The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

I have been pretty much an agnostic on the subject of Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody. I've written about her (or, more specifically, the passions she inspires) in this blog before. In that blog entry (no links -- we're not about links here, but it was around the time of the Oscars if you want to search for it) I profess my incomprehension at the ire she arouses in what otherwise might seem to be sentient human beings. Why the fury? Why the hate?

But recently Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey) wrote a blog entry on her My Space page that explains a lot about her personality and her feelings about her life and career. An article in Variety discusses the ridiculous enmity that both she and her "Juno" star Ellen Page arouse and Cody elaborates on that subject at great length. I find her post to be very revealing (sometimes unconsciously so) and, as I tend to do here, I thought I would break it down and analyze it so that people can get a glimpse of what's really going on beneath her persona:

A while back, there was a thoughtful article in the above-mentioned publication about Ellen Page and myself. The article was mostly about how passionately some people hate me. As I explained to my therapist the following day (ha) it's kind of weird to read something like that about yourself. On one hand, you feel defensive. On the other hand, you feel puzzled. You feel compelled to identify what it is about you that might inspire such vitriol. (I personally suspect the hate isn't that widespread; it's just loud.)I thought about it. For months. I even wrote a screenplay on the theme. And then, finally, I figured it out.

There's a lot going on in this one passage. I find particularly revealing the defensive "(ha)" when she reveals that she's seeing a therapist -- as if such a revelation will somehow threaten her tough-chick persona so she has to laugh off the fact that, apparently, she feels that she has issues in her life that need to be addressed in a theraputic context. The parenthetical statement is revealing as well -- it's as if she's willing herself to be more popular than she is, like a high school girl who wants the cool kids to like her. It's not really the case that most people hate her -- they're just a very loud minority (as opposed to the silent majority who thinks she's a genius -- it's a very Nixonian rationalization).

I have a response to those who are still boring enough to lob insults in my direction. (Those of you who are friends, fans, enablers, or dislike my writing for legitimate, rational, nonpersonal reasons can tune out now if you like. This isn't for you.)

This is a common ploy on Usenet -- whenever you're discomfited by a particular criticism, profess to find it deeply boring. It doesn't work there and it doesn't work here. However idiotic the people who hate Diablo Cody might be, they're clearly getting to her.

Anyone else? Bend thine ear:I am not Charlie Kaufman or Sofia Coppola (much as I supplicate at their Cannes-weary feet.) I'm not Paul Thomas Anderson. I'm not even Paul W.S. Anderson. I am middle-class trash from the Midwest. I'm a competent nonfiction writer, an admittedly green screenwriter, and a product of Hollywood, USA. I am "Diablo Cody" and if you're not a fan, go rent Prospero's Books again and leave me the fuck alone.

How to unpack this very dense and enlightening passage? From the faux-pretentious language (and just for the sake of the argument, when does faux-pretentious language cross the line and become actually pretentious?), the mention of other screenwriters to whom she clearly feels inferior, the self-contempt apparent in the expression "middle-class trash," the quotation marks around "Diablo Cody" -- it all points to a feeling of, if not exactly unworthiness (although that's clearly there as well), then a feeling of blatant self-inauthenticity.

The following passage points that up, as well as it sets up what follows and makes it more apparent:

I may have won 19 awards that you don't feel I earned, but it's neither original nor relevant to slag on Juno. Really. And you're not some bold, singular voice of dissent, You are exactly like everyone else in your zeitgeisty-demo-lifestyle pod. You are even like me. (I, too, loved Arrested Development! Aren't we a pretty pair of cultural mavericks? Hey, let's go bitch about how Black Kids are overrated!)

Whether it's original or relevant to slag on "Juno" is beside the point, whether Cody realizes it or not. The film is either good or it isn't. If it is, then all the attacks won't matter. If it's not, it doesn't matter either, because they're merely kicking a dead horse. And the sentence "You are even like me" might be the most revealing sentence in this very revealing piece of writing. The questions is not whether her critics feel Cody hasn't earned the awards she's won.

It's whether Cody herself believes that.

The defensiveness reaches fever pitch in what follows:

I'm sorry that while you were shooting your failed opus at Tisch, I was jamming toxic silicon toys up my ass for money. I get why you're bitter. I took exactly one film class in college and-- with the curious exception of the Douglas Sirk unit—it bored the shit out of me. I also once got busted for loudly crinkling a bag of Jujubes during a classroom screening of Vivre Sa Vie. I don't deserve to be here. We've established that. But I'm here. Five million 12-year-olds think I'm Buck Henry. Accept it (Incidentally, if you were me for one day you'd crumble like fucking Stilton. I am better at this than you. You're not strong enough, Film_Fan78. Trust me.) I'm sorry to all those violent, semi-literate fanboys who hate me for befriending their heroes. I can't help it if your favorite writer, actor, director, or talk show host likes me. Maybe you would too, if we actually met. I know my name is fake and that it annoys you. What, do you hate Queen Latifah and Rip Torn, too? Writers and entertainers have been using pseudonyms for years. Chances are, you're spewing bile under an assumed screen name yourself. I'm sorry if you think I'm like some inked-up quasi-Suicide Girl derby cunt from 2002, but I like my fake name. It's engraved on an Oscar. Yours isn't.

Is it my imagination, or is there a truly extraordinary amount of self-loathing packed into this passage? What I find most interesting about it is the extent to which Cody has clearly internalized her hate-mongers to the extent that she actually identifies with them (as in the "we" in "We've established that"). As Auden once said of Yeats that "He became his admirers," it seems that Diablo Cody has become her critics. Or, as they say nowadays, her haters.

It seems to me blatantly obvious that Cody is suffering from an advanced case of The Imposter Syndrome. Here's how it's defined (I snagged this off a Caltech website):

Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.

It is basically feeling that you are not really a successful, competent, and smart student, that you are only imposing as such.

I think they mean "posing" instead of "imposing," but you get the idea.

It is very common for people who become suddenly and unexpectedly famous to feel as if they are a fraud on the verge of being exposed -- and Cody clearly feels that way. It really comes out in the following passage, which sounds like a genuine cri de coeur. Here Diablo Cody practically begs her critics to understand her (and, possibly, love her?):

Listen: I've been telling stories my whole life. Even when I was a phone sex operator, I was the Mark Twain of extemporaneous jerk-off fiction. I took every perspiring creep on a fucking journey. I don't know how to do anything else.I'm going to make more movies and shows. I doubt they'll all be good, but that's the nature of this life. Even though the public only knows me from one book, one movie, and several aborted blogs, I've spent the last few years hustling like Iceberg Slim out here to prove myself professionally. The people I currently work for, and with, are more than pleased with my post-Juno output. My pilot was so good (thanks, Toni Colette!) that it got picked up for series. That is rare, children. That is blue-rare. In summation: you try it.This is the last I have to say on the subject, unless I'm provoked by a journalist in which case I'll gladly reload. With relish, as Betty Rizzo might say. That said, I'm a 30-year-old woman with a dwindling interest in blog culture, and I don't have time to address this bullshit every time one of my projects comes out. I'm in love, I just bought a house, and my boss made E.T. I kind of have to focus on reality.And drinking. I have to focus on drinking.

The last two sentences speak for themselves. When you feel like a fraud, drinking helps to hide it. Until that becomes even more of a problem than your feelings of fraudulence. I don't know when that will happen to Diablo Cody but I'm pretty sure it's inevitable.

So what do I think of Diablo Cody? I think she's a moderately talented writer. I found Candy Girl, with its let's-see-how-many-inane-pop-cultural-references-we-can-stuff-into-one-sentence prose style, to be a little annoying. And I thought I would hate "Juno," but much to my surprise I didn't. I thought it was an overblown ABC Afterschool Special that didn't deserve to win an Oscar (which was more a tribute to the money it grossed and the perversity of Academy voters -- let's not forget, this is the same Academy that voted Stanley Shapiro the Oscar in 1960 for writing "Pillow Talk" over Ernest Lehman for "North by Northwest," Ingmar Bergman for "Wild Strawberries" and Francois Truffaut for "The 400 Blows"), and I found its politics to be both mildly racist and more than a little reactionary, but the woman clearly has talent. How much talent, and whether she will write anything that has permanent value, has yet to be determined.

But the kind of whining and self-pity that her blog entry represents is really beneath her -- beneath anybody, for that matter. It's just unseemly (and the "my boss made E.T." stuff is just pathetic). It reminds me of that outburst that the novelist Howard Fain spews at Youngblood Hawke in Herman Wouk's novel of the same name. Cody would do well to read that book, if only for the sake of that passage. In it, Hawke and his publishers have convened a meeting to discuss how Hawke should defend himself against a vicious attack by a famous and influential critic who has a grudge against him. Into the meeting walks (or, more accurately, staggers) fellow novelist Howard Fain, who, in the words of the old song, is all lit up like a Christmas tree. He tells the group that "Of course he's been unfairly attacked!" and then goes into a pages-long rant that I think Cody should not only read but learn by heart. It might help her get through this passage in her life with her dignity intact.

I don't have the book on me, but I'll boil the rant down to its essentials:

Keep writing, and don't bother to answer your critics.

To which I would add one personal comment:

Stop drinking. Now. Before you do something you'll regret.

Tom Moran

The Other Fellow Just Blinked

John McCain will be coming to Oxford, Mississippi tonight to debate Barack Obama after all. What a shock.

It seems that, after suspending his campaign to pretend to be a working Senator for the first time in two years, McCain realized that he wasn't helping the negotiations (and was probably getting in the way) while at the same time he risked giving Obama an hour and a half of free air time on all the networks and the cable stations to talk to the American people without anyone there to respond to him.

Now, you gotta admit, that shows great judgment on McCain's part. The same kind of judgment that caused him to blow off Letterman -- and we know what that got him.

So after thinking it over (and, I would guess, having half his campaign staff scream at him to get on the damn plane), McCain caved and will be at the debate. Who knows what the fuck is going to happen with the bailout. A lot of smart people are saying that it really doesn't matter -- that the economy's screwed no matter what happens, and that we're in for another Great Depression.

I wouldn't go that far -- not yet, anyway. But it seems pretty clear that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that it's going to take someone of great prudence and great levelheadedness to run this country for the next four years.

Does anyone really think that John McCain is still that man?

That's all for now. More after the debate tonight.

The Era of Little Government is Over

Does this quote sound familiar?

"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Those words come from Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address in 1981. They have been more or less the guiding philosophy of the Republicans for the last three decades.

And now, somewhat belatedly, the G.O.P. has decided that they are a lie. In fact, they are proving even as I write these words that their entire political philosophy is based on a lie.

The lie is the idea of "let the market prevail." The notion that a free market economy, let undisturbed by government, is the best possible economic system. Laissez faire, dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Because in this present crisis, with less than two months to go before a presidential election, the Republicans are looking to bail out private companies to the tune of more than a trillion dollars in what has been called "Wall Street socialism."

Kevin Philips sets the scene well in a blog on Huffington Post:

We're not just looking at a real estate mess. Over the last quarter century, the total of public and private credit market debt in the United States -- most of it, in fact, is private -- has more than quintupled from $8 to $48 trillion, the biggest such orgy in world history. Over that period, domestic financial debt - the money borrowed by the financial sector for expansion, consolidation, empire-building, leverage, exotic mortgages, gambling, you name it - swelled from just $1 trillion to some $14 trillion. Employing these economic steroids, the financial sector ballooned itself from 14-15% of what back in the mid-1980s was the Gross National Product to 20-21% in 2004 of the newer Gross Domestic Product calculation. In the meantime, the once-dominant manufacturing sector fell far behind, dropping to just 12% of GDP. In a nutshell, the economy has been hijacked in recent decades by the very groups who now purport to have remedies - Wall Street, from whence Paulson emerged, and the money-bubbling, don't regulate the dangerous practices Federal Reserve Board, from whence Bernanke comes.

In other words, we don't really make anything anymore, are awash in debt, and in general we are in shit up to our eyebrows.

And when the going gets tough, the Republicans abandon their core beliefs and rush to suckle on the government tit for a trillion dollars worth of corporate welfare in a last desperate attempt to save failing financial instuitutions (not to mention the presidential election).

Philips points out that at least some Republicans are being intellectually consistent in this matter:

Ironically, the best hope for resistance comes not from the left but from free-market elements of the Republican Party. I have not had much good to say about the GOP for years, but recent events may hint at their political and ideological renewal. Sometime back, when Congress passed the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bail-out program, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, ultimately voted against it. He had worked on its early stage, but ultimately voted no because seeing a pay-off to "Wall Street and K Street (the Washington lobbyist corridor)". Then the Republican National Convention, in a rejection of Bush, Paulson and Bernanke, put an anti-bailout section in its 2008 platform. A few days ago, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, called on the Fed to reject bail-outs and allow the markets to work even if the consequences are "brutal." And on September 18, a hundred Republican members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Paulson and Bernanke requesting that the two men "refrain from conducting any additional government-financed bail-outs for large financial firms."

These guys may end up being the last rats left drowning on the sinking ship of laissez faire capitalism, but at least they get points for consistency. Unlike the vast majority of Republicans, who at this point would be willing to do pretty much anything to keep these private financial institutions afloat.

The Republican Party is bankrupt. They have no ideas, no guts and no idea what to do except to throw government money at the problem. They are completely discredited.

It's time for the Democrats, as they did in 1932, to get into power and, ironically enough, save capitalism from itself. Like the old song says, we did it before.

And we can do it again.

Republican Socialism

Didn't know that Republicans were socialists, did you?

Well, life throws you a few curves every now and again.

It turns out that the party dedicated to laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog capitalism is now begging en masse to be allowed to suckle on the government tit! Who knew?

It seems that if an ordinary citizen gets overextended on his house payments it's "Fuck you, buddy -- you're foreclosed!" But if it's a company like Bear Stearns or AIG and they screw up, well, they're just "too big to fail."

Sense a bit of a double standard here?

Consider the ramifications of the lead paragraph from Mike Allen's piece on Politico.com:

Congressional leaders said after meeting Thursday evening with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that as much as $1 trillion could be needed to avoid an imminent meltdown of the U.S. financial system.

That's one trillion dollars. With a "t."

And yes, he did use the word "imminent meltdown."

Still want to vote for the Republicans because you think Sarah Palin's hot?

To continue with the Politico.com piece:

Paulson announced plans Friday morning for a "bold approach" that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. At a news conference at Treasury headquarters, he called for a "temporary asset relief program" to take bad mortgages off the books of the nation's financial institutions. Congressional leaders had left Washington on Friday, but Paulson planned to confer with them over the weekend.

"We're talking hundreds of billions," Paulson told reporters. "This needs to be big enough to make a real difference and get to the heart of the problem." [...]

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” said lawmakers were told last night “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications, here at home and globally.”

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments — certainly rare in my experience here — was that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly,” Dodd said.

Are you scared yet?

It seems that the G.O.P.'s fiscal chickens are coming home to roost -- just in time for the election.

And it's time to ask some rhetorical (but important) questions:

Which party is better equipped to deal with this imminent financial meltdown? The party that got us out of the Great Depression? Or the party that got us into it? The party that ran up huge deficits, not once, but twice in the past 30 years? Or the party that turned one of those deficits into a surplus?

The answer's pretty clear. At least to me. Because voting Republican at this point in time is like hiring an arsonist to put out the fire he set.

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Sarah Not-So-Straight and Not-So-Tall

I don't know who the hell this Michael Seitzman guy is, but I have to admit that I agree with every word of this:

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You're an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we're going to agree to disagree. This isn't one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I'm not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren't scared out of your freakin' mind, then you're mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

He posts on Huffington Post (no links -- we're not about links here). On the other hand, he also claims that he finds her sexually attractive and wants to sleep with her, and if that's true then I think that he's either mentally ill, mentally disabled or mentally disturbed.

Because that woman is creepy. Deeply creepy.

Some of the squadrons of reporters flocking to Alaska to find out about Sarah Palin are starting to find out the truth about her. The New York Times has a story on the front page today that shows that, when you get right down to it, Sarah Palin really isn't all that different from George W. Bush:

Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages. [...]

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records. [...]

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

You have to admit, the bit about the Wasilla High School yearbook archives is priceless. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. This is exactly the same kind of cronyism that called FEMA to fall down during the days after Katrina. Do we really want more of that?

In the interests of fairness, though, I have to point out that there seems to be one glaring error of fact in the Times's reporting. They claim that Palin became governor of Alaska fifty years after it became a state, when Alaska became the 49th state in 1959 -- so it hasn't been 50 years yet (Hawaii became the 50th state later that same year).

So you see? We can be fair and balanced here. It's just that sometimes we choose not to be.

Sarah Speaks!

The McCain campaign has held Sarah Palin in virtual purdah since McCain named her as his running mate -- she's given lots of speeches, in which she has stuck strictly to the text, but absolutely no interviews. No extemporaneous comments. No diverging whatsoever from scripts written for her by others.

And now we know why.

Tonight Sarah Palin gave her first interview since being named to the Republican ticket, to Charlie Gibson of ABC News (full disclosure: I worked briefly for ABC News). Even with extensive coaching, she still came off as someone who -- how shall I say this politely? -- is no Hillary Clinton.

Sarah Palin can't even lie convincingly.

Here is what I felt was one of the most interesting parts of the interview:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?
PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.
GIBSON: Exact words.
PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side. That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

Do I really have to point out that Governor Palin was lying through her teeth? Not only that, but she can't even lie convincingly. It's one thing to be a liar. It's another thing to be a bad liar.

First she tries to wriggle her way out of it by claiming that she didn't say what she said (only to be shut down by Gibson, who reminds her that it was an exact quote). Then she tries to claim that what she said was only what Abraham Lincoln had said before her.

The only problem with that is that it's a bald-faced lie. What Governor Palin said was the exact opposite of what Lincoln said -- and anyone who knows the Lincoln quote knows it. And she doesn't even get the quote right.

This, according to Jim Wallis, the author of God's Politics, is what Lincoln said:

"Our task should not be to invoke religion and the name of God by claiming God's blessing and endorsement for all our national policies and practices—saying, in effect, that God is on our side. Rather, we should pray and worry earnestly whether we are on God's side."

For those of you who are into irony, John Kerry quoted the same lines of Lincoln in his acceptance speech at the Deomcratic convention in Boston four years ago.

Now, anyone who can read and is capable of comparing the two statements knows full well that Palin was not "repeating" Lincoln's words -- if she'd wanted to do that, she just could have quoted him, the way John Kerry did.

She said the exact opposite of what Lincoln meant. And thinks the American people are too stupid to know the difference.

I'll skip past the part where she encourages Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, serenely ignorant of the fact that such an alliance with those two countries would oblige us to go to war with Russia if Russia attacked either one of them. And I'll move on to my favorite part -- so far (there's going to be more on various ABC News shows in the next day or so):

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view.
GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.
PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.
GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

Did you get it? The woman didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was -- and she's running for Vice President of the United States! And by the way, don't you love Charlie Gibson explaining it to her: "as I understand it" -- that was really priceless.

Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle sound like Thomas Aquinas. And it'll be interesting to see what the G.O.P. does with her after this. Do they stick her back in purdah, away from those nasty beasts in the mainstream media? Or will Americans buy the bullshit that she's selling?

I guess we'll find out soon.

"My Muslim Faith"

Guess what? Barack Obama's human.

On "This Week With George Stephanopolous" he made a mistake. Not a big mistake, more of a verbal slip, but it's one that the right-wing bloggers are already obsessing about, trying to make it into a big mistake -- and it's one that we're going to be hearing a lot about in the next few days.

I guarantee that Rush Limbaugh and the boys at Fox News are going to be jumping on this one like a horny football player on a slutty cheerleader.

What did he say?

He said that John McCain had not attacked "my Muslim faith."

Ooooops!

Was it just bad phrasing? Or was it a genuine Freudian slip? I believe it was the former, the right-wing bloggers are already claiming that it's the latter.

What he meant to say is pretty obvious -- that McCain has not so far been one of those people falsely accusing him of being a Muslim. It just came out wrong. I suppose he could have used an expression like "my alleged Muslim faith" or "my so-called Muslim faith" but that would have been seen as being demeaning to Islam.

I see this hitting the mainstream media by Tuesday at the latest. Did Obama make a gaffe -- which is Washington is defined as the moment when a politician accidentally tells the truth?

After all, the right-wing has nothing better to talk about. They can't run on the record of the past eight years (and Sarah Palin on ice skates can't run away from it fast enough), so all they can do is mock Obama for being "community organizer" (although if you think about it, as one poster on the ABC News board put it, so was Jesus Christ) and imply that he's some kind of a scary Muslim.

Will it work? The last 28 years of American history would seem to indicate that we would be distinctly foolish to assume that it won't.

Noun, Verb, P.O.W.

John McCain talked about his personal story tonight in his acceptance speech on the last night of the Republican convention. He did so because there's nothing else he can talk about.

He heads a discredited party whose president couldn't even show his face at his own party's convention because it would turn off swing voters who distrust him when they don't despise him. He'd rather talk about being tortured himself in the 60s than admit the fact that the leaders of his own party have condoned torture of people who are being held in secret places without being charged with any crime. He'd rather allow his running mate to attack Barack Obama in carefully chosen code words (whenever either she or Rudy Giuliani used the words "community organizer" it sounded like those scenes in films like "Grand Illusion" or "Mean Streets" where we can tell that a character is anti-Semitic just by the way they pronounce a Jewish name) than to accept the fact that a party whose convention delegates are 93% white can no longer be said to represent America.

John McCain and the Republicans are the past. Barack Obama and the Democrats are the future.

Can John McCain run on the record of the past eight years? Of course not -- which is why he ran away from it as fast as he could. Are we better off than we were when Bill Clinton left office? Of course not -- which is why George W. Bush couldn't show his face at his own party's convention.

That's why you heard about John McCain's story ad nauseam during this convention. That's why we heard over and over again about how he was shot down and how he was tortured (but not about how he signed a confession) and how he came home with injuries that he carries to this day.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, wars are not won by P.O.W.s. And while McCain's service is impressive, and his courage is laudatory, it has no bearing whatsoever on the choice Americans have to make in November. After all, you never heard Franklin Roosevelt say, "Vote for me -- I have polio!" He told a country in the worst crisis it had faced in 68 years that he had a new deal for the American people. He spoke about optimism in the face of misery -- and he won in a landslide. John McCain, and his party, act as if it's 1980 and all it takes is a promise to cut taxes on the rich and boost military spending to get elected.

He, and they, are going to find out differently in about two months.

McCain's Problem

I don't know about you, but I'll bet that, for a lot of Republicans, Joe Lieberman is looking pretty damn good around now.

John McCain is sending a squadron of operatives to Alaska to find out what else they might have missed about Sarah Palin -- besides the knocked-up teenage daughter and the husband with the DUI arrest, that is. A bit like closing the barn door after the cow's gotten out, if you ask me.

This is starting to look a little like 1972, for those of you whose memory of politics goes back that far. George McGovern chose Senator Thomas Eagleton to be his running mate, only to discover that Eagleton had mental health issues that were considered at the time to be disqualifying, and which caused him to drop out of the race.

But the funny thing is that McCain is really fucked. In theory, he could replace her now -- after all, Palin hasn't even been officially nominated by the convention -- but in a very short time Sarah Palin has become the "ooomph girl" of the rabid right, the very base that McCain most needs to shore up if he wants to have any hope of winning in November. If he drops her now, he alienates a part of the Republican party that he just can't afford to offend. If he doesn't drop her, he runs the risk of alienating everyone else.

McCain better hope (pray is more like it) that nothing else pops up in the near future about Sarah Palin's past (and keep in mind that the woman is already under investigation -- something that McCain's people knew when he picked her). What else have they missed? What other skeletons does she have in her closet? Because anything else just might prove to be fatal.

But let's be clear about something. I feel bad for Bristol Palin (not least because she has a mother who's stupid enough to saddle her with a name like "Bristol"). A 17-year-old girl from Alaska who's suddenly thrust into national prominence because a teenage hockey player and self-professed "fucking redneck" was too stupid to put on a condom deserves our compassion, not our scorn. The issue here is not the daughter.

The issue is McCain's judgment.

Naming a vice president is the most important decision that a candidate has to make, and it's pretty obvious that McCain made a hasty and ill-informed decision. What does that say about his qualifications to be president? That's the issue that the left has to keep hammering away at -- that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is indicative of serious flaws in the way John McCain makes decisions -- flaws that could have serious if not deadly consequences should he get into the White House. And we can't afford to take a chance like that at this point in our history.

You have to wonder if the McCain camp is second-guessing themselves and quietly wondering who else might be available if they have to bail on Sarah Palin. The problem is that if they do, the campaign is pretty much over. For better or worse, they're stuck with her.

Sort of like a shotgun marriage. Appropriately ironic, don't you think?

An Interesting Week

The week ahead reminds me of the old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. These are going to be interesting days ahead, with a lot of challenges for progressives as we try to make our way through the minefield and into the White House.

The Republican Convention has already been drastically curtailed because of Hurricane Gustav, and although at first blush it might seem churlish to consider the political fallout from that event, we should probably do it anyway. Is this going to remind voters of Katrina and the Bush Administration's horrifically inept handling of that catastrophe, or is it going to give Bush and his cronies a second chance to get it right and look good? Is the fact that voters won't be reminded of Bush and Cheney at the convention a good thing or a bad thing?

Then there's the naming of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be McCain's running mate. An opportunity for the Democrats, or a trap? Their first reaction to her pick was wrong-headed and Obama himself corrected it. And I think it's obvious that in the way we discuss and treat Sarah Palin we have to be extraordinarily careful and avoid the idiot excesses that some left-wing bloggers have already begun to indulge in (such as their suggestion that Palin's latest child is actually her grandchild, the son of her 16-year-old daughter -- do we really need to be putting stupid shit like that out there?).

One thing Gustav will do is force the Republicans to tone down the red-meat rhetoric at their convention. They have to sound statesmanlike, not like rabid attack dogs. And Democrats have to be careful how they respond.

There are a couple of ways to attack McCain's choice that don't make progressives sound sexist or like they're attacking a hockey mom. I would suggest we concentrate on them:

• McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate, but was overruled by the right-wing of his own party, who, one could argue, practically made his choice for him. This could be a valuable line of attack, since it hits at McCain's so-called "maverick" status and points out the disturbing truth: that for the past eight years the worst, most fascistic elements of the Republican party have had McCain in their pocket.
• McCain picked for his vice president a person whom he had met exactly once. The rashness and the recklessness of the choice and the way it was made is a valid point, and needs to be made.
• Sarah Palin is a rabid right-wing extremist whose views are not mainstream -- which is exactly why the right wing of the GOP went so bonkers with joy when she was chosen. Pointing out exactly how far to the right of the American people she is makes a certain amount of sense.
• If Palin's choice galvanized the base of their party, it also has to galvanize the base of ours. This woman has views that are profoundly at odds with the majority of the American people, and that has to get people to move over to our side. Make people vote Democratic who otherwise would just stay at home and not bother to vote.

At the same time, Sarah Palin is an attractive, personable candidate, and we underestimate her at our peril. I hope Joe Biden is very, very careful in their upcoming debate, because if he goes after her the wrong way it could just spell disaster. Keep in mind the debate between the vice presidential candidates of 1988, when Michael Dukakis picked the venerable Lloyd Bentsen and George H.W. Bush picked the laughable J. Danforth Quayle, who was not just beaten but humiliated by Bensten in their debate by the most ferociously effective put-down in the history of modern politics: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

But we know who won that election, don't we?

NOTE 9/2: Sarah Palin's daughter is 17, not 16. And she's pregnant. And if the left-wing bloggers had not accused her of giving birth to Palin's Down Syndrome son, the fact of her pregnancy might not have come out -- at least not now.