The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year (Part 4)

The trendy/spiritual guy in the picture with the cosmically blue eyes is Mark Morford, scribbler of the Notes & Errata column at the S.F. Wrongicle, and true to the image he's trying to project in his little photo, he titled a recent column:

Is Obama an enlightened being?

Now, I've knocked around Morford's spiritual block a time or two in my misguided youth, but even bouts of kundalini yoga and astrological dancing (don't ask) didn't prepare me for this particularly curious brand of Obama fetish. That's why I've nominated Morford's column as the fourth entry in the 2008 "Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year" competition.

The rules for the competition are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic. This one sure does, so let's get started:

I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little debate, more and more, with colleagues, with readers, with liberals and moderates and miserable, deeply depressed Republicans and spiritually amped persons of all shapes and stripes and I'm having it in particular with those who seem confused, angry, unsure, thoroughly nonplussed, as they all ask me the same thing: What the hell's the big deal about Obama?

Off to a good start. Had he talked to any deeply happy Republicans, it might have rocked his entire cosmology, but what are the chances of that? Deeply happy Republicans are very rare in San Francisco because they are routinely hunted, outed and publicly despised.

I, of course, have an answer. Sort of.

Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.

He had that right.

Ready? It goes likes this:

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

Hey, I could have written that!

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

I get the JFK bit. He was an underqualified and incompetent politician who barely squeaked into the presidency because of his good looks and exceptional speaking ability. I won't touch MLK because that would be, you know, racist. But it turns out I'm wrong anyway:

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Powerful luminosity? Like a halo? Unique high-vibration integrity? Like the sound of a Rezko being dragged across a chalk board?

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

These are the same folks who were blown away by George McGovern, the same folks who fell for Al Gore's clever marketing ploy, global warming -- that slick gambit carefully orchestrated by money-grubbing carbon credit hucksters.

Here's where it gets gooey.

Be forewarned. Even if Morford doesn't win the "Most Ridiculous Story of the Year" award, he's definitely got a shot at the "Understatement of the Year" prize.

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The last Lightworkers apparently were the guys who wrote the musical Hair. But this time, apparently, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is really going to happen, so we won't have to worry about foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.

Is this the same Kennedy of the Bay of Pigs? The same Kennedy who started us down that long, bloody road in Vietnam? Or was that his twin, John Lightworker Kennedy? BTW, he asks a good question: Why has the Kennedy legacy lived on? And how many generations until it descends into complete debauchery, excess and irrelevance?

Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.

So W. plays the role of John the Baptist, kind-of. Gotta hand it to this guy, though: he's about as over the top as they come ... laid wasted, pummeled, disenchanted pulp. It's a wonder we're still here to welcome the Lightworker.

Let me be completely clear: I'm not arguing some sort of utopian revolution, a big global group hug with Obama as some sort of happy hippie camp counselor. I'm not saying the man's going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren.

Editors Note: The paragraph above is the one sane paragraph in this entire piece. You might want to clip it out and tape it to your monitor.

Please. I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual. While Obama's certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn't hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.

Show me W.'s Rezko, his Wright, his Ayres, his ... Michelle. (And hold off on that "worst president in American history" bit. There's a pretty good chance Obama's going to get elected.)

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically drawn to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

This will be a test for American politics: Will we find that policy doesn't matter; only vibration does? Can swirling energy become a viable political force? Can a candidate win with an effortlessly self-organizing organization? Are Hamas, Castro and Galloway people of high and positive vibration?

Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes?

Yeah, I have to say that pretty much wraps it up for me, except for that bit about tofu-sucking. That's just sick.

I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.

Not this time.

That's it, my friends. This year, you have the chance not only to elect the first black president, not only to elect the first junior senator president, not only the first Friend of the Weather Underground president, but the first Lightworker president. Or you could elect a war hero who has shown he can reach across the aisle and who definitely has both feet firmly planted in this world.

See other 2008 candidates for Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year:

• Michael Chabon's Obama vs. the Phobocracy
• Gloria Steinem's Women Are Never Front-Runners
• Libby Spencer's When -- not if -- martial law is declared
  

hat-tip: Jim

The Most Ridiculous Story Of 2008? (Part 3)

Anyone who's watched It's a Wonderful Life -- and that's everyone, right? -- knows that during WWII, local businessmen enforced national security in towns across America, making sure black-outs were enforced, maintaining Civil Defense facilities, organizing War Bond campaigns and other tasks that appear quaint today but were selflessly patriotic then.

But in 2008, when the enemy has proven he can strike our shores, unlike the situation in WWII, if businessmen work with government to improve the nation's security ... well, let the paranoia and ridiculousness begin!

Not at all surprisingly, this ridiculousness has roosted at Newshoggers, where Libby (as in "liberal?") Spencer writes:

I've taken a lot of criticism over the last year about my speculation that our government is preparing to declare martial law. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll get the last laugh, only it's no laughing matter and it's a lot bigger than just Blackwater. Consider InfraGard.

It's writing like this and what follows that gets Spencer's feverish nightmare of a piece nominated as the third entry in the 2008 "Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year" competition.

(The rules for the competition are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.)

That "no laughing matter" link in the pulled quote above goes to an AlterNet post that's similarly paranoid about InfraGard, saying it gives the George Baileys of the world the right to "kill without repercussion:"

One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law.

"... in the event of martial law." That's what's stuck in Libby's craw, that Bush has just got less than 11 months left to prove her right, and she and AlterNet are putting their bets on InfraGard as the key to the devious Bush's plans (no doubt still being managed secretly by Karl Rove).

"InfraGard?" you say? That's a federal program that links business leaders in a town to an FBI agent in that town -- a federal program that was created under the Clinton administration, a tid-bit that Libby seems to have missed. From the InfraGard site:

InfraGard is a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) program that began in the Cleveland Field Office in 1996. It was a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia for the FBI’s investigative efforts in the cyber arena. The program expanded to other FBI Field Offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and to the Cyber Division in 2003. InfraGard and the FBI have developed a relationship of trust and credibility in the exchange of information concerning various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters.

After 9/11, the FBI expanded InfraGard's charter from cyber- and business-related crime to broader assistance against homegrown terror. It's not a bad idea. Business owners have their eyes on their communities and their employees and are in a much better place than the average man on the street to see suspicious activity -- and report it to the FBI, not just shoot the suspected perp.

Libby, of course, does not trust business, as evidenced by her conclusion to the constant left-wing question: Why isn't everyone else as freaked out about this as I am?

Don't count on seeing this reported in the mainstream media. I expect the major media conglomerates are also members.

Would that be the Jew-owned national media, Libby? The Bush-Rove-Israel axis of evil?

So now we get to the basis of Libby's confidence that Bushitler is going to declare martial law any day now, from an "eyewitness account" that, she says, should make one and all "reconsider their mockery of my paranoia."

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says. (emphasis no doubt in Libby's fevered mind)

Note that the quote is not attributed in any way.

Let's posit how it came to be that "all of a sudden" the meeting was "knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared." Here's my guess: They began talking about what would happen if a major act of terrorism had occurred on the business owner's home turf. People were dead and dying. Infrastructure was out. Perpetrators were loose and possibly planning additional attacks.

Only lib-Libby and her anti-American ilk would think that the martial law was declared because Bush had nothing better to do that day. What would she have us do in such a terrorism scenario? Reach out to the terrorists and tell them how sorry we are that America's despicable behavior drove them to their justified act?

Libby cares not about what al-Qaeda or home-grown Islamists might be up to in the real world. Instead, she links to a 47-page ACLU document, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex, that highlights such outrages as:

Bush also called for “Neighborhood Watch” programs to be doubled in number and expanded beyond their traditional role of deterring and detecting household burglary to “make them more attuned to preventing terrorism.”

I've always thought Neighborhood Watch was just a cover for US-grown Stasi-like programs, and admit it, you did too, right?

The ACLU study documents all sorts of information-gathering activities by government, some going back to the 192os and 1940s, as if it were actually documenting the wholesale stripping of our American freedoms. But when it comes right down to it, the entire 47-page report only includes one specific example of someone allegedly stripped of their rights because of these Surveillance-Industrial Complex programs:

An American citizen named Hossam Algabri received a statement in late 2002 from Fleet Bank discontinuing his account. The bank would not tell him what the problem was, except that he had been targeted for “suspicious activity.” Algabri was just one of many people with similar experiences.

The horror! That #$@&! Bush!

But really, folks, how do we know that Algabri wasn't involved in something suspicious? Certainly there's nothing in the ACLU's write-up of this horrific quashing of his God-given right to have a bank account that would lead us to any other conclusion. (And BTW Wells Fargo suspended one of our credit cards last week due to "suspicious activity" -- Incredible Wife and Incredible Daughter #2 were using it at a trade show buying a lot of stuff -- and I didn't call the ACLU!)

Lib-Libby wraps it all up:

This is how 9/11 changed everything. Our government created a "Surveillance-Industrial Complex." Private contractors now have a license to kill Americans at will.

It's as I've been saying all along. We're in no more danger from terrorists than we were on 9/10/01 but we're in infinitely more danger from our own government because in the shock and fear of the moment, we allowed the Bush administration to trample our civil rights into oblivion, in trade for a false sense of security.

Have we had a rash of private contractors going Scott-free after killing Americans? Can anyone identify a civil right Bush has trampled -- not in theory, but in a real case, involving a real American who is not a terror suspect? And don't give me that attorney from the Northwest who got arrested. Due process worked for him.

Libby just might lose this competition, though, because she wrote, "We're in no more danger from terrorists than we were on 9/10/01," acknowledging that there is a certain danger posed to America by Islamist terrorism.

How did a crazy idea like that get into her head?

See other 2008 candidates for Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year:
Michael Chabon's Obama vs. the Phobocracy
Gloria Steinem's Women Are Never Front-Runners

hat-tip memeorandum

The Most Ridiculous Story Of 2008? Part 2

The debate is over. No, not that debate; we all know the global warming debate is over and has been since Al Gore declared it so.

We now also know, thanks to Michael Chabon, who authored the second article of 2008 to be nominated as potentially the year's most ridiculous, that the debate about who should be the next president of the United States is over.

In Obama vs. the Phobocracy, Chabon says if you don't agree the debate is over -- heck, even if you ask a single question about Barack Obama -- you are against truth and mankind's better nature, a gross purveyor of fear, and a dasher of hope. For espousing this view, Chabon joins Gloria Steinem in this year's list of nominees.

(The rules for the competition are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.)

At least Chabon let's us know at the outset that he's on a take no prisoners mission:

There are many reasons not to support Barack Obama's candidacy for president, but every one of them is bad for the same reason.

Ergo, there are only reasons to support Obama. Read on at your own risk.

Chabon tells us that because he supports Obama and has for some time, he's had to put up with people actually telling him "with wistfulness and regret, or with a pundit's show of certainty, or with a well-earned but useless skepticism" their reasons for not supporting his man. But he felt he had to put up with them:

Because Obama appears to be a patient, forbearing man with a gift for listening, I figured I owed it to him to play the thing his way. So I have nodded and looked into their eyes and hummed sympathetically as people gave their reasons and made their excuses and generally offered up, as if they were golden ingots of profound wisdom, the handful of two-penny nails with which they plan to board up the windows of their hopes for themselves, their families, their country and the world.

There you go. Any reason to not support Obama -- oh, like his support of partial birth abortion -- is just shutting out hope. Tell that to the dismembered baby in the abortionist's trash can. (For background on this Obama position and other real world positions mentioned in this post as a contrast to the image Chabon would have us embrace, check out this comprehensive post from Flopping Aces.)

Chabon has had it up to here with the stupidity of these imbeciles whose hearts don't go drowning in pitter-pat at the mention of Obama's name, so he's writing this piece and WaPo is running all 1,475 words of it.

The people who come up to Chabon with questions aren't a bad lot ... you know, they're not Republicans ... but rather "people who know that Obama is a remarkable, even an extraordinary politician, the kind who comes along, in this era of snakes and empty smiles, no more than once a generation," but have been duped by "an all-out, months-long push by the cynicism industry."

Shame on them for doing that irritating thing that people do every four years or so: ask questions about a candidate. How can they do that to someone Chabon critically eyes and pronounces "at once brilliant and sensible, vibrant and measured, engaged and engaging, talented, forthright, quick-witted, passionate, thoughtful and, as with all remarkable people whom experience has taught both the extent and the bitter limits of their gifts, reasonably humble?"

Is Chabon Barack's secret gay lover? Or is it just puppy love?

Chabon, who must live in some sequestered liberal enclave, apparently hasn't heard any questions about Obama's policies or character or experience. Rather, the nature of opposition to Obama is limited to this:

Things are so bad we just can't afford to waste our votes, people tell me, on some fantasy super-president with magical powers. We need someone electable, someone, as I have been told repeatedly in the past year, who can win.

So that's the bad question that rankles him so! It must be, because it's the only real question he raises. And he answers it by pointing to Obama's beaming hope, which is so evident to him only because he is one of those dreary people with a dark view of our country:

In a better world, if there were such a thing (and so far there never has been), we would not need a president like Obama as badly as we do. If there were less at stake, if our democracy had not been permitted, indeed encouraged, to sink to its present degraded and embattled condition not only by the present administration but by a fair number of those people now seeking to head up the next one, perhaps then we could afford to waste our votes on the candidate who knows best how to jigger, to manipulate and to conform to the vapid specifications of the debased electoral process it has been our unhappy fate to construct for ourselves.

In other words, it's a shame Obama even has to put up with this Democratic primary process, where people actually vote on who the candidate should be. He should simply be declared president, or king, or whatever Chabon wants to declare him, and get on with being His Luminency.

Chabon, who is a novelist of some fame, then gets to expressing what Obama is all about, and he does it in a paragraph-length construction that is anything but a sentence. I've read it several times now and I still have no idea what he's trying to say.

Because ultimately, that is the point of Obama's candidacy -- of the hope, enthusiasm and sense of purpose it inspires, yes, but more crucially, of the very doubts and reservations expressed by those who pronounce, whether in tones of regret, certainty or skepticism, that America is not ready for Obama, or that Obama is not ready for the job, or that nobody of any worth or decency -- supposing there even to be such a person left on the American political scene -- can be expected to survive for a moment with his idealism and principle intact.

Guesses on the point of Obama's candidacy, anyone?

Before we leave, let's get to the title of piece and what Chabon means by a phobocracy. He tells us that America's sorry state isn't "the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan." No! It's soylent green! people! Specifically, us:

The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

Yes indeedy. To paraphrase some other great champion of massive government, there is no reason to fear an Obama presidency except fear itself:

Since I started talking and writing about Obama I have come to see that this ruling fear, and nothing else, lies at the back of every objection or reservation people raise or harbor regarding the man and his candidacy.

Not Obama's support of the Nanny State, not his desire to raise taxes, not his rigid staking out of far-left positions, no it's just ugly, irrational fear that holds us back from giving Obama a political bear hug. What kind of fear?

Fear whispers to us that white voters have a nasty tendency to tell pollsters, friends and neighbors that they support an African American candidate, then go into the voting booth and let the fear known as racism pull the lever.

Fear tells us that ugliness, rage and brutality are the central facts of human existence, that decency and tolerance are luxuries on whose altar our enemies will be only too happy to sacrifice us.

In case you missed it, Chabon just called you a racist, fully of ugliness, rage and brutality. Unless, of course, you're an Obama supporter; then you've captured the magic; you've drunk the KoolAid:

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead ...

Wait a minute! Up to this point, all Chabon has said is that if we don't support the man, we are, in his words, meritless, without hope, racist, brutal ... and we are to accept this man he is demagoging onto us?

... but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

Not once in this piece does Chabon get to how Obama is going to do any of this; nary a policy or position is mentioned. This is, instead, image politics played out to its dangerous, ridiculous extreme.

There are no good reasons to oppose the image Chabon has attached himself as a leech to. There are just good reasons to question the candidate behind the image, to suspect the reality behind the gleaming polish, and to (and I use this word advisedly) fear the results of electing an image as our next president.

The Most Ridiculous Story Of 2008?

Updated

We're off to an early start with the 2008 edition of "Most Ridiculous Story of the Year," with honors for being the first contender going to Gloria Steinem for her NYT op/ed today, Women are never front-runners.

She would probably call it sexist that I nominated a woman first. That's the tone of her tome.

Update: Of course, just a dozen or so hours after Steinem's op/ed appeared, Hillary's win in New Hampshire made the entire exercise moot. So as you read on, note how the ubber-feminist's entire piece takes on a tone of emotional hysteria not born out by facts. A female trait? I dare you to ask Steinem for an answer. (End of update)

(The rules for the competition are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.)

This piece certainly qualifies, starting with the title. Women are never front-runners? Really? How long was Hillary the front-runner in poll after poll from coast to coast? And wasn't she the front-runner when she ran for senate? What about our women governors -- weren't they front-runners?

The first step in a feminist screed op/ed is to flip the "always/never" button. It's been so effectively tried and tested true in domestic disputes since the dawn of time -- "You always leave the toilet seat up. You never help around the house." -- that Steinem is comfortable using it in her title.

She begins her narrative with a portrait of someone who shares Barack Obama's bio but happens to be a woman -- lawyer, former community organizer, married to a lawyer, mother of two, state legislator, black and "an inspirational voice for national unity" -- and asks the question, "Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate?"

Of course not, and it doesn't matter whether the person described is a man or a woman. Obama is even less qualified to be president than the global disaster that was Jimmy Carter and it's stunning that he's the front-runner for the Dem nomination. But that's not how Steinem sees it:

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

One study?! Oh please. Since when was one study conclusive of anything? Gloria, Honey, was the study done by feminazis female academicians?

Besides, I would argue that lack of intelligence, not gender, is the most most restricting force in American life. After all, the more intelligent George Bush beat the less intelligent John Kerry. Discrimination by race or gender -- and I would argue particularly by gender -- is a thing of the past in America ... unless you're running in Steinem's circle:

That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

I see, Obama won in Iowa because black men got the vote before women did. Illuminating. And disgraceful in how she diminishes the powerful role of women in our society from its beginnings onwards. The vote is not the only measure of a woman's power; ask Abigail Adams. But Steinem's not listening; instead, she's laying out the holy grail of sexism:

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; ...

In other words, those of us who look at the world around us and easily deduce that their are natural differences between men and women are sexists, which is why Hillary lost in Iowa.

... because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; ...

Name me something beyond prostate cancer that only affects males? Not football, not war, not despotism, not politics. Of course, we all know that breast cancer funding far outstrips prostate cancer funding.

... because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; ...

And women being the primary raisers of children is a bad thing? It is, if you hold to the mistaken belief that there are no real differences between men and women, but anyone who has noted that female breasts produce milk and men's don't will see the fallacy of the feminist point of view here.

Her latter point, that men regress into childhood when they see a strong woman, is very interesting; something I'd like to ask Dr. Sanity. My mother was a strong woman and my wife is a strong woman -- in fact, I know precious few weak women -- and I don't find myself reverting to childhood too often. Of course, Steinem probably thinks that getting excited about a football game is reverting to childhood (and crying while watching the latest Lifetime movie isn't).

... because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); ...

Steinem falls to long-dong racism. What the heck is "masculinity-affirming" anyway? Is getting a paycheck masculinity-affirming? Satisfying your wife? Chopping a cord of wood? Tuning a car? Opening a door for a feminist? What a ridiculous idea, and to think that I feel more like a man when the more than a little soft around the edges Barack Obama is around is ridiculousness squared. Hillary is much more masculinity-affirming.

... and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

Finally, a point I can nod along with ... except for Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto and a host of others who seem to have figured this out quite well.

Steinem then says Obama and Clinton can't argue during debates because:

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

So what are they supposed to do? Dainty minuets while the other candidates trounce them? Solidarity fist-thrusting while the other candidates actually discuss issues? The point is ridiculous, anyway. Abolition and sufferage happened to move forward in roughly the same century with many players in common -- but saying they were interdependent is historical revisionism and out of place even in this ridiculous column.

Lest you think that Steinem is supporting Clinton for no other reason than she's a woman, she provides the full list:

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule.

Check, check, check, what?! "No masculinity to prove?" I just don't get these feminists. Out of one side of their mouths, they say women and men are the same, out of the other, they say women should not show masculine trends, and out of the other (they do have three sides to their mouths), they ridicule women who act like women, i.e., feminine.

And she apparently feels women are too dumb and disengaged to apply their talent unless a woman is in office. Of course, Hillary's election would be an inspiration for women, but whether it would have a measurable impact would be questionable, since women are already thoroughly integrated into our society.

And is that what she did yesterday -- break the no tears rule? I don't think Steinem understands the rule. Muskee lost it because he was crying a "Woe is me!" cry, as Hillary was yesterday, as the realization that she just might lose hit her. Bush, on the other hand, wells up regularly and isn't hurt by it, because he cries for others, not himself: The wounded, the killed, the hurting. That, Gloria, is the no-tears rule; it has nothing to do with male or female.

She then launches into five "what worries me" statements:

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

If he's so unifying, why aren't blacks quick to rally around him? And to view Hillary as divisive by her sex is to ignore the Clinton legacy, the debacle that was her First Ladyhood (from health care to moms baking cookies), and her unique and divisive personality. Blame it all on sexism; it's easier.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

I just don't know who's making or not making these accusations. If there's any rap on the Obama campaign, it's that he's not addressing the black agenda.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

Who saw it this way? I heard cries that men couldn't support Hillary because they weren't ready for a woman president and I didn't hear any criticisms of women who supported candidates other than Hillary. They were perceived as individuals with brains, not feminists who blindly follow.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What Democratic presidential hopeful has not raised John F. Kennedy, and what commentator on Democratic candidates has not done so as well. I've heard no comparisons of Hillary to Jackie, for what it's worth.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

Or grow more conservative, if you buy the whole Washington insider rap against Hillary. But I do agree with Steinem in a general way. My mother has leaned more left as she's aged.

Done being a worrywart, she concludes:

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

Well, duh. And what's your point, then, Steinem? This is the year that both a woman and a black have run serious races for the first time so your sex and race points are already moot. It is becoming evident that two things are ringing Steinem's clock: That a black man is ahead of a white woman, and that George Bush (money, powerful fathers and paper degrees [as if there were any other kind!]).

So in the end, we see where it all begins: Strident feminism and strident liberalism in one package, one blinding the right side of the brain, the other blinding the left. We couldn't ask for a better example of why radical feminism is nearly dead, and deserves to die.

Of course the NYT ran it, since it is a repository of the ridiculous.

The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year

There were certainly more than four stories this year to qualify for "most ridiculous story of the year," but given that I didn't start chronicling them until April 25, and that I still have to actually work for a living, rather than read all I'd like to read, four it is.

The criteria for selection aren't easy to meet: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the nominees, in order of their original appearance in C-SM:

First, Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America in 10 easy steps." Wolf is, of course, the author of much ridiculousness, much of it ending up in The Guardian, which is a repository of such stuff. But in this piece, Wolf lets lose all her paranoid delusions, not stopping at merely comparing Bush to Hitler, but:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And ... George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

She then lists the ten steps Bush is supposedly following to turn America into a dictatorship, stuff like "Create a Gulag," "Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy," and "Develop a thug caste," in this case, "angry Republican men."

Never mind that mobs angry Republican men have not rounded up scores of Muslims (the internal/external threat) and sent them to Guantanamo (the Gulag), Wolf is, very ridiculously, convinced her home country -- which lets her write and publish this filth -- is becoming a police state.

Second, Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh in their WaPo column "We've Lost. Here's How To Handle It." Cuing off the June mosque bombings in Samarra and Basra, Simon and Takeyh decide:

The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains -- for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers -- is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose -- how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

The authors miss the obvious point: No one loses a war unless someone has won it -- and not realizing that makes everything that follows, in a word, ridiculous.

It's easy to read this in light of what's happened following the Surge, which proved the authors false again and again, as in this case:

U.S. troops can't beat the insurgency on their own; our forces are too few and too isolated to compete with the insurgents for the public's support.

It is obvious that al-Qaeda has lost the public's support and we helped that happen not by the sheer number of our troops, but by their sheer decency and al-Qaeda's sheer savagery.

But that's the easy critique, and hardly the most damning. That goes to Simon and Takeyh's dismissal of speculation that bloodshed would follow our retreat as "unknowable ... In fact, history suggests that the consequences of a U.S. defeat will not be that dire."

Unknowable? Not dire? Can you say Vietnam? Cambodia?

The two have a solution, though, that they say will make retreat very do-able and positive: Contain Iran; tamp down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and return to realism.

Oh, yeah. We'll use all our great new credibility, gained by letting al-Qaeda defeat us, to do just that.

Third, This is Your Brain on Politics, by Sharon Begley, an opinion writer for Newsweek, a book by Drew Westen of Emory University, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

The book itself is a disagreeable thing with a central thesis I generally agree with: Emotion trumps rationality in opinion formation. But Begley earned her nomination for using Westen's book as nothing more than a platform for her blind as a bat, emotionally over-amped Democratic bias.

She dismisses GOP policy and its appeal to large blocks of American voters:

After reading [the book] you won’t be surprised that Westen has been approached by the campaigns of “several” Democratic hopefuls (he is too discrete to say which) for advice on how to make use of findings about how the brain operates in the political arena. Why aren’t Republicans beating a path to his door? Because the GOP has already mastered the dark art of psych-ops—of pushing the right buttons in people’s brains to win their vote. (emphasis added)

Have you ever heard a GOP candidate say the Dems would kill Social Security if they were elected? And don't even get me started on playing the race card. Button-pushing is not a single party deal, but Begley is blinded to reality.

No, she sees Dem mind as a high-minded thing, "dispassionate, making decisions by rationally weighing evidence and balancing pros and cons."

Ridiculous.

Our fourth entry is Is Cheney About to Blow Up the Bay Bridge? from Gypsy Taub at the blog Politics of the Heart. I considered not entering this post in the contest because 9/11 Truthers Paranoid Schizophrenics are so overwhelmingly ridiculous it gives Taub an unfair head start.

But then I thought about die-hard Socialists, cut-and-run Dems and blind pundits like Begley, and I thought, "What the heck? Taub's got no head start with this bunch."

Taub apparently missed the fact that the Bay Bridge was damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, so a new bridge had to be built. (That earthquake occurred in 1989, a bit before (take your pick) Bush/terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.) As part of this process -- and of construction not going as planned -- the Bay Bridge was closed for four days in August.

I'm too harsh. Taub is aware of the earthquake ... it's just the conclusions he draws from it in his muddled mind:

Don’t quote me on this, but I have also heard that the old Bay Bridge is not earthquake stable, so if that is true [it is, my gypsy friend], then it sounds like the World Trade Center that needed to go because of all the asbestos that it was filled with.

Anyway, the bridge's temporary closing was enough to set off a Truther's Numskull's paranoid fantasies:

Bush’s term is coming to an end. The public is pushing to ban voting machines. The power of the Bush administration is deteriorating with major figures resigning, almost daily scandals on the news and constant threat of impeachment. Their only weapon is fear, it’s their last hope. I can see them really desperately needing a terrorist attack in the near future. 911 [I thought that was an emergency number] did them a great deal of good. 911 was, of course, the work of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and others connected tightly to the Bush administration.

This is a bit muddled. If Bush wants to stay in power, what do voting machines have to do with it? If he doesn't want to stay in power, why does he need to (it's hard to even type this) concoct another 9/11? Well, let's not let rational thought get in the way of the ridiculous:

Getting back to the Bay Bridge, it being shut down for 4 entire days sounds suspicious. They are also demolishing a section of the bridge, so that gives them a green light to bring in a demolition crew. According to their official website they are doing seismic safety work which can, as far as I understand, involve drilling holes in the structure to test it for safety. Also, the new bridge being close to finished would be a convenient time to blow up the old one [sic].

Got it. Close the bridge for four days so as not to raise suspicion, then put your Black Ops crews out in full sight of all to drill the holes. Oh, those tricky bastards! Taug goes on to accuse the Bush administration of crashing a fuel tanker so the 880 freeway in Oakland would collapse:

As soon as 880 collapsed the mainstream media [those famous Bush allies] started screaming about steel melting from fossil fuel fires and comparing it to 911. I knew they were going to say that. That seemed to be the whole purpose of this incident, to “prove” that the WTC really did collapse from the jet fuel fire.

Purpose? There are no accidents? And the Minnesota bridge collapse? A training exercise for the upcoming Oakland explosion, of course! Then, suddenly, a near brush with reality:

Having said all this I would like to hope that I am wrong, that it is indeed a legitimate bridge repair work. But if the bridge does get blown up in the near future don’t buy the “terrorist” story! Investigate, document, take pictures, samples of soil, water, anything and don’t let them institute marshal [sic] law or sign Patriot Act 3!

It didn't blow up; there were no charges of a new terror attack. And there's no "marshal" law ... yet.

So, which story is the most ridiculous?

Wolf, and her countdown to Bush's dictatorship?

Simon and Takeyh with their primer for a win/win defeat in Iraq?

Begley with her insights into the GOP and Dem mind?

Or Gypsy Taub, with his deep, deep insanity over police emergency numbers ... oh, I'm sorry, not 911, but 9/11.

I have to reject Taub because his rants are more bizarre than ridiculous and are too narrowly focused on the guilt of the Bush administration. He says nothing that is broadly applicable.

Simon and Takeyh get a pass because history has so quickly proved so much of what they wrote to be wrong. Yes, history has made them appear even more ridiculous, but it has also made it easier to gauge their ridiculousness.

Between Begley's blindness to her own prejudice, which is such a lovely metaphor for the greater MSM's blindness, and Wolf's senseless but vivid paranoia about Bush, it's a tough choice.

But Wolf gets the honors because she took the care to identify ten separate steps, a primer for despots, and figure out how to connect each to Bush. In the process, she managed to ignore the fact that the American democracy remains balanced and protected by its three branches and its no-nonsense public, and that a campaign for the next American president is in the works.

But mostly, Wolf won because she didn't share Begley's blindness to her prejudices ... she lays hers right out there, for all to see, and she glories in just how bright and insightful she is -- failing to see just how ridiculous she and her views are.

Congratulations, Naomi. Keep up the ridiculous work.

The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year? (4)

Normally (if you can even remotely apply that word), a 9/11 conspiracy story would come nowhere close to having the stuff to qualify for CSM's Most Ridiculous Story of the Year. These conspiracy yarns are far too trite, and besides, "looney" and "ridiculous" are not exact synonyms.

But leave it to the lunatic fringe to pull together so much paranoia, Bush hatred and bad physics to actually compose a story -- Is Cheney About to Blow Up the Bay Bridge? from Gypsy Taub at the blog Politics of the Heart -- that can clear the high hurdles and qualify.

(The rules for qualifying are this: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic. One could debate that Gypsy is not a serious writer, having posted only 20 posts to her blog since starting it in May. One could also debate whether this article is serious; I thought it first to be a lampoon, but amazingly it is not. Besides, the "one" who could argue these points is me, the sole arbiter, and I say it's in.)

Let's get on with it, then:

Having been a 911 truth activist for 5 years, I have serious suspicions about the Bay Bridge being closed for [an] entire 4 days.

There has been a lot of threats of terrorist attacks coming form [sic] the government. Looks like they are preparing the public. Or else it could be their usual scare tactics.

On the other hand, Bush’s term is coming to an end. The public is pushing to ban voting machines. The power of the Bush administration is deteriorating with major figures resigning, almost daily scandals on the news and constant threat of impeachment. Their only weapon is fear, it’s their last hope. I can see them really desperately needing a terrorist attack in the near future. 911 did them a great deal of good. 911 was, of course, the work of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and others connected tightly to the Bush administration.

So we begin with the apparent supposition that Bush does not want to leave office in Jan. 08 -- why else would he bother with an attack? But if he wants to stay in office, why the line about the voting machines? He wouldn't need voting machines to stay in office; he'd need a military coup.

And yes, there is constant talk of impeachment, but really, constant threat? The alleged sins of Bush are now five and six years in the past; if no impeachment has happened yet, when are we expecting the train to arrive in the station?

Gypsy then drivels a bunch of 9/11 theory -- or as she quaintly puts it, "911" theory -- which I won't bother with, because she could do that all day and never achieve "Most Ridiculous" status. We then pick up again here:

Getting back to the Bay Bridge, it being shut down for 4 entire days sounds suspicious. They are also demolishing a section of the bridge, so that gives them a green light to bring in a demolition crew. According to their official website they are doing seismic safety work which can, as far as I understand, involve drilling holes in the structure to test it for safety. Also, the new bridge being close to finished would be a convenient time to blow up the old one [sic].

Got it. Close the bridge for four days so as not to raise suspicion, then put your Black Ops crews out in full sight of all to drill the holes. Oh, those tricky bastards!

Of course, she might have read this at the Oakland Bay Bridge Web site and not written a post at all:

Oakland, Calif., Monday, September 03, 2007 - The Labor Day Weekend closure of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge will end at 6:00 p.m. this evening, with the span re-opening 11 hours ahead of schedule.

The bridge was closed in both directions to allow workers to demolish a 350-ft. section of upper-deck roadway just east of the Yerba Buena Island tunnel and to replace it with a new seismically safe segment that was constructed on an adjacent site and rolled into place early this morning. This segment is the first permanent piece of the new East Span that motorists will drive across.

But we have to remember: Nothing the government says can be trusted.

Point of information: The old Oakland Bay Bridge was not seismically sound; a section of roadway tipped in the 7.0 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. That's why a new replacement bridge has been built next to the old one Gypsy's so concerned about. But she wouldn't want to be quoted on anything like that:

Don’t quote me on this, but I have also heard that the old Bay Bridge is not earthquake stable, so if that is true [it is, my dear], then it sounds like the World Trade Center that needed to go because of all the asbestos that it was filled with. Cleaning it up would have cost an enormous amount of money that no one was willing to pay. In other words, it sounds like the Bay Bridge is a good candidate for a “terrorist attack” just like the WTC was.

So, leaving aside the fact that there is no need to remove asbestos unless it is going to be disturbed, and leaving aside the fact that it's only disturbed during a remodel so abatement would occur one suite at a time, and leaving aside the fact that quite a lot of the WTC was built after asbestos was banned and has no asbestos, and leaving aside the fact that the cost of removing asbestos from the WTC was minimal compared to the value of the building, we have a theory emerging: The old bay bridge was no longer needed, so Bush would blow it up to stay in power.

Was the Pentagon also no longer needed? Just asking.

Unable to sustain this story for too long, Gypsy launches into a fresh new "Bush the terrorist" angle, tied to another Bay Area infrastructure disaster (she's a San Francisco "media activist," so she knows this stuff):

Another thing that raises suspicion is the collapse of highway 880 in Oakland this past April and the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge. As far as I am concerned 880 was an inside job. Gas doesn’t melt steel otherwise your engine in your car would have long since melted. Because of 911 it became a well known fact that steel melts at a much higher temperature than gas burns. The story that I read online about the collapse is full of inconsistencies.

Why would Bush set a fuel tanker on fire as a cover for a pre-planned demolition of the 880? Do you really have to ask?

As soon as 880 collapsed the mainstream media started screaming about steel melting from fossil fuel fires and comparing it to 911. I knew they were going to say that. That seemed to be the whole purpose of this incident, to “prove” that the WTC really did collapse from the jet fuel fire. The 911 truth movement used the impossibility of such a phenomenon as a proof of government complicity and cover up. So this was possibly meant to disprove this point.

You would have figured this out too if only you'd realized that the MSM are in cahoots with Bush and the silent Black Ops figures that really pulled off 9/11.

And Minneapolis?

I can see these events being a rehearsal to test out a bridge demolition by “terrorists.” I just talked to Eric Hufschmid and he said that the Minneapolis bridge collapse looks a lot like the 880 collapse in Oakland, very suspicious.

Got it. It's all rehearsals. I wonder what major building collapse we should look to as the rehearsal for 9/11. Maybe the Bush administration was behind the Las Vegas boom, so all those old casino hotels would have to be replaced, giving them a lot of opportunity to plan for 9/11. It would be just like them.

I don't even know how to introduce Gypsy's next paragraph, so here goes:

Also realize that both the mayor of San Francisco (Gavin Newsom) and the state government (the legendary Schwarznegger) [sic] are both unelected puppets installed by Bush and Co.

Geez. I thought Gray Davis' incompetence led to Schwarzenegger's election ... and didn't he beat Phil Angelides in 2006 all by himself? Maybe I'm naive.

As for Newsome, he has been winning elections since 1998 without any help from Bush (or so I thought). Perhaps Gypsy's alluding to the fact that former SF Mayor Willie Brown, a notoriously wheeling and dealing Dem, appointed Newsome to the SF board of supervisors way back in 1996 -- showing Bush's incredible reach. Four years before he was elected president, he was able to get Willie Brown to place Newsome on the board, so that years later Newsome could support gay marriage, thereby solidifying the GOP base. Look how well it worked out for the GOP in 2006!

Let's wrap this up, shall we?

So, the Bay Bridge is between a rock and a hard place. It would be very easy to imagine an investigation being made impossible if the bridge did get blown up by so called “terrorists.”

Having said all this I would like to hope that I am wrong, that it is indeed a legitimate bridge repair work. But if the bridge does get blown up in the near future don’t buy the “terrorist” story! Investigate, document, take pictures, samples of soil, water, anything and don’t let them institute marshal [sic] law or sign Patriot Act 3!

Gee, and here I thought that if the Bay Bridge went and got itself all blown up, we'd all just say, "Shoot, there go those darn terrorists again!" and not investigate it at all.

It must be very hard for Gypsy to through life knowing all the world is crazed and she's the only one who's sane enough to see it.

See also:
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year?
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year? (2)
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year? (3)

hat-tip: memeorandum; Bridge photo: Jimgris

The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year? (3)

Fast on the heels of our second nominee for Most Ridiculous Story of the Year comes This is Your Brain on Politics, by Sharon Begley, an opinion writer for Newsweek.

It definitely fits the rules for a nomination: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.

The piece is actually a review of a book by Drew Westen of Emory University, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” I don't disagree with Westen's s central finding as enunciated by Begley, which is that in the mechanics of opinion-formation, emotion trumps rationality. I see it daily in my work, which basically involves the formation and changing of public opinion, where rational approaches work, but take time to work. Emotional approaches are the microwave ovens of public opinion formation.

Granted, my agreement with Westen ends at the statement of his hypothesis. I find the illustrations he uses preposterous, like this one:

“People were drawn to Reagan [in the 1980 presidential race] because they identified with him, liked his emphasis on values over policy, trusted him, and found him authentic in his beliefs. It didn’t matter that they disagreed with most of his policy positions.”

People had just seen what a liberal Democrat could destroy in just four years, so Reagan's rational connection was very strong. People liked what he said. Plain, sensible, strong, American, conservative values didn't just sound good after Carter; they rang the rational bells because it was easy to understand that Reagan made sense and Carter didn't.

Westen aside, Begley earned her nomination for the commentary she provided, since she used Westen's book as nothing more than a platform for her blind as a bat, emotionally over-amped Democratic bias.

I wasn't even on the second click when Begley stopped me in my tracks, looping me back for a re-read of this:

After reading [the book] you won’t be surprised that Westen has been approached by the campaigns of “several” Democratic hopefuls (he is too discrete to say which) for advice on how to make use of findings about how the brain operates in the political arena. Why aren’t Republicans beating a path to his door? Because the GOP has already mastered the dark art of psych-ops—of pushing the right buttons in people’s brains to win their vote.

Here I always thought the GOP was the boring party.

Isn't it the Dems who threaten seniors with impending starvation every election, cajoling them to vote Democratic because "the Republicans want to kill Social Security?" Have I ever heard a Republican say he wants to kill Social Security? No?

Isn't it the Dems who play the race card in every black precinct, saying the GOP wants to take away the black man's right to vote?

Isn't it the Dems who papered colleges across the country with scary tales about how the GOP would reinstate the draft? And wasn't it a certain Dem Congressman who actually submitted that particular bill?

Despite these convincing examples, Begley insists that the Dems just don't get the whole idea of making emotional appeals.

Instead, their strategists start from an 18th-century vision of the mind as dispassionate, making decisions by rationally weighing evidence and balancing pros and cons. That assumption is a recipe for high-minded campaigning—and, often, electoral failure.

Yeah, that sure paints a picture of the chairman of the Democratic party, Howard Dean. Dispassionate, rational, balanced. Chuck Schumer, Dennis Kucinich, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Waxman, Maxine Powers, Ted Kennedy -- yeah, they're all a bunch of wonks who are so lost in rational thought and couldn't make an emotional attack if they had to.

What's' interesting about Begley is that she's so emotion-driven herself, as is evident in this passage:

The same forces were at work in 2004, when pollsters found that voters in small-town America placed more weight on issues unlikely to directly affect their lives, such as terrorism and violent crime and gay marriage in Massachusetts, than on those that were, such as mine safety. Positions on issues matter to the extent they incite voters’ emotions.

Notice how the issues she feels are "unlikely to affect their lives" are GOP issues. The fact that Dem issues are likely to affect their lives -- higher taxes, more government, more welfare bums around town -- and the impact that has on voters seems to be lost on Begley.

She can't imagine the GOP issues affecting her life, so she emotionally concludes that everyone thinks like her. But in small town America, folks remember 9/11. They have sons and daughters in the military. They go to church and hold marriage in high esteem. And they care about Americans, even its crackpot big city intellectuals like Begley, so they don't want them to get blown up by a terrorist.

Where exactly she got "mine safety" as something people in small towns would be concerned about is pretty quaint.

Even her parentheticals are pathetic:

(In 2000 the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, famously hostile toward federal intervention in state matters, overturned the decision of the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore and put the former in the White House. Go figure.)

The Supreme Court is famously hostile toward federal intervention in state matters? Really? Could someone explain Roe v. Wade to me? Brown v. Board of Education? And it was mere emotions that drove a Supreme Court that did not yet have two Bush appointees on it to rule against Gore?

Wow. Go figure. But then, even with my understanding of how effective emotions are, I guess I'm just not getting the concept. As an experiment, let's try to keep the people out of it. Let's look at an initiative, like Arnold's package of infrastructure bonds last year in CA. Arnold's got a heck of a personality and he tried to emote like crazy all over these propositions.

But I considered them carefully and ended up voting for a couple and not voting for the rest. Begley doesn't think I could do that.

Because emotions are central to beliefs and values, if an appeal is purely rational it is unlikely to tickle the emotional brain circuits that affect what we do in the voting booth.

She's done it. She's proved what I've always held -- that liberals are driven by emotion, whereas conservatives are more practical and rational. And she's done it by trying to convince us that the GOP has emotions down pat while they're a bunch of boring nebbishes -- and everything she's said to prove her point is drenched in emotions.

Next: A bit more on Westen's draft talking points for the Dems -- ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as Begley's review.

See also:
The Most Ridiculous Story of the Year
The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year? (2)

hat-tip: Soccer Dad

The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year?

There's a new file in my del.icio.us bookmark files: Ridiculous. Yes, I'm starting a little collection of work serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settles heavily into the imbecilic.

The inspiration for this new collection came from a source that should surprise no one, since UK's leftist The Guardian is a regular repository of the ridiculous. But they outdid themselves with Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America in 10 easy steps."

Wolf, an American with utterly no comprehension of America, has this thesis:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And ... George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

Wolf has defined 10 steps that any good megalomaniac general would undertake to crush a democracy and seize power, and then she sees W hard at work behind all 10.

Here's the Readers' Indigestion of her piece:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy, in which W nefariously uses 9/11 and some pixie dust to dupe Congress into passing the Patriot Act.

And, even worse, Bush has gotten us into a war that has no clearly defined end. Unlike the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, all of which apparently always had clearly defined end-dates early on. The Dems should take a tip from Dennis Miller and stamp each new conflict with an expiration date.

2. Create a gulag, as mentioned earlier. Here's what Wolf has to say:

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

Just a couple days I wrote about the real torture of three missionaries in Turkey at the hand of some Islamofascists:

"He had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum, and his back," Ugras said. "His fingers were sliced to the bone.

"It is obvious that these wounds had been inflicted to torture him," he said.

People like Wolf not only destroy all respect for pundits, they destroy perfectly good words like "torture." And speaking of words, it might help clarify her thinking if she looks up "prisoner of war" in her dictionary of choice. She will find that detention with an uncertain term, i.e., the uncertain term of all wars, is standard procedure.

3. Develop a thug caste. The Brownshirts! It's true! Didn't you know?

Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.

And under Clinton, groups of angry old Democratic men and women, dressed in identical polyester, couldn't figure out butterfly ballots, throwing America into chaos. Hey, it's as likely to destroy America as some group of GOP kids -- or the Dem kids in Wisconsin who slashed GOP tires on election day. But they weren't wearing the same kind of shirts.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system. You know this one already. The NSA program to scan data -- not voices -- of international calls to or from terrorist locales. From this action, which unfortunately had to be stopped when the order came down, Wolf leaps to this:

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

Yep, that's America under Bush for you. I'm sure you've felt it too.

And it goes on through six others, including some hilarious laughers like "Control the press."

And who are the heroes standing between W and a totalitarian America? Why it's "a handful of patriots" like the Center for Constitutional Rights, which defends the bloodthirsty terrorists, incarcerated at Guantanamo ... er, the gulag ... and the ACLU. Oh, and the Europeans, whose help she feels we desperately need.

God save us.

Please forward any nominees for consideration.