I heart Carl Paladino (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hot Carl)

OK, not really. But I love that we finally have a tea-patsy (I'll get to that later*) who makes no bones (he probably uses this phrase, because, you know, he "works in construction") about his flagrant prejudices--against everyone who’s not male, white and right--and total lack of governing skills. This tells us two things, at least, about the people who support him: they are equally prejudiced and have no interest in making government any better, only negating its existence.

It also wakes us (or maybe just me) from the somnambulism that this is New York City and "it can't happen here," in such a progressive northern metropolis. (Well, actually it can't, but, for better or worse, we're not just us. We’re a big-ass state full of rural and suburban upstate communities where this guy has all his support. It was Rick Lazio that took the Republican vote in the downstate counties.) We can't be blamed for this indulgence, after the usually status quo-loving Mike Bloomberg recently came to the defense of the downtown Islamic center (and Constitution and reason), and lulled all of us (or just me) into thinking the divisive moment had passed--north of the Mason-Dixon, anyway. But apparently it hasn't, at least until November 2nd.

But is he really a racist/sexist/general scumbag? The jokes, the comments, the idiotic ideas. But let's focus, as most are, on the jokes, emails actually, that he "forwarded" to a "select group of friends.” (Must not have been too select if they got out, huh Carl?) Defenders, calling into Brian Lehrer on WNYC (two out of three, aggravatingly and surprisingly, were women), claimed they don't make him anything, except maybe someone with a sense of humor. I'd agree, only, for one of the cartoons mentioned, it's a racist sense of humor, thus making him a racist.

Why not “call a spade a spade,” as one caller offered what she thought was one of Paladino’s attractive qualities? She suggested this right after denouncing the specific charge of racism from the email; Lehrer commented on her choice of words. Was she so oblivious to the fact that that expression shares a very common racial epithet for blacks, making her an idiot, or was she purposefully using thinly veiled language to tout his, and her, racist leanings?

All of which is a good distillation of the conundrum we find ourselves in, gazing into the psyche of these tea-freaks: either they really are that clueless, and that’s what passes for being anti-establishment these days—in part, now that The Man es moreno—or they’re not as dumb as we’d be comfortable believing. Paladino knows his audience; hell, he might’ve leaked the damn emails himself.

Hot Carl, by M. (thanks!)

“I’ll take you out!”

And if to prove my point, Paladino is now on video threatening, goomba-style, a journalist who had the gall to challenge him about unsubstantiated attack on his opponent, Cuomo, concerning something he himself is admittedly guilty—out of wedlock fatherhood. And, more tellingly, the reporter was from The New York Post, the super-conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned city’s daily. Paladino doesn’t have a problem with just the left-wing media conspiracy, but with ANY media.

Both of these, the threat and that it was against an ostensible ally, bring out the larger point—it’s not so much the obvious hypocrisy involved, but that it reveals what people who like him don’t care about. This isn’t about politics or, what conservatives might usually call, morals; it’s about tearing down the system, which to them represents, and is represented by, progress of any kind. This is the extreme-libertarian ideology.

However, despite the tea-partisan antipathy toward their institutional brethren, Republicans, as Paul Krugman points out in The New York Times, the latter shares their anarchic lack of policy or any real agenda, at least when it comes to fiscal policy. I would argue that the tea-partiers have necessitated the Republican’s shift rightward into pure platitude, devoid of the desire to help the country or even “make sense.”

“So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.”

I got your cartoon right here, Carl.

(A still from a cartoon remake of Night of the Living Dead.)

Callers also said that everyone gets these kinds of emails "nowadays." That's not the case for me. The few times I have, I either spammed the sender, or, if I knew them and didn't just want to just dismiss them (family or friends), I would tell them to "cut the shit;" perhaps not always in those words. Of course, nowadays prejudice (except for Muslims, at the moment) isn't as overtly bandied about in mainstream speech; it's coded in more appropriate ways, though sometimes not very much, as with this guy.

For one thing, humor, as it is for many touchy subjects, can be a chief mode by which extreme speech, whether you agree with it or not, can gain social acceptance. Where I grew up just below the M&D line, in a MD suburb, one of a few Jews until high school, I was hardly ever called a kike or Christ-killer (thought it happened), but I did hear a whole hell of a lot of Jew jokes. Both made my heart flush and my throat swell just the same, and yet I knew, even at the time, that there was a difference between the two.

Was one preferable to the other? Sure. I’d go so far as to say that the relegation of racism to jokes told on playgrounds and at water-coolers (do offices still have those?) is in itself a sign of progress. But was it ever cool? Hell no. Did I let it slide? Not if I thought I had a chance to get a few punches in, or more, before I got my ass kicked or it was broken up. And this was a fairly progressive era, the 80s, and area of the country.

Satire, especially, for good reason and effect, can engender discussion about uncomfortable topics that can easily get mired in undemanding silence--or it can be a, sometimes not so subtle, cover for hate. Not to realize the difference is either ignorance or wink-and-a-smile acceptance tantamount to collusion.

I just had to.

*Finally, why would I call Paladino a patsy, or any of these folks who are running for office or voting for them, for that matter? Because, as the Right have been doing for years, by appealing to the concomitants of fear and anger, thereby obfuscating any talk of substantive issues, they have managed to get people to vote against their own interests. But so too the politicians, using the term broadly here—and I’m no politico lover—are for the most part dupes for bigger interests of deregulation and privatization (see the Koch brothers, et al.).

Carl, himself has made his fortune in large part by state and local government largess up in Albany, as reported by The Village Voice—and he wants to “throw the bums out”? He was one of the bums, from the other side of it. Maybe he’s thinking of expanding into defense department contracting or “clean” coal. Maybe he’s so stupid he doesn’t understand the ramifications of his own rhetoric. Or maybe he knows, like the rest of us, probably nothing much will no matter who’s in office. In that way, then, he’d windup gaming the system form both sides. Yeah, he’s racist—like a fox.

[My apologies to all non-racist foxes, such as the enjoyable Fleet Foxes.]

Capital punishment proponents and opponents agree: Isn't it ironic?

Don't you think? So says NPR, anyway.

Ohio is about to execute a man who, last week, was brought to a hospital to be revived after attempting suicide. Why bother? you ask. Good question.

Ethics aside, lawmakers in some states are reconsidering the efficiency of the death penalty. It costs less to try and convict someone of murder who might get a life sentence, rather than going for capital punishment.

(I realize this pic alludes to the electric chair, which as far as I know isn't used anymore, though still legal in some states if the prisoner chooses it--yeah right, like that will happen--but I had no gurney photos.)

I grew up reading The Washington Post

And I grew up listening to my father rant, while religiously reading the thing, that the Post was just another liberal rag, on par with the holiest of holies, The New York Times.

Well, apparently nothing lasts for ever--if it ever happened in the first place. Like most candy-colored "things that used to be so great" nostalgia--you know, when America was America for Americans, capitalism was "free" and government was "small"--that never were (not the way people that use them mean them), this never existed.



Anyway, now they've run afoul of the rightist-watching Media Matters:

"The Washington Post just hired Marc Thiessen, who now becomes the second former George W. Bush speechwriter-turned-columnist at the paper. Thiessen isn't just any right-wing shill: He's an unapologetic advocate for torture. And he isn't alone. Charles Krauthammer, Michael Scheuer, and Richard Cohen have all used the editorial pages of the Post to defend torture.

"In his book and even on the pages of the Post, Thiessen has repeatedly made dishonest and dubious statements in support of torture. For example:

1. He falsely claimed in his most recent book that, since CIA interrogation of terror suspects began after 9-11, there were no attacks by Al Qaeda on U.S. interests at home or abroad.
2. He also claimed, falsely, in a Post op-ed that Bush oversaw "2,688 days without a terrorist attack on [American] soil," ignoring the anthrax mail attacks, the El Al shooting in Los Angeles and other domestic terrorist attacks.
3. In a Post op-ed, he called President Obama's decision to release Bush administration torture memos "irresponsible" and claimed that "Americans may die as a result.""

I grew up off Ardennes Ave in a neighborhood with WWII themed street names. Built for vets. Yeah.

From The Writer's Almanac, earlier this month:

It was on this day in 1944 that the Battle of the Bulge began. It took place in the Ardennes forest, a snowy mountainous region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg and lasted for more than a month. It was the last major German offensive, and it was the bloodiest battle of World War II for Americans troops. While estimates about the number of American casualties differ, the U.S. Defense Department lists 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded, and 23,000 missing.

Among those taken as prisoner of war by the Germans was a young infantry scout named Kurt Vonnegut. He'd only been in the front lines for five days when he got trapped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner. Within a month, he was sent over to Dresden and put to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He and his fellow American prisoners were detained in and slept at an underground warehouse in Dresden that had been a meat-packing facility and storage locker before the war. The building was marked 'Schlachthof-funf': 'Slaughterhouse-Five.'

Then, in February 1945, about two months after the Battle of the Bulge began, British and American forces started firebombing Dresden. The firestorm created by the massive Allied bombings killed nearly all of Dresden's residents, but Vonnegut and other POWs survived because they were three stories underground, in that meat-storage locker.




Vonnegut published his novel Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, a quarter century after he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and a witness to the Dresden firebombing. In it, he wrote:

'It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'

The Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, after Hitler agreed to withdraw German troops from the Ardennes forest. Less than two weeks later, Allied leaders met at Yalta to discuss occupying post-war Germany.


The New York Times:

When Theodore Roosevelt was president, three decades before World War II, the world was focused on the bloody Russo-Japanese War, a contest for control of North Asia. President Roosevelt was no fan of the Russians: “No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant — in short, as untrustworthy in every way — as the Russians,” he wrote in August 1905, near the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, on the other hand, were “a wonderful and civilized people,” Roosevelt wrote, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”

Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”

In June 1905, Roosevelt made world headlines when — apparently on his own initiative — he invited the two nations to negotiate an end to their war. Roosevelt’s private letter to his son told another story: “I have of course concealed from everyone — literally everyone — the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion ... . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.”

Years later, a Japanese emissary to Roosevelt paraphrased the president’s comments to him: “All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine, preserved the Latin American nations from European interference. The future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States towards their neighbors on the American continent.”

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.

To signal his commitment to Tokyo, Roosevelt cut off relations with Korea, turned the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military and deleted the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and placed it under the heading of “Japan.”

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

Japan’s declaration of war, in December 1941, explained its position quite clearly: “It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.”