Are my eyes really blue?

So my laptop died Saturday afternoon. Serious big-time directory issues, to the point that I suspected hardware failure (attempts this morning suggest that is likely). I have a replacement drive but it is not a known good drive (in fact it dates to last August and I don’t know how long it was used before then). It had all better be down to the hard drive, though, because I’m in no shape to splash out on buying a new computer – in fact, if the laptop goes, I will resort to the iMac indefinitely (although restoring all that music will be a right royal PITA) and use the iPhone for all portable computing. Which will at least keep me from parking my ass on the couch and thumping away at the MacBook all evening every evening.
Oh yeah – saw Iron Man last night. It is as advertised. I believe it does for the entire superhero genre what Daniel Craig and Casino Royale did for Bond. I would gladly have turned around and walked right back into the theater for a second viewing.
Anyone have an Asus EEE? Running Linux? What do you think of it?

So as we all wait for the superdelegates to play out, it’s time to think a little more about why they are there. To do this, we have to go back in history a little bit and walk it through to the present day. I know we’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating, so if you’ll just step into that Dr. Pepper machine over there…yes, I know it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, that’s not the point…

(click the jump to depart!)

Continue reading “Endgame”

A bunch of kids with a band in Manchester, unable to finance a video for their song, instead played it in front of surveillance cameras – and then used the data protection and freedom of information laws to obtain the footage.

The kids, clearly, are all right.

If this is true, then two conclusions are immediately possible:
1) Mark Penn is, hands-down, the Stupidest Fucking Person In All Of Human History.
2) HIllary Clinton, by virtue of employing Mark Penn high in her artillery, is completely unfit to run a Presidential administration.

One of the most irritating parts of the whole Democratic primary has been the chortling from the Republican side that the Democrats “have finally come around” on the matter of Hillary Clinton. As if sixteen years of bullshit is somehow vindicated by the exasperations of five months of primary trench warfare.

Listen up, and listen good: the reason the hardcore activist Democrats – the ones who turn out for primaries, the ones who organize caucuses, the beating heart of what political scientists call “the party-in-electorate” – cannot stand Hillary Clinton is twofold:

1) She was insufficiently anti-Republican;

2) In an attempt to grasp for the nomination, she embraced everything the Republicans attacked her with throughout the 90s and after.

Let’s be honest here: nobody who voted for the Iraq War was ever going to pass muster with the resolutely-antiwar Democratic core. John Edwards came closest, and he had to shovel coal hard and fast in the cause of economic populism to build any kind of following, and it was good for a poor third in Iowa. Hillary Clinton was still running her husband’s offense: triangulate, split the difference, and go along with the foe just enough to disarm the avenues of attack. And, as Joe Gibbs painfully learned, what worked like all hell in 1992 isn’t going to get the job done in 2008.

The Clinton offense works from a position of some strength. Even at the height of the Gingrich revolution, Bill Clinton was still President, and still had the power to make himself relevant (as he famously asserted). For the entire decade of the Noughts, the Democrats have basically been without power. They had some control of the Senate for a few months in 2001, but after September 11, they were never going to be anything resembling an opposition. They went along on the war, just as the Clinton offense dictates, in an attempt to take it off the table as an issue. But they got clubbed with it anyway, lost big, and spent four years basically irrelevant to the process. Even after barely regaining control of Congress, the Ds were hamstrung in the Senate by three roadblocks: a feckless majority leader, a minority party willing to shatter the record for filibusters, and a majority that hung on the single vote of the only Likud Senator. With no leverage and no bargaining power, the Democrats couldn’t possibly move the ball with the old Clinton techniques.

For the last seven years, the GOP has actively run over the Democrats like a tractor-trailer over a rooster. Dems have been consistently accused of being Al-Qaeda sympathizers, Sadaam apologists, feckless bong-watered granola-shaver hippie weaklings just dying for a chance to surrender to The Terrorists and submit to some sort of Islamic dictatorship. Hell, their 2004 Presidential candidate’s three Purple Hearts were famously derided as “band-aid injuries” by GOP convention delegates. As a result, a whole lot of Democrats got pissed off beyond recognition, and demanded a candidate for 2008 who would fight back, tooth and claw. And they almost immediately rejected Hillary Clinton as a palatable candidate, because at the critical moments, she hadn’t punched back.

The rest of the story tells itself. Despite her name recognition and early lead, she was outmaneuvered in Iowa – and once a viable “anyone but Hillary” candidate emerged, the activists flocked to him. Even still, she might have held on – but when Obama rattled off a dozen straight wins, she ultimately chose to go into Pennsylvania and embrace the very people and tactics that had been used so viciously against her husband and his administration. The image of Hillary Clinton sitting down with Richard Mellon Scaife – he whose money underwrote the anti-Clinton slime machine for a decade – created the impression that she’d sold her soul to the devil. Her embrace of the Karl Rove school of campaigning clenched it. To borrow Heinrich Böll’s phrase, once she partook of the Host of the Beast, there was no turning back.

If Team Hillary had bothered to work up a Plan B – if they’d plotted beyond Super Tuesday, if they’d made an effort to hit back in the Potomac, if they’d bothered to learn the rules in Texas so as not to lose the state days after the fact – maybe they wouldn’t have been forced into desperation in Pennsylvania. And if they’d been willing to take a chance on the high road, play it straight, keep beating the drum for experience and grinding out the hard work of governance, and stayed clear of buying into the GOP memes about secret Muslims and latte-drinkers and “real Americans”, maybe they could have closed the gap and kept superdelegates in play. As it is, she’s managed to piss off the kind of people who could have been her base, who should have been her base – and who definitely would have been her base, if she hadn’t taken the ball on February 5 and run 180 degrees the wrong way with it.

Ultimately, that’s what drove Democrats away from Hillary Clinton – not that she was inherently some sort of cloven-hooved bitch succubus, because they knew better than that. But she fumbled a sure thing – and in 2008, the one thing the Democrats can’t possibly risk is somebody who could screw up a sure thing. When you’re trying to avoid a plague outbreak, you can’t waste time supporting somebody who’s driving the monkey to the airport.

Hillary’s a great lady, one of the most formidable figures of the day. But that day’s over, and the faithful don’t have the patience to let her rage against the dying of the light any longer.

I swear, I will not post five times a day anymore.

It’s over. After everything that happened, after all the shit-slinging of the last two weeks, despite everything that came down the pike, Team Obama delivered the predicted crushing victory in North Carolina – and more impressively, are at this hour running less than 4% behind Team Clinton in Indiana, and that without any returns from Lake County (think Gary, Indiana – which should be an Obama stronghold for multiple reasons). The net result will be at least +3 delegates for Obama and an increase in the popular-vote lead by about 180K or so.

And that’s the end of it. Despite her best stand, despite the momentum from Pennsylvania, despite the return of the Rev. Wright and the first serious racial ad in North Carolina, despite shots of Crown and guns galore, Team HRC will end the day further behind Team BHO than when the day began. They are not closing the gap at all – they are falling further behind in delegates, in votes, in superdelegate commitments, and in fund-raising.

Bottom line: there is no way for Hillary Clinton to become the nominee without subverting the expressed will of the party-in-electorate.

Ballgame.

ETA: make that +6 net for Obama and +217K votes. MSNBC is reporting that Team Clinton has cancelled all appearances tomorrow. And the head of the Republican party in Lake County has publicly avowed that there is no shady dealing going on; the calculation of over 11,000 absentee ballots has to be factored in and he has confidence in the results. Of course, he has to be uneasy that Democrat turnout beat GOP today by over 3-1; couple that with the fact that almost a quarter of Indiana R’s voted for somebody other than McCain, and you can’t get too sanguine about perhaps the most reliably stalwart GOP stronghold in the Middle West…

I has a Want.

Seriously, I know it’s ridiculous, but you couldn’t get this stuff in Alabama in the mid-80s. Or two-tone. Or new wave. Or, in fact, any of the stuff that I could have really used half a lifetime ago when I wasn’t even remotely too old for this shit.

I know I’ve written at length about my rejection of the whole “rejuvenile” phenomenon, but I think it’s a little different when you’re discovering all the things you missed out on. I got kickball, I got cupcakes, I got everything you probably need to get out of childhood. To be honest, much as I grumble, you could make a case that I got most of what I should expect to get out of adolescence, too. Especially when you take into account how much Hollywood lies to you, and that real life is nothing like locker movies. (Shame, too, because I got a lot out of Heathers.) But I have discovered a lot of stuff that was out there at the right time – only it never got past the Wallace Line, and thus I didn’t stumble across it for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

OK, maybe it really is never too late to have a happy childhood. Maybe too sad, too pitiful, and/or too ridiculous, but not too late. Which means the only real question is….can I get away with 8-eyelet oxblood 1460s?

“…a depressingly high rate of self-destruction prevails among thise who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books.”

– V. O. Key (pray for us), Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949

Good ol’ Valdimer Orlando – patron and father of contemporary Southern studies, whose portrait hung in the study center when I was in grad school. He had it dead right. Suicide is an occupational hazard in Southern studies in much the same way that, say, black lung is for coal miners or blown knee ligaments are in the WNBA. Not hard to see why, either: consider the words of W.J. Cash, whose book is the first wellspring of all study of Southern politics – and who hanged himself in Mexico City in 1941.

In the mind of the South, any sort of deviation from the prescribed norm is suspect at best and to be violently opposed at worst. It’s the sort of thing that leads to preachers railing from the pulpit against Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. It also leads to things like massive underfunding of special education (especially gifted programs), bulldozers running over Dixie Chicks albums, the school-sanctioned LGB club at Birmingham-Southern College having to meet in undisclosed locations, and a 40% statewide vote against doing away with the laws against mixed-race marriage…in the year 2000.

The old man didn’t care for it – if you came around at the right time, like say election night in 1990*, you could hear him grumbling about the “redneck mentality” that kept Alabama in the basement – the hard kernel deep in the cracker soul saying “ain’t no man living can make me do nothin’.” He knew that at some point, you have to give a little to get along in a civilized society, and that eventually you’ll have to allow for something that isn’t exactly your thing. And that at some level, you have to have a social process and respect for the order that creates – and eventually, you will have to enforce that order.

Which leads to one of my favorite stories. I wouldn’t say the old man was a crusader in the field of civil rights or anything, but he was a Kennedy delegate in his college’s mock convention in 1960. And so, when he was teaching a history class in 1963, and word came over the intercom that the President was shot dead in Dallas, and one student let out a cheer, the old man – almost eight years into severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis – bodily jerked the kid out of his desk with one hand and backhanded the bejesus out of him with the other. Now in 1963, JFK was about as popular as cancer in the state of Alabama, but I can assure you that nobody in 8th grade ever again thought it was appropriate to publicly celebrate the death of a President.

I am – as if there were any doubt – my father’s son. And we were both definitely Lawful Neutral.

* It does bum me out that the last state election he experienced was the return of Fob James. Had the assorted medications and resulting kidney failure not donked him off, I am sure he would have been dancing a Fred-Sanford-esque jig on election night 1998, when the Fob was drummed unceremoniously out of office in favor of a Catholic of Jewish descent.

Back from another first-Sunday-in-May trip to the old patch. Given that next month is ten years since the old man passed, you’d think I would have been in a much darker mood – and that even before the layover that lasted four extra hours because United Airlines momentarily forgot that an airplane needs a crew to fly. And yet I made it mostly OK.

Part of that came from getting to spend the afternoon Sunday with my double-second-cousin and his lovely bride. (His grandfather and mine were two brothers who married a pair of sisters from up the holler, thus the double.) I suspect that this is going to be a recurring feature of spring: drinks on the veranda somewhere in Southside coupled with a rousing game of “Can You Top This,” embarrassing Southern family edition. He won this year, hands down, on a matter of elective biology too heinous to repeat here.

And then, today, after packing up a lot of stuff that should have been much more emotionally trying (my dad’s class rings, my mom’s original wedding bands, $270 worth of the family silver coinage and just try sliding THAT past airport security), I was actually glancing through my baby books. You know, the ones with all my test scores and early report cards and first cut hair and first lost tooth and medical history and blah blah blah.

And apparently – no wonder I forgot this – I seem to have left a trail of urine in every mattress from here to South Carolina for the first six years of my life. To the point that they had me on two kinds of drugs – one for the wee problem and one for “nerves.”

Now, I think doctoring was different back then. I was born on the 1st and didn’t come home ’til the 6th. I cannot FATHOM any hospital keeping mother and child for five days when it was a regular uneventful birth with no complications and nothing gone awry. I mean, that’s longer than my first niece stayed in the hospital and she was at least five or six weeks premature. When I had my tonsils out in January of ’76, in an attempt to do something about my chronic rhinitis, I was in the hospital for TWELVE DAYS. I’ve had family members laid up for REAL medical issues – serious lighting candles at Mass stuff – that were in and out of the hospital in half that. Medicine has changed, kids, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, the older I get, the better I was. I say this because I saw various test scores, report cards, the original letter that gravely informed my parents that I was eligible for special education services at a different elementary school than I had been slated to attend. And apparently, I peaked around age 6 in terms of being light-years smarter than my peers. There was stuff written in those evaluations that was just embarrassing to read (and I’m not talking about the “He especially enjoys Gilligan’s Island” comment).

So I guess the moral of the story is this: if you want to be the kind of superstar that would make Kanye West weep with humility, you can’t bother yourself about getting up to have a piss.

I don’t think I’m going to be let to try this at home.