it by fighting in it. Phil Nugent ☀

For the past forty years or so, any Republican strategist who’s been sufficiently eager to win points for candor to acknowledge how important the white racist vote has been to the GOP in its vote-getting efforts has been quick to add that it’s just politics and that, sure, it’s sort of embarrassing, but for a while it was necessary because of the way the Democrats had cheated in FDR’s day by unfairly getting so many people to favor them just because they’d gone and created a halfway livable society. But now that people had had the chance to get a taste of Republican rule and see how swell their ideas were, they’d be able to drop the “welfare queen in a Cadillac” crap from their playbook and win on their own virtues. That never work out too well. The classic Republican campaigner since Nixon may not be the magical elf Reagan or his spiritual heir Li’l War President, but Li’l’s babbling daddy, who ran the ugliest, most content-free campaign in modern memory in 1988, then spent at least three and a half years entertaining reporters by telling them how, now that everyone had the chance to see what a dandy president he was and how much they loved him, he’d be able to run a proper, dignified re-election campaign in 1992, one that would make it easier for his future hagiographers to point to as an example of what was best about him and his party. Whereupon the queasy-making old bastard tumbled from his perch in the poles, had a public meltdown, and wound up needlessly elevating Larry King’s blood pressure with wild tales about how we just didn’t know for sure that Bill Clinton hadn’t peddled state secrets to the KGB when he went to Moscow on a school trip. And who knows? Maybe the only reason that Bush couldn’t save himself that year was that he’d recklessly used up all his race-based ammunition four years earlier. The first time you pull Willie Horton out of the box, it’s shocking; try it a second time and the desperation is so evident that it just looks as if the Wizard of Oz’s diaper needs changing; people just feel sorry for you. Phil Nugent ☀

…when it comes to reading material, I am the hero of Bertolucci’s Partner, with his room filled with stacks of books; I am Burgess Meredith on the steps of the library after the world has ended. I have no interest in little fiddly mechanical gadgets designed to store my library in cyberspace where the silverfish can’t get at it, and I have even less interest in hearing anyone explain to me why these innovations will displace the storehouse of printed crack that is my favorite of the countless reasons that my apartment is unfit for human habitation. I can understand the appeal in theory, just as I understand in theory the appeal of those little pills the astronauts in old sci-fi movies used to gulp that, the movie’s resident Werner von Braun would explain, packed all ze nutrients of a three-course dinner vit steak und ize cream into a zingle capsule. But the thing is, I enjoying chewing, and I want my stuff. Phil Nugent ☀

It was in the first Bush administration when Republicans first discovered that they could aggravate the hell out of their enemies, and have a good cynical chuckle in the bargain, by nominating underqualified (and worse) people of color to important positions and then, throwing around terms like “high-tech lynching” and “move to the back of the bus”, accuse anyone who objected of racism. Of course, when you factor in the considerable drop in brainpower when you dive bomb from Arlen Specter and Clarence Thomas to Tom Tancredo and Rush Limbaugh, the possibility of projection, as opposed to conscious plotting, has to be considered. I don’t think that either of these is the case here, though. I grew up in Mississippi in the ’70s with a Klansman father, as regular readers of this space are no doubt sick of hearing, but I think the experience did give me certain insights into the mindset that is now very much the accepted, official viewpoint of the Republican party. What you want to keep in mind about these people is that, all appearances to the contrary, they don’t think they want to hurt anybody or even unduly insult anybody. People like Tancredo and my pop, and if he means the shit that he’s been shoveling, even so illustrious and establishment-acceptable a figure as Limbaugh, is that they think they’re doing what Martin Luther King did. They’re representing their people in a twilight struggle against their oppressors. That’s why they have that authentic, heartfelt tone of bitter grievance in their voices. There was a time when you could get away with dismembering some smart-ass black man who looked cross-eyed at a white woman, when blacks could be chased away from a polling place or a lunch counter and weren’t allowed to touch their white co-stars on TV. And it’s terrible enough that these things, which represented the proper balance of things in the universe, had to be changed. But now, when you call certain phone numbers, you get a recording offering you your choice of being spoken to in English or Spanish. What did Rosa Parks ever have to endure that was half as bad as that!? Phil Nugent ☀

The open secret of what Stone did is that anyone can do it. This fact is catnip to bloggers and anathema to career journalists who want to believe that what they do is a specialized skill that sets them apart from the amateur commoners. What’s much more important, though, is that hardly anybody does anything remotely like what Stone did, because what he did was hard work. When Stone went his own way, he had what he’d learned about the journalistic trade to guide him in his search for the news that others had missed; it helped that he knew what kinds of important stories publishers aren’t that interested in, but he could have probably developed a similar set of instincts just from two or three decades of reading the papers and shaking his fist from time to time. There’s nothing magical about the Internet, just as there was never anything magical about hard copy. If someone as smart and dedicated as I. F. Stone wanted to do what he did today, he could do it on-line or he could launch his own newsletter, and there’s no reason that it wouldn’t soon feel as if it were as essential to our times as the Weekly was to its times. But he couldn’t do it at at The New York Times or The Washington Post, because, now as then, those institutions are not interested in funding someone whose specialty is in highlighting the areas where they haven’t done their jobs. Phil Nugent ☀

The feeling in Republican circles seems to be that, while people who were moved to resort to violence, or even just angry rhetoric, because they objected to the course their government was on and thought they might be able to change that, pissed-off racist white men who claim to hate their country and think its representatives are Nazis and pledge to burn the whole mess down are admirably feisty embodiments of that good ol’ straight talk and the maverick frontier spirit that is America. Phil Nugent ☀

In the almost forty years since the Republican party developed its squalid, corrupt, but spectacularly successful “Southern strategy” based on siphoning off votes from the Democratic party’s economic base with coded racist appeals to white voters, there’s been a little ritual that the party’s handlers have forced their candidates to go through. The candidates attend NAACP conferences and other settings where they can “reach out” to black voters, urging them to enter the “big tent” that is the Republican party and belly up to the trough that the unregulated free enterprise system would like to provide for everyone. It is not the point of these events to court black voters. If black voters wanted to vote Republican in droves, the Republican party would be very happy to have them, or at least it would be very happy to have their votes, but they have long since abandoned any realistic hope of this ever happening. (George W. Bush’s great dream was to bypass the African-American vote altogether and bring Latin voters, en masse, into the Republican party. Then some genius in the region of the Texas-Mexico border started talking about building a fence.) The whole point of the ritual of Republican voters “reaching out” to blacks has always been to reassure people like my uncle, to tell them that, even though they know that white racists in this country tend to feel closer to the Republican party if they have any feelings of solidarity with either major party, this is just some weird fluke and voting for Republicans is nothing to feel guilty about. This dance requires a careful balancing act, one where the candidates plastering TV screens with photos of black ex-cons and regaling audiences with stories of welfare queens in Cadillacs have plausible deniability and can always retreat to safe ground with a look of Alfred E. Neuman-style “What, me racist?” consternation and cluelessness if called on their bullshit. It is very hard to keep up this innocent-miss act once people at your rallies start looking like a crowd scene from The Ox Bow Incident. Phil Nugent ☀

McCain once claimed to hate the kind of politics he now embodies, and with the current low standing of the people who turned his party into a cesspool, he had a great opportunity to rise above it this year: rising to the status of party nominee over the dead bodies of the party faithful who loathe him because they judge him guilty of having the personality of a liberal, he could have capitalized on widespread disgust with the Rove-Bush way of doing things and taken the high road, secure in the knowledge that Obama wouldn’t get down in the mud without a shove; Obama can only lose this election if enough people respond to the sleaziest kind of negative campaigning. Between the two of them, they could have taken American politics out of the pattern of mutually assured destruction that it’s been stuck in since at least the end of the Cold War. But something in him, whether it was terror overcoming him as he accepted the fact that this is his last chance, or a misguided, grudging decision that Rove and Bush are right after all but their way being the only way to win elections, or the genuine contempt he feels for Obama, which seems to be rooted in nothing more elevated than his resentment at having to share the fawning good opinion of the media with anyone else, caused him to buckle, and so now, unable to rise to the standard set by his opponent, he’s running a campaign that, at its best, is based on sneering sarcasm at the whole idea of eloquence and inspiration. The maverick’s last message to us is, stop all that high-falutin’ jibberjaw and get down here in the pigpen with us good small-town people. Phil Nugent ☀

George W. Bush got to be president by riding on his father’s name while promising the dubious that he had nothing in common with his father besides that name, but they do share a close, dysfunctional relationship with the concept of loyalty. By the time he was ready to run for president as Ronald Reagan’s heir presumptive, the older Bush—a man with no spine and no deep beliefs in much of anything, a man willing to say anything and wipe out what personality he had if it would get him enough votes—claimed to have nothing in him but loyalty. It was his only characteristic. If you liked Ronald Reagan, it was your duty to vote for him, because he had been loyal to Ronald Reagan, to the point of throwing many things he’d once claimed to believe overboard, and as president he showed that he was prepared to take a chance when it meant showing his loyalty—to the Chinese government, with whom he’d worked as Ambassador, after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, to the CIA, which he’d once been in charge of, when there were calls that maybe it could use some housecleaning given how thoroughly it had botched its reports on the dying years of the Soviet Union. Now his son has reached the point where the only grounds for supporting or defending him is…loyalty. Phil Nugent ☀

The fact that we have two Democratic candidates who inspire passionate responses is seen as a terrible thing, but my God, the Republicans are currently toting around a candidate who’s seen by many as anathema to their party’s leaders and basic principles, and he got there not by winning over his doubters but because his competition started dropping off like flies. (Incidentally, has anybody else noticed that this makes twice in a row, starting with George W. Bush in his “compassionate conservative”, GOP-controlled-Congress-bashing days, who’s basic appeal to many, many voters is that they buy it that he’s not really one of those crazy damn Republicans? Some people never learn.) Unless this really is an election year completely unlike any other, we’ve still got a while yet before this really gets down to the wire. Until then, people should chill out and enjoy the show. Phil Nugent ☀

Many of the war supporters probably won’t even take acknowledgement of their stupidity as any kind of insult, because they’ve bought into the popular idea that stupidity and morality are in fact mutually exclusive. That’s what the stupid unfunny comedian and user of big words Dennis Miller was saying when he said that George Bush, Jr. was a better president than Bill Clinton because, said Miller, it’s better to have a good man in charge than a smart man. The fact that George Bush, Jr. condones torture and does other bad things can never make him not good in the eyes of someone like Miller, because his programming, from Gomer Pyle to Forrest Gump, has taught him that anyone who’s stupid enough must be good. Phil Nugent ☀

If Christianity as it’s practiced in America—the religion of John Brown, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, John Updike, James Earl Carter, and my grandmother—is going to survive as something other than a fully owned subsidiary of and recruiting tool of the Republican party, then it’s going to need people who will stand up and reaffirm that compassion and forgiveness are Christian virtues, and then actually challenge those who have profited from encouraging people to believe that they are somehow demonstrating their devotion to their faith through material greed, selfishness, harsh judgement of the unfortunate, libelous attacks on those they disagree with, and congratulating themselves on their enthusiasm for meting out punishment of all kinds. Mike Huckabee is to be appreciated and applauded for the extent to which he offers an alternative to the small-mindedness of George Bush’s puny vision; it is regrettable that he himself is a compromised figure, with his own self-righteously callous side. That doesn’t make his better qualities count for nothing, but the fact that someone so flawed can seem so enlightened in comparison to Bush is a sad comment on Bush himself. Phil Nugent ☀

Growing up in the 1970s, after the bloody craziness of the desegregation era, one tended to grade Mississippi governors on a curve. If they weren’t driving around town with somebody’s skeletal remains tied to a rope hanging from the bumper of the car, they qualified as progressives. The Phil Nugent Experience ☀