What a surprise: Another short political post

Jim Henley, everyone's favorite anti-war libertarian political blogger, has been blogging up a storm recently. Meaty, if disputable, posts on the cycles of press coverage of the war, Clinton's record on military intervention, and the conservative divisions.

However, a recent post on the Democratic candidacy is the one that causes me to comment because it says something so astoundingly wrong that I have a hard time believing it.

[Daniel Radosh said that if Dean were the nominee,]

... you can be sure that right now we'd be having a real national debate about the issues, and that Howard Dean would be setting the terms of that debate.

I think this is exactly right.

And I think this is exactly the opposite of right. There is no circumstance under which the national new media--which are cowed and lazy, at best, when they are not outright partisans of the right wing noise machine--would have allowed the Democratic nominee to set the press agenda during August. Instead of the Swift Boat "Vets", we would have gotten "Maple Tree Tappers For Sanity". John Kerry spent the entirety of August talking about nothing but the issues--the economy, tax policy, foreign policy again and again and again--often quite forcefully; what dominated the press was the whispering campaign. We would have gotten stories about how living in Vermont had frozen Dean's brain, and people would have worn polar bears at the RNC. Ed Gillespie would have been given eight minutes to rebut Dean's crazy speech in August on all networks and then twenty minutes to praise the Imperator in September.

Would Dean have done a better job of fighting the whispering campaign? I honestly don't know. But I know that he wouldn't have been able to make it not happen.

Kerry is now, finally, being allowed to discuss the issues. Let's see what happens next. Let's make it happen next.

Following up a comment from a previous post: Memory and Politics

In my post on Decency, max_bialystock quotes Woody Allen from Radio Days:

I never forget that New Year's Eve when Aunt Bea awakened me to watch 1944 come in. I've never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each New Year's Eve, those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.

and added:

I think the problem lies in the passage of time. For those of us close enough to remember the events of the "McCarthy Era" and the Viet Nam "Police Action" the past grows dimmer and dimmer.

There are a lot of things this brings to mind. Two of them are fighting for foremost.

One is this recent statement from Grover Norquist. Grover is probably the leading intellectual force behind the current "conservative movement"; he delights in repugnant statements like "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" and "Bipartisanship is another term for date rape". This week, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, he said that he thought the Democratic Party was coming to an end because: 

their demographic base is shrinking. Each year, 2 million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exeception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying.

In case you were wondering, yes, the Republicans really do want you dead. When you're dead, you won't remember.

The other is this, the one brilliant line from Barry Levinson's Avalon:

If I'd known everything was going to be gone, I would have remembered harder.

Don't forget.

If I were a different person

One of the high points of my week is that on Wednesday nights I get to stand all by myself at the trailing end of the #6 station at 23rd Street watching the rats play in the garbage bins.

If I were a different person, this might sound like a cry of despair. But I is me.