Agree To Disagree

The part of the debate coverage that's driven me nuts is how everyone from The Daily Show to Chris Matthews to the McCain campaign has strung together out-of-context clips of Obama saying some variation of "Senator McCain is absolutely right."

Just for the record, here's the full context of every time Obama "agreed" with McCain:

1. Well, I think Senator McCain's absolutely right that we need more responsibility, but we need it not just when there's a crisis. I mean, we've had years in which the reigning economic ideology has been what's good for Wall Street, but not what's good for Main Street.
2. Well, Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused, which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up. And he's also right that oftentimes lobbyists and special interests are the ones that are introducing these kinds of requests, although that wasn't the case with me. But let's be clear: Earmarks account for $18 billion in last year's budget. Senator McCain is proposing -- and this is a fundamental difference between us -- $300 billion in tax cuts to some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country, $300 billion. Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important. And in his tax plan, you would have CEOs of Fortune 500 companies getting an average of $700,000 in reduced taxes, while leaving 100 million Americans out.
3. Now, John mentioned the fact that business taxes on paper are high in this country, and he's absolutely right. Here's the problem: There are so many loopholes that have been written into the tax code, oftentimes with support of Senator McCain, that we actually see our businesses pay effectively one of the lowest tax rates in the world. And what that means, then, is that there are people out there who are working every day, who are not getting a tax cut, and you want to give them more. It's not like you want to close the loopholes. You just want to add an additional tax cut over the loopholes. And that's a problem.
4. But John is right we have to make cuts. We right now give $15 billion every year as subsidies to private insurers under the Medicare system. Doesn't work any better through the private insurers. They just skim off $15 billion. That was a give away and part of the reason is because lobbyists are able to shape how Medicare works. They did it on the Medicaid prescription drug bill and we have to change the culture. Tom -- or John mentioned me being wildly liberal. Mostly that's just me opposing George Bush's wrong headed policies since I've been in Congress but I think it is that it is also important to recognize I work with Tom Coburn, the most conservative, one of the most conservative Republicans who John already mentioned to set up what we call a Google for government saying we'll list every dollar of federal spending to make sure that the taxpayer can take a look and see who, in fact, is promoting some of these spending projects that John's been railing about.
5. Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families. They have done a brilliant job, and General Petraeus has done a brilliant job. But understand, that was a tactic designed to contain the damage of the previous four years of mismanagement of this war. And so John likes -- John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong.
6. John, I -- you're absolutely right that presidents have to be prudent in what they say. But, you know, coming from you, who, you know, in the past has threatened extinction for North Korea and, you know, sung songs about bombing Iran, I don't know, you know, how credible that is. I think this is the right strategy. Now, Senator McCain is also right that it's difficult. This is not an easy situation. You've got cross-border attacks against U.S. troops.
7. So obviously, our policy over the last eight years has not worked. Senator McCain is absolutely right, we cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran. It would be a game changer. Not only would it threaten Israel, a country that is our stalwart ally, but it would also create an environment in which you could set off an arms race in this Middle East. Now here's what we need to do. We do need tougher sanctions. I do not agree with Senator McCain that we're going to be able to execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation with some countries like Russia and China that are, I think Senator McCain would agree, not democracies, but have extensive trade with Iran but potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon. But we are also going to have to, I believe, engage in tough direct diplomacy with Iran and this is a major difference I have with Senator McCain, this notion by not talking to people we are punishing them has not worked. It has not worked in Iran, it has not worked in North Korea. In each instance, our efforts of isolation have actually accelerated their efforts to get nuclear weapons. That will change when I'm president of the United States.
   8. And one last point I want to make. It is important for us to understand that the way we are perceived in the world is going to make a difference, in terms of our capacity to get cooperation and root out terrorism. And one of the things that I intend to do as president is to restore America's standing in the world. We are less respected now than we were eight years ago or even four years ago. And this is the greatest country on Earth. But because of some of the mistakes that have been made -- and I give Senator McCain great credit on the torture issue, for having identified that as something that undermines our long-term security -- because of those things, we, I think, are going to have a lot of work to do in the next administration to restore that sense that America is that shining beacon on a hill.
   
   So, let's get this straight -- the only time when Obama unambiguously agreed with McCain was in his opposition to torture. Every other single time, he opened by agreeing with McCain, only to turn it around and show how profoundly he disagreed with him.
   
   It's absurd for pundits to endlessly replay loops of McCain saying "Senator Obama doesn't understand" and then not question exactly what it is that Obama doesn't understand (especially when McCain is very often factually wrong). And it's ridiculous to show these clips of Obama saying he agrees with McCain without even referring to the fact that the apparent agreement is part of a strategy to show the absurdity of McCain's logic. Every time Obama ducks McCain's punch to "agree," he comes back with a disagreeable shot to the jaw. And for people who watched the entire debate, it worked.
   
   

Dig Down In Your Pockets, Come Up With Two Bits

Something else we can look forward to in a new Depression: amazing tap dancing!

The Appropriately Juvenile Response

I can't help but giggle when I read James Fallows's headline:

"The Bush taint becoming the McCain taint?"

Just imagining scenarios where that transformation could be possible -- an exchange? a fusion? a mysterious convergence? -- is a source of unending hilarity.

Artificial Scarcity

Jonathan Gottschall on Prehistory and Homer:

Reconstructing a prehistoric world from literary sources is rife with complications. But there are aspects of life in the Homeric era upon which most scholars agree. Homer paints a coherent picture of Greek attitudes, ideology, customs, manners, and mores that is consistent with the 8th century archeological record, and holds together based on anthropological knowledge about societies at similar levels of cultural development. For instance, we can trust that the Greeks' political organization was loose but not chaotic - probably organized at the level of chiefdoms, not kingdoms or city-states. In the epics we can see the workings of an agrarian economy; we can see what animals they raised and what crops, how they mixed their wine, worshipped their gods, and treated their slaves and women. We can tell that theirs was a warlike world, with high rates of conflict within and between communities.

This violence, in fact, opens an important window onto that world. Patterns of violence in Homer are intriguingly consistent with societies on the anthropological record known to have suffered from acute shortages of women. While Homeric men did not take multiple wives, they hoarded and guarded slave women who they treated as their sexual property. These women were mainly captured in raids of neighboring towns, and they appear frequently in Homer. In the poems, Odysseus is mentioned as having 50 slave women, and it is slave women who bear most of King Priam's 62 children. For every slave woman working a rich man's loom and sharing his bed, some less fortunate or formidable man lacks a wife.

In pre-state societies around the world - from the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin to the tribes of highland New Guinea to the Inuit of the Arctic - a scarcity of women almost invariably triggers pitched competition among men, not only directly over women, but also over the wealth and social status needed to win them. This is exactly what we find in Homer. Homeric men fight over many different things, but virtually all of the major disputes center on rights to women - not only the famous conflict over Helen, but also over the slave girls Briseis and Chryseis, Odysseus's wife Penelope, and all the nameless women of common Trojan men. As the old counselor Nestor shouts to the Greek hosts, "Don't anyone hurry to return homeward until after he has lain down alongside a wife of some Trojan!"

The war between Greeks and Trojans ends in the Rape of Troy: the massacre of men, and the rape and abduction of women. These events are not the rare savageries of a particularly long and bitter war - they are one of the major points of the war. Homeric raiders always hoped to return home with new slave-concubines. Achilles conveys this in his soul-searching assessment of his life as warrior: "I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women."

Notes:

1. I don't endorse the anthropology not-quite-cited here, but this is an important motif in Homer. I would almost rather have "Darwinian" literary critics misunderstand the science than misunderstand the text. Gottschall doesn't misunderstand these texts, at least at this level.
2. Should the banking crisis cause society to completely collapse, it's nice to know what we have to look forward to.

Narcissisms OId and New

Dan Piepenbring at if:book on Facebook's displacement of yearbooks, and what that tells us about the future of the book:

Despite the presence of “book” in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader “social network” applications. That’s all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right?...

The site, then, is a better yearbook than any yearbook can be. It suggests that the networked screen is, at least for this purpose, an infinitely more versatile medium than the static page. In considering Facebook as an electronic book rather than as a mere web franchise, we see how this new medium can improve upon the tried-and-true formulas of the print age...

There’s arguably another, bleaker lesson to be learned here, which is that Facebook’s true victory over print is predicated on its ability to massage our narcissism. Perhaps MicCalifornia, a commenter on the Economist piece, says it best: “The first thing we do when we get our yearbooks is see how many pictures we are in. Who needs it when with Facebook, I am in all the pictures.”

If It Raines Or Freezes

Paul Newman Dies At 83.

Gobama

Image via this post @ Racialicious.

Restoring Confidence in Our Instruments

Charles Bernstein, "Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers":

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets...

Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems...

We are convinced that once we have removed these troubled and distressed poems from circulation, our cultural sector will stabilize and readers will regain confidence in American literature. We estimate that for the buyout to be successful, we will need to remove from circulation all poems written after 1904.

Or as I wrote to Charles, instead of trading mortgage-backed-securities, we should be dealing in high-energy poetic constructs, like Charles Olson advocated back in 1950 in "Projective Verse." On Citizen!

New York, New York

I know I promised light blogging while I get myself all pretty for the job market, but this week it's actually about geography. I'm in Manhattan for an MLA committee meeting, so between planning panels and projects and furiously finishing writing samples on Ezra Pound's hatred of classical philology and love for loose-leaf files (seriously) and perhaps a trip to the Superhero Supply Store, I am keeping my schrifts to meself.



















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Okay, here's the deal. I'm actually in New York for a super-secret meeting with Henry Paulson, Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, and John Maynard Keynes (who isn't really dead). John McCain was invited, but cancelled at the last minute for an interview with Katie Couric instead. We're going to get this mess sorted out. My proposal is that we start a cap-and-trade system whereby companies exceeding strict emissions standards have to buy troubled mortgage-based security assets from the government. We're going to use the money to pay for universal health care. Pray for us.

The Negatives of Negative Voting ("Delighting in Lamentations")

Daniel Larison, "Delighting in Lamentations":

Even though I was not a Bush voter and voted for Buchanan, I have to admit that my contempt for Clinton and Gore was so strong in 2000 that I was quite pleased when Gore finally conceded defeat.  I was no Bush partisan, but even then I could see that he was somewhat preferable to McCain, who promises once again to be much worse than Bush once in power, so Bush seemed the least awful of the lot of them.  What many conservatives would prefer to forget now is how much worse by virtually every measure Bush has been compared to Clinton, and Clinton was certainly no prize, which should be a humbling realization for anyone who thinks visceral reactions should guide political behavior.  The desire to see Clinton and Gore suppporters disappointed and outraged combined with a politics of contempt for these politicians, fueled by my distaste for the leading Democrats, worked to distort my assessment of Bush in at least the first few months of his administration.  That he launched an airstrike on Iraq within weeks of assuming office should have told me something about the obsession with that country that would cost us so much, but at that point I was still in thrall to my contempt for Gore.  If there is one last thing for which I blame Clinton, it is how easy he made it to despise him and his backers and how he helped pave the way for the appalling joke of a President we currently have.

Delighting in lamentations is a strong temptation, and it is one the selection of Palin was designed to provoke, as there is a powerful urge to cheer on Palin if it turns the likes of Mark “Obama is a Lightworker” Morford into more of an incoherent, sputtering buffoon than he already was.  Even so, we all know that this is a ridiculous way to respond.  It makes your loyalties hostage to the most idiotic of your opponents, and it compels you to ignore your interests and any semblance of independent thought.  I would add another point–even those who seem to break from the herd and back a candidate from “the other side” to repudiate all the worst elements on your own “side” are falling prey to what Conor calls the politics of Schadenfreude, as an important part of the rationale for conservatives backing Obama or conservative Democrats backing McCain is not that these candidates better represent them but that they function as scourges for elements in their own party that they find appalling.  We hear it all the time–an Obama victory would be a judgement on the neocons, or Democratic defections would be a repudiation of Obama’s progressivism–and somehow we do not see it as part of the same moral blackmail that keeps the two-party system functioning.  If we voted our interests and paid no mind to the kinds of people who would be outraged by the victory of one candidate or another, we would quickly realize that neither party represents us and serves mainly as a rallying point for our undefined grievances against other people, most of whom we have never met.