Month: June 2009

A few days ago one of my Instaputz colleagues brought attention to this piece from Debra Saunders of the SF Chronicle. Entitled "Enough of Sarah Palin, the Victim," Ms. Saunders opines:

I wish Sarah Palin would just go away. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote about the unfair personal treatment to which the political press corps subjected Palin and her children. Now I just want her to stop milking her role as GOP martyr. Palin should stick to her day job – by which I mean, governing Alaska, not being fodder for talk-show humor.
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Both parties have their umbrage industries – thanks to true believers, who love nothing better than to see themselves as victims of a perceived double standard. Last week, comedian David Letterman's two off-color jokes about a Palin family trip to New York led to an orgy of indignation.

I can only hope that Ms. Saunders survived the shocking orgy of indignation which, like clockwork, streamed forth from America's Favorite Female Alaskan Incumbent Governor last week. While still not quite dismounted from her crucifix over a stupid David Letterman joke, the woman who wants to be your President set her sights on even bigger, even more powerful game: some two-bit Alaska blogger named Linda Kellen Biegel. Ever heard of her? Me neither.

Ms. Biegel did a 30-second photoshopping job on a picture of Palin holding her infant son, replacing his face with the face of an Alaska media personality, AM Radio jockey Eddie Burke, who is (apparently) perceived to be Palin's lackey. Here is the amateurish result:

The humor isn't very complex. Palin holds baby. Baby replaced with radio host. Radio host is Palin's baby. I guess the most offense you could take from it is, based on the fact that the baby is Trig, Biegel is insinuating that the radio host is retarded. Personally I find that hilarious. Regardless, Trig is Palin's only baby at the moment.
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Her other kids are all grown. So if someone wants a picture of Palin holding a baby, it's going to be Trig. God knows she took every possible opportunity to be photographed holding PropTard (facing out, of course) during the election.

The reaction was predictable. "Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother's love for a special needs child," (emphasis mine) Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapelton told CNN. "Desecration"? This isn't the fuckin' Shroud of Turin. It's a public domain .jpeg of which about 300 billion versions exist. I suppose such a common photo could be "desecrated" if it had, you know, the Dalai Lama or Pope John Paul II on it. I'm not convinced that anything associated with Palin, including this picture, is "iconic." Just a little full of ourselves, aren't we, Meghan Stapleton? Someone photoshops a Palin pic and all of the sudden it's like someone airbrushed a damn Weezer logo on the Magna Carta or pasted Jesus' face on the unfortunate bottom in sadistic gay porn pics.

Stapleton followed that, "The mere idea of someone doctoring the photo of a special needs baby is appalling.
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" So would photoshopping a non-tarded baby be OK? I'm confused. Was the photo "desecrated" in the sense that Palin's child was made part of a partisan attack or is it because said child is "special?" I need clarification.

By the way, this is the 7th picture which comes up when Google image searching "Obama photoshop."

I can't imagine how even the most ardent Palin supporters have the stamina for the level of faux-indignant martyrdom she's embracing at this point. How can anyone be so constantly and so grievously offended by…well, everything? Oh, wait. It's because said person has absolutely nothing else to say. The McCain campaign and Palin's own media handlers have been beating this drum since Day One. As I noted way back when, it's the Spiro Agnew strategy all over again: bring some complete idiot into the limelight, have him/her sit there like a wounded puppy, and try to reel in sympathy votes when the media rips Puppy to shreds.
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Aww, that's terrible! How could anyone do that to such a helpless little puppy?

Sarah Palin used her kids, whether it's her handicapped baby or her knocked-up teenager, as Social Conservative Credential props more than any national candidate in the last 50 years. Even Bush never stooped to waving his daughters around so the media could attack them and he could benefit from sympathy. The Bush kids spent very little time in the spotlight even though the media badly wanted them on camera (because, of course, they're hot and blond). I have the feeling that if they were Palin's kids she would have had them in thongs, spread-eagle on the hood of a 1968 Pontiac GTO in full view of a few dozen photographers so that the Governor could wring every fake tear out of the ensuing outrage that the privacy of the candidate's family could be so violated.

Ever since I was old enough to string words into sentences I have been amazed at how regularly people seem to ask the wrong questions. Throughout the Reagan years (bearing in mind that I was given a daily ration of the era's prevailing wisdom throughout) everyone in white, suburban America was up in arms about "welfare." No one bothered to define exactly what that meant, which was unimportant so long as we all properly understood it to mean theiving government bastards stealing white people's money to give it to the coloreds so they could buy cigarettes and crack and bouncing cars. The problem was explained to Young Ed thusly: welfare was too generous, comparing favorably with the salary one would earn if working full-time at minimum wage. Why, the argument went, would anyone work if sitting at home was worth an equal paycheck?

It was, one must admit, solid logic. Staying home or working 40 hours at Pizza Hut for the same money (or close enough) is a slam dunk decision from a rational choice perspective. Thus the argument carried the appearance of logic and truth. But eight year-old Ed had to spend a lot of time wondering why everyone thought "Is the gap between welfare and minimum wage work big enough to discourage loafing?" was a more appropriate question than "Why does working 40 hours a week at the prevailing wage provide people with a sub-poverty line income which can barely house and feed single individual, if that?" The problem was always that welfare was too generous; it had to come down. Never was the problem that the minimum wage, which was a stunning $3.15 in the early 1980s, was too low. The rational choice game for the welfare recipient wasn't to work and live a decent life or to lay around collecting pitiful checks to live in abject misery – it was between working and living in abject misery or not working and getting the same. Anyone interested in facts (and really, who was back then?) would note that not once in its 80-year history has the minimum wage, if earned 40 hours weekly, hit the Federal poverty line for a family. Not once. Really:

This is why I concluded at a very young age that adults are bizarre. Reaching adulthood has given me no reason to revise that. I see this kind of red herring-vs.-Occam's Razor questioning all the time, debates which are fierce but avoid more obvious solutions, problems, and questions entirely. For instance.

We're fat. By "we" I mean Americans, although the non-American readers should note that most of the industrialized world is doing yeoman's work to close the obesity gap lately. While I recognize that obesity can result from medical problems or genetics, there's also a whole lot of American obesity that results from shoving heathen portions of disgusting food into our faces and maintaining activity levels somewhere between that of the three-toed sloth and a rock.
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We're fat and it's a problem. We're lazy and it's a problem.

On account of our fatness the airline industry periodically threatens to start charging us more money if we are too fat to fit in one of their seats. On the surface this is logical. More weight on the plane means more fuel and, if we happen to take up another revenue-paying seat, fewer fare-payers on board. Again, though, I think this argument is a red herring set up to let us bloviate on Fairness and how Fatty should pay up. It misses a more obvious question that I prefer to ask when I fly (which is often): why are the seats so fucking small?

I'm not a large individual. I am usually described as lanky or, in the past, too thin. But at ~6'3", most of which is limb, I am forced to shoehorn myself into coach seats. Especially with the rapid movement of domestic routes to "regional jets" with small cabins, I commonly fly with my knees in my chin. I'm not really that big. There is nothing exceptional about my size. I barely fit myself in Delta's idea of a reasonable seat. What do people who are taller than 6'3" do? What do people who weigh 400 pounds do?

The larger (pun intended) problem, in my opinion, is never discussed: the overwhelming failure of airline deregulation. Having created only the illusion of savings (believe me, you've paid back all that money you "saved" on lower fares in airline bankruptcies, fuel surcharges, and pension bailouts) while doing absolutely nothing to introduce real competition on most routes (try to find a non-Delta flight to/from Atlanta. I dare you.) it has succeeded only in setting up a market in which airlines cut every possible corner to save a nickel. The Heritage Foundation says it has given us lower fares.

I say it has given us six-across seating in MD-90s and airline customer service that rivals that of a Nigerian intercity bus line.

Of course we cannot expect airlines to provide seats that will comfortably sit any conceivable passenger; if you weigh 400 pounds the experience is still going to be uncomfortable even if the seats are a couple inches wider. But can the airlines really be surprised that their seats, which can barely accomodate people of unexceptional size (and even then cannot do so comfortably) pose problems with obese customers?

Was air travel palatial before deregulation? ("Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman's pursuit, back before any Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.") I doubt it. The point is that where airlines once competed on amenities, service, and comfort, they now compete on the only basis that American businesses understand: out-cheaping one another. And we're supposed to be thrilled that we can fly AirTran on some winged tin shitbox for 0 while being charged for our baggage and asked to open our wallets by surly, overworked flight attendants who are too busy worrying about what happened to their benefits to care about passengers.
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Maybe I'm nuts, but asking why airlines are so strapped that they have to charge for the extra few ounces of fuel that a heavy passenger necessitates or why airline seats are apparently designed for small children makes more sense than having an argument about whether or not it's Right to charge fat people more.

Local conditions may be different wherever you live, dear reader, but in my city the graffiti, stickers, and other public displays of the "9/11 was an inside job" movement are so numerous that they have become part of the urban landscape, no more noteworthy than stop signs or flyers for band shows.

That we are nearing the eighth anniversary of the events in question and the conspiracy theories are only getting more popular is more depressing than it is alarming.

Are our lives really so fucking dreary that we've resorted en masse to this kind of delusion as a preferred alternative to reality?

These theories are popular and, if you spend a lot of time reading things with comment sections on the internet, on some days it seems like half the country believes them. The internet isn't a random sample, of course, but the evidence for the popularity of these theories is clear. A Scripps-Howard poll from 2006 showed 16% of people believing it is "likely" that "controlled demolition with explosives" brought down the WTC while a whopping 36% believe that the government knew of the attacks in advance and willingly chose not to act.

On the plus side, we might applaud Americans for these "low" numbers…compared to the 55% who believe they are protected by a guardian angel, 20% who believe that God has spoken directly to them, and the full one-third of your friends and neighbors who believe in alien abductions, astrology, and witchcraft. Compared to those figures we look like a nation of solemn skeptics regarding 9/11.

To paraphrase the argument in The Great Derangement, there are three major explanations for the popularity of such opinions. First, Americans are stupid and, in contradiction of everything known about the relationship between wealth and education in the history of civilization, getting stupider. Second, conspiracies about shocking, unbelievable events have always been popular because we can't accept boring explanations for traumatic events. Third, the post-Watergate public is so jaded to governmental malfeasance that even the most idiotic claims seem downright plausible. So many things that we would have considered implausible have actually happened that in order to stay one step ahead of the real news coming out of Washington our imaginations have had to delve into the truly ridiculous.

Of course all three explanations are relevant. We are dumb. We like to think things are more exciting than they are. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Kuwaiti incubator baby hoaxes, and eight years of Bush featuring a war in Iraq based entirely on pure bullshit have put many people in the mindset that no conspiracy is too outlandish to be true. Hell, if I just woke up from a 30-year coma I'd find the possibility of the government having planned 9/11 and a bunch of jurassic neocons starting a war with the evidence used in 2002/2003 to be equally implausible. And one of those things actually happened.

That's not a statement of support for 9/11 conspiracism, i.e. If Iraq happened then maybe this is plausible too. One argument has facts beneath it and the other doesn't. But pushing more and more people to the fringes of plausibility in their beliefs about what our elected leaders are capable of doing is just another negative externality of our carnival sideshow in Iraq. It re-defined what is plausible to younger generations like Watergate did for those before us.

The sad thing is that I love a good conspiracy theory, especially when there are tantalizing shreds of evidence to support them. I do not believe that we know everything we will ever know about 9/11. Over time we will see more information declassified, more offical "we fucked up" admissions (i.e., NORAD admitting that it lied its ass off to the 9/11 Commission), and more facts/evidence uncovered. Personally, I will not be shocked if we someday find conclusive evidence that the Bush administration had far more advance warning about potential attacks than it has thus far admitted. But natural skepticism based on our political system's tendency to withhold information is a far cry from swallowing theories about controlled demolitions, "inside jobs", computer-generated planes, and all of the other horseshit these people believe.

In an era in which the availability of information makes us all self-appointed experts ("I watched WTC 7 videos on YouTube and there was a lot of stuff flying out the windows, which totally looked like an explosion!

") this is inevitable, of course. I divide the blame and my anger at the American public for being dumb enough to swallow something so stupid and elected leaders whose actions have gotten so brazen and so corrupt that our imaginations have been forced to go beyond the merely implausible and take up the downright ridiculous in order to stay one step ahead.

I am astounded daily at the lack of shame, originality, effort, and reading comprehension skills shared by the right-wing luminaries on the internet. Having just written up the phenomenal laziness of Glenn Reynolds yesterday afternoon, he forces me to do so again less than 12 hours later. Here is a post from Instarube, late Monday evening:

LARRY KUDLOW: “According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?”

Note Professor Assrocket's original contribution to this post ("LARRY KUDLOW:"). Keep up the good work, G-Ren. Mr. Kudlow, for his part, hasn't done much more work. He's cherry-picked a single statistic which (he believes) supports his predetermined conclusion. Here are some facts that Mr. Kudlow either refrains from mentioning or was too lazy to learn in the first place.