iPod Picks Up Yoda?

I was just lounging listlessly at my bus stop last night, trying to look even half as cool as the dozen folks around me, all but one twenty years younger than I, while still grokking (ok, yes, occasionally leering at) the remarkable human spectacle passing by. Truthfully, the holiday may have upped the ante 30%. I admit capes and exposed upper thighs are rare most days.

Perhaps it was an errant cosmic ray that led me to crank up the iPod lest Anka or Sedaka or the like (and yes, I have discs by both and enjoy them when the time is right) gift me with an ear-worm.

What I got were back-to-back signature tunes for the respective campaigns. Or so I concluded. First up was Garth Brooks, swaggering on about going "Against the Grain." Yeehaw! I have gotten a kick out of Garth's music and at times even his over-the-top persona for years, while realizing that more traditional country performers I also favor have often looked askanc

Folks call me a maverick
Guess I ain't too diplomatic
I just never been the kind to go along
Just avoidin' confrontation
For the sake of conformation
And I'll admit I tend to sing a different song
But sometimes you just can't be afraid
To wear a different hat
If columbus had complied
This old world might still be flat
Nothin' ventured, nothin' gained
Sometimes you've got to go against the grain

[...]

Does that remind you of a certain tweedle-dee and -dum, at least in terms of their self-descriptions? It sure does me.

Of course we know in the case of Mr. Dee that it all boiled down to being constipated, spoiled, and unable to do nuances or ever revisit a Decider moment. I believe the polls make it very clear what sentient, non-authoritarian, i.e. stable folks with a healthy ego and self-esteem think of a president whose perhaps sole public attempt at an apology was his woeful, actually pitiable skit of looking for WMDs behind the curtains in the Soiled House.

As for Mr. Dum, he may have had a brief (faint) chance at a cameo with James Arness back a good long spell. Lately of course, he will sell out any principle at the slightest hint that another might sell better. Independence or even principles have long departed. This brightened my day a good deal:

In Colorado later this afternoon, Barack Obama will pounce on Dick Cheney's endorsement of John McCain earlier today. From the prepared remarks:

I'd like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington's biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney's support.

But here's my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain's going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?

Colorado, we know better. After all, it was just a few days ago that Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a "common philosophy." And we know that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain and Dick Cheney share a common philosophy that thinks that empty bluster from Washington will fix all of our problems, and a war without end in Iraq is the way to defeat Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So George Bush may be in an undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush's economic policy and Dick Cheney's foreign policy -- but that's a risk we cannot afford to take.

A huge gift.

Oh, indeed. But so much for Against the Grain.

Next up was Marvin and Tami doing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." This was when it occurred to me that the pod was channeling something!

Cause baby there
Ain't no mountain high enough
Ain't no valley low enough
Ain't no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you babe

Now if you paid any attention at all to that 30-minute rehab session Wednesday night you should understand how this had me thinking my little toy was suddenly connecting with the cosmos. I resorted to handkerchief more than once Wed., so moving it was to see a person who so obviously cares about others, is not so hung up on ego and self-infatuation that he can't admit personal foibles, and offers so much hope of working with us to move on.

[Aside: I believe the next tune that iPod brought up was "Sister Morphine." So much for my muse! "Here I lie, in my hosptial bed . . ."]

And, while I was dutifully collecting all this audio data for later processing and analysis leading to above, my bus passed the marquee of one of the few remaining slightly naughty First Avenue venues in Seattle. Ever-so-topical, this featured "We Forgot Our Costumes" on one side and "Happy Halloweenie" on the other. There you go!

I'm a linear critter in general, but when the stakes are high, I can multiprocess.

Turning to the Palin soap opera, it's hard to know where to focus. I settled on this episode, more tasteful than others I have encountered, but must admit that staging and details are unclear and stretch this poor bear's brain. This particular account courtesy the admirable Ms. Walsh at Salon, who I believe features video that I cannot access that might clarify how this happened:

This is painful to listen to. You know I'm always in danger of feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah Palin. But she might have known she was being pranked by Quebec comedy duo Masked Avengers when a comedian posing as French president Nicolas Sarkozy talked about going hunting with Palin by helicopter, and exclaimed, "I just love killing those animals, taking away life, that is so fun!" He also asked if Joe the Plumber was her husband, and told her he enjoyed "the documentary they made on your life, 'Nailin' Palin,' that was really edgy," a reference to a recent Palin-inspired porn film.

[...]

Thanks for hanging in here with me, especially those of you bombarded by my stuff. I mean that both in the sense of this post and in general. It's been a stretch for me to overcome instinctive inhibitions and let my inner blabbermouth loose, and I appreciate your tolerance and greatly appreciate the occasional feedback.

I guess I saved the big post for last here. But I think a stanza of Jackson Browne's "Fountain of Sorrow" is needed first (this strictly from memory, while above were googled; JB and Baez both have versions pretty well implanted on my aging gray matter). I've always cherished the words "taken by a photograph," as just one little kernel of a terrific tune:

Looking through some photographs
I found inside your drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you

There were one or two
I know you would have liked a little more
But they didn't show your spirit quite so true

You were looking around to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that the camera happened to find you
There was just a taste of sorrow in your eyes.

[...]

But here's the capo. It should be common parlance that the McCain campaign has gone way beyond the pale. The crap they are attempting to stick to the wall is absolutely shameful and absurd. Aside from the fact that their sneering insinuations are readily disproven, many of them have a distinct element of projecting their own frailties onto the opposition. They are obviously sifting through and selecting the heinous, biggoted, racist, filth-mongering nuggets from the demagogery we should be trying to rise above. The fact that the bush/rove thugs, together with most of their mainstream corporate media lapdogs, have been doing this same cheap crap all along is no excuse. Josh at TPM puts words to his disgust:

For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I'm under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don't think that's realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It's part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many of us have for the issues at stake in our elections.

But McCain's campaign has devolved into something altogether different ... what with its increasingly open appeals to racial conflict and aggressive invocations of blood hatred of Arabs and Muslims. As The New Republic phrases it, McCain's "subtle incitements of racial warfare and underhanded implications of foreign nativity." Over the months we've become desensitized to the moral depravity of McCain's campaign.

There is of course what appears to be a more conventional attack on economics and taxes. But 'socialism' refers, if we can speak in shorthand, to state ownership of large portions of the economy. In other words, something like the Bush administration's decision to have the government purchase a large amount of the financial services industry. But as John Judis notes, a closer look at the language and imargery McCain's 'socialism' pitch reveals it's actually "about whites paying their taxes so that lazy, indolent, unemployed blacks can live off them."

McCarthyism has rightly become an American shorthand for smearing liberals and anyone else from the center leftward as political traitors. The McCain campaign's current campaign of villification of Rashid Khalidi is cut from a very similar cloth -- the kind of rancid race-baiting that we sometimes see at the fringes of our politics but seldom quite so directly and formally from a national campaign, even going so far as to have McCain himself compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi. Where McCainism is different is in its particular amalgam of racism and xenophobia specially suited to this historical moment, to this opponent and to Americans' continuing fears of foreign threat from Muslims and Arabs seven years into the War on Terror.

We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.

Amen. The bigger the defeat the better.

If Only it Was the Pronunciation That Mattered

I was disturbed to hear the other day that the new MacD golden arch apple campaign (these are what, something like apple equivalent to fries, but with caramel sauce to drag the dietary aspect down a little?) is wreaking havoc on Yakima orchards. Rumor has it that acres of well-established orchards are being razed in favor of Pink Lady - the Kroc regime's apple of choice. Akin to the former demise of the tomato, maybe, the unregulated market selecting for robust enough for transport, flavor-be-damned, now somewhat being reversed thanks to local farmers and gardeners raising and pushing heirloom varieties.

Following up on "Virginia Creeper," that title came to mind as a confluence of Autumn color and politics "back there." Okay, for the record, note addition of "West" in front of Virginia - I'm sure too much casualness about such could offend some - we do know the difference! And if the original theme, i.e. the Creeper, is jealously fought over as symbol, by all means help me with that. I had meant to include this upbeat post by Christy Hardin Smith of FireDogLake:

Sometimes, people break away from the stupid and divisive, and surprise you -- and themselves -- by how much they can accomplish together (YouTube) instead of living in their past. Thought we could all do with a little inspiration from Wheeling, WV:

...The predominately elderly, white organizers who have run the county Democratic Party here for a generation were uneasy about integrating their operation with the Democratic presidential campaign, which was filled with new, unknown faces, many of them minorities....

..."now when I see the way people have really worked together and banded together, I see a different way."

"It's a different era," she muses. "I accept it."

John "Big Dawg" Saunders is less sentimental. Now engaged in a union battle over 800 layoffs, he is watching the stock market in horror.

"Look, race is still an issue," blurts Saunders. "We're not nearly where we should be, but when it got to your pocket book, that became the determining factor in this race."

"For now the race issue went away," he declares, with both eyes opened wide. "Race is gone, OK?"

You grow, you reach out, you learn, and you hopefully do better. I am so glad that Obama's grandmother, whose backbone of steel and love of family reminds me so much of my own beloved granny, lived to see this all happen for her grandson.

And for all of us. Whatever the outcome, calling to something better in all of us is exactly what this nation needs more of these days.

PS -- If you can, think about donating to Larry Kissell -- or any of our other fine Blue America candidates -- today. The NRCC has gone all in for a lot of races, including pounding Larry's district with ads for the odious Robin Hayes. He could use a hand if you can give him one! Better yet, get out there and work for candidates in your community.

And, speaking of the Virginias and all, those scurrilous repubs are apparently up to their old tricks:

Every year the Republican Party sends a flier into minority or poor neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day. This one is even more efficient, because it claims that Virginia modified their laws to have Republicans vote on November 4 and Democrats on November 5. That way, they don't lose one vote! Good work, Virginia GOP! There's a copied logo from the Commonwealth of Virginia on the flier, too, making it look all official-like.

But as far as crude fliers go, this one from Wisconsin, distributed in a heavily white area, wins the prize.

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I came upon the work of Philip Zimbardo in the course of trying to better inform myself about the possible genesis of the Abu Ghraib affair a good while back. I had actually heard previously of the famous prison experiment Zimbardo conducted with Stanford undergraduates, demonstrating that real folks are readily prone to becoming monsters when given the power of jailers. This article ties this thesis to the propagandizing that the McShameful uncampaign is engaging in:

At this point, most reasonable people understand that John McCain and Sarah Palin have engaged in rhetoric that has incited hate and fear. I do not have my PhD, but I am a research assistant in a experimental social psychology laboratory that studies social influence. So I know a little bit. There is quite a lot of research that I believe is directly related to the McCain-Palin rhetoric.

Indeed, their rhetoric is having similar effects to what has been seen in psychological experiments. In an article for my column on Huffington Post, I discuss some of this scientific research as it relates to the current tactics (and what I believe will be lasting effects) of John McCain and Sarah Palin. I am cross-posting the article here because I believe this is an important discussion for the American people.

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In recent weeks, as the McCain-Palin campaign has increasingly been called out for leveraging --- at rallies and in its notorious robocalls --- words of division, suspicion, and contempt, the emotions and tempers of McCain-Palin supporters have been heated beyond the boiling point. The language of the McCain-Palin campaign now goes far beyond the divisive language typical of modern American political campaigns. John McCain and Sarah Palin are actively promoting a perception of Barack Obama as an enemy, not as an opponent.

Civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said that John McCain and Sarah Palin are "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" through hostile rhetoric. Indeed scientific research by psychologists has shown that the type of framing used by McCain, Palin, and their surrogates can create and foster disunity, hostility, and even violence. The resulting societal tensions may be more lasting and severe than John McCain and Sarah Palin realize.

In The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, famous psychologist and researcher Philip Zimbardo discusses his lifelong research into the psyche of good people who engage in evil acts. He warns first about the dangers of psychological constructions that imbue people with "otherness" and then issues even stronger warnings about the dangers of psychological constructions that transform "others" into "the enemy."

The process begins with creating stereotyped conceptions of the other, dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless, the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to our cherished values and beliefs. With public fear notched up and the enemy threat imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors.

When Sarah Palin says, in her stump speech, "Obama does not see America the way you see America," she is separating Obama from what social psychologists call the "ingroup." Both Palin and McCain suggest that Obama does not share the goals of ordinary Americans, that he and his associates are somehow anti-American, that he is a socialist, and that he pals around with terrorists.

Through this rhetoric they aim to separate Obama from patriotic Americans --- to make Obama the other, to make him one of them, to characterize him with the property of otherness. Then, Sarah Palin escalates the rhetoric by adding, "He sees America as so imperfect that he pals around with terrorists," effectively transforming the other into the enemy.

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This is truly hateful, despicable stuff. The McConscienceless pogrom doesn't seem to have any compunction about using what amounts to a revved-up version of the 1930's Fascism cheerleading. Incredible. They cannot be allowed to get away with this and I cannot believe they will.

And while we have the dictionary open to "despicable," Joan at Salon has a few words for John and link to earlier Salon post putting Palin-pity to rest:

I've hated the GOP effort to protect Sarah Palin from her own shortcomings in the global knowledge department by insisting her critics are sexist. Rebecca Traister summed up my feelings here.

But I'm equally appalled by the McCain camp's recent effort to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat for his horrific candidacy. You've read the headlines: Campaign aides have called her her a "diva" and said she's gone "rogue," for finally speaking up about Neiman Marcus-gate and other campaign troubles. (After I posted this, Politico's Mike Allen quoted another McCain aide calling her a "whack job.") Palin's defenders shot back that she's fed up with the way her McCain camp handlers have managed her, especially their shutting off her media access. To which one of those handlers, anonymously, retorted: "Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic." The same aide said it was harder to get Palin "up to speed than any candidate in history."

What classless jerks. I am no Sarah Palin fan, but I think it was obvious, before McCain picked her, that Palin lacked "fundamental understanding" on key issues. They chose her anyway; her charm, charisma and appeal to the Christian right base outweighed her drawbacks back in August. Now they're trashing Palin for their own failure to adequately vet her, or to anticipate the way her "lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues" might actually scare voters.

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There's more there now, and intriguing hint of debate that Walsh feels she lost. I'd pursue link, but that's just me.

I noticed, when checking back for lost link, that JW has another column on circular firing-squad that is not to be missed (with subject "Veepzilla"!). This longer-than-usual-for-Walsh post is one of the best of hers I have come across, balancing disgust for Palin with insight that of course the real villan here is McSame with his totally abjectly craven pandering nomination of a somewhat pitiable (if, remarkably, to more than a few, charismatic) disturbingly unqualified vp candidate:

The GOP circular firing squad kept blasting away on Tuesday, over the question of who's to blame for the cavalcade of bad Sarah Palin news. Come on, you know you're paying attention. It's a grotesque pileup on the political highway, and it's impossible to look away.

To recap: Palin went "rogue," and blamed the Republican National Committee for buying her $150,000 in clothing. McCain advisors then unloaded on their veepzilla, calling her a disastrously underinformed "diva" – anonymously, of course. Palin supporters shot back, blaming the McCain camp for its poor handling of the talented Alaska political phenom. A "top McCain advisor" retaliated by calling Palin a "whack job" in the Politico. The RNC, meanwhile, kind of unbelievably, publicly blamed the McCain campaign for the clothing scandal. Ouch.

If you think all that's super petty high school stuff, well, it gets worse. (I feel like I'm back to recapping episodes of "America's Next Top Model," but I love it.) Palin-lover Fred Barnes, of Fox and the Weekly Standard, came out and, without apparent evidence, named Nicolle Wallace as the John McCain aide who personally put the $150,000 in clothing on her credit card. Wallace struck back, telling Ana Marie Cox: "There's obviously an organized campaign to lay blame for things at my feet and I’m not going to engage before the campaign ends. I have a very long relationship with Fox News and the notion that someone would call me a coward on the air and accuse me of putting $150,000 on my credit card without a single person calling and checking with me suggests that something is going on."

Barnes and his buddy Bill Kristol are now, of course, completely, like, pissed, and they're spreading the skeeziest rumors about Wallace in between classes, and insisting nobody sit at her lunch table after Nov. 4.

When I posted about this late Monday night, I said all the Palin scapegoating was making me feel a little sorry for her. A little. The next morning, I assigned Tom Schaller to debate me, and frankly, he won. It's hard to defend Palin in this mess. But then I saw Joe Conason denounce the McCain campaign as sexist in the New York Observer, and I couldn't help coming back to the issue of whether Palin was being treated unfairly one last time.

The fact is, both of the following observations are true:

A) Palin is a nasty and very skilled political opportunist who is giving as good as she's getting, smacking Barack Obama, Joe Biden and now McCain (his staff, anyway) with savage glee, and

B) She's being scapegoated in a personal way that seems sadly familiar for female candidates, in very sexist terms: First "diva," then "whack job;" next she'll be Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction." Oops, sorry, that was Hillary Clinton.

We need to be able to hold such seeming contradictions in our minds, as we watch Republicans unravel. I vehemently disagree with fringe feminists like former Ms. Editor Elaine Rafferty, who use both Palin's gender and Clinton's defeat as a reason to back the anti-feminist McCain. Let's be clear: They're a tiny, eccentric minority of feminists. The fact is, Sarah Palin's pick made Hillary supporters who were still-grieving, lukewarm Obama backers into ardent Obama lovers, and sent most of those who, inexplicably, stayed on the fence when Clinton asked them to back Obama, back to the Democratic party where they belong. Palin has been an enormous boon to the Obama-Biden ticket, helping Democrats cement their standing especially with independent women. Lafferty is in a category of, if not one, very very few alleged feminists who use Palin as an excuse to support McCain.

Still, it's hard not to notice that a woman is being blamed and shamed yet again, when the real screw-up here is McCain himself, who presided over possibly the worst VP pick in modern history. (See "The Vet Who Did Not Vet" for more.)

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Amen Joan. This total piece of sycophantic shit who thinks his POW-dom is a free pass has no excuses. No Palin-pass. He was a loser before, he's a total loser now. When he hugged up to the awol-never-elected-bush after the shameful rove bashing he took, he was done. John McCain is still a pathetic loser, despite the fact that he was (maybe) slightly less of a pathetic loser-jerk in terms of prior performance than the current "president."

Joan linked to this post, which I will only briefly excerpt. It is brilliant in its' own way, helping free us from need to expend too much pity on the AK gov:

Is this the week that Democrats and Republicans join hands -- to heap pity on poor Sarah Palin?

At the moment, all signs point to yes, as some strange bedfellows reveal that they have been feeling sorry for the vice-presidential candidate ever since she stopped speaking without the help of a teleprompter. Conservative women like Kathleen Parker and Kathryn Jean Lopez are shuddering with sympathy as they realize that the candidate who thrilled them, just weeks ago, is not in shape for the big game. They're not alone. The New Republic's Christopher Orr feels that Palin has been misused by the team that tapped her. In the New York Times, Judith Warner feels for Sarah, too! And over at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates empathizes with intelligence and nuance, making clear that he's not expressing pity. Salon's own Glenn Greenwald watched the Katie Couric interview and "actually felt sorry for Sarah Palin." Even Amy Poehler, impersonating Katie Couric on last week's "Saturday Night Live," makes the joke that Palin's cornered-animal ineptitude makes her "increasingly adorable."

I guess I'm one cold dame, because while Palin provokes many unpleasant emotions in me, I just can't seem to summon pity, affection or remorse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like all of the rest of you, part of the bipartisan jumble of viewers that keeps one hand poised above the mute button and the other over my eyes during Palin's disastrous interviews. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in "The Godfather: Part III," Sarah Palin talking about Russia -- they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

But just because I'm human, just because I can feel, just because I did say this weekend that I "almost feel sorry for her" doesn't mean, when I consider the situation rationally, that I do. Yes, as a feminist, it sucks -- hard -- to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it's because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics.

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I've already saddled you with probably more than some of you may be able to deal with in one sitting. But I have two more items I must link you to that are imo of greater consequence than the above.

And, by the way, bumper-sticker of the day: "My poodle is smarter than your honor student!"

Gary Kamiya has a truly fantastic post-mortem on the repubs at Salon. I've had to ponder this, as it is a bit more cocky and closer to shadenfreude than I am yet prepared for (while wanting to think I am not superstitious!). You owe it to your inner self to read the whole thing. He calls it a Shipwreck (how could you not?):

The modern conservative movement is dying in front of our eyes, and its death throes aren't pretty. As John McCain heads for likely defeat, the GOP is eating itself. Right-wing politicians and pundits who never criticized Bush in eight years are suddenly jumping ship like rats, while bitter-end loyalists angrily accuse them of being "pathetically opportunistic." After months of veering from one tactic to the next, McCain has finally settled on one message for his campaign, but it's absurd: claiming that the party whose signature is tax cuts for the rich is really on the side of Joe the Plumber.

Meanwhile, 3.1 million real Joe the Plumbers across America are sending Barack Obama hundreds of millions of dollars, a torrent of cash that is helping to flush the GOP down the national toilet.

Right-wing hacks like Palin and Minn. Rep. Michele Bachman respond by doing the only thing they know how to do -- attack, demonize and divide. They wave the flag like a cutlass, dividing the country up into "pro-America areas" and "anti-America" ones. But this old pseudo-patriotic trick that has served the GOP so well for so long doesn't work anymore. In a development that showed just how much the political landscape has changed, the attack dogs have been forced to apologize -- something neither Bush nor his party nor conservative pundits ever did while they were trashing the country during the last eight years.

McCain's choice of the insultingly unqualified Palin to be his running mate was right out of the GOP's old culture-wars playbook, but it has backfired disastrously. The changing demographics of the country are working against the right wing. The party is lost, and it doesn't have a clue what to do next.

There's something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP's mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Then the luxury liner hit an iceberg known as reality. The biggest damage was done by the Wall Street crisis, which happened just in time to tilt a close race toward Obama. But the economic meltdown was only one of the disasters for which the GOP is largely responsible. The war that was going to establish American hegemony forever turned out to be one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in our nation's history. The GOP's free-market idolatry led to the gravest financial crisis since the Depression. Its ideological insistence on cutting taxes for the richest Americans ran up a record deficit. Its embrace of torture and denial of due process assaulted the Constitution and eroded America's moral standing. Its doctrine of the "unitary executive" concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive branch. Its anti-scientific denial of global warming endangered the entire planet.

It's a historic shipwreck, and the American people are diving off the foundering GOP hulk in droves.

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I'm aiming to end on a positive note. Of course a catastrophic failure at the polls for the republicans, owners of most of the voting equipment and stealers of most of the national treasure and self-esteem over the last 30-or-so years, would be a huge potential victory for the American way of life and the Constitution and all that sort of embarrassingly patriotic stuff.

Here's how our wishing-on-a-star might actually come true, via Stanley Fish, "The Power of Passive Campaigning":

In the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better campaign.

When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?

The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning.

We saw it in the 10 days when the activity around the mounting economic crisis was at its height. Henry Paulson alternated between scaring members of Congress and scaring the public. Nancy Pelosi alternated between playing the responsible Congressional statesperson and playing the partisan attack dog. Media commentators went from one hysterical prediction to another. John McCain went from saying there’s nothing to worry about to saying there’s everything to worry about to saying that he would fix everything by suspending his campaign to saying that he was not suspending his campaign and that he would debate after all.

And Barack Obama? He didn’t do much and he said less (O.K., he did say some reassuring, optimistic things), and his poll numbers went up.

Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.

In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time, points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change.

What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five, or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice.

Meanwhile, McCain’s surrogates get red in the face on TV when they try to explain away the latest jaw-dropping thing Sarah Palin has said, or proclaim that anything can happen in seven days, or respond to ever more discouraging poll numbers by saying (how’s this for a weak cliché) that the only poll that counts is the poll on election day. (I know things are bad when my wife, a staunch Democrat, feels sorry for them.)

What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way), just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates. What Satan wants to do is draw Jesus out, provoke him to an unwisely exasperated response, get him to claim too much for his own powers. What Jesus does is reply with an equanimity conveyed by the adjectives and adverbs that preface his words: “unaltered,” “temperately,” “patiently,” “calmly,” “unmoved,” “sagely,” “in brief.”

In response, Satan gets ever more desperate; he conjures up rain and wind storms (in the midst of which Jesus sits “unappalled in calm”); he tempts him with the riches of poetry and philosophy (which Jesus is careful neither to reject nor deify); and finally, having run out of schemes and scares and “swollen with rage,” he resorts to physical violence (McCain has not gone so far, although some of his supporters clearly want to), picking Jesus up bodily and depositing him on the spire of the temple in the hope that he will either fall to his death or turn into Superman and undermine the entire point of his 40-day trial in the wilderness. He doesn’t do either. He does nothing, and Satan, “smitten with amazement” — even this hasn’t worked — “fell.”

Toward the end, the poem describes the mighty contest in a metaphor that captures its odd and negative dynamic. Jesus is “a solid rock” continually assaulted by “surging waves”; and even though the repeated assaults result only in the waves being “all to shivers dashed,” they keep on coming until they exhaust themselves “in froth or bubbles.” The power Jesus generates is the power of not moving from the still center of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him, leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale.

And McCain knows it. Last Wednesday, campaigning in New Hampshire, he spoke sneeringly about Obama’s campaign being “disciplined and careful.” That’s exactly right, and so far the combination of discipline and care — care not to get out too far in front of anything — along with a boatload of money is working just fine. Jesus is usually the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.

OK, yes, cynicism comes easy. I can go there too. But Hope is a huge and much more constructive concept to work with, would you not agree? My iPod on shuffle this AM at the bus-stop rang up Bob Seger's "Night Moves," a long-time favorite of mine. Less than a minute later I read in Iglesias's "In Justice" how that was one of his favorite tunes.