After a Few Whiffs of Another World He Decided to Stay with the Stench of the Present

I understand the argument that local still counts, that if you turn off the top-of-the-ticket voters it's the bottom of the bases' Boards of Education that get seized by motherfucking christers. If I hadn't said yes to one of mine saying please I wouldn't walk literally across the street day after tomorrow to vote a certain BoE ticket.

I wish I remembered where I read this so I could cite it, but someone observed that the insurance industry invested in Democrats to make health insurance mandatory and now that's done the insurance industry is investing in Republicans to make sure everyone is reamed by the insurance industry down to the last extractable penny. Which is the more loathsome, the one which baits or the one which switches?

Since I'm trying to escape the bonds of either/ors I say it's entirely possible that Barack Obama is both the best American liberalism can do and a grateful and complicit tool for the system that made him President.

A friend and I profoundly and respectfully disagree about Obama, a disagreement brought out again by my observation that a terrorist crisis on the Friday before Election Day 2006 would have sparked one motherfucking angry blogpost from me. She says "he (Obama) didn't exploit (the situation) -- he handled (it) responsibly. " My response is that it wasn't in his interest to exploit it. In a world of no either/ors, both can be true.

David Fucking Broder, two days before an election result that will remind him he once got boners writes:

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve. 

And in a world free of either/ors it's entirely possible I will vote again on my own initiative on a local issue and for a particular candidate at least once more in my lifetime even though it's so jarringly disconcertingly to agree with David Fucking Broder (on anything) that Obama will cynically manipulate foreign policy, even if Broder approves while I feebly damn, that I feel like never voting again.

• On the Broder.
• Seymour Hersh on cyber-war, cyber-security, and the immense profits in confounding the two.
• Sing it, clowns.
• The view from Kentucky.
• A view of the view from Kentucky. Since I'm trying to stop self-tyrannizing myself with either/ors, I can hold that Sartwell is right and the motherfucking crackers are still motherfucking crackers.
• Lowest common denominator: The true terror is that the American left is caught between Scylla - a Republican Congress that will attempt to roll back over a century of social progress - and Charybdis - armed revolt by reactionaries who confuse an electoral setback with tyranny.
• Johns pissed at whores.
• When Maureen Dowd alludes to Lebowski, a major shark has been jumped.
• Blame calculus.
• Deja vu. 
• Dr Leo went to the festival.
• Cryptozoology. 
• Baltimore is no longer epicenter.
• Marvin Mandel isn't dead?
• Field Mice! Twee or fey? Haven't thought about that debate in a while.
• Horrible news.
• Good news!

AFTER A FEW WHIFFS OF ANOTHER WORLD

Thomas Lux

After a few whiffs of another world
he decided to stay with the stench
of the present: dumpster lids everywhere
rising like cakes, garbage scows
moving in long orderly lines
across the harbor.... The olfactory - he loves it
even when it wafts, wracking all points
of the compass. It's always invisible
and takes its direction according to the whimsy
of wind, or fans, or the waves
of a hand. Cave dwellers knew it,
and dogs. The bare smell
of dirt on cabbage, the snow-
on-your-arm smell. Even
in the abstract: fear-smell, like spit
on a knife blade. And
what the worms inhale, and then
the smell of dew on barbed wire, the sweet,
thick smell of sex, slick,
our lungs giddy and pink with it....
It's not the world which is good or bad
and so we run our noses over everything.
Even the dumb have this sense.