From the Department of Lameduckery

Of course, now the right-wing turns on Dubya, after the left has pretty much abandoned the guy to the denigration and derision of future historians. Where were they when it mattered?

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Bailout? What bailout?

• The ugly sexual-orientation/racial divide being cast over Proposition 8.
• New fiction from Lethem.
• Say goodbye to the Maldives.
• Rahm, designated jerk.
• John Zogby: McCain’s defeat the third straight such loss for a Vietnam vet.
• Hannity, Limbaugh, etc., already feeding the frenzy to blame not-yet-president Obama for the current recession and stokes fears of his supposed radicalism.
• More about Norm Coleman’s buddy Nasser Kazeminy, who was concerned Norm wasn’t making enough as a mere senator.
• August: Osage County (best play of the last few years) coming to movie theaters in 2011.

From the Department of Wizened Punditry

Remember 2004 after the Dems let the GOP walk away with the second should've-won election in a row? How the left twisted themselves into pretzels of self-recrimination and outrage (the self-righteous and self-piteous combination of the two being a liberal specialty) trying to figure out how such a thing could have happened, Rove-ian dirty tricks and outright fraud beside. There was a lot of talk of wedge issues, how "we" let conservatives corner the market on values and Godly things, and for about five minutes you saw the left awkwardly trying to figure out what this whole religion thing was about, anyway.

Didn't work. When the Dems finally won, it was not because they had embraced the language of the enemy but because they had found a different way to fight and a different set of symbols to use as their standard.

Well, the same thing is happening again, only it's on the other side of the imaginary isle. Now conservatives are full of apoplexy over how such a thing could have happened, and determined to lash out. At the media, and their snooty insistence on "facts" and being mean old meanies making fun of Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge about, well, stuff. At liberals, for not being conservatives. At minorities, for voting for a minority. And so on.

But a lot of the anger coming from conservatives right now is being self-directed. Some of the more self-destructive kind comes from the sort of people who think that the whole election should have been decided by Jeremiah Wright, and that if McCain-Palin had gone completely Willie Horton in their campaign it would have been won. A scorched-earth campaign, to be sure, but something that the troglodytic Dubya-supporting base could rally behind.

A slightly less intellectually bankrupt approach is being taken by the likes of P.J. O'Rourke, who has a must-read essay in the current Weekly Standard entitled "We Blew It":

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

It's a blissfully rational piece of writing that could, just could, point the way forward for the party to become a reasonable opposition to the coming Democratic majority. Let's suppose somebody is listening.

From the Department of Military Affairs

Not so long ago, we were being told that the Dems would have an easy time in this election because everybody was so sick of the war(s). Then came a recession, the bailout, and Sarah Palin, and the country appears to have just moved on. Too bad for the 31,000 American troops battling in Afghanistan and 150,000 or so doing the same in Iraq, because for the forseeable future they have to keep on killing and dying no matter what happens back here.

In a Veterans Day article, The Nation notes this pretty disgraceful forgetfulness on the behalf of the public and media; in the last week of October, media coverage of the war had dropped to about two percent of stories. This forgetfulness matters not just to the men currently serving, but those who already have served:

"When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall...by themselves," says therapist and Vietnam veteran Shad Meshad, who heads up the National Veterans Foundation. "No one goes up to them; that positive energy toward them has faded. No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do, and they're supposed to think about that alone."

The Department of Veterans Affairs reports that 18 veterans commit suicide every day, and some 200,000 are sleeping on the streets most nights. With the thousands of wounded and mentally damaged coming back everyday from Afghanistan and Iraq (particularly all those afflicted by head injuries from IED blast waves) and not receiving the needed care, it's hard to imagine that the coming years won't see the streets lined by traumatized veterans, unable to reenter a society that just forgot about them.


Meanwhile, the New York Times reports from an old castle in Afghanistan that's now a U.S. Army outpost which gets attacked most everyday by the Taliban; as one officer puts it, "We're the bullet sponge." It's a grinding kind of war that doesn't appear to have much in the way of an early exit-date for Western troops. Unlike Iraq, there's no even dysfunctional government to operate if the West pulls out. And though Obama has pledged to refocus attention on Afghanistan and the porous border with Pakistan, a depleted budget and inattentive public may not let him do that.

But in the end it's not just about getting the troops home, it's about taken care of them after they get here.

From the Department of Finance

So AIG is continuing to spiral the drain, prompting another few billion or so in government funding to keep it from completely imploding. In case you weren't keeping count, this latest infusion will mean that taxpayers will have lent the struggling insurance giant $150 billion so far. That's about a year's worth of the Iraq war, or a few years' worth of universal health care.

Meanwhile, the hobbling disaster that is GM sinks further into the mire, saying that they could well run out of needed cash by the end of the year. Even if one assumes that they're overstating the case in order to get some of that good federal cash (on loan, of course), this would still be a serious blow to the economy were they to go belly up. Not that companies shouldn't be forced to sink or swim on their own (capitalism and all), why is it that some companies deserve taxpayer dollars and others don't? At last count, AIG employed over 100,000 people, but GM's workforce topped a quarter-million. Either way, it's a lot of people who could be looking for work if things don't improve.

Instead of taking GM's weakness as an opportunity to force them into making some smart choices for the environment and the country (making energy-efficient vehicles people can actually afford), Washington seems content to let them flounder, while spoon-feeding care to Wall Street and firms like AIG that have behaved just as stupidly over the past few years as Detroit has. It's all about consistency.

From the Department of Weekend Reading

OK, so Election Day was a little bit exciting…

• Baghdad now demanding a fixed date for U.S. withdrawal; does this mean Republicans will start calling them defeatists, too?
• Race, dignity, history, and White House butler Eugene Allen.
• The Jews of Iraq.
  
• Unemployment rate highest since 1994.
• Thirty million Americans live alone, one-fourth have nobody to talk to.
• TSA rules do nothing to keep us safe, they are simply expensive security theater.
• Klein: Was the financial bailout nothing more than the White House’s parting gift to Wall Street?
• The Air Force wants to control the Internet. Just in case.
• Yep, cooties are real.
• Iraq still waiting, nervously.
• The rules of film criticism, via Ebert.
• History, in chart form.
• Spielberg, Will Smith to remake Oldboy?

From the Department of Evil Media

All through the election, the staff at Newsweek has been compiling a mass of behind-the-scenes material that would not be published until after the election. It's a big, book-sized mess of gossip (chapter 1 here, shorter summary here); some tidbits:

• The FBI believed that hacker attacks on the McCain and Obama campaigns' computer systems were sponsored by "a foreign entity or organization" looking for hints on what a future administration would do.
• In 2004, Obama was mobbed after giving a DNC speech; one aide was bruised after all the pushing: "I remember grabbing women's hands because they were trying to pull his shirt from his pants."
• A McCain staffer referred to the Palin family's spending spree (likely much higher than $150,000) as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast."
• McCain never wanted to use any of the following as campaign targets: Jeremiah Wright, Michelle Obama, Barack's lack of military service; when Palin launched the Ayers attack, the campaign hadn't even signed off on it yet.
• Secret Service codenames for the Obamas' daughters: Radiance and Rosebud.

From the Department of Civil Rights

Far be it from us to suggest that the citizenry should take part in civil disobedience, but now might not be a bad time to do so, particularly in California, Florida, and Arkansas, where bigotry has prevailed against same-sex couples desiring to get married.

This would be bad enough had it always been the case, but what of the couples who have already married? There are some 18,000 same-sex married couples in California alone. What exactly are they supposed to do? Just hold tight until some appeals court judges somewhere decide (as will inevitably happen, given the tide of history) that these laws are unconstitutional? In the meantime there are children to raise, bills to pay, and lives to live; all supposedly to be put on hold until the country decides it no longer wants to discriminate.

After the ban passed in California, there were protests in Los Angeles and a vigil in San Francisco. At the latter, one couple brought their baby daughter along. One of the girl's mothers said that "Hopefully by the time our daughter is of legal age, all this will be a distant memory. And for her it will seem ridiculous that there was once a time when gay people could not get married."

The nation overcame one discriminatory barrier on Tuesday -- and let's not forget the fact that both candidates, not just the Republican, oppose same-sex marriage -- it's well past time to overcome another.