slacktivist

Block the Vote

Writing in The Guardian (UK), Brad Friedman offers a succinct summary of what he calls the "Republican voter fraud hoax." This is one of the best overviews I've found of the ACORN nonsense and what's really at stake, so I'm going to quote a big chunk of that here:

It's an old Republican scam, but it's never been carried out with more zeal than this year. ...

The only actual crime here is that ACORN managed to register some 1.3 million low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up.

But in the bloody and desperate trenches of the Republican war on democracy, that's more than enough to kick in a last minute surge of lies that may -- with the help of a compliant and lazy corporate U.S. media -- wreak enough havoc, scare enough voters, confuse enough people and plant enough seeds to call an Obama victory into doubt on Nov. 4.

If you can't win it, steal it. If you can't steal it, claim the other guy stole it. If you can't claim the other guy stole it (yet), say they're about to and then kick up smoke that maybe someone will believe you. (Heckuva job, CNN.)

Here are the facts. ACORN verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by ACORN, it's because ACORN itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "ACORN is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

You'll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That's true. And we know this, why? Because ACORN told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won't hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won't be voting this November. You needn't worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.

Now House Minority Leader John Boehner is jumping on the bandwagon, spreading the lies about ACORN he hopes will keep poor and black voters away from the polls.

But Boehner also has something much more ambitious in mind. He's trying to do to the FBI what Alberto Gonzales tried to do to the Justice Department: conscript it into the permanent GOP election machine.

"House GOP leader asks Bush to cut off ACORN funds," the Associated Press reports:

Boehner on Wednesday urged President Bush to block all federal funds to a grass-roots community group that has been accused of voter registration fraud. ...

Boehner said his office had determined that ACORN had received more than $31 million in direct federal funding since 1998. He said the group had likely received far more indirectly through federal block grants to states and localities. "Immediate action is necessary to ensure that no additional tax dollars are directed to ACORN while it is under investigation," he wrote Bush.

So Boehner wants to keep federal funds out of the hands of ACORN. That's simple enough for the $3 million or so that Boehner says the group receives directly, but the real target here is that other money -- the funds ACORN receives indirectly, through block grants from states and municipalities. To prevent such block grants from benefitting ACORN "while it is under investigation," Boehner apparently would amend the rules for such grants to bar funds from use by groups "under investigation."

You see where this is going?

ACORN's voter registration efforts benefit Boehner's political opponents, so he and his party -- acting as his party and not as public, government officials -- arrange to have ACORN placed "under investigation." Next they want to change the rules so that no community groups that are "under investigation" can receive community block grants. The step after that, of course, is to evaluate which other community groups are doing work that might be perceived as supporting Boehner's political opponents and then to have them also placed "under investigation," and thus disqualified from any public funding.

The agency doing all of this placing under investigation at Boehner's behest would be the FBI. John Boehner is trying to turn the FBI into a political tool of the GOP campaign.

Note: "Place under investigation" is usually just a circuitous, bureaucratic and belabored way of saying "investigate," but in this case these are not quite the same thing. Republicans have contrived to have ACORN "placed under investigation" every two years or so because that serves their goal. It allows local Republican law enforcement officials to hold press conferences expressing their "concern" that new voters, too, are "under investigation," that newly registered voters are guilty until proven innocent. It allows these Republicans with badges to warn those new voters -- especially, you know, the black ones -- that there will be a law enforcement presence at the polls, and that these officers will be instructed to ensure that none of you people tries anything funny.

And then, quietly, a couple of weeks from now, ACORN will be, um, un-placed under investigation, or placed out from under investigation, or whatever the antonym is of this bureaucratese.

This won't mean the investigation has been concluded, because there won't really ever be an investigation. Republicans don't need or want any actual investigating to take place because they already know there's nothing to investigate.

Payroll tax

Let's try to imagine, shall we, that John McCain is not a dishonest con man deliberately heaping scorn on every American who earns a paycheck. Let's try to imagine, instead, that he is telling the truth about what he knows and understands when he suggests, as he has all week, that income taxes are the largest and only tax facing working Americans.

I can't really say that this would mean giving McCain the benefit of the doubt, because it would require a staggering, incomprehensible stupidity on his behalf to have spent more than two decades in the Senate without learning that the payroll tax exists, or that it, and not the income tax, is the largest share of the tax burden for 7 out of 10 American workers. To accuse the senator of such staggering ignorance seems to me even more insulting than to assume the simpler, more logical explanation -- that he's just a bastard who doesn't give a rip about the actual day-to-day expenses of working families and that he is willing to say the most ridiculous and absurd lies if he thinks it might improve his standing in the polls.

But as I said, let's pretend. Let's pretend that this simpler and likelier explanation isn't the case, and that John McCain really, truly believes what he is saying -- that taxes refers only to income taxes.

What would that mean for those whose job it is to brief the senator on the issues? What sorts of conversations must be occurring backstage at his rallies this week?

JM: Boy the crowd loved that bit about the evils of tax cuts for the middle class.

AIDE: Yes, sir.

JM: They especially liked the bit where I rolled my eyes and got all sarcastic about That One's tax cuts for people who don't even pay taxes.

AIDE: Well, yes sir, but you know, actually, they do pay taxes. Everybody who gets a paycheck pays the payroll tax, and ...

JM: The what now?

AIDE: The payroll tax, sir.

JM: Play dough fax?

AIDE: Uh, no sir. The payroll tax.

JM: Made of wax?

AIDE: Payroll tax.

JM: Potato sacks?

AIDE: Payroll tax, sir. It's the biggest burden on most work --

JM: Day-old snacks?

AIDE: Now you're just messing with me, aren't you sir?

JM: Let's roll craps!

AIDE: Sir.

JM: I just don't understand where you're getting this from, son. Taxes means income taxes. Everybody knows that. They're whaddya call it? Cinnamons.

AIDE: Synonyms, sir. And actually, no, you see the Social Security Trust Fund is --

JM: Slush fund?

AIDE: OK, I'll give you that one. That's actually kind of true. But the trust fund is paid for with --

JM: With Reagan's tax-cut in 1982. You may be too young to remember that, son, but Reagan cut taxes in 1982, thus increasing revenue enough to create the Social Security slush fund.

AIDE: Reagan cut income taxes, sir. But he paid for that income tax cut with a corresponding increase -- the biggest tax-increase in American history, sir -- a corresponding increase in the payroll tax.

JM: Day-glo racks?

AIDE: I ... I don't even know what that means, sir.

JM: Balderdash!

AIDE: (sighs) Yes, sir.

Local news

Been putting together the paper's online "Voter's Guide," getting ready for Election Day.

We've got an overview article on every major local race -- statewide offices, both houses of the Legislature, the county councils and the city councils for some of the larger cities ("larger" in relative, Delawarean terms). These are accompanied by brief bios of each of the candidates, plus the candidates' responses to a questionnaire sent out by the paper.

Putting this project together is a lot of work, but I enjoy being part of it. It's important. We're providing side-by-side information on the candidates up for election, giving voters a place to see the candidates' positions on the issues spelled out in the candidates' own words  so that voters can make an informed decision when they step into the voting booth. This is the kind of thing that newspapers are for.

Now our paper has its problems -- it's part of the largest nationwide chain, so we're always struggling against the Wal-Martization of the newspaper business -- but we take this particular job seriously and we do an OK job putting this Voter's Guide together.

We have to take our role here seriously because we don't have an understudy. We're the only statewide paper. There's a half-hour PBS program on Delaware news and a couple of AM radio stations (plus an increasing number of informative blogs), but the paper -- for better or worse -- is really the dominant player in covering news in the state. For most voters in Delaware, finding out where the candidates stand on the issues means turning to our coverage and our Voter's Guide.

You might think, then, that the state Democratic and Republican committees would also be taking this Voter's Guide seriously. But, inexplicably, they're not. The candidates, at every level, have apparently been left to their own devices to answer the questionnaire as best they can, however they see fit.

On the one hand, this is kind of refreshing. The candidates' answers are often idiosyncratic and off-the-cuff and that can provide a more genuine sense of the individual candidates' perspectives than one usually encounters in the scripted talking points recited by party surrogates on cable news. A little spontaneity and individuality is nice to see.

But on the other hand, as far as the state parties are concerned, this is incredibly sloppy, disorganized, unfocused and undisciplined. The answers vary wildly from candidate to candidate within each party. Even on very specific questions about local issues, it's very hard to discern from the individual candidates' disparate and sometimes contradictory answers what either party's position might be. I'm not saying I'd prefer a parliamentary style emphasis on rigid party discipline, but it'd be nice to be able to infer something from the D or the R listed after a candidate's name on the ballot.

There's also the matter of the widely varying quality and coherence of some of the candidates' answers. Many are thoughtful, informed and well-argued. Many are not. Some candidates never even managed to respond to the questionnaire.

You would think the state committees of both parties would want to ensure that their candidates are all briefed on these issues, conversant with the parties' respective positions on them, and able to provide respectable and persuasive answers. The paper's questionnaire is not a pop quiz -- candidates have time to respond, in writing, with whatever assistance they want or need to seek. The fact that so many of them don't seem to have found any such assistance tells me that the state party committees have been negligent in providing, or insisting on, that kind of help for their candidates who needed it.

The paper's Voter's Guide is too important and too influential a source of free media exposure in the First State for it to be so neglected by the state parties. I'm astonished that neither party seems to have provided their slate of candidates with a sample questionnaire listing generic Republican or Democratic responses to these questions, along with basic background information on the issues discussed. If either party did do that, I can't find any evidence of it from the candidates' responses.

I can, of course, imagine the opposite problem --- nearly identical questionnaires from every candidate repeating almost verbatim their official party lines. I wouldn't want to see that happen either, but at least that would show me that the local parties are concerned about their respective brands or, less cynically, that they both stand for something.

Maybe the local parties do stand for something now, but neither one has proved able to communicate whatever that might be to their entire slate of candidates, let alone to the voting public. Again, many of the candidates from both parties have done a capable job on their own of responding to the Voter's Guide questionnaire. But candidates shouldn't have to do this on their own. The state parties need to get their act together.

Hazy cosmic jive

I've been immensely encouraged by John McCain's attacks on Barack Obama's record and his character.

McCain's campaign has had months during which to dig up all the dirt they could find on Obama and this is all they've got. Really? Bill Ayers? A half-assed attempt at guilt by fleeting association. That's it?

For a while there I figured this had to be a feint of some kind, a decoy, a quick jab to set up the roundhouse blow McCain's people hoped to deliver when they revealed the real dirt -- something actually substantial and legitimate. But nope, they apparently couldn't find anything substantial or legitimate. The debates have come and gone and now it's clear that this is all they've got. All that research and nothing. They got nothin'.

Then again, this research was conducted by the same set of bozos who vetted Sarah Palin -- the same people who didn't realize that Joe the Plumber was actually Sam the Xenophobic Non-Plumber. So their failure to find any substantial problems with Barack Obama is less reassuring than if this research had been conducted by a competent campaign.

* * *

News Item: Palin to appear on SNL this weekend

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is set to appear this weekend on "Saturday Night Live" skriiiitch with host Josh Brolin, the star of director Oliver Stone's new movie about President Bush. ...

The Alaska governor has skriiitch been the thump subject of a popular "SNL" parody featuring lookalike actress Tina Fey, a former "SNL" cast member who stars in the NBC sitcom "30 Rock."

Whether Palin and Fey will thumpthump appear together Saturday was not announced. Jill thumpthumpTHUMP Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for McCain's campaign, confirmed Friday that THUMPTHUMPcrrraaaaack

Oh my God! Run! It's zombie John Belushi returned from the grave and he's mad as hell!

This sort of thing would never have been allowed if Lorne Michaels were still alive.

* * *

I've been reading Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution (thank you, whoever it is I should thank for its mysterious but very welcome arrival), and came across his discussion of Benjamin Franklin's original proposal for a motto for the seal of the United States.

Franklin wanted the seal to read, "Opposition to tyranny is obedience to God." Walzer amends the idea slightly. Opposition to tyranny, he writes, is the imitation of God.

That's a beautiful distinction. Unfortunately, this means I now have to track down my old seminary prof and find out if it's too late to rewrite that paper I did on the cave at Engedi and the Valley of Jezreel.

Anyway, if you're familiar with Walzer, it's probably due to his Just and Unjust Wars, which is probably the definitive book on that subject. If you're not familiar with him, let me recommend both of these titles.

His study of/retelling of/reflection on the book of Exodus might also provide a bit of useful parenting advice. When you find that "Because I said so," seems unsatisfying, try, "Because you, too, were strangers in Egypt."

* * *

I watched the candidates at last night's Al Smith banquet as they both capably delivered some decent material written for them for the occasion (Crooks & Liars has the video here and here). Polite, toothless fun, which is just what is called for on such an occasion.

The reason that Gov. Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live is disappointing is that SNL once aspired to be something more than polite, toothless fun. Nowadays they seem content to be the Ready for Primetime Players. Instead of being, in principle, anti-establishment, they now aspire to be the establishment.

The invitation to Palin seems to be an attempt at "balance," but balance is not the satirist's or the comic's job. Harmlessly spoofing "both sides" so that no one is ever really offended does not make one a fair-minded, non-partisan satirist, it simply makes one a bad satirist. And a cowardly one.

SNL's problem these days is similar to the problem that George Orwell diagnoses at the end of David Copperfield. There, Orwell says, Dickens betrays what it is that sets him apart as a writer, namely:

... his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has got to change sides when the underdog becomes an upperdog, and in fact Dickens does tend to do so. ... Whenever he departs from this emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending of David Copperfield, in which everyone who reads it feels that something has gone wrong. What is wrong is that the closing chapters are pervaded, faintly but not noticeably, by the cult of success ... Dickens has ‘turned respectable’ and done violence to his own nature.

As a general rule, comics and satirists must also be always and everywhere on the side of the underdog. To invite the upperdogs -- or the wanna-be upperdogs -- to be your guests, reassuring them that they have nothing to fear from you, is to go astray. Everyone who sees it feels that something has gone wrong.

* * *

P.S.: I just read A.O. Scott's lukewarm review of What Just Happened. This section of that may cut closer to the something that has gone wrong (or has always been wrong) with SNL.

... True satire works correctively and by antithesis, arriving at an implication of virtue through the faithful representation of vice. In other words, it is not enough to expose shallowness and duplicity unless you have some notion of what depth or honesty might look like. And this movie fails to be as funny as it should be because it has no idea of what to take seriously. ...

Walking

Ma'am, I am tonight

"Walking Contradiction," Green Day
"Walking Down Your Street," The Bangles
"Walking in Memphis," Mark Cohn
"Walking Man," James Taylor
"Walking on a Thin Line," Huey Lewis & The News
"Walking on Sunshine," Me First & the Gimme Gimmes
"Walking on the Spot," Crowded House
"Walking the Dog," Rufus Thomas
"Walking to New Orleans," Fats Domino
"Walking With a Ghost," Tegan and Sara
"Walking With Jesus," The Muslims

Racism and litigation

How very strange it is these days to hear Sen. John McCain and his surrogates constantly vacillating between calls for (undefined) "Reform!" and scapegoating condemnations of "Reform Now."

What do they want? Reform!

And when do they want it? Not now.

If you're not a racist bastard living in the fever-dream of a post-fact surreality, then you'll appreciate this summary of the confusions and distortions in the latest round of ritual attacks and scapegoating leveled at ACORN.

And no, it's not an overstatement or an uncharitable characterization to say that anyone swallowing this ACORN-scapegoating is insane and a racist bastard. This is a baseless assertion that begins with the argument that poor people and black people are the powers that be in America -- that they run the show. That's insane. It's laughable on its face to anyone not infected by the voluntary mental illness of old-fashioned American racism.

It's also worth pointing out that former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez may one day wind up in prison for his role in promoting this crazy racist lie. His Justice department, at the behest of Karl Rove, tried to enlist the nation's U.S. Attorneys to help promote this myth of the All Powerful ACORN. Eight of them -- all Republicans -- refused because these "voter fraud" allegations were baseless and there seemed to be no legal point to them, only a political attempt to intimidate black voters, scaring them away from the polls.

This is the kind of desperation move you only resort to if you're convinced there's no other way for your party to win at the polls. It's not surprising, then, that the Republicans are pushing this ACORN nonsense now. They're looking at the same numbers as the rest of us, and what they saw during the primaries had to have them spooked.

Here, in graph form, are some figures from the primary season earlier this year (all from here). First, a look at total Republican votes cast (in red) vs. total Democratic votes cast (in blue) in six swing states:

I'm not cherry picking six lopsided states to make this look worse than it is for the Republicans. If I'd had more time, I could have made many more of these. I find all that blue rather delightful.

Here's another pie chart showing the total Republican/Democratic votes cast in all six states, plus one that's even worse news for the GOP. The graph on the right below shows the total votes cast for the Republican winner vs. the total votes cast for the Democratic runner-up. So, yes, that's right -- throughout the primaries, the candidate who lost the Democratic primary still received a lot more total support than the winner of the Republican primary.

In these six states, in fact, the Democratic runners-up received more total votes than all of the Republican candidates combined (3,882,147 to 3,875,813).

So what's a Republican campaign strategist to do?

First, of course, you have to try to increase the size of that red portion in terms of absolute numbers. You have to try to increase Republican voter turnout by getting voters who lean your way more excited about your candidate.

That's part of what it seems the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate was intended to do. For at least one block of GOP voters, I think it worked. Evangelical Republicans were, at best, tepidly supportive of John McCain. Some were openly hostile to him. Palin's Pentecostal roots and -- more importantly -- her credentials as a zealous abortion opponent helped to fire up evangelicals and to get them behind John McCain.

Unfortunately, that doesn't change the dynamic reflected in the graphs above. The red portion of those graphs isn't just John McCain's supporters, but all of the Republican voters in those primaries -- including the Mike Huckabee-supporting evangelical voters now reclaimed by the selection of Sarah Palin. Firing up the base doesn't change the dynamic reflected in those graphs because what they show is the gap between the size of the Republican base and the size of the Democratic base.

Just consider the example of Ohio. More than 600,000 new voters registered in Ohio to participate in the primary elections. As the graph above shows, these new voters were overwhelmingly Democratic. It's as though the entire population of Vermont just moved to Cleveland. Firing up the Huckabee faction by choosing Palin doesn't do anything to change that, which brings us to Strategy No. 2.

The next hope for Republican strategists was that the Democratic primaries would leave their opponents so fractured and divided that some of the blue portion of the graphs above would turn red. Sure, it's devastating for the GOP to contemplate that the Democratic runners-up still outpolled the combined total of the entire Republican field, but what if the supporters of those runners-up could be peeled away and added to that Republican total?

This isn't a terribly plausible scenario, once you start to think about it a bit. The Democratic primaries were hard-fought, but nowhere near contentious enough to cause core members of the Democratic constituency to turn away from all of the issues they care about and support the other side out of spite. The idea here, essentially, is to fire up the other side's base in the hopes that they will then switch sides. Not a promising idea.

But Republicans gave it their best try. They spent months pushing the narrative that huge numbers of disaffected Clinton supporters were somehow up for grabs. This culminated in a weird ritual interview conducted dozens of times over at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The reporters all set out to find some of these disaffected Clinton supporters and, failing to do so, they wound up interviewing people who had voted for Hillary in the primaries but who were now, like Clinton herself, squarely backing Obama.

"Still though," the reporters said, "in theory, you must agree that it's possible that somewhere there might be Clinton supporters who are so angry after the primaries that they're now willing to vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on every issue just for, like, revenge or something."

"I guess, in theory," the interviewees all conceded. "It's possible that such people might exist. I just haven't met any myself."

Dozens of interviews like that in every newspaper and on every cable news program. The idea of peeling away Clinton supporters was thus a runaway success as a media meme and a talking point for pundits. As an electoral strategy, though, it turned out to be a miserable failure.

The last gasp of that strategy was also apparently the idea that the Palin selection would help to win over those who had voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries. The idea seemed to be that, you know, they're both, um, women?

In that regard, the Palin pick was a disaster. It turns out that Clinton supporters weren't charmed by the insulting insinuation that their candidate had nothing to offer beyond her gender. And the contrast between the two women's respective qualifications and talents did not flatter the McCain ticket.

So with the failure of strategies No. 1 and No. 2 to change the lopsided dynamic seen in those graphs above, what's left for the GOP?

Well, they could try to win voters on the merits of their policy positions, but such an attempt doesn't seem to have occurred to them. It's just not the way Republicans run nowadays. "Who do I look like," they ask, "Al Gore?" And anyway, let's give the voters some credit -- the graphs above likely reflect that voters have already evaluated the policy positions of the two parties and their preference, in that regard, seems to be clear.

So what else is there? Not much. There's personal biography and character. Unfortunately the graphs above already account for that as well. When this long, long campaign started, voters generally regarded John McCain as an impressive guy, but they still weren't going to vote for him.

So that leaves the GOP strategists, apparently, with race-baiting and dirty tricks. And that is where we find ourselves today.

Thus, in the midst of an unprecedented and vastly consequential global financial crisis, we have witnessed a Republican campaign dominated by conspiracy theories about 1960s radicals and the flagrant racism of the cyclical ACORN two-step. Ugly, low, dishonest and dishonorable.

And probably also counter-productive.

The only other arrow that GOP strategists seem to have in their quiver is litigation. The Ohio GOP has now sued to force a massive re-verification of all 600,000 of those new voters in the Buckeye State. The goal here seems to be to intimidate and/or burden those new voters to keep them away from the polls. If you can't win by a straight up vote, then litigate and disenfranchise.

That sleazy strategy worked in Florida in 2000, but it's a trick play and those become less effective the more you rely on them. In 2000, with Nader in the mix, Florida was close enough to swing by purging 40,000 voters whose names were the same as those of felons. The army of obstructionist GOP lawyers working in Ohio in 2008 faces a much more difficult task. Dirty tricks might help to whittle down the blue side in those graphs above, but -- barring something even more egregious and illegal -- the gap is simply too large to litigate away.

I've been watching the unraveling of John McCain for the past several months with some fascination. His campaign has worked its way through the list of strategies above, using up ever more of their candidate's credibility until the account was finally overdrawn.

What scares me now is this: I don't think they're done yet. Just because I can't imagine how McCain and his surrogates could sink any deeper into the sleaze and the race-baiting muck doesn't mean that his strategists -- odious professional liars like Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis -- have reached the limits of their imagination. Each time one of their previous strategies has failed to gain traction, they have responded as though it would have worked had it only been more dishonest and just a bit sleazier. So they roll out the next plan and drag their campaign even lower and John McCain approves of the newest ugly message and Sarah Palin enthusiastically embraces the next inflammatory lie and Obama's lead in the polls gets even bigger.

John McCain, right now, is hoping that Barack Obama will make some massive mistake in tonight's debate -- an epic gaffe for the ages. I don't expect that to happen.

McCain's next best hope -- and I mean for his soul, not for his electoral prospects -- is to have someone like Bob Dole sit him down and explain what's at stake in the three weeks he has left. Bob Dole should explain to McCain that even though Bob Dole never got to be president, Bob Dole is OK with that, because people remember Bob Dole as an honorable man and not as a lying, dishonorable, race-baiting windsock willing to say or do anything in pursuit of his ambition for power.

Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain today repeated his call for an across-the-board freeze on federal spending.

That's a bold and decisive approach to solving a problem. Unfortunately, the problem it addresses isn't the problem we're currently facing. And due to the very serious problem we're currently facing, McCain's proposed austerity plan is just about the Worst Possible Thing one could recommend.

McCain may be genuinely confused. He has repeatedly referred to the current financial crisis as a "fiscal" crisis. That's a different word that means a different thing, but McCain doesn't seem to appreciate that. He seems to think that the financial crisis is the same thing as a fiscal crisis -- a problem of the federal balance sheet being out of balance -- and so he has proposed a fiscal response, the freeze in federal spending.

Like John McCain, the editorial board at the paper is still struggling to comprehend or to respond to the financial crisis. And also like McCain, they've decided to treat it not as what it is, but as something else that they would have understood had that been happening instead. So they too are responding to a "fiscal" crisis, beating the drum for cuts in federal spending and proclaiming that government at every level can't afford to do anything right now beyond such cuts and freezes.

A freeze and a reduction in federal spending, they insist, is the only "honest" and "grown up" response to the current crisis. This is what Matthew Yglesias has been calling the New Hooverism. (FDR? Keynes? The 20th Century? Any of that ringing a bell, people?)

Faced with the onset of a global recession, a massive credit crunch and severe liquidity problems, John McCain, the sages at our paper and the rest of the New Hoovers are advocating not just less government spending, but much less government spending. Their response to a perfect storm of tight money crises is to make money even tighter. Brilliant.

This response would get you an "F" in any Econ 101 class -- unless, I suppose, the test question were something like, "What would be the quickest and most efficient way to turn a recession into a massive, crippling worldwide depression?"

It's not just McCain and the bigwigs at the paper, of course. This same foolishness has been promoted by the moderators of every national debate so far -- by Jim Lehrer, then by Gwen Ifill, and then by Tom Brokaw (who apparently wasn't listening when he did all those interviews with the "Greatest Generation").

This foolishness would be easier to tolerate if the fools advocating it weren't also being so condescending toward everyone who chooses not to follow them off of the cliff. Lehrer, Ifill and Brokaw all displayed this misplaced condescension of the stupid* -- each insisting that anyone who did not share their confused and perverse misapprehension wasn't Being Honest With The American People. This is apparently the lesson these journalists have learned from the past eight years: If you don't understand the problem, pretend it's because you're more courageous than those who do.

The drumbeat for the New Hooverism on the paper's editorial page has resulted in strange juxtapositions, such as this editorial appearing on the same day that the lead story in the local section described the millions of dollars and the massive public works project that will be needed to get the area's sewer system working properly.

That's a nice reminder that this New Hooverism literally stinks, but it also reminds us that this financial crisis presents an opportunity.

Thanks to eight years of the Bush administration, the United States once again has massive annual deficits and the largest total debt in the nation's history. That constrains what the government is able to do in terms of the increased federal spending that is called for by non-stupid economics in response to a crisis like the one we're now facing. But the massive public deficit the U.S. is facing isn't wholly a matter of dollars on the balance sheet, we also have a huge problem with deferred maintenance.

That maintenance deficit doesn't appear in the figures tossed around when we talk about the size of the budget deficit, but the total amounts may be even higher. Our bridges, highways, dams, levies, rail systems, power grid, power generation, broadband, water, sewage and food inspection infrastructure is all languishing from years of neglect and insufficient investment. These things are not luxuries and they are not options. They are national emergencies -- bright flashing red lights on the national control panel.

Spending on projects like these is exactly what non-stupid economics prescribes for a financial crisis like the one we're currently facing. It's also something we desperately needed to do anyway. Such spending may increase annual deficits in the short term, but investing in infrastructure pays long-term dividends that will more than pay for themselves over time. What we have here, in other words, is a solution neatly divided into two crises.

As long as we don't listen to the McCains, the Brokaws, the Lehrers, the editorial wisemen and the rest of the Hoover Brigade, we should be OK.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* The Misplaced Condescension of the Stupid -- Band name, album title or three-volume comprehensive biography of the 43rd president? You choose.

Happy Thanksgiving, eh

Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there.

A Very Good Thing

From comments, posted Friday at 5:32 p.m. by cjmr's husband:

Twelve hours ago, cjmr self-delivered a healthy baby girl in the front seat of our little Saturn station wagon. Parked in front of the Emergency Room entrance, in the two minutes I was at the desk getting a doctor.

7lb 9oz, 20 inches. (3.43 kg, 51cm) (0.54 stone, 120 pica)

Much jubilation, congratulations, celebrations in the previous thread, but this seemed like it ought to be re-posted and re-celebrated above the fold too.

(Note to Saturn's PR office: This feel-good ad practically writes itself. The concluding image, of course, should be the happy family standing alongside the brand new Saturn station wagon they receive as a birthday present from the "different kind of car company" ...)

They need help

Snopes.com is necessary, but not sufficient.

That's one of the things I started out wanting to say. Then I got a bit distracted as that thought was reinforced by the dismaying spectacle of Sarah Palin's unconditional admirers -- their admiration only increasing with every Katie Couric interview and every repeated, documented lie -- and that initial thought led to others and those led to others, and puzzlement led to exasperation and then to pity and then to resolve and I never quite came right out and said exactly what it was that I had initially wanted to say as precisely as I'd wanted to.

And that again was this: Snopes.com is necessary, but not sufficient.

If you're not familiar with it, Snopes is an indispensable resource, one of those Internet tools that it now seems impossible to imagine living without. They deal with rumors, urban myths, legends and idle gossip, addressing every case with an open mind and subjecting it to a simple test: Is this true? What are the facts?

Facts matter. But facts are, in themselves, rarely persuasive.

The last time I had occasion to consult Snopes involved an acquaintance who is, in many ways, a likable enough person. But he also seems to hear and absorb a lot of information that ain't necessarily so.

This time it had to do with Target, the nationwide discount retail chain. He refuses to shop at Target because they hate veterans. I hadn't heard that. It seemed implausible, since hating on veterans would be just about the most self-destructive PR strategy one could imagine for a retail chain. Plus I know a lot of veterans and I've never heard about this from any of them. Those I know best, in fact, shop at Target all the time.

But OK, I said, let's look it up. And we went to Snopes and there it was. Snopes explains that this rumor is not true. They provide the background of the rumor and trace its history back to a single e-mail from a single person. They cite that person and his retraction and apology. They cite official statements from Target and evidence of the company's support for veterans' causes. They cite veteran's groups gratefully attesting to that support. This is all sourced and linked back to sources and in general a devastatingly thorough and altogether Snopes-like job of debunking and rebutting the rumor.

The result of this, of course, is that the acquaintance still does not shop at Target because he still chooses to believe that they hate veterans, and now he no longer believes anything from Snopes.com because, he says, this proves they can't be trusted.

This might have gone another way. Had this guy merely been misinformed, the Snopes data might have been persuasive. If the root of his problem were only a matter of bad information, good information might have resolved that problem and he could have walked away knowing something true instead of having to manufacture new falsehoods to reinforce the old ones. But misinformation was not the root or the source of his problem, so supplying him with the correct information was not, in itself, sufficient to help him.

And that really is my goal here -- to figure out some way to help this guy and others like him. To figure out some way to help these poor bastards and others like them.

They need help. They need, frankly, liberation.

The weird rumor about Target or the even weirder rumor about P&G are somewhat trivial examples of this, but basing your life on things that aren't true, that aren't real, is a kind of bondage. In simpler, more pragmatic terms: Unreality doesn't work. It is unsustainable. It is a recipe for unhappiness.

The reason I've been writing about/obsessing over things like the P&G rumor or the usefulness of Snopes is that I'm trying to figure out how to liberate the captives of unreality. (I doubt they'd appreciate my stating it that way, but there it is.)

Part of that task, obviously, is to provide them with a dose of reality -- to supply good information that might replace the bad, to offer them facts as a better option than lies. That's necessary, but not sufficient. That throws open the gates, but can't convince them to walk out into the world. Providing information offers the opportunity to choose reality, but it cannot compel or persuade them to take that opportunity or to make that choice.

That's what we're dealing with here: choices. My Target-boycotting acquaintance is making the choice to believe what he prefers to believe, irrespective of whatever the facts might actually be. That's a lot of hard work on his part. It requires an ongoing and exponentially multiplying set of fabrications to maintain. It involves an ever-expanding web of things that he can't allow himself to think about. It has to be, on some level, exhausting.

Take a look at those videos linked above (via). These people have fabricated imaginary monsters that, at some level, they know aren't real and yet they've put those monsters in charge of their lives. They're driven by fear and hatred -- fear and hatred of things they know don't really exist. They are, for whatever reason, choosing bondage to that fear and hatred and it's making them miserable. It's stunting their humanity. It's confining them. It's wearing them out.

They need help.

I'm sure help isn't something they'd welcome. And it's probably not something they'd want (although what they really might want is a more complex question). Whether or not it's something they deserve isn't for a wretch like me to decide.

But it's not about welcome or want or deserve. It's about what they need. They need liberation. They need help. And we're going to have to figure out how to help them, soon, because many of the people in those videos seem to be on the threshhold of real violence and the kind of ugliness that will make it even harder for them ever to escape.

I heard an interview with Don Cheadle recently in which he said, "You can't play down to the cynics." That's an actor's advice, but he wasn't talking only about acting. Ours is a cynical time, and in such a time I realize that any expression of concern will sound to many as merely concern trolling. Attempts to diagnose will sound to many as mere attacks or accusations. But I'm not concern trolling here and I'm not attacking or accusing. I'm just trying to figure out what has gone wrong with these people and why, because allowing them to continue along the path they have chosen would seem, for lack of a better word, cruel.

Information -- facts, reality, the rebuttal and debunking of lies -- is one kind of help that the captives of unreality need. That information is necessary, but not sufficient, for those who have chosen their own captivity. What else is necessary, and what might be sufficient to help them choose not to make that choice, is something I want to continue exploring.

False Witnesses 2

"If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people."
-- Thornton Melon

Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no "innocent dupes" involved in its spread. That's too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale -- the very young, the very old, the very insular -- weren't also among those most active in spreading the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I'm interested in here.

Those spreading this rumor can be divided into two categories: Those who know it to be false, but spread it anyway, and those who suspect it might be false, but spread it anyway. The latter may be dupes, but they are not innocent. We might think of them as complicit dupes. The former group, the deliberate liars, are making an explicit choice to spread what they know to be lies. The complicit dupes are making a subtler choice -- choosing to ignore their suspicion that this story just doesn't add up and then choosing to pass it along anyway because confirming that it's not true would be somehow disappointing and would prevent them from passing it along without explicitly becoming deliberate liars, which would make them uncomfortable.

What I want to explore here is why anyone would make either of those choices. In both cases, the spreading of this rumor seems less an attempt to deceive others than a kind of invitation to participate in deception. The enduring popularity of this rumor shows that many people see this invitation as something attractive and choose to accept it, so I also want to explore why anyone would choose to do that.

To briefly review the details of this absurd rumor, the claim was that some nameless CEO of Procter & Gamble appeared on some daytime talk show and declared his allegiance to Satan. This unidentified and unidentifiable Fortune 100 executive told Donahue/Oprah/Sally Jesse that he belonged to a Church of Satan, and that a portion of the company's profits -- every dollar collected from the sale of Tide and Dawn and Crest -- went to support its evil agenda.

The origin and organization of this slanderous tale seems to trace back to P&G's would-be rivals in a cult-like multi-level marketing scheme that coveted the Cincinnati-based company's market share. That's a sleazy tactic -- marketing by smear campaign -- and it betrays a lack of confidence in the quality of the rival product line, but one can appreciate the perverse logic at work. There was money at stake. If the rivals could create a negative association with P&G's product line, then it would make their own products seem more attractive by contrast.

Such whisper campaigns needn't be terribly plausible. They work by connotation and association. For every possible X number of people who actually come to believe that P&G supports the work of Satan there will be 3X people who come away with some dim, unexplored sense that the company is "controversial" or vaguely associated with something unsavory (think "Swift Boat").

The motive of this small core-group of rumor-mongers is thus not terribly complicated or difficult to understand. It's not even terribly interesting. They were lying for the sake of money. Nothing novel or remarkable about that.

Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread this malicious and obviously false story. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what's in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?

To try to understand these cheerful gossips, I'd like to turn to an equally strange, if less malicious, group of enthusiasts -- the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition.

Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn't happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.

The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.

A few years ago there was a particularly horrifying kitten-burning incident involving a barbecue grill and, astonishingly, a video camera. That sordid episode took place far from the place where I work, yet the paper's editorial board nonetheless felt compelled to editorialize on the subject. They were, happily, against it. Unambiguously so. It's one of the very few instances I recall when that timidly Broderian bunch took an unambiguous stance without their habitual on-the-other-hand qualifications. 

I agreed with that stance, of course. Who doesn't? But despite agreeing with the side they took, I couldn't help but be amused by the editorial's inordinately proud pose of courageous truth-telling. The lowest common denominator of minimal morality was being held up as though it were a prophetic example of speaking truth to power.

That same posturing resurfaced in a big way earlier this year when the kitten-burners struck again, much closer to home. A group of disturbed and disturbing children doused a kitten with lighter fluid and set it on fire just a few miles from the paper's offices.

The paper covered the story, of course, and our readers ate it up.

People loved that story. It became one of the most-read and most-e-mailed stories on our Web site. Online readers left dozens of comments and we got letters to the editor on the subject for months afterward.

Those letters and comments were uniformly and universally opposed to kitten-burning. Opinon on that question was unanimous and vehement.

But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn't seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn't seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.

If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you'd get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.

One came away from that comment thread with the unsurprising but reassuring sense that the good people reading the paper's Web site did not approve of burning kittens alive. Kitten-burning, they all insisted, was just plain wrong.

But one also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong. 

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we're better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we're Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

Kitten-burners are particularly useful in this role because their atrocious behavior seems wholly alien and without any discernible motive that we might recognize in ourselves. We're all at least dimly aware of our own potential capacity for the seven deadlies, so crimes motivated by lust, greed, gluttony, etc. -- even when those crimes are particularly extreme -- still contain the seed of something recognizable. People like Ken Lay or Hugh Hefner don't work as signposts of depravity because we're capable, on some level, of envying them for their greed and their hedonism. But we're not the least bit jealous of the kitten-burners. Their cruelty seems both arbitrary and unrewarding, allowing us to condemn it without reservation.

Again, I whole-heartedly agree that kitten-burning is really, really bad. But the leap from "that's bad" to "I'm not that bad" is dangerous and corrosive. I like to call this Thornton Melon morality. Melon was the character played by Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Back to School, the wealthy owner of a chain of "Tall & Fat" clothing stores whose motto was "If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people." That approach -- finding people we can compare-down to -- might make us feel a little better about ourselves, but it doesn't change who or what we really are. The Thornton Melon approach might make us look thin, but it won't help us become so. Melon morality is never anything more than an optical illusion.

This comparing-down is ultimately corrosive because it bases our sense of morality in pride rather than in love -- in the cardinal vice instead of the cardinal virtue. And to fuel that pride, we end up looking for ever-more extreme and exotically awful people to compare ourselves favorably against, people whose freakish cruelty makes our own mediocrity show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off.

Melon morality is why if the kitten-burners didn't already exist, we would have to invent them.

And, of course, we do invent them. After a while the buzz of pride we get from comparing ourselves to the kitten-burners begins to fade and we start looking for a stronger drug. Who could possibly be even worse than the kitten-burners?

How about Satan-worshippers?

In the first post on this topic, I mentioned that the Church of Satan aspect of the Procter & Gamble rumor seemed a bit too outrageous and over-the-top. But while that outrageousness makes the story less plausible, it's also what makes it so compelling. The pride that fuels Melon morality is an addictive drug, and the mythological Satan-worshippers of the P&G rumor offer that drug in its purest form.

Whether or not there actually is any such thing as the or a Church of Satan needn't concern us here. This story has nothing to do with any actual religion or cult or the actual doctrines espoused by Anton LaVey or any other publicity-seeking character who has claimed the name of Satanism. This story isn't about that. It's about the idea of Satanism -- the lore and legends of this enduringly popular bogeyman.

That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke and Bob Larson, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan's Cheerleaders.

From sources like those, you already know the basic outlines of "Satanist" lore. Black robes, candles, pentagrams and strangely shaped knives feature prominently. Those knives, of course, are used for ritual human sacrifice.

The very idea of ritual human sacrifice is shocking and horrifying, which is why it tends to be included in stories told by people seeking to shock and horrify. When that is your aim as a storyteller the tendency is to constantly up the ante. What could be more shocking and horrifying than ritual human sacrifice? How about the torturous ritual sacrifice of children? And what could be even worse than that? The sacrifice of babies.

This is what "Satanist" signifies in the P&G rumor. It means people who kill babies -- sweet, innocent, adorable little babies. Here, from the article linked above, is an excerpt from a 1991 fundraising letter from the Anti-Satanist "ministry" of con artist Bob Larson:

I watched them rip apart a newborn baby and take the heart while it was still beating. I can't forget the screams. I still hear them every night!

That's supposedly eyewitness testimony from someone saved out of the depraved Church of Satan thanks to the ministry of Bob Larson. It reads more like something out of a horror story than like something out of a fundraising solicitation for a Christian ministry. It's not quite a horror story, but it works in a similar way.

Satanist stories, much like stories about ghosts or vampires, tap into big mythic fears -- the sense that there is real evil in the world, that the innocent often suffer, that we may be powerless against the powerful. We tell such stories because we are afraid -- reasonably afraid -- of powerful, unnameable things. These stories give those fears a shape and a name and a horrifying face, and somehow that can be more reassuring than allowing such fears to remain amorphous and existential.

And just like vampire and ghost stories, Satanist stories have their own sets of rules, details and basic outlines with which we're all familiar. These give the stories their own kind of reality. (Ask most people, "Do you believe in vampires?" and they will answer No. But ask those same people if vampires can be killed with a wooden stake and they'll tell you Yes.)

None of these stories work as stories if we undercut their impact by acknowledging that there's no such thing as ghosts or vampires or Satanic detergent executives. To tell these stories well, we have to pretend these things are real. To hear these stories well, our readers have to agree to go along. This is a familiar, but dramatically necessary, convention in horror stories from Sleepy Hollow to Amityville. This conceit usually involves only the willing suspension of disbelief, but for those who really get caught up in them -- those particularly afraid already -- that storytelling suspension of disbelief can turn into the expulsion of disbelief, the abandonment of skepticism in real life. The fearful and the fear-prone come to almost believe that the ghost stories and urban legends are really true. They come to almost really believe that someone out there is really killing the innocent little babies. (Almost.)

So maybe that's all we're dealing with when it comes to the P&G rumor -- the same mixture of storytelling and suspension of disbelief, with the usual subset of listeners/readers who fail to make that distinction. Maybe the people passing along this rumor are no more malicious than that gullible friend of yours who still thinks The Blair Witch Project was a documentary.

Maybe. Maybe for some few of them. But the problem with this horror-story explanation is that the P&G rumor isn't told the way we tell horror stories and ghost stories. It's told in well-lit supermarkets and Sunday schools, not in dark rooms just before or just after bedtime. And it isn't really told as a story at all. It's presented, instead, as more of an argument or a lecture, the way someone might tell you, for example, why you shouldn't eat foie gras.

In it's usual forms, the P&G rumor is told and retold without any of the flair or artful detail that we expect from storytelling. I'm not sure it even qualifies to be grouped in with urban legends. Compare it to any of the stories we usually think of as urban legends -- the subcutaneous spider-eggs story or the missing-kidneys and bathtub-of-ice story -- and it just doesn't measure up. Those stories are retold, in part, because you don't have to believe them to appreciate that they're good stories. The P&G rumor, by contrast, is implausible and unforgivably dull. It's just not a very good story.

But while the P&G rumor can't really be considered a horror story, it is clearly about horror or, at least, about fear. Consider, for example, the variation of the rumor that Snopes provides on their page debunking it. Try to count all the things the author of this particular lie is afraid of:

PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, "THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE."

That's as pure a distillation as you will ever find of the nightmares and bogeymen that terrify the religious right, complete with the attempt to justify those fears because those people are really Satan-worshipping baby-killers.

Perhaps the deepest fear lurking in that e-mail has to do with the persecution complex of American evangelicals we've often discussed here before. The fear here is not that Christians in America might face persecution, but rather the fear of what it might mean that they don't. The supposed effort to prove that there are ENOUGH CHRISTIANS ... TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE is an expression of the fear -- or the recognition -- that the people sending and resending this e-mail are not CHRISTIAN ENOUGH TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. They're shouting because they're frightened -- truly frightened of the truth about themselves, which is always far more frightening than any fear of what might be lurking outside ourselves in the dark.

The response to that fear is a desperate grasping at Melon morality in the most extreme form they can imagine -- trying to prove to themselves that they are different enough to MAKE A DIFFERENCE by contrasting themselves with baby-killing Satan-worshippers. With baby-killing Satan-worshippers that they know are purely imaginary.

That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn't really need to be plausible or believable. It isn't intended to deceive others. It's intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you're mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won't be able to forget that you're just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it's true for you if you will pretend it's true for us. We need each other.

You can't be doing well if it seems like an improvement to base your life and your sense of self on a demonizing slander that you know is only a fantasy. To challenge that fantasy, to identify it as nothing more than that, is to threaten to send them back to whatever their lives were like before they latched onto this desperate alternative.

That suggests to me that if we are to have any hope of disabusing them of their fantasies, then we will need to recommend some third alternative, something other than the lie or the reality that had seemed even worse.

Connections

Former 1960s radical Bill Ayers appeared (as himself) in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which was narrated by Lili Taylor.

Taylor was in High Fidelity with Tim Robbins who was in The Hudsucker Proxy with Steve Buscemi.

And Steve Buscemi was in Tanner on Tanner with, yes, Barack Obama.

That's only four degrees of separation -- a closer connection than either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times was able to establish in their exhaustive attempts to find any links between the former '60s radical and the current Democratic nominee for president.

Gov. Sarah Palin has also recently tried to link Obama and Ayers, suggesting that Obama is somehow complicit in Weather Underground activities that took place when he was a child because he has since raised funds for poor kids' schools in Chicago and so has Ayers. CNN debunks Palin's claim, noting that they're a bit late to the party what with the Times and every other news outlet -- "Several other publications, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic ..." -- having already staked and dusted the claim before Palin repeated it.

I've never met Ayers, and I haven't been to Chicago in years, but I can claim a closer connection to the man than Obama has. My uncle, and namesake, is listed in Ayers' c.v. Ayers contributed a chapter for a book* my uncle edited. It's the very first chapter -- meaning Ayers' name in the book's table of contents is listed directly below the name of my mother's favorite baby brother. By Gov. Palin's reasoning, that'd be more than enough to put me on some FBI watch list.

This kind of desperate straining to find some distant association with which to smear Barack Obama seems like a counterproductive tactic for the McCain campaign. Going after Obama with a smear that's this obscure, this far-removed, and this baseless reinforces the perception that McCain and his hired mudslingers were unable to find anything substantial or legitimate with which to criticize his opponent. (Plus, as a general rule, when you're trying to land a below-the-belt smear it probably shouldn't include having to point out that your opponent has a long history of raising funds to help poor schoolchildren. That's generally regarded as a Good Thing.)

It doesn't speak well of Sen. McCain that his campaign is willing to rely on such silly tactics. Ten years ago I might have said that McCain was "stooping" to such tactics, but the senator has gotten lower and lower over those years, wallowing deeper and deeper in whatever filth he thought might get him elected. It's hard to say at this point that anything is beneath him.

More to the point though, these strained attempts at guilt-by-association don't actually prove anything. The photograph above, for example, shows the 1996 Republican nominee for vice president Jack Kemp with one of his intimate business associates -- a suspected murderer who is now a convicted felon. Did Kemp's association with this unsavory figure make the former congressman any less qualified to be Bob Dole's running mate? I didn't think so, but then I don't work for the McCain campaign.

Actually, when I say that these baseless and illegitimate attacks "don't prove anything," that's not quite accurate. They don't prove anything about the person being attacked, but they do prove quite a bit about the people making the attacks. They prove the attackers to be capable of the level of dishonesty and the level of sheer silliness that ought to disqualify one from public office.

In Gov. Sarah Palin's case, this isn't the first time she has demonstrated such dishonesty or such silliness. Nor is this the first instance of Palin repeating something that isn't true long after it has been thoroughly documented as untrue.

Palin's willingness to repeat such disproven and discredited allegations confirms the dismaying pattern we saw established in her very first speech after being selected by John McCain. She says things that aren't true. She does this a lot.

Worse than that, Palin says things that aren't true long after it has been pointed out to her repeatedly that the things she is saying are not true. She says things that aren't true that she knows are not true. This is called lying.

The public hasn't been afforded the opportunity to learn very much about Gov. Sarah Palin, but this much we do know: Sarah Palin is a liar. She lies to make herself sound better than she knows herself to be and she lies to make her opponents sound worse than she knows them to be. Her lies are many and they just keep coming, from her misleading self-flattery on her role in the Bridge to Nowhere scandal, to her obstruction of the Troopergate investigation, to her recent perverse description of her role in Alaska's efforts to divest from the Sudan. She is a serial liar.

This has now been so well documented that the closest thing to a defense of Palin isn't a defense at all, but rather an admission. "All politicians are liars," her defenders say. That cynical, blanket condemnation blurring all degrees and frequencies of dishonesty fails to recognize what makes the Alaska governor special. She has distinguished herself by her willingness to continue repeating her lies long after they have been thoroughly discredited. Most lying politicians either back off or change the subject when their lies are refuted, but not Palin.

And that brings us to the second thing that we have been able to learn about Gov. Sarah Palin: She views her own supporters with contempt.

However much Palin may dislike her critics, that dislike is nothing compared to the scorn, disdain and loathing she regularly displays for those who offer her only their unconditional support. She detests those people.

Palin's supporters are, for the most part, evangelical Christians, which is to say these are my people. She feeds my people lies, with a smile on her face, convinced that they are too stupid or too lazy to know or to care that she is feeding them bullshit and calling it chocolate. These people that she is treating with such contempt and inordinate condescension are my family -- both figuratively and literally.

And, yes, I find it upsetting when someone treats my family so contemptibly. It would be wrong of me to allow anyone to treat my family this way without calling them on it, so I am calling her on it: Sarah Palin is a remorseless liar with a hole where her soul should be.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* The chapter "Work that is real: Why teachers should be empowered" in the book Empowering teachers and parents: School restructuring through the eyes of anthropologists. G. Alfred Hess, Jr., ed., Bergin and Garvey, 1992. In case you were wondering.