The myth of American exceptionalism is a powerful one. It is the foundation of every piece of history we are taught in school, it runs like a river through every news article that gets reported by the American media. America the Beautiful, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. America, the Shining City On The Hill. America, beacon of freedom and liberty to the rest of benighted, unAmerican world.

In our hearts, we believe that we are just a leetle bit better than every other human on the planet. We believe this because we have been taught it from our infancies; it is in everything we see on TV, everything we read, everything we hear from our fellow Americans. Americans are good, Americans are noble, Americans are heroic, Americans are larger than life, we are John Wayne and Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and Jimmy Stewart. We are down to earth, unpretentious, common-sensical, no nonsense. Good with our hands, tough as nails, reliable when the chips are down. We Put Men On The Moon. We are pragmatic but sentimental, intent but kind. We Get The Job Done.

Americans are always the Good Guys. Americans Play Fair.

Americans, dontcha know, Save The World.

That's the narrative we lap up eagerly with our mother's milk. We gulp it down avidly, we consume it voraciously, we buy it over and over and over again, in our books, in our newspaper comic strips, in our TV shows, in our movies. Americans are just, y'know, better than the rest of the world. To be unAmerican is to be less than American. In the endless anthem that our American hearts pump through our American veins with our every American breath, we always wear the white hats. Foreigners are, at best, hapless wannabe Americans, or, at worse, malevolent evildoers bent on our destruction, and why? Well, they hate us for our freedoms.

They hate us, because we are Americans.

(It may well be worth noting here that Americans are also, in the eyes of the world including our own, pretty much white males... John Wayne, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan, Jimmy Stewart... those are all white guys. How the world sees us, and how we see ourselves, may undergo a subtle evolution should Senator Obama become President... and won't change at all, if McCain gets in.)

This is our story, this our song -- we are Americans, and we are the best there is, although we are too darned humble to ever say that out loud. Yet this is a myth, and, in fact, it is less than that. It is self delusion. It is propaganda. And it is a glorious lie that has been very carefully crafted and fed to us over the course of our entire existence as a nation.

In reality, America, The United States of, is no better than any other nation-state that has existed in human history, and far worse than many. The true history of America is one of violent bloody turmoil, internal and external, of xenophobic hatred and all too human greed. Americans, like every other people on the face of the earth, are wretchedly, viciously tribal. If America is exceptional in any way, it is in our ethnic plurality. America has indeed been a beacon to the peoples of the world, and there have always been many different kinds and sorts of human beings living here, and perhaps because of that, we have seen an enormous amount of tribally driven atrocity here in our country. We have hounded our red people to near extinction, we have historically enslaved, imprisoned and murdered our blacks and our Asians, we have butchered the natives of Hawaii and the Phillippines. This is our history, and if it is at all exceptional, it is only for the sheer, raw, unrelenting mass of hatred and murder and cruelty and horror we have inflicted on our fellow citizenry, and on those non-Americans who stood between us and whatever it was we wanted at any given moment.

And our shame is not just historical. We are still tribal, still xenophobic -- still savagely so, to the same murderous degree as our great grandfathers were, throwing a rope with a noose at one end over a tree limb or kicking some uppity Chinee to death with their American made workboots. You disagree? We've come a long way since those days, you say? We're not like that any more? Then why are your friends and neighbors, your sons and daughters, your fellow Americans, over in a foreign nation raping, torturing, and killing people who do not look like you? Why are there hundreds of people who do not look like you rotting in illegal prisons with American flags flying over them, languishing without outside contact, people who have never been charged with anything, who have never been tried, who have no hope?

Why aren't you doing anything about it?

If the American government had invaded Sweden and slaughtered a hundred thousand blue eyed blondes, would we all be sitting around going "Well, that's terrible but honestly there's nothing I can do?" If a company of Special Forces troops parachuted into Cleveland and started dragging people out of their houses and locking them up in prison without trial and torturing them and raping their kids to make them cooperate with the government, would we just frown, switch the channel, and continue watching THE MOMENT OF TRUTH?

Blond, blue eyed Europeans are too close to human for us to remain comfortable with their slaughter at our own hands. Our fellow members of the American tribe are definitely off limits. Americans will shrug their shoulders at atrocity as long as it occurs at a comfortable distance, to non-people... non-Christians, with darker skin than ours, who wear funny hats, and have unpronounceable names.

Oh, we want the war over with, and we pretend our outrage is primarily moral. Yet the question we must ask is, would we be so disenchanted with a distant conflict against a strange, dusky skinned, barbaric enemy, if we were kicking their asses?

Would George W. Bush's Administration, or the Republican Party, have become so unpopular, if they weren't obviously and irrefutably losing the war in Iraq?

The truth is a horror, but it is the truth and we need to face up to it: we are not angry with the Republicans for Mark Foley or Larry Craig, for Tom DeLay or Duke Cunningham, for George Bush or Dick Cheney. We are not disappointed with the Bush Administration because they have stolen votes, or corrupted the Justice Department, or outed Valerie Plame, or let our fellow citizens drown in New Orleans.

We have not turned our backs on our government because they started an illegal war of murderous aggression to line their own pockets.

We put up with all of that. We did nothing. We signed online petitions, and bitched about it on our blogs. And then we turned the TV back on.

No, our outrage is not moral, our indignation is not righteous. We are pissed off with the Republicans, and we are voting them out -- because they didn't win the war.

This is the failure we cannot accept, and this time, it is a Republican failure. Like any people, we will not suffer defeat, or tolerate public embarrassment. When we finally admitted defeat in Vietnam, a war begun by the most liberal President since FDR, liberalism itself was politically marginalized for the remainder of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Now conservatives are suffering this same sort of monumental set back; this war is indelibly stamped as theirs, and try though they might, they cannot wash their hands of it. But the pendulum does not swing by itself; had American actually won in Iraq, had we wiped out Sadam's forces, set up a friendly puppet regime, and stood valiant guard while the oil began to flow back to us here at home, Republicanism might well have achieved Karl Rove's dream of 'permanent majority'.

No one argues with a winner, least of all Americans. Sure we would have had to kill a few thousand towel heads who hadn't done anything to us, but with an undeniable victory under our belts, we would have viewed the conquest of Iraq as something to be proud of, something to strut about, something to brag to our grandchildren over.

This does not make us exceptional, not even exceptionally evil. No country, no culture, no society likes to lose, wants to see itself as a loser, wants to ruin its own economy and destroy an entire generation of its own youth for the dregs of defeat. Now that it has become apparent and undeniable to all of us except the most bitter dead enders that we cannot win this war we never should have started, we want out. We want to stop spending our blood and treasure on a blood-soaked rainbow that has no pot of gold at the end of it.

This is why we have two separate promises from two separate Presidential candidates as to how they will resolve this murderous mess in Iraq. Obama promises he'll get us the hell out. McCain says he's going to win this thing for us. When McCain says there is a choice between wrong change and right change, this is what he's talking about. We can win, or we can pack our shit and git, but no more of this losing crap; that's unAmerican.

The Bush Administration could not and cannot choose either of these courses. Bush and Cheney kicked off a war they never wanted to win, because a clear victory in Iraq would lead to immediate expectations of lowered oil prices when the Iraqi oil fields finally came online at something like full production capacity. This is not what the energy cartels want, and ultimately, Bush and Cheney are neither Republican nor conservative so much as they are oilmen. If the political futures of the Republican Party and the conservative movement had to be sacrificed on the altar of $140 barrels of crude, so be it.

Neither McCain nor Obama are oilmen, and therein lies the only hope we have. McCain, unfortunately, is a lunatic who still thinks we can win a war that has at this point been irrevocably botched by a team of schemers whose optimal goal was a Middle East in just enough chaos to keep the oil markets sky high. Had the original invasion plan included the deployment of a few companies of MPs to help restore civil order immediately after the invasion, Iraq might very well be a relatively docile American ally at this point. But we're a thousand days late and a trillion dollars short of any such resolution now. After Abu Ghraib and the constant, grinding blundering horror of the ongoing American occupation, Iraqis will hate everything red white and blue for the next ten generations, at least. The only thing McCain can do to win is start lobbing nukes around... and we can only hope he isn't that crazy. (Bush and Cheney would drop nukes in an instant if a conquered Iraq was what they, or their masters, truly sought. But it isn't.)

The energy cartels who pull Bush and Cheney's strings will be very content if McCain gets into office; short of all out deployment of American WMDs, Iraq cannot be pacified, and they will happily watch while thousands more American soldiers, and millions more Iraqis, die in an endless orgy of destruction whose sole accomplishment will be to keep the bulk of the Iraqi oil fields offline, and world crude prices soaring.

Should Obama become President, he will hopefully have enough political acumen to realize that he has only a very short window in which to withdraw American troops before Bush's war becomes his war, and he has to personally shoulder the blame for America's defeat in Iraq. But withdrawal will come with a cost. Not only will President Obama be essentially cutting a trillion dollars in unrecoverable losses, but without an ongoing military presence in Iraq, the U.S. will be in no position to influence the sales of what petroleum reserves are being pumped, or may eventually come online. And an America still heavily dependent on foreign petroleum, and now almost universally despised throughout the Middle East, will have no future at all as a civilized nation.

No President wants to be the last President of the United States, the one that presided over the final, disastrous collapse of the great American nation. McCain dreams of being the glorious American hero who leads us to star spangled victory, restoring our faith in ourselves and our prestige in the eyes of the world. Obama doesn't seem that insane, but he will be faced with a terrible decision.

It would no doubt help him if he could know that the American people are behind him, that we are aware of the enormous problems confronting us, and we are willing to do whatever is necessary to get through the hard times to come. Bush and Cheney never trusted the American people to sacrifice anything (or perhaps they simply didn't want people to stop spending money on gas), but history shows that we can pull together if we see the need. If we truly want to see the war in Iraq ended, we are going to have to accept that this will have grave consequences for our way of life. We will have to conserve energy in every way, which will mean changing our lifestyles tremendously. We will need to carpool and take mass transit whenever we can. We must to rebuild our national rail network, and probably give up heavier than air flight for at least a generation. We need to use less electricity, and we probably need to pay higher taxes to fund research into alternate energy. We need to pull in closer together, and give up our far flung suburbs. We need to live in walkable neighborhoods again. We need to use less plastic, recycle everything we can, give up our disposable lifestyle, learn to be more self reliant. We need to learn to entertain each other, and to feed ourselves. We need to start manufacturing again.

We need to strive to be worthy of the myth of American exceptionalism we all so badly want to believe in.

If we are willing to do that, and we elect a President willing to lead us in these efforts, then yes, we can end this needless, pointless exercise in ongoing slaughter we call a war and work towards redeeming ourselves for our many grievous failings in the eyes of the world. We can begin, perhaps, to deserve the accolades and admiration we have always thought we deserved, but have never truly earned.

Otherwise, I guess we can all just keep watching AMERICAN IDOL and bitching about the price of gas while our less lucky fellow Americans kill a whole lotta towelheads in a galaxy far, far away.

For a little while, anyway.

“I’m not sad because Obama’s the nominee. I’m sad because there are women … across this nation, many of whom weren’t even Hillary Clinton supporters, many of whom voted for Obama in the primary, who have watched with horror the seething hatred directed at Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman.”
                                 - Melissa McEwan,
                                      Shakespeare's Sister

I'm a man, not a woman, an independent liberal/progressive with the occasional truculent streak of libertarianism, not a Democrat.  So I may be disqualified from commenting on this.  Nonetheless, I cannot help but call shenanigans.

In the 1990s there was no bigger fan of Hillary Clinton than I.  I thought she was classy, smart, ultra-competent, and pretty clearly the brains of the marriage.  I looked forward to a time when I might be able to vote her into some office or other, and if that office happened to be the highest in the land, well, that worked for me, too.  If anyone had the chops to be the first woman President of the United States of America, certainly, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Unlike many native New Yorkers, I was neither outraged nor annoyed when Ms. Clinton bought a house in New York State so she could run for New York State Senator.  Many saw it as opportunistic, and, well, yeah, I guess you couldn't argue with it.  However, as a lifelong resident of New York who had had to clench my teech for years over the corrupt self serving antics of Senator Alphonse D'Amato, I was pleased at the prospect of getting someone to represent New York in the U.S. Senate who wasn't a complete lugnut.  That our upgrade came in the person of one of the most capable human beings to appear on the national political scene in ten years was wonderful beyond belief.

Certainly, both of the Clintons have always been intimately familiar with the cold equations of rough and tumble politics, and being neither blind nor a child, I was aware of their awareness, and understood the necessity of it, especially for the female half of the team, burdened as she was not only by the fearful hatred of tiny souled, threatened males everywhere, but by the sheer venomous loathing the right had for her husband.   I kept this always in mind, and tried to make allowances due to it.  Yet as time wore on, Senator Clinton's cynically pragmatic approach to every issue and every vote wore on me even more.   Was there no principal dear enough to her that could get her to cast a vote without carefully triangulating her position first?  Would I ever see her take a stand that might conceivably cost her more than she netted from it?

It didn't seem likely.

So gradually, the shine wore off the crush I had on Ms. Clinton.  And then, I started reading stuff by Greg Palast, like this, and this. 

So I was no longer the Hillary Clinton fan I had once been, and no longer quite as enamored of the idea of her becoming our first female President.  Yet I went into the 2008 election season with every intention of voting for whoever the Democrats put up.  As John Rogers recently intoned on his own blog, Kung Fu Monkey, had the Democrats put up a three legged bulldog, I'd have voted for it, rather than see the Republicans keep the White House for another four years of rolling catastophe, disaster, and calamity.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination.  At some point, Senator Clinton completely lost her mind, or, at least, any sense of proportion or restraint she might have had.  I do not know why, and will keep my speculations private, but at some point, Senator Clinton pretty clearly decided that she was fated to be the next President of the United States, that this was the way things were going to be, and anyone or anything that tried to get between her and her glorious destiny had better run for the high country, because there was absolutely nothing she was not willing to do to get to where she felt she was supposed to be.

Absolutely nothing.

Here is what Hillary accomplished with her constant cheap shots and relentless pandering to the right leaning, black-hating redneck vote -- she lost my vote.  After hearing Hillary's staff brag about how much she loved to toss down a shot and a beer after killing some grouse with her favorite shotgun, and hearing Hillary herself jeer at her gracious opponent with words like 'elitist' and moronic aspersions as to exactly what kind of firearm Senator Obama thought dimbulb hunters might use to shoot varmints, I was done with Ms. Clinton.   I would still have voted for that three legged Democratic bulldog, but there was and is no way in hell I was pulling a lever in a voting booth with Hillary's name on it.  I'd  have voted Libertarian first, goddamit.

None of these feelings, none of this outrage, none of this alienation, none of this revulsion on my part has anything to do with Senator Clinton's gender.   Nor do I ascribe any of her relentlessly wretched, miserable, petulant, childish, near pathologically entitled seeming behavior to her sex.  There are men who routinely behave every bit as boorishly as Senator Clinton has in pursuit of this nomination, and women who comport themselves every day of their lives as admirably as she hasn't.  This has nothing to do with the configuration of anybody's X and/or Y chromosomes. 
This is a very simple matter:  Senator Clinton has been a brat.  We've had a brat for a President for the last eight years, and it hasn't worked out all that well for most of us, or most of the rest of the people in the world. 

I say, no more brats in the Oval Office.  Male or female, black or white, older or younger -- no more brats.

Period.  The End.

Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in "atrocity producing situations." Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.

Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or Marines, are to most of the occupation troops in Iraq nameless, faceless, and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing -- the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm -- to murder -- the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you.

...

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.

"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"

                     - Collateral Damage

                                       By Chris Hedges
                                        (via Tomdispatch)

* * *

I've never seen actual combat, never served in a live war zone, never pointed a weapon at another human being and pulled the trigger.  And thank whatever gods there may be that it is so.  But in spring of 1985, I went through 13 weeks of Army Infantry Basic Training at Fort Benning, GA.  The biggest joke in the universe may well be the piece of paper I have in a drawer somewhere that claims I am a fully trained and qualified infantry soldier -- I may well have been the worst 'soldier' ever to actually graduate Basic -- but it's not a funny joke, because there's nothing funny about the military.  It is an evil institution, and while it may well be a necessary evil, it seems to me that as a culture we generally place far too much emphasis on the first word in that phrase when we find ourselves using it.  We should always remember the second word as well.  In fact, we should stress it to ourselves.

However necessary something may be, evil is still evil.

I've never shot at a real human being.  But for 13 weeks in 1985 at Fort Benning, GA, I was taught that it was okay to do so, if my commanding officer told me to.  'Taught' is an understatement bordering on an  irony as a description for military training; the exact word is 'brainwashed'.  Military training is systematic, it is precise, it is purposeful.  For 13 weeks I was forcibly exercised into utter exhaustion, humiliated, abused, denied sleep, placed in stress positions, exposed to extremes of heat and cold, punished for infractions as minor as not using the correct words in the correct sequence when speaking with a fellow trainee, and threatened that, should I commit graver offenses, I would receive worse punishments, ranging from fines to imprisonment to having the living crap beaten out of me. 

One of my drill sergeants advised me, in a rare unguarded moment, that "We have a reason for everything we do".  And the reason is a simple one -- they need to turn civilized, socialized civilians into brutal but disciplined killers.   And they need to turn individuals into faceless, nameless cogs in their killing machine.

From my own experiences with military training, I can understand and empathize with the '18 year old kid' from the excerpt I've quoted, who ended up murdering an entire family of Iraqis with a rooftop mounted 50 cal.  I can't imagine the personal hell he has gone through since he discovered the actual nature of his weapon's targets, but I can imagine what would be even worse -- not shooting at a vehicle that really was a suicide bomber, and having to live with the fact that by failing in his duty, he killed 30 or 40 of his fellow soldiers.

The military is an evil, ugly institution, and war is an evil, ugly thing.  If we justify the existence of our military to ourselves with the phrase 'necessary evil', how, then, do we justify to ourselves the ongoing horrors of an entirely unnecessary war?

What is a necessary evil that isn't necessary?

Even the most foolish and ignorant among us should be able to work that semantic equation.

Like John Cleese with a monstrous big sword and a gigantic black tin bucket on his head, Hillary Clinton stood in front of every other Democratic candidate for President in '08 declaring ringingly, "None shall pass".

Once upon a time, the kingdoms of the Earth were all laid out before her.  The Democratic nomination process for 2008 was to be a coronation of Queen  Hillary I, First Woman President of the United States of America.  The Democratic party would cement its grip on power once more, patronage, power and influence would flow to its wealthiest donors, and vengeance would be Hillary's and Bill's.  And oh, it would be sweet.

But that was then, and this is now.  Where Senator Obama offers hope for the future and a gracious hand to a defeated opponent, Senator Clinton clings gracelessly to her past. 

By 'making no decisions tonight', Senator Clinton may believe she is doing many things -- saving face, preserving maximum bargaining power for the VP slot on Senator Obama's ticket, keeping her campaign's hopes alive, just in case a dinosaur-killer hits the Earth between now and August, or now and November.  (Then, as the human race feels its collective skin boiling off its collective bones in the massive cloud of superheated steam that will sweep the globe, she can raise her fist victoriously in the air and declare that yes, it's true, SHE is now the Democratic nominee for President.  And if she manages to outlast everyone else on some mountaintop somewhere, then, yes, indeed, she will be the First Woman President of the United States, finally.  Her tenacity will have paid off, and the last laugh will be hers.)

Every vote must be counted, except the ones that weren't for Senator Clinton.  The fight to seat the full Florida and Michigan delegations was the equivalent of the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s or the battle against slavery, as long as it would benefit Senator Clinton.  Obama was an elitist who thought you hunted ducks with six guns and that the American people were bitter, said the whiskey drinkin', shotgun totin' Senator Clinton. 

And now, like a limbless torso somehow comically upright on its severed stumps, Senator Clinton shrills desperately at her rapidly receding opponent's victorious rear profile, "Oh, runnin' away, is it?  Come back!  I'll bite your legs off!"

Perhaps, like JFK before her, Senator Clinton had hopes and dreams of turning Washington, D.C. into a modern day Camelot.

Camelot.  Camelot.

Unfortunately, Senator Clinton, it's only a model.

For the last many months, Senator Clinton has done her best to stay on the road -- not because she had any real hope of getting to her original destination, but simply so that she, like any petulant driver, could make sure nobody else got by her. 

Her gracious opponents refer to her courage, her drive, her tenacity.  The word they want is hubris, although Senator Obama is too kind to say it and Senator McCain isn't sure how to pronounce it. 

Fortunately, it no longer matters.  Senator Clinton is still stubbornly, truculently, petulantly sitting in the middle of the road... but Senator Obama has now, finally, gotten around her and is speeding onward to his destination. 

Maybe she still figures she can get him to come back and pick her up, and she can ride shotgun.  My personal feelings are she's long since ruined any chance she had at that, but you never know how these things will work out.

In the end, though, there was no coronation, and Senator Clinton was not invincible.

So be it.

We progressives like nothing more than to talk about Bush's 'bubble' -- the cocoon of fantasy he has surrounded himself with, where he is the Good Wise Cowboy/Commander In Chief leading a sometimes unwitting, unwilling nation into war with (and inevitable victory over) the Insidious Forces of Ultimate Evil. 

But I worry we have built our own bubble, and that that bubble can best be described as a The Earnest Belief That America Is Ready To Elect A President Who Isn't A White Dude.

A year ago, I was in despair at the thought that, in an election year when it seemed absolutely impossible for the Republicans to win the White House again, the Democrats were going to hand it to them anyway -- by insisting on running either a woman (and not just a woman, but The Woman Most Hated by Conservatives In The History Of Humanity) and/or a black man (and not just any black man, no, if the Dems decided to run a black man for Prez, they were gonna run a first term Senator from Illinois whose father was a Muslim and whose middle name was Hussein and whose last name rhymed with Osama). 

Since then, though, I've gotten past that, and come to believe that Senator Obama, at the very least, has a very real chance to win the Presidency.  I try not think I've drunk the Kool-Aid.  I like to tell myself that I'm still detached, still calm, cool and collected, still standing on the sidelines weighing the advantages and disadvantages and calculating the odds with my eyes wide open and my head on straight.

And yet, there's this still small voice deep inside me that says "ARE YOU CRAZY???  THIS IS AMERICA!!!"

The America that distributed smallpox infected blankets to the people who were living here originally, and that put the survivors of those people on the worst land it could find.

The America that annexed Hawaii by force and near-genocide so a rich guy named Dole could get a little richer selling inexpensive pineapple in cans.  

The America that killed a few thousand people in the Phillippine Islands so another rich guy named Hearst could sell some newspapers.

The American that rounded up Americans of Japanese descent and put them in concentration camps because, unlike all the Americans of German and Italian descent, the Japanese Americans weren't white.

The America that, by and large, shrugs and goes about its business while soldiers wearing its flag on their uniform kill, maim, rape, and torture thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis. 
 
The America that elected and re-elected a posturing fraudulent foolish failure to its highest office... or didn't, but stood by and watched while he and his handlers stole both elections right in front of our eyes, anyway.

The America that ties gay kids to trees and throws rocks at their heads  until they die. 

Yeah, yeah, we look at the polls and we fill out our surveys and we rejoice at the news that Obama is leading McCain nationally and soon we will enter a post partisan era of Change We Can Believe In, when our very own Magical Negro will open his hands and smile beatifically and all good things will finally come to those who have waited. 

Prices will go down, wages will go up, our factories will reopen and everyone will get good jobs making $30 an hour and our bridges and highways and cities and suburbs will flourish and grow and American will once more take its rightful place as internationally beloved and universally respected leader of the Free World and President Obama will personally invent a time machine and change history so that Taylor Hicks never won AMERICAN IDOL.

All will be well, and all will be well, and ALL will be well, world without end, amen. 

And... are we kidding ourselves?  Are we?  Do we really think... do we really dare to HOPE... that America, the America of gas guzzling SUVs and cheap Wal-mart prices supported by Chinese slave labor and crappy health care and thousands dead and missing after Katrina and CIA offshore black sites and Abu Ghraib and free speech zones and the PATRIOT Act... that our America, the one we all live in, is going to elect a black man... ANY black man, much less one whose middle name is Hussein and whose last name rhymes with Osama... to be its President?

Do we really believe this?

And if we do... are we living in a bubble, too?  A Democratic-liberal-progressive bubble, where we only see what we want to see, and we only believe what we fervently truly really really really want to be true?

I hope not.  I hope we're ready.  I hope we've come far enough.

Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

Like Michelle Obama, I want to be proud of my country, for the very first time since childhood.

Neil Sinhababu, guest blogging for Kevin Drum over at Washington Monthly, notes the following:

<i>One of the more amusing results from the poll is that 25% of respondents supported giving animals the "exact same rights as people to be free of harm and exploitation." 55% of those respondents then said they didn't want to ban hunting. If we take their responses at face value and multiply, this means that over 10% of Americans support the hunting of humans. Who knew?</i>

The thing we never talk about is that every problem we face as a race and a species stems from one irrefutable but never-to-be-discussed source -- there are way too many people on the planet right now, and more coming all the time.

Nobody is volunteering to get off any time soon, either.

BHO has run very successfully on his 'Change You Can Believe In' slogan, and I remember very well the You Tube video that went around a few months back, where, set to the backround tune of David Bowie's 'Changes', every Presidential nominee for both parties spoke repeatedly and constantly about the need for 'change'.   Change is what we want, change is what we need, change is what we are bound and determined to enact.  Change, change, change.  The status quo has failed us, we want change.  It's the one thing that, apparently, we can ALL agree on.

Funny, though, how the 'change' we want seems to be entirely political, and largely confined to government circles.  We want our government to be less corrupt and more transparent, less intrusive and more respectful of our basic civil liberties, less aggressive and predatory abroad and more compassionate towards those who need our help, especially those we have done grievous wrongs to.  And we especially want our government to be less irresponsible in its fiscal policies, and considerably less servile towards the already rich and powerful, and more diligent in its responsibilities towards the working poor and the struggling middle class.

We want our GOVERNMENT to change, oh yes. 

But change apparently stops at the Potomac.  We the people do not want to have to change AT ALL.  We want to keep on driving gas guzzlers to Wal-Mart for low cost home furnishings and low cost electronics we can sit on and stare at to watch NASCAR and AMERICAN IDOL with.  We want to keep on consuming all our consumables and throwing their packaging into landfills, which in a couple of decades we'll have to build houses on for all the kids we insist on having. 

Looked at this way, I can easily see how hunting humans could indeed seem like a great idea -- to everyone in the Third World, anyway, always assuming, of course, that the humans are Americans. 

I read a pretty good handful of progressive political blogs, and lately I'm seeing the same question pop up over and over again:

"Why would ANYone vote for John McCain?"

I can practically hear the anguish in the asker's tone, and see them wringing their hands together.

I've been there.  I myself asked this question many many times in the 2000 and 2004 election seasons, except I couldn't understand how anyone could vote for the posturing fraudulent failure that was George W. Bush. 

It's a valid question for Bush, because I suspect a great many of the people who pulled the lever in his column did, indeed, cast a positive vote FOR George W. Bush.  They honestly liked him and supported him.   I can't understand that, but, well, for all that his appeal was entirely emotional and non-intellectual, still, it was real. 

McCain doesn't have that.  Very few people are genuinely going to vote FOR him, very few people who do cast a ballot with his name on it are going to genuinely like him, or want him to be President. 

Still, it's a genuinely dangerous form of blindness to allow ourselves not to understand that John McCain is going to get millions of votes in November -- and why.

It's rare that people have a candidate they can genuinely, honestly, and wholeheartedly vote FOR.  I've only really, genuinely voted FOR a particular candidate once, and it was a disaster, as that vote was for Ralph Nader in 2000, when I was living in Tampa, Florida.  And it taught me a very hard lesson, and I honestly never expected that I would ever in my life have another candidate I could genuinely vote FOR, again. 

But the lack of a candidate to vote FOR has never kept people from showing up at the polls to vote anyway.  Heinlein once rather cynically advised (through the larynx of his eternally crusty-but-loveable old man character Lazarus Long) that if your society allows you to vote, you should always do so.  You may not always have a candidate you want to vote FOR, but you will nearly always have one you wish to vote AGAINST, and you will rarely go wrong doing so. 

McCain is going to get millions of votes in November.  They may not be votes from genuine McCain supporters, but they will still propel him towards the Oval Office, because  millions of Americans cannot tolerate the thought of any person of color, or any woman (but, especially, the Eeeeeeeevil Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most universally loathed by conservatives female in the history of the conservative movement) being their President. 

We keep forgetting this.  We look at McCain, and, yeah, he's pretty much a joke -- he's old, he's bald, he's not very charismatic, he vacillates and dodders and maunders; his greatest essential appeal is largely fraudulent, his own base can't stand him, and every time he tries to pander to one focus group, he shoots himself in the foot with two others.  It's like Grampa Simpson is running for President.  I don't deny any of that.

But it's dangerous to underestimate McCain, because the simple fact is, while all the factors I've listed above matter greatly to progressives, they don't really mean a thing to the people who are going to vote for McCain by the teeming millions.

Here's what matters to them -- McCain is a white guy, and he isn't named Clinton.

Stacked up against that, none of McCain's undeniable shortfalls, inadequacies, and  perceived disadvantages matter.

I believe Senator Obama has the charisma, the savvy, and the pure raw capital G Game to rise above all that, to convince even many of those who hate him for his skin color that he is the best President we could have, and the President we need, for the next four years of non-stop crisis and calamity.   And I just as certainly and fundamentally believe that Senator Clinton doesn't, and if The Woman Conservatives Loathe The Most went up against any white male Republican in any national election at any point in the early 21st Century, she was going to lose. 

Nonetheless, it is foolish to think that simply because McCain flashes very little substance to vote FOR, that no one is going to vote for him.  Millions of people are going to vote against either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in November 2008.  What we must hope for, and work for diligently, is that millions MORE will vote FOR one of them. 

In a country as radically polarized as ours, the undecideds decide every election.

Conventional political wisdom, and, for at least the last two elections, a fairly accurate summation of how things worked.  (It isn't universal; Bill Clinton won the Presidency not by swaying undecideds at the last minute, but because Ross Perot grabbed a big chunk of the vote that otherwise would have gone to Father Bush.)

Yet if the last minute undecideds have decided the last two elections, it seems to me we need look no further to discover the source of all our woes. 

Because, frankly, if someone is honestly 'undecided' when confronted with a choice between George W. Bush and Al Gore, or George W. Bush and John Kerry, or, for that matter, George W. Bush and Mortimer frickin SNERD, well... as some comedian or another once opined, these are people we do not need.  These are walking, talking, slope browed slack jawed exemplars for why maybe oft despised social programs like eugenics and/or early euthenasia might be worth considering, after all.

A further musing on the subject of the Undecided Voter, and Conventional Political Wisdom:

As a general rule, candidates lock up their base during the nomination process, then move to the middle in the general election to appeal to moderates and indies (again, the dreaded undecided voter).  Some candidates only move a little bit, others move a great deal, but still, this is the usual practice, because it's generally safe to assume that once a candidate has his or her party's nomination, the base of that party's electorate is safely in that candidate's pocket, regardless of how much pandering the candidate now does to pick up some of the all important Middle Of The Road voters.

Bill Clinton has long been considered king of this kind of politicking.  He ran exactly as far to the left as he needed to to get the nomination, then moved pretty deep into the center to appeal to moderate voters.  (Why Clinton is considered a genius for this is beyond me, again, without Ross Perot's invaluable aid in 1992, Clinton could have triangulated until he was blue in the face and he still wouldn't have won the White House.  Conservatism was just too strong, and for all Daddy Bush lacked in charisma, he still had the incumbency on his side.)

It's interesting to me that John McCain is the first candidate I can think of who is going about a Presidential bid from the opposite direction.  His political cred as a straight talking maverick moderate means he starts out with enormous appeal to the moderates, indies, and undecideds, and he can rely on his popularity with the MSM to keep that essentially false facade largely intact through November. 

However, that same largely false facade makes him toxic to his party's base.  In the general election, McCain finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to selectively punch holes in his maverick aura that only the avid Red State carnivores will bother to peer through, while maintaining his bogus street cred as an honest independent moderate with the all important moderate, undecided voters.

It's a balancing act of frankly mind boggling proportion, and if he somehow manages to pull it off, I would nominate him (or whoever runs his campaign) as the true king of political gamesmanship.

However, I don't think McCain really has much of a shot at doing it.  There's only one real master of political gamesmanship on the national scene right now, and his initials are BHO.  What I find ironic -- delightfully so, in fact -- is that Obama's mastery of the political field is manifesting itself in an utterly deceptive aura of post-political innocence.  To actually sell an entire nation (or a significant percentage of it) on the idea that one is above politics, one HAS to be an absolute master of politics.

Compare this to Senator Clinton's 'masterstrokes', like, trying to convince the rednecks that she's a rootin tootin shotgun shootin shot-and-a-beer chuggin' cowgirl just like them.  And then tell me which is the stronger candidate.

Two slices of bread, and you wish you had some meat:

***Or a Democratic Presidential nominee.

***Or the ability to send the astral selves of every adult American citizen who didn't vote for Al Gore back in time to possess their 2000 era bodies and vote all over again. Imagine no War on Terror, no Gitmo, no Abu Ghraib, no illegal Federal wiretapping, no outing of Valerie Plame, no invasion/endless occupation of Iraq. Imagine we got started on sensible energy and economic policies 8 years ago. Imagine.

***Or a job designing games.

***Or a reasonably lucrative career as a writer.

***Or a successful job as an online cartoonist.

***Or super-intelligence.

***Or a cool musical playlist in my blog border, like Mike Norton has... oh, wait, I gots one o' dose. Neat.

***Or an XBox 360 I could play MASS EFFECT on.

***Or a functional light-sabre. Or a phaser (Old school, please, not those stupid things that look like TV remote controls.) I'll take either.

***Or KOTOR 3. (Or a finished version of KOTOR 2, for that matter.)

***Or the check I've been promised for my story in ASTONISHING ADVENTURES #3. Or the slightest hint when I can expect it.

***Or a flying car.

***Or a few more computers in this house with Internet access.

***Or a big screen high density TV with a satellite dish so I could watch Bucs games at home during football season.

***Or a secret satellite headquarters from which I could teleport anything on Earth from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth.

***Or the ability to draw like Jack Kirby.

***Or a good singing voice.

***Or a great deal of natural talent at playing musical instruments.

***Or a robot duplicate Doc Nebula that could go to work and do my job for me while I stay home and blog.

***Or a blog that more than 6 people read.

That last is no doubt very unenlightened of me, but I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.

 For years I've been laboring under the crushing burden, the sheer oppressive spiritual weight of hellish guilt that is the lot of a person who, while living in Florida in the year 2000, cast a vote in the presidential election for Ralph Nader.

It's been an ordeal. Truly.

But earlier today, it abruptly occurred to me, that maybe, just maybe, I'm a hero rather than a goat.

Perhaps... perhaps, in the long run, I did a magnificent and noble thing.

After all, did I not spare the world the sheer unrelenting horror of... a Joe Lieberman Presidency in 2008?

Think about it. ;)