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Election Prediction
Pat Lang analyzes the election race and concludes:
John McCain will be the 44th president of the United States. His need to feel the equal of his "fathers" will be assuaged for at least a few months. Sarah Palin is likely to succeed him as president. He is elderly, fragile, physically much abused in life, choleric, and seemingly in decline. His belligerence grows. He is under the influence of the Jacobin neocons who know no limits to the possibility of the fulfillment of their dreams. Who can say where that influence will take us?
Governor Palin is yet unreadable. […] She has a great deal of "catching up" to do. People spend their whole lives studying the subject matter that she must master if she is not to be a menace to the world. She needs to have someone explain the consequences implict in the acronym SIOP. Perhaps she can "catch up."
I think his prediction is correct. Obama plays fair with McCain. That is nice, but will lose him the election. Why is he not really trying to win?
Colonel Lang shows his imperial stripes again.
His lifelong, Regular Army devotion to Cold War thinking has him evaluate everything in terms of the United States versus Them. Ideally, Them means Russia, but really Them is anyone who doesn’t welcome America’s boundless, inchoate desire to dry hump every other nation on this round planet, and bomb the ones that resist.
For lo, they have no right to resist, since our intentions are the very best. This time. Honest they are.
That’s the very business the Colonel is in. He and a few other retired spooks show American businessmen how to get in there and stick it to the nation of _________________ most efficiently. ‘Tain’t personal. Just bidness. American bidness.
Patrick offers three threadbare opinions as to why McCain must surely win, and in the same breath sees him dead and gone, with Sarah the Cypher in the sacred seat atop the greatest nation ever, proving herself eminently ‘coachable’ as she proceeds to put the Russkies in their place.
His glee at this prospect positively reeks of Buck Turgidson’s salty brow. No doubt Colonel Lang sees himself prominent among the worthies who will be coaching Madame President.
Lang’s opinions as to why McCain must win are hollow, and wrong.
1) Hillary would bring along as many negative demographics as positives. A lukewarm campaigner for Obama, she is already planning a run for President in 2012, and she and Bill are fighting to keep some control of the Democratic Party. Besides, in purely practical terms, there is no way she and Obama could ever share the White House. It would be a house divided. Such houses fall.
2) He brings up ‘quiet racism’ against uppity black men who talk real smart and somehow get a hold of more money and education than us white boys — c’mon, that has been a central part of Obama’s Electoral College calculations for years. It’s not something new and potent because Colonel Lang just thought of it. Yes, it is quite real, but it is also well measured and accounted for by the Obama campaign. Bringing this up as if it is a sudden show stopper is the logical equivalent of saying, “Ya know, them tires on your new car are going to wear out on you, brother. Nuthin’ you can do about it, either. Sixty, seventy thousand miles, and it’s over. I’m just sayin, it’s hopeless . . .” A slick bit of concern trolling on Patrick’s part.
3) Sarah Cypher attracting the votes of church-attendin’ 1950-ish apron-wearin’ well-meanin’ Plain Jane Moms by the millions is a real public response, but so is those same Moms facing their husbands and themselves out of work, the price of food, gas, clothes for the kids, mortgage, car, and college savings.
The economy has turned to shit, and it’s getting worse by the day. These same Moms are thinking to themselves that electing a well-meanin’ Church Lady who knows zip about addressing these daily financial terrors is beyond dumb. It’s too retarded even for trailer trash to swallow.
This election will hinge on the economy, not on new wars, old surges, personalities, identity politics, and not on Patrick Lang’s purblind desires for a new Cold War with Russia to make the world feel all right again. People will enter the voting booths in eight weeks with Lehman Brothers long gone, with WaMu and Wachovia and Wells Fargo sunk or sinking, and with maybe a few other national banks failed.
This means there will more than likely be a taxpayer bailout of the FDIC before Election Day, so that no American voters lose their savings accounts. That will scare the shit out the voting public, and neither John nor Sarah will have anything intelligent to offer.
The Colonel, as always, sees an America that can continue screwing over the whole planet, meaning well the whole time. He wants feel good people in the White House, people who will feel good about dictating economic surrender to other countries — or else. Patrick can identify with well meaning people like that, and get behind them. OO-rah. Go team, go.
In a nutshell, Lang is of the old school that insists on inflicting America’s domestic policies on the world, and calling it foreign policy. It worked for years — it will work forever.
If the Colonel should ever stray from the cloistered world of think tanks and consulting companies sucking on the public teat in the shadow of Washington, DC’s alphabet agencies, he will discover a very different country than the one he thinks is out here.
Posted by: Antifa | Sep 12 2008 20:55 utc | 18
@Political Brain
Nice turd bomb you dropped there, of course b could be sysop (sic) hell, over half of us here could be, including your truly…
But so what, think that will stop anything? One conclusion I came to whilst watching the double feature horror show of the DNC/RNC was when the tax slave police were popping concussion grenades on the protesters, it wasn’t to get them to disperse, no, it was to get them to panic. Therefore giving them the justification to, well you know where I going w/that thought.
problem is, as I have mentioned before, When dealing w/ spy’s…The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who
is spying on him. In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry
and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game—even as victim, or citizen being monitored—will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.
Wilson calls it, Games without end:
…the peculiar nature of the game…makes it impossible for [participants] to stop the game once it is under way. Such situations
we label games without end.
— Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson,
Pragmatics of Human Communication
SUSPICION LEADS TO MORE SUSPICION
In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on,forever.
or
THE BURDEN OF OMNISCIENCE
or: Why you can’t reach the Court
or the Castle in Kafka’s allegories
Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps or secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because
(a) infiltration of the secret police, for purposes of subversion, will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and hostile foreign powers and (b) secret police agencies acquire fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police in a row because of this danger. As Nixon so wistfully said in a
Watergate transcript, Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have
scared them to death. He had a file on everybody. [Italics added.]
Thus, those who employ secret police agencies must monitor them, to be sure they are not acquiring too much power. Here a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to acquiring “too much power” in the opinion of its masters. And so it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order.
SUSPICION LEADS TO MORE SUSPICION
In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on,
forever.
Thus games without end
Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.
In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating,however unwillingly, in the secret police game–even as victim, or citizen being monitored–will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.
The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.
The only alternative was suggested sarcastically by playwright Bertolt Brecht (who was hounded by U.S. secret police as a communist and by East German secret police, later, as not sufficiently communist). “If the government doesn’t trust the
people,” Brecht asked innocently, “why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect a new people?” No way has yet been invented to elect a new people, so the government will instead spy on the existing people with increased vigor.
Every secret police organization is engaged in both the collection of information and the production of misinformation, euphemistically
called “disinformation.” That is, you score points in the secret police game both by hoarding signals (information units)–hiding facts from competitors–and by foisting false
signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates the situation I call Optimum SNAFU, in which every player has rational (not neurotic) reasons for suspecting that each and all
may be trying to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe him and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.
Such is the neuro-sociological “logic” of a Disinformation Matrix. It is, as Paul Watzlawik has demonstrated, the logic of schizophrenia.
the philosophical banter of a madman, but what if we are all mad?
myth baking or meme dreaming?…lol
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 13 2008 4:58 utc | 30
Artilect, I wondered too, partly why I posted it (women against sarah palin), I can’t judge (see annie further down…)
jawbone, the Dems ‘ran’ so early because they have so many internal divisions and are always mired in controversy…and it was important to ‘get’ and agree on a *winner*. It was a mistake, a predictable one.
The Dems’ problem, as the Socialist or ‘left’ problem in EU countries, is that their electorate is anti-right, or anti-establishment/conservative, for all kinds of reasons.
The precious, vegetarian, smartly suited, animal-loving green with two doctorates has little in common with black-single-mom part-time waitress or uppity gay metro who hates Bush principally because of one issue or…fill in more.
Socialists and Dems (being very broad here) will support and end to vivisection (that is a no brainer, but they never enforce it), workers in meat factories, the proletariat, or rather honest workers in today’s terms, don’t cha know, researchers who need rats (to create new drugs etc.), extra controls and tax on meat, thus killing off part of the industry, as well as subsidies for farmers or ‘nice peasants’ etc. And more!
They try to square the circle, don’t manage and can’t convince. (Swiss example.)
The Repubs, with a simpler, tribal, ancient kind of belonging mechanisms, only need a few basic principles, talking points, it doesn’t even matter much which ones, they need not be ‘true’ or ‘sensible’, to conserve adherence. Although ‘conservative’ values are involved in a vague way, which is why Bush managed to co-opt the Xtians on Rove’s advice, it is about class values, about empty principles, about snobbery and disdain (the real ingroupy thing..), about white supremacy (under the radar), etc.
As: the high-school group that melds and excludes others on crazed criteria, ticks, way of walking, color of clothing, scores on math tests, shoes, etc. and develops its own oh-so-special idiotic rituals, feeding itself with its own exclusivity, nothing else. Who gets to take over the school once the teachers leave?
Devout Muslims don’t carry on in this way (not the ones I have met or read). Nor do terrorists – these are only interested in one cause and never reject ordinary ppl.
rgiap, it is goebellish gibberish..what is going to happen when McC wins?
antifa, great on Lang.
Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 13 2008 16:28 utc | 43
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