Rick Perry, Straight Talker

Okay, it's about trying to create another word bite the Rick Perry Campaign website might find while trolling and raise the Swimmer's visibility a notch. You must understand that what appears, at first glance, like unprincipled bipartisanship really serves a deeper purpose, that of constructive anarchy. I think the USA has crossed a kind of national Event Horizon and is not going to "reform" itself into anything useful for the well-being of mankind; therefore, the ethical approach must be to support developments in America which tend to bring about radical transformation through unconventional methods (not "revolution by force," mind you - no sedition here, or "treason" of the kind that nogoodnik Bernanke might resort to). I cannot think of a more effective way to bring about radical transformation than the election of Rick Perry, noted outspoken Secessionist, as President of the United States.

Thus, to return to the "Bernanke as traitor" meme, first trotted out by Good Ol' Boy Rick a few days ago while charming the corn farmers of Iowa: Rick said, in his usual direct, semi-rational way, that if "that guy" prints any more money before the election that Rick didn't know what they would do in Iowa, but down in Texas they would treat him "pretty ugly," because printing money like that is tantamount to "treason." Now, Rick didn't say "tantamount," because a C+ student from Texas A&M doesn't use ten-dollar words like that. It isn't manly, or necessarily within his syntactical reach. Anyway, on the East and West Coasts, the liberal Nerd-O-Meters started flashing red and the usual academic economists weighed in, leaping to the defense of their fellow academic economist nerd Bernanke. Paul Krugman, always the first in line in any politically correct parade, sniffed that "aside from the ignorance of monetary policy," blah blah blah.

Okay, Perry People, let me set up the lift. I'll even mark it off with quotations to make it easier:

"But Perry was right - Bernanke is printing money through quantitative easing. Krugman, disingenuous as always, is engaging in academic sophistry. In his customary way of pulling the wool over the eyes of his gullible and adoring readership, Krugman is drawing a distinction between the Fed's 'crediting the reserve accounts' of Primary Dealers who sell Treasury bonds back to the Fed in POMO operations, thus increasing the Fed's balance sheet and the monetary base of the dollar, and simply printing money. But the act of adding to the 'reserve accounts' in exchange for Treasury bonds which the Primary Dealers paid actual money for is the creation of wealth out of thin air, as Krugman well knows, and is tantamount [note to Perry Campaign: use Google dictionary function] to 'printing money.' You can't fool a straight-talking, eminently sensible, down-to-earth Texan with such sleight of hand, Perfessor Krugman."

Maybe that can help Perry, and help my underlying cause, the election of a secessionist to the White House (I'm not sure that one has ever happened before). Perry also made some news with his idea of using "Predator drones" along the Tex-Mex boundary (and Southern border generally). He went on to add that he was talking about aiding law enforcement (and the military, which he also wants to use) in "surveillance." He wasn't talking about using Predator drones to blow up illegal immigrants or Mexican drug cartels. (Was he?) Well, I'm not sure. The main use of Predator drones currently is to blow up Aghani wedding parties, as far as I can tell, which must be the festive occasions where the Taliban, or al-Qaeda (what's the difference, they're all Muslims), plan their attacks.

In both of the above examples, the Wily Rick is really operating at two levels. 'Twas said the Bard of Avon simultaneously wrote at four levels, but Shakespeare did not have the benefit of an education at Texas A&M, where simplification was the order of the day. With the Bernanke "threat," Perry is creating distance between himself and Obama/Wall Street/Federal Reserve. The latter troika, of course, is dedicated to preserving the financial oligarchy of the banks and Big Money, and the Tea Party dimly appreciates this conspiracy at their expense. Quantitative easing is a way to pump the stock market while holding down interest rates to, well, zero, thus making sure that old people with savings accounts can't make a dime on their nest eggs (hey, Gramps, just go head-to-head with the High Frequency Trading computers located two nanoseconds from the stock exchange servers -- no guts, no glory!) So Rick is heading that one off at the pass, by telegraphing that Bernanke may face a posse in Fort Worth if he tries that trick again.

With the Predator drone remark, Rick is again having it both ways. If you want to think this former Air Force Captain is advocating blowing up coyotes and their illegals as they approach the border, or blasting away at the gun-drug trade down in "Murder City" (Laredo), then have at it. Ol' Rick ain't gonna stop you. Plus, it gives Rick a chance to draw a nice distinction between himself and the oh-so-careful O Man, who, as noted, has opened his first attacks on the Defense of Marriage Act in areas around Kandahar.

Rick is full of Texas bluster, that's for sure. He scares the crap out of liberals for that very reason. I remain fairly sanguine about the whole thing, however; it's all working out according to plan. Michele (Deer in the Headlights) Bachmann is not going to last very long, even with the adoration of Chris Matthews and other dirty old men. It will come down to Mitt versus Rick Perry at the end of this interminable process of maneuvering, since the media have decided that Ron Paul (who finished in a virtual dead heat with Bachmann in Iowa) has ideas that threaten the cozy power sharing of the military-political-media complex. Paul represents the "reform" path, which doesn't work anymore. Not enough drama. But a Cowboy versus a guy wearing Magic Underwear - that might play on cable. And thus, the die is cast, and the cast is picked.

Bachmann Palin Overdrive

I don't really understand what the "Ames Straw Poll" is, exactly, although I assume that it's about momentum in a presidential primary, a way for a candidate to distinguish her/himself ("hermself"? did I just coin a usage, another neologism?). Yes, it's a way to distinguish hermself from the pack, and this apparently is what Michele Bachmann did yesterday in Iowa, by winning the Ames Straw Poll with a plurality vote of 29%.

Michele is, of course, the recognized leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, and as such she is a force to be reckoned with even if, as appears to be the case, at the personal level she doesn't really seem like a force to be reckoned with, if you know what I mean. I toss in the early caveat that I don't mean that as some sort of sexist snark - I get that she's a "tax attorney," and all the rest. Caveats aside, however, if the United States of America elects Michele Bachmann President of the United States, then I must go on record as saying that from that point forward I would not be able to take the USA seriously as a country again. There comes a time, and all that.

Thus, Bachmann's victory in whatever just happened in Ames, Iowa acquires a different kind of significance, a watershed event, another crossing of the Rubicon. The straw poll, one way or other (and the canny Michele, of course, knows this), conferred upon Bachmann the laurel wreath of legitimacy, of Seriousness, and this is the clear and present danger which the country now faces. Particularly with a badly weakened President, whose flagship legislation, his health care bill, just took another torpedo amidships from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal in Atlanta and will soon be struck down by the Supreme Court. With the O Man reeling, with his Irrelevance Factor hitting the ionosphere, the race is wide open. All the Republicans really have to do is play it safe and nominate someone who sort of looks the part, like Mitt Romney, maybe Rick Perry, although Rick Perry most looks the part of a singing cowboy in a John Ford western.

However, the Republican Party is certifiably insane (as opposed to their brother duopolists the Democrats, who are mostly certifiably corrupt), and rational expectations of the party elders no longer determine the outcome. Thus, Michele's victory in Ames comes really as no great shock. Michele, with that rare distinction of a law degree (J.D.) from Oral Roberts University, the largest Charismatic Christian college in the world, although I don't know what "Charismatic Christianity" is, exactly, and I'm too lazy (and too disillusioned) to google it. I assume it's like ordinary Christianity only weirder, and that the kind of "charisma" involved implies some other, off-the-wall meaning of the Greek word, and not the kind, say, that John F. Kennedy had. No, that's definitely what it doesn't mean. A law degree from Oral Roberts is fairly rare because the school only existed between 1979 and 1986 before it packed up its library and reopened as Regent University, another Christer college. But ORU is only one of several Bachmann alma maters, and don't forget her undergrad days at Winona State, where it all began.

However, Michele really owes her opportunity to the trailblazing work of Sarah Palin, who proved that any kind of actual credentials are increasingly beside the point. I don't know what the "point" is anymore, to tell the truth. There is some sort of "brand" or telegenically-driven "buzz" which is now decisive in these matters. It's nothing altogether new, of course, this melding of mass advertising concepts with the political process. The process of selling products and candidates is now virtually identical, and the fact that Bachmann has only been in Congress since 2007, and regards global warming as a "hoax" because carbon dioxide occurs naturally in the atmosphere and could therefore never be a poison or harmful substance, and has a husband who runs a clinic to pray the gay away - none of these factors, which should be absolutely crippling in a rational country, will ever be held against Michele, that feisty, gutsy gal that Chris Matthews just thinks is kinda cute.

It so happens that I've been reading Sam Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape, which posits the idea, which always seemed true to me, that morals and ethics arise naturally in human society, the products of subjects which neuroscience can now study rigorously, and do not depend on religion or formal, codified codes of other "spiritual" paths. The book seemed kind of dry, at first, till I got to the chapter on "religion," which Sam, in his usual deadeye way, devoted mostly to a detailed demolition of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH and founder of the BioLogos whatever (some "bridge" between science and religion which Collins insists must exist, somehow), and the loony ideas Collins expressed in his 2006 book The Language of God, where part of Collins's conversion moment (his rededication to the Christianity of his Virginia youth) apparently came about because of the beauty of three frozen waterfall streams he encountered on a hike through the Cascade Mountains. (Three. Get it?) Harris called The Language of God an "intellectual suicide note." Anyway, the appointment of Collins was a previously unknown (to me) example of yet another compromise sell-out of intellectual honesty by the Incumbent-in-Chief.

Be that as it may: The Moral Landscape brought home to me again that my view of America is badly distorted by the Parallax of Nostalgia, as I've called it before. Alone among advanced industrial countries, America is a profoundly theocratic nation, hyper-religious, anti-secular, anti-intellectual, obscurantist, with falling standards of education and quality of life (religiosity is always negatively correlated with quality of life, perhaps not surprisingly, since deteriorating living standards are one of the factors which drive the commoners to an embrace of divine assistance). In such an irrational environment, anything, really, is possible, because it is not constrained by rational thought processes. Religious dogma in, clear thinking out (RDI-CTO). Any criticism of Michele Bachmann, in such a context, can be stood on its head - her naivete and inexperience can be rebranded as "perkiness" or "authenticity," her intellectual mediocrity can be recast as "the common touch." God's Messenger in sling-back heels and a short skirt. Golly, she's got a lot of zing!

Anything can happen. Washington, D.C. might close, the nation's capital moved to some place in the heartland, in Iowa or Missouri, and the White House turned into a museum, to be replaced, on some blue highway off the Interstate, by the White Trailer, in the Congressional Mobile Home Park, sharing a ten-acre parking lot with the local Charismatic Mega-church.

(Note to self: keep studying French re: relocation to Arles.)

I gave up Hope long before it was fashionable to give up Hope

I don't mean to pull rank or anything, but these Cassandras-come-lately such as Drew Westen in the Sunday New York Times need to respect their elders in the disillusionment game. Westen wrote a long jeremiad about the strange inability of Barack Obama to fight for anything - well, at all, but in particular for any of the progressive values which an enraptured nation thought they might have a shot at only three years ago.

I don't like it but I guess things happen that way.

I became alarmed way back in 2009 when it became apparent that Barack Obama had no respect whatsoever for the Bill of Rights. What this now "controversial" charter was all about, what engendered its inclusion with the Constitution way back in the late 18th century, was the concern of these recently liberated colonial subjects that tyrannical powers must be held in check, and the best way (the only way, as John Stuart Mill made clear in On Liberty) was a system which guaranteed the rights of the individual against the majority, and which did not permit rule by mob in matters of justice and civil liberties. When Barack Obama came out squarely against the use of military tribunals for civilian trials when he was a candidate, I thought he endorsed this principle. And then, as in so many subsequent reversals on absolutely fundamental issues of fairness, transparency, and due process, Obama just blew the whole thing off. Guantanamo is still open for business, all important criminal trials against anyone vaguely associated with "terrorism" will be conducted by military kangaroo courts where tainted evidence and torture-induced hearsay are freely admissible, and the trial itself is probably pointless because a defendant can be held forever whether he can be convicted or not.

We comfort ourselves with the reassurance that these outrages are only directed against Muslims; if you're not a Muslim, where's the problem? We often forget that our own guarantee of due process, at having a chance at fairness if a bad turn in life should suddenly propel you into the gulag of the criminal justice system, depends, first and foremost, on a mind set which honors such fairness. Once a nation allows exceptions for "special circumstances," because of a felt need for enhanced security, when it just seems too dangerous to play fair, then that country is well on the way toward tyranny. I hear arguments for such "exceptions" all the time from Republican legislators in Congress -- it's just too dangerous to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, where his crime was allegedly committed, although other Muslim terrorists have been tried in Manhattan in regular civilian (Article III) courts without incident and without endangering security. New York's Republican Congressman Peter King is especially awful at this kind of demagoguery, this fear-mongering, but he is joined in his play to the cheap seats by the likes of Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The great shame is that Obama, and Eric Holder (apparently the Attorney General, based on rumors and occasional public sightings), have played along with this profoundly unconstitutional approach. It has always seemed to me that it's possible to disagree on the substance of a subject such as terrorism, for example (how big a problem it is, whether "blowback" is responsible for the threats that exist), while still agreeing on the procedure for determining guilt or innocence for those who get caught up in our system of justice. That is our great legacy from the Enlightenment thinkers who founded our nation. It is always the most stirring theme in any movie or book featuring the legal system, when you think about it, from "To Kill a Mockingbird" to "Inherit the Wind." We were ashamed when an African-American could not get a fair shake in "To Kill a Mockingbird," despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Finch, precisely because it offended our sense of justice. It should not matter whether a person is a pariah in a given social context, that is what Atticus Finch tried to tell the jury. It remains the bedrock of due process.

I saw early on that the concepts of due process and fair play were easy for Barack Obama to sacrifice, if it meant he could pander to those same regressive, unenlightened Americans that Peter King likes to impress. If Obama could give up on something like that, he could give up on anything, and he has not disappointed.

Well, I note with satisfaction that a new CNN poll concludes that a majority of both Democratic and Republican voters, at levels around 57-58%, have expressed the opinion that their own Congressional Representative should not be reelected. Disenchantment with both political parties has reached epidemic levels, in fact, since approval of Congress does not reach even 20%. That's remarkable, as if the general electorate has awakened to the startling realization that the freeloaders under the Capitol dome don't represent them and never did. Upon such a realization stands the basis for genuine third (and fourth through nth) party viability. And if the duopolistic strangle-hold of the two big parties could be broken, why, who knows? Maybe even campaign finance reform could follow and the ownership of Congress by the military-industrial-media complex might come crashing down.

There I go, hoping again.

What if they held an election and nobody came?

I haven't been able to bring myself to the effort necessary to understand the "debt ceiling deal." Some of it sounds, as usual, unconstitutional, since our scofflaw government rarely pays any attention anymore to the actual rules of our charter document. Something in there about a "Super Congress" which will fast-track budget cuts, without the opportunity for normal amendments, if the two Constitutional bodies (the House & Senate) don't get with it and impose enough austerity on the American people. The Super Congress will be composed of gangs from the two houses - this gang problem is getting serious in Washington. Every time you turn around, there's a new Gang of Six taking control of the street and telling the rest of them in the Capitol 'hood what to do. The Super Congress will apparently be a Gang of Twelve, indicating an escalation in turf warfare. Maybe Obama should appoint a Gang Task Force to try to get this crisis under control.

Meanwhile, despite the best efforts (ha ha) of Congress and its various Gangs, the United States has had its FICO score lowered by the rating agency S&P, which was one of the main rating agencies most guilty of malfeasance during the mortgage-backed securities fiasco, which (briefly) brought Wall Street to its knees, until it was rescued by the Gangs of Washington. Thus leaving only the American people in general on their knees, the other 90% or so who are not actually represented in the District of Columbia.

I was gratified to see on Lawrence O'Donnell's show the other night that at least one national poll indicated that the general approval rating for Congress now stands at 14%. In some ways this is remarkable, given that it was only last year that there was a wholesale turnover in the composition of Congress. It would appear that this convulsive, spasmodic thrashing around by the electorate is not making any big difference in how the American commoners view Congress. As if an awful truth is beginning to dawn on The People: it doesn't make any difference what the exact composition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress is: we still cannot abide them. They are a pestilence, a waking nightmare from which we can't escape. They are forever there, these same Zombie-Solons, Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, betraying us, selling us out at every turn, standing in front of a "bouquet" of microphones, intoning the same nonsense, the same stock, utterly fraudulent phrases, invulnerable even to Woody Harrelson swinging a baseball bat to their oozing heads - they just keep coming!

Aiieeeeeee!! (In the old comic books, that was supposed to be a scream.) In the space of a couple of weeks or so, I have now read the same blog post by two different writers. The first, which I take to be the original, was by Guy Saperstein, an East Bay civil rights lawyer working in Berkeley for whom I have high respect. He argued, rather persuasively, that the main problem with the Obama presidency is that it has utterly de-fanged and neutered any progressive or civil liberties movement in the U.S. His logic proceeds from the simple binary truth about our politics: if a Democratic President does all of the same awful things as a Republican (which Obama does), such as starting unconstitutional wars, over-using secrecy, denying due process, using "military tribunals" indiscriminately (and contrary to the 5th & 14th Amendments), reauthorizing the Patriot Act without even bothering to see how it's working, jacking up the Afghanistan War in ways not even Bush would have countenanced, refusing to close Guantanamo, buying into Republican ideas of dismantling the social safety net, passing an insurer gift bag of a health bill, etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam, there is no effective opposition because the Democrats in Congress must support their party leader. Whereas if John McCain had done all of these things (plus had acted out his essentially insane ideas on other other subjects), there would have been at least the semblance of resistance.

Then on "Counterpunch" yesterday, I read Alexander Coburn's piece saying the same thing, without so much as a h/t to Guy (Hey Alex! didn't realize us detail geeks read around so much, huh?) Coburn suggested that electing Romney would be a good idea for these reasons; Saperstein simply thought that any Republican in 2012 would be superior.

I take these two columns, thoughtful as they are, for the acts of sheer desperation which they represent. That's how nuts things are now - liberals are arguing for the advantages of electing John MCain and Mitt Romney. As they say in the rehab game, we've hit bottom.

Here's another idea: with only 14% of the electorate to go, how about a complete boycott of the electoral process in 2012? Instead of shuffling the Dems and Pubs, let's do away with them altogether. This surely would appeal to Americans' sense of disenfranchisement, apathy and dillusionment, don't you think? And what is easier than doing nothing? We don't have to vote - who is it, after all, who is constantly urging you to "exercise your franchise," to "do your civic duty" by voting? Democrats and Republicans. Know why? Because they want the power and the money.

Unlike my "535 Plan," whereby we simply replace everyone in Congress with someone new, preferably from a "third" party, this one would entail the honor system. Everyone must refrain from voting. Of course, even members of Congress can vote, so we might wind up with the same 535, each receiving precisely one vote. Yet that would certainly convey a message, would it not? What kind of authority and authenticity would a Congress person command through receiving a plurality of one? The important thing is, like the riddle "what do you call 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the sea?" - it's a good start.

Imagine there's no country

(Just a note: it occurs to me that John Lennon and George Gershwin, who both died too young, at about the same age though in different ways, were the two incandescent musical geniuses of their respective generations. John Lennon, who could not be imitated, fused rock music with the lyrical sensibility of poetry and the art song; and Gershwin, similarly inimitable, took the American standard to an entirely different level with the influence of jazz, Yiddish folk themes and classical music.)

As I tool around the fair environs of this pretty nice county where I live, sometimes on foot, or in a car, or even on a bike, I sometimes think to myself: my actual interface with government, the parts I really rely on, are very local. For example, we have a very good fire department here, because the conditions demand it. Lots of trees, lots of dried-out tinder every fall (we're entering fire season now and the signs are everywhere - "Get Ready! - meaning, prune back the overgrowth from around the house, etc.). I live in an unincorporated area so there's no city council and no municipal police, but we're covered by the Sheriff's Department. The nearest emergency room is within two miles from where I sit. The only federal facility I can think of, that I interact with regularly, is the U.S. Post Office. I practice law at the state court level, organized by county. These are the government features that seem to matter most to my individual well-being.

Which is to say, all this crap that goes on in Washington, that I write about, talk about, blog about, actually has very little to do with my everyday life. More than anything, it's a huge, complicated, irritating annoyance. It's such a mess that it's virtually incomprehensible. The semi-competent grifters in Washington, D.C., who went there out of ambition or because they could never find work in the private sector that paid nearly as much, have run the country's finances into the ground so that we're now a zombie country, more than just technically bankrupt - we're the real thing. When the tax revenue pays for slightly more than half the "services" you're trying to provide, you're bust-o - you just haven't admitted it yet.

All of these matters are intellectually diverting, of course, something to talk about, argue about. In a mostly pointless way. Americans have to "interface" with the federal government mainly when they fill out a 1040, and make their contribution to the "insurance company with an army" that is the United States of America. Although the federal government actually seems to have very little to do with one's day-to-day life, they're the big tax hogs. They want most of the money, even if to a large extent we have overlapping and duplicative levels of government - local, county, state, layered beneath the federal behemoth, all of which have to be paid for.

The sheer size of the United States produces a feeling of alienation and powerlessness in the individual taxpayer and citizen. Maybe we hang in there because we want, at the end of all of it, those goodies we've been paying for all those years - the "Entitlements." Social Security and Medicare.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the U.S. population in the year Social Security was enacted, 1935. It was 127 million people. The official census says we now have 307 million, so FDR introduced a program, when unemployment was at 20%, in the very depths of the Depression, to a population that was about 41% of its current size. In other words, the entire population of the United States was about three times larger than California's current population.(Detroit beat the Cubs in the World Series that year, 4-2, and Fred Perry won at Wimbledon. Minnesota was the NCAA champ in football.) The total federal budget was $6.4 billion. Life expectancy (from birth) was 61.7 for both sexes combined. A male reaching the age of 60 could expect to live another 14 years.

In 1965, when the Great Society brought us Medicare, the U.S. had a population of 194 million (the Dodgers took the Twins in the Series, 4-3, and UCLA beat Michigan, 91-80, for the NCAA b-ball championship. Roy Emerson won at Wimbledon.) Federal spending was $118 billion and the national debt was $322 billion (and was about to get much worse because of the Vietnam War). Life expectancy was 70 years; a male achieving the age of 60 could expect to live another 16 years (it's about 20 years today).

If James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, Guy McPherson (that's his website over to the right, "Nature Bats Last") and others are correct, that imminent energy shortages are going to force a "re-localization" of commerce and life in general, it's probably good to keep such basic statistics in mind. The local government entities that we rely upon stand a much better chance of weathering the storms of energy constraints, and of national insolvency, than the huge, bloated, militarized, globalist federal government, for which size, distance and "reach" (the ability to "project power") are everything, its life blood, perhaps the only justification for its existence (if that's a justification). The feds dangle those pretty baubles of the "entitlements" in front of a dazed and confused populace in order to keep them in the game, along with the paternal protection of the huge military establishment keeping us safe from all those terrible al-Qaeda monsters who are out there somewhere, "plotting" even as we sit here nervously wondering why they've waited a decade to hit us again. (We're spending trillions to protect ourselves here! For God's sake, give us something to work with!)