After months of worrying that Obama would not get elected, now you get the unnerving sense that he can't possibly be President - can he? It's not just the tedious, stubborn challenges to his citizenship, or that, of all things, the fucking swearing in was flubbed. It's this: Can all the pomp and ceremony and ludicrous, fawning deference that's reserved for American presidents really coalesce around him now? Over the past 16 years we've grown accustomed to the President as exalted clown - with Bush, the emperor had no clothes; with Clinton, the emperor had no pants. The elaborate ritual surrounding the office seemed more suited to these farcical figures - they were both versions of the grandiose, infantile King Ubu. It made sense that they had a special airplane, an outsize kitchen staff and guards outside their bedroom door. Part of what Obama brings to the White House is a seriousness, sobriety and prosaic approach - much in evidence in his inaugural address - that we might expect of a great college football coach but not of the occupant of this most curious perch atop our politics. In his life experiences, too, there is more for most Americans to relate to: community organizing (odiously disparaged by Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Convention), teaching, dropping off the girls at school with a kiss. He is "a guy of the street," but not in the sense the McCain campaign intended. And now he is our president. Can it be true?

George W. Bush Is Willy Loman

An article in the Washington Post about Bush's disheartened lackeys made me realize that he's a sad fucking Willy Loman figure, bewildered that he's not liked, idiotically uncomprehending of his toxic affect upon the world, an all-American tragic figure.

An Open Letter to Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia, though an Obama supporter, really likes Sarah Palin and is ridiculing anyone who disagrees.

Camille: You say, "People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary." Then, in an astounding and head-spinning paragraph, you compare Palin's tortured expression to that of your Italian-American relatives, the "expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts," and finally, to Shakespeare, "the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules."

While it may be true that Sarah Palin has discarded the rules of English and is improvising furiously, I've read William Shakespeare, and she, Sarah Palin, is no William Shakespeare.

Camille: You're transparently, painfully, chronically eager to play the contrarian, to fly in the face of "liberal orthodoxies," to knock your fellow intellectuals and academics down a peg. Do you do it to sustain yourself, to define yourself and find a reason to survive? You just do it for fun, in the end, don't you? Admit it.

Here's a quote from Sarah Palin at the vice-presidential debate:

"I'm not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?"

She doesn't want to argue about the causes but wants to "positively affect the impacts"?!

Camille, how dare you undermine the importance of coherent thought and diction 1) as a person of coherent thought and diction, 2) for any reason whatsoever, and 3) in a potential president of the United States!? You have made a career out of your own athletic, virtuosic command of language. It is a hypocritical, cynical and PERVERSE game that you are playing by lending your own linguistic skills in defense of someone who is plainly struggling to form more than one sentence at a time that makes any sense at all. We're trapped in the hackneyed forms of our upper-middle-class syntax, are we? You've got a worse problem altogether. You're so good with words that you can eloquently disparage eloquence. And you can't resist the temptation.

Something also needs to be said about Palin's character, apart from her mind. You praise her "frontier grit and audacity," which suggests that she has some deep-seated, indomitable spirit. I think it's more likely you were seduced, like so many others, by the notion of a lipsticked hot girl shooting a moose. She has - in collaboration with McCain campaign handlers - withdrawn almost completely from media inquiry (not that she was too engaged to begin with). For the sake of argument, let's say the media are biased to the left, that they might set traps for Palin, that Katie Couric is a "viper." This is still the "filter," to coin Palin's term, through which the people in a free society learn about their politicians, their country, the world. For a vice-presidential candidate to respond to journalists' questions so incoherently and opaquely, then to cry "foul," and ultimately to recoil from the media with a month to go before this crucial election is shallow and craven in the highest degree. Barack Obama went on O'Reilly!

Camille, for Christ's sake. This person wants to be vice president of the United States. I know it's cute and fun and cheeky to be as smart as you are and yet to elevate stupidity. (I think you tipped your hand when you wrote, "As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn." A self-hating genius! Who knew.) But here's the problem: There is a culture in our country, I'm sure you'll agree, that is wary of intellectuals the way people once were (and in some cases still are) wary of blacks, or of Jews. I'm going to try not to point my snobbish finger at any particular group right now, but I think you'd be hard pressed to deny that a very big part of the George W. Bush phenomenon, and thus a key reason we are in such dire straits today at home and abroad, is that Bush and his ilk managed to demonize book smarts, intellectualism, Ph.D.'s and so on as elite, effete, out of touch, you know, gay. (I wonder if Palin's church has a program for sinners to "journey away" from thought.) You should be careful what you're promoting as you laugh heartily at your TV set. Don't underestimate the hysterical venom that the Bush era has actually managed to inspire in Americans against people like you - like us. Don't we agree that we need a change, at last?

You celebrate Sarah Palin's vitality and underestimate her stupidity at our peril.

Sometimes when you see a George Bush press conference on TV - when they're not really showing any questions and answers, but they just want a bit of coverage to let you know this is what they're talking about - they shoot Bush in profile, and you can see his posture behind the lectern. Watch next time. He keeps one of his feet - his left? - up on the tip of his shoe, as though he were kicking the floor, or in fact as if his foot were broken and he'd been dragging it behind him. I'm tempted to say this points out some deep-seated corruption in his soul, a fundamental lack of character. But it's probably more in the category of things that have, dangerously, endeared him to people. It's winning and childlike, almost girlish - the gesture of an overanimated adolescent who doesn't yet know how to still her hungry limbs. In a sense it belies any notion of him as a tyrant, a torturer, a war criminal. But it emblemizes his particular sociopathy: the wide-eyed boy-king, oblivious; unwise to the world and to the deleterious consequences of his power.

There's an interesting passage in Bob Woodward's new book, "The War Within," as described in Jill Abramson's review in The New York Times:

In "Plan of Attack," the author’s doubts grow. When Bush tells him that "freedom is God’s gift to everybody in the world. . . . I believe we have a duty to free people," Woodward, in a rare interpolation, asks whether such a conviction might seem "dangerously paternalistic." "Those who become free appreciate the zeal" is the president’s retort.

"Those who become free appreciate the zeal?" I read and reread this apparent non-sequitur with some fascination. What could Bush possibly mean? Certainly he's had a history of offering churlish, dismissive responses to reporters, especially when he feels cornered. But there's something especially odd in the specificity of his statement here, given that it does not follow from the question. I felt there was something there to puzzle out, and here's my theory: George Bush does not know what "paternalistic" means. Of course, he's not going to betray his ignorance - he's going to think on his feet and make some half-assed guess as to what it may mean, cross his fingers, and toss out a reply. I think he assumed the root of "paternalistic" was the word "pattern," and that Woodward was therefore accusing him of trying to impose some sort of pattern upon the world. Therefore, he may well be accused of, or applauded for, zeal, in the sense of the zeal of an infant intent on fitting pegs into the appropriately shaped holes.

The news that W. is sending Special Ops to Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government can mean only one thing: This is the October surprise. Mark my words: There will be an announcement in mid- to late October that Osama bin Laden has been captured. It will be a moment of pure vindication for Bush, allowing him to strut and preen and prattle on a bit about how history will view this moment, how our sacrifice has been great but our cause just, etc., etc. There will be the implication, as there was in the capture of Sadam Hussein, that one man - our man, our president - has humiliated another man for the sake of the clan. And the corollary of course is that only tough talking, Republican men do that. Sure enough, McCain will glide into office. He'll have a stroke in early 2012, making Sarah Palin president and ushering in a dark decade of warmongering, religio-fascism and economic mayhem that future historians will marvel at the way an avid mortician scrutinizes a bludgeoned corpse, but that's beside the point for now.

These hideous, corrupt, power-mad and murderous cocksuckers have waited seven years to the day to play this card. They could have picked up bin Laden any damn time. But why waste a trump? It's akin to the 3/11 Madrid bombing. Hit them when it hurts. Hit us when it hurts.

If you're inclined to, pray that this doesn't occur, as it surely can't be God's plan.

I was a bit surprised that Paul Krugman defended Obama for going after McCain's inability to remember how many houses he owns. It seems to me that if you don't want the Republicans to castigate you as an intellectual elitist (which Obama is), don't castigate your opponent for being a wealth elitist (which McCain most certainly is). A better point to make - and I'm not sure how to make it in this twisted political landscape - is that it's far better to be an intellectual elitist than a wealth elitist. If you went to Harvard Law, you're an elitist; if you can't remember how many houses you own, you are one too. But which kind is more likely to have the know-how, poise and breadth of diplomatic and other skills necessary to lead the country?

This notion that intellectuals are to be distrusted, this creepy idea that Nixon internalized and that Karl Rove and George W. Bush externalized and perfected, seems to haunt us still - even after its disgraceful consequences in our recent past. It's far more damaging than your run-of-the-mill campaign canard; in fact, it's fascist. It's Bolshevik. And Islamist, too. Totalitarian regimes, and the philosophies that gird them, have long repressed, demonized, ridiculed and even slaughtered the intellectual class. Why? Because intellectuals are the types of people who have the brains and insight to stop evil people, such as Republicans and terrorists, from doing whatever the fuck they want. It's always been easy for regimes to repress the intellectual class, because "regular" people - be they blue-collar Americans, the Russian proletariat or the Iraqi poor - are exceedingly susceptible to class resentment. This is a very easy button for propagandists to push, and once that's taken care of, it's not hard to make the problem "go away" - intellectuals tend not to be militaristic; they don't put up much of a fight. In Spain during the Inquisition, or Russia under Stalin, this meant you could round them up and kill them. In the United States today, you have to dispatch them more subtly - by insinuating that they're "soft on national security." No matter the method, it's the same crime.

I struggled to fall asleep last night, my head bright with weird imaginings. I was John Edwards on some talk show, declaiming on the Iraq war and his principles compared to Bush.


There are people in public life who commit the cardinal sin of mistaking personal virtue for moral authority. Bush and his coterie of course. Condoleeza Rice with her treadmill, goddamn her. Up at the asscrack of dawn. How can she be wrong when she is sweating? This seems to be a tendency in the righteous, religious right. A temptation. Bush himself - he quit drinking, now he thinks he has the upper hand that allows him to invade countries and murder people by the hundreds of thousands. But Elliot Spitzer does it too, according to a recent New Yorker article. Apparently he drags his ass out of bed and jogs at 5 am each day, even when all he wants, like the rest of us, is two more hours' sleep. Careful what you do with that credit, boy.

There's that tired phrase we hear from time to time from Bush and his supporters: We have to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

I propose that what's really happening is a grotesque twist on that pat phrase: They're not fighting us here because they can already fight us there.

George W. Bush Is an Idiot and a Fucking Craven Little Bitch Besides

George W. Bush on "60 Minutes" looked pained, reluctant, tired, all things you might expect. But it took me a while to form any other thoughts about this dreary, obligatory bit of public relations work. The President's vague and halting manner seemed to defy close scrutiny, as though his famous aversion to introspection and his incuriosity form a sort of field around him which similarly dulls our own inquisitiveness.

But with the benefit of a night's sleep a few ideas began to coalesce.

This is a sad, stupid and bumbling man who has real difficulty – and I mean the tragic, pathos-filled difficulty of the semi-functioning adult moron – putting together a coherent sentence. And like idiotic people typically do when they are faced with challenges, Bush has – deftly, even, one might say – developed a series of strategies to deflect questions and thus to appear "normal." For example, there is the "stalling" of questions that are beyond his mental functioning to properly address. Scott Pelley asked something like, "Mr. President, many Americans feel that you're stubborn. Is this true?" Bush replied, "What, that I'm stubborn... or that many Americans think I'm stubborn?" And here Bush produced his slack, shucky grin, like, Whew! OK. I thought of something to say. Pelley repeated, with what appeared to me to be a trace of impatience, of patronization: "Americans feel that way. Is it true?" And then the denial – odd, actually, since he's always tried to play his inflexibility off as strength, as gutsy resolve. This time: "I think I'm a flexible open-minded person. I really do. I really do." A touch of petulance now. And then, "Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?" Bush's reply: "That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?" The maddening tactic he employs of answering questions with questions, often idiotically reversed ones, no matter how ill-conceived or inappropriate, in order to deflect attention from his inability to properly consider and respond to such questions, questions that are even the least bit penetrating, is only part of the problem. He also reflexively casts the blame on others. Like a kid at recess: I know you are but what am I? It's a craven gesture, the signature of a petty and immature soul, and he performs it at once, without hesitation.

Why would HE fucking APOLOGIZE for the IRAQIS not doing a better job, anyway, for fuck's sake? My God, if you're going to be weak, if you're going to be a coward, if you're to be a petty little BITCH and you happen to be the President of the United States can't you be the least bit clever about it?

Bush's spin doctors, aides, speechwriters and other Rasputins have jammed a gummy wad of fucking self-serving, disingenuous, sinister, hypocritical EXCUSES for the mayhem and murder in Iraq into his thick, tiny skull and he STILL can't get them right.

And that's the sad truth about Bush. He's Pandora, who opened the box. And just as the box contained that one ghostly glimmer of good to be loosed upon the world, hope, Bush himself is not all bad. He's not evil; he believes he's doing good and in fact doesn't believe he's doing great harm in the service of good. He's far more dangerous than evil people are. Saddam was evil, and our rickety constitutional democracy seems to protect us against actually electing people like that. People like that are recognized and soon enough marginalized in a free, educated society. They'll make their mark, sure, but they won't become president. And if somehow they were to they'd get run out of town sooner or later – Nixon was as close to actual evil (knowing, calculated malfeasance) as any leader we've had and we kicked him around until we didn't have him to kick around any more. Bush is worse: he's both stupid and craven. Let's face it, this emperor's naked as a jaybird. Can we say so finally? He's a low functioning adult, not borderline retarded but frankly much closer to that line than most people are willing to think. By any measure, by any observation, he's hapless, exceedingly inarticulate, lost, halting, bewildered. In addition, he is a moral coward. He's quick to blame others, to hide, to avoid being implicated and to cower from any physical or other danger even when such a risk might be warranted as a rite, or in order to protect others, or as a matter of principle. He has no desire to accept responsibility and to experience the accordant realization of his own weaknesses, shortcomings and errors. In short, to grow. In some, these shortcomings arise out of evil; in Bush they arise out of stupidity. The effect is the same, though more terminal and – because he is not entirely unsympathetic, not a Nixon – more insidious. To bring us back to the playground, he's like that really fucked up dumb kid no one felt sorry for because his reaction to being dumb was being mean. And in the meantime those who are evil, who know how to, and seek to, take advantage of this circumstance, this president's miraculously obstinate idiocy, happily further their own war mongering, war profiteering, insane pseudo-religious fantasies and all manner of other machinations whose toxicity imperils our moral environment just as greenhouse gases imperil our physical one.

People are wringing their hands over this election. Blaming Kerry. Don't fucking blame Kerry. People are tempted to see in losses sorry, self-evident conclusions when it's really just a fucking loss. Even after the fact we struggle to assert some kind of control over the event, as though we could reverse the outcome by explaining it away. He lost because he wasn't aggressive enough. He lost because he wasn't inspiring. He failed to make a case for himself.

Who's to say that the very qualities we now reproach him for are not qualities that earned him votes, not cost him votes? To a certain degree, for better or for worse, he certainly presented himself as the anti-Bush. Actually fuck that, he didn't just present himself that way, he is that way. Thoughtful and introspective where Bush is impulsive and brash. Intellectual and well-read where Bush is incurious and famously ill-read. Versed in the minutiae of policy where Bush paints broad strokes. The advocate of nuanced and complex views where Bush will hit you in the face with a fucking idiot sledgehammer. Isn't this who we fucking wanted? Didn't the anti-Bush voters want to vote for the anti-Bush? Of course we fucking did. Had he won – had, say, fewer votes in black districts been thrown out in Florida and Ohio, or lines had been shorter in these same districts – you better believe we'd all be fucking crowing about how he had been the ideal candidate. We're so lucky Kerry came along to capitalize on the anti-Bush sentiment, we'd be saying. Wasn't he just perfect? Aren't we fucking delighted that our great country woke up and realized we need a smart, reasonable man in the White House and not a fucking moron? Hurray! This is SUCH A WONDERFUL TIME TO BE AN AMERICAN.

You better fucking believe we'd all be saying that. 150,000 votes in Ohio. But now that he lost we have to fucking cry about it and go blaming Kerry.

It is a sad truth of human psychology that we accentuate the positive and accentuate the negative. When something goes right we trick ourselves into imagining that God Himself is shining a fucking light up our asses. When something goes wrong we enter paroxysms of petty blame and self-loathing. Let's remove the inconvenient factor of subjective human perception for a moment and examine the truth: Kerry lost a very close election to a fucking flag-waving Jesus-talking moralizing prick of a wartime president. Bush basically handed a big fucking lollipop to every single voter who: is insecure and possibly even hypocritical on the topic of morality and craves reassurance that they are morally superior; dislikes gays without quite knowing how to articulate why – just fucking dislikes them; kinda feels the same way about – shh! – black people; thinks America is like, the greatest, and doesn't understand why those who are enemies of freedom seek to do us harm; and perhaps most importantly, resents, fears and dislikes smart city folks.

Turns out there are some people out there like that. Call it the oppression of the many by the many.

The other day I waited for the 6 at 51st and Lex, late for a Tuesday, 12 or so, among a curious band that included two lost stewardesses and a short Hispanic man leafing through an enormous coffee table book about George W. Bush. A man emerged from the corridor and traipsed past us, chanting-hollering: "I got the last dance. I'm a gonna get the last dance. The last dance. Yep. I'm gonna do the boogaloo. I got the last dance…"