black helicopters

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has been chronicling and examining the various activities of extreme right wing groups for some time. He writes in this post about racists on the internets hoping Senator Obama wins in November, then fails as a President so that white folks learn once and for all that we can't trust the darkies:

If you thought the far right went nuts in the 1990s -- when the Democratic president was a white Southern male -- just wait till there's a President Obama. Progressives should be bracing for it.

Remember all the black helicopter loonies from the 90s (Hank Hill's loony neighbor on King of the Hill, Dale Gribble, is a dead-to-rights satire of the type)? The end of the Cold War took away the bogeyman they needed to feed their wierd fantasies of manliness and glory, so they turned their energies to hating the Clintons, the U.S. Government, and the U.N., while Rush Limbaugh and others in the talk-radio echo chamber provided plenty of fodder. It was the crazy-ass rumor mongering that turned me off of politics in the 90s.

When a Republican took the White House and started a war in the Middle East, these loonies had a new, Islamic bogeyman and their mistrust of the government changed to lock-step approval of warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention in Guantanamo and ohter such threats to American civil liberties. They especially won't be happy if a President Obama manages to end the war and take away their new bogeyman. And, as Dave points out, it'll be much, much nastier than it was in the 90s.

The good news is that liberty held on in the 9th to win 5-4.

re: small ball

So much for that...Chicago swept the Twins, and Cleveland shut them out yesterday. Oh well. Maybe next year they'll have some pitching.

i'll whoop 'em

Senator Obama threatens Congress with a stick. Seriously. Crooks and Liars has the video.

small ball

Ty Cobb, enormous prick that he was, pretty much invented the modern game of baseball. Then came Babe Ruth, an enormous prick of a different kind, who changed everything. Their legacies have been slugging it out ever since. Generally, Ruth's wins.

Not an overly talented athelete, Cobb played an aggressive game based on speed and hustle. Put the ball in play, and run like hell. Once on base, steal. Challenge the defense. Distract the pitcher. Cobb played small ball. And he cheated.

First basemen were sometimes afraid to keep their foot on the bag long enough to record an out for fear of getting Cobb's spikes, sharped with a file before each game, in the calf. Second basemen and shortstops faced those same spikes in the face if they dared lay a tag on him as he slid into the bag on a steal. That Cobb's career batting average of .366 still leads the Major Leagues, and that he's still fourth all-time in stolen bases owes a little to the fact that that shit don't fly anymore in the Majors. But that doesn't change his legacy.

Babe Ruth, on the other hand, had loads of talent. A dominanting pitcher early in his career, his explosive bat became too valuable to his managers to have him in the lineup only once every four days. In the last fifteen years of his career, Ruth only pitched in five games. Meanwhile, he racked up homeruns like no other player before him.

Before Ruth, the homerun was rare. Ruth himself hit more in one season than most other teams before him. Other ballclubs started looking for their own sluggers. The homerun ingrained itself in baseball's culture, and the Cobb-style small game was slowly pushed aside. Too bad. Except for the cheating.

The Twins head into Chicago tonight for a four game stand against the Central Division leading White Sox. Sitting in second place two and half games behind the Sox, if they take all four, they'll lead Chicago by half a game. If they lose all four, they'll be six and half behind Chicago, and probably in third place behind Cleveland. The Twins are one of the few teams left that play small ball. Sluggers are expensive and the Twins are famously frugal. Their pitching is too weak for them to do anything in the playoffs this year if they make it, but its nice to see a team in contention that doesn't rely on homeruns to be there.

Maybe next year they'll have pitching.

useless

In a post about the source of the racism and sexism memes in the Democratic primary (How Right Wing Crap Polluted the Democrats), Dave Neiwert at Orcinus gives me the springboard for a post I've been wanting to write for some time:

That's how right-wing crap works. It's not meant to advance or even partake of discourse; it's meant to end it. One can argue the worth of Hillary's policies or her voting record or her position on the war till the cows come home; but when she's reduced to being a bitch, that pretty much ends the discussion. And when it's as pervasive as it's become in the past decade, its effects are paralyzingly toxic.

Professional conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have blown a lot of hot air over the past four decades in a deliberate effort to rob the word "liberal" of any real meaning. They have managed to turn it simply into a caricature of an elitist America-hating snob living in hypocritical splendor while trying to take away our guns, force us all to have abortions, get gay married, and give all of our money to lazy, Cadillac driving welfare queens. The right wing noise machine has been so succesful in this campaign that formerly self-described liberals have attempted to flee to the shelter of the less loaded word "progressive," and liberal politicians have bent over backwards to avoid the liberal label, when, as Daniel Larison at The American Conservative Magazine's blog, Eunomia, states, they ought to embrace it:

That means that a nominee who is running on the most left-wing platform of any candidate since McGovern (as is Clinton, as was Edwards!) is effectively pretty far to the left. If you’re a liberal or an Obama supporter, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with that and presumably it is the reason why you’re supporting him (conservatives who are supporting him primarily because of the war are obviously the radical exception).

Now, at the same time these unprincipled, blowhard footsoldiers of the right wing noise machine have turned the word liberal into a useless descriptor of actual political thought, they have managed to rob their own word, conservative, of any of its usefulness as well (with the help of some opportunistic Republican politicians, of course). The conservatism of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater has morphed into a strange coalition of warhawks, religious "family values" voters, corporatists, and middle-Americans whose only real shared value is that of American Exceptionalism: If America is doing it, it's right, and to suggest otherwise is un-patriotic (and by extension, liberal).

The end result of all of this is that the two most common words used to describe political thoughts and ideas in America have been rendered effectively useless, other than to tar a political opponent. And for the Limbaughs and Coulters, that's mission accomplished. Poisoning the discourse and muddying the waters has been their goal all along.

In the introduction to his 1964 treatise, A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge, former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy addresses a little of what I have addressed here. He suggests that,in the absence of a clear definition of what liberal is, we abolish the use of the word as a noun and embrace it as an adjective:

In religion one could not simply be a liberal, but would be a liberal Baptist, a liberal Anglican, a liberal Catholic, or a liberal of some other denomination. In politics he would be a liberal Republican, a liberal Democrat, or a liberal Vegetarian.

Putting aside that odd reference to vegetarians (seriously, what?), the Senator is on to something. I have as many beefs with the far left of the political spectrum as I do with the right. I'm not a communist or a socialist anymore than I am a corporatist or a nationalist. Applying Senator McCarthy's rubric, the closest descriptor I can come up with for my political beliefs is that I'm a liberal libertarian (gotta love the Latin root!): I don't believe that liberty comes in the absence of government, but in the strict accountability of government to the governed.

Somehow, I doubt the term liberal libertarian will catch on. I dearly hope the accountability thing does, though.

patriotism as a bludgeon

Watched Senator Obama's victory speech last night, and this bit toward the end stood out (gotta give a hat tip to Annie Wagner at Slog, too):

But what you don’t deserve is another election that’s governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon. What you won’t see from this campaign or this party is a politics that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to polarize, because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Don't let the idiots in the right wing noise machine define your campaign, Senator. This is a good start. Keep this up, and you can't lose.