Monday, September 01, 2008 

All virgins are liars honey.

I haven't blogged much about the incessant background chorus which is the US presidential election mainly because I'm probably one of the few political creatures that isn't fascinated by the whole thing. The Democratic convention last week didn't help matters: it takes something to make our political parties' soirées at the seaside look meaningful and not like an exercise in navel gazing which both the politicos and the journalists spend getting lashed, but last week's convention and its screechingly mawkish sentimentality, which featured Obama's daughters on the stage talking to Daddy whilst he was elsewhere, the Hillary and Bill show where the least likable couple in political history failed culpably to get over their sour grapes at losing, and then Obama making a thunderously overrated speech, like all the rest, surrounded by a Roman-Greco backdrop which the Republicans themselves couldn't have constructed if they'd wanted him to look like a pseud, succeeded admirably.

All this was meant to have set-up McCain for what would have been a fight-back; instead what we've seen has been natural disaster and, well, human disaster. You can't plan for events like Gustav disrupting your enthronement, but McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate must in the pantheon of political choices go down as one of the worst of all time, without hyperbole, although who knows, come November I may be eating my words. This was a shockingly cynical but also shallow choice, at a stroke rendering the Republican attack on Obama as inexperienced dead in the water. If this was a further sop for the PUMAs, then it was one based on a flawed idea of what the average Hillary supporting Democrat was after: Palin doesn't just oppose abortion, but also opposes it for rape and incest victims. She has thanks to her reputation as an evangelical, NRA-supporting, global warming sceptic appealed to the Republican Christian conservative base, but on every other ground she comes up short.

To be completely juvenile and dwell on irrelevancy for a paragraph, that includes on naming her children. I mean seriously, Bristol, Track, Trig, Willow and Piper? We expect celebrities to call their children stupid, pretentious things, whether it be Peaches, Pixie, Apple, Shiloh, Romeo, Brooklyn and all the other assorted nightmares, but politicians generally have slightly more sense. Except for David Cameron, of course, but then he fits the profile alluded to. Bristol is apparently named after Bristol Bay in Alaska, which I am reliably informed by someone who used to live 12 miles from where Palin was formerly mayor is a huge salmon processing place which always smells like death, but Wikipedia informs us that it was named by James Cook in honour of the Admiral Earl of Bristol, so it takes its name from our own delightful city. Anton Vowl alludes to where next if Palin was to have any more children she could take influence from - Swindon, Bradford, Middlesbrough, to which I can only add that I don't think anyone has yet thought of calling their offspring Scunthorpe, Cockermouth (which is actually a rather lovely little town) or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.

The issue that has emerged has however not been Palin herself having any more children, but that of her daughter, the aforementioned Bristol who it has been revealed is 5 months pregnant. Whether this was released because certain left-wing blogs in the US were scurrilously and completely erroneously alleging that Bristol had in fact given birth to Palin's last child, Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome, is unclear, but it has nonetheless rather energised comment as only something resembling a scandal involving a politician can.

This shouldn't as some have already argued be either something to score points over or to even mention for fear that it will be seen, quite plausibly, as the lowest form of politics. The facts however do speak for themselves: Palin is an opponent of "explicit" sex education and has supported abstinence only education in its place. After all, if a politician's own daughter's experience appears to suggest that abstinence only education doesn't work, isn't that something that ought to be highlighted? Plausibly, but it will still be seen as it ought to be of bringing family into something that most will highly sympathise with; after all, we all make mistakes and this is one that Palin's daughter most likely bitterly regrets. There might be more in it if Palin additionally opposed contraception, but she doesn't. Probably the best case I've seen for it to be any sort of issue is made by innerbrat.

More pertinently I think that the real issue here, away from the fact that Palin doesn't seem to have been properly vetted by McCain's people, further suggesting that she was on-the-cuff choice designed to also pull some of the attention away from Obama's speech, is that it's been swiftly announced that Bristol will also be marrying the father of the child. Considering that she's already 5 months pregnant and there doesn't seem to have been any sign at all that there was to be a marriage prior to Palin's swift ascension to being McCain's number two, this seems to be even more cynical than our own Tessa Jowell's swift separation from her husband after the mortgage debacle. Quite aside from whether this is her daughter's own wishes and whether getting married at 17 is even anything resembling a good idea, it also rather exposes Palin's opposition to same-sex marriage, which she detests to such an extent that she supported a constitutional amendment which would have denied state health benefits to same-sex couples. The familiar argument against it is that it debases marriage and the sanctity of the institution; what more actually offends the institution than shotgun weddings in this day and age, either to appease a Christian conservative base or to spare a vice-presidential candidate's potential blushes?

Now, it might possibly be that her daughter fully intended to marry the father, and that theirs is a loving and committed relationship. Maybe I'm just being too cynical over potential cynicism, or then again, maybe I'm being realistic about the sort of relationships which most 17-year-olds have. In any case, Obama's campaign has quite rightly said that it won't be so much as mentioning it again. That doesn't matter though: already both left and right are squabbling online as only they can. The real question is exactly what those who previously hailed Palin as their sort of person based on her beliefs really think when they're not required to mind their language. As Michael Tomasky points out, Karl Rove thought that the revelation about Bush's DUI cost him three or four points with evangelical voters. We all know that such rigidity of dogma can only result in inevitable hypocrisy, but those self-same conservative warriors might not think too highly of her mother's skills as a parent, and that might just be enough to put the nail in the coffin of McCain's gamble.

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9/01/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, April 28, 2008 

Ashley and Hillary.

Jackie Ashley opens her ball-breakingly familiar column with this paragraph:

There can't be a lot that cheers Gordon Brown over his morning porridge, but if he turns to the foreign pages he might ponder the Hillary effect. In Hillary Clinton, we see a politician loathed by a big section of the population, written off, jeered at, ordered to leave the stage, who, by sheer dogged determination - and by fighting, not quitting - has not only managed a comeback but earned grudging respect.

Well, that's one perspective. There's a different view of Hillary - an individual who's past their sell-by-date, who can't possibly win the popular vote, and whom by sticking around way past when they should have given in is only causing possible irreparable damage to their wider party, especially by resorting to cheap and nasty tactics while her opponent is dignified and respectful by comparison.

Now who does that remind you of?

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4/28/2008 11:34:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 03, 2008 

And so it begins.

If there's a counter-argument to fixed-term parliaments, as proposed across the political spectrum after Gordon Brown's outbreak of Grand Old Duke of York syndrome, it has to be how a second-term president in the United States oscillates between the two pillars of being free to do whatever he wants or becoming a lame duck. While George Bush's decline in power, if not support has been grossly exaggerated, the re-election of the sitting president now looks to be creating a four-year presidential candidate campaign cycle. That wouldn't be so bad if either the Democrat or Republican campaigns had shown signs of flickering into life, but neither have. The initial excitement around Barack Obama has subsided, while the only Republican to generate genuine fervoured support has been Ron Paul. To quote Dave Barry:

It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history. It was a year in which roughly 17,000 leading presidential contenders, plus, of course, Dennis Kucinich, held roughly 63,000 debates, during which they spewed out roughly 153 trillion words; and yet the only truly memorable phrase emitted in any political context was, "Don't tase me, bro!"

It's hard to disagree with that. The Iowan caucus, taking place tonight, means at least a temporary halt to the debates and also the end of the phony war for some of the candidates who fail to get into the top three places.

The Republican race is the one that is still most certainly undecided. While there are only three realistic Democratic candidates, the Republican base in Iowa, 60% of which is estimated to be of the evangelical Christian variety, has a veritable pizza menu of choice, as long as you like an entirely male field, all of whom profess to believe in God and deny evolution, are opposed to a woman's right to choose and feel similarly about gay marriage, although some are favourable towards our civil union type model. You expect that from the likes of Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher who has described abortion as a "holocaust", supports insanely right-wing craziness like the oxymoronic FairTax and denied Medicaid to a 15-year-old with learning difficulties raped by her stepfather; Mitt Romney, a Mormon who in an attempt to woo the Christian right made clear he had a problem with those who don't believe in God; the laughing stock that is Fred Thompson and the opportunist policy shifter Rudy Guilani.

You don't however from the suppoused libertarian Ron Paul, whose noisy supporters have been clogging up message boards and irritating everyone else now for months. His only real quality is his opposition to "war on terror" as it's currently being fought, as one of the only Republicans to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. He then takes his non-interventionist policy to ludicrous extremes: advocating US withdrawal from the UN, for example. His supporters' talk of how he's the only candidate espousing freedom; what Paul actually supports is fundamentalist, selfish individualism, which is something completely different. An actual libertarian would defend to the death a woman's right to choose and gay marriage, both of which are examples of the state interfering with a person's personal freedom where they're not harming anyone else. Instead, Paul supports the exact opposite: allowing the concealed carrying of guns for self-defense. He doesn't despite such over the top devotion have a chance, likely to come fifth or lower in today's caucus, but it'll be interesting to see if he runs as either an independent or the Libertarian candidate, where he'd have the potential to do a Ralph Nader and split the Republican vote.

John McCain is the only other Republican candidate that anyone on the left would even consider supporting if it came to it, in spite of his number of reactionary positions such as the above. He's the only one other than Paul to oppose to torture in all its guises, even if he blots his copy book with his hawkish views on both Iraq and Iran. His recent co-sponsoring of the bill on illegal immigration, probably the most heated issue enveloping the Republican campaign, shows his refusal to conform either to the ideological Republican base or to the prejudices of the right, and his significant ability to reach out to the Democratic leaning voter. If the worst came to the worst, McCain couldn't possibly be any worse than Bush.

The Democrat campaign, as disappointing as it has been, has at least attempted to deal with the primary concerns of ordinary Americans: health care and the Iraq war. All of the top three, Clinton, Obama and John Edwards support some kind of universal system, the first time that mainstream politicians have come to recognise that the insurance system with Medicaid for the desperately poor is a scar on the nation's conscience. Naturally, none is suggesting an American NHS: "socialised" medicine is almost as dirty as a concept as socialism itself, but it's the first sign that the United States is looking towards Europe or Canada rather than continuing to stare at its navel.

Iraq is and has been far more tricky. Hillary Clinton, as Michael Moore has wrote, has not just supported the Iraq war from the very beginning, she's done everything that's been asked of her when it's come to funding or otherwise. Her continuing belligerence towards Iran, despite the NIE report and her polarising manner ought to rule her out as the presidential candidate altogether. Does anyone really want the most powerful position in the world to begin to resemble a dynasty instead? Please spare us from a 20 year long reign of Bushes and Clintons.

That leaves us with Barack Obama and John Edwards. As inspirational as Obama originally was, and as charismatic as he continues to be, it's difficult to know either whether he has enough experience, or, sadly, whether America is ready for a black man to be president. He has to his credit always opposed the Iraq war, although he was only elected to Congress in 2004 and so didn't vote on the matter, which would have been the ultimate question of his position. He would be the break in convention and perhaps with the past that America desperately needs, even if it doesn't recognise it at the moment. Whether he would be up to that job is also uncertain.

John Edwards, leaving aside his $400 haircuts, has dared to tread in places where those before him would have quailed. He's not only not accepted corporate money towards his campaign, he's also made clear that he is willing to take on poverty and support the emasculated US unions, fighting those same corporate interests if it demands it. Again, the main question is whether he means it: his past record suggests he does, but as the third candidate in the Democratic nomination he's had to look for a different, defining message. The case against is that as a lawyer he's acted for those same hedge funds currently gobbling up so many companies in private equity deals. On Iraq, he's the only candidate to say that within a year of taking office that the troops would be withdrawn; a highly ambitious target.

Whether Democrats should unite around Obama or Edwards will becoming clearer after tonight. The opinion polls suggest that all three are neck-and-neck; victory for Obama or Edwards will be an immense boost. The dream-ticket might be the eventual winner with runner-up as the vice-presidential candidate. Never before have the 2.9 million population of a tiny American state had so much potential influence over something that will undoubtedly change the way the next five years pan out the world over.

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1/03/2008 08:22:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 07, 2007 

Amerikkka.

No, he doesn't look sinister at all.

It is of course terribly easy to look on in horror at the various political vagaries surrounding the American presidential campaign, but that doesn't stop it from being similarly amusing. As long as those it involves then don't become president.

What then are Mitt Romney's, emerging as a Republican front-runner alongside Rudy Giuliani, favourite books?

“What’s your favorite novel?” is a perennial campaign question, the answer to which presumably gives insight into leadership.

When asked his favorite novel in an interview shown yesterday on the Fox News Channel, Mitt Romney pointed to “Battlefield Earth,” a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. That book was turned into a film by John Travolta, a Scientologist.

A spokesman said later it was one of Mr. Romney’s favorite novels. Asked about his favorite book, Mr. Romney cited the Bible.

That would be Romney, a Mormon, selecting as his favourite novel a book by the founder of Scientology and general fraud L. Ron Hubbard, he who formed his own religion in order to get stinkingly rich. Still, that's at least more honest than Joseph Smith and his "visitations" by the Angel Moroni, which just happened to lead to him being able to keep more than one wife. He also seems to be somewhat hedging his bets in selecting the good book as his favourite work of strictly non-fiction, over the less inspired Book of Mormon. Even if you were being charitable towards the more lucid moments of say, Job or Revelation, and decided to ignore that Job is essentially an almost meaningless parable which just showcases how useless belief in God essentially is, and that Revelation has some stunning imagery and elements of allegory as long as you dismiss the interpretations of it as any sort of prophecy, you'd be hard pressed to consider it as any great work of literature. It is however a masterpiece compared to Battlefield Earth, or indeed any of dear L Ron's output.

As well as choice of books, Romney made a lacklustre attempt to channel the spirit of JFK in delivering a speech on how his faith would in no way influence his decisions were he to be elected, the irony being that he was forced into making it because of the Christian right's views on Mormonism. In doing so he actually inferred that the current interpretation of the division of church and state was too rigid, which in a nation where politicised religion has never been more powerful ought to start alarm bells ringing. It also gave birth to this staggering quote:

"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom."

Even if we accept that some of our ideals or norms and values originate in Christian theology, it is laughable to claim that freedom requires faith to continue, while it is willfully blind to ignore the tyrannies which have been imposed through the ages of the basis of religion. The current ones might be more associated with Islam, but even the briefest knowledge of history gives examples of the past atrocities carried out in the name of Christianity.

Speaking of which, it's not much of a surprise to learn that the CIA decided to disobey orders to hand over all related evidence to the 9/11 commission, instead deciding to destroy two taped sessions of state-sanctioned torture:

"The tapes posed a serious security risk," the CIA's director, Michael Hayden, told agency employees in a statement yesterday. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the programme, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathisers."

And not of course allow for prima facie evidence of the legally questionable practice of water-boarding to emerge, nor for the men responsible to be brought to account, who have now been helpfully pardoned and given protection from prosecution. The United States remember, does not torture. It just doesn't get caught doing it, or it lets its sub-ordinates do it instead. Whilst all the Democrat presidential candidates have condemned the use of torture in the "war on terror", the only Republican front-runner to do so is John McCain, who was himself tortured during his captivity in Vietnam. Two others with no chance of winning, the libertarian Ron Paul who has strongly denounced it, and Alan Keyes, who has tied himself in rhetorical knots, have been the others to join him. Our friendly Bible thumper Mitt Romney, meanwhile, called instead for Guantanamo to be doubled in size.

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12/07/2007 10:35:00 PM | | | links to this post

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