By the way, have you heard that John McCain was a P.O.W.?

I've decided I don't like Republicans. In grad school I rubbed shoulders with plenty of conservatives, and some became my friends. In D.C. and on the Internet I try to establish civil relations with those conservatives who mostly avoid vilification of me and my ilk. But the inescapable fact remains: the leadership of this party, backed by no small number of adherents, is jingoist, racist, homophobic anti-working class scum. I mean, look at 'em. I couldn't watch these bastards. I may have seen less than 15 minutes of their vile convention.

As far as I'm concerned, John McCain's P.O.W. credit line is maxed out. First of all, outrageous as it may be to say, this man was abused by his captors only after participating in the murderous, mass-saturation bombing of a poor country, including its villages, hospitals, etc. He was really fortunate to get out of there alive. Okay, let's put disagreements about Vietnam aside.

This is a man who weasels out of every unprincipled attack leveled by his campaign, who has done more 180s on policy positions than a Saigon whore. Who, in response to a statement that the U.S. exports a lot of tobacco products to Iran says, "Good, maybe that'll kill them." That riposte could inspire a entire panel discussion at the next MLA convention.

Innocent, non-rhetorical question: why do we seldom see JMC's adopted Pakistani daughter Bridget in family pictures? Where on the campaign web site is her picture? Somebody ask Carmen Sandiego.

Then we have the Gidget Goes to Washington story. Few take note of one of the more revolting revelations about Governor Palin (little things, I feel, can be revealing): as mayor, she fired a librarian for refusing to indicate a readiness to remove books that Palin might find objectionable from the library. This is a nasty, narrow-minded woman, in contrast to the courageous but equally rural, small-town librarian. Another anti-government ideologue who likes to abuse the powers of office and tyrannize over those with little or no power, like that librarian and a certain state trooper.

All that is prelude to my theme, and I do have one. It is the assault of the Republican Party on the concept of meritocracy. There is a huge constituency for it -- namely, all those of modest capacities and accomplishments, not excluding yours truly. After all, most of us are ordinary. That's what ordinary means. All who have attained wealth and power in spite of, rather than because of their gifts and striving of course have an interest in protecting their ill-gotten gains from people of actual talent. An example is the Alaska Independence Party, which seeks ownership of the state's rich natural resources out of no justification other than their mere residence. Another is the entitlement mentality of our trust-fund baby president, who regards as amusing the claims of any not born to privilege. Unless you understood the demands of anti-meritocracy, why else would you nominate the likes of Clarence Thomas or Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court?

Now meritocracy is overrated. After all, the inheritance of physical appearance, faculties and capacities is an accident of birth. The resulting inequality of wealth is to some extent arbitrary, rather than rooted in social justice. While a person must often exert some effort and deploy some intelligence to exploit his or her gifts, the luck of the initial endowment remains.

The best thing about meritocracy is that it beats oligarchy, which for the purposes of this screed could be defined as the arbitrary and uneven self-bestowal and fossilization of wealth and power to a corrupt, incompetent, anti-meritocratic elite. The Bush-McCain G.O.P. is the party of Oligarchy.

Oligarchy is only inherently attractive to those who seek to protect undeserved advantage, as well as to those fools with actuarially insupportable hopes of ascending to similar status. Oligarchy must cloak itself in some more popular but not conceptually inconsistent doctrine.

There is a grain of talent in the oligarchy. As Professor Chomsky has said, "Instead of the comforting rationale that merit breeds success and the successful have merit, a more rational approach would be to speculate that in our society wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain."

The oligarchy's message to the masses is the populism of fools -- mobilizing support on the basis of hatred of the meritocratic elite. The real elite includes the Supreme Court, the Congress (in the 90s), corporate leaders, the Administration -- overwhelmingly Republican. The fake elite are journalists, television anchors, Hollywood stars, professors, and rock musicians. A genuine populist cannot be a right-winger, since the real elite is itself right-wing.

Our G.O.P. nominees and their surrogates hasten to remind us of their ordinariness. This harkens back to the late Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska. The Senator cemented his name into history when President Richard Nixon nominated the singularly undistinguished segregationist G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. In response to critics who noted Carswell's lack of qualifications, Hruska said: "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there." (It could be a coincidence that all those named as 'stuff like that' were Jewish.)

As for celebrities, those without talent can have a love-hate relationship for those who do. The hate component rises with the perception that the talented person does not necessarily recognize the dubious claims of the mediocre. The talented person is too busy passing you on the up-escalator of life to sympathize with your inadequacies.

An irony is that Sarah Palin is herself a person of some talent. After all, from humble beginnings she has ascended to the governorship of a state. That is impressive. But her appeal is not in what she has accomplished, but in what she has not. She has unremarkable educational attainment, limited knowledge of foreign policy, limited accomplishments as a public official. She is just like you and me. Not like those fancy Democrats with their rags-to-riches stories of hard work, god-given brilliance, and triumph over adversity.

By contrast, John McCain is a person of no demonstrated talent. Like G. Bush, he was born into privilege but took it for granted, blowing off his Annapolis education -- an opportunity many working-class kids would love to have. His advance up the military ranks was limited, as General Clark has noted. His imprisonment allowed for a display of character, one which has long since been left behind. His wealth and political career are due to marriage. He is a trophy husband. He ran his presidential campaign into the ground, surviving only due to the limitations -- actually the merits (Huckabee's eloquence and his rise, along with Ghouliani, from humble beginnings; Romney's business acumen) -- of his opponents.

In other words, he got a head start in life, abused his advantages, got lucky, never learned or accomplished much, and lusts for power. He is not out of step with his party. He is the perfect Republican.

You want the person who performs your heart-lung transplant to have been the nerd in college who did nothing but study all the time, then work his or her way up to the pinnacle of their profession. You don't want the person voted "Most Popular" in high school. If only politics was like surgery. But it isn't, and here we are, ready to be put under the knife. "Wake up, America" indeed.