Gin and Tacos

Oliver Stone's new George W. Bush biopic (or "dramatization" or whatever one calls a life story retold with poetic license) seems, even in comparison to every other Oliver Stone movie, like the wrong movie at the wrong time. The acting may be great, it may be funny, it may be accurate, and it may cure cancer after two viewings, but….who in the hell actually wants to watch a movie about George W. Bush after seven years and nine months of living the George W. Bush experience?

Matthew Brady, undoubtedly the most important (and first) photojournalist, is famous today for the thousands of uncensored images he made of the American Civil War.** What is often forgotten is that immediately after the War he went bankrupt and died penniless, many of his images being destroyed in the process. It wasn't because his pictures were not gripping or lacked artistic merit – it was simply that after the Civil War, no one wanted to look at pictures of the Civil War.

Stone's film might have been the perfect movie for 2011. Maybe at that point we will have gained enough distance from these events to appreciate them as a source of comedy, irony, or entertainment. Right now it feels a little like expecting the public in 1866 to pay to see photos of mangled, bloody Union soldiers and burnt villages. Maybe I am incorrect and the public will flock to see the film, but I very much doubt it. Sticking with the Civil War theme, when Booth's co-conspirators were executed in 1865, a newspaper called the Evening Star stated:

The last act of the tragedy of the 19th century is ended, and the curtain dropped forever upon the lives of its actors. Payne, Herold, Atzerodt and Mrs. Surratt have paid the penalty of their awful crime. In the bright sunlight of this summer day the wretched criminals have been hurried into eternity…We want to know their names no more.

That is the best summary of how I feel about this administration and everyone responsible for the events of the last eight years. There will come a time when I want to think about them in great detail, but it certainly is not now.

**He also photographed 18 of the 19 presidents between 1824 and 1900, excepting only William Henry Harrison, and is responsible for the only extant photographs of six presidents. Among them is John Quincy Adams, the earliest president (chronologically) to be photographed, albeit late in his life and many years after he left office. The first president to be photographed while in office, also by Brady, was John Tyler.

This is the McCain campaign in a nutshell: his "Joe the Plumber" prop from last evening's debate is related to a man who married into the Keating family. Not exactly a close relation, but why in the name of god would McCain use an example – an example he KNOWS we are going to dash off and research – that will lead back to, and hence remind everyone of, his Keating Five connections?

The only good answer? Because he is retarded.

(I want to preface this by stating quite clearly that I am not implying that this presidential election is "over." My comments refer to the position in which McCain finds himself right now and does not suggest that no change can take place before Election Day)

While many commentators have opined that this election is fascinating, unprecedented, and unique in numerous ways, I believe that twenty years from now we will still be studying what happened to McCain in the short time between the GOP convention and the second presidential debate. Republicans' heads must be spinning right now. Electoral fortunes rise and fall, but rarely so rapidly.

The most basic of questions will suffice here: what in the hell happened? McCain emerged from the convention on even footing with Obama for the first time. It felt like a race. It gave every indication of being an eight-week dogfight until Election Day. For a moment it even looked like Obama would be the underdog. Now, just a few weeks later, adjectives like "pathetic" and "desperate" seem a lot more fitting than "strong" or "energetic." How did McCain go from possible front-runner to worrying if he could hold Montana? I will suggest three answers.

First, there is a portion of the electorate that does not pay any attention to the races until after the conventions. They have a limited interest in politics and, if you'll forgive the metaphor, they don't turn the ballgame on until the 9th inning. I will go to my grave convinced that "Undecided" responses in pre-September polling are proxies for "I have paid no attention whatsoever." Part of what happened recently, in short, is that some of that 10-15% of undecided/no-answer respondents in the polls we've been seeing all year have finally decided to pay a little attention to the race. Once they put some thought into it, many apparently realized that they don't like this McCain fellow so much.

Second, these voters began to pay attention at the height of the latest installment of our financial distress. Economic trouble is always the harbinger of doom for incumbents and the incumbent party.

Third, the turning point in this entire race: Sarah Palin talked. The second she opened her mouth, non-Republicans found it nearly impossible to take the McCain campaign seriously. The campaign, which invested so much capital in McCain's wisdom, experience, judgment, and professionalism, suddenly felt like a PTA meeting in a trailer park. McCain had it right in January – in these difficult times Americans are looking for someone serious, someone in control. His decision to try to sell "folksy" and "Main Street common sense" could not have been more poorly timed. This economic crisis is a moment at which Americans don't want to look across the table at their candidate – they want to look up to someone, someone who seems like he or she knows what the fuck is going on and is prepared to handle it. We're not interested in someone who "shares our values." We're interested in someone who can fix a potentially catastrophic problem.

Post-Palin, the McCain campaign has sputtered and my hunch is that he's going to regret this decision until he dies. If his appearance in the last few days is any indication, that may be soon. He looks tired, angry, and desperate.

I do not know what miracle McCain can conjure at this point, but unless the polls are wrong – utterly, completely, historically wrong – he had better think of something fast. His recent efforts to right the ship landed with a thud; his ads are terrible, the Ayers/terrorist thing only stuck with people who weren't voting for Obama anyway, and he's burned a lot of his credibility and veneer of dignity by resorting to rolling around in pig shit in the desperate hope that he'll find a diamond buried in the pile. Emily Dickinson famously described hope as "the thing with feathers." McCain 2008 is starting to look pretty bald.

Rather than resorting to my usual marathon of words, today I intend to use some numbers to prove that a major McCain talking point (and a staple of right-wing rhetoric) has something in common with Trig Palin.

"I can eliminate $100 billion of wasteful and earmark spending immediately–35 billion in big spending bills in the last two years, and another 65 billion that has already been made a permanent part of the budget." — Sen. McCain, All Things Considered, April 23, 2008

How does Gramps McCain's mysteriously-derived estimate of earmark spending compare to calculations by organizations that bother with "facts" and "numbers"?

John McCain: earmarks = $100 billion
Anti-tax hawks Citizens Against Government Waste: FY 2008 earmarks = $17.2 billion
Anti-tax hawks Taxpayers for Common Sense: FY 2008 earmarks = $18.3 billion

McCain magically (and without explanation, even when pressed, of where the $100 billion figure comes from) quintuples the amount of "wasteful spending" calculated by people who follow such matters for a living. More importantly, the premise of his argument is downright ridiculous when we look at earmarks in context. Yes, yes, I know. Republicans hate context. Context has a pronounced liberal bias. Consider the following.

FY 2008 earmark spending: ~$18,000,000,000 (#1 state: Alaska)**
Annual cost, tax-deductible home mortgage interest: $65,000,000,000
Bailout of sinking insurance giant AIG: $85,000,000,000
FY 2008 Iraq War spending: ~$155,000,000,000
FY 2008 cost of Bush tax cuts: $189,100,000,000
FY 2008 cost of Bush tax cuts with AMT "relief": $247,400,000,000
FY 2008 interest on the Federal debt: $261,000,000,000
FY 2008 Dept. of Defense budget (excluding Iraq): $481,000,000,000
FY 2008 Social Security: $608,000,000,000
Financial "rescue" plan: $700,000,000,000
FY 2008 Federal Budget: ~$3,000,000,000,000
National Debt as of 9/30/08: ~$10,000,000,000,000

FY 2008 Earmarks as a percentage of the Federal budget: 0.6%

That's right, folks! Vote for John McCain and in the fantasy world in which he can eliminate all Congressional earmarks (using the line-item veto….which was just declared unconsitutional by Scalia and Thomas ten years ago) you can maybe, kinda, potentially (but probably not) save six-tenths of a percent of the annual Federal outlay of your hard-earned dollars! Yes, truly those wasteful earmarks for things like cancer research and military aid to Israel (which McCain hates, right? Let's ask Joe Lieberman) are the cause of our economic difficulties.

Let's go one step further, critically examining the common right-wing bitching point about "unnecessary" Federal spending of the non-earmarked kind.

FY 2008 budget, Environmental Protection Agency: $7.2 billion
FY 2008 Deparment of Labor budget: $10.6 billion
FY 2008 Department of Interior budget: $10.6 billion
FY 2008 Treasury Department budget: $12.1 billion
Iraq War in FY 2008: $12.9 billion per month
FY 2008 Bush tax cuts to top 1% of income earners alone: $79.5 billion

For the mathematically challenged – and polling indicates that about 45% of you are – the annual budgets of your least favorite Cabinet agencies, if completely eliminated, would not fund the Iraq War for 30 days. To put it another way, the combined budget of Labor and Interior ($21.2 billion) is 4.4% of the Department of Defense budget or 3.5% of the cost of Social Security for one year. This year we spent four times as much giving tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy (top 1% = incomes greater than $275,000) as we did on the Departments of Labor and Interior combined.

The point, and one that will surely be lost on McCain, is not that earmarks or the Department of Labor are productive uses of our financial resources. The point is that eliminating them would not make the slightest goddamn difference when considered in the context of our Federal budget. It is a spit in the ocean. A grain of sand in the Sahara. A snowflake on a glacier. "Wasteful" or not, earmarks and the budgets of agencies most loathed by conservatives represent piss-ant sums compared to the items that perennially dominate the budget. Uncle Sam saving the money spent on earmarks would be about as meaningful as a millionaire with $100 million in debt finding a quarter in his couch. McCain's earmark crusade fits snugly into the narrative about those shiftless tax-and-spend libruls. But like so much of the conservative canon, it makes sense only as long as one remains stunningly ignorant of the facts.

**Is life hilarious or what? I could not make this shit up if I tried.

OK, the Republicans might want to just hide under a pile of coats for the next few weeks. Democratic Army veteran Jim Martin has pulled even with Saxby Chambliss in the Georgia Senate race. Georgia. I will repeat that: the race between a Republican incumbent and a no-name challenger in Georgia is a statistical tie.

No matter how negative a picture we paint, reality seems intent on one-upping us.

I'm 29. That places me in the last generation of Americans to experience any part of the Cold War and superimposes my formative years over eight years of Reagan Worship. Accordingly, an integral part of my image of the Baby Boomers (my/our parents) is their raging erection for privatization. Boy, those fat cats in Washington can't do anything right! There's nothing worth doing that Private Enterprise can't do better! Government-run health care programs? Privatize 'em. Military personnel? Privatize them too. NASA wants to build a space probe? Private sector will do it better. Airport security? Yeah, that can be privatized. And the big one: Social Security? Oh hell yeah, we'd best privatize the fuck out of Social Security.

This is easily one of the most fascinating issues of our time, not because it has any intellectual merit but because of its tendency to create rabid, short-lived enthusiasm at great intervals and then disappear into the ethers. One day it is all over the news and the next day it is as impossible to locate as last night's thunderstorm. It is the Keyser Soze of public policy – everyone has heard of it, no one sees it.

When Our Leader first took office in 2001 he put substantial energy into this issue. Then 9/11 happened and it summarily vanished. He gave it another push after the 2004 Election (which provided a mandate and all the political capital on Earth!). Alas, he couldn't even convince his own party – who held healthy majorities in Congress – to sign on. Again it vanished.

John McCain, a supporter of privatization (although he's trying his best to deny it for some strange reason) dipped his toe in the water early in the campaign but today he'd sooner eat broken glass with an AIDS chaser than mention it in public. And the obvious link among the issue's three most recent appearances on the national stage? Well, oddly enough it disappears every time the stock market does a half-gainer off the high board into an empty pool. Which, of course, reminds everyone who is about to retire of just how screwed they would be with a market-based "alternative."

Stocks, as the plan's supporters point out, are an excellent long-term investment. You'll generally come out ahead over 30 or 40 years. In the short term, however, they are pretty damn unpredictable. How would you like to be 65 and preparing to retire right now? You did post-retirement planning with the assumption (which held as recently as a few months ago) that your "investment" is worth X dollars. Now it's worth 60% of X. In six more months it'll be 40% of X. Why, you'd be pretty fucked, wouldn't you?

That, "my friends", is why this half-assed idea never goes anywhere – not because of the much more valid arguments about the impossibility of ushering such a behemoth pool of money into the stock market (pension fund socialism, anyone?). The right tries to railroad a privatization plan through Congress every time the economic barometer rises, but people have the annoying habit of asking questions like "Gee, what if the Dow does an uncontrolled flight into terrain six months before I retire?" The answer is pretty obvious – the providential hand of the market "corrects" your standard of living.

Well, add Mr. Sunnis-and-Shias-Love-One-Another to the list of rats fleeing a sinking ship (today's NYT column: "Fire the Campaign"). Note the irony in Kristol criticizing McCain's campaign for its panicked, frantic behavior in a column that reads like the author is running about like a chicken minus its head.

Some day a friendly reader is going to register "www.billkristol.net" as a gift to me (my birthday's coming up!) and I will use it to chart a timeline of every Kristol column and major TV appearance since 2000, based on which I will determine what percentage of the time this man is actually right about anything. And as a bonus, we will see how many times he contradicts himself in print in any six-month period Friedman Unit.

As the armageddon scenario for the GOP – sixty Democrats in the Senate and Obama in the White House – becomes a possibility it might be a good time to get some perspective. Possible? Yes. Likely? Not really. Some extraordinary things would need to happen. And the world's biggest cocksucker would once again be thrust into a position of power.

The current Senate features 50 Democrats (counting Bernie Sanders), 49 Republicans, and Joe Lieberman. This gives the Democrats a nominal 51-49 edge. To reach 60 they would need to pick up nine seats in one election. Some GOP losses seem inevitable. Others would be a stretch.

Republican incumbents who are all but assured of going down include Sununu (NH), CO Open (Allard retirement), NM Open (Domenici retirement), and VA Open (Warner retirement). This means the Democrats can confidently assume a 55-45 split counting Lieberman as a Democrat.

Several incumbents have a very good chance of going down but may hold on: Smith (OR), Dole (NC), Coleman (MN), and Stevens (AK) are all in big trouble. Sweeping these four – no easy task – would leave the GOP at 59-41. Ouch. But it's not 60.

To reach 60, the Democratic candidates would have to pull off an improbable victory in MS-2 (Wicker vs. Musgrove) or Kentucky (where Mitch McConnell is fighting for his life). Neither can be considered likely. If they pull one of these races off then it is 60-40.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, it's more like 59-40-Cocksucker because that sixty includes Holy Joe. I can only imagine how deeply the party dreads having that sanctimonious asshead in a pivotal position yet again. To "Lieberman-proof" a 60-seat majority they would need to win both the McConnell and Wicker races (or some other race which isn't even considered competitive at the moment, Cornyn-Noriega in TX being the only real possibility). That is, to say the least, unlikely.

It is highly likely – something on the order of 99.9% – that the Democratic edge in the Senate will reach 55 seats in a few weeks. It's nearly as likely (let's say 80%) that the majority will be 58 or 59. But the odds drop precipitously at that point. The battle to get to 58 will be a pretty easy one but there will be rapidly diminishing returns beyond that point. Fighting their way to 60 will require an improbable victory and a few more years of kissing Joe Lieberman's ass, bending to his every whim.

Now that I've downplayed the odds as much as possible it's worth noting that the scenario is costing the GOP some sleep. In what can only be described as a ringing vote of confidence, the RNC is reportedly ready to stop spending money on McCain's rudderless ship of a campaign in order to devote more resources to a "firewall" at 40 Senate seats. Think about that for a second. If the big victory they can take away from this election is "We have enough Senators to threaten a filibuster!" then the GOP has truly suffered a beating of historic proportions. Note, however, how well the "firewall" at 50 worked in 2006. Something tells me this one will work slightly better, if only because the odds of the Democrats hitting 60 (and especially doing so sans Lieberman) are small independent of any GOP strategy.

We are all familiar by now with the phenomenon of outsourced call centers handling marketing, customer service, and technical support calls for thousands of American businesses. Advances in telecommunications technology make it as easy to have 1-800-BUY-DELL connect to a depressing shack in Bangalore as a depressing office park in Tupelo. Logistical costs are greater but more than offset by depressed foreign wages.

The change has hardly been seamless for American consumers. India-based call banks have become a cultural punchline dotting media commentary, films, sitcoms, and hacky stand-up comedy routines. Aside from bringing the usual nativist prejudices out of the woodwork, there has been some legitimate backlash. First, being as frank as possible, intelligibility can be an issue. Understanding someone who learned English out of a textbook speaking with a heavy Indian accent over a 6,000 mile connection on our cell phones as we walk down a noisy street is often difficult. Non-native speakers staff these call centers after being rapidly crammed with colloquial American English at the behest of foreign employers, putting the people on both ends of the call in an uncomfortable situation. Second, some American customers resent the farming out of what were once American jobs – shitty jobs, but domestic shitty jobs.

Companies using South Asian call centers have attempted to compensate in the most awkward, ridiculous way: by pretending that the employees are American. We've all been on a tech support call which began with a young man whose accent is heavier than Apu from The Simpsons introducing himself as "Hello, my name is Brian." My favorite personal experience involved an AT&T DSL service call two weeks ago in which the obviously Calcutta-based representative introduced himself as "Todd McIntosh." I had to restrain myself from telling "Todd" that if he's a third-generation Irishman in America than I am a native Hindi speaker named Jagdish. The second most popular tactic is forcing phone reps to read even more American colloquialisms off of a script.

In whose interest are these charades? American callers, of course, are not fooled. It remains immediately obvious that we are speaking to someone in India. If anything it is slightly more offensive to imply that we are stupid enough to think that "Brian" or "Heather" are speaking to us from Iowa – not to mention how offensive it is to make the employees conceal their identities to appease an American audience. Neo-colonialism indeed.