Liberal Media Elite

From my very own home state of Saarland/Germany: Gimme Hope Obama by Sly’n Boyle.

Ei jo!

(Hat tip: my dear friend Melanie)

Barack Obama was correct in ridiculing Hillary Clinton and John McCain for their half-assed “gas-tax holiday” bullshit. This is an idea that carries alot of downside (forgoing revenue critical to our crumbling infrastructure) for a minor and temporary relief to consumers.

But, at least it did something.

Obama has now come out with his own half-assed solution…going after speculators who are driving up the price of oil. Now, while we should go after anyone who is using illegal tactics to drive up the price, a concentrated effort at going after these folks will have the impact of dropping the price of oil from $135/barrel all the way down to, like, $133.50. The underlying fundamental, which is that global demand for oil is increasing at an increasing rate, doesn’t change.

Mr. Obama is the most inspiring politician to come down the pike in a generation. If anyone can galvanize public support for a national R&D network focused on moving away from a carbon-based fuel system, it’s him. To waste that kind of charisma with “we gonna round up a posse and git us some speck-a-laters” is fucking lame.

I mean, dude, seriously.

“I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president.”

–George Bush, June 17th, 2008. Referring to the levee break in Gulfport, IL.

Yes, Mr. Prezzz has been to too many disasters. Pity he hasn’t done anything to diminish the impact of them. Having learned nothing, apparently, from Katrina…having opted to defer doing anything whatsoever about our crumbling infrastructure…the Prezzz has, in the time since Katrina not yet proposed a single increase in funding for levee improvements.  Of course, he couldn’t do a thing about the rains that have led to the flooding throughout the Midwest. He could and should have done something about improving the infrastructure in place to mitigate the damage and even diminish the likelihood of these floods. The levees in Gulport, one of the 37 levee sites in the US considered at risk, broke today flooding millions of acres of cropland, destroying businesses, and ruining homes. In each of his previous budgets, the Prezzz has refused to allocate additional funds for critically needed improvements. Why? ‘Cause he can’t do that and continue his ridiculous tax cuts and corporate subsidies without blowing up his budget even further. Infrastructure ages and it takes more than maintenance money to fix it. If the next President chooses to address this issue (or the Dems in Congress…who I have little to no faith in given their track record of the last two years) he will have to raise revenue or hack the life out of spending elsewhere. And the Republicans will scream “tax and spend, tax and spend” like Rainman screaming about burning the baby.

I’ll take tax and spend any day over slash and spend. I’ll take a higher tax rate any day over more disasters that have more severe consequences than they need to have.

Yeah, Mr. Prezzz. You’ve been to way too many disasters as President. And you’ve done nothing but diminish our ability to address them.

So we’ve started rehearsals for our next show, All Rights Reserved: A Libertarian Rage, which is a rewrite and a remount of a show we did a couple of years back — the show that initially got me into political writing. Like most of Maximum Verbosity’s shows, one of its primary themes is language, in this case how it operates within the realm of politics. One of the ways this is represented is through the use of profanity and racial slurs throughout the script.

When I initially wrote those scenes, I recall sitting down and thinking through the implications very carefully. I recognize the fact that there are some people — indeed, a significant portion of the population — who can find the mere existence of a word to be offensive, even painful. Surely, I thought, I must be able to connect to that mentality on some level — there must be at least one word, somewhere in the English lexicon, that fills me with rage.

But there isn’t. As a student of language, I’ve always had the sense that words, by themselves, mean nothing — they’re complete abstractions of the concept they represent: an arbitrary collection of syllables; ink on paper. Their meaning is defined entirely by intent and context. I’m reminded of a quote by Larry Elder:

Hate crime legislation forces us to place greater value on some victims because of race. By all means, we should prosecute bad conduct. But if I’m standing at an ATM machine and a Ku Klux Klansman hits me in the back of the head with a brick, the operative word is not “Klansman.” It is “brick.”

I’m also conscious of individual words as bearing the weight of history. Am I being excessively semantic to point out that the word “nigger” ultimately emerged from the Latin “niger” — a form of speech that hasn’t been widely used in nearly 1600 years? That it has derivants in every Romance language? That it was a neutral descriptive in our own country until about 150 years ago? That 150 years from now, it will no doubt carry a completely different connotation?

Oprah’s serene assertion that the word should be stricken from the dictionary (to full-house applause by an interracial audience) seems to me to be to be nothing less than an attempt to — if you’ll forgive the phrase — whitewash history. Language isn’t an absolute, but an evolving organism; and for someone fascinated with that process, witnessing the attempts of the black community to consciously reclaim the word has been compelling stuff.

These are all arguments I’ve been making for years. But picking up this project again, I find that my thinking has developed, and I think that my beef runs a little deeper than that.

I’m not prepared to say that I’m totally immune to being offended by something, but I think I certainly have a higher threshold than most. If someone says something I disagree with, I’m far more likely to laugh, shrug my shoulders, think “Wow, that dude is crazy,” and go on my way. If I were to be physically attacked for my minority status, my emotional response would be fear for my life — being “offended” on behalf of the race I was born into would, I imagine, be very far from my mind in that moment! A lot of my writing has been offensive to a lot of people, although that’s never been my intention. And here, I think, is why it bothers me so much:

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to read taking offense as anything other than attempt to seize control of the conversation. To be “offended” by something is to immediately put your opponent on the defensive. This is one of the reasons that polical correctness is subjected to much ridicule: that, for example, the appropriate term for an American of African descent has been, at various points, negro, nigger, colored person, person of color, black, African-American, Afro-American — and none of them are an appropriate descriptive of the range of ethnicities it applies to! To use the wrong one in the wrong environment is to demonstrate how out of touch you are, to force you to apologize, to put you on the defensive.

This is perhaps more visible in the left — but the right is, if anything, worse — it’s just that their sacred cows are differently placed. Try to say anything critical of America’s recent military ventures, and, oh! The offense! The umbrage! And we have to twist ourselves into knots apologizing, affirming our patriotism, beating the nationalist drum. It’s a dirty trick, and one that’s killed dead just about any meaningful dialogue we could have about the war. Or race. Or language. Or any number of other issues.

None of this is new — after all, it was just a few centuries ago in Britain where it was a stated crime, punishable by death, to think treason against the king. In a representative republic, we’ve organized our “forbidden language” around a different set of concepts. Could we at least stop being offended long enough to figure out where we all stand beneath this steadily-growing morass of forbidden words and phrases?

So I’m out on the road right now. Have been for about two months. Things have been quiet. I haven’t subjected our readership here to my screeds about saving fish and the necessity of dam removal or the evils of the proposed Pebble Mine.

What I have figured out is who I can’t stand. Connecticut Republicans. These are officially, after having traversed this country, the most repellant people I have ever met. These fucking people have everything: money, civil infrastructure, culture, and an economy that caters directly to their fucking ‘needs.’ And yet, AND YET, they are fucking fascists.

So here’s the situation: I wander into a bar. The Detroit Red Wings are in game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals. All I want in the world is to drink a beer in peace and watch Nick Lidstrom hoist 35 lbs. of hockey history etched in silver (otherwise known as Lord Stanley’s Cup) over his head. What I get is a screaming match by everyone at the bar about how Barack Obama is at best a socialist, and at worst the anti-christ. And I was fine with that. I didn’t want to talk politics. I just wanted to watch The Wings win the oldest trophy in professional sports. It wasn’t until the bartender, trying to dismiss the Junior Senator from Illinois asked who was the last president to (in his words) ‘unify the country.’ Given that to him the ‘Kennedy’ is a bad word, I went straight for FDR. Franklin Delano himself. I hadn’t said a word in this conversation until this point, as it was cutting into my enjoyment of the third period. So it’s in part that these idiots were harshing my Stanley Cup mellow, and in part that they were trashing on one Barry Obama, that I had to speak up. I wish I hadn’t.

Did I mention that these people are fascists? I kid you not, he defended HITLER over FDR. Something about how he brought his nation together and FDR nearly became a tyrant.

This was the most egregious example, but the two women at the bar basically gave a pocketbook defense of Republicanism. Yes, yes, you don’t like Bush, and absolutely you don’t like how the war turned out (didn’t stop you from re-electing Bush 2004, but, I won’t say I told you so) and, of course, OF COURSE, you’re socially liberal.(I mean, The Gays are very nice) But you just can’t vote for a Democat because they’ll raise taxes.

When the Revolution happens I’m coming to Connecticut, taking your Beamer for a joyride, pissing in the backseat, and laughing my ass all the way back to the newly formed Great Lakes Nation. Where good people live.

Joe Lieberman never made so much sense to me until just now.

Connecticut. Worst Blue State, EVER.

It’s looking like US Air is heading towards its 3rd bankruptcy in 7 years. You read that right. 3 in 7. One bankruptcy every 2 years and 4 months. Remember, the do-nothing Congress of 2004-6 did manage to pass a personal bankruptcy law that made it much, much harder for individuals to gain bankruptcy protection (a grossly under-reported factor in the current mortgage crisis). As a big ass company, it’s still so easy it’s as viable a strategy as issuing debt is. At some point, we have to seriously considering limiting the number of times a company can go to the bankruptcy well. At some point the advocates of the free market (as Republicans allegedly are despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) have to let the market work…which in the case of US Air means let that piece of crap business die the ugly death fit for it.

The current problem for US Air, and for nearly every other airline, is the price of oil. A year ago many industry analysts, when the price of oil was $60/barrel, said they didn’t think the industry as a whole was viable if the price of oil doubled. Said price is now at $130/barrel. Doubling complete. Hmmm…

Consolidation (mergers between Northwest and Delta and the one being explored between United and US Air) ain’t gonna provide the answer in anything but a short term sense. The reason for this is that the price of oil (as mentioned ad nauseum by me it is a factor of production in everything) is skyrocketing. The only answers are going to be new business models, new technologies, and most of all, higher prices. Get good with that concept. The price of oil, the single biggest factor of production for an airline, is rising far faster than fares. We are just now starting to see higher fares but they do not reflect the full increase in oil. Airlines will continue to piss off their employees by hammering them on pay but you can only get so much blood from that corpse before it runs dry. Fares are going up and they’re gonna keep going up. They have to.

It doesn’t end with airlines. Prices are going to rise. China and India’s increasing demand for oil has radically changed the market for oil and it ain’t changing back any time soon. It may stabilize, the rate of increase may slow, but the price for crude will, for the forseeable future, keep going up.

As a result, stupid shit like the gas-tax holiday, opening up ANWR, opening up the coasts to drilling, are ineffective. The gas tax thing is, as Obama says, electioneering. It gets you in office. What are you going to do…suspend it as long as the price of oil is above some trigger level? It’s a bullshit policy. Opening up ANWR and the coasts to more drilling will do nothing meaningful to lower the price of oil. In a best case scenario it’d drop from $130 to $125 or so. It would, however, make the very wealthy oil companies very wealthier.

There is not going to be a single solution to this. We are entering the age of expensive oil and the age of increasing global oil demand. This is a considerable threat to us as a nation, given our oil dependence. Not foreign oil dependence…any oil dependence. The next President is going to have to lead this country kicking and screaming (and I mean all of us who love our cars and our gadgets and our lights and our heat and all the things we do and rely on that lead to the endless burning of fossil fuels) into a new future that is not powered by oil.

One important note (and this from a knee-jerk environmentalist): environmental organizations want to have you believe that switching from fossil fuels to low carbon energy will be painless economically. Don’t believe it. It will be expensive and it will be painful. Industries will die out. Jobs will be lost. The whole shooting match. However…the sooner we start through things like widespread publicly supported research of alternative fuels, new engine designs, etc., the less expensive and less painful it will be.