Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

The Sweet Spot and Dan Barreiro

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A couple days ago I swapped vehicles with #1 son. (Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to wedge a pressure washer into my car, which at least gets vacuumed more than once a year.) With ignition came Dan Barreiro of KFAN sports talk radio in mid-soliloquy.

As I pulled out of the driveway two thoughts came to mind. 1: How long it had been since I heard Barreiro’s show, and 2: Why I lost interest in it.

His topic of that moment, and again this was just him alone on stage, was how Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian expert deposed last week in the Trump impeachment inquiry, was being routinely lionized for his military career and combat veteran status. Barreiro’s point was essentially that laudable resume and chestful of medals withstanding, it’s possible some like him, though not necessarily Vindman himself, could still be a lying scoundrel. Point being, “the media” was engaged in yet another exercise of herd-think, equating appearance and pedigree with truthfulness.

By contrast, Barreiro quickly pivoted to say, liberals and “progressives” (a word that came with a tone of “here-we-go-again” disdain), people like Hillary Clinton, had no problem impugning the integrity of people Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, herself a military veteran.*

Where Barreiro went after that I really can’t say, because by the time I was merging onto Highway 100 I had hit the new Sturgill Simpson CD and was moving into a better realm of consciousness.

I might have held that moment of zen-like bliss if I hadn’t heard, a couple hours later, of the latest Republican messaging strategy and how neatly it fit with new polling that showed a large minority of voters explaining away Donald Trump’s Ukraine transgressions on the grounds that, “They all do it.”

Now, full disclosure, I know Barreiro only as an acquaintance in the very short time I worked down the hall from him at what was then KTLK-FM. This was over a decade ago now. But even then Barreiro was established as the #1 act in afternoon drive. I haven’t seen radio ratings in years, but I’ll believe it if anyone tells me he’s still #1. And, for what it’s worth, he’s not a bad guy. He’s smart, and unlike some other local radio titans, not dripping with self-loathing issues.

His show worked because he folded a facility for sports rumination/fulmination/exasperation in with the more relevant news of the day, like politics. Unlike the long, long list of pandering, bloviating radio hucksters, Barreiro’s shtick was/is: “I’m the Sanest Guy in the Room.”

But … there’s always a thing, and here’s that thing.

Success in commercial radio is powerfully, unequivocally linked to the First Rule of Show Biz, i.e. “Give the people what they want.” It’s a rule predicated on knowing who those people are. And if you’re building a succcessful career in sports talk radio, you have no reason — none — to believe you’re audience is deeply, vitally interested in politics, political scandal and matters of government morality. They’re tuning in to hear why the Vikings screwed up Sunday’s game, why the Pohlads will never drop $30 million on a pitcher and whether P.J. Fleck’s brand of hucksterism might be the real deal.

If you the host have a few minutes to dissect the day’s headlines, well go ahead, but get back to Kirk Cousins before the next commercial break. And, while you’re at it, don’t feed us any of that crazy lefty shit.

If you can imagine a scale where zero (heh) is as far left you can go (“crazy progressives”) and 100 is as far right as you can imagine, (Alex Jones and InfoWars), the sweet spot, ratings-wise, for a guy like Barreiro is somewhere between 60 and 65. It’s a Goldilocks zone where the liberals are always kind of “nutty”, too “radical” and “out there” and forever juiced up on “conspiracy theories”, and where prominent Republicans, while laughably self-serving — I give you Donald Trump — are never up to anything worse or more nefarious than anyone else.

Which is to say … “They all do it.”

The sports talk radio audience is, in my experience, a group of people, vast majority male, who are either politically indifferent/agnostic or conservative by default. Default being the result of the discomfort they feel around “politically correct” “elitists” always who are always “talking over their heads.”

So, and here’s the offense: you give those people only what they want to hear, which is a 2019 variation on Ronald Reagan’s sunny cynicism: “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” It’s an eagerly digestible trope amplified now for 30 years by Rush Limbaugh, et al. A ratings winner. You may win no big liberal audience, but why worry? Liberals are not a reachable audience to begin with. They just don’t spend much time listening to football nattering.

What you are doing though — and in fairness to Barreiro, he engages in a less virulent extent than many, many others — is re-fueling the basic, lazy-minded, deeply-held cynicism that “they all do it”. They’re all corrupt scoundrels. Everyone knows that. They’re all out for themselves. None of them care about you. Liberals especially. So it’s a waste of time trying to sort an of this out.

Or … why get so worked up about whatever they’re saying about Trump? It’s just the same old same old.

As a commercial radio strategy it’s gold. But, and I’m serious here, on a moral level it is appallingly cynical and a not inconsequential driver in the dumbing down and perpetuated ignorance of a sizable chunk of the voting age population.

Now, again in fairness to Barreiro, I haven’t listened to entire show of his in probably a dozen years and I heard less than five minutes of this one. So I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt wait and for someone to tell me that …

As a shrewd judge of human nature, at least in terms of athletes and big time sports management, Barreiro saw Trump for the long term, ludicrous fraud he was as he ramped up for his run in 2016

… and that he admonished his large drivetime audience repeatedly to see Trump’s Obama birth certificate “issue” for the naked racism it was

… as were his repeated attacks on Muslims

… and that there are no “fine people” on the Nazi side

… that the Clinton Foundation actually provided tangible benefits to the poor and desperate while Trump’s foundation had to be shut down for farcical corruption

… that the Mueller Report didn’t exonerate The Donald

… and that, no, “everybody doesn’t” run a hamfisted bribery con on a foreign government, holding up military aid for a bogus investigation of political rival, and then lie about it constantly

… and so on, and on and on.

Hillary Will Be a Better President Than Bill.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2For the record, and for the gamblers among you, I’m sticking by my belief that Hillary Clinton will win the election in November by a minimum of 40 electoral votes more than Barack Obama in 2012. I think I first heard that number in an interview with Howard Wolfson, Mike Bloomberg’s deputy Mayor of New York. It sounded right six weeks ago and it still does today, Donald Trump’s post-convention “bump” withstanding.
Full disclosure here means saying I’ve never had a problem, certainly not a righteous, disqualifying problem with Hillary Clinton. I don’t have to hold my nose to vote for her. In fact, I have a kind of fondness for competent, wonky managers. When I was 25 I thought the most important quality in a candidate was the ability to, you know, “inspire”, to send a tingle of hero-worship up and down my spine. Years later I’ve grown to realize that it’s a lot easier to fake that than it is to actually get [stuff] done.
Hubby Bill was pretty good last night making the case for Hillary as “the best darn change maker” he’s ever known. Our boy gives a great folksy speech, no fancy $10 words. And he knows how to hold a room with pause, inflection and gesture. A natural, as the cognoscenti have always said. The Mrs?  Not so much. But I just don’t give a damn about that. That’s not what I’m buying.
In fact, as I’ve said before, I truly believe Hillary could be a better president than Bubba, who was, if you recall, was pretty good, at least when he wasn’t setting his feet on fire playing rock star with starry-eyed interns. She’s the disciplined one of the two, and she’ll arrive at the job with 25 years more experience in the mechanics of national administration, foreign policy and — perhaps as important — the tactics of neutralizing the infantile nihilism of today’s “movement conservatives” than he did.
That last point is not inconsequential. In fact it was central to my problem with Bernie Sanders. The way the game is going down these days, nothing moves until you hit the Republicans with a kind of stun gun and shake and bake your way around their obstruction. Obstruction being the only thing they’ve got. Impeachment withstanding, Bubba routinely outfoxed Newt Gingrich’s conservatives and Obama for the most part has managed to blunt the worst of their excesses, although with things like the government shut down and the failure of gun control post-Sandy Hook and a dozen other items, the consequences of nihilism are evident to everyone.
I never saw Bernie, god bless him, being up to that game.
But here again, Hillary, who is a better schmoozer than the cerebral Obama, and has much longer standing relationships with the few Republicans worthy of the term “adult”, may be better suited to the combination of one-on-one deal-cutting and hardball political tactics than Obama.
Not being a player on the DC social circuit, I am in no position to say for certain what the reality of the “real Hillary” is. But from what I read, and there’s plenty to read about her, the cartoonish picture of a shrieking, duplicitous harridan just doesn’t compute. Perpetually wary? Yeah, I see that. But story after story portrays her as more genuinely gracious than Bill, who, you know, being Bill kind of likes every moment to be about him.
Bubba’s long recitation last night of all the projects she’s launched and reports she’s written and negotiations she’s concluded should be taken with a full shaker of salt. He’s a master at gilding the lily. But the fact remains she has in fact devoted enormous amounts of time to all sorts of wonky, bona fide, not-so sexy but vital issues and, more to the point here, arrives at the White House with a far better-than-average understanding of how to get that stuff done than any incoming president in my lifetime. (Lyndon Johnson knew how to get stuff done. But Hillary’s got him beat hands down in terms of ground level social issues, certainly for women and children, and foreign policy. Plus, she isn’t a crude old bastard.)
Campaign-wise, I don’t know what she can do to damp down the perception of “crooked Hillary”. The GOP base is entrenched in their total war opposition to any Democrat, and the sense of her as “untrustworthy” has been marketed very effectively for a very long time by Bill and her career-long adversaries. The sad fact of a public life lived on the grand stage as long as the Clintons is that perception is as powerful as the bona fides of your resume.
But she isn’t naive to that either. Someone who has taken as many shots as she has and kept on truckin’ fully understands the game. She may not like it. Who does? But she inspires confidence that in a genuinely unique way, she understands how to blunt it and be productive.

Hillary Survives Another Nothingburger “Scandal”

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3It’s a tough day to be Republican. But then most of them are this year, aren’t they? This thing with the FBI letting “crooked Hillary” off on that colossal e-mail scam … well, until someone starts shouting for a special prosecutor to investigate the FBI, that notorious den of lefties, men and women of conscience (and with nothing better to do with their time and our money) are going to have find another dead horse to flog.

Not that “e-mailgate” didn’t succeed almost as well as other ginned-up Clinton scandals. I mean it began with Benghazi and after throwing years and taxpayer millions at that mirage it begat e-mail servers. It was just like how Whitewater begat Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and impeachment, which as you remember was such a winning strategy for Republicans Bill Clinton left office more popular than St. Ronald the Daft.

The fact is that like Whitewater and Travelgate and Benghazi before it, the Republican attack machine never had a coherent theory of the crime with e-mailgate. Which is why it bored people and never caught on like, well, like hanky panky in the Oval Office. (Now if among Hillary’s e-mails had been some hot mash notes to Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger we might have had some fun.)

I mean, she used her own servers … to do what, exactly? Send military secrets to Al Qaeda? Sell off Texas to the North Koreans? What? Please tell me. Because I was never grasping the Constitution-tearing gravity of the situation.

“Well,” came the usual response, “we’ll never know. Because she won’t disclose everything. That’s the way the Clintons are. Clearly corrupt. Every time we accuse them of something they refuse to turn over all the evidence we need to make our case! Bastards! It’s like they don’t trust us! We have to Make America Great Again!”

This perpetual cycle of molehill non-scandals that … we the people have paid to prosecute … only to watch “the case” evaporate under the harsh light of actual evidence is of course central to the widespread perception that Hillary and Bill “can’t be trusted”. Never mind that if you ask “why can’t they be trusted?” the most frequent response is something along the lines of, “Well, because I hear they’re always in trouble over something.”

Somehow, maybe by adding a little video to this argument, from Kevin Drum Team Hillary has to turn the guns back on the firing squad.

For the record: Whitewater was a nothingburger. Travelgate was a nothingburger. Troopergate was a nothingburger. Filegate was a nothingburger. The Vince Foster murder conspiracy theories were a nothingburger. Monica Lewinsky was Bill’s problem, not Hillary’s. Benghazi was a tragedy, but entirely nonscandalous. The Goldman Sachs speeches were probably a bad idea, but otherwise a nothingburger. Emailgate revealed some poor judgment, but we’ve now seen all the emails and it’s pretty obviously a nothingburger. Humagate is a nothingburger. Foundationgate is a nothingburger.

Bottom line: Don’t let Donald Trump or the press or anyone else convince you that Hillary Clinton is “dogged by scandal” or “works under a constant cloud of controversy” or whatever the nonsense of the day is. That constant cloud is the very deliberate invention of lowlifes in Arkansas; well-heeled conservative cranks; the Republican Party; and far too often a gullible and compliant press. Like anybody who’s been in politics for 40 years, Hillary has some things she should have handled better, but that’s about it. The plain fact is that there’s no serious scandal on her record. There’s no evidence that she’s ever sold out to Wall Street. There’s no corruption, intrigue, or deceit. And if anything, she’s too honest on a policy level. She could stand to promise people a bit of free stuff now and then.”

I make no apologies. I have no great problem with Hillary. She’s pulling the gears on a huge, sophisticated, well-heeled and well-oiled political machine. Live with it. That’s the game in 2016 USA. It’s how you get elected. You want to change it? Me too. But it ain’t happening this year.

Moreover though, I tell anyone who cares to listen that I believe she’ll be a better president than Bill, who if you remember anything other than the stained blue dress, did a pretty good job of keeping the economy on the rails and US troops out of unwinnable foreign wars.

She arrives in the Oval Office with more experience on every imaginable level than anyone since maybe LBJ (problematic comparison), plus the full support of officers and staff from two successful Democratic presidencies and a whole lot less of Bill’s, shall we say, “impulse control” issues. She has also demonstrated masterful control over the Republican wing nut fringe, an enormous time, energy and money suck in D.C. these days, that must be persistently neutralized.

So there are plenty of rational reasons to trust her to competently manage matters here and abroad.

Not that the usual suspects will be screaming “scandal” and “special prosecutor” before she takes the oath of office.

Benghazi Committee vs. Hillary: Talk About a Fool’s Errand.

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWhat do I know about political strategy? Somewhere along about the second hour of the latest interrogation of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi … Benghazi! … BENGHAZI!!!, I turned to my dog, who looked about as interested in what was going on as the average voter. “I don’t get it, Lou. I would have opened with the blockbuster new revelation, the killer detail, the smoking pipe bomb that would have her sweating, ‘like Dan Quayle on ‘Jeopardy’, as we used to say. But they’re two hours into this and they’re talking … e-mails. This Gowdy guy couldn’t possibly be so stupid that he’d let the lights go up on this circus without bringing something new to the show, could he?”

Well, Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, may not be stupid, but he pretty clearly found himself in the position that having pandered for a year to his Tea Party base he couldn’t figure out any way to pull the plug on the lifeless corpse he was required to roll out on national TV, showing off a kind of Tea Party “Weekend with Bernie”, without any intentional laughs. He had no other choice than to put on whatever show he could, so he can go back to South Carolina, look the tri-corner hat crowd in the eye and say he brought the fight to the devil incarnate.

You knew it was a resounding disaster, certainly for the ambitious Mr. Gowdy, when his close-ups showed him slathered in Nixonian flop sweat by the time he gaveled the thing to adjournment 10 hours and 59 minutes after it opened. At least his faux hawk held up.

If you’re a Republican outside the Freedom Caucus psycho ward you had be shaking your head and reaching for the Jim Beam before lunch. All you could possibly see, knowing that Gowdy had nothing, much less anything new, is that Ms. Clinton would not only prevail against GOP’s clown car of interrogators, but that their easily foretold failure was only going to strengthen her for the 13-month run to the White House.

The conventional (Freedom Caucus) wisdom (sic) was that given enough time, the tea cup Torquemadas on Gowdy’s committee would either force Clinton into at least one juicy, viral 5-second gaffe or reduce her to a babbling Socialist, troop-hating ninny. Because, you know, she’s Hillary Clinton, someone who has never before in her long career ever had a tough/stupid question put to her or been forced to sit in front of cameras and smile patiently at a panel of filibustering buffoons. Of course they’d break her! She’s never seen the likes of Gowdy or Jim Jordan (leader of the Freedom Caucus) before! By the glory of God and our guns we’ll show her what freedom’s all about!

Talk about a fool’s errand. You got nothing. She knows it. She’s been at this game for 25 years. You’re still trying to find the Capitol rest rooms. What could possibly go wrong?

Until Hillary oversees the indictment of Goldman, Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon she won’t be my dream candidate. But as long as mastery of The Game and serenely swatting down mosquito logic — keep biting until it bleeds — are criteria for high office, she’ll do just fine.

Lord, what a pathetic farce that was.

Ladies, It’s Time You Got Tough with Hillary

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAre we having another deep doo-doo deja vu Clinton moment, or what? Suddenly it’s 1998 all over again. If only the economy was nearly as good.

So it seems Hillary Clinton, presumptive next president, played by her own rules and kept her State Department e-mails (more or less) hidden from official prying eyes. That is except for government types who received her e-mails. Those are still on the big server system, accessible to every EOH (Enemy of Hillary) who wants to root around and prove she personally armed the terrorists who killed the ambassador in Benghazi.

Now … obviously … this is a (big) deal because she’s Hillary goddam Clinton, with an empty six-lane freeway in front of her leading to the White House. If she wasn’t we’d still be obsessing over that stupid dress thing. Whether this outrage(!) actually has legs, which is to say if the conservative outrage machine can sustain it for 18 months, remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it, since Es of H have a bad habit of picking the wrong horse to saddle up their righteous indignation. See: Whitewater, Benghazi.

But this email flap is another reminder that liberals might want to demand a hell of a lot more from Her Regency before the coronation. Personally, I’ve never been comfortable with the acclamation route to big power. I like candidates who have had a scare thrown into them, people who have been forced to explicitly defend and/or adjust their thinking and promises based on aggressive examination from E’s and F’s alike.

The current Hillary-Jeb match-up is so embarrassing. Clinton and Bush. Again. We look like a goddam banana republic, alternating between owners of the two biggest estancias every eight years. It’s bad enough we have to endure a system at both the national and state level where millionaires (of both parties) essentially buy themselves a job, usually guaranteeing that their previous stakeholders have primary access to their souls. It’s so damned unimaginative, if nothing else.

More to the point, as many have written before, the Hillary ascension, with no Plan B, strikes me as recklessly perilous. Even if the jowl-flapping buffoons of modern conservatism fail to make “Email-gate” stick, where are we if something truly grave happens to our one-and-only roadblock to Bush III, or President Scott Walker? Tomorrow is promised to no one. Hillary may not get hit by a bus, but not being the springiest of chickens, her health could fail, or we could discover that she really did plan the Benghazi attack. What then?

Given a choice between female candidates, I’d much prefer Elizabeth Warren. (Hell, I’d prefer Warren over any other Democrat, x or y chromosome, off the top of my head.) But a Warren candidacy would ignite the most godawful firestorm of coordinated, multi-front, big money attacks this back water oligarchy has ever seen. She’s despised and feared that much by Wall Street. And frankly, I doubt she’s prepared yet for that level of intensity of defamation. Hillary on the other hand seems quite cozy and well-triangulated among the Goldman Sachs and Citigroups of the world.

Liberal women in particular seem all but unanimously united in their support of Hillary, which is understandable to a point. After 240 years of alleged democracy, a woman president is waaay overdue and Hillary clearly has more experience and retail savvy than any plausible male on the scene. (Sorry, Joe Biden. Ain’t never going to happen.) That said, it may be that the women rushing to carry Hillary’s sedan chair up the White House steps are precisely the people to be grilling her most intensely on how exactly she intends to transform this country’s financial regulatory system, which is so tightly inter-locked with campaign finance, which is to blame for the obscene, truly Guatemala-like corruption and waste of DC?

There are a half dozen other good questions, but getting Her Highness on record, explicitly and in detail on that point alone would be a damned valuable start.

And if (not when) she answers, don’t put up with any of the usual Clinton-ish legalisms.

 

 

 

Place Your Bets: Handicapping 2016

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Lambert_to_the_Slaughter[Updated]. From the number of pieces I’ve read recently, handicapping the 2016 presidential race has become a click-bait hobby for plenty of allegedly reputable people. So let’s see how it works with a disreputable, unabashed, socialize-all-medicine, raise the tax and fix the damn roads, free community college for all, screw the F-35 and legalize pot liberal.

With Hillary Clinton a given for the Democrats — although god help them if she’s hit by a bus or caught in a love nest with Vladimir Putin, because there is no “Plan B” — I’ll assign a percentage value to the Republican field poised against her. 0% being the most serious candidate, someone likely to beat her, and 100% being a laugher, the equivalent of another Michele Bachmann delusion.

Jeb Bush: 5%. The Republican ruling class actually did a very good job sweeping the worst of the nut cases off their candidate slate last year. (Yes, Joni Ernst won in Iowa.) But there were no witches, no “legitimate rapes” and very little open Tea Bag pandering, at least compared with 2010. This suggests authority –spreading money to local Tea Party captains — is capable of getting Jeb through the primaries without forcing him to wear a tri-corner hat, leggings and ‘rassle snakes at prayer breakfasts. If that’s true, he’s bona fide serious opposition. He certainly more serious and intellectually engaged than his feckless brother. (I seriously doubt we’d have gone to Iraq with Jeb instead of W*, if only because he wouldn’t have laid the “detail stuff” off on Dick Cheney). But I still don’t think he could beat Her Regency. The Democrats have a profound electoral map advantage, the horror of another Bush is just too much for millions of active voters and while Hillary Clinton is hardly anyone’s idea of a “transformational candidate”, the stage is set and lit, with roses in place for a woman.

Scott Walker: 15%. In most ways a textbook example of the ideal Movement Conservative. He’s got that Tim Pawlenty careerist talent of rarely sounding like the pathological narcissist/cynic he is. Despite a Pawlenty-like mismanagement of his state’s economy, laying on massive multi-billion dollar deficit while Minnesota tries to decide what top do with giant surplus, his “go-big” brawl with public unions is all it takes to be hero to … the rubes who aren’t in unions and his industrialist, union-hating benefactors, most notably the Koch brothers. He’s no serious threat top defeat Hillary in a general election, but there’s no question he has the duplicitous wiles to survive a GOP primary campaign.

Rand Paul: 25%. He’s sort of this year’s version of Newt Gingrich. “What dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.” There are college-age wonkers who love his contrarian poses and think tankers who see a guy who’d go out play with their most batshit Ayn Randian theories. But he’s also a little like Joe Biden, in that he’s not big on filters. Over the course of the grind he’ll say at least 20 nutty things that will serve to remind fence-sitters that Hillary at least is a predictable commodity.

Mitt Romney: 40%. Face it. He’s the only Republican with the exception of Jeb, who doesn’t have bury his face in the laps of the Koch Brothers or Sheldon Adelson. He could pay for the race out of his mad money jar. Moreover, he might have learned something about pandering to the loonies in 2012. But, come on. Everywhere outside of a Palm Beach investment bankers luncheon Mitt is still the clueless rich guy, a cartoon who gives no indication that even he knows what he really believes.

Ted Cruz: 60%. Now this guy can do some damage. Not to Hillary. It’d be a landslide in her favor if he ever went mano a mano. But he’s the sort of wholly self-absorbed, unapologetic douche bag who’ll blow off any notion of collegiality and force the Jebs and Mitts to explain why they’re not sending in the Marines to block Obamacare. Frankly, I’m amazed that someone hasn’t dug up a juicy scandal on the Tedster. If ever someone looked like they’re hiding a closet full of perversions, its Cruz.

Marco Rubio: 75%. By now his reputation is locked in concrete. An empty suit. A cutey-pie shill for old money interests without the Clintonesque imagination to make a serviceable case for either pole of the same argument.

Rick Perry: 80%. An even emptier suit than Rubio, even with his new “I must read something because I’m now wearing glasses” look. Worse, for him, Jeb, though associated lately with Florida, is closer to the big, safe-bet Texas money. Still, in terms of pure entertainment, Perry was good stuff on the campaign trail, we’d all love to see him back

Rick Santorum. 90%. Say what you will, Santorum was the hardest working guy in a sweater vest Iowa and the Deep South primaries have ever seen. Lacking Bush and Romney-style money, he has no choice but to pander to the most medieval of the crazies, while reminding everyone else of the guy in high school who no other guy wanted to hang out with. He’s the Republicans’ Harold Stassen, unless Romney wants to fight him for it.

Mike Huckabee: 95%. He’s one of those sweaty, grasping characters who just refuses to go away, clinging to the belief, like Jim Carrey in “Dumber and Dumber”, that “there’s still a chance”. There isn’t. There never has been. Besides there’s more money in slinging stale meat to rubes from FoxNews.

Sarah Palin: 1000%. There’s nothing, short of a long weekend with Sofia Vergara, (sorry, dear), that would delight me more than a Hillary v. Sarah face-off. Michele Bachmann was an opportunistic nut-case sucking up $20 checks from embittered revivalists living on Social Security checks, but Palin is the gold standard for naked pandering, startling stupidity, rank incompetence and non-stop public buffoonery. We are already looking back on her as an icon of the age of celebrity worship. “Does she look good in a form fitting suit? Well then she can be president.” I think John McCain said that.

Here’s Hoping Jesse Wins

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterIt hard to take Jesse Ventura’s defamation suit seriously. Too much irony keeps getting in the way. I mean Jesse Ventura outraged that someone put too much show biz in their shtick? Gotta love it.

But whether he wins — which is doubtful, despite, I believe being warranted — I’d like to think his willingness to mount an attack will have, if only a momentary, impact on our vast, fetid “non-fiction” industry.

Our guy Jesse is many things. Among them: A grasping, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, thin-skinned galoot. But he is also positively reverential about the Navy SEALs and the bond of macho brotherhood with those who have served. Similarly, he has been unabashedly vocal about the War in Iraq since it was launched, saying rational, reality-based things about that misbegotten adventure I’ve still never heard from the likes of John McCain or Lindsey Graham.

For those reasons alone it is nearly impossible for me to believe that he ever said the SEALs “deserve to lose a few” to anyone, much less a group of actual (half drunk) SEALs practically in their own backyard. Even if he too was drunk or hell, on mescaline, like some sage native mystic, asking me to believe Jesse Ventura urged death on any of his brothers-in-shark-infested-waters is a bridge … way too far.

And based on the deposition of Chris Kyle, the now-deceased “American Sniper” himself, the whole incident at the bar in San Diego, with all the chest bumping, swaggering, taunting and brawling sounds deeply flaky, as in it made for a much better story when you’re trying to sell a tough guy/uber-patriot memoir. Certainly a lot better than letting Ventura get away with an anti-war crack. When your target audience is gun-worshipping, flag-waving, hoo rah wannabes, you slap that shit down … even if you actually didn’t.

Jesse’s fight coincides with right-wing fantasist Edward Klein’s latest best-seller, “Blood Feud”, in which we’re too believe the Obamas and the Clintons are, behind the scenes, in private, barely different in their connivery and blood lust than the Lannisters and the Starks on “Game of Thrones”. If Jesse thinks he got unfair treatment in Kyle’s book (ghost-written, of course) imagine how Hillary feels with Michele Obama calling her the “Hilldebeest”, and how about Barack pounding down the vino and bad-mouthing Bubba to his face? I always knew that guy a drunk and a boor. I mean, hell, did you see him boozing it up in Texas? W* never behaved like that.

Point being of course we rarely have any good reason to believe anything in a memoir — really, any memoir, including Hillary Clinton, Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachman, every tired old statesman, jock, pop star, etc. — although, personally I’d actually read Vladimir Nabokov or William Styron in their own words than the ghost-written, demo-targeted tale of an expert rifleman, who despite the hagiographic lurches would never have been mistaken for Vasily Zaytsev defending Stalingrad from the Nazis.

And why stop with memoirs? The publishing industry has only the most loosely defined and even more loosely policed definition of “non-fiction”. It hardly matters to the average publisher, and not at all to the partisan houses pushing precisely what their demographic wants to hear, if no one can corroborate the author’s astonishing verbatim dialogue from private episodes between characters who’d rather flatten him under their limo wheels than grant him an interview.

House attorneys may scour books for the most egregious slander, to avoid time-sucking litigation. But once into the realm of “celebrity” or “public person”, why waste time checking and deleting the juicy stuff that might accelerate on the Interwebs and move product? If the aggrieved celebrity yob wants to declare the whole thing an insult to nature and a hideous, despicable lie, well hell, thank them for being stupid and vain enough to goose the publicity effort.

According to reports from the Ventura trial, Jesse’s original complaints about the Kyle book spiked sales and delighted the publisher, proving again that the best offense in the face of obscene offense is … nothing. Ignore it. The shelf life of the average, under-publicized unlitigated memoir is about as short as a mayfly, or a jihadi in a sniper’s crosshairs.

Hillary Ain’t No LBJ Either.

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterAs we watch our political leaders try to deal (and not deal) with the flood of Central American kids over our southern borders, and as the pundit class wiles a few summer days offering variations on the same themes they always play — Why is Barack Obama ineffective in this crisis? Why is “Washington” broken? Why, darn it, does everything have to be so hard? I’ve heard several “experts” invoke (again) the name of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ is the kind of guy, they insist, who would … get something done. There’d be no mealy mouthed politesse about him. No bogus “reaching out” to virulent enemies crapola. What they’re wetting themselves over is a guy who, on reflex, would threaten your livelihood, your reputation and the well-being of the family dog to get you to do what he wanted done.

Although a lot of them look old enough, the same pundits seem to have overlooked a handful of serious misadventures — The Domino Theory/Vietnam — in Lyndon Johnson’s career of unmitigated success. Likewise, few of them spend much energy imagining LBJ maneuvering through Texas politics, circa 2014. Even fewer bother to wade too deeply into the much more recent reality of the current GOP (House variety to be absolutely specific) blocking the “Gang of Eight” immigration legislation, then cutting off all discussion of a coherent immigration policy, with adequate funding while howling about Presidential ineffectiveness …  in order to stay “true” in the eyes of their most rabid, primary-voting base in an election year.

Likewise, I don’t hear much from liberals and Democrats on how the current scenario, with the Tea Party dictating total gridlock to their “leaders”, will be any different with Hillary Clinton in the White House. The Clintons may be more ruthless and better connected through the bureaucracy than Barack Obama. But I don’t see Hillary having any magic wand ability to break the Tea Party spell over the few traditional Republicans left in DC.

My wife has just finished listening to the John Heilmann-Mark Halperin book, “Game Change”,and has been reporting her surprise at how badly the Clintons come off — in the early stages, before the arrival of Sarah Palin and uttter batshittery makes Bill and Hill look like petal-strewing cherubs by comparison. Simultaneously, I finally pulled Seymour Hersh’s late ’90s book on JFK, “The Dark Side of Camelot” off the shelf and have been refreshing my memory of what a gangster the Old Man was and the bubble world of reckless privilege and double-standards Jack and Bobby were born into, molded by and never ever worked too hard to escape.

Point being, the average American knows very little about the true nature of any high-profile politician and an enormous number of us, credulous pawns to a celebrity culture, don’t want to know. We actually prefer the slickly marketed hagiographies, perhaps because raw reality has a nasty way of leaving us even more cynical than we already are. (How we as a culture have clutched at the lacquered veneer-over-rotted wood Camelot myth for so long, proves my point.)

All elections come down to “the choice”, and given the imbecilic levels the GOP has fallen to, the choice these days is profoundly easy. At least with Hillary Clinton or the average Democrat you’re not dealing with someone who is dubious of evolution, climate change, women’s reproductive and employment rights, the desperate need for affordable health care, a less ideological Supreme Court and immediate immigration reform.

But anyone wistful about a “new LBJ” really should read Nick Confessore and Amy Chozick’s piece this week, titled, “Wall Street Offers Clinton a Thorny Embrace”. The reminder, in case you’ve forgotten, is that Bill and Hill are about as tight with the true barons of American-style democracy as any two people can get, and give no indication that they’d go “all-LBJ” on the crowd best-positioned to drain the juice out of the lunatic Right.

Most likely the game has changed so much since Lyndon Johnson’s, uh, uninterrupted march of success that we’ll never see his kind again. But fodder for another post is the peril underlying Democrats’ near-unanimous embrace of a Clinton Restoration.