Libertarians? Spoilers?

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga makes the case that the libertarian vote in Missouri (and elsewhere) gave Senate to the Democrats. Exhibit A: Missouri and Montana.

Missouri Senate

McCaskill (D) 1,047,049 50
Talent (R) 1,001,238 47
Gilmour (L) 47,504 2

Montana Senate

Tester (D) 198,302 49
Burns (R) 195,455 48
Jones (L) 10,324 3

Well, there’s certainly no need to guess, as the numerical breakdown speaks for itself. Zuniga extrapolates from this, however, suggesting that Bush-era politics have left Libertarians “adrift with few alternatives,” and that seems a somewhat shakier analysis. To the glib extent that libertarianism is defined as righty on economic issues and southpaw on matters of personal liberty, it’s possible to view its adherents as up for political grabs, but overall voting may tell another story. Even as worried as they were at the right-wing Cato Institute following the election, David Kirby and David Boaz had this caveat about the “Libs tilted the table” notion:

President Bush and the congressional Republicans left no libertarian button unpushed in the past six years: soaring spending, expansion of entitlements, federalization of education, cracking down on state medical marijuana initiatives, Sarbanes-Oxley, gay marriage bans, stem cell research restrictions, wiretapping, incarcerating U.S. citizens without a lawyer, unprecedented executive powers, and of course an unnecessary and apparently futile war. The striking thing may be that after all that, Democrats still looked worse to a majority of libertarians.

Here’s an assumption on my part, fortified by hunch and leavened with guesswork: I think that the electoral tendencies of any minority are influenced by the political leanings of the whole…and while Missouri may well be a “purple” state these days, there’s still more red in the mix than blue. That is: nobody’s mistaking the Show Me State with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Why, many of our Dems could easily pass elsewhere for Republicans. If that isn’t enough to warn Dem strategists away from the shoals of complacency, consider that each election has its own particularities which may not be repeated in subsequent contests. In short, the combination of an exceptionally weak Republican incumbent with a prominent personal liberties issue - the stem cell research ballot measure - may have combined to produce a Libertarian influence that one might well never see again.

It takes more than one election to make a trend. Democrats hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time around with the Libertarian vote should keep that in mind.

Apparently, Biden is less “articulate” than some

This is going to be the political story of the day. You’d feel sorry for the man at the center, except that it’s Joe Biden.

There is no way on Earth to spin Biden’s remark, but it will be endless fun to watch him try. If he was trying to caricature someone, who was it, exactly? This is miles away from John Kerry’s “botched joke” about “getting stuck in Iraq” if you don’t study hard and get good grades becase at the core of the clumsy delivery there’s a pointed and valid message: people with fewer employment/educational options may be more likely to join a wartime military that people with degrees and a wider field of choices. You don’t have to dig too deeply for that, and it was kinda cowardly of Kerry not to own his words and do so.

Anybody think Biden will own what he said?

I do not often want to hear from the apparently unarticulate, allegedly dim , comparatively dirty, and generally horrible looking Al Sharpton, but I sure do today. Jesse Jackson, too, if he’s not busy.

(HT to Paul at ShakesSis.)

Addendum: Is all this (or a large part of it) a matter of imprecise editing in transcription? And does that explain away the whole “clean” thing? And hell, where is Al Sharpton, anyway?

The problem with tripping along the third rail of American discourse is that, well, you might trip. Biden wouldn’t be the first pol to learn that the hard way.

(Additional hat tip to Paul.)

Addendum Two: Regarding Al Sharpton - Oh. There he is. Jesse Jackson, too.

Under questioning from reporters at his announcement conference call, Mr. Biden was pressed on what he meant in his description of Mr. Obama, particularly in his use of the word clean.

“He understood exactly what I meant,” Mr. Biden said. “And I have no doubt that Jesse Jackson and every other black leader — Al Sharpton and the rest — will know exactly what I meant.” [...]

Mr. Biden’s assurances notwithstanding, both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton — African-Americans who have run for president — said they had no idea what Mr. Biden meant. And both suggested they felt at least a little offended by the remarks.

Mr. Jackson described Mr. Biden’s remarks to the Observer, which also included critical statements about the Iraq positions of two of his Democratic opponents — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina — as “blabbering bluster.”

A wounded note to his voice, Mr. Jackson pointed out that he had run against Mr. Biden for the 1988 Democratic nomination, and had lasted far longer and drawn more votes than did Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden was forced out in September 1987.

“I am not sure what he means — ask him to explain what he meant,” Mr. Jackson said. “I don’t know whether it was an attempt to diminish what I had done in ’88, or to say Barack is all style and no substance.”

Mr. Sharpton said that when Mr. Biden called him to apologize, Mr. Sharpton started off the conversation reassuring Mr. Biden about his hygienic practices. “I told him I take a bath every day,” Mr. Sharpton said.

No stranger to electoral intrigue, Mr. Sharpton was quick to offer a political motive: That Mr. Biden was drawing distinctions between Mr. Obama and African-American leaders like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson, to “discredit Mr. Obama with his base.”

Not many pols work as hard to make themselves unlikeable as Joe Biden. You have to play to your strengths, I guess.

A delayed sentence

Look upon his works, ye Mighty, and despair

One of the last times I found Doonesbury…well, you know…funny…occurred in the wake of the death fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie for supposed blasphemies in The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was described by Nobel literature prize awardee V.S. Naipaul as “an extreme form of literary criticism.” Such a notion certainly informed Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, who launched a storyline in which the wholly-fictional “Islamic Book Critics Circle” handed out literary judgments that were harsh indeed:

To Sidney Sheldon, for The Sands of Time, a sentence of death!

The comic strip’s intrepid-yet-witless TV news correspondent, Roland Hedley, offered this breathless bit of commentary to his anchor back in studio:

Ooh, a pan! That’s got to hurt, Peter!

All this is to say that the sentence has finally been carried out - by God, if not by man.

Note: Feel free to pay for the privilege of digging through the voluminous archives of ancient Doonesbury strips, if you like. I elected to rely on memory: one of the greatest curses of the human race, as someone or other once said.

Technorati Tags: Sidney Sheldon, Doonesbury

Stupor Bowl countdown

As casual a sports fan as I am - barely motivated to turn in bed lest the disaffection of my sports apnea cut off all respiration and cause me to die snorting - I can still manage bored irritation with this year’s Super Bowl and its attendant idiocies. It’s just my way of giving the game a hundred and ten percent. The word “anticlimactic” was coined for this final gridiron contest, coming as it does a fortnight after the usually much more dramatic division and conference contests. Small wonder that the import of the event had to be artificially inflated by way of a cult of inordinately expensive commercials and the antiquated concept of overdone halftime productions (with or without malfunctioning costumes).

That the event of the Super Bowl counts as one of our few points of national unity (along with American Idol, Survivor, and the quinquennial release of a Microsoft operating system) says terrible things about us.

You know, I had a lot to say but I just don’t give a damn. Guess I only gave a hundred and nine percent after all. I have strength enough for just this much more:

To put-upon white football fans and media types, all men from what I can tell, whining about the burden of having to acknowledge that two black coaches are meeting in the Super Bowl: Your hardship is acknowledged and your trials truly inspiring. It is a wonder that you have found the strength to carry on. Just a few more days and you can take yourselves down from your crosses.

To football insiders wishing aloud that the NFL would mandate a near-tropical venue such as this year’s Miami for all future Super Bowls: Life just can’t be made soft enough for you people, can it? As long as the NFL forces cold-weather cities to build mega-complexes just to have a chance of competing for a franchise, you can look forward to covering the game in cities where (to quote Dave Barry, I think) the crime rate is indeed low, but only because the getaway cars won’t start. Hope you enjoy Super Bowl LXXXXII in goddamn Juneau.

I married a general contractor

A couple of months ago, M showed me an article in an issue of This Old House with the self-explanatory title of “She Saws, I Sauté.” Really, there’s no mystery left after that; the woman of the household is the one who has fun with power tools, while the man cooks or does needlepoint or magazine editing or something else far removed from home repair and renovation. The article was fairly well-written and funny enough, though it scarcely broke new ground for the denizens of Casa Waveflux; regular readers here know that M and I have tilled that soil to a fare-thee-well.

So yesterday morning with the outside temperature a bone-rattling twelve degrees, M cheerfully said that she was thinking of working on the closet in the first-floor bathroom. Yeah, and maybe the pantry.

“Okay doke,” I replied and sipped at my coffee. I knew that for M, “thinking about it” means doing it within the hour. My wife has become, over time, the kind of person who gives little or no advance warning preparatory to launching a project. The recent holiday room painting was testament to this unnerving trend towards immediacy. You may know such terribly abrupt people yourself. You may actually be such a person, as foreign as that sounds to me.

Anyway, one quick trip to Lowe’s later, M commenced to work. It would probably beggar your belief that I would have helped out - though, in fact, I most certainly would have - but I became ill yesterday and was reduced to blearily poring over lengthy and soporific documents for work.

I did manage to - yes - fix dinner.

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So this is what they mean by “An army of one”

We are fated to live in times that are, shall we say, difficult to parody.

Fortunately for us all, America’s finest news source&trade is still up to the task. And no, I don’t mean CNN.

Bush Commits One Additional Troop To Afghanistan

In an effort to display his administration’s willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

“I want the American people to know that I have not forgotten that our battle for freedom began in Afghanistan, rooting out the extremists of al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” Bush said. “Today, I am ordering the deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Private Tim Ekenberg, to the embattled Kandahar region.”

“We will take whatever measures necessary to win,” Bush added. “Isn’t that right, Tim?” [...]

Ekenberg’s most vital assignment will be to patrol approximately 1,200 square miles of volatile territory on the Afghan–Pakistani border and conduct search-and-destroy missions on the estimated 40,000 caves where U.S. intelligence sources believe Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda operatives could be hiding.

In addition to truthiness and pointyness, great satire requires you-too-ness. Let’s hear it for the loyal opposition.

Some prominent Democrats have expressed cautious support of Ekenberg’s deployment. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) applauded the Bush administration for “at least meeting [our] demands 1/20,000th of the way.”

“This is where we should have been sending troops all along,” Clinton said. “It’s a promising sign that the president is finally willing to unleash on Afghanistan the full force and military might of the United States Marine Corps Private Tim Ekenberg.”

Fair and balanced. All hail The Onion!

Distractions

So yesterday I was sick. Today I’m horribly busy. Together these comprise my reasons for not being the prolific, attentive, and - uh - present blogger that you deserve.

Forgive me, readers! It’s gonna be much better real soon.

Who’s the grown-up here, anyway?

Twelve-year-old actress patiently tries to explain to overzealous concern trolls the difference between reality and make-believe.

“It’s not really happening,” Fanning said of a rape. “It’s a movie, and it’s called acting. I’m not going through anything. Cody and Isabelle aren’t going through anything, their characters are.

“And for me, when it’s done it’s done,” she said. “I don’t even think about it anymore.”

Were these would-be guardians this alarmed when Fanning was kidnapped by criminals, pursued by aliens, and menaced by a deranged father? Where were they then, huh? Please, won’t somebody think of the children!

Oh…movies?

All of them?

Never mind.

Blog expansion project report

By now, you’ve probably forgotten all about my “Waveflux gets hyooge” post from a while back, and that’s quite understandable. The bigtime secret project is still underway, however, and should reach the first public stage - that is, the start of implementation - pretty soon. In a week, maybe, or sometime around there.

In response to stated concerns: a new and larger monitor will not be required in order to enjoy the new hyoogeness here. More info as events warrant.

Obama’s skin causes IQs to drop sharply, wankery to rise

Enough is enough.

I have tried mightily to get through the gray winter landscape (if not farther) without commenting on the political wankery surrounding the skin color of Barack Obama - for the love of God, Montressor, the election is nearly two years away! - but the smug mindlessness of Mickey Kaus is just a bridge too far.

Kaus ignores the better judgment of friends in order to fill column inches in Slate with this thought-free drivel: the newcomer Obama obviously doesn’t appeal to blacks because Hillary Clinton - a long-time ally of African Americans and a known quantity in the public mind for fifteen years outdid him (and the unmentioned John Edwards) in an ABC/WaPo poll. Setting aside Kaus’ evident deductive weaknesses - drawing logical inferences is apparently not his strong suit - the pundit’s astonishment that the black electorate wasn’t immediately and inexorably drawn to Obama’s bright shiny ethnicity like worker bees to nectar is self-indicting. What was that George Bush once said about the soft bigotry of low expectations? Kaus has got that by the truckload.

If only Mickey Kaus was the only pundit desperate to say stupid things about Barack Obama’s epidermis! Alas, the field here is as crowded as that of presidential hopefuls. The most notable loudmouth on this matter remains professional curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, who hasn’t been this bizarre on a racial matter since he practically labeled cross-dating African American women as race traitors. When it comes to Obama, however, the situation for Crouch is a wee bit different: why, Obama isn’t even a member of the race at all. He apparently hasn’t suffered enough, having endured only “some light versions of typical racial stereotypes,” though Crouch doesn’t stop there. If you follow the columnist’s attempt at logic, Obama is disqualified from official black Americanness because his father was a black Kenyan - practically a native of Switzerland - while his mother had the misfortune of being “of white U.S. stock.”

And that, ladies and gentleman, bars the doorway to genuineness. So much for quaint notions such as the content of one’s character. On a related note, future immigrants hopeful of joining our little club need not apply.

There is some detectable irony in Crouch’s racial standards being indistinguishable from those of Southern racists of the Jim Crow days - spiteful and irrational blood-fraction standards, eventually reduced to the infamous “one-drop rule”. You might wonder if Crouch sees that for himself - but by this point, it’s frankly hard to bring oneself to care what Crouch thinks.

There are reasons to be skeptical about an Obama candidacy, let alone an Obama presidency, valid reasons that are light years from the discussions pundits would have us engage in. We may never get to consider them, however, so long as uncritical bloviating and racial paranoia comprise what passes for public discourse.

It’s distressingly clear from the matter of Barack Obama and the race obsession of his most vocal detractors that America does indeed have a race problem, and it can be reduced to this: Talking about race seems to make us stupid. You would think that the cure for that would be identical to what Nat Hentoff once prescribed for the treatment for hate speech - that is, more speech - but you’ll have to forgive me if recent events have left me feeling that the cure is at least as bad these days as the disease.

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