Fascinoma

Sweet Jesus! Somebody on Pox News totally making sense and not promoting the Police Stater agenda! Check the temperature in Hell.

Here we have an old white guy, a former judge, a Fox-certified expert, carefully, lucidly, with sympathy towards all and malice towards none, explaining how Henry Louis Gates has grounds to sue the city of Cambridge for "false arrest." Thank you.

While I'm on the subject, it's worth looking at Crowley's arrest report. It's clearly a hodgepodge of lies, lies of the-dog-ate-my-homework quality, meant to retroactively justify said false arrest. No wonder the prosecutor punted. To people who say Obama shouldn't have called the arrest "stupid," perhaps Obama should say, "Well, clearly Sgt Crowley's superiors agree with me, that's why the charges got tossed instantly."

On the other hand, to Obama's invitation to have a beer with Crowley Gates should say, "Why would I want to sit down with that testilying asshole?" But that might involve sacrificing the spotlight to stand up for a principle.

The people I know who have known Skip Gates allege that he can be a bit of an asshole. But, of whom can we not say this? Moreover, of which Harvard professor can we not say this? But finally, I always thought one gets to be a bit of an asshole in his own home without fear that the Manners Police will arrest you for poor deportment. Apparently Professor Gates thought so too.

Now, along with Mark Kleiman, I suspect that Sgt. Crowley has lied in his report. It seems pretty clear that he decided to arrest Gates for being inusfficiently subordinate to his authority, for "contempt of cop," essentially, and then he suckered him into coming outside where he could manufacture a charge. This is the oldest trick in the book -- more ususally it takes the form of, "If everbody leaves the party now we won't arrest you for the noise." Then they arrest the departing guests for being drunk in public. But maybe I'm just extrapolating from my own misspent youth.

Could Gates have avoided arrest? Almost certainly. Should he have been allowed to rant at the cops with impunity? Only in an ideal case. But if you're in your own home, in a town where you have some prominence, where you are are well known, aren't you as close to the ideal case as it gets?

Of course the Police Staters don't get it. Government is always bad, except when it's armed apparently.

Postscript: Of course my storymind suggests a scenario: maybe Professor Gates has ruffled some feathers around the neighborhood; then one day someone sees him breaking into his own house. She reaches for the phone thinking, 'Yell at my kids, willya? Well, see how you like this....'

I can almost believe in Satan sometimes, and that his highest pleasure is seeing us deliver our own souls to Hell. Like any seducer, there are strict rules he abides by, in order to heighten his own pleasure. I see him coming to Richard Nixon, during his days in the desert while Kennedy’s Camelot was aglitter, and offering him a proposition.

Satan, you see, had a problem: one of his principal franchises was in decline. After the indecorous excesses of the Nazis, bigotry had a rather high odor and was falling out of fashion, even in America. But Satan saw that a straight-up deal with Tricky Dick could easily fix everything. “Power,” he whispered. “The White House, vindication.” Of course Nixon, the living embodiment of banality, couldn’t resist, and he rather considered the evil cost an additional benefit. He needed only institute the Southern Strategy, which brought the lyncher’s bigotry indoors, and gave it a seat at the GOP country club, and his party would be guaranteed generations of victory and power – so long as they pandered cryptically to racists. Code words had to be used, and language had to be repurposed. Concepts like State’s Rights, Law and Order, Reverse Discrimination, Welfare Queen, were used, where what was meant was, “Let’s stick it to the niggers.”

Of course this begat Reagan’s run from Philadelphia, Mississippi – where the civil rights workers were murdered. And it begat George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton Ads. And it begat George W’s obsessive hatred of affirmative action, though all his life he’s sidestepped an meritocracy with a sort of reverse-affirmative action – but of course, that fact has the true Satanic imprimatur.

Now, that we have a black man in the White House Satan’s handiwork is paying of in spades with the Birther Movement. These people are utterly convinced that Obama has no right to be President, no because he’s not qualified by training or intellect, not because he didn’t really get the most votes, but simply in virtue of who he is – which is, they believe, despite much evidence to the contrary, African by birth. They insist he prove a negative, that he was not born in Kenya, though at the same time they’re already positive that he was.

However these shitheads want to dress it up, their objection to Obama is pure, ignorant bigotry. They should be denounced, ostracized, ridiculed. But instead they are given respectful coverage on national television, because their freak show makes a better spectacle than thoughtful consideration of our many pressing problems. And so America fizzes closer to civil war, while Murdock, Limbaugh and O’Reilly get richer and richer and richer. Satan has really outdone himself, again.

So, last night as I was lacing up my old New Balance for another risky run among the silent Priuses of Cleveland Park, I had the TV on and was flipping through the news to see what new absurdities/monstrosities had been worked by homo sapiens. The remote alighted for a moment on Katie Couric, soon plunging me into a vexed meditation on the question: is banality always evil? Katie read moronic questions to one Jeff Greenfield, whom I had never realized was such a clueless asshole. But then again, he's a highly paid journamalist on TV, which like being a professional wrestler, a televangelist or a kiddie-porn lover is very strongly correlated with being a flaming asshole, so....

Anyway, I was struck, within a few seconds, by just how far toward the Fascistic we've drifted. Here, about the Sotomayor confirmation heerings, is the key exchange between these two stooges:

James Risen is unstuck in time. The reporter for undead Gray Lady, the one who thought it was a good idea to keep his warrantless wiretapping story under wraps until after the 2004 election, has got a real scoop. There was a massacre of several thousand Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan -- in 2001! And nobody since has then been real eager to investigate it but him. Now I recall hearing in-depth about this story on godless, America-hating Pacifica Radio, at least five or six years ago, remember hearing eyewitness accounts which put our Special Forces soldiers on the scene. And then again there's this long detailed report from Newsweek, 2002! But now that the New York Times is on it, you can be sure that the truth will come out, just like it did when Judy Miller wrote about Iragq for it, just like it did when Liz Bumiller wrote how one in seven Gitmo prisoners "has returned to terrorism" after release. At least we can be sure that none of the several thousand prisoners who died in those truck containers will taking up the jihad again. So there's that.

Monday night Olbermann did a good thing, he put on a Sarah Palin's Greatest Hits segment, consisting of her innumerable lies, gaffes, and slurs. (Alas, he didn't post a link today, so here's an older version, and Josh Marshall's version, and here's David Shuster's version.) It would be really nice if all this material were kept in heavy rotation, because even though people who should know better are trying, for highly various reasons, to suggest a method behind her madness, we should all recall that Sarah Palin is basically a piece of ignorant hatemongering trash -- a bigot and a sociopath. She's lazy, mean, stupid, greedy, crooked and still sanctimonious, but most of all double-dipped in Teflon, else she'd have be on her way to prison already.

We should above all recall that Sarah Palin is dangerous. She has that W-like gift for issuing preposterous lies which go unchallenged by our alleged journalists. She postures constantly as a guileless staight-talker, but is of course a pathological liar. She issues lies like a forger does bad checks, one to cover the last and another to cover that one, and so on ad infinitum. Like Bush, Cheney and most of those in their circle, she seems to lie for exercise, in may be her mode of respiration. Like a true sociopatgh her one real love is manipulation; she prefers lying to truth, prefers lying to silence. She would rather get over than win. And she has the sociopath's ability to believe her own lies. I have no doubt a polygraph would prove useless on her.

Many assume that Palan is too stupid and corrupt to be elected President, and that may be so, but that doesn't mean she won't become President. George W. was too stupid and corrupt too, but that was not proof against our affliction. In the glare of her promised resignation's novelty our talking heads have clearly forgotten just how awful Palin is. So she's played it just right. She probably won't be prosecuted for Housegate, since the Federal Prosecutor screwed up the Ted Steven bribery case, giving her a more credible claim of political motivation for any prosecution of herself. And in a couple of years the assholes at the Post and the Times will find the narrative of her Incredible Comeback irresistible, making her once again a viable candidate. Given that Obama is fucking up about as hard as is possible without any actual ideas or courage the country may well be ready for more of that famous "change" in 2012. Probably Sarah will have new book out by then, My Struggle, and so will perfectly positioned to lead her goose stepping ignoramuses to Götterdämmerung.

But if there were any justice in the universe Sarah Palin would end her hatemongering days in hiding from the revulsion she has so richly earned.

Or perhaps Mika Brzezinski is to Joe Scarborough as Sammy Davis was to Sinatra, or as the Generals are to the Globetrotters. She apparently gets paid to represent a ditzy blonde, or she really is an incredibly stupid, smug bitch, on who declared today that "Sarah Palin's views connect with real America."

Yeah, that's right. That's why John McCain is in the White Hosue today.

Thus does the hot gaseous amnesia fog begin to enfold Sarah Palin, who like George Bush is a crooked, despicable nincompoop, a petty criminal, a bigot, a hatemonger and a vindictive sociopath. The truth is, Iquitarod Sarah doesn't really want to do the job of governor, she just wants to have the job, or perhaps more importantly go around endlessly drawing attention to herself on the pretext of campaigning. Sarah likes the spotlight, Sarah likes the perks, Sarah likes the power to smite her enemies, but Sarah mostly likes the spotlight.

At present rate she'll be President in about four years.

On Independence Day, The Lobbyist and I went up the bay to a Yacht Club, to help one of her fellow Beltway Bandits (together they would bleed things like the F-22 program dry for frivolities like Head Start and childcare) celebrate a big birthday with dinner and booze-up beside the Chesapeake. The Yacht Club, despite its snooty self-concept, is pretty low-key, just a pool and dining room next to a marina, much more like a Rotary or a small officer’s club than the haughty haunt of Thurston Howell. But it is on a beautiful point of land from which, after dinner, standing in a delicious breeze off the water, we could see the fireworks going up at a least a dozen shows up and down the Chesapeake, from the vast and distant one at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, to the halting and pipsqueak (more fun) neighborhood one across the little estuary. All this did promote a moment’s general sense of communion and jubilation. I imagined millions of people all up and down the east coast joining in the observance – even if it really amounts to little more than animal high spirits in the ease and plenty of midsummer. It’s a syncretism, I guess, the repurposing of what must surely be a traditional feast older than history. It sure as hell doesn’t stand much for America’s gift of freedom and justice anymore -- if it ever did. Still, nice sparkly distractions, good food and drink; if one squints and imagines….

By now it should be fairly obvious to thinking people that right-wing neurosis consists largely in the desire for absolute power, and especially the kind of power that will license violent and sadistic fantasy. But we rarely get so pure an example of the mania as pustule Glenn Beck treated us to with his guest Michael Scheuer, a former CIA man who has apparently been unhinged by his many years of failure to neutralize Osama. Or perhaps he failed in his assignment because he was a frothing nutjob all along. But in any case he's practically orgasmic over the notion that Al Qaeda will touch off a nuke here in America and thus complete our country's conversion to the kind of Polizeistaat of his wet dreams:

"Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand thay their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary," says Santa's Evil Twin, his eyes fluttering and then rolling back as he says "violence." Of course, this kind of destruction-is-salvation thinking isn't new, it goes back at least as far as Ben Tre.

But to think, this is the kind of guy who held high rank in our "intelligence" service.