Category: Rants

(Editor's note: The Lieberman Award is given annually to the worst example of a human being over a twelve month period. Click the tag at the end of the post to review past winners.)

For years now the internet has been blanketed with Ruin Porn and other voyeuristic stories about the decline of cities like Detroit. Anyone who follows the news even superficially or spends a good amount of time on the internet can probably draw Detroit's abandoned train station and Packard plants from memory by now, so frequently do they appear in the news and in films. Like any kind of human misery, comfortable people are fascinated by decay.

In 2013 we were introduced to a new phenomenon that offers a refreshing change of pace to Rust Belt tales of woe: the "What the hell happened to San Francisco and why is everything there awful now?" segment. In many ways it is the polar opposite of Detroit but the train wreck is just as compelling to journalists looking for an easy yarn. Detroit brought us the $100 two-story house; San Francisco countered with the $5000 one-bedroom apartment.

We've been reading paeans to Silicon Valley for nearly two decades now, originally confined to tech media outlets like Wired and Fast Company (the official scribes of record for the Breathless Bullshit industry) but by now it is quite mainstream and uncontroversial to proclaim that Google or Apple or venture capital or "tech" or innovation or "thought leaders" or some other thing nobody quite understands (but knows innately that "Silicon Valley types" do) is going to solve all of the world's problems. We've drowned in TED talks – like watching somebody masturbate on stage, only less pleasant and without the satisfaction of a definitive ending – by Valley guys who believe that because they have made a billion dollars by engineering better ways to harvest personal data online or make Mashable sidebar ads more clickable they are qualified to solve all of the world's problems. While hunger and economic inequality have yet to be tamed, oddly enough The Valley has been remarkably successful of solving all of the problems inherent to being a twentysomething Valley Guy with tons of disposable income.

While the rest of us can safely roll our eyes and ignore them – assuming we can put the frightening amount of political influence these mavens of Creative Destruction are wielding – but San Francisco has to live with them. Literally. We had the pleasure of watching the ugliness of elitism and classism unfolding during the BART strikes, when Valley Guys were loudly outraged that transit employees had the temerity to demand $60,000 salaries in an attempt to be able to continue living indoors in the city thanks to Chad and the other New Millionaires driving monthly rents into the thousands. Having turned entire neighborhoods into literal frathouses they're none too happy when the lower class people who serve them remain visible among the organic dog treat bakeries and various retailers of high-end craft cocktails.

While bashing TED talks is now quite in vogue – I like to think I was ahead of the curve by several years on that one – it was in 2013 that we began to see the Silicon Valley Douchebag for what and who he really is.

So ubiquitous is the problem of rampant assholery in the industry that tech media outlets and blogs are now regularly running content about how San Franciscans are suffering plagues of "Startup Douchebags" pricing them out of, well, everything. Like any gold rush, the tech boom of the last 20 years has attracted the brilliant and innovative…and hordes of fad-following, trend-hopping. buzzword-spewing bullshitters. In true gee-whiz New Economy fashion, a self-help industry will probably appear to give Webinars and Corporate Retreats to explain to the Apple folks how not to be such raging dickwads.

Aside from complaining bitterly about the homeless and inventing myriad ways to sell us expensive gadgets and harvest our personal data, what has Silicon Valley actually accomplished thus far? For all the grand ideas and self-congratulatory, attention seeking behaviors, how have they "changed the world" as they so often and loudly claim to be doing? They've repackaged neoliberal economic wisdom for the umpteenth time. It's nothing but the latest coat of paint on the "privatize it, outsource it, focus on costs" mantra we've been hearing since the Seventies. Indeed, there is nothing revolutionary about "Find someone to do it for less, piecemeal and without benefits.

" It's another version of the glorious future in which the rich can hold onto all of their money with the added allure of replacing even the unwashed plebeians who serve them with apps and robots. For now we can develop a web-based platform to farm out to The Cloud the tasks of an Executive Assistant, but just imagine a dazzling techno-future of automation in which the elite don't need to pay anyone at all.

God help the normal people trying to live in the Bay Area, and congratulations to all the Silicon Valley Guys.
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Their actions are in keeping with the smug, self-satisfied, and unctuous tradition of Joe Lieberman himself.
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Truly they are assholes of year-defining proportions.

For a long time I've thought I might be half-decent at making comic strips, except for the fact that I can't draw.
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Like, at all. Not even a little. I can barely print legibly let alone draw a representation of a real physical object. And since I did not think the world needed The Adventures of Stick Figures and a Talking Square nothing has ever come of it.

Eventually I realized that while this skill is not one I possess there are many friends and acquaintances who do. So we're trying something new here today; I wrote out a pseudo-storyboard and text/dialogue and told an artist who has done some comics in the past, "Do with this what you will.
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" Our goal was not to create visually breathtaking art, but rather to try out a different way of making the points I would otherwise make with 1000 words.
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Here is, in comic form, the first ten minutes of my Intro to American Government lecture on the 1st Amendment. Since that seems to be in the news these days. I didn't draw squat; that's all on R. O'Brien (multiple-vultures.tumblr.com). Click to embiggen.

And with that, a Merry Christmas and happy assorted other holidays to all.
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Look, we all know that comment sections on news websites are where hope goes to die.
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With sites like YouTube one at least has the small comfort of knowing that half of the commenters are under 16 and the other half samples liberally from the adult dregs of society. Sports websites arguably have a higher level of stupidity but at least we expect that from an army of meatheads and nerds ranting and smack-talking about grown men fighting for a ball. With news websites the crushing blow that we are dealt repeatedly by comment sections is due in part to the fact that some small part of our brain expects that the people reading news (which only about half of Americans claim to do, skewing heavily toward the higher ends of the socioeconomic scale) to be capable of saying something half-intelligent.

Alas, even if they are capable they do not choose to do so. We know that part of the problem is that anonymity and an audience tend to turn normal people into foul-mouthed lunatics; comment sections are the ideal breeding ground for this phenomenon. Another issue is self-selection – the vast majority of readers leave no comment, and the ones who do tend to be people with more extreme opinions, a high opinion of their own intelligence, and a fondness for arguing. Just for example, an average post on Gin and Tacos gets about 4000-5000 hits and 25-35 comments. On a major news website where they're raking in 100,000 hits per hour the ratio of lurkers-to-comments must be even higher.

What amazes me lately about these comment sections is how predictable they have become. The internet has matured as a medium (even if its users have not matured as humans) and we know what dynamics will play out in the comments as soon as we read the headline. Think about it; the next time there is a school shooting, do you not already know with disturbing, resigned precision exactly what the comment section following the story is going to look like? You could practically recite it in your sleep.

As an academic I see a phenomenal number of news items about education. They are passed along by friends or posted to Facebook by other teachers daily if not hourly. Nearly every story has the same comments making the same points using the same language in what seems like an instant after the post appears online.
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Recently the notoriously troubled city of Camden, NJ appeared in the news because only three students in the entire district rated "college ready" on the SAT test.
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I did not link to the story because I challenge you to find your own version – almost every major (and minor, for that matter) news source picked up the story. Look at the comment section. They're all exactly the same: blah blah government, blah blah Teachers Union, blah blah Obama, blah blah charter schools, blah blah liberal media. Go ahead and look, it doesn't matter where you go.
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Within the first few comments you'll see that, perhaps many times over.

It's some combination of impressive and terrifying to see how completely these people have internalized the talking points fed to them by the Echo Chamber / Shit Factory of AM radio, Fox News, forwarded emails, and the right wing blogosphere. They have not only committed it to memory but they have burned it into their subconscious so that it comes pouring out of them unthinkingly, reflexively. And no matter which of America's millions of old, bitter white men is typing the comment on a particular site it is virtually guaranteed to end up looking exactly the same as it would if he traded places with one of his brethren. The only variation comes from the spelling / grammar errors and the choice of anti-gay epithets.

You have to hand it to the noise machine, as it has succeeded likely beyond even the most optimistic expectations of the people who run it. There are a million old or aging people with nothing to do who are spamming every news story on the internet with identical salvos of rage and bad logic. And they do it automatically, without cognitive effort. You know, like trained seals. if a seal could be trained to be a xenophobic, provincial, small-minded, and bitter asshole with nothing better to do.

And yes, I know that the best thing to do is to avoid looking at the comments. What can I say? I'm like a guy picking at a scab.

We're all capable of holding conflicting beliefs, but that kind of mental hypocrisy – intentional or not – is subject to the same rules of stupidity. Everyone is entitled to be stupid, of course, but we must be careful not to abuse the privilege.

The recent right-wing freakout over Nelson Mandela (who was a TERRORIST!

) is a perfect example of how little sense their worldview makes when taken as a whole, not to mention how embarrassingly little critical thinking that worldview is subjected to. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who, I guess, should have fought Apartheid with peaceful protests. Even though black South Africans were denied any semblance of basic political rights – Do right wingers get mad when governments try to take away individual rights? I can't remember – American conservatives remain staunch in their belief that peaceful protests are the best way to change a government.

Which is why they hoard guns like they can't breathe without them and banter freely about overthrowing the government by force because of a health care law passed by Congress.

On the most basic level their beliefs make no sense, unless they're willing to admit that racism is a fundamental part of their worldview.

Mike Konczal, because he is a more patient person than me, wrote out a long examination of just how ludicrous the new right-wing talking point about "corporatism" is. We know that the GOP and its noise machine love to play fast and loose with ideological language; we've known for decades that few Americans organize their belief systems with ideological language like "liberal" or "conservative", and in fact the number who can use those terms correctly is depressingly small. So there is very little cost to throwing around terms like "socialist" or "Marxist" or "corporatism". Since nobody knows what they mean anyway, it's a simple matter to use them pejoratively and turn them into a slightly classy sounding insult. Listen to how your Teabagger friends use the word "liberal" and it won't take long to figure out that it basically means "Things I don't like" to them.

That said, to anyone who does understand what "corporatism" means it is simply mind-boggling to hear it come out of Mitch McConnell's mouth with a straight face. My guess is that this meme developed because the word sounds unpleasant, invokes Corporations (which even conservatives realize no one likes), and has a historical connection to fascist movements of the 1930s that only Republican voters are old enough to remember. Republicans have long been desperate to nurture some kind of populist cred – they embody the herculean challenge of being against The Man when you are, in every conceivable sense of the term, The Man – and this is no more than its latest incarnation.

To take the claim seriously, as the linked article does, leads rapidly to the conclusion that "the entirety of capitalism and the last several centuries of property rights are corporatist through and through." And the last time I checked, conservatives like capitalism and their property rights. Again, I understand the basic problem here: people using this term don't really understand what it means. Nonetheless it's exhausting to think of what kind of mental gymnastics are necessary for the few who do grasp its true meaning to make Barack Obama the paid servant of the Robber Barons while, you know, Louie Goehmert is the champion of the little guy.
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Since the Gingrich Era the GOP has tried selling the idea that because they talk a lot about individual rights they are the true defenders of the common man, conveniently ignoring the fact that "rights" is a code word for "power" in their talking points.

In political science there is a shrinking but still quite depressing group of academics who studied the internal politics of the Soviet Union ("Sovietologists") and, due to tenure, outlived the Evil Empire by a couple decades. This is sad to me because these people specialized in something that has zero useful applications at this point, yet some of them are still around. The art of Sovietology involved using what little information was available to Western academics to make predictions about the heavily opaque internal politics of the Communist Party leadership in the USSR.
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They looked for signs that certain individuals were gaining or losing power and made educated guesses about the conflicts within the system, hidden from public view. It was, to put it mildly, an inexact science. Critics said it wasn't a science at all. But given that the entire Soviet government was shrouded in mystery to most Americans (even the intelligence services were only marginally aware of what was going on in any aspect of Soviet government and society except for the military) it was a useful effort.

When the USSR fell, ideally all of these people could have just retired or something. Some tried to transition to post-Soviet studies, but this is in fact a very different endeavor, theoretically and methodologically.

Some tried to peddle their analysis for the Russian successor state ("Kremlinology") but information about Russian politics is not nearly so hard to come by as it was for the USSR. For the most part these folks, all of whom are pretty old now, are like a rotary dial telephone; a relic from a previous era, interesting but useless.

This is not unique to academia – the State Department, military, and other government agencies were full of these people in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them are gone now. Most of the institutions of our society and government have come to grips, a quarter-century later, with the fact that the Cold War is over. But not everybody. Some people – neocons, for the most part – just can't let go.
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Either they are constitutionally incapable of updating any aspect of their worldview or they lack the intelligence to understand that the Cold War paradigm is no longer useful. It is not possible to keep the same framework in place and simply update the names – strike "USSR" and fill in "terrorism" or "North Korea." The world is different. Very different.

I feel the same sort of sadness when I see people like John Bolton, who recently generated some attention with an op-ed about how agreement or no agreement, someone needs to bomb Iran anyway. People like Bolton are forever stuck in 1980. The answer for everything is "Bomb it" or "Give the Pentagon more money" or ideally both. These aging Cold Warriors have been flailing around for two decades looking for an enemy, for a new Evil Empire to plug into their monochromatic worldview. But there is no modern equivalent of what the USSR was during the Cold War. It's pathetic to watch them try to make a new Soviet-sized enemy out of the table scraps available to them – an "Axis of Evil", for example, consisting of D-list wannabes that barely count as regional powers let alone global ones. Look at the dilemma this way: what would become of Superman if Lex Luthor and the other villains in that universe disappeared? Suddenly Superman would seem pretty irrelevant. He would either have to disappear or spend his time busting shoplifters and jaywalkers. And that would just be sad to watch.

It is reassuring, though, to realize that absolutely no one pays attention to these people anymore. Does anyone take John Bolton seriously? Does anyone care what he has to say about this or any other subject? The neocons had a chance to reassert their relevance in the early George W.

Bush years and they blew it with Iraq. They were exposed for what they are: a sad group of people who are no longer relevant resorting to outrageous fabrications in an effort to make some third-rate dictator seem like an extremely dangerous boogeyman. Lacking what their belief system requires – a relatively equal opponent with nuclear weapons or their equivalent – they had to fabricate one.

And now all but the most fact-impervious right wingers see with hindsight how little of a threat a country like Iraq posed or poses.

They're going through the motions again with Iran, and no one outside of the boardroom of the AEI appears to be buying the idea of Iran as a terrifying global menace. Deprived of a real enemy packing nukes, they're reduced to issuing hysterical warnings about countries that might be trying to build nuclear weapons – 75 years after the US, Britain, the USSR, and other true global powers did so. It's like the United States of 1950 deciding that some tiny nation posed a threat because they were attempting to figure out how to build machine guns. If the current situation with Iran is less ridiculous than that it is only slightly so.

For people who like to portray themselves as Constitutional scholars and the modern executors of the Founders' intellectual estate, Republicans sure play fast and loose with the sacred text when it suits their needs.

Here is the briefest possible explanation for why the Senate changed the filibuster rule we all remember learning about in junior high civics class. Chances are most people who know what it is recognize it because the name sounds vaguely hilarious.

Yes, with three years remaining in Obama's second term the Senate Republicans have already nearly tripled the previous record for filibusters against the party in control of the White House. Worse, they have abandoned even the thinnest pretext of principle behind their use of the filibuster to block presidential appointments. They no longer bother mounting long, windy, insincere speeches about how the president's appointees are just Too Liberal and Activist Judges. No, for the past few years their approach has been essentially, "We're going to block all of these because we don't like you."

Typical Republican approach: break government, declare that government is broken, campaign against government. Repeat as long as rubes will buy it.

That a rule change was necessary is beyond obvious at this point. Yes, at some point in the future it will be used against Senate Democrats when they find themselves in the minority; that is something they will have to live with. This made sense in both the long and the short term. I'm sick to death of hearing about how the Senate is thinking about changing the rules. They've been talking about it for a decade. Shut up and do it already. It was starting to feel like Duke Nukem II, for christ's sake.

Now that it's over and done with, I do have a few lingering issues for our Constitution worshiping brethren on the right.

They're very big on upholding the intent of the Founders, right? Right? Of course they are. Just ask them.

First, the word "filibuster" appears nowhere in the Constitution. It's a simple Senate rule. It is to the Senate what the phrase "under God" is to the Pledge of Allegiance – inserted after the fact but misrepresented as part of the original intent. Anyone who brings up the Constitution as a reason why the rule cannot be changed is the purest breed of dolt (Art.

I, Sec. 5: "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…")

Second, does not the Constitution give the Senate the duty to ensure the operation of the government by facilitating the presidents' appointment of judges, ambassadors, and other officials? Sure, we could quarrel over the meaning of "advice and consent" here, but for people who claim to rely on the intent of the Founders it is abundantly, sparklingly crystal clear that the authors of the document had zero intention of the Senate minority using rules to prevent the body from approving appointees for partisan political reasons. Find some archival evidence that Madison said, "Well if you don't like the president, it's cool to abdicate the constitutional responsibilities of the Senate." I'll wait.

Third, it strikes me as hilarious that some Republicans appear to believe the party will score political points with this issue. The very idea that Americans even know what Senate rules are, let alone care that they have been changed, is laughable. As someone who studies public opinion, I've had this conversation a few times with folks who study Congress – you can't poll people on things like Senate rules and congressional procedure because people have zero idea what any of those things are. I'd assume, thanks to Hollywood, that the filibuster is somewhat more recognizable, but in an electorate in which 1/3 of eligible voters don't know which party controls Congress it's highly doubtful that the GOP will be able to build on…what, pro-filibuster sentiment? Do they think that is a thing that exists?

The simple reality of our system is that at some point you have to stop fighting election results. At some point the minority party has to accept that they lost and that they will have to do some things they don't like because the other party is in control.
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Except that now the GOP can't accept that and can't stop fighting, ever, because the Tea Party is looming over them like a cloud – a crazy, illiterate cloud – ready to primary challenge any member who fails to refuse absolutely to perform any part of his/her responsibilities that abets Obama in any way. In that light, we could argue that eliminating the filibuster did Senate Republicans a favor, as they no longer have to go through the futile kabuki theater of mounting a filibuster against every single act the Senate undertakes. That must be tiring, after all.

Recently I saw this on Facebox:

The comment reminds me an awful lot of one of the most common problems I encounter while teaching. You see, this person has done her research. Unfortunately research is not helpful if everything you read is bullshit. That's the beating heart of the anti-vaccination movement, for example: a person can do endless research on the subject online and find numerous sources of antivax information.
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I mean, none of it is accurate, but it's certainly plentiful.

About once per semester, depending on what I'm teaching, I will encounter this with a student. He will write a paper and cite numerous sources throughout as students are taught to do in a research paper. But the sources will be, for lack of a better term, bullshit. Tumblrs. Blogs. Conspiracy theory websites. Essentially, a bunch of garbage that falls into the category of Unreliable.

Now I have to do a mini-lecture on Good Sources vs. Bad Sources. The problem is that younger people who have grown up with the internet perceive The Internet, or perhaps Google, as a source. If one views Google as a single source, than any link found on Google is as good as any other.
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I try to explain that reliable sources of information for academic purposes are things like major media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, government records, and so on. Certainly all of those can and do provide inaccurate information at times. But if we're playing the percentages, your odds are a lot better with the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Science than with the Vaccine Facts tumblr or the Strip Mall Holistic Healing Wellness Center's website.

What I do not understand about this is that Americans of all ages express a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the media, the government, corporations, interest groups, and anything else considered Official. Yet when reading some anonymous mommyblogger's tale of how she cured her son's autism with quinoa cookies, an appreciable percentage of the public is willing to internalize this information completely unskeptically. The librul media and the government and "scientists" are lying to us wholesale, but this random asshole on a message board speaks the unvarnished truth. Even the fact that such dubious sources of information often have a clear ideological or financial motive – they reveal the rapacious greed of Big Pharma and then immediately try to sell you some unregulated Homeobullshit product – it's not enough to tip some of us off that it might be a scam.

I understand, but I don't understand. The skepticism of our scientific, media, and political institutions makes perfect sense. That none of that skepticism extends to random, qualification-free people talking out of their asses on the internet does not make sense. Perhaps this is an area where the rottenness of cable TV news and the decline of print media are causing serious problems. Perhaps Fox News and the like look so utterly ridiculous and amateurish that people raised on a diet of that product honestly can't tell what distinguishes it from some half-decent looking Tumblrs. Maybe one news website looks as good as any other, whereas if one sees a physical copy of the New York Post next to the New York Times the differences between the two are much clearer. I don't suppose I will discover the cause by ruminating on these questions, but I do know that an uncomfortably large number of people claiming to have "done their research" have done something that makes them feel like they are well informed when they have actually filled their heads with nonsense.

I watch 24 hour cable news networks solely for comedy value at this point. They serve no other purpose. Fox News is and forever shall be the king of journalism as unintentional comedy, of course. Their daily exercise in self-parody must be seen to be believed. However, over the past year CNN has been nearly as fun to watch. The network's disintegration – economic, professional, and psychological – has been a thing of absolute wonder to watch. They managed to finish fifth in the ratings this month, behind Fox, MSNBC (not exactly a ratings juggernaut itself over the years), its sister network HLN, and, somehow, CNBC. Every new ratings stumble sends them into greater paroxysms of desperation. And thus the viewers will never come back; we all know that desperation is a big turn-off, and CNN has it in spades.

Its mission to re-brand itself as the bland, centrist, Beltway consensus alternative to Fox and MSNBC at the outset of the 2012 election succeeded – CNN is now an inoffensive dish of lukewarm water between the fire and ice of its more partisan rivals.
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This hasn't helped the ratings one bit, as it turns out that no one wants to watch mushy nonsense delivered with no position or perspective. It appears that their current mission, perhaps inspired by their ratings boost from saturation coverage of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, is to brand themselves the Breaking News network.
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If it's sudden and sensational and absolutely needs to be covered to death for weeks on end, CNN is your huckleberry.

This emphasis on sensational breaking news stories, and the concomitant need to Be First in breaking all the Big News, played out to hilarious effect during the Boston marathon bombing. The network provided one of the most jaw-droppingly awful spectacles in the history of journalism as producers argued, I assume, over ordering Wolf Blitzer to commit seppuku live via satellite. This failure only motivated the network to redouble its efforts. Whenever disaster strikes – particularly natural disasters and school shootings – they beat the drum louder and longer than any of their competitors.

And that is why all of their coverage, such as the recent hysterical coverage of the Philippine typhoon, feels so goddamn tacky = they seem like they're excited by disasters. To see this coverage is to wonder if network policy forbids filming their field reporters from the waist down so as not to reveal their massive hard-ons. It is plausible to argue that the news media play an important role in the early stages of disasters. But CNN's coverage is more Debris Porn than Information Clearinghouse. No sooner did the storm strike than Anderson Cooper was parachuted in to show us rubble, rubble, more rubble, and some corpses. They're giving this story the full court press not because it is important to their American audience but to exploit the suffering for the kinds of lurid images of death and destruction that they hope will capture viewers' attention for a few days. They will argue that they are doing it to help the victims, perhaps not even aware that whatever line exists between public-minded journalism and exploitation has been obliterated.
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Unfortunately for CNN, too many of us recognize the difference between voyeurism / disaster porn and a sincere concern for the well being of the victims. Hint: The blaring DEATH TOLL counter on the screen kinda gives it away.

You've probably heard about this one already, so there's little I need to do here in terms of setup. Sometimes I question my purpose in life; at other times it is so very clear why I was put on this Earth. When I first read Richard Cohen's latest, I had one of those moments of clarity. This is my everything.

The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative

When Chris Christie is your cuddly moderate, you need to start asking questions. Start with "Are we a party full of crazy people?" Then say "Yes." and move on to wondering how it came to be that a guy who looks like Kevin James doing a Tony Siragusa impression is your most charismatic candidate.

won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate.

"took the Internet Express out to Iowa" is the noblest way ever concocted of saying, "I read some blogs and I'm going to treat them as representative of public opinion, at least inasmuch as I can use it to make my point."

Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him.

That's deep. This is why he gets the big bucks. Looks like we're all about to get blasted by Tropical Storm Bullshit just as Mount Hackneyed begins to tremble.

From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, serial losers to Barack Obama, "is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.
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" The sort of candidates Iowa Republicans prefer have already been in the state. The blog cited Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (considered to the right of Cruz, if such a thing is possible), Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party's recent vice presidential candidate and its resident abacus, and the inevitable Sarah Palin, the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona. If this is the future of the GOP, then it's in the past.

And what in the ball-jiggling hell is "Iowa Republican"? The linked story has a typo in the headline. Even by right-wing standards this does not seem like a legitimate source. And remember, these are people who found Ahmed Chalabi credible.

None of these candidates bears the slightest resemblance to Christie. And the more literate of them — that's not you, Palin – must have chortled over post-election newspaper columns extolling Christie as precisely the sort of candidate the GOP ought to run in 2016. This is the dream of moderate Republicans, but not many of them vote in the Iowa caucuses or the South Carolina primary, two of the early nominating contests.

And New Hampshire, which people like McCain and Romney have used as a springboard to the nomination. But other than that.

At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans. Cruz has not only been to the state, but he also was accompanied by his evangelist father, Rafael, a colorful preacher who opposes almost anything, including, of course, same-sex marriage. ("It was Adam and Eve, it was not Adam and Steve," he recently said.)

Boy that's clever. That line is so old, I think the nuns beat Michelangelo's ass in grade school for using it.

Cruz the younger is not merely tea party to the nth degree, he is a Christian conservative as well – and for 22 percent of Iowa's "likely 2016 caucusgoers," polled by the Des Moines Register, that's who they think stands the best chance of winning the presidency. The No. 1 choice (44 percent) was "a candidate focused on civil liberties and a small government rooted in the U.S. Constitution."

Well 22% isn't great, especially when followed by the revelation that twice as many respondents preferred a vague description of someone who doesn't exist to Cruz.

Christie can passably argue that he is that,

As plausibly as I can argue that I starred as Wade Garrett in Road House.

but no one is going to call him a Christian conservative. After all, he opposed same-sex marriage in New Jersey, but he acquiesced. Cruz would not to do that. He’d still be talking – and Steve would still be single.

In comedy this is what's called a "comeback". It's usually only done with good jokes, but whatever.

Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States' Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn't care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice – but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss.

This is what we call some good ol' fashioned foreshadowing! Everyone take a big sip of your drink.

Today's GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled – about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde.

It's not racist, it's just "deeply troubled" about "expansion of government" (READ: WELFARE QUEENS) and immigration (READ: OMG MEXICANS), not to mention secularism and "mainstreaming" of what used to be "avant-garde", which I assume are coded references to the gays.

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.
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OK. Wait.

(Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)

NO, YOU SHOULD QUIT WHILE YOU'RE AHEAD. And by ahead I mean fired. Maybe just sit the next few plays out, champ.

This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts – but not all – of America.
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Pretty sure interracial marriage happens, like, everywhere. Even when I lived in the deep south, where one might expect resistance to be found even if nowhere else, it seemed pretty unremarkable. If there is a bloc of resistance to "the miscegenation" or whatever such people – PEOPLE LIKE RICHARD "GAG REFLEX" COHEN – might call it, I'd like to see some data on who they are.

To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all.

Maybe all of their endless rage and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments is not a result of their country changing but of their delusion that the country is "theirs". You know those black lesbian wiccans with adopted Chinese children and three purebred Greyhounds who live in Dem Big Cities are Americans too, right? Like, they can vote and stuff, and they have an equal 1/319,000,000 claim to ownership of America as does Richard Cohen. Nobody's taking away "their" country; they're just dying off, and not quickly enough if I may say so.

As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program – although Obamacare comes close – but about a tectonic shift of attitudes.

Sounds more like a lack of shift in attitudes, cubby.

I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party's anthem.

It took a guy with a Ph.D. to find a YouTube video of a popular song by an artist who is nearly a household name? While you mull that over, let's talk about nostalgia for The Good Ol' Days. Maybe flip through a book of Norman Rockwell paintings while we're at it. Ask for whom they were good – white men with money, not unlike Richard Cohen – and you answer the question of who's so desperate to bring them back.

For all his positions and religious beliefs, Christie is too Joisey for the tea party – too brash, as well. He would be wise to steer clear of Iowa lest he lose or, worse, follow Romney and take on the deeply conservative coloration of the state's GOP.

Yes, this man who is running for president will skip Iowa. Richard Cohen has quite the grasp of how the nomination process works. He should skip Iowa, lest he follow in the path of Mitt Romney…who won the Republican nomination I think. Let me check. Yep, he won it. Didn't win Iowa, but neither did McCain. I guess Iowa isn't that big of a fucking deal after all.

That might make him (barely) acceptable to Republican Iowans but anathema to the rest of us.

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read, and one time I read Going Rogue.

Read more from Richard Cohen's archive.

I'll pass, thanks.

Sunday was the 24th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember watching this TV broadcast of a young Peter Jennings in Berlin like it was yesterday. Aside from 9/11, which I/we remember for how awful it was, this is one of the only things in my life that I remember in the kind of excruciating detail that comes with the awareness of being witness to at a significant moment.

At the time, the evening stood out for me as the first time – I had just turned 11 – that my bedtime was unconditionally waived. Even on cable, which we had, there still just wasn't much news on TV in 1989. CNN was in its infancy and the major networks didn't preempt regular programming. But everything that was available, we watched.

I made it to about one in the morning.

It also stood out because my dad cried.

All four of my grandparents are from Poland. My dad, like most Americans of Eastern European stock, was fiercely anti-communist. The lack of freedom in Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc was a regular topic of conversation. He cried because for so long people had suffered and now they would not have to. When the symbol of restricted movement between the East and West fell, we all knew that the world was about to become a very different place.

It is indeed very different, but not in the way that the commentary of that time imagined. For Americans, life changed inasmuch as the Cold War was no longer the framework in which we understood economics, politics, international affairs, and our own society. For the people living in the soon-to-be-post-Soviet parts of Europe and Asia, they may have expected that their lives would improve. In time, both groups would be disappointed.

Now that American-style free market democracy has established itself as, to paraphrase The End of History, the final form of human social organization the world finds itself in a persistent malaise. When no alternative exists – in fact, when no alternative can even be imagined or proposed – what are dissatisfied people supposed to do?

Our society encourages them to work within the existing institutions to reform the system to their liking, a process with a tendency to protect the status quo and weed out any real reform about 100% of the time. When people cannot believe, even if it constitutes wishful thinking, that the Other Way is better, what else is there to do but feel powerless and aimless? This is It. This is the system. This is how we all must govern ourselves from now on. These are the rules under which we will live and with which our interactions with one another will be defined. Is it any wonder that so many people here and around the world look at politics with such overwhelming apathy?

For the ex-communists, the rude awakening was discovering that the Soviet-style communist system, which they believed to suck, was being replaced with another system that sucks. In fact, it might suck more. There is and has been a tendency for Americans, and westerners in general, to paint an overly optimistic picture of the glories of capitalism and democracy. The peoples of the Eastern Bloc might well have imagined that they were about to tear down their ossified system and replace it with a far superior one. Twenty-four years later, precious little has changed. Sure, there is more shit to buy; Moscow has American fast food restaurants and Russians can waste their money on all the same gadgets and consumer goods on which Americans waste money. But places that were grim, underdeveloped, and poor under communism remain grim, underdeveloped, and poor after two-plus decades of capitalism. Russians and Poles and East Germans learned quickly that capitalism shares an important feature with their communist systems: it has a small number of Winners and the overwhelming majority of the population gets the shaft.

If they were expecting otherwise when they threw off the shackles of the Evil Empire, surely they must be disappointed. A little truth-in-advertising could have prepared them for the fact that capitalism would do very little to improve their lives, and that the transition to it would mostly serve to replace one system that exploits people with a different one. The big difference is that now there is no alternative, no mysterious border to gaze across and think, "Surely their way must be better.

" We are left as nations and as a planet to wonder: If our way of life is so self-evidently great that no alternatives exist or need to exist, then why is everyone so unhappy?

Why does everything, for lack of a more sophisticated description, still suck?

Old-school anticommunists would answer that it does not suck; that the system has worked as intended and rewarded those whose talents and achievements deserve to be rewarded. That group of people is small, of course. Our system is one of staggering inequality. It replaces the control of centralized bureaucracy with the control of banks and debt. We are told that our lives are better because we have cars and 30000 channels and 60" TVs, and that even the poorer members of the working class can afford these things (on credit). But that persistent feeling that everything is not quite right, that capitalism simply privatizes the job of making your life dreary, never goes away for long. While we are encouraged to make ourselves fat and stupid with beer and Pizza Hut and nine hours of football on Saturday and Sunday, none of that is able to drown out completely the nagging question, "Is this it?"

The answer is yes, and it has been for more than twenty years. This is it. The fall of communism replaced six with a half dozen. All of the same inefficiencies, inequalities, and indignities remain; only the names and titles of the people and institutions who make it so have really changed. They will not change again anytime soon.