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THE TERM "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" IS A PET TERM AMONG THE CONSPIRACIST ELEMENT to refer to such candidates for political office suspected of having their "official" (public) agenda unwittingly influenced by "brainwashing" influences of certain weird and unwholesome types, especially such suspected of harbouring "Communist" or "Socialist" beliefs and articles of faith--and (so this conspiracist line goes) hesitant to acknowledge such "dangerous" associations overtly lest his campaign go into scandal.

ConWebBlog has this interesting item which reveals where the ConWeb can't quite make up its mind over who the real "Manchurian Candidate" of Indecision 2008 is:

Earlier this year, David Kupelian set the tone for WorldNetDaily's rabid, falsehood-laden anti-Obama jihad by endorsing John McCain. Kupelian is back, declaring in an Oct. 30 column that Barack Obama really is the Manchurian candidate:

Barack Obama was programmed for years by his atheist, Muslim father, by the communist sex pervert Frank Marshall Davis, by con man Tony Rezko, by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and others – most of all by black liberation theology screamer Jeremiah Wright. Obama's resume is largely manufactured. There is a total blackout on his college years. His campaign obscures what he did as a "community organizer." All his radical associations are denied or minimized. His miserable legislative record (voting "present" over 100 times to avoid taking a stand), his lack of achievement, his radical views and so on – all have been laundered through the magic of public relations into the near-sacred saga of "The One" who has been sent to serve, and to save, America.

[...]

America has a choice Tuesday between a genuine war hero and a genuine Manchurian candidate.

The funny thing is, just a few years back, WND was promoting the idea that McCain was the Manchurian candidate. 

An August 2001 WND column by Samuel Blumenfeld bashed "Republican liberal" McCain for contemplating an mavericky "Bull Moose" approach that would harm the Republican Party. Noting McCain's "sudden metamorphosis from conservative to liberal," Blumenfeld stated that "It is highly probable that McCain learned at least as much about the Marxist class struggle while undergoing forced communist indoctrination during his five years at Hanoi as any American student learns at a liberal state university." After citing a Camille Paglia column suggesting that McCain might be a Manchurian candidate, Blumenfeld writes:

The implication is that McCain subliminally absorbed communist doctrine as a result of his five-year captivity. If that is the case, then he ought to subject himself to deprogramming. The strength and vehemence of his liberal convictions, the fact that he considers himself to be a war criminal, would indicate that he very profoundly absorbed the communist critique of the American system. Is it possible that the communists have perfected a time-release form of indoctrination? That would account for the sudden switch in ideology at a very crucial period – a campaign for the presidency. Leaving speculation aside, however, we don't need conjecture to face this hard fact: The last thing America needs in the White House is a self-admitted war criminal.

As we've documented, virtually all criticism of McCain on WND's news pages disappeared when McCain became the de facto Republican nominee back in February. Thus, you won't see Kupelian referencing a column by Jack Wheeler WND published before McCain clinched the Republican nomination, in which he called McCain "psychologically unstable" and a "nutcase wack job," then asserted that McCain "collaborat[ed] with his Communist captors" while a POW -- not even to denounce it. Nor will Kupelian reference Blumenfeld's column calling McCain the Manchurian candidate.

Why? Probably because he hates Obama too much to remind their readers that he, despite all his blather about McCain being a "genuine war hero," secretly hates McCain too.

Not to mention the prospect of "Barack Obama is the Manchurian Candidate" quickly becoming the last-minute desperation meme among the Dark Satanic Mills of Conservative Propaganda and their droogs @ the Elmer Gantry Institute for Religiopolitical Theology.

Right Wing Watch has some interesting examples of that likelihood:

You know, the first five or six times you see right-wingers screaming that America will be doomed, cursed, or destroyed if Barack Obama is elected, it’s kind of entertaining.   But then it just starts to get annoying.

Here’s the latest [PDF] from Mat Staver and Liberty Counsel:

The future of America is at stake and its future rests with us … If we elect leaders who will not stand up for innocent unborn children, then America will be cursed. If we elect leaders who will not defend marriage as one man and one woman, the people will groan, and our great nation will decay … We could not have a more important election about America’s future than the one will we face this year. I am so burdened about this Country and our future that I cannot begin to express my concern. We already have the most liberal, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual Congress in the history of America. We cannot afford to unleash an unbridled leftist, secular, anti-religious agenda on America and our children. We must stand up now! … God has called each one of us to the Kingdom for such a time as this. Each of us are called to different roles, but all of us are commanded to be good citizens. To be a good citizen, we must vote. It is not an option. And, we must vote our Christian values. The future of America, our children, and grandchildren, are depending on us.

Fortunately we only have to put up with four more days of this … which will then by followed by four more years of it.

[***]

Last week Gary Bauer warned that at some point down the line, God will "take his hand of protection off of America" if the country doesn't get its act together and stop coddling gays, finally outlaw abortion, and elect John McCain.

And it looks as if that GOTV strategy is being picked up by others on the Right, judging by Jane Chastain's latest column in WorldNetDaily.

Chastain admits that many Christian voters might be confused about things like the economy, healthcare, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so they should just get "back to basics:"

Examine the stands of these two candidates —and more important, their records – on the moral issues, and vote accordingly. Then, you can rest assured that this country will be in good hands.

The Ten Commandments given to Moses are not suggestions. They represent God's moral law – and it has never changed. The first commandments are about honoring God and your earthly parents. Next comes God's law against murder. God leaves us no wiggle room when it comes to the shedding of the innocent blood of another human being.

It is no accident that abortion is the most divisive moral issue in America today. God's law may be inconvenient at times, but it is still God's law.

But just in case they are still confused over how to vote, Chastian concludes with a pretty straight-forward argument that God will destory America if Obama is elected:

If you call yourself a Christian and you are still flirting with abortion, or flirting with voting for a candidate who condones the taking of an innocent life, no matter how small, sick or vulnerable, you are only fooling yourself about your Christian commitment – but you will not fool God!

...

If 9/11 wasn't a wake-up call for America, then the financial meltdown of 2008 should be. How many more warnings will God give us before he lifts his hand of protection that has been over this country for more than 200 years? He did not spare the children of Israel. He will not spare the United States of America!

(In that last instance, I'd cue up the "Sieg Heil" march, of Nazi vintage, as rejoinder; such, methinks, is rather apropos the Religiopolitical Right, no?)

(Interesting historical insight: Not many know this, but the "Sieg Heil" march is actually based on an old Yale University marching tune, with an old Eli adding the infamous lyrics. He would later lose interest with the Nazi movement, by the way. Take that, ye critics of "elitism"!)

more the engrish!

AS IS OBVIOUS FROM THE TITLE, THERE ARE NOW BUT FOUR DAYS UNTIL WE "MORALLY SUPERIOR" AMERICANS MAKE THAT FATEFUL DECISION as to where a 21st-century America ought go.

Which can only mean that the propaganda can only get all the more vile and disgusting from certain circles in this the final countdown.

Making this all the more relevant: Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of perhaps the single greatest demonstration of how radio's power and intrusion can be abused to the point of perverted--viz., the Mercury Theatre of the Air's dramatisation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds under direction of Orson Welles, the pride(?!) of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Said dramatisation being done in form of simulated radio news coverage and live remotes as sounded too realistic for many listeners to accept as drama, even to the point of mass hysteria ensuing throughout the country as listeners believed that Mars was invading Earth based on the various "bulletins" frequently heard throughout the first two-thirds of the drama.

Welles, however, waited until the end to "let the cat out of the bag," so to speak, with this dénoument explaining it all for you--or trying to in the face of the chaos outside:

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the best next thing. We annihiliated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be releieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. . .it's Hallowe'en.

As it turned out, the Mercury Theatre's presentation of War of the Worlds in such a realistic stylee was deliberate. Payback, as it were, for one of the early episodes thereof being interrupted by a CBS newsflash announcing the infamous Munich accords (which brought, as then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would say, "peace in our time"--howbeit on Nazi terms, as it turned out).

And, even more bizarrely, aided and abetted by a late programme change for The Chase and Sanborn Hour on rival NBC, which then dominated Sunday-night radio listening: The traditional early-show comedy sketch involving Edgar Bergen and his Little Wooden Pal, Charlie McCarthy, was cut back to accomodate an expanded musical interlude by resident vocalist Nelson Eddy. Frustrated listeners responded by twiddling their radio dials to find out what else was on the ether waves, and, more often than not, stumbled upon War of the Worlds--howbeit too late for them to know that it was a dramatisation (i.e., about ten minutes into the broadcast, when the first of the "bulletins" from the "Intercontinental Radio News" of the "Martian attack" was being broadcast), thus helping forment the belief among many listeners that Martians were invading Earth and laying all to waste.

And the furore wasn't exactly confined to New York and environs; as The New York Times reported on The Morning After, outbreaks of broadcast-related panic and hysteria were widespread:

Last night's radio "war scare" shocked thousands of men, women and children in the big cities throughout the country. Newspaper offices, police stations and radio stations were besieged with calls from anxious relatives of New Jersey residents, and in some places anxious groups discussed the impending menace of a disastrous war.

Most of the listeners who sought more information were widely confused over the reports they had heard, and many were indignant when they learned that fiction was the cause of their alarm.

In San Francisco the general impression of listeners seemed to be that an overwhelming force had invaded the United States from the air, was in the process of destroying New York and threatening to move westward. "My God," roared one inquirer into a telephone, "where can I volunteer my services? We've got to stop this awful thing."

Newspaper offices and radio stations in Chicago were swamped with telephone calls about the "meteor" that had fallen in New Jersey. Some said they had relatives in the "stricken area" and asked if the casualty list was available.

In parts of St. Louis men and women clustered in the streets in residential areas to discuss what they should do in the face of the sudden war. One suburban resident drove fifteen miles to a newspaper office to verify the radio "report."

In New Orleans a general impression prevailed that New Jersey had been devastated by the "invaders," but fewer inquiries were received than in other cities.

In Baltimore a woman engaged passage on an airliner for New York, where her daughter is in school.

The Associated Press gathered the following reports of reaction to the broadcast:

At Fayetteville, N. C., people with relatives in the section of New Jersey where the mythical visitation had its locale went to a newspaper office in tears, seeking information.

A message from Providence, R. I., said: "Weeping and hysterical women swamped the switchboard of The Providence Journal for details of the massacre and destruction at New York, and officials of the electric company received scores of calls urging them to turn off all lights so that the city would be safe from the enemy."

Mass hysteria mounted so high in some cases that people told the police and newspapers they "saw" the invasion.

The Boston Globe told of one woman who claimed she could "see the fire," and said she and many others in her neighborhood were "getting out of here."

Minneapolis and St. Paul police switchboards were deluged with calls from frightened people.

The Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Va., reported some of their telephone calls from people who said they were "praying."

The Kansas City bureau of The Associated Press received inquiries on the "meteors" from Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Beaumont, Texas, and St. Joseph, Mo., in addition to having its local switchboards flooded with calls. One telephone informant said he had loaded all his children into his car, had filled it with gasoline, and was going somewhere. "Where is it safe?" he wanted to know.

Atlanta reported that listeners throughout the Southeast "had it that a planet struck in New Jersey, with monsters and almost everything and anywhere from 40 to 7,000 people reported killed." Editors said responsible persons, known to them, were among the anxious information seekers.

In Birmingham, Ala., people gathered in groups and prayed, and Memphis had its full quota of weeping women calling in to learn the facts.

In Indianapolis a woman ran into a church screaming: "New York destroyed; it's the end of the world. You might as well go home to die. I just heard it on the radio." Services were dismissed immediately.

Five students at Brevard College, N. C., fainted and panic gripped the campus for a half hour with many students fighting for telephones to ask their parents to come and get them.

A man in Pittsburgh said he returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife in the bathroom, a bottle of poison in her hand, and screaming: "I'd rather die this way than like that."

He calmed her, listened to the broadcast and then rushed to a telephone to get an explanation.

Officials of station CFRB, Toronto, said they never had had so many inquiries regarding a single broadcast, the Canadian Press reported.

Even CBS wound up having to eat crow in explaining the situation; again, The New York Times explains:

The Columbia Broadcasting System issued a statement saying that the adaptation of Mr. Welles' novel which was broadcast "followed the original closely, but to make the imaginary details more interesting to American listeners the adapter, Orson Welles, substituted an American locale for the English scenes of the story."

Pointing out that the fictional character of the broadcast had been announced four times and had been previously publicized, it continued:

"Nevertheless, the program apparently was produced with such vividness that some listeners who may have heard only fragments thought the broadcast was fact, not fiction. Hundreds of telephone calls reaching CBS stations, city authorities, newspaper offices and police headquarters in various cities testified to the mistaken belief.

"Naturally, it was neither Columbia's nor the Mercury Theatre's intention to mislead any one, and when it became evident that a part of the audience had been disturbed by the performance five announcements were read over the network later in the evening to reassure those listeners."

Expressing profound regret that his dramatic efforts should cause such consternation, Mr. Welles said: "I don't think we will choose anything like this again." He hesitated about presenting it, he disclosed, because "it was our thought that perhaps people might be bored or annoyed at hearing a tale so improbable."

Within days, CBS issued this statement in response to the broadcast's producing such hysteria in extremis:

In order that this may not happen again, the program department hereafter will not use the technique of a stimulated news broadcast within a dramatization when the circumstances of the broadcast could cause immediate alarm to numbers of listeners.

It would also emerge in the ensuing fallout that H.G. Wells himself did not allow for such excesses of dramatic licence in allowing The Mercury Theatre of the Air to so dramatise War of the Worlds:

LONDON, (AP). H. G. Wells, whose "War of the Worlds" furnished the basis of the broadcast which spread alarm in the United States Sunday night, said that it was "implicit" in the agreement for selling the radio rights that any broadcast would clearly "be fiction and not news." The novelist added that he gave no permission whatever for alterations which might lead to the belief that the broadcast material was real news.

[***]

(From a later, related dispatch, under dateline of New York:)

Jacques Chambrun, literary representative for H. G. Wells, said the famous British author was "deeply concerned" that the radio dramatization of his book should have spread alarm in the country. Chambrun said Wells cabled him from London Monday morning, declaring that "the Columbia Broadcasting System and Mr. Orson Welles have far overstepped their rights in the matter***and should make a full retraction."

He said Wells cabled that the radio dramatization was made "with a liberty that amounts to a complete rewriting" and made Wells' novel into "an entirely different story."  

Has the McCain/Palin campaign in particular--let alone their close droogs in conservative propaganda prolefeed--learned these Lessons and Warnings from History?

THE PRECEDING VIDEO FROM THE DAILY BEAST speaks volumes for the kind of people who are too easily attracted to McCain/Palin Presidential rallies and appearences in these the waning days of Indecision 2008.

Simply put, the Dregs of Society.

The weird and unwholesome.

The poor, undereducated or homeschooled, easily-influenced, emotionally-unstable and socioeconomically marginalised to the point of vulnerable.

Easy fodder for all manner of "work from home," "cashflow gifting" and "multi-level marketing" schemes as just can't wait for the socioeconomic meltdown to provide fresh meat they can exploit to the point of their limited and limiting savings being depleted, almost always with glowing promises of big-big money week after week, the end of economic uncertainty and "a new happy life."

Who themselves are, for all I know, closet alcoholics, drug addicts, sex fiends and pervertos, gamblers, spendthrifts and other specimens of the lower fringes of Society likely to identify with the "persecuted" Afrikaner Peoples of South Africa if and when asked to.

Who, all in all, are clinging to a failing pipe dream, yet are still hard-wired in their deluded belief that America is, was, and will forever be, a White Low Church Christian Nation if it expects to remain a Pecuilar Among the Nations and retain its Antient and Pecuilar Soverignty and Soverign Identity as a Nation. Hard-wired all the more thanks to equally weird and unwholesome associations with misguided and deluded religious in large measure.

So what prevents their getting something they seriously need--Therapy?

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FOR CONSERVATIVE PROPAGANDISTS, AND THE ZEALOTS AND TRUE BELIEVERS WHO FALL FOR THEIR PROPAGANDA, stereotypes crude and tasteless play a crucial rule in the "winning of hearts and minds" department.

Witness what Media Matters for America discovered on Bill Cunningham's broadcasts of the 23rd and 28th of this month, respectively, vis-a-vis why the poor in an otherwise "morally superior" United States remain so:

CALLER: This guy told me, one of our employees -- not of this company here but some other companies I've worked for -- they told me, they said they've got to have one day off a week. And I said, for what? I just got to have a rest. I said, well, we work five days out of the week. You got Saturday and Sunday, and you can go to church on Sunday to learn about God. But then you got all day Saturday to do what your honey-do list. Well, I've got to have a way -- a day during the week 'cause all my brothers are down at the liquor store. We've got to go down there and hang out.

CUNNINGHAM: Right, in other words, the work ethic, shall we say, is lacking. The reason people are poor in America is not because they lack money, it's because poor people in America lack values, character, and the ability to work hard. And it's got nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with color, and Buzz, things are about to fundamentally change in this country.

I tell you, when you take San Francisco values of Nancy Pelosi, with the Massachusetts values of Barney Frank and hook them up with a political hack from the Daley political machine in Chicago named Obama, this country's gonna take a hard turn to the left and none of the working men and women are gonna like it. Most of McCain's supporters don't have the time to go to a noon rally because we're working.

STEVE MALANGA: There was a certain mentality in the war on poverty, which essentially made the problem worse. With things like welfare -- we changed welfare in the 1960s, we made it permanent. We changed public housing in the 1960s. Public housing had been something people were in temporarily as they were trying to get a leg up and, you know, people who had fallen on hard times and they were then out of it.

We changed those things. We, as a result, created a dependency mentality in a lot of communities, and we made communities worse. And that's the thing that worries me the most, that we're gonna go back to a way of thinking that encourages more dependence and makes communities worse again.

CUNNINGHAM: Well, what community in America is better off with more Section 8 housing and more welfare and more food stamps? Because, unlike many countries in the world, Steve, we have fat poor people. We don't have skinny poor people. Ours are fat and flatulent. So what city in America's been helped by Section 8 housing -- more food stamps and welfare?

[...]

MALANGA: The problem is also with middle-class and upper-middle income parents, too, because in a lot of suburban school districts, they also believe that money is the answer, and you, you know, you want to start a fight in a suburban school district these days, suggest something like vouchers or charter schools as a -- as an alternative and you'll just, you know, you'll start a wicked fight because there's this notion, even among, you know, upper-middle and middle-income parents, that more money is always the answer when we know, for instance, from the example of charter schools in the 1990s, which spend less money per pupil and do a better job of educating, that money isn't the answer.

CUNNINGHAM: Steve Malanga -- the article is "Obama's counterproductive war on poverty." The war on poverty was declared in the 1960s. It was lost in the 1970s. The funding continued for poverty. You know, people are poor in America, Steve, not because they lack money; they're poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics. And if government can't teach and instill that, we're wasting our time simply giving poor people money.

Beg pardon, Mr. Cunningham, but:

• There are studies out there which disprove your Social Darwinist arguments about people being poor because (using your own words, know) "they lack values, morals and ethics," and that the root causes of poverty have nothing to do with lack of morals or decency; and
• Shocking discoveries earlier this year of poor white South Africans reduced to direst poverty as probably prevailed even under apartheid by ANC leader (and Prime Minister-wannabe) Jacob Zuma deflated the apartheid-era notion that white South Africans were somehow "racially and morally incapable" of poverty (as if equating race and morality in the same breadth).

No wonder conservative articles of faith are as hard-wired as they are in their basis on Social Darwinism, whose adherents otherwise take issue with evolutionary thought. So what explains this doublethink anyway?

*************

SIR ISAAC NEWTON, EAT YOUR HEART OUT: The Royal Academy in Great Britain has announced that it will review numerous proposals put forward to same (some bordering on the outlandish) about how to reverse the effects of Global Warming upon Earth through strategems like sending up orbiting mirrors into space to deflect solar rays, shooting sea spray all the higher to help whiten clouds and shooting desert sand and dust into the atmosphere with artificial windstorms to diffuse sunlight.

Which reminds Your Correspondent of a rather outlandish (yet seriously considered) proposal the British floated during World War II as was code-named Project Habbakuk (after the Biblical character), which sought to create an aircraft carrier out of Arctic ice to fool German air-raid squadrons.

=============

IMAGINE THIS SORT OF THING HAPPENING TO SOME SPECIMEN OF CONSERVATIVE TALKBACK RADIO HOST here in the "morally superior" United States with a substantial following among the Great Unwashed:

In response to a Rather Notorious Incident involving "wind-up" phone calls containing sexually-suggestive language going to air over BBC Radio 2 last week, and the complaints thus generated from Land's End to John O'Groats, hosts Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have been suspended without pay for 12 weeks with immediate effect ... and on top of that, the controller responsible for Radio 2 has tendered her resignation, acknowledging where Broadcasting House exercised poor judgement.

As well, the BBC's Director-General, Mark Thompson, issued this statement on behalf of The BBC Trust, which oversees the BBC:

I would like to add my own personal and unreserved apology to Andrew Sachs, his family and to licence fee payers for the completely unacceptable broadcast on BBC Radio 2.

BBC audiences accept that, in comedy, performers attempt to push the line of taste. However, this is not a marginal case.

It is clear from the views expressed by the public that this broadcast has caused severe offence and I share that view.

Since Sunday, I have been in regular contact with the senior executives I tasked with handling this issue.

The investigation that I instructed Tim Davie [director of BBC audio and music] to conduct is nearing completion, and I am returning to London to review the findings and, in the coming days, announce what action we will take.

In the meantime, I have decided that it is not appropriate for either Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross to continue broadcasting on the BBC until I have seen the full report of the actions of all concerned.

This gross lapse of taste by the performers and the production team has angered licence payers.

I am determined that we satisfy them that any lessons will be learnt and appropriate action taken.

I have been asked to report to the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee before the end of this week and will discuss with the Trust the findings of the report and the actions I propose.

Ofcom, the British equivalent of the FCC, has also announced that it would open enquiries into the Ross/Brand incident.

*************

MEMO TO SARAH PALIN AS MUCH AS THE McCAIN/PALIN CAMPAIGN IN GENERAL, with particular emphasis on their playing the canard that Barack Obama is some class of a closet Socialist or Communist, courtesy of Keith "Countdown" Olbermann in a Campaign Comment on his MSNBC show of the 28th:

Finally tonight, the Campaign Comment, and the real danger when you run a presidential candidate who thinks he's Joe six-pack the Plumber, and a Vice Presidential candidate who thinks she's Huey Long.

It's not that the rhetoric in a desperate flailing last week on the stump can get hyperbolic and dangerous. It's that each person on that campaign hears some of that giddying hyperbolic and dangerous rhetoric and tries to top it.

This has ended up, as it usually does, with one of the desperate candidates going so far to the right that they meet themselves coming back in the other direction.

That'd be you, Gov. Palin. You've finally done it. You've accused Obama of doing something wrong, of being something evil, something you boasted of doing, and being, yourself, just two months ago.

You try to figure out what this might have been, while I go back and talk to those good people over there. The Republicans called Obama a neophyte and then they picked a V.P. nominee with a tenth of Obama's experience.

The Republicans called Obama a celebrity and then they bought that nominee $150,000 in designer clothes. The Republicans called Obama a terrorist sympathizer and then McCain said he was proud to be a friend of Gordon Liddy.

It's like they've been unknowingly endowed with ESP and have been telling their own futures. And now the GOP has selected its last drum-thump for the remainder of the campaign although they said that about the last 17 "last drum-thumps."Obama is a socialist!

Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, speaking near St. Louis:

"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing It's a referendum on socialism."

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is apparently still running for President, at Dayton Ohio yesterday:

"Barack the Redistributor.”

Then he realized that sounded like an auto part, so, John McCain at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, later yesterday:

"Sen. Obama is running to be Redistributionist in Chief.”

No, no, go back to the first one.

Nobody you're talking to, even understands what socialism means, Senator.

"Re-dis-tri-bu-shun-ist"is six syllables, and it sounds more like he's recycling newspapers or something. Go simpler, like Michelle Bachmann's only rival for "least stable member of the House of Representatives:" Steve King, R-Iowa, 5th District and 17th Century.

Warming up a crowd at a high school in Sioux City, for Gov. Palin on Saturday, King, who is amazingly still let out of the house each day without adult supervision, said of the Obama candidacy:

"When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship.”

"There is no freedom to the left. It's always to our side of the aisle.”

"We choose freedom and liberty.”

Presumably that's why the Congressman's party was good enough to torture prisoners, eavesdrop on Americans, suspend Habeas Corpus, demonize dissent, pay news organizations to run favorable stories, and generally come as close to a totalitarian dictatorship as any American president ever has.

To choose freedom and liberty. For Congressman King and invited guests. Not for the country. Can you tell I'm stalling?

I'm trying to give Gov. Palin out there, a couple more seconds to figure out how she managed to get herself, as Shakespeare wrote of people destroyed by their own evil plans, "hoist with her own petard.”

Got it yet, Gov?

Okay, you remember Sen. Obama telling J.T. Plumber that it would help the country to "share the wealth”—a sentiment with which anybody not receiving $150,000 in free clothes would probably agree?

So you went off in Des Moines, remember this?

"See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free."

So Gov., Obama's not just a socialist? Not just a re-distributionist re-distributor? Maybe not just a totalitarian? Maybe not just a dictator, he may be a communist?

To paraphrase you in Des Moines, Governor, Obama wants to set up, unlike other candidates, collectively owning the resources. By sharing that wealth and those resources. Collectivist sharing' the wealth socialist communism, I'd say.

And still none of that sounds familiar to you, Governor?

"And Alaska - we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."

Who said that, Governor?

Who was the collectivist share-the-wealther, who was boasting to the reporter visiting from "The New Yorker Magazine,"of having been able to send a check for $1,200 to every man, woman and child in the state since, quote "Alaska is sometimes described as America's socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources?”

Why, you said that, Governor! You're a share-the-wealth, collectivist, Almost-Socialist-Governor, Governor! Who also believes that income, property, inventory and investments, collectively belonging to everybody else, leads to a misuse of power, and government making decisions for us, turning countries into places where the people are not free.

Places like,  Sarah Palin's America! Governor, all sorts of choice words apply here: hypocrite, double-talker, snake-oil seller, socialist. But let me stick with just one, with which to bid you goodbye. You, governor, are a fraud.

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FOR ALL THE RATHER PATHETIC PLATITUDES, BROMIDES AND PATSIES WHICH THE GOP AND THEIR ELMER GANTRY-STYLEE DROOGS LOVE TO PUSH about America being Morally Superior to All Other Nations by virtue of Christian Heritage and Honour, is it any wonder that our "morally superior" nation and society is all the more in socioeconomic decline and deterioration to such an extent that some observers see Indecision 2008 as all the more important for where we may head next?

As for possible answers to explain how our "morally superior" society got to be this way, consider what The Progressive Curmudgeon blog had to say recently in this regard:

How did it happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?

Was it charity that permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president?

How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering mulyuks succeed?

How were Republican rallies in 2008 drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, unique among the developed nations, learning is a grave political disadvantage in America.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklyn Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived. But Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as cerebral elitists, as if this were a disqualification to be president. Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter – stumbling a little, using long words – carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan just smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this.

This great Republic’s founding fathers – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others – were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

Dumb Is As Dumb Does

On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is a failure. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept evolution; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many US citizens become so stupid and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the best explanation I’ve read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion generally, and fundamentalism specifically, makes you stupid. The US is the only rich, developed country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there once was a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after The Origin of Species was published, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the US with “social Darwinism” and the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with help from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

In other words, Darwinism became indistinguishable from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is totally ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by prominent fundamentalists like William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the tested science of Darwinian evolution but embrace the pseudoscience of social Darwinism.

Local Control

But there are other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of fundamentalists. The US is alone in giving control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters and a great educational gulf opened.

"In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to an advanced degree without any exposure to secular teaching.

Worse, Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A 1998 survey by researchers at the University of Texas found that 25% of the state's public school biology teachers believe humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American worship of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education is unnecessary; all that is needed to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century were in vogue.

But in the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Subversive Intellectuals

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism is equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism nearly 80 years ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Every day, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite – like the neocons, some of them former communists, surrounding Bush – has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite is successfully branded as elitism.

Barack Obama has a lot to offer the US and the world but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people like Bush and Palin who flaunt their ignorance.

Which recalls Thomas Gray's poem "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," perhaps famous for its closing lines:

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
    That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
    Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
    His silver-winding way.

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade,
    Ah, fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
    A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
    As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
    To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
    Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
    The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
    The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
    Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
    Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
    To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
    And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
    And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
    Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
    The sunshine of the breast:
Theirs buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever new,
    And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
    That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
    The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
    Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
    And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murderous band!
    Ah, tell them they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
    The vultures of the mind
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,
    And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
    That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
    And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
    Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
    And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
    That mocks the tear if forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
     Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
    A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
    More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
    Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
    And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
    Condemned alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain;
    The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
    And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
    'Tis folly to be wise.

Something worth pondering over, and then some, as Indecision 2008 approacheth.