Hitchens on McCain

On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.
--Christopher Hitchens

Quote of the Day

I think Obama's relatively weak but nonetheless real interactions with William Ayers are a legitimate campaign issue. But Obama's best response, after telling the facts of the relationship, is to point out who else supported him. Republican machers Walter and Leonora Annenberg gave the former terrorist $50 million. They also gave money to Rick Santorum, Strom Thurmond and Mitt Romney. Annenberg was Nixon's ambassador to Britain. If Obama is "palling around with terrorists," the Republican Annenbergs are funding them.

Yesterday, the McCain campain put out a press release boasting that Leonore Annenberg had just endorsed him for president. Why is McCain happy to accept the endorsement of a funder of terrorism?
--Andrew Sullivan

Lost in Confusion

I took my wife to the airport today. She'll be spending the next two weeks with her family in Thailand. I don't like driving to the airport. San Francisco International is eighty miles away and is an intimidating maze for me. Even though I worked there for almost two years, I still get lost in that place. And even though I worked there most of the time as a baggage handler and have subsequently flown out of there myself once and taken my wife and others to fly out of there several times since, I still get confused about check-in and boarding procedures. I simply don't know what to do or how to do it. If I didn't have someone with me who does know, I'd be lost in confusion, even if I somehow eventually managed to muddle through. This is one manifestation of the learning difficulty I've often written about here.

Another example happened last night. At work, I wear a badge attached to a lanyard. Last night, the lanyard became entangled with my headphones that I use to listen to my Walkman. I spent over ten minutes struggling to untangle them but only made matters worse. I looked at the tangle and tried to figure out how to resolve it, but my brain just couldn't make sense of it. So, at quitting time, I ended up throwing my tangled badge and headphones in my backpack, bringing them home, and asking my wife to untangle the mess.

I could have struggled with it more at home, but I wanted to see how quickly my wife could undo the tangle. She looked at it for no more than a few seconds and took only a few more seconds after that to extricate the headphone cord from the lanyard. It was no problem for her whatsoever. She could instantly "see" how to do it before she began. By contrast, when I'd looked at it, all I could see was a tangle that I had no clue how to resolve, so I tried haphazardly to untangle it and only made it worse.

When I venture outside my comfort zone of narrow routine, this is the sort of thing I deal with constantly. So I've lived a very circumscribed life that has spared me all the wasted time and frustration of trying in vain to untangle life's knots and navigate life's mazes. If I had believed that taking on these challenges more often would make me better at resolving them, I would have done it. But lifelong experience has told me that practice not only doesn't make perfect but seldom results in significant improvement of any kind.

Yet, I'm now trying to disregard voices speaking of the past and focus on creating a different present and future.

Sonny Rollins and Leonard Cohen

I've seen some great musicians playing great music on television. But here is some of the best of the best. The immortal Sonny Rollins in a sublime duet with Leonard Cohen that sent chills of awe up my spine when I saw it over twenty years ago on David Sanborn's amazing program Night Music. Thanks to the divine blessings of YouTube, I joyfully present it to you here.

Who By Fire

Gagdad At His Best

I never imagine that my life will change in any fundamental way, no matter what happens. I realize that the environment I live in is in my head, and that the only way to really change things is to change my head. Here again, this can be confused with solipsism or narcissism, but it's quite the opposite. I just mean it in a very concrete, experience-near sense. You must be very, very careful about the ideas you allow to take up residence in your head, because they will end up sharply limiting your ability to know the Real, which always transcends any idea you have about it. Life is impossibly rich, with hundreds of little daily pleasure that will pass you by if you do not heighten your awareness and hone your ability to appreciate them. Never imagine that getting what you want will satisfy you so long as you cannot appreciate what you have.
--Gagdad Bob

The Real John McCain?

I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political forms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. I was sixty two years old when I made the decision, and I thought it was my one shot at the prize.
--John McCain from Worth the Fighting For

Dennis Miller thinks John McCain is a "great man," and he's voting for him in the upcoming election. Not because of what McCain's done in the House or Senate, but because he's a "war hero" and a principled man who has selflessly loved and served his country his entire adult life.

No doubt Miller speaks for many McCain supporters. But I wonder how many of them have read Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone article Make-Believe Maverick. If what that article says about McCain is true, is McCain even close to being the selfless hero and man of principle he and his campaign make him out to be? Or has he been a spoiled, undisciplined, impulsive, tantrum-throwing, narcissistic, self-serving, and venal individual from childhood on?

McCain said during his nomination speech that his POW experience radically transformed him into a man who has put country and principle above himself ever since. But Dickinson's article recounts the following, which, if true, casts McCain's alleged "transformation" in a very different light.

At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.

There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

According to Dramesi, McCain was no more heroic or exceptional as a POW than anyone else. McCain told the North Vietnamese soon after his capture that his father was an Navy admiral so that they would tend to his wounds. He then disclosed to them a variety of other information about his and Navy operations in general, and he turned down a typical offer for early release because, had he accepted it, he would have had to make disloyal statements about America that could have subjected him to condemnation and even court martial when he returned home. As another fellow POW said, "Many of us were given this offer. It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

The article proceeds to cite many other incidents and details about McCain before and after his POW experience that make him sound to me like one of the last politicians I would want as president. I don't know if all of these things are true, and I suspect that, even if they are, there are also positive things to say about John McCain that Dickinson's article doesn't. But I believe that anyone who supports McCain and, like Dennis Miller, considers him to be a great hero owes it to himself and this nation to read the article and then do some fact-checking before casting his vote for McCain in November.

And if anyone can show me where anything in Make-Believe Maverick is false, I encourage them to do it. So far, I've seen many scathing denunciations of Dickinson's 'contemptible hit-piece,' but I've seen no refutation of what he cites as facts.

Quote of the Day

Locate your center -- your psychic being -- which is "behind" the empirical ego, and is the blueprint of your true self. It is like a bead in a celestial string that descends from God to you. Find the divine language, the logos, that speaks to this true self; in a sense, the two cannot be separated, for to find the idiom is to locate the Self. Then it's just a matter of deepening the conversation.
--Gagdad Bob

Quote of the Day

There was a time when conservatives lamented the dumbing down of American culture. Preservation of basic standards in schools and workplaces compelled them -- or so they said -- to resist affirmative action for women and minorities. Qualifications mattered; merit mattered; and demagogic appeals for leveling were to be left to the Democrats.

Not anymore.
--Joe Conason

Quote of the Day

We are, just now, stuck between eras. The old order -- the Reagan-age institutions built on the premise that the market can do no wrong and the government no right -- is dying. A new order, in which Wall Street plays a diminished role and Washington a larger one, is aborning, but the process is painful and protracted.
Harold Meyerson

Who's The Man?

and now Obama, who doesn't even seem adolescent to me, just nothing. Not only is he of indeterminate developmental age, but of ambiguous "gender" as well. He has a pseudo-adult mind that can only recycle half-understood slogans he learned in college, and he seems devoid of any manly virtues at all. Like Clinton, he can only imitate them.
--Gagdad Bob

Gagdad--
Obama is devoid of all manly virtues? What virtues are those? Working hard and earning a good living? Being a devoted and faithful husband and loving father? Successfully raising a family? Playing a mean game of basketball? How is Obama any less a man than YOU? How is his "gender" any more "ambiguous" than YOURS? Who and what are YOU to denigrate Barack Obama's manhood? What "manly virtues" do YOU exhibit that Obama doesn't?

Three Conservative Pundits

I feel pretty bored with my job much of the time. I imagine that many people do. Fortunately, I'm allowed to listen to my little Sony Walkman radio while performing some of my more monotonously menial tasks, and I like to listen to talk radio some of that time.

The only talk radio station I can pull in clearly, besides a conservative Catholic station, is conservative newstalk KTKZ. It's 6AM to midnight lineup consists, in the following order, of syndicated hosts Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, and Mike Gallagher.

Despite my liberal leanings, I enjoy listening to this station. I used to switch back and forth between it and a local liberal talk radio station so that I could get contrasting perspectives on controversial issues and, more generally, the world at large. But when the liberal station changed to an all gospel music format, KTKZ became my only local newstalk radio option.

Since I work swing shift, the hosts I hear at work are Dennis Miller and Mike Gallagher. I must admit that I was surprised the first time I saw Miller on HBO praising President Bush and the war in Iraq. I suppose I entertained the naive assumption that anyone who used to do a satirical newscast on hip Saturday Night Live had to be "one of us"--the few, the proud, the liberals.

Well, Dennis Miller is no liberal. He thinks Bush is the best president of his lifetime and has tremendous admiration for him. He is 100% behind the war in Iraq and constantly lampoons liberal politicians, ideas, and causes. But he's also a very sharp guy who's remarkably articulate and witty and who has an amazing memory for movies, TV shows, sporting events, and other elements of past and present popular culture and can draw clever allusions to them with machinegun-like rapidity. Even when I disagree with him, which is much of the time, I enjoy hearing him riff on politics and politicians. And another thing I appreciate about him is that he doesn't come across as a fanatic. He seems to have a healthy distaste for zealots on both sides of the political continuum and will challenge them to justify their opinions.

Mike Gallagher is an entirely different story. I might formerly have characterized him as a Rush Limbaugh wannabe whose booming, blustery voice and stereotypical arch-conservatism is, wittingly or unwittingly, a caricature of right-wing lunacy. And I might have proceeded to comment that when he goes to a commercial break, a synthesizer plays a long note undoubtedly meant to sound imposingly momentous but which actually sounds like a monstrous human gasbag deflating before the pressure of its verbal flatulence builds to a sudden, massive explosion that reduces the poor man to human fragments scattered all over his studio.

I might have said that, but I won't. I'll just say that anyone who states, as he did awhile back, that Bill Maher is such a horrible person that if he were on fire, he, Mike Gallagher, wouldn't so much as urinate on him to put out the fire, I figure here's a guy who either has some serious psychological "issues," or, if he's just pandering to his perceived audience of conservative nutcakes, has stepped way over the line. Frankly, I suspect that this self-professed Christian meant what he said.

This is kind of like a certain clinical psychologist who specializes "in the treatment of psychological barriers to spiritual growth" and who has authored a book and keeps a blog purporting to dispense psychological and spiritual wisdom to the "intellectually gifted" while disdaining the"idiot masses," who calls Bill Maher a "rat faced homunculus" "moron" and "devil" and Maureen Dowd, Erica Jong, and Gloria Steinem "desiccated old feminist hags," and who makes jokes about Muslims like this:

And the Iranians are still pushing ahead with their Manhattan Project. Of course, they say they're only developing nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. Personally I'd feel better about it if Muslims had figured out peaceful applications for rocks and belts. For them, it's a wardrobe malfunction when some boob doesn't explode out of his vest.

I listen to or read all three of these conservative "pundits,"but I often wonder why.

Quote of the Day

Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening -- really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology -- were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues -- a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she's petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she's been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I'm not really sure which is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.
--Glenn Greewald

Elitist Quote of the Day

I don't want to write for the idiot masses.
Gagdad Bob

Quote of the Day

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

--George Will

Quote of the Day

History is trying to get somewhere, and it is our job to help it get there.
--Gagdad Bob

You Can't Blink?

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
--Sam Harris

Quote of the Day

Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
--Sam Harris

Hypocrisy

There are so many idiots out there, such as Bill Maher, who take scripture literally, and then attack it for being so literal. As such, when he attacks religion, he is really attacking his own stupidity.
--Gagdad Bob

Don't all Christian churches teach that what the Bible literally says about the nature of Jesus and his purpose on earth is literally and not simply metaphorically true? If so, how is Bill Maher the "barbaric idiot" Gagdad says he is when he accurately characterizes the teachings of institutional Christianity and the beliefs of its members about Jesus?

I agree that there may be something "barbaric" about Maher's blatant mockery of Christian teachings. But don't we find the same "barbarity" in Gagdad's mocking attacks on atheists such as Maher and on Muslims? However, doesn't the barbarity lie not in the criticism of false or dubious beliefs per se, but in the disrespectful if not hateful treatment of the "children of God" who hold them? And when Gagdad disparages another for perpetrating the same misdeeds of which he himself is guilty, doesn't he compound his own barbarity with hypocrisy?

Bill Maher Doesn't Have It Right?

There's a connection between magical thinking and not thinking clearly about practical issues...Sarah Palin is a Pentecostal. They believe the Holy Spirit can heal. So, why do you need health insurance?

--Bill Maher

Last night I watched the most recent episode of Bill Maher's Real Time program. One of his guests was acclaimed author and political blogger Andrew Sullivan. At one point, the two of them got into a heated argument about religion and politics. Maher claimed that too many Americans and American politicians are influenced by the "magical thinking" of Christianity and religion in general to solve our pressing domestic and international problems, and he implied that we'd be better off if we and our politicians rejected all religion and its nonsense.

Sullivan, a Roman Catholic, strongly disagreed. While he conceded that biblical fundamentalists like Sarah Palin might well be compromised by their simplistic religious beliefs, he argued that many religious people embrace much more sophisticated religious understandings that can be reconciled with the secular truths and approaches of the sciences, economics, politics, and so forth.

However, Maher vehemently disputed this. He argued that nonsense permeates all Christian beliefs and can't help but influence the way all Christians think about the world and try to solve its problems. At one point, he mockingly remarked to Sullivan: "You're saying God had a son, and he sent him on a suicide mission that he survived because he was really him." Sullivan bristled at this. "Don't describe my faith to me," he retorted. "You mean I don't have it right?" challenged Bill. "No, you don't have it right," Sullivan replied. Yet, the discussion continued without Sullivan ever elaborating on this.

It seems to me that Maher does have it right. Even "sophisticated" Christians believe Maher's characterization, whatever elaborate theological structures they build on this foundation and then, like Andrew Sullivan, try to fool us and themselves into believing that they don't do this. In other words, Christianity is based on nonsense.

The question is, does this, as Maher claims, inevitably taint the Christian's approach to all secular problems and concerns, or can wiser Christians do as Sullivan claims and realize "that there is a difference between heaven and earth. Some of us believe in that difference and can deal with the earth on secular terms and with our faith on religious terms."?

But doesn't one's "faith" concern both heaven and earth?

Sarah Palin's Outrageous Action?

When I heard this story on talk radio tonight, I had a hard time believing it. As much as I dislike Sarah Palin, it wasn't easy for me to believe that even she could be so cruel. But I came home and went online and quickly found many references to this story. Most or all of them appear to come from or refer to the same source, an article or column in what appears to be a progressive Alaskan website. But I would like to see this investigated and, if it's true, I would like the media to ask Palin how she could justify what she did, and I'd like them to ask McCain if he agrees with her conduct and wants such a person as his running mate.

In a nutshell, the story is that when Palin was mayor of Wasilla, a town in a state with reputedly the highest per capita rate of forcible rape in the country, the town charged rape victims for the rape kits used to examine them for evidence of rape, and when the police chief of the town asked that these kits, which can cost as much as $1200, be covered by the city budget, Palin had him fired for noncooperation and hired a chief who revoked the rape kit budget request. Thus, Wasilla did charge rape victims for rape kits until a state law was passed mandating that these kits not be charged to the victims.

I don't know about you, but I think this is one of the most outrageous things I've ever heard. I am absolutely infuriated thinking about it! Charging someone who's been raped as much as $1200 to collect evidence of the assault, and then firing a police chief because he wouldn't go along with this.

If it's true, I really do want to hear Sarah Palin and John McCain try to justify it, and then I'd like to see them scorned and then defeated by the largest landslide in the history of American presidential elections. And if the American people were as decent as they pride themselves on being, they'd make sure this happened.