Snaking the Drain

I just turned on Letterman and was shocked to see Jane Mayer sitting next to Dave, talking about Bush and the prospect of war crimes trials. I’ve seen her talking about her new book, The Dark Side, on C-Span, and I’ve seen mentions of it in lots of other places. But I can’t fully explain how startling it was to see her sitting in Letterman’s guest chair talking about the US engaging in torture.

I give Letterman a lot of credit for having her on. I missed the first part of the interview, but I guess someone, if not CBS itself, will post it online.

I naturally makes me wonder if a war crimes trial could ever happen. I’ve thought for a long time that trying Bush and a lot of the others for war crimes would be a cleansing experience and a very positive activity for the nation. It would help clean up the stain of the Bush years, and help restore America to the role it once had.

But I also figured  it was an idea that would never happen. Seeing David Letterman talk about it like it’s something that should happen makes it obvious that the idea is within the mainstream.

I honestly thought McCain would have been deposed by the Republicans by now, but he’s still hanging in. And he’s really not doing much except attacking Obama with increasingly wild outbursts.

If you watch McCain’s campaign, if you can even call it a campaign, all he’s doing is attacking Obama. His advisers don’t have him doing much to advance himself. It’s all attack.

And nobody seems to care that McCain is undermining himself with nasty outbursts.

The strategy, on the surface, is to make the election about Obama. Makes sense so far as it goes. But there’s a deeper game.  The Republicans, including McCain’s own advisers, are sending McCain out to attack because they know it doesn’t matter how much damage he does to himself. They’re going to replace him anyway.

Something I noticed about McCain a few months ago is that his anger is under control in what appears to be an artificial way. In the clip of him bickering on the airplane with Elizabeth Bumiller, it seemed that he wanted to explode, but couldn’t. I suspect he’s on some mood-altering drug that inhibits his wild temper. But boy, you can see the steam rising. It just can’t explode.

I’m wondering if the Romney people know that eventually the boiler just has to blow, and that will be the moment when everyone just agrees that ol’ John McCain just isn’t cut out to be president. I’d been hoping that Giuliani’s campaign would end in a weird emotional breakdown, but this summer the big show to wait for may be McCain’s eruption.

Listening to him over the last few days, I think it’s not too far away. If the drugs wear off, watch out. It’s gonna be a corker.

The first time I really heard Barack Obama at any length when he wasn’t giving a set speech was during an appearance on David Letterman’s show, which I think was in the spring of last year.

I don’t remember much of what was discussed, but I do remember thinking that Obama was a very funny guy. I recall talking to somebody afterward and saying that Obama made some funny comments and that he had very good comic timing. The point is that until later last year, when I saw Samantha Power’s memo about his foreign policy ideas and first began to take him seriously as a candidate, my general impression of Obama was more or less that he was very smart and very funny.

So it’s kind of strange to see that one of the media narratives now being pushed is that Obama has no sense of humor at all. And not just that, he wants to stamp out sense of humor!

Of course one of the main offenders in pushing this lunacy is Maureen Dowd. That’s not too surprising, as her job this year is to do what she did in 2000 and 2004: nitpick the Democratic candidate over ridiculous and irrelevant points and try to get across the idea that he’s too weird (or too something) to be president.

All those hundreds of thousands of people who have gone to Obama speeches and have laughed at his quips? Those people don’t exist. They don’t count. Because Barack Obama has no sense of humor and you people never heard him be funny.

Maureen Dowd, who is about as funny as a weekend of cystitis, knows that Barack Obama isn’t funny. What’s really amazing is that she’s pushing this wackiness in the pages of the New York Times… in a just world, she’d be wearing three pairs of sunglasses while screaming it on a subway platform.

I turn on Charlie Rose to see if he’s airing the interview he taped with Neil Young, and what do I find but New Yorker editor David Remnick going on and on about the notorious cover.

Remnick is articulate, but he still comes off as somewhere between smug twit and goddamned fool. He rejects the idea that the magazine was perpetuating racist stereotypes because everyone knows the magazine is opposed to that. Oh, okay.

So I guess William Shawn could have run a cover showing Martin Luther King as a Golliwog. Because, hey, the New Yorker would really be opposed to it.

I don’t even know if Remnick himself believes some of the stuff he’s saying. And with the advertisers and readers pissed off, the calculation must be to hang in and compare yourself with Jonathan Swift and hide behind Jon Stewart’s riff on how the media made too much out of it all.

So I’ve read way too much about the notorious New Yorker cover, and while I did consider a few variant points of view, I still see it the way I did yesterday morning. The magazine had every right to publish it, of course, and while they think they were being smart and clever, it was a very stupid and very offensive thing to do.

One point of view that I tended to agree with was from the brilliant cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, who mentioned that he also engages in the riff of pretending that right-wing craziness is true as a way of poking fun at it. I get his point, but I’d also say that he handles the material more intelligently. And, he’s funny.

The problem with the New York cover is that it just wasn’t funny.  It was stupid.

Try to imagine a New Yorker editorial meeting in 1963 or so. Imagine an artist showing a prototype cover, which he introduces by saying that it makes fun of racists and segregationists by portraying their outrageous lies about Martin Luther King. And the cover shows Dr. King as a Sambo character eating watermelon and fried chicken.

Had such a cover been published, how would it have been perceived? Would people have thought it was such a clever joke aimed at segregationists? Or would they have denounced the New Yorker staff as a bunch of clueless twits?

Would people be seriously suggesting, as they are today, that liberals have no sense of humor? And would they be giving lectures, as they are today, about how some people are just too dumb to get the oh so clever humor of the New Yorker?

Oh well, enough with the magazine cover. Things are spiraling out of control, banks are collapsing, people are getting laid off all over, the country is in deep shit, and a boneheaded attempt at satire by some New Yorker editors who are obviously educated beyond their intelligence won’t matter much in the long run.

I don’t have much time to think this morning about the New Yorker cover that has everyone freaked out, which is just as well. I do get the point that illustrating the ridiculous Republican lies about Obama serves to show precisely how idiotic  the smears are.

But saying that really doesn’t make it any less offensive. Back when The New Yorker was really the The New Yorker, Harold Ross wouldn’t have run a cover illustrating how the Nazis portrayed Jews and expected that to be regarded as very clever irony. And William Shawn wouldn’t have published a cover illustrating the racist rants coming out of the mouths of segregationists and expected everyone to get that as some sophisticated joke.

Americans are considerably more stupid today than they were in the 1930s or 1950s. So it’s just inane to think that this week’s cover is going to be appreciated as irony.

It’s probably way too early to analyze this anyway, as the whole thing needs to play out in the media. It could inspire a conversation about how idiotic the smears against Obama are. Or it could turn into the TV just showing the racist and inflammatory imagery over and over and reinforcing the lies told by Republican surrogates. I know which one I expect, but we’ll have to wait and see.

The New York Times dropped a bomb on Charlie Rangel Thursday night, running a story on the front page of the web edition about how the congressman has four apartments in a nice building in Harlem. The story made it sound like it was some kind of payoff, but didn’t really explain how it was wrong, let alone what it would be a payoff for.

On Friday Rangel gave a press conference and offered his explanation, which seems to make sense. And Rangel angrily noted that it’s not the business of the New York Times how much space he thinks he needs for his family.

The real puzzler is why the Times is all of a sudden doing stories on Rangel and where he lives. Seems like someone passed the info to the Times, which ran with it because it somehow seemed scandalous, though there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal going on. The only thing we know for sure is that somebody is pretty pissed off at Charlie Rangel.

It’s only a month or two ago that Rangel came forward and said that Hillary Clinton should give it up. And he then criticized her for not conceding in a timely fashion. You can’t help but wonder if this wild shot at Rangel originated from within the Clinton camp.

If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need it’s a make-believe Maureen Dowd, but Snopes is alerting us to one.

Turns out there’s a bogus Dowd column in which fake MoDo claims to find out that most of Obama’s internet fund raising is actually coming from mysterious sources in the Middle East.

Whoever wrote this latest smear against Obama included enough bogus internet stuff to dazzle the rubes, but they forgot to insert the weird psychosexual stuff and pointless pop culture references that would sound like it rattled forth from Dowd’s mind.

Even Dowd wasn’t impressed: “I got to the second line and I knew it wasn’t me.”

Jesse Jackson saying something bizarre isn’t really news. So what strikes me is how the story of his “crude comments” suddenly jumped into the news today, three days after Jackson was caught on tape in the Republican network’s studio.

The people at Fox knew they had the comments on tape, and they could have sprung them anytime. So why now? My guess is that with McCain just stumbling around pointlessly, the Republicans figure they have to just try anything at all.

But do they really think that Jesse Jackson expressing distaste for Obama is going to hurt Obama?

It’s always puzzled and amused me that people at Fox seem to think Jesse Jackson has some influence. It’s similar to how some Republicans are obsessed with Barbra Streisand and think she somehow has influence over all Democrats.

It’s questionable whether Jesse Jackson ever had much influence anyway, but even if you stipulate that he did, that was a long time ago.

So after sitting on the inflammatory videotape for a few days, somebody at Fox finally made the brilliant decision that Jackson whispering that he wants to cut off Obama’s nuts must show some deep division in the Democratic Party.

What it really shows is that Jackson is hopelessly out of touch. And while the boneheads running Fox News think they’ve found Obama’s kryptonite, they’re also out of touch.

In reality, a lot of Americans, including a lot of liberals, will just think, hey, Obama pisses off Jesse Jackson. Makes me like the guy even more.

So thanks Fox. Keep pimping the story. Please.

Something nice to see: Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate today and received a standing ovation.