Typewriters, baby, typewriters!

Did you read Thomas Friedman’s op-ed yesterday in the New York Times? (Making America Stupid.)

You know Friedman. He’s one of Chancellor Raghu Mathur’s favorite authors. Remember Raghu’s endless references to The World is Flat a couple of years ago? Yeah, Friedman wrote that.

Yesterday, Friedman smacked the Republican Party, and especially its Presidential candidate, John McCain, upside the head. He describes that special moment during the GOP convention when the crowd chanted “drill, baby, drill!” That is an America, says Friedman, that wants to feed its disastrous oil habit. Plus it's an America that is stuck in the past:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? …[I]t reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution … is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

This ruinous lunacy, he says, is symbolic of Senator McCain’s Presidential campaign:

It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue — including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters and no matter how much it might weaken America.

“Stupid.” That is the unofficial theme of the Republican Presidential campaign. Lacking in pizzazz? No problem! We’ll just put a minor, gun-toting, moose-shooting, lie-spouting Alaskan governor on the ticket! Who cares that, in truth, she’s clueless and to the right of Bush? So what that Her Cluelessness could easily end up with her finger on the button? We’ve gotta get elected!

As Friedman notes, Senator McCain, “who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.”

John McCain, version .08, is an unmitigated disaster.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich (I don’t think Raghu reads him much) drew attention to the “real elephant in the room of this election”:

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

Rich focuses on Palin’s curious acceptance speech, in which she compared herself with Harry Truman—you know, the guy who became President when FDR died. (Get it?) You’ll recall that Palin offered a quotation from an author who, she said, had praised Truman.

The author has now been identified: he was Westbrook Pegler, who, says Rich, after Truman was elected in 1948, declared that America was now “done for.”

Gosh, I guess Sarah got that “praise” thing wrong.

According to Rich, “Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.”

No wonder Palin reads this guy! He was a culture warrior, like her!

… [T]he vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

On Friday, the Times’ Bob Herbert brought up the inevitable “stupid” theme:

…I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

Yeah, we’re hitting a new low. We’ve got millions of stupid people cheering for a stupid candidate:

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.
…
The Bush doctrine, which flung open the doors to the catastrophe in Iraq, was such a fundamental aspect of the administration’s foreign policy that it staggers the imagination that we could have someone no further than a whisper away from the White House who doesn’t even know what it is.

Herbert notes that the same fact-challenged spirit that got us into the Iraq quagmire (viz., Screw you, college boy!) is alive and well in Sarah Palin:

…[A]t Palin’s son’s deployment ceremony [to Iraq]…, she told the audience of soldiers that they would be fighting “the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.” ¶ Was she deliberately falsifying history, or does she still not know that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Do you recall the polls back in 2004 that showed that those who voted for Bush believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks? Many of them even believed that there were WMDs in Iraq!

Yeah, the stupid people.

They’re still around, and they’re getting excited.

Speaking of cynical and/or clueless cultural warriors, have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a member of the SOCCCD board of trustees? I’m thinking in particular of Don Wagner, a smart guy, but a guy who has done as much as anybody to impose the spirit-crushing, incompetent, and fear-inducing Raghu Mathur upon our colleges. 

It’s stunning, really. Here we have two of the best community colleges to be found anywhere, and, for years now, they’ve been running on three cylinders, with morale in the toilet.

Wagner is explicit about his enthusiasm for the “culture wars.” To people like Wagner, a real American, faculty are those “probably gay” atheistic communists that Rich was talking about and that Pegler hated.

Faculty are dispirited and thwarted, are they? Ha! Serves ‘em right, the subversive, anti-American bastards!

I wonder though. When you get up close to faculty—and Wagner’s been doing that for the last half-year—you can’t help but notice that they are no subversives. Mostly, they’re just ordinary people trying to teach and to do it well. 

Spirit-crushing and fear is the wrong atmosphere for that, you know.

Do you suppose that there is a corner of Don’s soul where he recognizes the evil he has done and that he continues to do? D’ya think?

DON WAGNER ON THE "CULTURE WAR":

"My side of the culture war thought that the first term of the Clinton Administration was … a disaster. There was nothing to like about his positions on gays in the military, nationalization of the health care industry, opposition to welfare reform that took a Republican Congress to finally achieve, …the incineration of children in Waco, …stonewalling on Vince Foster, missing Rose Law Firm billing records, … sale of the Lincoln Bedroom, ad nauseam.

…"Those on my side of the culture war believe that with rights come responsibilities, and that you have a right to build on your own property even if a snail darter or some such endangered vermin happens to live on it, a right to pack a gun, and the right to live free of an oppressive nanny state. You also have a responsibility to care for yourself and your family, and to exhaust every effort to do so before asking the government for a handout. Personal responsibility and self reliance [sic] are more highly regarded on my side of the culture war than are feelings and groupthink.

"My side of the culture war laughs at the hypocracy [sic!] of the left when it says we care about children only until they are born, when in fact it is our side that also opposes euthanasia, the left's creeping culture of death, the killing of Terry Schiavo….”