Dangerous & Lazy

Campaign slogans include:

• Not as mad as McCain.
• They plaster on the makeup like trollops, you cunt.
• Probably not stealth muslims.
• Comparitively unlikely to start a war in the Middle East.

Your Ann Coulters and  Rush Limbaughs don’t like John McCain. They say it’s because he isn’t a real conservative, but I think there’s a better explanation, which is almost the opposite. The hardcore of the American right don’t like John McCain because he’s the perfect conservative candidate, and they’re jealous.

Though McCain’s often described as a war hero, I’m not aware that he did anything especially heroic. America does have strangely low expectations of its soldiers, as merely serving appears to qualify you as a hero; getting injured, which one might think a predictable hazard of being in a war, qualifies you for a medal (although, of course, nothing so extreme as good health care). But McCain’s military record does involve one thing that makes him perfect for conservatives.

The fundamental narrative of American conservatism is its increasingly ludicrous attempt to portray the conservative as the victim: suffering at the hands of the liberal media, big government, and the commies at the ACLU. In this, of course, McCain has a trump card that is all but unassailable: unlike almost every other American conservative, he really was tortured by Communists.

Dennis Kucinich on impeaching George Bush:

This isn’t a political question, by the way…this is a matter that’s beyond politics. This is a matter that relates to a democratic system of government…. We cannot let our political system trump the requirements of the law.

In a fairly dubious article in the New York Review of Books, I noticed this interesting description of:

the waqf, or Islamic trust, which, beginning in medieval times, was one of the most important institutions of the precolonial era. These foundations, which were immune from government interference, allowed the transmission of wealth down the generations while sustaining public welfare by providing hospitals, schools, mosques, inns, public drinking fountains, and other services independently of the state.

Waqfs were the primary civil society institutions in the Islamic world. As such they represented a threat to the modernizing schemes of governments facing the challenge of grow-ing European power. The Ottoman sultans and other would-be reformers gradually took them over, incorporating them into the apparatus of state—a movement that facilitated the emergence of the autocratic regimes that prevail in much of the Islamic world to this day because the increase in the power of the state was not balanced by advances in democratic accountability.

This description of a “civil society” which is pre-modern and in opposition to (rather than dialectically dependent on) state power is not the most dubious thing in the article; but it intrigues me, because it has a lot in common with the kind of Lockean state-of-nature fantasy that is central to libertarianism. It’s common to impose the western division of liberal and conservative onto Muslims; but where are the libertarian Muslims? Hiding in Ron Paul’s campaign staff, that’s where.

(And isn’t “stealth Muslim” an extraordinarily fucked-up term to have entered our political vocabulary? An “international Jew” for the 21st century.)

I may be missing something, but INTERPOL seem to have “verified” the data that the Colombian government claim proves a connection between Venezuela and FARC by checking the timestamps of the files. Just as well there’s no way the Colombian government could have changed those timestamps then, eh?

A couple of quotes I happened to stumble across:

The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its admission to the International from the General Council, but got the reply: “Already in the case of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Council has declared that it recognizes no theological sections” (Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association).

Which is interesting a) because I never realized the YMCA tried to join the First International (presumably we can now claim the Village People song as a communist anthem) and b) because the First International rejected a group for being explicitly atheist, which sheds some interesting light on debates about whether Marx was a secularist. Also:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable (“Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”).

Which is presumably the source of Negri’s celebrated line “No pity for our enemies.”