In an earlier post I offered my bemused opinion as to the infatuation factor ruling the roost in Obama circles. The campaign is far enough along to warrant another look.

Two things are responsible for Obama’s delegate showing: 1) evidence of infatuation from caucus victories and the black vote, and 2) the departure from winner-take-all in allocating delegates.

I only spent a little time googling for this stuff, but feel reasonably confident of the results. Evening out delegate allocations consequent to caucus wins and splitting the black vote wipes out Obama’s delegate lead. That leaves the popular vote which is at 60% if the figure I saw was correct (don’t quote me). Who would be laughing now?

Of course it was even easier to establish the results for a winner-take-all scenario. Hillary wins with about the same percentage as her popular vote lead. Had this been done, would anyone seriously question her nomination? With 60% of both delegates and popular vote (the way the electoral college stuff was supposed to work?) and popular vote, what could anyone possibly say in defense of an Obama nomination?

Oh, that’s right, an Obama-friendly site asked Clinton to be nicey-nicey, and don’t be mentioning any of this what-if stuff. Well, this what-if stuff is pretty convincing to me. I hope the Clinton camp gives this reality check to the remaining uncommitted delegates. Of course no Obama supporter will hear of such facts, they are all just what-if’s, the attempt by a loser to justify herself.

So despite being outspent 2 and 3 to 1, and winning the vast majority of the last 15 contests, Hillary has demonstrated precisely what she said she would: all the large states, all the industrial states. And the November election will retain the electoral college which, if the contest with Obama is any clue, Hillary is the one to win those closely fought purple states, the one to win against McCain. But all that is just smoke and mirrors. I have the feeling that even the super-delegates want somebody to love—and if he wins, well, that’s icing on the cake. So Hillary’s already lost it if that’s the case.

Mayhill Fowler wrote this in the Huffington Post. Unlike other pieces questioning the Jesus-semblance of Obama, this was not placed at the end of the list, so kudos to Arianna’s sense of fair play (which I have seen little of as of late).

Fowler is no lover of Clinton, any more than myself. She admires much in Obama, and again, that’s ditto.  But she selects her facts, interprets the atmosphere and reads the tea leaves precisely as do I, but with far greater fill for the facts and feel for the written word. So what she wrote is the best defense (or expression) I have for my own views, since electability is truly the king-maker in this contest. She writes very fairmindedly and does not fail to find both good and bad in each candidate. Here it is, enjoy.

Posted March 24, 2008 | 09:26 PM (EST)

Two small but significant events happened over Easter weekend in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. First, not only Clinton but also Obama sent out invitations to big donor fundraisers in California the first week of April. (They’re rattling tin cups in New York, as well.) Since the O-kitty is nearly three times bigger than hers, Clinton’s hitting the money trail isn’t surprising. The nooks and crannies in which the campaigns expect to find these $2300 checks is more of a mystery, since Californians who both can and want to give have long since done so. California is beginning to appreciate how Carthage felt squeezed by the Roman Imperium. Obama’s dragging himself to fundraisers, however, is more surprising–and revealing. Despite what various pundits say about the race–that Clinton has almost no chance to win–the Obama Campaign must be looking down the road through a different scope. Obama must be estimating that his 30-plus million in the bank is not going to be enough. Internet fundraising from small donors is not going to re-supply him for a coming fight of the magnitude for which his campaign is bracing.

The second significant event, related to the first, is that Clinton has signaled her intention to fight Obama hard for North Carolina on May 6 by sending in Ace Young, who crafted her victories in California and Texas. The conventional wisdom has been that North Carolina, because of its large black population, is Obama’s. A month ago, Obama led Clinton there in the polls by 14 points. By last Friday, however, his lead had dropped to a single point. His fall in North Carolina would seem to be a result of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. Clearly, this is Clinton’s golden opportunity. For the first time since her humiliation in South Carolina, she will be able to contest seriously a Southern state, and if she wins–as well she might–she will change the dynamic of the race. If she wins Indiana the same day–another more and more likely victory–she will be able to keep that momentum going for a week until West Virginia, which she also should win, and then another week to victory in Kentucky, which will offset her likely loss of Oregon the same day. (Many experts say that Clinton has the edge in Oregon, but I don’t see it. Outside Portland and Eugene and Ashland, the state is very conservative, but those voters are not Democrats.) Clinton should win the Hispanic vote in Puerto Rico on June 1. Moreover, Guam a month earlier (May 3) may not be the predicted Obama win. Sharing the Pacific does not make Guam Hawaii, and Clinton, unlike Obama, has visited Guam several times.

Of the last ten Democratic contests, therefore, Obama may win only the three in the continental West: Oregon and then Montana and South Dakota on June 3. As his nearer goal, Obama absolutely must keep his loss in Pennsylvania less than twenty points. If he cannot, the margin will signal the kind of collapse in white support that Clinton experienced with African-Americans in South Carolina. Either scenario–a sweeping defeat in Pennsylvania or a slow bleed through the last ten contests–will plant the question of electability in the minds of some Super Delegates. For the reality is that Barack Obama cannot win the national election in November without the faith and enthusiasm of a good chunk of white middle class and lower class America. So the Obama Campaign can keep sending out daily press releases reminding us that their candidate leads in pledged delegates, number of states won and the popular vote until the cows come home. They can do the math over and over again demonstrating that it is impossible for Clinton to catch Obama in any of those categories. But absent the bigger picture it’s whistling Dixie.

Remember Harold Ford? The arc of his 2006 Senate race may be a prognostication of Barack Obama’s political fortunes. The national media loved Harold Ford. He was a very intelligent, St. Albans/UPenn educated black politician with seemingly limitless possibility. During the mid-term elections, Newsweek chose Ford for a cover representing all the Democratic contenders nationwide. But the national media never understood the dynamic of that Senate race in Tennessee. Partly because it took the Republicans until the eleventh hour to field a candidate, and therefore Ford dominated the race coverage for so long, the national media never grasped the unlikelihood of a Ford victory. But Tennesseans knew. For he was not just Harold Ford but Harold Ford, Jr. He came from a family that, since its rise to power in Memphis in the 1970s, had increasingly been in the news both for charges of political corruption and for personal peccadilloes–a sordid saga that all Tennesseans abhored, but that white Tennesseans, unlike black Tennesseans, either could not or would not place in the larger context of Shelby County’s long history of public malfeasance.
Like Barack Obama, Harold Ford refused to disown a man close to him. For Obama, the mentor is a father-figure; for Ford, the mentor was his own father, whose House seat he had taken (inherited, really), who had been tried but not convicted of 18 counts of bank and mail fraud. White Memphians, who widely regarded Ford, Sr. as a crook, thought that these charges were only the tip of the iceberg. Stories about the father’s questionable behavior had been circulating for two decades. The only chance for Harold Ford, Jr. to grab that Senate seat was to distance himself once and for all from his father and his family, whose scandals are too numerous to recount here. But Ford, a decent man, refused to disown his father. And even if he had, Harold Ford, Jr. had in his family a lot of baggage for white voters in Tennessee. Now Barack Obama has baggage. He is no longer the “post-racial” candidate.

It’s not that white voters in North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania are racists. It’s that a jug of Tide detergent now costs $12.99–about double what it did a year ago. With rising prices and all the other economic worries, middle class voters don’t want to have to deal with one more thing–and a presidential candidate with uncertain baggage is that one more thing. Certainly not all–but many–middle class white voters are bewildered by Reverend Wright and Obama’s refusal to disavow him. They have been dropped down in the middle of an ongoing story in black America for which they don’t have the context. They are once again aggrieved, perceiving, rightly or wrongly, that they have made the effort, as one teacher told me, “to love all my students equally,” while “these black separatists” have not done the same. Inadvertently, Barack Obama has opened an old wound. Obama truly is a post-racial candidate, but therein lays tragedy if he loses the Democratic nomination. It’s precisely because he didn’t grow up on the Southside of Chicago, or elsewhere in the continental United States, that he lacked the sense of place to divine where Trinity Church fit into the larger African-American narrative; and therefore he never grew the political antennae necessary to sense the price of a membership there. I hope I will be proved wrong, resoundingly, about white middle class voters soon to line up at the polls. But having talked to family and friends in North Carolina over the past two days, I fear not.

While Barack Obama has acquired baggage, Hillary Clinton has finally got a narrative–and for her this is a very good thing, far outweighing any consequences of losing the possibility of revotes in Michigan and Florida, or of losing this or that endorsement, in an election where endorsements have not meant much. Voters firmly rejected her first queenly claims to the nomination–that she deserved it, that she was the inevitable winner–and punished her for the presumption. But now, almost despite herself, and certainly despite the royal style of her campaign, she presents a consistent persona of the hard-knock candidate, both giving and receiving blows, who refuses to lay down and die. There’s a grudging respect for her now in middle America and, more importantly, a growing sense that as a nation we are so screwed–damned if we stay in Iraq, damned if we don’t; the government needs to spend big on health care and education and infrastructure and rebuilding the military at the same time it needs to rein in the deficit–that it well may take a tough-as-nails, Washington-bitten, willing to get-down-and-dirty closer like Hillary Clinton to hack a path through the swamp.

In addition to placing North Carolina in the hands of Ace Young, last week the Clinton Campaign brought onboard P.R. maestro Howard Paster. This (undoubtedly very costly) hire also signals a victory strategy through Electability. Bill Clinton has already said that they are going to take it to the Super Delegates on that issue, and if Obama cannot hold onto enough of the white vote, the Clintons may get a hearing. Bill Clinton has made the cynical assessment that African-American voters will return to Hillary in November. (See “San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom Spills The Beans On Clinton Strategy,” my earlier piece on how Newsom has been parroting what Clinton told him in Texas.) As Carl Bernstein writes in A Woman in Charge, “‘His [Bill Clinton’s] ground zero assumption is that you’re an asshole, but he can charm you.’” An unnamed source is talking to Bernstein about Clinton’s attitude toward the press (former attitude, surely) but it is an apt description of the ex-President’s condescension to his audiences out on the current campaign trail. Moreover, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been working to mend fences with African-Americans: attending a black leadership event in New Orleans, speaking with black pastors, seeing what worked and what did not in Mississippi, where all three Clintons campaigned vigorously even though Senator Clinton had no chance of winning. Therefore, the Clintons are not likely to credit the possibility that overturning the expressed will of the voters will fracture the Democratic Party.

Adding to the possibility of success for an Electability strategy are two recent polls on how Democrats would like to see Super Delegates make up their minds. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll of March 14-16, 49% of respondents said that the Super Delegates should choose “the best candidate;” 27% said the Super Ds should heed the race results in their own state; 19% said that the Super Ds should make a decision based on all primaries and caucuses combined. In a Newsweek poll taken March 5-6, 43% of respondents said that the trailing candidate should concede and 42% said that the Super Delegates should determine the winner. Unless these percentages change over the next few months, they undercut the belief that Super Delegates shouldn’t feel free to choose on the basis of Electability over other (even though quantifiable) criteria.

So I’m dubious about your assertion that “Clinton has virtually no chance of winning,” Messers VandeHei and Allen over at Politico, and that Clinton’s long shot “seems to have grown a little longer,” Mr. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times. Maybe I’m too much of a Faulknerian Southern pessimist. But I think you guys are sitting in the middle of the forest and draping narrative trees with spring solstice paper chains of reason, sanity, goodwill, hope, relief, healing, new beginnings and the higher truth of number theory. Meanwhile the Clintons gather again beyond the forest over the horizon, and whether the next nasty fight–and I predict North Carolina is going to be very nasty indeed–is the Ardennes (Clinton makes a terrific last push but is defeated) or the Wilderness (Clinton and Obama fight to a draw, inflicting serious wider damage) or Transalpine Gaul (Obama is Vercingetorix and Caesar Clinton triumphs) remains to be seen. But it’s going to be one hell of a story, and I’ve already got my plane ticket to Charlotte.

Mr/s President:
One of my goals for this debate is to fight what I see is an erosion of fiscal discipline in the budget. I think that we need to work harder to tie what is in this budget with what is actually going to be spent by the United States Government.
As a component of that work, I want to add an amendment — an amendment I intend to vote against, but an amendment that I think needs to be a part of the process – that will budget for some of the rhetoric we are hearing on the campaign trail. Three of these amendments could be offered, but I am just going to do one.
Sen. Obama has offered 188 campaign proposals that would add up to at least $300 billion in new annual spending. That has a 5-year cost of more than $1.4 TRILLION.
Of the 188 new spending proposals, the $300 billion price tag only covers 111 proposals. There are another 77 proposals with unknown cost estimates that will add billions to this number.
This new spending, if enacted, would represent an almost 10% increase over the President’s FY 2009 budget. To put this in perspective, this $300 billion spending proposals would cost more than 42 states’ budgets combined (general fund expenditures). It is more than the United States spent last year on imported oil ($294 billion net). It is more than 60% larger than any one-year federal spending increase, ever.
Who will pay for the proposed $300 billion increase in spending? Middle-class American taxpayers and small businesses (which are the engine of growth for our economy), that’s who. Raising taxes on just the “rich” simply won’t cover it.
Under Pay-Go budget rules, new spending or tax cuts are paid for by spending cuts or tax hikes. The CBO budget baseline already incorporates the extra revenue due to higher tax rates, so the end of the Bush tax cuts won’t pay for the proposed spending and still satisfy Pay-Go. Senator Obama has promised to pay for his record new spending increases with a tax increase on families making $250,000 and over. However, this increase would only yield $225 billion over 5 years, a far cry short of the $1.4 trillion required under his new spending plan.

So we will need to raise taxes on the middle-class and small businesses, or deficit spend.
According to CBO, President Clinton’s 1993 tax increase raised taxes $240.6 billion over five years. The late Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) called it the “largest tax increase in the history of public finance in the United States or anywhere else in the world.” But this proposal will increase spending $300 billion in a single-year!
To finance the first year of this proposed spending ($300 billion), Congress would need to increase taxes on the top 1% of taxpayers by 57%. Under that scenario, taxpayers with incomes over $365,000 would see a tax hike of at least $40,300 on top of what they currently pay! That is simply not realistic. So if Congress decides to widen the pool of taxpayers footing the bill, it would have to raise taxes on the top 5% by 38%; or the top 10% by 32%; or the top 25% by 26%; or the top 50% of taxpayers by 23%.
The top 50% of American taxpayers, who already pay 96.9% of all federal income taxes, are those who earn $31,000 (AGI) or more.
To translate this point into language everyone can understand: if you have an income of $104,000 or more, the plan will cause your tax bill to go up at least an additional $5,300 a year; if you have an income of $62,000 or more, the plan will cause your tax bill to go up at least $2,300 a year. This is on top of the $2,300 increase already assumed by the failure to extend current tax policy.
But we are not just looking at new spending. He also wants to balance the budget and stop spending the Social Security Surplus. If he follows through with these promises it would mean: The average taxpayer earning $62,000 would see their income tax bill rise $5,300 (61%); or The average taxpayer earning $104,000 would see their income tax bill rise by $12,300(74%)
The average taxpayer earning $365,000 would see their income tax bill rise by an astounding $93,500 (132%)! Keep in mind all these tax increases would be on top of the:
$2,300 tax increase 43 million families will feel when the current tax policy expires,
$2,200 tax increase seniors will experience when the current tax policy expires, and
$4,100 tax increase small business will have to pay when the current tax policy expires.
If such a massive hike is deemed politically un-doable, all of this staggering spending would simply be added to the federal debt each year, to the tune of over $1.4 trillion over five years. That debt would be passed along to our children and grandchildren, with interest.
I will oppose this. But I think we need to include these proposals in our budget debate.

# # #

I am sad, but nonetheless satisfied, at your decision to bow out. When the DNC curiously granted me a voting block of 75 super delegates to do with as I pleased (a “superman” delegate?), I am told you saw the writing on the wall, and the following letter therefore did not see the light of day. All the same, it may comfort you to now see its contents as it will hopefully satisfy you that the decision was well advised, and your consequent wisdom uncommon for so youthful a politician.

The issue was not that you had amassed more states and votes and delegates, but rather how you did so. Of course it is beyond argument that you had, as we all noted at the time, mojo and momentum. The more accurate descriptive, however, one more reflective of the actual public psychology, would label the response to your oratory for precisely what it was: infatuation. How often it is that well-intentioned parents take on the onerous responsibility of telling their son or daughter that the affair is of infatuation, not love; that there is simply insufficient experience. History is littered with the detritus of wrecked shot-gun marriages.

The political equivalent should be obvious to anyone with a flair for American history. Given the impetuous nature of Theodore Roosevelt (despite a genius for the written word that earned him a Nobel) we may be pleased that he served in a lower capacity (roughly the same sort of position in government as Churchill) and then as vice president prior to taking the reins at the untimely death of McKinley. We were not as lucky with another man sporting great and grand ideas, for Woodrow Wilson would not likely have invaded Mexico had he some experience under the belt. And he learned, in the hardest possible way, what Elliot “Ness” Spitzer learned in New York, what Hillary Clinton learned with her initial foray into health insurance legislation, and what you, Senator, can look forward to: gridlock and deadlock. All because they not only bear grand ideas but in addition consider themselves  somehow privileged to hand proposals to the legislature on a silver platter for swift passage. What utter nonsense. Spitzer now has as many enemies in his own party as in the other. Hillary is older and far wiser for her experience, and freely admits as much. You, Sir, have grand ideas and zero experience, and even more self-confidence than the rest. Add to this your youth and you will be barking up the wrong tree, as you fail to tell us how you intend to deal with the opposition that will amass against these grandiose plans. This is not a mere matter of “working across the isle”. Ask Bill Clinton to explain the point further.

Finally (at any rate it’s the last example I will mention), there is JFK. Too little experience and too young. Like others before and since, very bright. Unlike his youngest brother he doubtless had no need of tutors at Harvard. With a few more years under the belt he’d not as likely have countenanced the military’s view of a Cuban invasion.  With maturity he would not likely have favored nepotism regardless the merits of Bobby. Can you imagine Hillary attempting to install Bill as Attorney General? Now recall McCain’s remark concerning Obama’s offhand decision to unilaterally track Osama through Pakistan—as if negotiation, or prior permission, or perhaps the character of an ally (like it or not the term is correct) had no influence upon such a judgment. Recall the Bay of Pigs. Youth and confidence can spell danger despite intellect and despite the best of intentions. History speaks, and, as Santayana wisely remarked, it should be listened to if not blindly catered to.

You campaign as if tossing ideas was tantamount to their enactment; as if an anti-war conviction were equivalent to the judgment required to shoulder the reigns of government. Occasionally a piece of legislation allows the voice of conviction to hold sway. That is all to the good. As for the senators who voted to authorize force (99 of them?), they voted as experience, tradition, and prudence dictated. When a president asks authorization to employ force you grant it unless he is manifestly dimwitted or mentally dilapidated. When a president thinks seriously enough of an actual or potentially explosive situation, he expects from Congress a mandate, and, short of sheer wreckage of the system, s/he will get it. Had you, Senator, been with these others at the time of the vote, I wager approximately a billion to one you would have been one of the 99. If you don’t recognize why, you are too inexperienced to be a president. If you can honestly say you would have had reason to ledger a symbolic protest vote—fine, but you will find it hard convincing me of that one, buddy boy. Even anti-war dove Kerry voted for that original authorization.

Which makes all this talk of yours a little hypocritical—or should I say a little bit of the politics you loudly descry. And speaking of politics—You recognize experience and intelligence in campaign managers, which is fine, though it has zero to do with forming a cabinet (had you more experience you, too, would have carried the baggage of loyalty that has stunted Hillary). You have a heady sense of what a solid segment of the public is hungry to hear, which is bad, because you are as a child with a gun, and for the time being your cohort are as good as lemmings. Again, it isn’t that your ideas are necessarily bad, as in fact they are broadly excellent. But you are selling them as a done deal. The older women see clean through you. The students of history and those psychologically atuned likewise see through you. At your age, and with your experience, you have no business seriously contending for this office. The way politics has been played up to this point, a newbie runs with the understanding that the experience will garner name recognition and good vibes for a later more successful and serious candidacy. Perhaps you were playing that game. If so, bow out now and stick to that game plan.

Besides, supposing that Hillary doesn’t outright stumble, the super-delegates should have wised up somewhat by the time the convention rolls around, and if you haven’t vastly improved your form and substance, they will throw their votes fully in accord with the observations I have been making. The majority of them are well aware of these points, and their ultimate issue will be whether they harm your electability sufficiently to toss the decision to Hillary—which, for all the above reasons, will likely happen. Her current argument will gain in value with time, namely, large and/or industrial states are prerequisites to November success, and as she continues to demonstrate that advantage, on basics your caucus/mojo victories seem hollow indeed. After all, on many additional grounds they are just that.

Bowing out gracefully will spare everyone a mess at the convention and will leave a great taste in peoples’ mouths when you next run for your party’s nomination. Or, even better (if you have any sense at all, which doesn’t look likely as of now) you would be a shoe-in for the second spot on the ticket—the surest possible way to ensure the nomination down the road.

And this business of accepting the second spot requires a further note. When Hillary allowed the possibility of yourself as her running mate you should have taken it as the backhanded compliment that in part it was. The public is perfectly able to see slick ulterior motivations and your pointing them out only worsens the other error of failing to graciously accept the compliment. What on earth was wrong with “I am flattered, but it is a little early as we both vie for the first position on the ticket. And I might return the favor and indicate Hillary would almost certainly be on my short list.” But no, you acted bratty and self-absorbed; and further, your response displayed inconceivably poor political judgment (to those not laboring under infatuation).

What is wrong with truth and reason? Why not apply to yourself what you claim to offer your worshipers—say what needs to be heard, not just what is comforting or desired. How about saying to yourself, Self, you can’t in good reason or conscience equate a conviction (shallow though it is) with experience. Just grant her that and take up what she in turn cannot compete with. Demonstrate by how you will govern that your capabilities offset her experience. Demonstrating that you can get out the student vote doesn’t cut it. Demonstrating that blacks vote their ethnic pride rather than upon any more intelligent grounds, again, doesn’t cut it (they are making the Christian right look savvy).

Nor even do your vaunted arguments about electability count for much. McCain will invent what means he can’t find ready-to-hand to sway Independents formerly Republican.  Republicans of any stripe recognize the “Republican” strain aback both Clintons. When push comes to shove they will vote for the candidate most likely to get them a reasonable piece of what they want—ergo a “Republican-like” person. Chelsea goes around campuses saying her mom is more fiscally conservative than her father. When that sort of thing permeates the public consciousness maybe the wool will also lift somewhat. Republicans want what is safe for the Republican temperament. That is how they think, that is how they vote. Hillary will take the vast majority of the disaffected Republicans, whether or not officially Independent. These are people the majority of whom are frankly scared by the specter of an Obama presidency.

Much or your electoral lead is the result of caucuses, and they are nothing if not the evidence of infatuation. They mean next to nothing in the broad scheme of things. You got the anti-war vote, to be sure, despite the fact that your Senate votes imitate those of your opponent who is on that account disqualified in your eyes! Right. You got a fair amount of college-educated folks, especially the men, who doubtless appreciate someone who at least comprehends, like Edwards, how serious the lobbying issue is. But Clinton understands that, too—but she, unlike you, appears at least to be realistic. She knows that there are lobbyists who speak on behalf of very helpful and laudable groups and causes. Experience has doubtless taught her not to cut off the nose to spite the face. She also knows that lobbying will always remain with us, if with modifications here and there. The beginning of the end of lobbying as a problem is terminating the influence of corporate and interest group moneys: no moneys for campaign coffers, re-election caches in advance, etc. Why haven’t you bothered to thoroughly address this, if you deem it to be so vital to your candidacy?

Good Godfrey, you remind me of a revivalist pulpit-pounder, who spills venom on man’s sins but offers pitifully little counsel on how we can remedy our sinful nature. It is a little bit more complicated than “Believe!” If all I did as a preacher was to emphasize the rationale for man’s guilt, I would, if I had a conscience and wished to sleep at night, take up a different profession. You, Senator, are accomplishing the political equivalent. Cease and desist or demonstrate why, despite your youth and inexperience, we should take you seriously. For a Harvard graduate you are proving to be terribly shallow, what with putting political strategy ahead of speaking directly to the issues. For someone who is selling a departure from politics-as-usual, you appear as hypocritical as it gets. And after the mentoring of Lieberman, are you a closet Republican into the bargain? Even that portion of your health plan specifically at odds with Clinton has been called a “Republican talking point”. Sure, that goes a bit far, but where are the skeletons? That, Senator Obama, frankly worries me as much as the same tendency to be expected in Hillary. With her, what you see is pretty much what you get (another inexpressably helpful legacy of what we call “experience”). With you, all bets are off, and that is plainly worrisome to many of us out here.

Because of heedless mojo and a front-loading of states stupidly thinking that the first blush represents the true measure even of an unvetted candidate, we have arrived at this impass, at which we can sum up your approach in two words: Trust me. Okay, give me a reason why I should. As it seems you aren’t able or willing to do that, decency demands you call it quits and make life easier on us all.

In the West, references to wisdom are infrequent; and even when met with, arrive only indirectly.  Rarely might we refer specifically to Lincoln’s wisdom, or to the “Sage of Monticello”.  These are high compliments indeed, coming from a culture on whose lips the word “wisdom” is but rarely observed.  On the other hand we have sayings such as “a man for all seasons”, by which we imply the wisdom necessary to navigate the terrain of life, from rivulets to cataracts and all the formations in between, all of which I believe can be viewed as an assemblage of offices—platforms from which we variously address life’s crises in addition to all its assorted stations and duties, whether official or informal, whether at work or leisure, whether familial or social, whether religious or secular.

If the “Renaissance man” is a polymath, adroit at many things and at home in many places, the man for all seasons is likewise adroit, but is most noteworthy for brandishing, in many different circumstances, sound judgment.  It requires judgment to respond appropriately to life’s varied callings, and wisdom is, if it is anything, indelibly tied to that capacity to assize and respond with the benefit of experience and foreknowledge without which one cannot be assured of conduct fit for the present moment.  And whereas the Renaissance man acts upon matters largely material, whether sprung like gadgetry or bound as books, the man of wisdom is no less broad, but attends much more to matters of the spirit, where by ’spirit’ I refer to the embellishment aback the style in which knowledge and know-how are attained and brought to bear so as to be appropriate.  Style marks, as by a sign, the awareness—a kind of “spiritual awareness”—that  appropriateness is indeed at issue, and, furthermore, that such appropriateness is attended to with care, devotion and punctilious regard for the expectations of similarly sensible people.

We happily grant the authority of our highest offices of city, state and nation to those ‘men for all seasons’, knowing in advance that the phrase carries an idealized notion not to be located upon more than the occasional mortal.  In that, our conception of the great and wise man is no less than precisely mythic. For myths are not merely stories, and certainly are more the business of the social truism than the source of widely recognized falsity.  Myths are sometimes the statements of a culture’s ideals, wrapped in language fitting to such pinnacles, and intended for ears not likely ever to hear, nor with eyes ever to see, the exemplar.  Always and everywhere, however, myth establishes the rationale and/or the means by which to know one’s normative place and role, as well as what constitutes both the original and the ideal types of conduct, and we should for our part simply accept the fact that in reality our best business is to offer myth its greatest chance at success, the greatest degree of attainment, of which at any moment we are yet capable.  And as the years may favor us and enable us, so our responsibility to improve on our rendition of mythic prescription is increased commensurately.  For myth bespeaks the stewardship of an office.

“All men are created equal” is the quintessential American mythos, one that required off-and-on-again stewardship until it came upon Lincoln to declare the moment ripe to formulate, between the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation, the level of responsibility owed our dearest myth.  Even today we unconsciously grow in the recognition of human dignity and our responsibility grows along with it, that is to say, as a requirement of stewardship—of the grand office of “citizen”, whose meaning has been doing battle with cynicism and the abuse of office even as its responsibilities continually increase.  It is left to the “progressivist” agenda to nourish and promote that day when the myth shall have become as nearly a piece of reality as possible for men of peace and dignity.

Is there yet room for the common man in the rarefied harmonies of wisdom?  At a third remove from the grantor, the average Joe stands as the intended recipient of all that these myths inspire.  If aristocracies have nearly always claimed special privileges to represent the grantor’s meaning, it is not because they have had any better claim upon it than their servants.  Myth, even when culture-bound,  embraces within that sphere everyone equally.  The most primitive peoples have always been the most reliant on myth, and, not without good reason, upon pure democracy, and they were evidently also the proudest of their considered freedoms.  The Franks, for example, named themselves after their very word for  “freedom”.

When we say, as reasonably we do, that “rules are made to be broken”, we are restating the common view that presumes the better part part of wisdom to know that what is correct in one circumstance becomes inappropriate in another, so much so as to necessitate the extending or perhaps even the supplanting of rules, and the granting of otherwise remote exceptions to customary practice.  What stewardship does not permit, however, is for a man who has long employed Karl Rove to feign ignorance of the man’s methods while falsely gaining at the expense not merely of his opponents but of common sense and decency both.  What came to be known as the Geneva Conventions long existed in the minds of decent and generous people who had not the need be told that equivalents must prevail even in politics and economics (though we have had a president who cared not that the Geneva convention spelled out the impropriety of water-boarding, not without reason the selfsame beneficiary of Karl Rove.).

Pliny the younger expressed the general principle in quite appropriate terms: I do not permit of myself all that the laws permit of others.  Those who once stretch the envelope gain a perverse appreciation for the practice and turn it to something of an art form, a practice demonstrating Pliny’s wisdom as few other stupidities can.  It becomes the very height of cynicism to then defend such motivations on the basis that “rules are made to be broken” (or its fantastic equivalent: the Constitution is only a damned piece of paper).  People such as this turn truisms into canards, and myths into falsities.  Their abuse of stewardship is itself a powerful abuse of the actual office.  It is a standing denial that wisdom has anything to offer those who already have perfect motives and require to learn nothing more of relevance, for in their vaunted ideologies they are themselves as perfect as the gods on whom they freely rely for justification.  Into the bargain they turn religion to poison.

Wisdom, in light of all of this, can at some point find it not only possible, but necessary, to call a spade a spade even after a career carefully avoiding the effects of ill-chosen words.  Ronald Reagan is not to be faulted for (appropriately) naming the “evil empire”, or, in seeming contradiction to those words nonetheless (and appropriately) hosting their premier in our fair country as a gesture of peaceable intent.  The same marks of occasional wisdom (very often as occasional as lightening) cannot be offered in defense of the “triangle of evil” comment offered up by the present occupant, whose words revealed ignorance and impropriety both.  My remarks are warranted by wisdom as pointing out, publicly and critically, a man who deeply bruised and embarrassed the same country whose laws he once vowed to uphold and defend.

For a man, part of whose stewardship obligation is to rule on behalf of all the people, to curry favor solely and entirely, tirelessly, nay shamelessly, for the moneyed and propertied classes at the clear and evident expense of all the rest, such a one, I say, should not be mentioned in the same sentence with stewardship except that wisdom regards it an expedient sermon upon citizenship.  The behavior warranting such naked examination is not only not stewardship, it constitutes the public trashing of all that stewardship represents.

We take away another point: wisdom is not always as popular as it is necessarily appropriate, which may be one of the reasons why philosophers are not known for going overboard to win popularity contests.  Stewardship defends and upholds truths as well as offices.  Wisdom, as with philosophy, requires the courage of one’s convictions as much as the generosity of spirit that freely grants the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed it is the better part of wisdom to distinguish and apply the difference between these two.  Too many liberals are entirely too kind in their easy-going friendliness and forgetfulness; too many conservatives are overly preoccupied with the polite turn of phrase while digging deeper the knife into another’s back.  If this is all too typical of the human condition, we all desperately require a lesson in wisdom.

The present success of Mike Huckabee among Iowa Republicans should serve as a clarion call to action. Liberals should raise their voices in opposition to this stunning, if perhaps expected, event. America, for whatever its improvements in the bigotry category, has nonetheless a ways to go before intelligent and reasonable human beings can avoid the strong temptation to apply the “M-word” to these religionists in our midst.

Conservatism has always been a comfortable home and haven for morons—er, for the fanatical amongst us. It offers an oasis of sorts for all manner of religious ignorance and anti-intellectualism. To say nothing of bigotry and intolerance. To say nothing of war-mongering and hyper-patriotic Exceptionalism.

Given the similarity of mindset occupying the conservative and religious Weltanschauungs, one may be forgiven if we lump them together for an evening of epithet-tossing. Let’s start with “moron” and see where it goes from there.

In a recent Huffington Post essay, James Moore remarks, “Religion Matters: Why Mike Huckabee Will Win the GOP Presidential Nomination.” Such a posture would be laughable and preposterous except that it may well be correct. It does not make me proud to be an Iowan myself to think that my former fellow citizens have set this jerk upon the national scene with a badge of authenticity.

It is one thing to be against abortion; intelligent people can differ even on penetrating matters such as this. No liberal calls conservatives or religionists “moronic” for such a position. It matters not to a liberal that but few of us maintain that view; since our liberal principles remind us that issues with substantially equal justice on either side must be viewed as a class apart from those other issues in which one of the partisan positions is manifestly (and properly condemned for being) foolish, boorish, crude and—moronic.

As an independent scholar who is gay and disabled, I fall in for no inconsiderable flack from conservative and religious ministries. I am acutely aware, for example, of the inherent and endemic bigotry of Mormons toward gays. It matters not that Harry Reid is the nominal head of the democrats, he qualifies as a moron by that single reality. Mitt Romney, already a moron for a host of other causes, could only be expected to marshal the stupidity common to Mormonism. In my Kabalistic moods I wonder if there isn’t a mathematical or mystical relation between the similarity in the words Mormon and Moron. They differ by one letter only, the one that divides the alphabet. As between the two words, this letter divides the world between stupid freaks and religious freaks. But they are both stupid, freakish and moronic.

Some will say, even some of my fellow travelers on the liberal side, that in speaking thus I commit many of the sins I rail against. I regularly tell them to grow up and get a grip. Calling someone a gay is no grounds for libel when that person is a known gay (Buckley wasn’t rendered a million dollars lighter for calling Gore Vidal gay, he was trimmed because the word he used, “faggot”, presupposed a false characterization of those who happen to be gay). Calling people morons, and specifying these labels as broad generalities, is neither wrong nor even imprudent so long as there is sufficient evidence that the people are just as they are labeled. If liberals can’t determine the validity of a reasonable definition, upon that basis I tell them to grow up. My work is philosophy. I have next to no appetite for those who are without stomach for the proper use of words and their reasonable definitions.

So let’s begin with what stupidity is, and what a moron is. Let us place them first within and between two contexts, that of values and that of principles. Values, like beauty, exist in the eye of the beholder. Art and aesthetics are rather more grounded in principles, for in each of these, despite the immense variation within the category, principle rules, and as such we must confess a fundamental objective reality in the designation. Not all that has beauty is either artful or aesthetic (the “beautiful people” are rarely so by the usual standards evidenced in principle, for example), even as we happily admit that much of the latter has formal (if not always pleasant) associations with the former.

Stupidity doesn’t recognize the difference between values and principles and couldn’t care less at the consequences. Morons place great truck in the differences between principles and values and set values above principle at all cost, even going to far as to redefine value as the ground of principle itself, as if redefining words could excuse the ensuing culpability.

Conservatives and religionists are stupid when they refuse to credit scientific theory; moronic when they not only dismiss it but deliberately hold out against it; and that to the point of holding up the Bible as evidence against science, and of family values likewise. I don’t need fellow liberals complaining at my use of words. If they can better my definitions let them try. If they are better philosophers let them defend themselves against me.

Academics are stupid when they presume that unaffiliated persons are comparatively dull. To be careful, let me qualify the error of false generalization and put it this way: they are correct to suppose a likelihood that unaffiliates are less knowledgeable and definitely correct if to this they add that the intellectual paraphernalia is just not there to easily permit a comparable display of knowledge (which is largely because the academic community has seen to it that unaffiliates have no reasonable access to advanced research materials). They are dead wrong if they suggest that it simply is too unlikely that anyone not in academia has the chutzpa to add materially to the core of knowledge. I challenge any academic to match my credentials and accomplishments. Some few will. The rest I can demolish in short order.

Academics are morons when, in addition to holding others to be stupid, they present themselves as being so far better than they actually are that they cannot be bothered to conceive of the notion that their accomplishments pale beside those of any number of unaffiliated scholars (ask Ken Wilber for his opinion on this topic)—when, that is to say, they go out of their way to protect their sanctimonious stature by directly and indirectly prohibiting any independent scholar from a reasonable hearing; when they work with administrators to ensure that independents never get published in professional journals.

Academic hold an office, that of scholarship, and, like all other offices, this one requires to be stewarded. Their stewardship of this office is a calamitous failure. Their office calls not only for teaching and research, but for “service”. Read, “service to the broader community.” Read, “service to unaffiliates”. What about service do too many academics not understand?

But why do I bring up academics in this discussion? Are they not generally taken to be liberal? Do they not typically posit principle as equal to (or even above) value? Yes, they do usually vote with the liberals, though not as often as one may think. And yes, they do prefer principle to murky realms of questionable value. But with the good comes the bad when conservative habits enter the field unabated. It is a conservative feature common to insecure, parochial and patronizing attitudes that fosters the notion that they are God’s gifts to intelligence, God’s gifts to humanity, that they deserve tall status and lots of perks (if society nonetheless refuses them the kind of pay they feel themselves to deserve).

I am speaking, in sum, of a species of elitism. Now there is relatively innocuous elitism and then there is the bad stuff, and it is the bad stuff to which I here refer (of the difference I have written elsewhere). Elitism is the influence of a naturally occurring conservative disposition even with the nominally liberal amongst us. Elitism is conservative for the same reason that any anti-intellectualism (or anti-progressive) is: conservatives wish to conserve what seems uniquely deserving to themselves, even to the point of stripping others of the very rights to the like consideration. They hog the very prerogatives that they spout off as universal in other contexts. No academic will tell you in public that they favor dismissing the rights of independent scholars. They may be stupid and moronic, but they aren’t dumb. God gave them the means to know the difference.

Religionists share this conservative trait and add the worst sins of Republicanism into the bargain. That is why they are anti-evolutionist. They associate such tenets with what they take as a challenge to something they feel themselves to uniquely deserve—the absolute moral upbringing of their children, for example, or the right to be free of drunkards or street people, or simply to be free of the low-brow, to the extent that they downgrade the public schools, keeping them endemically poor and incapable of doing their tasks for the unworthy of society. Conservatives have always and everywhere avoided the poor and downtrodden because that is what they least desire to be forced to identify with. For the good conservative what is out of sight is out of mind. They think (as only morons can) that if only they can think others out of mind, that they have the right to legally keep others out of sight. Which, translated, means a frank denial of the very rights that every good conservative believes to vote.

Therein lies the tie between the anti-intellectualism of academics (counter-intuitively) and religionists (as expected). The liberal is distinct because he or she has been morally and ethically elevated above this inherent disposition. The liberal has taken principle to trump values that would allow such mean conservatism to rule our conduct. So for a liberal to complain at my language or arguments is something I accept rather as I would an insult. I tell them to grow up and get a grip.

Morons, practically by definition, are uniquely hypocritical. They fully realize that the rights they deny to others are those they would reserve to themselves. This is the worst insult pressed upon others by the elitists of either political stripe. Most of these are good Republicans, but there are sufficient in the other camp to make my stomach nauseous and skin to crawl. I personally know, for example, the daughter of a great philosopher who was regrettably elitist. At least he also stood up for general principles (especially for women) even when he denied the general public the rights to respectability on other grounds. His daughter, also a good card-carrying liberal, is also a not too small sliver off the old block. She is unreservedly status-mongering and, equally obnoxiously, she is categorically elitist. While she is happy that her father gave me a hearing, she is not willing to lift a finger to support the very accomplishments which her father acknowledged with a strongly worded recommendation. Precisely to be expected from an elitist, but without reservation, it is admittedly counter-intuitive coming from a diehard liberal. But it happens, and all liberals should be aware of the tendency and fight manfully against it.

Another conservative trait is the extravagant extension of an otherwise very civil and decent behavior: upholding the perquisites of one’s fellow travelers, whether of one’s social group, political affiliation, family tree, or profession. Conservatives have a disposition to transform a mutual self-help relationship into a self-serving mutual admiration society. Academics, lawyers, doctors, all the professions alike, get into the act. Many of the results are the same as what we come to expect from elitism, including the disenfranchising of students, clients, and patients from their rights.

Religionists are, of course, the very worst, and some of the results are so elliptical and obtuse as to verily make the head spin. Reporters covering the campaign of Mike Huckabee in Iowa report that the evangelicals are plenty pleased to dismiss the requirement of critical thought in favor of presuming a fellow evangelical to be one in whom one may feel free to place their total trust, no questions asked. This is the attitude that got George Bush elected. Twice. If anyone thought that morons learn from past mistakes (and many evangelicals acknowledge Bush to have been one such), please do think again about that proposition.

Morons uniquely fail to learn from past mistakes, since all of their mistakes are related to the values that they feel make them special in God’s grand designs; to wit, they can never make a mistake as long as they believe it is in the interest of all that should be conserved—their and their God’s special uniqueness and claims upon the world. And so the same story unfolds once again in the person of Huckabee. Nothing will change until everyone with a thinking mind calls a spade a spade and publicly (and privately, to their faces) dispenses the “M” word. Shame and condign ridicule are all that will ever, in the end, make a dent in their specious and dangerous mentality. They will pretend that shame cannot reach them. They will deny and deny some more, as it is in the manner of mentally unfit people to consistently deny the obvious. And these diehard Republicans, these evangelicals, both alike are mentally unfit. Both will ultimately respond to shame when they realize they have lost the ability to force their ways upon others.

When liberals tell me not to demean my principles by reducing myself to their level, I have one piece of advice. Grow up and get a grip.

Religious freakazoids, and far too many Republicans are, still to this day and time, oblivious to the science and common sense surrounding the causes and characteristics of homosexuality.

Evangelicals had to be led by the hand to Alaska so that they could see for themselves the harms perpetrated by man’s cupidity. It was insufficient to read about it in articles or books or in the news. All of those are, after all, merely liberal propaganda. It is just one of the harms abetted by anti-intellectualism, that conservative defense of all one holds dear to oneself and to be kept from all others not of the correct wealth, color, status, or sexual orientation.

Personally, I have had enough of Republicans, conservatives and evangelicals and I say that it’s past time to call a spade a spade. Are you with me? Or do you merely require to grow up and get a grip?

Michael Dell, like so many other executives, is staking his company’s future on success in China. It reminds me of another strategy that has always had its adherents—buying your way out of debt. Betting the barn on China has a similar logic and is likely to have similar effects.

It’s not that there aren’t temporary benefits to be had. It’s just that the long-term prospects are so worrisome. Three problems loom large: bad faith, bad blood and bad odor.

More and more U.S. firms are caught with their pants down, trying to suck up to their Chinese masters all the while these same masters oversee opportunism at the expense of everyone but—well, the overseers. China is out for number one, and that means China. But this is no average game of well, let the boys be boys, economics is, after all, rough and tumble, etc. No, this is reality 101, and America has boycotted the classes. The Chinese are not out to win economic contests. They are out for economic supremacy. Remember when Khrushchev banged his shoe on the podium at the U.N. and declared his countrymen’s desire to “bury” the U.S. (economically)? Well, it was a genuine threat that meant a whole lot more than winning over markets. It meant strategic supremacy and nothing less. Ditto for China.

Question to Michael Dell: What is it about “Communist” that you don’t understand? When you left college for business, did you forget to continue your education? Have you read anything on this minor matter of “Red Storm Rising”? I’ll be more than happy to educate you. Educated people do not stake their mascara, far less their businesses, on China. Companies falling over backwards to be friendly with China are demonstrating the worst kind of bad faith both to the American public and, ultimately, to their own interests. (Why is it that Republicans are so fond of doing what they so dearly love to convince others to do—vote and act against their own interests. Will Republicans never learn?)

The Chinese are “gaming” the system. Does Michael Dell not understand the meaning of this phrase? Or is individual lucre so much more relevant to democratic values than the very system whose freedoms permit such malarkey? Ultimately, economic policies vie with politics for the honors of the dunce cap. When they work as a positive feedback system—a self-feeding spiral in the wrong direction—the result is bad blood. U.S. politics operates via the government of George Bush as if its raison d’etre was to serve corporate interests here and abroad, somewhat after the fashion that the legal system exists to ensure our rights and liberties.

It doesn’t dawn on anyone until it’s way too late that letting the big boys play their unregulated games is forcing the hand of American foreign policy in directions that make intelligent folks cringe. Ultimately the coincident forces of greed and political depredation turn the best of motives into bad blood. The Chinese know they have the upper hand and will play their hand accordingly. As America becomes more and more angry, and more and more helpless to enjoin reasonable solutions, China ratchets up its plans, putting out the good neighbor posture all the while executing an occasional businessman just to let the folks back home know that China means business with its businessmen.

Bad blood means saber rattling and a war of words while we dig in deeper and China buries us with the backhoe that American dollars make available. Bad blood means an angry public with a helpless government. It means posturing politicians and a falling dollar. It means shoddy products and corporate lobbying through the roof. It means lost jobs and dislocations. It means, in short, that Michael Dell’s policy works into this catastrophe-in-the-making as surely as buying your regular supply of cocaine supports the murderous thugs who kill wantonly and threaten police and government officials at will in order to maintain their hegemony. Verily I say to you: American corporations are selling America to the Devil and they couldn’t care less. If money is at stake it’s all okay. American industry has become the latest and most dangerous cartel, making the most obscene profits at the expense of its own citizens—at the expense even of our foreign policy and national security.

Surrounding it all is an odor worse than rotting flesh. No educated American needs to be told about the stench arising from the Chinese and American governments. Americans in general need to take a strong whiff of this malodorous conspiracy of corporate and government interests over the health and welfare of the citizenry. Iraq has not exactly made us popular in the world. But our business interests and the governmental policies offering a blank check to all manner of corrupt management practices have for a long while assured a pejorative tone of voice whenever “America” is ventured in a conversation abroad. Of course some of this is hypocritical, since other governments are on the China bandwagon, especially Japan. But at least they understand the Oriental mindset just enough to force the inspection of products on-site. That they are egregiously advancing a communist regime doesn’t appear, however, to hinder Japanese moral obloquy any more than our own. And it all just reeks.

Question to Michael Dell: What did your business do by way of successful marketing before the dawn of the China card? What is your business doing wrong that better policies in friendlier environments might not address? What is your excuse for avoiding basic economic and citizenship responsibilities right here? You are demonstrating only that you can’t take the heat in the kitchen so off to China you go. That’s as cheap an approach as the products you are soon to dump on the American market. Next you’ll be opening bank accounts where taxation is averted–if you don’t already cotton to this obscene practice. Where, Michael Dell, is your moral compass? Where are your guts and go-get-’em attitude that once served you so well?

Well, now’s as good a time as any to get in trouble. O.J. is at it again, as it were, but wait a minute: he just might have been set up.

Setting aside racial issues, setting aside legal issues (former New York Supreme Court judge Harold Rothwax, for one, some of you may recall, was pretty certain O.J. was guilty as charged in his murder trial), and setting aside a love affair with sports/Hollywood heroes, and finally, setting aside a sadistic tendency to put well-heeled miscreants behind bars upon any, even the flimsiest, evidence…setting aside all of that, what, if anything, remains?

I’ll tell you precisely what remains.

In two words: Bipolar Disorder.

Now let me try to stay as far away from the worst trouble as I can manage. In saying we should be looking to bipolar disorder for answers, I am not claiming to offer a diagnosis at arm’s length (and without that hallowed license to practice). What I am going to do is ask you to observe some traits common to those with bipolar disorder, and then suggest, perhaps strongly, that maybe that many bipolar traits should lead anyone with half a brain to an obvious possibility. So let’s be clear: bipolar is brought up as a possibility, not as a clinical fact. I am not prepared to tell anyone that O.J requires Depakot or Lamictal; I am prepared, however, to suggest that he, or those close to him, think seriously of paying a physician a visit.

Here’s a hypothetical. Suppose O.J. was actually set up. Does that by itself release him from any and all culpability? Heavens no!!!

If the whole thing was intended as a set-up, O.J. was perfectly pleased to interpret the situation in a manner as favorable to himself as possible. That included, apparently, the option to take the law into his own hands. Was it right for O.J. to bring a band of thugs along, ostensibly to put the fear of god into others as foolish as himself? Was it really O.J.’s place to offer an ultimatum (supposing this to be accurate)—hand over the merchandize or someone else will call the police? Was it meet for O.J. to presume, for whatever reason, that the police could never be counted on? Was it intelligent for O.J. (supposing it be true) to suggest the media be brought along to record the ‘sting’ operation?

No, I haven’t taken that from a textbook of psychiatry. If you don’t like what you read here, please feel free to blame the author. But before getting carried away (see below) you might wish to know that I am on disability for bipolar disorder (it ought rather be called what it is, namely, a ‘disease’), and I therefore tend to think I know a little more about the issue than some armchair psychiatrist.

These acts were, at a minimum, utterly foolish. They were the thoughts and actions that typify a bipolar personality, even, more especially, someone with frank bipolar disease. Let’s go through them one by one: the very notion that one could take a matter of questionable legality and settle the matter beyond the reach of those who have a special interest in such things, is really, to get to the bottom of it, a case of sacrificing scruples in favor of expedience. In the listing of bipolar traits I have recently compiled, ‘scruples for expedience’ is a ‘first tier’ trait.

Bringing along a coterie of like-minded thugs is nothing less nor more than getting carried away, in the sense specifically of over-reacting. If all was as innocent as advertised, why the show of force? But a bipolar is not one to let a lesson slide by unnoticed. A bipolar is very apt to get carried away thinking of delicious ways to advertise one’s pique (and agenda?) to the opposition. One example of over-reacting is going to extreme lengths to ‘rub it in’. And over-reacting is also another ‘first tier’ trait.

Handing over an ultimatum is not just a little like throwing one’s weight around. In this drama O.J. presumes himself to be in total control; he calls the shots, he makes the call, he is the ‘decider’. And he has decided that the miscreants are wrong if they have to give up the loot, and still more wrong if they prefer the police. Gotcha!! Regardless of the methods employed, all is well for O.J.’s team because the miscreants are soooo in the wrong, and don’t they just know it! And in any event, no one is going to be calling the police (in theory)—right?

But, with the aid of hindsight, O.J. has only demonstrated what diagnosticians refer to as impaired insight, another first tier trait. He ought to have understood that to the extent he allowed himself to look like the guilty party, to that extent the others were all the more likely to talk to the authorities. With the publicity and temptation to cash in, how could anyone have thought no one would rat? At least a couple of the actors were sometime buddies. His expectations regarding their behavior left much to be desired, and adds measurably to the issue of impaired insight.

The excessive manner in which he took control of the situation calls up a number of classic bipolar traits. He was vindictive, vengeful and spiteful all in one. The first two are first tier traits, the last is a ‘second tier’ trait. Further, he was clearly brow-beating those guys, over-asserting his authority, behaving very aggressively and impulsively into the bargain. The last three are first tier traits, the first is a second tier trait. In the tapes leaked to the press (or sold??) we hear a guy with a mouth filthier than Richard Nixon himself. This is an attempt to add emphasis, to exaggerate and embellish, to get (expressively) carried away. But note as well how loud he gets. He could have gotten the same ideas across with a lower volume snarl. This is no calm and collected anger, it is showy and flashy, the sort of thing expected from an explosive personality. But a good bipolar wants expressive umph, and volume will always elevate with involvement. That’s five more first tier traits. His pretension to innocence is just that, pretentiousness; his presumption of self-righteousness is just that, presumptuous. Both are second tier traits.

O.J himself said that the police had never been impartial and could hardly be trusted, if they were indeed interested at all, in anything that might speak to his upright character or his desire to see some element of justice done. Here is more of that self-righteous attitude that superficially reminds us of vanity (2nd tier) or self-advertising (1st tier).

But the real bogeymen here are the paranoia and conspiratorial aspects (both first tier) of his thought processes. It is one thing to suspect the police of prejudice, rather another to expect the height of impartiality directed toward a guy with his rap sheet. Furthermore, why would a guy who can get the slickest lawyer money can buy be afraid of demonstrating in court, once again, the sad disposition of cops to lean hard on a black dude? If O.J. is trying to suggest that the police have no interest in fraud or grand larceny, he needs more therapy than most of us in our very worst moments. The ‘out to get me’ attitude is frankly paranoid, and few are the serious bipolars without a healthy dose of it. The disposition toward conspiratorial thought is second nature to a paranoid mindset. It hardly seems unreasonable to suppose that on being told what the sellers of his memorabilia were up to, he would smell a conspiracy. Most people tend to over-react to the possibility of a conspiracy against their interests, and a bipolar is disposed to see it far away and over-react relative to anyone else.

Suggesting the media be brought along smacks of overkill (another variety of over-reaction), and is further evidence of impaired insight, since there is no reason to think any media outlet would touch an O.J. ‘sting’. Even were that faintly possible, he’d have been better advised to bring along the police instead. Would not the media far prefer a feeding frenzy with O.J. at the center of—suspicion?

More can be said beyond those obvious questions. That this cast of characters consisted of present or prior acquaintances brings into play in the most obvious manner another first tier trait. It has been referred to in the case of alcoholics and druggies who prefer their own kind to hang with: ‘peer clustering’. But it has a further application many would never know of unless they were bipolar themselves or who lived with one. Bipolars, even schizophrenics, have a striking tendency to seek out others of similar personality, whether as friends, associates or even mates. It doesn’t take too much to see numerous tell-tale signs in every one of his buds.

Just look at one of the many commonalities: they all have rap sheets. I don’t recall seeing a clean soul in the bunch. A talent for finding trouble, up to and including criminality, are two additional first tier traits. (Let me add that the presence of these traits needn’t mean that most bipolars posses them, only that where the trait is in evidence with other bipolar traits the odds increase astronomically, making them first tier traits.) Many bipolars aren’t diagnosed until they are directed by a judge to undergo evaluation consequent to disruptive or criminal behavior. Prison populations are grossly disproportionate in the percentage of mentally ill.

Finally we can observe O.J.’s behavior subsequent to arrest. This is the calm, cool and collected O.J. What a marvelous contrast from the ranting man in the hotel room! This is O.J. the actor, with a little lawyerly coaching. Really, though, O.J. needs no coaching in this department. Like a good bipolar, this guy has a talent for being disingenuous (2nd tier) and a still greater talent for spreading charm, all part of an extensive repertoire of affected conduct (the latter two are first tier).

Having nothing more to go on than a couple days worth of media reports, we garner no fewer than twenty-one first tier traits and six second tier traits. Can you guess what will happen if we examine his long litany of past excursions? The number of 911 calls to the police from his former wife were not for nothing. He could explode into a fearful rage, to say nothing of stalking and other modalities of threatening behavior, these latter being examples of relentless pursuit of ego self-satisfaction, disinhibition, over-protectiveness, with a vicariously controlling nature (measures that allow for the pretension of control where direct control is not available).

One could go on for a while longer, but hasn’t the point been made? Add up these traits and ask yourself how many are normal. Sure, any one of us, in a really bad moment, may lay claim to a few of these traits. They are, after all, very broadly disseminated in the gene pool. Note also that a few of the traits are actually very desirable, if only they were not utilized for self-serving purposes. But when they are all aggregated together, and when most of the ugly traits are so frequent as to seem like actual character faults, we have the makings of one sick puppy dog.

If you want at least some portion of the reason behind his past and present behavior, think bipolar, and you will be wiser for the effort. If you want to know why he is a hero for many, again think bipolar. His sports and broadcasting careers alone bring to mind many excellent traits very frequently characterizing the bipolar, and, naturally, not just a few ‘normals’. Here is a small sampling: exuberant, optimistic, goal-oriented, self-confident with high self esteem, redoubtable and charismatic, with a take-charge, can-do attitude. He (or she) will often be gracious and vivacious, with a personality that is intense, adventuresome, indefatigable and intrepid, fun-loving and industrious. The bipolar is typically driven to excel, is well-spoken (expressive), humorous, often the life of the party (gregarious), and just as often elegant and stylish. That’s another twenty-two traits, the majority being in the first tier. In all likelihood they speak, to the last one, of our beloved O.J.

Today in Salon.com there appeared a cartoon. Not funny so much as sufficiently pointed to be at least delicious. Then along comes a silly Republican…

Conservatives as hypocrites…
As a conservative, I am deeply disturbed by the actions of some of these other so called conservatives who have had allegations brought upon them. At the same time, I realize that there still exists a group of conservatives that stand committed to their ideals and values. For this reason, I hope that you progressive thinkers out here can come to your senses and realize that there will always be a few bad apples in a bushel. Don’t pin the actions of these few people on the entire Republican Party. Just as you push forward for eliminating prejudice amongst certain ethnicities, races, and sexes due to certain stereotypes, you should stand opposed of prejudice against conservatives for this stereotyping. Thanks for your time.
– mcb1025

I thought I’d step into the fray…

mcb1025 enters with a compliment to the point made by a liberal, then does everything in his power to sideswipe that very answer. How sincerely Republican of the guy!

The title of this letter suggests what I think of his logic. What logic?
This reminds me of another segment of the Republican party I dearly luv to put down, namely, the Log Cabin Republicans. Years ago Barney Franks gave a speech in which he not only decried the Republican position on homosexuality, but went the extra mile and attributed the issue generally to the party faithful as a whole–a constituency, mcb1025.

Republicans–here’s another great generality that happens to hold good–have made a habit of accepting the most conniving gays just so long as they play by the Republican play book and that includes “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (you guys apparently don’t want anyone realizing that you can work with the self-same people who you elsewhere accuse of taking the country to hell in a hand basket). Just more hypocrisy piled on more hypocrisy. What’s truly difficult to swallow about you Republicans is your supercilious hypocrisy!! And YOU, mcb1025, think that since YOU are to be exempted, that the majority of your fine fellows are just peachy? What planet are you from, dude?

People like Andrew Sullivan (i.e. of the Log Cabin bent) make my skin crawl. As if Liberals had nothing intelligent to say about economics or government (that any Republican could vote for even after being separated from moralizing matters). The better way of looking at this isn’t that there are a few rare decent Republicans, of course there are. The point might be better taken were we to point out that most liberals don’t cotton to the far left, to conspiracy theories, to hating America, etc.–which seems to be the Republican mantra, ergo, all liberals are of a feather. All the same, it takes a Republican to make one nearly embarrassed to say we’re Americans…

One last thing. Liberals didn’t vote for George Bush. Point taken? Liberals have standards of tolerance and generally informed rationality as their mental platform. As mcb1025 did properly note, we don’t care a lot for bigotry and so forth. Republicans who can make an admission such as that ought to wonder why they are Republicans in the first place. By voting for your glorious party you are supporting those folks you wish to be distinguished from. Voting solid Republican supports their platform and makes you a co-defendant. Good godfry, what is it about Republicans and bigotry that you haven’t figured out by now?
– c s herrman

Alec Baldwin wrote a post for the HuffingtonPost today.  Here’s how his mercifully short piece began: “I feel sorry for Larry Craig. Truly.”

Okay, Alec, thanks for being, well, gay-friendly, but let’s get a grip.  Yes, it is sad and pitiful for a person to live a lie, to resort to public bathroom sex, public parks and the rest, but it stops being sorrowful and sad and pitiful once the hypocrisy flows full kilter, when you turn up the volume on homophobia and do your utmost to plow through Congress the most hateful legislation possible.  Alec, dude, I gotta luv your Christian attitude, but you have missed the boat on this one, fella.

A little ways down on the first page of comments came this, from one Halsey:

jig..and those above… I truly believe that is the opportune moment for Democrats (or whatever party)..to take the high road.. show the compassion that even Craig himself is not capable of. No satire (shame on YOU Keith Olberman.you lost a lot of points with me…). This is a tragedy..must more so than the Foley (underage pages!)..debacle.. I’d LOVE to hear Edwards come out and say..”leave this man alone..to work on his personal crisis with his family”…

I have a dark thought..that Craig should be on suicide watch. This is too much for a conflicted person to deal with. I don’t, for a moment, condone his attitude toward the gay community..but he’s done MORE FOR the Gay community by this involuntary act..than Barney Frank could ever do.

That was enough for me. I angrily penned the following comment that will, if they accept it, appear immediately below Halsey’s knee-jerk trash—

Gotta love it when lefties get tears in their eyes for Republicans. Here’s a definition of reality for you: Craig would do everyone a favor if he DID commit suicide! Think of the advertising! Think of the Republican hypocrites who might start concentrating their thoughts on decency! Think of John Q who would start seriously appreciating that living the lie carries deep penalties way down into the soul.

Who in this country (outside of gays and gay-friendlies) doesn’t need the wake-up call that a Republican suicide could inspire! After the people killed on our highways, anyone who thinks I care a whit for a F_____ Republican who has done nothing but try to make my whole life miserable, needs a better therapist than I’ve been able to locate.

Let the damn hypocrites shake and quake in their rotten boots! It’s time for lessons to be learned, dammit! Without a few Republican suicides all this will be carefully swept under the carpet and forgotten ’till the next time. Nothing changes until death concentrates the mind. Bring it on, Craig, get a nice sharp knife and do it right. Give it up for god, country, momma and apple pie–and rot where you presume the gays are destined to fly in a hand-basket. This weep-for-a-Republican nonsense is just that, nonsense. Pls get a grip.