“Sarah Palin is a great friend to the bowling industry and we’re so proud and honored to welcome her as our keynote speaker at International Bowl Expo 2010,” said Steven Johnson, executive director of the BPAA.

A bowling columnist writes:

Politicians don’t seem to give a hoot about championing the great sport of bowling and that bothers me when politicians who know nothing about bowling are invited to speak at a bowling convention and barely mention the sport. I would venture a guess that a keynote speaker at Bowl Expo earns between $25,000 and $50,000 for maybe 25 minutes of jokes and their beliefs about what is happening in the country…views they probably have expressed numerous times on numerous cable and network TV shows.

And that’s the point.  The convention brings her in for the publicity and she’s there for the payoff and to reread her lines.  

…is only indicative of local situations, really – with two caveats.

1. If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose.
2. If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Democrats ran really poor candidates and got beat.  In NYC, Bloomberg spent $100M of his own money and won by a much lesser margin than expected; exit polls said that his gyrations to but term limits didn’t go over well with voters.

In New York’s 23rd congressional district (which will go the way of the dodo come next reapportionment and census)  the Conservative Party candidate and his snarky stunts and we’re-entitled-to-stomp-the-unpure approach, hand in hand with Glen Beck, didn’t go over well with the locals.  For the first time since the 1870s, the Republicans lost that seat to the Democrats.

The big lesson for the Democrats is not that Obama’s lost support; his support in VA and NJ was far higher on election day than the sad-sack Democratic candidates.  It’s that they run to the right with cruddy candidates at the peril of losing the active support and interest of their base and of voters who are tired of the same old stuff.    A large majority of voters in both states clearly said in exit polls that their vote had nothing to do with national politics, period, and far more that the other guy was a bigger stinker.

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

• Governor Sanford of South Carolina’s spokesman is resigning for a job in the private sector.  Comments from folks who know him say that he’s a nice guy who probably is very tired from this ride on the circus.
• Unlike at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Arlington trashes the stuff left behind.
• As I’ve said before, I’m ignoring the Sotomayor hearings as much as possible to avoid raising my blood pressure.

John Ensign has decided that he’s not resigning his seat, he’s running for re-election and he’s expecting the voters to forget it as soon after Britney Spears is killed in a love-suicide pact with Lindsey Lohan and CNN spends a week of coverage on the aftermath as possible.    Well, whatever keeps his dad’s and the RNSC’s pockets empty as they try to defend the seat in the next election is fine with me and another example on shining levels of morality.

The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed.   This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without mentioning the reluctance many GOP types felt about elevating the Lietenant Governor to the job.  Allegedy, he’s a not-very-head-screwed-on-tight sort who is ambitious without ability, and has a bunch of his own personal skeletons rattling around.

Then again, I was on the road today, and heard a snatch of a couple of conservative talk dudes rolling on the floor over Senator Ensign having to get his parents to payoff the family of the woman he was having an affair with.   As in they thought it was freaking pathetic – which it was.  No way Ensign comes back from that politically, either.

And then there’s the whole Sarah Palin thing, which is beyond anyone’s understanding.

Locally in Illinois, the next set of statewide races for the Senate seat and Governor’s chair are suddenly defined by all of the people who are stating that they don’t want the jobs.

From a new WaPo article about details on how Governor Sanford elaborately jerry-rigged up an Official Trip To Argentina to see his ’soulmate’ in Buenos Aires, we have a new euphemism to go along with ‘hiking the appalachian trail‘ – to ‘go Dove Hunting‘.

Dick Durbin and some other Senate Democrats are saying – dudes, you Democratic senators who don’t wanna vote *for* a bill we ‘re putting through don’t have to do so, but fer pete’s sake, nobody lost their seats for voting to shut off debate and bring the bill to a floor vote.

The ‘close debate / cloture’ vote requires 60 votes.  An up or down actual vote on the bill / law just takes a simple majority to pass.

If that’s the deal, then Democratic Senators in Red states can vote to have the up or down vote, and we’re through with this 40-Republicans-can-choke-off-everything crap.

Apparently, she’s resigning the governorship at the end of the month (at a picnic?!) and neither she nor the new Lieutenant Governor who will replace her will run in the next Gubernatorial election.   Nothing about 2012 and the national scene.

Gov Sanford of South Carolina admits that his mysterious disappearance over the last week was to go off to Argentina to see his mistress.

Well, there’s always the Sanford / Ensign ticket for the GOP next time, with the motto: “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

And yes, that is Gary Hart to the right.

“I spent the past five days of my life crying in Argentina,” he said, “so I could come back and cry here.” Dude.  That is specifically what Eva Peron didn’t want people to do, ya know?

Daniel Larison thinks that the Republican leadership in Congress is rotted out and has to go:

The attacks on Sotomayor are not going to help this, especially in the face of the further radicalization of the Republican Party:

No matter what the specific amounts are (somewhere between a net of 6% and 8%), roughly half of the Democratic electoral improvement since the dark days of 1988 has come from demographic change, rather than from either infrastructure / strategy / activist improvements, or from poor Republican governing performance. Further, this demographic change is actually more problematic for Republicans than the other two areas, because it requires changing the coalitions rather then developing better infrastructure or simply hoping that Democrats can’t get the economy going again. It is an underlying problem Republicans face, and which requires them to break out of the ongoing Nixon-McGovern framework of American political coalitions. From now on, the McGoverns are just going to keep winning, even if they were to nominate another Michael Dukakis.

Daniel Larison on the state of the Republican Party and why (read the whole thing):

One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the crash solely on the other party, which had not been in power during most of the period in question. One might be able to understand, if not condone, this on account of the timing right before a general election, but the infuriating thing is that they actually came to believe that these tall tales were correct and they have continued to repeat them as if they were true. Unanimous House GOP opposition to the stimulus bill seemed unwise to me at the time because it suggested that the party had learned nothing from its electoral repudiations, and more than this it suggested that the party was unwilling to take responsibility for decisions that its leaders had endorsed over many years…In short, the leadership took the wrong side on the obviously winning issue of resistance to the bailout and then took the right, but politically toxic side in the stimulus debate, all the while believing that it had behaved both responsibly and cleverly. If there is to be any credible Republican opposition to centralization, it is not going to come from the current House and Senate leadership. The leadership must be replaced. It will be as clear a break with the Bush-accommodating ways of the past as the GOP can manage at the moment, and it could bring to the fore a new set of leaders in the minority to craft an agenda, or for that matter simply an alternative budget proposal, that will not be immediately laughed out of the room.

Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen.  Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie.  But the level of ranting and screaming on the subject will further alienate the non-base GOP, who are dropping off the Republicans in droves, especially the younger voters who don’t automatically share those views.

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

Well, the Senate can filibuster a Supreme Court nomination.  And I have no idea who Obama will pick.  But you can rest assured that the confirmation will be messy no matter who he picks, considering what’s been going on over the last little bit.  I’m not looking forward to it at all.

Interesting articles on a speech given by the guy who ran McCain’s VP search; to wit, Sarah Palin did better on some matters when questioned about foreign policy stuff than a lot of the others (God knows what the seekrit answers were supposed to be) and that Joe Lieberman and the fusion ticket was indeed a major direction of the search effort, but that legal barriers to ’sore losers’ not swtiching parties at the last minute in several states, not to mention hardcore GOP I-dont-think-so reactions to Joe pushed the idea aside.  Read the linked articles in you’re curious…

from CNN:

Gergen: “They still haven’t found their voice, Anderson. This happens to a minority party after it’s lost a couple of bad elections, but they’re searching for their voice.”

Cooper: “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

Them Chinese-ers needs to pick them some real American names, like Mississinewa or Oconomowoc.  Or Cholmondeley St. John.  (Pronounced Chumley Sinjin, BTW)

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Which is why I’m not called Rittenhausen, or something more complex, I guess.

• I wonder how many of the people who are going on about “teabag” protests understand the common slang usage of the term?
• Retail vacancies at malls and shopping areas are soaring.
• Men aren’t buying new underwear, which was one of Alan Greenspan’s classic uh-oh-the-sky-is-falling barometers of how well business is doing.
• My question on Coleman-as-sore-loser-and-endlessly-litigating-this is  - if Pawlenty decides to not certify the election until all appeals and whatnot have ended, how much in-state political doom will he create for himself in Minnesota?
• Normally, the rate of how-long-cars-stay-on-the-road fluctuates between 10 and 15 years, but at the current sales rates, people must be expecting them to stick around for over 26 years.
• Warren Buffett’s company just lost their AAA rating.  No, we won’t talk about how the rating agencies tried to shnooker us into believing all of the mortgage-related paper was made of gold, too, and busily bankrupted all sorts of small towns who went in for goofy paper arrangements.
• Our constitutional right to whup our children.  Well, real soon now…