I have a trait that most of my closest friends consider a character flaw at best, or proof of yet another, fourth, form of insanity that the doctors have yet to diagnose. It gets me in trouble, all the time. But I can't help it: once a tragedy gets to a certain point, I blow past denial (in fact, that seldom lasts more than a few nanoseconds with me, I'm always willing to believe bad news if it comes with any evidence at all), anger, bargaining, depression, and even acceptance into a sixth stage of grief that is, so far as I can tell, unique to me and to a handful of writers whose work I admire: hilarity.

So I know that you're going to find it evidence of something wrong with me that I laughed so hard my sides hurt, that I laughed so hard I was physically gasping for breath, while reading these two articles and their sidebars (so far) in the "Buyers Betrayed" series on the enviable Miami Herald website: Jack Dolan, Rob Barry, and Matthew Haggman, "Ex-Convicts Active in Mortgage Fraud" and Jack Dolan, "Thousands with Criminal Records Work Unlicensed as Loan Originators." (Found when tracking inbound links to yesterday's journal entry, via alobar's journal entry "Rotten to the Core." Thanks!) And after the weekend I've had (really over-the-top nightmares), I need more laughs, so I just can't wait for the third and final installment in the series. I can't help it. It's just how I am.

When an industry that's been the victim of fraud (as well as a perpetrator) over and over again throughout human history decides that, in our modern electronic age economy, that kind of fraud is now impossible so they want to not be regulated any more, I ought to find this hard to believe. When I find out that they set out to persuade legislators to set up a parallel unregulated form of the same business for them to move all of their business into, just to evade regulation they think is burdensome and unnecessary, I know that I ought to consider it my top responsibility to bargain with the people who think like this, to try to persuade them to accept some kind of regulatory scheme that meets the minimum requirements. When I find out that the people appointed to do the regulation that's still in place don't actually do their jobs, because they don't see actually doing their jobs as part of their job description any more, I ought to find that depressing. When I find out that this allowed people with federal criminal convictions for running financial scams for the famous "five families" of the New York mafia, and people who've made their entire living to date off of drug dealing or credit card fraud or identity theft, to legally work directly with the customers in the mortgage industry, I ought to find that terribly depressing. When I find out how many people knew about this and decided to do nothing, perhaps the sane response is to just give up, and accept that this is just how rotten the American people have become. I know that most of my friends, and most of the people I admire, never reach the phase of "acceptance" of this kind of thing, but maybe that is the sane response.

But when I read stories of fraud so egregious that you couldn't include them in a comic caper novel because nobody would believe you, and then I find out that even a newspaper was able to turn up at least four thousand such implausibly silly sounding criminals getting away with it for five to six years? When the insanely goofy details keep piling on? I blow right past acceptance into out-of-control laughter. I laugh so hard, and so long, that it hurts to laugh, and I have to get up from my reading and come back. I laugh so hard it's actually an effort to sustain my outrage, to where it takes some small effort to even remember to focus part of my mind and my conscience on the horrible, horrible crimes that were perpetrated on some of the most vulnerable people in this country, people who did nothing wrong and that even the most anarchic of libertarians would agree deserve a government that would protect them from (as the libertarian credo goes) loss of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. Even when I see that nobody around but me (and, I'd bet, Carl Hiassen) is laughing, when I know that my emotional reaction is inappropriate to the situation, I just can't help myself. The tragedy has reached the level where it's just that damned funny.

I'm a bad person.

How do you know that the economy is in a real recession, not just an imaginary one, one that's all in your head, a "mental" recession? When a Republican is out of work.

A particular Republican is out of work, actually: lobbyist and former US Senator Phil Gramm, the guy who said that the recession was something entirely imagined by a "nation of whiners" -- until he was laid off himself. OK, I'm aware that the newspapers say that he quit "to end this distraction." But trust me, he's out of work, and I don't think there's any doubt that this was a "quit or be fired" moment. Okay, he's really more of an involuntary retiree than the victim of a lay off, and I'm sure he has some rich Republican friends who'll front him his rent and grocery money should it come to that. Still, the fact remains that at this point, the architect of one of the pillars of Reaganomics is radioactive to any potential employers.

Most of the news media have covered this from the inevitable "Presidential horse race" angle, wanting to know what it means to the "contest" between Obama and McCain that Gramm wrote pretty much the entire McCain campaign economic plan; how much of an embarrassment is this to John McCain? And the focus is on that because the top candidates firing, dismissing, cutting themselves off from, betraying, denouncing, renouncing, and/or accepting the only-semi-voluntary resignations of their closest friends, allies, advisers, and staff has been a recurring thread this year, to the point where most news editors and many journalists are begging the rest of the commentariat to throw the phrase "throw (someone) under the bus" under the bus.

But there's a bigger news story here than the wannabe horse-race handicappers trying to juggle the odds on which "horse" will cross the "finish line" ahead of the other, and I'd like to thank the Washington Post's columnist E.J. Dione for calling it to my attention last Friday on Countdown with (No, Really, This Time) Keith Olbermann. Because Dione came very close to predicting this news story, a week in advance, pretty much by accident, with his column for July 11th, 2008: "Capitalism's Reality Check" (registration required). Because in a very real way, the 2008 election isn't about Barack Obama or John McCain. In a weird sort of a way, it's an actual national referendum about Phil Gramm. Because before he was before he was UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm, before he was Senator Phil Gramm, before he was U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, he was Texas A&M University professor of economics Dr. Phil Gramm, whose entire life's work has been about laissez faire economics. He wasn't just the a contributor to the Republicans' "Contract on with America," he was one of the main intellectual architects of Reaganomics, and for him, its founding principle was this:

In the long term, Dr. Gramm argued, it is basically impossible for a business to stay in business by harming its customers, without some unfair form of help from the government. If all government help is withdrawn from businesses, and a free market prevails, then customers will flock to the business that doesn't harm its customers, that business will earn more money than the businesses that do harm their customers, and the bad businesses will either go broke and close their doors or get bought out by the good business. This means that in a free market, any form of government regulation aimed at preventing companies from harming their customers is unnecessary. What's more, the effort that the government spends on checking up on companies that it thinks could go bad costs money, so they have to raise taxes to pay for the compliance checkers, including taxes on those companies. What's more, companies that are having to look over their shoulders at hovering, hostile government regulators have to practice business defensively, have to divert resources that could go into making better, cheaper products into dealing with regulators, have to hire and pay the people who do nothing but placate the regulators, and those costs get passed on to the customer. So according to Phil Gramm (and most other hard-core laissez faire economists) any kind of government regulation of business at all achieves no good end, gives customers no better products or more products than they would have had under a laissez faire market, and does so at a higher cost. Therefore any kind of consumer or citizen or environmental protection by government is an inherently bad thing.

When he was doing his academic work back in the 1970s, American businesses' regulatory compliance costs were at their all-time maximum; from the 1890s to the early 1970s, fed-up American voters had demanded more and more protection from companies by government. And when Phil Gramm was doing his academic work, the US economy was in horrible shape. In hindsight, we can see that this had more to do with horrible budgetary mismanagement during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and the wreckage wrought on the federal budget by the ever-escalating costs of having just lost a major land war in Asia, than it had to do with corporate regulation. But voters, eager for a fast way to repair the wreckage of the Carter-era economy, were willing to listen to the many US businesses who were claiming that there wouldn't be so much inflation if they didn't have to spend so much money hiring people to protect them from unnecessary government regulators. And, in fact, by the end of President Reagan's first term, this academic and political argument had so thoroughly won the day that it not only became a permanent bedrock principle of the Republican Party (where it was no big surprise, as hands-off-big-business had been Republican party dogma since the robber-baron days of the 1880s and '90s), but it even became the majority position on economics in the Democratic Party, as well.

So we've spent the 28 years since Ronald Reagan won his first election to the US Presidency rolling back regulation after regulation, trusting more and more in "voluntary compliance" and "market-based solutions." And even where some regulations were too popular to repeal, businesses in formerly heavily regulated industries like banking, lending, real estate, and finance found ways to shift all of their actual money, all of the actual economic activity, into what had been niches too tiny to come to regulators' attention during the heyday of government regulation. We got exactly what Phil Gramm devoted his entire career to trying to persuade us to want, an almost completely unregulated economy. So it's not terribly surprising that Phil Gramm thinks that our current economy is really, really great; he just wants his side's politicians to make whatever bare-minimum entirely-symbolic gestures are necessary to placate the American voting public long enough for the "invisible hand of the market" to weed out the bad actors and turn the economy over to the good companies, still at a lower cost than government regulation.

But here's what E.J. Dione was writing about, a week ago last Friday: Phil Gramm, and his friend John McCain, and a few equally hide-bound ideologues with no actual business experience of their own, are practically the only people left on the planet who still think so. The same companies that spent the 1970s through the 1990s begging for less and less regulation are now begging for more and more regulation, and so are ever more of the Republican politicians that are beholden to those companies. Not just the American voters, but American companies, are standing up to Phil Gramm and saying en masse, "We tried it your way, and it turns out that it doesn't work." They don't want to hear from some pointed-headed economist turned politician turned lobbyist, who not only never managed a business but who never even worked a day of actual work in his life, how the economy "ought to work." They can see with their own eyes that it didn't turn out that way.

There is, actually, a reason why it doesn't work. It would not be entirely fair to penalize Professor Gramm, Ph.D., for not having foreseen this; much of the math didn't exist during his academic tenure. There have been an awful lot of advances in economics, especially coming out of the application of the school of mathematics known as "games theory," that couldn't have been made without fast and inexpensive computer simulations. But having done the math, and seen the results, there's a perfectly logical explanation in plain English that we can now give. When I do give it, it's going to sound so obvious that you're going to ask, well, sure, why didn't they see that coming? And all I can say to that is, you weren't there, it was a much more primitive world back then. Anyway, here's the reason why it doesn't work: all too frequently, the market doesn't have time to fix itself. Suppose that even just one company cheats by finding a way to make its products more profitable in a way that harms the buyers or that downstreams costs to its non-customers, imposes costs on them involuntarily, and manages to keep this at all secret for even a matter of months, or at most a couple of years. It can then drive prices down to the point where none of its competitors are making any money. They go bankrupt; this company then buys them out or monopolizes the market.

As one company cheats, therefore, there are morally crippling pressures on other companies to find ways to match the cheating company's prices; if anybody cheats, they all know within a matter of at most a few months that they have to cheat, too. Nor can they go public with their knowledge that the other company "must be" making deadly safety compromises with their product or dumping toxics onto an unsuspecting public. They know from their own business experience that that's the only way that the other company can be making that product, in the same market they are, with the same raw materials costs and vaguely similar wages and the same broadly-known business practices ... but they can't prove it in a court of law. It could take them years to find the evidence they'd need to protect themselves if they made that accusation and got sued for libel and slander. And they don't have years; they'll be out of business long before then, probably.

Nor does it help that we had a wave of shareholders' rights lawsuits back in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the same conclusion: company boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder return in the short run, and since it is a fiduciary duty, they can be sued for not doing it. If there are investors out there (and there are) who think that the company should take insane risks with public safety because their competitors are doing so and thereby returning more value to their shareholders, it doesn't even help if the company that would rather do the right thing and wait for the market to catch up is still somehow minimally profitable, or if it has the cash reserves to wait until the evidence comes out: they'll still get sued, there'll still be a hostile takeover of that company, and new management will be put in that has no such optimistic faith in the goodness of markets.

And all of that makes Phil Gramm what he richly deserves to be: a retiree. At age 66, he's an academic economist who, through his success in politics, actually got to experiment with an entire nation's economy. As a "scientist" who still won't admit that the experiment didn't produce the results that his hypothesis said it would, even after all the evidence is in, he deserves to never work again; he's not just a bad person, he's a poor scientist. So he belongs where he is now, laid off, unemployed and unemployable, living off of Social Security and his US Senate pension, not anywhere near the reins of power; Gods help us, if he could, he'd repeat the experiment again, rather than admit that his model was flawed, in hopes it would turn out differently a second time.

Does this (David Kravets, "Hans Reiser Leads Police to Nina's Body," "Threat Level" on Wired.com, 7/7/08) mean that finally the blogs I depend on for tech updates and other real news will stop trying to "prove" that the case against Hans Reiser, author of the ReiserFS file system offered in most Linux versions, in the murder of his wife, was "only" circumstantial? And ideally drop the subject altogether, since if I wanted true-crime news, there are plenty of other places I could look for it?

News flash: once the weight of it rises to a certain level? And in the absence of any other plausible suspect? And given motive? "Circumstantial" evidence is actually the best evidence there is, better than eyewitness testimony. In this case, the word you were looking for wasn't "circumstantial," it was "forensic." There was never any meaningful doubt that he did it, and I will be completely damned if I have the slightest idea why that was so hard for nearly every tech journalist to believe.

rnk35 asked me overnight what my opinion was on D.C. vs Heller. Good timing; if I hadn't been asked an easy one, I might have been too lazy to write anything tonight. For those of you who don't know, that's the Supreme Court case this last week that (in all too common fashion these days) completely overturned the previous Supreme Court interpretation of the 2nd ("Right to Bear Arms") Amendment to the US Constitution while pretending to be completely compatible with it. (See the always-brilliant Dahlia Lithwick, "Was It Ever Miller Time?," Slate.com, 6/26/08.) The relevant back story, as documented in almost every worthwhile history on the subject, is that during the writing of the Bill of Rights they engaged in that classic bit of parliamentary hand-waving that you sometimes have to do to get a majority to pass anything: write an ambiguous piece of legislation that both sides can think means what they want it to mean. In this case, it was an argument over whether the US would grant unlimited gun ownership rights to every individual citizen, or just to the various state militias, what we now call the National Guard. Half the Founding Fathers said they would only approve it if it restricted gun ownership to the militias; half threatened to veto it if it restricted gun ownership at all; the resulting legislative compromise muddled the issue to this very day.

So, what's my opinion? I honestly don't care. No, let me make this really clear. Not only do I not care, I think less of you if you care a whole lot about the 2nd Amendment. This has got to be the most mind-bogglingly stupid thing we've ever argued about as a nation.

First of all, I don't care what you think the US Constitution says, and I don't care what laws you pass: if you think you can disarm the American people, you're an idiot. The closest thing I can come up with to a plausible estimate of how many firearms there are in the US is about 192 million, including about 65 million pistols. (Jeremy Travis, "Guns in America," National Institute of Justice, 1997.) I cheerfully invite you to imagine any way, in any way at all consistent with the 4th Amendment, that you could forcibly collect all 200 million or so guns there already are in here. And the government that spends billions of dollars a year to keep however many hundreds of tons of drugs from entering the country and fails, the government that devotes thousands of agents to trying to prevent umpty thousand illegal immigrants per year from entering the country and fails, isn't going to have any better luck stopping gun runners from importing and illegally selling as many handguns per year as the American people want. Period. So, the American people are armed. And they always will be armed. Get over it.

Secondly, if you think that any law, whether pro-gun or anti-gun, has ever had any effect on crime rates in America, you're at best ill-informed. Study after study after study has shown, to the contrary, that if you compare two jurisdictions of equivalent demographics, one with strict gun control laws and one with no gun control laws (or even, as is true in a couple of places, mandatory gun-ownership laws), there is no net difference. None.

And you know what that makes this whole debate? An absolute and total waste of everybody's time. We donate tens of millions of dollars a year to pro-gun and anti-gun lobbying groups, who spend that money on TV ads, who use that money to influence legislators if they can, and who spend millions of dollars every couple of years on stupid pointless Supreme Court cases like D.C. vs Heller, and for what? You would literally not notice the difference, no matter which side won. So no, I really don't care a whole heck of a lot which way the Supreme Court ruled on individual gun ownership. I have a very faint prejudice against banning anything, so to the faint extent I do care, I'm happy with it. But you know what? They could have ruled the other way and it wouldn't have bothered me one tiny bit. No, again, I'm understating the case: they could have ruled the other way and it still would have qualified, in my opinion, as the least important thing the Supreme Court did all year. I just wish we could bloody well settle the issue, get all the dim-witted or narrow-minded "single issue voters" who only care how a politician votes on guns to care about anything that would actually affect the country instead, and that both sides would just shut the heck up about the stupid guns.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has been all over the news tonight, everywhere you turn. He has a new book out entitled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Since Politico.com broke the news early of his accusations, he's been under steady attack by his fellow Republicans, accusing him of being brainwashed or confused or dishonest or all three, so he moved up the promotional interviews that were planned for the book's official release date (Monday) to Thursday night, and unsurprisingly found himself welcome on more talk shows than any author of his stature could possibly expect. The long and short of it: he swears he was telling the truth the whole time up at the podium, so far as he knew it, but that everybody else in the White House was lying to him, and until he got out of there, he didn't have enough objectivity to realize that he shouldn't have been giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Uh, yeah. Right.

I took the opportunity to pull out the three times I mentioned Scott McClellan in this blog while he was still White House press secretary: "Good Day for the Good Guys" (Nov 9, 2005), "The first vice president to shoot a man since Aaron Burr" (Feb 16, 2006) and "Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Told You So" under "Sleepy-Time Quicktakes" for March 1st, 2006. Let me refresh your memory. In the first, I referred back to an incident so shameful that I hadn't felt the urge to pile on poor Scotty at the time, when he got caught openly lying out of his own mouth to the press corps, swearing up and down to their faces that the President's video phone call conversation with a group of US troops in the field wasn't rehearsed and that they weren't told what questions to ask, after the reporters already had videotape of the rehearsal, showing exactly that, in hand. From that day forward, he became exactly useless to the Bush administration. Completely. It is an absolute rule going all the way back to the first White House press secretary during World War II that the press secretary may omit any facts he doesn't want to tell, may refuse to answer any question, but the one thing he must not do or the press will crucify him is knowingly lie to a reporter. So, from then on, every single time Scott McClellan went up to the podium, the press got more angry and more dismissive of him and more rude to his face, particularly when he was put in the untenable position of lying to the press some more over Dick Cheney's hunting accident, repeating stories about the incident that had been well documented to be false for at least a day and a half by that point. He also got caught lying about torture in CIA-run prisons even after reporters had actual torture victims on the record, showing their torture wounds. For all of these lies, he was openly booed at the podium. I predicted at that point that he wasn't long for the job; two months later, I turned out to be right, as he was fired by Bush's new White House chief of staff ... and replaced by someone who knew the rules of the job, by someone who (just as importantly) didn't share Scott McClellan's naked and blatant hatred for the White House press corps.

Bush spokespeople are calling McClellan a disgruntled ex-employee.

I'll bet he is. He did his job exactly the way Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the rest wanted him to do it, and he got fired for it. And now he's taking it out on them. Is he telling the truth? For gods' sake, people, this is Scott McClellan. What on earth would possess you to think he's telling the truth? Has he ever? In his life? Told the truth to a reporter? I wouldn't bet good money that the man was capable of telling the truth to save his life!

And this act of flagrant retaliation (whether honest or dishonest), and all the aggravation it's bringing to the White House, and all the aggravation it's going to bring to John McCain by bringing back into the news cycle just how dishonest the war is, right at the point where McCain wants to change the subject to the War on Terror with the usual tired old trope of "vote Democrat and die"? This could all have been avoided, if it weren't for one of Karl Rove's more "brilliant" ideas, the kind of outside-the-box thinking that got him labeled "Boy Genius" by his co-workers. Rove's idea, enthusiastically supported by Cheney, was that one of the mistakes past Republican administrations made was hiring people who were good at their jobs, hiring people based on their proven skills and track record applicable to the job they're being given, only to find out afterwards that they wouldn't consistently and reliably run their new job according to the President's and the Party's political principles. So the word went down: hire based on loyalty, not competence, because (in Rove's "brilliant" opinion) it's easier to teach competence to someone loyal but dumb than to teach loyalty to someone competent and smart.

Yeah, but then you end up with a White House full of people who are loyal and dumb and incompetent, who end up embarrassing themselves and you, and who then write the most bitter, angry tell-all books ever written by White House staffers when they take the blame for it, not you, without even doing you the courtesy of waiting until you're out of office. Not the smartest idea you've ever had, Karl.

I've said it before: the really interesting politics are never about good versus evil. That's easy. Nearly everybody's for good, and against evil, so it tends to be really easy to unite people. No, when politics gets really interesting is when it's about good versus good: when we have to choose between two incompatible good things, or when we can't currently afford both good things on a list and have to choose one for now. Well, where politics gets not merely interesting, but grimly interesting, not merely grimly interesting, but really tough is when it's about evil versus evil: when no matter what choice we make, something truly awful is going to happen, and it's going to be our fault either way, and what remains is to decide which of the two evils is the lesser.

I've been thinking a lot about the Myanmar cyclone damage, wondering which of two truly monstrous evils the world community was going to settle on. Because the wind had barely stopped blowing before we knew two things. We knew that the military government of Myanmar just plain doesn't have the airlift capability to get enough food, water, and medicine to the people in the hardest-hit coastal areas, even if they had it; that to save literally tens of thousands of innocent lives, they were going to need help. And we also knew, again before the wind even stopped blowing, that the ruling junta had flatly ruled out accepting any such help. By day two, we saw clearly why. No ambiguity, no conspiracy theory, no doubt; it ran on Myanmar's own official government TV stations. The junta is confiscating all aid that enters the country, relabeling it in the name of the ruling generals and their close friends, and only delivering it to their political supporters -- even to political supporters that weren't affected by the cyclone. Which leaves the world's humanitarian aid community, both governments and non-governmental organizations, to do some very, very ugly math.

If we do absolutely nothing, then at least 40,000 people will die of hunger, thirst, and infectious disease. And it will be partly our fault, for having decided it was better to let them all die than to help the junta punish its internal opposition, real or suspected.

If we deliver the aid to the ruling junta, probably at least half of those people will still die of hunger, thirst, and infectious disease, 20,000 or more ... and it will be partly our fault, because we will have helped out those who chose the slain, and because we will have directly funded the junta with the half of the aid that they confiscate and keep for themselves and their supporters.

And there really isn't a third option. It's a mark of how desperate everybody is not to make this choice that some diplomats and reporters have actually floated a trial balloon: what if we send the Marine Corps in to seize and hold a beachhead, then send in the Seabees to build a temporary port and landing strip for the aid workers? Or to evacuate the dying? But it's a fantasy solution; aside from the fact that the US military is kind of busy right now, fighting two land wars in Asia already, it'd be flatly illegal. Nor is it a given that the people who need the aid wouldn't join the junta in rising up against us; it's not as if we have any credibility left on the subject of invading countries for their own good. Nor are the American people going to put up with even a half-serious suggestion that we risk American soldiers' lives for tiny little Myanmar.

So all we can do, all we could do, was threaten to withhold the aid while trying to persuade Myanmar's few remaining allies, notably China, to try to talk them into accepting international assistance, or more to the point, into letting people receive aid without the generals getting personal credit and without first checking their names against a list of possible pro-democracy subversives. Since the junta knows full well that the US government, like nearly every government in the world except for China's, would really like to aid pro-democracy subversives in Myanmar, there was never any serious chance they were going to give in. They can let 40,000 or 50,000 people die without losing a night of sleep, and would rather do so than let opponents of the regime, foreign or domestic, claim any credit for doing anything good in Myanmar. So they just kept us reminded, day after day, how many people were dying, how many more people were going to die, leaving it to us to decide which of two monstrous evils we were going to pick.

Over the weekend, one by one, all of the world's governments and NGOs started shipping food directly to the junta.

It makes my teeth itch, sure, to prop up a military dictatorship. But to be fair, they're no worse a dictatorship than probably 40 or 50 other countries' rulers, nor are they the only military junta we're supporting, at least a couple of which are way worse than Myanmar. (Half of "Stan-istan" comes to mind.) And either way, we were basically screwed, let alone the tens of thousands who are going to die no matter which choice we made. So however I feel about it, I'm hesitant to second-guess anybody's decision, in either direction; I'm far from sure how I'd decide, if the mess landed in my lap as anything other than a theoretical problem. But as a theoretical problem, it is an interesting one, isn't it? Grimly interesting. And a genuinely tough call.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not politics, I am as clanging brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not politics? I am nothing. And though I bestow all my own goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not politics? It actually changes nothing. Politics is patient, and is helpful; politics is not personal, is something professionals know not to take too personally, not to have grudges over; rejoices not in ideological purity, but rejoices in practical solutions; supports all things, believes in the people, hopes for a better world, endures anything. Politics never fails: but whether there be prophesies, they will fail; whether there shall be spin, they shall run out of things to say; whether there be trivia, it shall fail. For we prophesy unsuccessfully, and we spin to an audience that knows our tricks by now, but when that which actually solves problems and gets things done shows up, trivial distractions pass away. For trivia is trivial, and prophesies get even the most elementary things wrong, but when the rubber hits the road, trivia and prophesies are done away with. When I was a child, I ranted like a child, I understood no more of how the world actually works than a child does, and I had a childish faith in ideology: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see the world as through a dirty window, but in the future, we'll see the evidence face to face; now we know a little, but then we'll know every bit as much about the actors as they know about us. And now abideth economics, history, and politics, these three: but the greatest of these is politics.

No, really, that's more or less how I think. OK, what's really going on above is that I was thinking about something way out of character for me, namely the fact that I am actually falling asleep at my desk while trying to watch the evening's political news coverage, night after night, for almost two weeks, to the point where it's randomizing my sleep schedule. And that's very, very weird for me, because there are three lenses that I use to look at almost the entire world: history, economics, and politics. That's how the parody of First Corinthians chapter 13, above, began, with the realization for me there "abides three things, economics, history, and politics, but the greatest of these is politics," and having put it that way, I couldn't resist completing the parallelism. But no, really, in truth three things are fundamental to my self-image, and fundamental to how I approach and understand and interact with the world. So do you realize how hard it is to bore me with political news?

But the fact of it is this: nothing has changed in months. George Bush and John McCain still intend us to be bogged down in two or more land wars in Asia for at least an entire generation, thinking that's the best tool for protecting us from tiny and largely irrelevant criminal gangs, and nothing's changed that. Congress is too afraid of having something go wrong if they stop these stupid wars, and too willing to keep signing Bush's loan paperwork and too willing to let several young Americans die per day in order to not have to deal with this until they have a Democratic president who won't blame a Democratic congress if things go wrong. Barack Obama is still going to actually win the whole campaign, Hillary Clinton will still say or do anything however sleazy to try to persuade delegates to steal it for her, but she can't so today's particular accusations are neither likely to be true nor at all interesting. And no, we won't know until November if despite John McCain's intention to wreck the country with disastrous unnecessary wars and even more disastrous deficit spending, people will vote for this senile and clearly increasingly deranged old man who only has two virtues: he used to have an honest reputation, and he's neither black nor female. And Hillary's still a woman, and Obama is still black. We've known all of these things since February, at the very least.

It has been at least that long since anything actually changed, so I'm having an increasingly hard time justifying to myself why it's still on the news every night. I mean, I used to have two problems with the Monica Lewinsky story. First of all, it was trivial garbage, something that took at most a couple of nights' reporting to know everything that mattered about it and for any reasonably well informed and honest person to see it as what it was, a right-wing partisan witch-hunt, an attempt to win in Congress what they'd lost at the polls in November of '92 and '96. But my even bigger problem with it was that even on nights in which there was no actual news on the Monica Lewinsky story, it was still the top headline. No, really, I watch the news to hear something new, at least some new detail in an ongoing story; recapping the previous several months' worth of story without adding any new details night after night after expletive-deleted boring night, eventually ticks me off. And that's how I feel about this increasingly pointless and stupid Democratic nominating contest. I just want the damned thing to be over, and if I can't have that, I want the journalists I watch to wake up and realize that even if it's not over, it's not news, or at least not the top news story of the day every day, any more.

P.S. That being said, one thing did wake me up last night while watching the news, briefly: Keith Olbermann was in rare form, at his snarkiest best in a way he hasn't been in months. Check it out. (YouTube copy found via obama_2008.)

You know that stuff I wrote about how anything resembling a functioning democracy, anything resembling a free country, needs a fair and impartial independent meritocratic tenured judicial system, needs citizens to give that system the benefit of the doubt? I had my own belief in that rather substantially challenged by a news story on Monday: Mark Sherman, "Supreme Court says states can demand photo ID for voting," Associated Press, 4/28/08. Given that even the 6-judge majority wasn't able to find a single case of documented fraud in all of Indiana history that would have been prevented by this law? Given that even the 6-judge majority admitted that the Republican majority in the Indiana state legislature passed this law for partisan advantage, to make it harder for Democrats to win, that their allegedly neutral justification for this law was just a fig leaf? Given the largely hostile tone they adopted towards this law back when this case was argued in front of them? This hit me hard.

When I got into the story, I was expecting "Bush v Gore II: Bush Harder," yet another 5:4 vote by which the Republican judges sided with the Republicans. And I could already feel myself getting pinched in a tight place, pinched by my own insistence, a while back, that there are still enough safeguards in place to prevent dishonest and/or ignorant and/or partisan hacks from getting a majority on any appellate court bench in America. But then I went over to SCOTUSblog, which unsurprisingly has some excellent coverage of this, and saw that maybe, just maybe, my faith in the universe and in the robustness of American democracy was not entirely misplaced. Because the actual vote was 6-3, the actual official ruling has some interesting implications, and I think maybe there's a coincidence that even the analysts at SCOTUSblog haven't noticed. First, some links to the SCOTUSblog.com coverage, all dated 4/28/08:

• Lyle Denniston, "Court rejects voter ID challenge; no new grants," their main news story,
  
• Ben Winograd, "From Election Law Blog: Initial Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Decision in Crawford," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief against the Indiana voter ID law, and
  
• Jason Harrow, "More on Crawford: The Court Steps Back From Electoral Refereeing," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in favor of the Indiana voter ID law.

Because, as a few of the news stories and editorials I've seen elsewhere have also picked up, this is actually a much more complicated ruling than usual. Unless they're unanimous, Supreme Court rulings are always divided into two sections: the ruling majority opinion, and the complaining losers' dissents. But what we have in this case is three entirely conflicting opinions, each with three votes. Three judges, unsurprisingly led by Scalia (who never saw an attack on any minority other than Catholics that he didn't like), think that anywhere that Republicans are the majority, then as long as Republicans can come up with even a fig leaf of an excuse to disenfranchise Democrats, that's their right as the (permanent) majority; suck it, losers. Three judges, led by David Souter, flatly oppose disenfranchising any voters without first meeting a very high standard of proof. And three judges, including the Chief Justice, basically voted to throw the case out of the Supreme Court ... for now. Ordinarily, a 3:3:3 split means the Court doesn't hand down its ruling, yet, but somehow, behind the scenes, somebody managed to glue together a 6 vote majority by persuading the latter group that since they agreed with the hardcore Republican group about the merits of thiss particular case, that constituted a majority.

And if you look at the official ruling, its defense of this law is pretty tepid. Because what's really going on here, the side that really won (of the three sides), is the side that's on the winning side of a very long argument that's been going on these last couple of years about an entirely unrelated point of constitutional law: namely, the role of the Supreme Court in what are called facial challenges. A facial challenge is one in which someone argues that even though they can't show any one person who's been hurt yet by a law or other government action, and can't even show one actual plaintiff who will be hurt by it, they can still challenge the constitutionality of the law in front of the Supreme Court by arguing that the law is so blatantly awful on the face of it (the "face" in "facial challenge") that it must be struck down, preemptively, to protect the U.S. Constitution. What's going on here, pretty much all of the analysts from both sides agree, is that this is just the latest in a series of rulings, this year, in which the Supreme Court is sending a clear message: they want to get completely out of the business of hearing facial challenges. The three-vote ruling majority (by virtue of the 3-vote non-binding concurrence) as much as says, in the ruling, show us even one voter who's been improperly disenfranchised by this law, bring us a case in which that person has first been harmed by a voter ID law, then proven in a lower court that they've been harmed, and then that person will have the legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of these laws. Until then? They're saying "get out of our ... well, get out of our face," not to make too awful a pun out of it, I hope.

Which brings me to an interesting observation of my own. Note the timing of this ruling: one week, to the day, before the Indiana primary. One week from today, there will be Indiana voters who will have to vote by provisional ballot, then at their own expense travel to the nearest county seat sometime in the next 1 to 10 days and file an affidavit confirming that it was them who cast their ballot. (What, exactly, this proves, escapes me; anybody who impersonates a voter once will quite cheerfully do it twice, won't they? But that, apparently, is irrelevant to this one case, to Crawford v Marion County, IN.) And since there's an existing case, brought up in the footnotes of Crawford, that reminds us that even a $1.50 non-discriminatory poll tax was struck down as an improper burden on the right to vote, if it takes them more than 2/3rds of a gallon of gas to drive the round-trip, then they'll have standing to challenge this law. And isn't it an amazing coincidence that they issued this ruling in time for this new, non-facial challenge to be filed with respect to an election in which the Republicans can not actually benefit from any disenfranchisement that happens? Bet your bottom dollar that the Indiana Civil Liberties Union will be on the ground, next Tuesday, looking for that one victimized legitimate voter. And if nobody changes their votes between this case and that case, then the voter ID laws will be struck down, permanently, by the same bipartisan 6-3 majority, while allowing the Court to make its little political point about how much it hates having to decide facial challenges.

I got distracted by an argument that I'm working very hard to stay out of, to not get dragged into, in somebody else's blog. So distracted I couldn't get anything productive done last night. Fortunately, I have something to offer you that's on a subject near and dear to my heart, and at least as good a read as anything I've done: Kai Wright, "If They Are So Scared, How Come We're The Dead Ones?," TheRoot.com, 4/28/08. This subject needs to keep coming up until everybody, especially everybody in law enforcement, smartens up about it.

When I woke up late this morning and opened the news, the first thing I saw was that the undercover cops who murdered Sean Bell had been acquitted on all charges. All I could do, for the next couple of minutes, was sit there in shock, stare at that headline, and slowly say out loud in my empty apartment: "You. Have. GOT. To. Be. FUCKING. Kidding. Me."

Look, there is nothing left that is useful to say about this case. I figured this one out within a week of when it happened, from the ample eye-witness accounts, and wrote it up back on December 3rd, 2006: "Drunken Undercover Cops 'Spray and Pray.'" I see nothing in the subsequent trial record or any other news coverage that would change my mind. One group of drunks got into an argument with another group of drunks at a strip club. When one of those groups left, the other group decided to continue the beef outside, then got stupid, went into circular firing squad formation around the other group of drunks' trapped car, and slaughtered as many of them as they could before the ammo ran out, killing an unarmed man and crippling his equally unarmed friends. And because the group that did the shooting are all New York City cops, they're getting away with it. Because they're cops, the judge let them testify via affidavit without having to submit to cross-examination. Because they're cops, the judge doesn't even notice that they've changed their story even more often than the victims did, didn't factor that in when deciding who to believe.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

Other than that, there really isn't anything else to say about it. And that wasn't anything new, was it? I just feel like I needed to say it, out loud, in public: "Un. Fucking. Believable."

Because there's nothing else worth saying, I'm damned tempted to lock the comments on this entry, and for that matter on the earlier one. This is not a good one to argue with me about. If you think there is something worth arguing with me about, say it on your own damned web page or blog. Oh, and here, here are the links to the New York Times articles on today's verdict; unsurprisingly, the hometown newspaper has the fullest coverage:

• Michael Wilson, "Judge Acquits Detectives in Bell's 50-Shot Killing," NYT, 4/26/08.
• John Eligon & Corey Kilgannon, "Outrage and Uncertainty After Verdict in Bell Case," NYT, 4/26/08.
• Jim Dwyer, "Outside Court, an Unmistakable Police Presence," NYT, 4/26/08.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

I'm from Missouri, born and bred, lived here my whole life, it's been where every bit of political activism I've ever done has been. And my growing up years in politics coincide very thoroughly with the era of John Ashcroft, aka "the Deacon:" Missouri state auditor 1972-1974, assistant Missouri attorney general 1974-76, Missouri attorney general 1976-1984, Missouri governor 1984-1992, Missouri US Senator 1994-2000. Those of us here in Missouri, especially those of us at all active in politics, saw an awful lot of "the Deacon" over those 28 years, and we know him well. I can't say that I know the man personally, myself, but I do know a bunch of people who do know him well, people who served with or under or alongside him in his various offices, people who've worked on his various campaigns, people who've worked with him on various charitable projects. And here's the thing that everybody who knows the man personally says about him, even his most determined political enemies: John David Ashcroft is flat-out one of the nicest guys in American politics.

This does not change the fact that his politics are deeply, deeply scary. John Ashcroft earned his nickname "the Deacon" not just because he is (or at least was? not sure if he still is) a deacon in an Assemblies of God church, but because in some ways, that's all he is. It is almost the entirety of his personality. When John Ashcroft uses the phrase "the founding fathers," he doesn't mean guys like Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he means guys like John Winthrop and John Cotton and Roger Williams and John Endecott, people that most Americans have never even heard of -- the Puritan founding fathers, the organizers of the 1620-1640 Puritan Migration that provided North America with its first truly large-scale white population. No, contrary to what he feels obligated to say, Ashcroft's level of commitment to founding US principles like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is nominal, at best; this is a man who believes that the only point in there even being a United States of America is to be New Jerusalem, Christianity's global capital, one nation entirely under Jesus Christ. He pays lip service to the idea that nobody should be forced at gunpoint to be a Christian, but he sees absolutely nothing wrong, or even out of the ordinary, about all levels of government tilting the playing field that way as hard as possible. He is the absolute epitomé of the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, an absolutely dangerous man and we are all much safer now that he is retired from public office, hopefully this time for good.

But all of that being said, even people who understand everything about why the man's politics are so scary, those among them who know him personally are without exception huge fans of his friendliness, his personal manners, his personal style, his sincerity, his legendary honesty, and his long reputation for personal kindness. And knowing all of that makes this widely-linked headline over at Daily Kos all the more interersting: Elsinora, "John Ashcroft Yelled at Me Tonight. No Joke," under "State of the Nation," 4/22/08. Capsule summary: on a very liberal college campus, the 6-person Campus Republican club raised enough money from the surrounding town, $15,000, to pay John Ashcroft's speaker's fee to come and address an open meeting of the Campus Republicans. What they couldn't have known when the issued the invitation and he accepted was that he would be appearing only a couple of weeks after ABC News broke the story that John Ashcroft is a war criminal: Jan Crawford Greenburg et al, "Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'," ABC News, 4/9/08. So when he walked onto a very liberal college campus, it is entirely unsurprising that almost all of the questions he faced in the Q&A session after his talk were about torture. And something truly remarkable happened: he lost his temper, completely lost it. And that's something that John Ashcroft is legendary for never doing, certainly never for so long, and absolutely certainly never in public.

Something very weird is going on here. And if John Ashcroft remembers his time as a prosecutor, and reflects honestly on how his own behavior resembles that of suspects he's held in custody before he rose to the top, even he must recognize something about himself: if any of the co-conspirators is going to crack, going to confess and testify against the others, it's him. He is clearly losing it. So I'm hoping that those of us who'd like to see almost the entire top ranks of the Bush administration brought up on charges somewhere, ideally at Nuremberg or The Hague but at the very least in front of a US federal court, on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges, not just liberal activists but some very serious and non-partisan constitutional scholars, I'm hoping that we manage to keep the pressure on him about this. He is, after all, the one who is also reported, in the same news coverage, to have been the only conspirator to express moral qualms about this at the time. And now he's the one who's acting out, emotionally, in ways he's never done before. Any police interrogator, any prosecutor, would tell you what that means: for now, stop questioning the rest of them; lean on him, because he's the one who's about to crack. And if he cracks, it'll blow the whole case wide open.

I see in the news, this week, that former President Jimmy Carter is holding his own private meetings with the leaders of Palestine's Hamas "party," the winners in the last round of Palestinian elections, in an attempt to get his beloved "two-state solution," the "Middle East Peace Process" for which he won his Nobel Peace Prize, back on track. He has even offered to oh-so-informally ferry messages between Israel, Hamas, the Fatah Party (who lost the elections but who the US and Israel are still pretending to be the government of Palestine), and the US. This is, quite reasonably, being mocked, because neither Israel nor the US has any intention of negotiating, even informally, with a political party that still endorses world-wide genocide against Jews, and Fatah has no country to be negotiating on behalf of. (Beth Marlowe, "Carter offers to be Hamas go-between," Associated Press, 4/15/08.)

But a funny thing happened to me over the weekend, regarding this story: I heard it wrong, in an interesting way. Someone who was at the St. Louis Polymunch asked me if I'd heard the story that Jimmy Carter had agreed to meet with Hezbollah. "Iranian Hezbollah?," I asked incredulously -- and then I was struck dumb, with what must have been the most bizarre expression on my face. Yeah, I know, it turns out to not be true. Nor is it likely to ever be true, given that the current President of Iran has been identified by several of the US Embassy hostages from 1979 as one of their captors, and that for entirely legitimate reasons a main street in Iran's capital city is still called Death to Carter Avenue. The idea that Iran's president, or any high ranking member of Hezbollah, would sit down face to face with former US president Jimmy Carter, and vice versa, was so mind bogglingly radical that I sat there, completely pole-axed, for several minutes trying to parse the consequences. And then my face broke out into a beatific smile.

Oh, sure, even then I realized that the person who asked me this had to have heard it wrong, as it turns out that they did. But if it were true?

Because what is true is this: over the course of the Carter administration, the US and Iran treated each other abominably. Jimmy Carter was complicit in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranian communists, socialists, and Hezbollah members, back when Hezbollah was a relatively peaceful political party advocating (along with their coalition partners) a return to democracy in Iran. In response to this, a student activist group within Hezbollah, within hours of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, lead a mob rush against the US Embassy in Tehran; the Marines guarding the embassy, uncertain if their orders permitted them to machine-gun thousands of civilians even if they were attacking our embassy, retreated and were captured along with the embassy personnel ... and, notably, the CIA station chief for Iran, the man who'd really ordered the capture and torture-murder of all those dissidents, who himself is said to have confessed to this under torture himself before being murdered. And for the next 444 days, with the permission of the Iranian government, those militants continued to occupy our embassy, in total violation of all the norms of international law, and held our diplomatic staff hostage demanding that we return the Shah (who had fled to New York when the revolution came) and all the money he'd stolen from the country if we wanted our hostages back. And there they sat, until the next President, Ronald Reagan, "solved" the problem by bribing the government of Iran to return our hostages by having promised them a large shipment of anti-tank missiles in return.

And neither country is anywhere near ready to forgive the other for this.

And so on Saturday, when someone who'd misheard the news on the radio in their car asked me what I would think if Jimmy Carter were going to sit down with Iranian Hezbollah, what I worked through in my head was this. What if Jimmy Carter were to hold such a meeting, look the Ayatollah and the President of Iran in their faces and say something like, "OK, look, I admit it: I screwed up. When I gave the 'island of stability' speech that the Shah took as my permission to keep doing what the CIA was telling him to do, I had no idea what the CIA was actually telling him to do. If you look at my record back then, you would see that if I had known, I would never have permitted it. But it was my responsibility to know. And what's more, I should have thought to ask, when all my staff were telling me it was so important that I not deviate from the speech they handed me. And at the very least, I should have realized that if I didn't know why they were telling me that, I needed to not improvise my own lines until I found out what they were so worried I was going to say. All I can say in my own defense is that it was a long day, and I was tired, and I got carried away and I shot my mouth off without thinking. That was wrong of me, and I know that hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people died because I did. But please believe me when I say: I didn't know, and if I had known, I would have stopped it, and I am terribly sorry that I didn't. Will you forgive me?"

And in my fantasy, the Ayatollah looks at the President of Iran, and they nod at each other, and the Ayatollah says something like, "Mr. Carter, we didn't know that you didn't know. And this idea that everybody else in the world has about the sacredness of embassies is, well, because of the way they put it, offensive to us spiritually, and I don't know why it isn't offensive to you, too, since nothing is sacred but Allah, or as you call Him, God. And we really believed that you were intentionally taking the Shah's side after he'd kidnapped, tortured, and murdered so many of our friends and family members and co-workers, and our anger hardened our resolve to the point where we could not back down. And we still think that that money you have frozen in Iran's former bank accounts in your country is all money that the Shah stole or intended to steal, and surely you must realize that by now, and it really does belong to the Iranian people. Nor are we ever going to forgive your country for taking Israel's side against the entire Islamic community, not even you, because just because you want to give the Palestinians back half of their land doesn't excuse your wanting to let Israel keep the half of their land that Zionist terrorists stole from them during the British Mandate. On this, our countries will never agree until you come around to our point of view. But we now admit, especially in light of your generous apology and your humble explanation, that what we did to your embassy and its staff was wrong, too, almost as wrong as what the Shah did, and unlike the Shah, we have nobody to blame for having given us such bad advice as your CIA gave him. For the atrocities the Shah committed in your name, for the orders he mistakenly thought you had given him, we forgive you. Will you forgive us for holding your ambassadorial staff hostage for so long?"

Not much of a start if it were to happen, and it's never going to happen. But just as a fantasy ... my gods, what would change if for the first time since 1979, Iran and the United States didn't so fervently hate one another? What else could change? How much good could spread in the world if those stiff-necked religious old men would apologize to each other and ask each others' forgiveness?

So far as we know, nobody from the US Department of Homeland Security's department of Citizenship and Immigration Services has showed up as a client of Emperor's Club VIP, or any other prostitution ring being investigated by the Justice Department (as if there were any others being investigated, unless Democratic officials turn out to be involved). But then, why would they? Why would anybody at Immigration actually pay for seedy sex? When it's so much easier, cheaper, and safer for them to blackmail female immigrants into submitting to forcible rape?!?

I'm too angry, and too disgusted, too deeply sickened to even summarize the story. Just read it: Nina Bernstein, "An Agent, a Green Card, and a Demand for Sex," New York Times, March 21st, 2008. Don't read it while eating.

All I have to say about this is this. The Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case, involving sex offenders, questioning whether or not it's constitutionally permitted to sentence someone to the death penalty for any crime other than murder. After reading this article, I'd like to nominate a few people. And the only plea bargain I'd accept, if the law were what I wish it were, would be for them to plea bargain it down to permanent revocation of their US citizenship, and permanent exile from the US on pain of death. Preferably to be deported to the same countries where these women's families still live.

One more crime, one more disgusting unpropitiated sin, for the gods to hold against us as a nation. I think I'm going to be sick.

Presumably it was either Fox News or someone at Hillary Clinton's campaign who only just discovered that many of the sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the pastor who converted Barack Obama from atheism to Christianity were video recorded and are available online. Having seen them, they want everybody to see them, because it is 100% clear to them that the man was insane. They also take it for granted that when you hear what the man had to say, you'll also conclude that the man was insane. And, in fact, judging by Friday's news cycle, they were right about this; even Barack Obama himself has claimed that he strongly condemns some of Pastor Wright's statements, and did the rounds of every major news analysis show Friday night to make sure that everybody knows that he doesn't agree with what's on those clips.

I watched a bunch of those clips.

Jeremiah Wright is not insane.

He does, however, know a lot of things that fall under one of the main categories of Forbidden Lore: your own country's historical misdeeds. And by the public's standards, repeated exposure to Forbidden Lore has driven him "insane." As a matter of fact, I've heard nothing so far from pastor Wright that I haven't said myself. Most of it, in this blog. If you have been reading this blog for a long time and paying attention, you should be able to defend every single one of them. None of the history that pastor Wright talked about in those video clips, or that I've talked about in this blog, is particularly secret. The parts that once were, those secrets got "blown" at least a decade ago. Nor is he in any legal trouble for saying them, nor I for writing them, and neither one of us are going to end up in Guantanamo Bay for calling them to your attention. No, what makes these things "forbidden lore" is that they're the kind of things you think, mistakenly, that your newspaper, your TV news shows, your history teacher, and so forth would have told you about if they were true. So they must not be true.

That all those people would have "conspired" to keep you in the dark about history that you really ought to know about if it were true seems implausible to you. And if it were an overt secretive conspiracy involving all the people who ought to have told you these things and didn't, yes, it would be a logically impossible conspiracy. Some people do get obsessed with trying to figure out how such a conspiracy could have really worked, come to really foolish false conclusions, and actually make themselves not just socially insane but actually clinically insane, paranoid psychotic, looking for evidence of the vast conspiracy that made so many people lie to them. But no actual conspiracy is needed, not when everybody in America who counts as "sane" shares one important common interest: they want you to be proud of your country, and they think that means that you have to be proud of everything America has ever done or else you won't be. So if there is anything they know that they know would make you ashamed of your country if you knew about it, they mostly won't tell you. The reason that none of this stuff stays secret is that there still are journalists who merit the name, in America and elsewhere, who think that you can still be proud of America and what it stands for but you need to know this stuff. All of it's seen print, at least once. But the public, who just plain don't want to know it (there's that "forbidden lore" angle again), stayed away in droves, and those who accidentally heard it forgot it as fast as possible, so that they can stay "sane."

One more thing about this caught my attention. Here's one of the things that Senator Obama said about this in his appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Friday night. (If you're looking at the video clip on the Countdown website, which thanks to MSNBC's crappy web design I can't link directly to, it starts at roughly the 4:40 mark, to about the 5:25 mark.)

Now, one thing that I do hope to do, is, to use some of these issues to talk more fully about the question of race in our society. Because part of what we're seeing here is, Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the '60s. He is an African-American man who, because of his life experience, continues to have a lot of anger and and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation, partly because I benefited from the struggles of that early generation. And so part of what we're seeing here is a transition from the past to the future. And I hope that our politics represent that future.

You know that argument that came up in black America, egged on by right wingers, over whether or not Barack Obama is "really black enough" to represent black America? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men in America who grew up being called niggers were the ones who grew up in the 60s? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men who get pulled over for Driving While Black and get patted down by police everywhere they go are those who grew up in the 60s? Then maybe he did grow up in a privileged (and largely outside-the-US) environment. Maybe the man really does need a wakeup call. Maybe he doesn't need to be repudiating Jeremiah Wright. Maybe Jeremiah Wright needs to be repudiating Barack Obama. Maybe Reverend Jeremiah Wright has more call to be ashamed of Barack Obama than Barack Obama has to be ashamed of Reverend Wright.

Because unless he's pandering to white ignoramuses who think that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to blame the CIA's illegal war in Nicaragua for the crack cocaine epidemic, that he's "obviously insane" to think that the US's own CIA were the ones who originally trained al Qaeda and the Taliban in terrorism and sponsored their terrorist attacks against the then-pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that Hillary Clinton can't fully understand the indignity of being called a nigger the whole time you're growing up or the indignity of being constantly pulled over and searched by police when you're doing nothing wrong because those things have never happened to her, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that America will be judged harshly by God for explicitly racist drug war policies, unless the people who think those things are people that Obama is dishonestly pandering to in order to allay their bigoted fears? Then that man needs a good, hard wake-up call. Because if he agrees with white ignoramuses and bigots that those ideas are all "crazy" and that only "crazy people" are angry over them, then I'm not ashamed of Obama for what his pastor preached, I'm ashamed of him for not believing it when he was told.

(Damn it, I didn't set out to be famous for writing about race. Telling the truth about race in America is turning out to be my version of taping bacon to the cat. One of the things that's driving up my in-bound link count lately is the last set of things I wrote about race in America. And in every single blog that linked to it, the commenters on those blogs have entirely justifiably pointed out that none of what I'm saying about race is new, or original, or even particularly controversial to professional historians. It saddens me that so many people think it is. To quote a line from one of my all-time favorite comic book limited series, Steve Darnall and Alex Ross's U.S., when a dilapidated and confused Uncle Sam asks a symbol of black America why he's tormenting him with memories of American slavery and racism, "Because you need to know! That's why! Because you have a tendency to forget these things.")

I've been thinking about this John McCain/Vicki Iseman thing ever since the New York Times broke it, off and on, and I think I've finally got a handle on it. What's more, I think that if I'm right, it casts an interesting light on one of the earlier incidents of John McCain's political life. If you don't know what I'm talking about at all, be patient; I'll explain. But first, some background.

The first thing I want to point out about John McCain, in this context, is that he is a famously lousy liar. John McCain doesn't actually lie very often. And we know this because on the rare occasions that he does lie, even in front of the most gullible audiences, he just can't sell it. His body language and his face and his tone of voice completely give him away: "I don't believe any of this," they say, "I'm just saying it because somebody told me I have to." For example: John McCain hates the religious right, and it's mutual. (I count this as a good thing about him.) And has said so, over and over again. And so they have used the fact that they make up almost the entire volunteer base of the Republican Party to sabotage every presidential bid he's made. So a couple of years ago, he made the trek to a miserable little horribly backwards and bitterly racist hell-hole called Bob Jones University that just so happens to be one of the schools most respected and beloved by the religious right ... and told them he was their kind of people, that he loved and respected them, that he wanted to be their kind of a president. Nor was he the first politician to lie to them. Reagan, who really didn't care squat about anything the religious right cared about except anti-communism, blew smoke up their backsides and they loved it. Even after they'd been lied to, they believed the same lie when the elder George Bush, who has always held religious fundamentalists in contempt, came and told it to them, and he wasn't even any good at it. This is a gullible audience. They want to believe that a Republican front-runner who tells them he's on their side is telling the truth. Heck, they halfway believed it when Rudy Giuliani said it, that's how gullible they are -- and they didn't buy it when McCain was selling it.

This raises the interest prospect that John McCain is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or as much of the truth as he knows, when he says that there is no romantic relationship between him and telecom industry lobbyist Victoria Iseman, that he and she never discussed business, and that he never did her any favors that he wouldn't do for anybody else who asked. At least two of those things are plainly false, but McCain clearly very sincerely believes them. And that, and if I'm right the reasons why he does, say some very interesting things about John McCain's character. Things that explain the Keating Five scandal very, very well. But first, back to Vicki Iseman.

Shortly after John McCain got enough seniority in the Senate to get a plum political assignment that he wanted, to get the assignment as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 1997, he just "coincidentally" met a woman named Vicki Iseman who just "coincidentally" happened to be a former cheerleader, an elementary education major in college, and who "coincidentally" looked eerily like Cindy McCain did back when John McCain married her, when Cindy McCain was at her most attractive to him -- and who happened to be, despite total lack of telecom credentials and astonishingly few years in the lobbying business, a partner in the big-name lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay. From all accounts, she found the senator fascinating, worshiped the ground he walked on him, wanted to be with him at all times, went with him on all his trips, and spent so much time trying to snuggle up close to him in public, touching him in small but intimate ways, hanging on his every word, and gazing adoringly up into his eyes that it freaked out McCain's staff. She never wanted to talk about her job or her clients or herself, all she wanted to do was get John to talk about himself, her new favorite subject. And whatever John said, she found something to praise about it.

Look. If you're an ugly old turtle with a famously bad temper and no people skills, and a woman who just happens to match what everybody knows to be your taste in women comes over from a lobbying firm and into your life only after you become the most powerful man in America as it relates to the industry they lobbied for? And her day job, when she's on the clock, is to follow you around and worship you continuously, and her employer is okay with getting billed by her for that? She's not your friend. She's a bribe. McCain says there was no romantic relationship; one must assumes this means that he didn't have sex with her, either. One wonders just how much of a relief this was to her, to find out that this was just a "talk job," and just what her real job entailed if McCain had shown any interest in doing so? But whether she's an actual hooker or just a professional (fake) worshiper there to prop up his ego, one thing is absolutely clear. It never occured to McCain that he was being played. On the contrary, that she thought John McCain was the most wonderful guy in the world only struck him as proof of her good sense. And so if someone has the "obvious" intelligence and good sense needed to recognize what so few in the world recognize, namely how handsome and important and brilliant and dedicated and skilled and destined to lead John McCain really is, then to John McCain, this must actually be a pretty intelligent and pretty discerning person.

I'd heard it alleged by people with their own personal grudges about McCain that he's a sucker for flattery, but they were all people with obvious axes to grind. Here we see it laid bare: no matter how thick she laid it on with a trowel, McCain never took it as anything but intelligent commentary about his insufficiently appreciated virtues. And since this good looking (to him) woman was one of the only women in Washington smart enough to understand how wonderful he was, if she, oh, you know, just happened later to mention some just sad problems that her firm's clients were having with federal agencies that were very vulnerable to being threatened by John McCain's committees, I'm sure it was so obvious to him that if someone as "smart" as Vicki Iseman said it then it must be true and need no further investigation. Which explains why he did it, why he doesn't remember that the ideas originated with her, and why he denies it was any kind of a favor. By now, he probably remembers that it was his own idea in the first place ... if she's any good at what she really does for a living.

And suddenly, the Keating Five scandal snaps into place. Between 1982 and 1987, famous anti-porn crusader Charles Keating, Jr., whose day job was running a savings and loan that was deeply corrupt, gave $112,000 in campaign contributions to John McCain, and similar or larger donations to four other congressmen and senators, all of whom (like McCain) had committee appointments in areas where they had power over S&L regulators, or who were home-state politicians in a good position to intimidate or threaten local federal prosecutors. The other four of them, including hero astronaut turned senator John Glenn, had their careers go down in flames. John McCain kept insisting that he'd done nothing wrong, that he had to have it explained to him why anybody even thought it was wrong. And now, I think, we see why. Because somehow, you just know that every time Charles Keating gave McCai