Bikes, Bruce & ‘Bama

It was quite a weekend in Milwaukee.

• Under perfect summers skies all weekend long, we enjoyed or survived – depending on your perspective and tolerance level – our quintennial visit from Harley riders.
  
• The generous HD company treated the bikers to an incredible performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (see first 3 songs here) and shared it with anyone else who wanted to take advantage of the cheap ticket ($40 – you didn’t need the $65 HarleyFest pass after all), not to mention free admission for any kid 13 and under, for which Ken and at least two other fine young men are eternally grateful.


• And, finally, Barack Obama put 20,000 in the seats of the Marcus Amphitheater on a day’s notice for a subdued, but very effective rally on Labor Day evening.

If Harley riders were the hell-raisers of their own legend, we in Milwaukee would all be cowering behind locked doors during these things, hiding the women and children while all the boozing, whoring and terror went on all over town. That is hardly the case with the type of investment bankers, corporate lawyers and salespeople who have the tens of thousands of dollars to spend to revel in Harley merchandise and mystique.

The only thing you have to be afraid of with these respectable men and women is the lawsuit they would hit you with if you forgot to check your blind spot and sideswiped them while changing lanes on the freeway, a situation I only got close to once this weekend. Like obedient conventioneers, they dutifully congregated in the various sanctioned parties, drove up and down the lakefront and spent a wonderfully huge amount of money all over our fair city. The only obnoxious behavior was that damn thing where they make their engines sound like a machine gun. But, what’s a little noise between friends?

Speaking of friends, the Harley people spent five or six hours mingling with the loyal subjects of Springsteen Nation on Saturday night on the sprawling space of Veterans Park on Milwaukee’s lakefront. It was weird seeing so many people who were not dedicated Bruce fans at one of his shows – especially the last of a long, successful tour. While us Bruce-heads did our usual jockeying for space – which didn’t do much good, since, if you weren’t in one of the wristband areas, you were at least 100 yards away – the riders in their dusty jeans lounged on plastic sheets and, basically, couldn’t care less about "Sandy" or "Spirits" or "Rosalita" or any of the other special parts of the Springsteen oeuvre that we were treated to this night.

Which made it interesting, because I would say the "Harley-Davidson motorcycle enthusiasts", as Bruce kept calling them, made up more than half of the huge crowd (I still haven’t seen an estimate, but it had to be at least 50,000). Not that it mattered much to Bruce and the E Streeters, who played like they were in the bosom of their loving regular fans the whole night.

You’d think the mixed and sometimes indifferent nature of the crowd would be a bummer for Bruce, who tours a lot in Europe because he gets jazzed by the exuberant way the crowds react there. But he and the band had bigger fish to fry on this night, and they set about from the beginning to create a masterpiece. He started with "Gypsy Biker", his own ode to the biker nation from his latest album and ended with a perfect cover of Steppenwolf’s iconic "Born to Be Wild" (which I predicted, by the way, going 12-for-31), but everything else was up for grabs.

Unleashed from the structure of the Magic tour (although he stuck with the last three songs of the set he’s been playing all year), everything seemed to be an audible as he careened through his epic catalog of passionately poetic stories. He gave his body up to the crowd during "Spirits in the Night" – his trust was rewarded when they passed him right back to the stage. He challenged the crowd with a torrid version of the little-known "Youngstown", but still hammed it up with "Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark". He gave love to a fallen brother on "Sandy" and wasn’t afraid to get justifiably political on Bush’s ass during "Livin’ in the Future".

By the time he was done after three-and-a-half hours, if you weren’t a Bruce convert by then, you ain’t gonna be. I thought back when they rocked Miller Park in 2003 near the end of the Rising tour, they should have quit right there – it wasn’t going to get any better, for them or for us. Someone very close to me said before this show that this would be it for him going to Bruce concerts. It’s always possible at the end of a tour that we might have seen the last of the E Street Band – Clarence’s health has not been the greatest at times on this tour, and it can't be E-Street without him. Could it be that Ken and I were at both the last Bruce/E-Street show and the last Favre game in the same year? No, wait, that wasn’t the last Favre game. Never mind.

While my foggy mind was clearing Sunday morning, I found out my weekend was not quite done. It was in the morning paper that Obama was coming to the Marcus Amphitheater for a rally on Labor Day. All it took was a quick trip to the Obama web site to score some press credentials, and I breezed into the scene (after celebrating my boy’s birthday by attending a disappointing game by the playoff-bound Brewers - did I mention it was a busy weekend?) just as the first speakers were getting started. It was a friendly, upbeat, diverse crowd that was ready to roar.

Obama was politically subdued due to hurricane Gustav making landfall and creating still-unknown damage in Louisiana. "Tonight is not a night for political speeches," he said. He even mentioned that Bush and McCain cared just as much as he did about the unfolding events on the Gulf Coast, without a boo or a peep from anyone. It was billed as a "Rally for American Workers", and Obama apologized that he wasn’t going to be getting into what he had planned to say to the largely union crowd. But he segued from expressing his concern for what was happening in the gulf into a stirring, if brief, plea to achieve unity to reach important goals and to take up the challenge to be our brother’s keeper. “What makes us great is that we rise and fall as one nation,” he said. “The spirit that we extend today and in the days to come . . . that’s a spirit we’ve got to carry with us every day.” He spoke for less than 15 minutes and got a rousing reception and response from the large crowd.

Most important, Obama exuded cool on this hot day with unpredictable dangerous weather still churning in the ocean. It wasn't the cool of some jazz cat, but the cool of a calm and measured leader. While John McCain ran impulsively down to the gulf for photo-ops, Obama said yesterday he would go there, when the time was right. He used the shortened rally in Milwaukee to bring home the message of concern and to call his supporters to voluntary action by supporting the efforts of the Red Cross. What we saw on that stage in Milwaukee is the steady hand of someone who was ready.

And, if what we are hearing today about the vetting process for McCain's just-met-her-once stunt-pick for VP is true, McCain, for all his experience and valor, is not ready at all.

Palin: Less Than a Rookie

I am still trying to get my head around this Sarah Palin thing. The timing of the announcement certainly served its cynical purpose of not letting Barack Obama bask for a day in the glow of his dynamic address the night before. The selection is also a not-so-thinly-veiled attempt to peel the shrinking number of still-not-over-it Hillary acolytes away from the Democrats, for those who can’t see the issues for the skirts they are packaged in. As for the substance of Palin herself, well, we’ll see.

This much we do know: Obama chose someone who is eminently qualified to take over the reigns of government if something were to happen to him. John McCain, just as surely, did not. The Republicans want you to believe that the governmental experience level of Palin – serving, as she has, on a small-town school board, city council and for a brief time as governor – is comparable to that of Obama. However, Obama has been running for president for a year-and-a-half now – a resume enhancer all by itself – and has successfully managed a huge staff dealing with complex issues such as campaign logistics and issue development. All candidates and presidents of any experience level rely heavily on staff and advisors, and Obama has put together a distinguished group who not only show his ability to recruit talent but also serve to define him. Who defines Palin? Except for the armchair quarterbacking we all do about national and international issues, if she even does that, she has zero experience in many of the issues that will face the next president and VP.

Secondly, experience-wise, McCain has it exactly backwards. It’s one thing for someone with less experience like Obama to come to the White House with a fully-formed staff and agenda and a VP who can support his initiatives and offer advice informed by many years of distinguished service. It is quite another for McCain to put the nation at the risk of having less than a rookie as the head of the government if something happens to him. (Palin in People: Ready to be president? "Absolutely. Yup. Yup.") Being "one heartbeat away" means something quite different when that one heartbeat belongs to John McCain. With this interesting piece of stunt-casting, McCain violated his promise to pick someone who could take charge if he could not.

Although the MSM always hold Republicans to a lower standard than Democrats – imagine what would have happened if a Democrat had tried to bring along a knob like Dan Quayle – Palin will be defined in the next couple of weeks in the drips-and-drabs of her political history that will get exposed, chewed up and spit out in various future 24-hour news cycles. We already know enough to know there are likely to be more interesting things out there. She is already under investigation for using her state office to extract vengeance on a former brother-in-law; she came out four-square for teaching religion-disguised-as-science ("creationism" – which, I just noticed, comes up as misspelled on my spell-check – among the options offered: "cretinism"); she gave a $27 billion contract to a Canadian company for a pipeline; she does not believe women have the right to control their own bodies; etc. Distinguished investigative lawyer IT seems to have a very nice running start on these and future issues, for which we are all eternally grateful.

What she has said and done in the past will be grist for the mill, but I expect her to be tightly scripted this week at the GOP convention. They’ll have her taking a crash course in things she doesn’t know yet, like what a vice president does and such. When she does have a press conference (talking to People magazine doesn't count), I expect her to wax indignant about any questions trying to probe her past and current positions, trying to knock down old issues and avoid creating new ones. It'll be interesting, at least.

Enough! Obama Undresses McCain

Anatomy of a right-wing talking point:

1. RNC gets hold of a photo of the facade being erected at Mile High Stadium for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. The layout features – gasp – columns, like those on the Parthenon in ancient Greece or, if you will, every monument in official Washington. Do the math: Columns = temples = god worship = god complex = messiah = Obama = self-importance = arrogance.
2. The word goes out via blast e-mail to willing fellow-travelers national and local to mock the pretentious Obama for daring to pretend to be a Greek god.
3. Pliant lap dogs comply like hungry children who will not be fed until they strap the plow to their backs and till the fields.
4. Locally, a Marquette law visiting professor embarrasses himself by sucking up the GOP garbage and distributing it as Legitimate Concern about an imaginary character named "Barackus Caesar" who is "stupid enough" to believe that appearing before historic American architecture used in everything from the Lincoln Memorial to Junior Bush’s stage at his ‘04 convention is a "good idea".
5. When the actual details of the convention site are put in context of the large stadium and people point out the obvious non-religious nature of the columns and previous use of columns on non-temple historic landmarks and in political rallies since the beginning of American time, the wing-nuts do not back down from their obviously phony construct. "Whether you think it's fair or not," snoots the impossibly Obama-phobic visiting professor on his comment thread. "Obama is acquiring a reputation for staggering self importance and regard. You don't play into that." That the professor is guilty of ridiculous and unsupportable smears and sucking up is perhaps the reputation he should be more concerned about.
   

As Barack Obama stepped onto the stage before the large crowd that could be gathered by no one else (I would love to see the Republicans try – they couldn’t get that kind of turn-out for an exhumed Reagan, much less the hapless McCain), the columns were off to the side – framing the video screens for those in the stadium – and nowhere to be seen in the frame featuring the dynamic Obama, who seemed to be speaking in front of a pane of windows. Tomorrow, I suppose we'll be treated to a treatise on the history of fake windows in religious imagery (were they symbolic of mirrors, so he can admire himself?) and the attempt by Obama, by standing in front of them, to stop you from seeing through to the Truth.

It is one thing to take advantage of the beautiful video image of the cheering capacity crowd on a perfect night in a football stadium; it is quite another to be able to take advantage of stadium acoustics to make a great one-word line even better. Early in the speech there was a dramatic moment when he made clear that the legacy of Bush was firmly attached to McCain and both were put on notice. "Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land - enough!" The "enough!" echoed and vibrated through the stadium and through my HD audio channel. It was a one-word wake-up call to the audience and around the country. Enough, indeed.

Those concerned that he was not specific enough and would just come out talking about "hope" and "change" (which wasn’t a fair characterization of his stump speech, but, never mind) would have much to chew on in this dramatic address. From energy independence to health care to Iraq, Obama was concise, articulate and, of course, exactly right.

He did not shy away from fights with McCain on areas assumed to be his strengths:

• "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have...We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans -- Democrats and Republicans - have built, and we are here to restore that legacy...I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first."
  

Boo-yah, McCain. Boo-yah, all your Republican lap-dogs and lackeys. This will fall on deaf ears for people like Rick Esenberg, Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling and the other tiresome local subscribers to the RNC daily talking point e-mails, who provide endless free advertising for the GOP and who will keep pretending Obama is someone they know he isn’t and McCain is someone they say he is. "This election has never been about me," said the supposed Anointed One. "It's been about you." Did you hear that, wing-nuts? Humility from the one you claim thinks of himself as a messiah? Not that you’ll admit it, but your pants are down and your lies are exposed.

We can only hope the (I’m betting) record audience watching at home heard that message and will finally make the smears themselves an issue, and dismiss the tiresome Republicans who cannot be elected on their own merits.

Barack Obama kicked ass tonight, not just a little, and not a moment too soon. The Republicans next week will be back on their heels, with a bunch of meaningless arguments for a couple of talentless candidates. On the stage supposedly designed as a temple in Denver, it was the absent would-be Emperor McCain who could be seen clearly – by many, for the first time – as not worthy and without clothes.

Hillary Rocks Denver

There is nothing more mystifying in the annals of mainstream media political coverage than its over-heated, biased coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Like the neo-cons that concocted the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the MSM has been wrong about everything involving the Clintons. They were wrong when they attributed a false sense of entitlement to the Hillary campaign when it began. They were wrong when they called Bill Clinton racist for pointing out the obvious press bias against him and his wife during the campaign. They were wrong about both sulking since the end of the primary season. They were wrong about either Clinton being hesitant to support Barack Obama once the contest was over.

The "what are they really thinking" coverage of the Clintons has a National Enquirer quality to it. No one "close to the Clintons" has ever been quoted by name saying anything that the reporters and commentators have used to drive their anti-Clinton story-lines. The MSM dreams up Clinton devious machinations in their heads, willing to accept "confirmation" by any lower-rung flunky who wants to ingratiate themselves with the MSM by giving them what they want to keep the mirage of psycho-drama alive to justify their past pronouncements and future perpetration of the myth of the Clintons as selfish egomaniacs who will do anything to advance – well, what is it now? Hillary in 2012?

Hillary’s tremendous speech last night at the DNC convention and her unequivocal support of Obama’s candidacy should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has listened to what she and Bill have been saying since the primaries were over. Yet, we were subjected to weeks of speculation about whether she would really get behind him or just mail it in at this convention. No doubt, there was a large minority of former Hillary supporters gathered in Denver who were still bitter about the campaign, disappointed in the dramatic near-miss by the first legitimate woman candidate for president, etc. But Hillary was never one of them. Always knowing what’s right for the nation first and the party second, Hillary had long ago resolved her understandable disappointment and offered to do anything to help Obama get elected.

Hillary’s stemwinder of a speech was expertly crafted and dynamically delivered. She had a strong message to those who still clung to candidacy as an excuse to sit out this election or, god help them, vote McCain. In the most direct challenge I’ve ever heard a politician put to her most ardent supporters, she asked "were you in this campaign just for me?" What a beautiful rejection of the politics of personality that the MSM has been accusing her of for all these years. Not only does she think it is not all about her – she told her supporters, not so gently and in no uncertain terms, to knock it off and get real: After all that hard work on these important issues, you are going to sit back and give this thing to John McCain? Are you crazy??!!

The most dramatic moment was at the close of the speech when she called up the spirit of super-patriot Harriett Tubman. As read strongly by Clinton, Tubman’s words read like angry, life-affirming poetry on the Underground Railroad:

If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If they're shouting after you, keep going.
Don't ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

The more clever of the network analysts, always watching out for the Devious Ways of Clinton, might dismiss this as a cynical way to counteract allegations of racism in the Clinton campaign by calling up an African-American icon. But Hillary Clinton has always known her history. And now she has made her own, by her historic campaign and, now, by her strong plea to her supporters to get to work for Obama.

The cable talkers had almost universal praise for Hillary’s speech – "did what she had to do" was the consensus, without giving her the benefit of considering it was also what she wanted to do. Over on Fox Noise, of course, it was a different story. Juan Williams, the only reasonable voice on the channel (and that’s only occasionally – he is often very wrong), who was almost in tears in praise of Michelle Obama’s home-run on Monday, was mysteriously absent as GOP flunkies like Bill Kristol and Brit Hume chewed over whether she said enough nice things about Obama in the speech.

But, after less than an hour of giving Hillary her due on the real news channels, they all slid into the same anti-Clinton story-line in anticipation of Bills’ address tonight. Will he get behind the ticket, will it be begrudging, is he still bitter and blah de blah blah. After Bill Clinton delivers his rousing affirmation of all things Obama tonight – then what? Having been proved wrong about the Clintons yet again, do you think they could get off of it?...

Nah.

Michelle Obama and the American Dream

The tremendous story of Michelle Obama’s family that she told so eloquently last night at the DNC convention should resonate with everyone here in Milwaukee. After all, many of us are familiar with the South Side of Chicago a mere 100 miles away. Although on a much larger and denser scale, the South Side of Chicago is not that different from the North Side of Milwaukee. To succeed – much less excel – from that depressed, heavily-segregated part of the city is a remarkable achievement of not only her but her entire family.

Tell me again how "elitist" this up-from-nothing woman is, as she worked her way from the South Side to Harvard, a big law firm and, ultimately, public service. Tell me again how she is a product of privilege when her hard-working father, a city worker, struggled just to get out of bed with his deteriorating MS that took him too young. No welfare, food stamps or handouts for this family – everyone in it got what they had and what they have through hard work, determination and, yes, faith.

And the extraordinary talents of Michelle Obama were on full display as she delivered her compelling story on this week’s biggest stage. She is the model of the modern professional woman – strong in her own right, but stronger still in an obviously equal partnership with Barack in raising a family and trying to affect real change. In this campaign, she and Barack are seizing the opportunity to live their dream of developing a more-perfect nation; not out of a sense of entitlement, but of duty. One of the most interesting parts of the biopic was the fact that her mother and father implored her not to abandon the community in which she grew up, as too many before her had done and continue to do. So she didn’t, and the South Side of Chicago is a better place for her commitment to her home.

Imagine such a story coming out of the North Side of Milwaukee. There are, of course, many such stories, told in smaller forums; less noticed, perhaps, but no less inspiring. If this kind of against-all-odds success resulted in the emergence of a conservative star, we would never hear the end of his or her accomplishments, regardless of what college, law school or right-wing think tank they ended up in. Instead, with Michelle Obama, the Republicans have created out of whole cloth a caricature, a cartoon figure; as if she were born in Harvard Yard, taken in and raised by ‘60s radicals and committed to a subversive campaign to destroy the American Way.

Michelle Obama spoke not only with passion but with joy about her success and that of others in her family. She came before the nation last night fully-formed and in full, beautiful flower – much more so than Hillary Clinton when she was first introduced to us as the Accomplished Spouse in 1992. Regardless of what happens in this campaign, Michelle will be just as much of a force for positive change as her husband. I can’t wait to see what she can do.

Obama-Biden: Ready on Day One

I love me some Joe Biden.

I always thought Biden was the best white guy running for president this cycle. For me, he is the quintessential old-school American politician – someone who is funny, smart, brilliant on his feet and has always shown himself able to get things done. He brings real gravitas to the ticket and shows everyone that Barack Obama is serious about putting the post-Bush government back together. Obama said he was looking for someone who would feel free to speak his mind and challenge Obama when he thought he was wrong. He’ll certainly get that.

That’s the easy part. Because of his long record of service and his big mouth, Biden also comes with loads of baggage for Republicans – who can only win by tearing their opponents down – to poke through. Even before the announcement this morning, they were already dragging out video from his ‘88 campaign, saying that the presidency was no place for on-the-job training, showing his use of line from a British politician the same year, squawking about his calling Obama "articulate" and "clean" last year and blah blah blah. McCain even put out an instant ad in the middle of the night, showing Biden at a debate earlier in this campagin, saying that Obama was "not ready". This is the sort of thing that they would have done with anyone – like I said, they have no other argument for their own election.

But Biden is going to give as good as he gets. He does not suffer fools gladly, and will turn the lies of the GOP against them when he has a chance. Senatorial comity notwithstanding, if I were John McCain, I would stay away from any direct public debate with Biden. All he would have to do is remind McCain what it was like when he was really independent, really a maverick, before he was stuffed into the uncomfortable straightjacket of right-wing Republican orthodoxy for this campaign.

Biden is also perfect for the VP-as-bulldog role – he’s the best choice in that way since Bob Dole, without the dark surliness and without being wrong all the time. The Joe Biden that has sharply grilled Bush lackeys and judicial nominees is going to be an invaluable resource for the campaign and in the White House after that. We can only hope that the campaign consultants get out of the way and let Joe be Joe, with no "play it safe" constraints.

Most exciting is the prospect of Biden in the vice-presidential debate. It will be one thing if McCain tries to get cute by picking a newby like Pawlenty or Jindal. Either will most likely be stunned into Qualye-ian silence by Biden's superior experience and intellect. But, my dream scenario continues to be to have Captain Underpants, Mitt Romney, on the ticket. I would love to see Romney try to mix it up with Biden – Biden would take Romney’s empty rhetoric and stuff it down his golden throat. I can’t wait to see those vacant eyes glaze over the way they do when he knows his goose is cooked. Besides the entertainment value of having Mitt to kick around for a couple of months, an all-rich/all-elitist McCain-Romney ticket would provide an excellent contrast to the far more modest Obama-Biden pairing. The motto: Obama and Biden – we only have one house each!

The only drawback in the choice of Biden is that, at 65, he is unlikely to be a viable candidate if Obama serves until ‘16. But that’s a small consideration and there will be no shortage of heir-apparents if the Democrats are able to govern effectively when they have control of both houses of Congress and the White House. The choice of Biden shows that Obama will be ready to hit the ground running, ready on Day One. That was someone else’s most effective argument for her candidacy, and Joe Biden takes care of that for Obama.

Right-Wing Cry-Babies

For all of their chest-thumping posturing, you’d think the right-wing bloggers that come out here telling everyone else what to do and think would have thicker skin. Instead, if you try to engage them on their comments or otherwise, many of them run for the hills. They are obviously used to just patting each other on the backs and find themselves in over their heads when challenged on their usually phony facts and arguments.

For instance, everyone’s favorite laughing-stock, Jessica McBride, closed her site to outsiders soon after the spring judicial election, while she was being spanked around the block by IT and others for her amateur and ludicrous analysis of Louis Butler’s record on the Supreme Court. She just took her ball and went home. Who knows what she has been writing since then behind her protective veil – all I know is I am missing out on at least one laugh-out-loud moment a week.

That was quite a move for an attention hound like McBride. I thought the idea was that everyone just had to hear what she had to say about her husband’s latest failed campaign, her continued pain over getting her radio show cancelled by TMJ...whatever. I mean, she always had so much to talk about. Now, you might be able to get a few chuckles from her occasional GMToday/Freeman column, but it’s nothing like when Jess would get into some serious late-night crankin’ and hit the "send" button all by herself.

The latest example of cowardly behavior comes from the current occupant of the McBride chair at TMJ, the equally inadvertently-humorous J.T. Harris. I’ve engaged Harris a bit on his comment threads in the past couple of weeks over some of his more amusing escapades involving Obama and John Edwards. He even called me out by name in one recent post, and we went back and forth on the comment thread for a little bit and, you know, no harm done – not to me anyway.

Then, on Monday, he posted a brief dig at NBC sports guy Chris Collingsworth for daring to ask Kobe Bryant why he felt so patriotic about putting on a USA basketball uniform. Collingsworth’s behavior in the interview "illustrated the soft bigotry of anti-Americanism," scolded Harris. Well, I watched the clip he linked to and discovered no such thing. When Bryant talked touchingly about what it meant for him to represent our country, Collingsworth drew him out with a very mild devil’s advocate routine. "Is that a cool thing to say in this day and age..." he said, smiling in a friendly way.

It was ridiculous for Harris to pretend that Collingsworth was anything but supportive of Bryant’s sentiments. But, as usual, he was following right-wing talking points from somebody else (very little of what Harris "does" is original), designed to further demonize NBC, pretend like there is all this rampant anti-patriotism all over the place, and blah blah blah.

So, anyway, I posted a brief comment about how he was wrong for calling Collingsworth out for something he wasn’t doing – his comments are not moderated, and there it was. Later in the day, I checked back to find that my comment was deleted. Not only that, when I tried to post another one chiding him for deleting the first one, I was notified that I was on his comment-spam list and the site wouldn’t even take it.

You know, it’s his site – he can do what he wants. But, if he’s going to run and hide from every little challenge, his supposed "national conversation" is a bit one-sided.

It is an interesting trend that right-wing bloggers are increasingly walling themselves off from impure thoughts and challenges. For all of their bullshit-and-bluster, their veneers of self-rightousness are paper-thin. The bottom line is, when challenged, they just can't handle it.

Journal Sentinel to Readers: Drop Dead

With all the buy-outs and shedding of talent going on at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I suppose it would be too much to ask them to hire or even let a volunteer act as an ombudsman to deal with their various, er, issues related to coverage, non-coverage, bias and incompetence. If you, dear reader, have an issue with the paper, you may only take it up with the editors through their laughable Ask the Journal Sentinel feature on occasional Sundays. If you don’t like the answer, well, too bad.

This Sunday, the J-S’s right-wing managing editor George Stanley steps in to make excuses for exaggerated coverage of fluffy issues like Favre’s unretirement to the exclusion of more weighty matters like the recent exposure of more Lies of Still-President Bush. Using old standard phrases of defensive corporate double-speak, Stanley dances around the issue, blaming his selective use of the J-S’s shrinking news hole on the perceived interests of his short-attention-span readers. "We try to choose stories our readers will consider the most important, most relevant and most interesting," he writes. See, it's you, you stupid readers, not him.

Not that he is going to give his readers the chance to get interested in a story like, say, the Bush administration sending White House stationary over to the CIA and ordering them to phony-up a Hussein-Atta link after-the-fact. The excellent question posed by an anonymous reader references that story, the full-of-holes case against the conveniently-suicided anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins and the ridiculous substance and result of the political show-trial of OBL’s driver, all of which were a) important, b) embarrassing to the Bush administration, and c) virtually ignored by the Journal Sentinel.

Stanley addresses the substance of none of these interesting stories specifically – perhaps, if he did, he would have to admit that they all run contrary to his conservative perspective and thus the, er, "space" problem. The J-S has "space to only print a small fraction" of the national news stories that come over the wires, he says, so, natch, he’d rather run a New York Times story about the anxiety of a few Democrats over Obama’s failure to gain as much traction as they would like in the race against McCain and the trunk-length and shoe size of Michael Phelps (with art) than all this falderal about the potentially criminal acts of Bush officials to gin-up the case for the Stupid War that has claimed the lives of over 4,100 American servicemen and women and counting. I mean, as far as Stanley is concerned, get over it already.

You want the real news, Stanley says, get on the internets. "More and more, we’re linking readers to sources on the Internet and elsewhere where they can dig deeper into a subject of special interest to them," he claims. Oh, really? Other than headline links to AP wire stories, good luck finding any links to in-depth national stories on the front page of the J-S web page, much less the kind of non-breaking news expose demanded by the questioner.

In other words, the Journal Sentinel has officially abdicated its responsibility to expose people to news simply because it is news they should know. "We try to choose stories our readers will consider the most important, most relevant and most interesting," he says. So the editors forego their judgement for that of their perception of the elusive, imaginary Typical Reader. This is newspapering by focus group and polling. If the consultants tell Stanley that establishing the historical record of Bush’s many continuing scandals is a downer, well, order up another twenty inches (plus art) on the 65 year-old British matador.

As with all these Ask the J-S puff-pieces, Stanley can’t help but remind the ungrateful complainer how wonderfully local the paper is, covering the world "as if southeastern Wisconsin were at its center." Thereby Stanley makes the remarkable admission that the J-S reports from a fantasy world. Oh, and did he mention the Pulitzer Prize they got last year, and by the way the same reporter starts a series today...What any of this has to do with the failure to report important national issues is anybody’s guess. If an investigative tree falls on Junior Bush in Washington, does it make a sound to people with their heads in the sand in Mequon, or, for that matter, to newspaper executives with their heads up their asses on 4th and State? Not if Stanley can help it.

In the end, Stanley falls back on that old saw that if all sides complain, they must be doing something right: "We are criticized by folks with strong personal political opinions from all over the spectrum." Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah...back when Stanley and his bevy of reporters were doing their best to get the hapless Mark Green elected governor in 2006, I took them to task for their extremely biased story placement and reporting. Stanley responded to my observations by saying "every election season we receive the same volume of complaints from people who work for candidates of both major parties..." This line of "argument" is the cheapest of dodges, ignoring the substance of each complaint by throwing all complaints in the same circular file. Yeah, you say that, but this guy on the other side says this...whatever.

Some criticisms happen to be more valid than others, but Stanley does not accept that as a possibility. If he did, he’d have to do something about it. But, behind the barricades of the Only Newspaper in Town (which increasingly reminds one of Monty Python's Very Big Corporation of America in The Meaning of Life), they ain’t doin’ nothin’. It seems like a strange attitude for Milwaukee’s last vestige of the wilting dead-tree industry to take: Shut Up and Trust Us.

This kind of arrogance does not bode well for those still working in the building that once housed a great newspaper.

Defining the Worst as the Norm

Today’s question is: What is the cheapest trick in the right-wing blogosphere?

I know...where do you start? Is it the constant repetition of GOP talking-points designed to ridicule Democrats who might dare to wear scarves in Muslim countries or claim the very real benefits of proper tire inflation? Is it the citation to and propping-up of conservative columnists and "think"-tank "thinkers" like Bill Kristol and John Bolton, who have been dreadfully wrong about everything – not least the Stupid War in Iraq – as authorities on anything? Is it hacks like Charlie Sykes running whole memos from Scott Walker and David Clarke, as if these self-serving politicians have anything interesting to say?

No. The cheapest trick used by right-wing bloggers is to try to demonize and misrepresent the left by seeking out offensive comments, usually made deep in obscure comment threads, often anonymous, and to try to present the comments as mainstream lefty thought. It’s a sneaky kind of subterfuge, a smear within a lie; especially when the anonymous comments may have been posted by right-wingers pretending to be lefties so they can "find" the comments later and use them to dishonestly beat us over the head.

A primary purveyor of this sort of sleazy maneuver in the Cheddarsphere is John McAdams, who is apparently is some kind of professor to various unfortunate students at Marquette University. McAdams blathers on about all kinds of issues, real and imagined, within the Marquette community (keeping an eye on a fellow Marquette lecturer with impure thoughts here, trying to brow-beat the student press there) and among Catholics (those who dare to stray from his wing-nut evangelical Catholic orthodoxy get a spanking, although, alas, the beyond-sanctimonious McAdams has not gone through the trouble to get himself ordained).

In the last couple of months, McAdams has exploited the deaths and illnesses of various right-wingers by pointing to their alleged vilification in the comment sections of left-wing sites. Citing selective comments on Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, McAdams declared after the death of right-wing commentator and former WH press secretary Tony Snow that the entire left is "so shameless in their hate. They think their views are the only decent ones, and therefore all who oppose them deserve to be hated. They are, in other words, proud of their hatred." "Hate" is the key word here, in case you missed his point.

In fact, except for those who knew him inside the Beltway, who had nothing but nice things to say, Snow's unfortunate early death was greeted with, at most, indifference in the mainstream left. For what it's worth, I thought his appointment as press secretary set a bad precedent by lending undue credibility to a certified radio wing-nut - who's next, Sean Hannity? I also thought his smug. condescending attitude at the podium should have earned a bit more blow-back from the pitifully cowed MSM correspondents. On the other hand, the guy didn't deserve to die young, fer cryin' out loud. And nobody with a legitimate lefty web presence said otherwise.

But lefties behaving well does not fit in McAdams preordained construct, so he digs deep to make stuff up. Defining the worst as the norm, he decides the left reacted "with all the venom one might expect". Well, what one of him might expect, maybe, especially when he is trying to separate normal Americans from center-to-left flirtation by creating non-existent boogiemen.

Oh, and as if you needed help on that point, McAdams is shocked to find out that liberal bloggers are more "profane" than otherwise merely offensive conservative bloggers. "The kind of vulgarity used on leftist blogs betrays a fundamental contempt for the sensibilities of others," he declares. Well, I don't use much profanity on my blog myself, but several come to mind about elitist snobs like McAdams with the kind of contempt for the intelligence of others he displays on a regular basis. That's much more offensive, I think.

Gathering ideas and links from Wing-Nut Central and googling feverishly, McAdams also finds shame in the reaction of some Brits to the anticipated demise of Margaret Thatcher. I don't know what this has to do with anything in this country, but, you know, to blind squirrels like McAdams, a lefty is a lefty is a lefty. Elvis Costello had the best take on Thatcher almost 20 years ago: When England was the whore of the world/Margaret was her madam. She was perfectly healthy then, although he did promise to "Tramp the Dirt Down" after she was gone. I think people in other countries can own their own contempt for their criminal leaders without suffering input from our fifth-rate commentators. We'll have our own celebration of Dick Cheney's passing soon enough.

Republican flack Brian Fraley also checked in last week with his typically-unoriginal contribution to the smearing of the left by digging deep to find anonymous people on lefty sites kicking Bob Novak while he's down with inoperable cancer. The guy at Texas Hold 'Em Blogger, who likes to play racist games with Obama by calling him the Chocolate Jesus (yeah, I know Harris does it - that's no excuse), decided to poke around on Obama's official website and found anti-Semitic contents. "Birds of a feather flock together," he concludes.

Several obvious points should be made here. First of all, it is entirely possible and maybe even likely that the commenters posting on these lefty sites are about as left-wing as Tom Delay. These are anonymous postings, for the most part, easily left by nut-right interlopers who then "find" them later and send the links around to the needy community of giggling fellow travelers. They read as authentic as those supposedly "liberal" callers on wing-nut radio shows whose convictions crumble under the weight of the host's genius.

Secondly, whatever is on lefty sites that represents the opinions of actual people who think they are being supportive of Obama or left causes, those comments pale in comparison to the vitriol that boils under and on the surface of nut-right sites all over the net. Just one visit to the Free Republic site will expose all manner of the language of bad intent for Tim Russert, Ted Kennedy and any other dead or injured non-right-winger. All of this blather from these sad bastards means absolutely nothing in terms of what passes for mainstream right-wing "thought", and I would never pretend it did.

The right's constant attempt to smear the mainstream left with our anonymous alleged fringe proves nothing but their deep insecurity with their ability to fight us on our real issues. Wrong as they can be, they continue to grasp at straws that don't exist, under pretenses that are as thin as the logic in their position papers.

The Enquirer in 2005: Bush Drunk Again

The sad end of John Edwards’ political career takes out one of the most dynamic, articulate Democratic leaders and sends him prematurely to the ash heap of history, along with Gary Hart and various others, known and unknown, who could have, but didn’t. Edwards’ eloquent commitment to the poor and disenfranchised fell just short of what was necessary in his scrutinized life. It is a tragedy for more than just the already-injured Elizabeth – the whole country will be worse off by not having his enormous talent around in the Obama administration and after.

For this, we have to thank the National Enquirer, the supermarket rag usually too busy with the comings-and-goings (and babies and weight problems) of Hollywood stars to be too concerned with those who really have something to do with the ways of the world. This is the New Media, we are told (although there is nothing new about it); loosed from the namby-pamby rules of the Old Media, printing rumors in the hopes that it becomes true. Sure enough, in the case of the sloppy Edwards (really, do you think you could have found somewhere a little more discrete than the Beverly Hills Hilton?), the blind squirrel got a nut, putting the Enquirer’s known batting average at something like .059.

But there are Lessons To Be Learned here, and not just by Edwards. The MSM, it is said, smugly ignored the Enquirer’s ambush reporting, supposedly protecting the Democrat by hiding behind ridiculously obsolete concepts like verification and credible sources. Except that the MSM didn’t ignore the story – their slower-but-surer methods eventually closed in and actually resulted in Edwards’ confession. Never mind: this is the "end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism," writes Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times, also crediting the "bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion." Oh, and don’t forget the GOP's nationwide network of radio wing-nuts and Fox Noise, who squawked about the story for weeks. Ooops, looks like he did.

Well, alrighty then. Cheap tabloids toss out some rumors, conduct some ambush "journalism" in a hotel somewhere and publish their results. If it makes a Democrat look bad, the RNC will put it out in their talking points for their too-willing messengers to drive the story for weeks, forcing the issue onto the guilt-ridden MSM for belated discussion and denouement. Sure – that might work, if I'd rather have my rumors and innuendo untested by facts and quality. Then you could just give it to me raw and I’ll believe what I want to believe. Like music, the news would become fractured into niche markets, giving people what they want. Forget what we need to know, you elitist MSM smarty-pants. Just tell me pretty lies.

Well, now that the torch has been passed, let’s play a little catch-up and see what we might find in the newly-Pulitzer-worthy Enquirer. Hello? What’s this? It seems the Enquirer reported back in 2005 that the right-wing’s own darling, Junior Bush, lept off the wagon with both feet and helped himself to a couple of snoots to sooth his self-imposed pain during his mishandling of the Katrina disaster. "‘When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot,’ said one insider. ‘He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: ‘Stop George!’" I love that quote: "Stop, George!" Many of us have been screaming that at him for eight years.

Anyway, I don’t remember the MSM getting all fired up and doing anything at all about that one. If they were protecting a Democrat by ignoring the Edwards story, don’t you think they’d go after the important story of an admittedly alcoholic president going off on a bender or two? But, no. They ignored it because it was the Enquirer. Regardless of the obvious entertainment value of the Bush story (did Laura throw a lamp at him? did he start talking to the pictures on the wall, like Nixon, the last Drunk President?), it seems like a good guideline to me.

I don't want my news cheap, sloppy and half-baked. And I certainly don't think the national discussion should be poisoned by tabloid stories, blown up through the right-wing echo chamber, and served up as anything other than the self-serving, selective efforts at personal destruction that they are. The right-wing messengers couldn't care less whether the Edwards story or any of the other garbage they throw out there is true -- just whether it will effectively destroy an effective politician who will make it harder for them to pull the wool over people's eyes.

This is Edwards' real failure -- that he gave them something like this to blunt his career and his message. In this, he becomes his own worst enemy and, unfortunately, at least for now, one of ours.

Why I Blog: A Declaration of Principles

Some comments on my recent post about the sadness of 20 years of Rush Limbaugh on the radio struck me as thoughtful and even helpful. I started writing a response in the comment section and thought, what the heck, I’ll just bring it out here for all to see. Why? Because I can.

Many of my regular commenters like to engage in amateur and, methinks, not well-intentioned psychoanalysis. For instance, my complaints about Limbaugh, they say, are not based on an honest concern about the poisoning of public debate, but rather arise out of "jealousy". Not only that, I am accused of speaking out of a "bulbous, bloviating head". Setting aside for a moment the fact of my 99th percentile size-8 noggin (lucky guess, Anony), I think it might help if I kind of set out what I am trying to do here on this blog; my Declaration of Principles, as it were, although I’m no Charles Foster Kane.

A couple of my recent commenters had some appreciation for my occasional forays into music writing (which is how I got my foot in the door at the Daily Cardinal in the summer of ‘79), but don’t appreciate the political stuff. "There's never any light or joy here," says a regular, Patrick (I don’t think this is the guy from Badger Blogger, but who knows), "except when Plaisted writes about music."

No light or joy? Really? I'm trying to make this blog thingee as entertaining as possible -- my perspective in writing has always been to write something that I would want to read. But I do try to do it with a sense of humor, at least. I think some of the targets of my barbs don't have one, but that's another story.

Besides the exercise of writing, which I love to do, my focus in getting out here and making some noise for the last couple of years is to expose and confront tactics and substance of the right-wing echo-chamber. I really do think that the phenomenon of having right-wing advocacy on the radio, nation-wide, 24/7, with the messages largely being driven (until recently, but maybe still) by Karl Rove's shop is a bad thing, and not just because it’s right-wing. The predominance of one side’s message – a primary focus of which is taken up with falsely defining the other side and its message – on the publicly-licensed radio airwaves that still have an influence and power over and above other media (especially in the captive-audience automobiles of our increasingly mobile society) is unprecedented. It skews not only the political discourse, but also the coverage of straight news organizations, who think they need to suck up to the targeted angry-white-male demographic by lending credence to wing-nut-fabricated "issues’ they would otherwise rightly ignore.

In my mind (and on my blog), the mere existence of the highly-disciplined echo-chamber is an issue in itself (and, by the way, it has never been denied). Another regular commenter, Another Tosa Voter, regularly complains that I keep talking about the right-wing’s "talking points" instead of "real issues". But, see, this is primarily a media criticism blog – the consistent use of GOP talking points by their radio and blog sycophants is a legitimate thing to discuss and criticize all by itself, both from the angle of the GOP’s blatant manipulation of the all-too-willing media figures and from the angle of the media’s willingness to be so manipulated, from the on-air "personalities" to the station managers that hire and schedule them every minute of every day (well, except for the home-and-garden show on Saturday morning).

For instance, let’s take Barack Obama’s off-hand comment last week about tire inflation being one way to get better milage out of your cars. Before the words had barely left his lips (and well before his campaign staff got done slapping their foreheads, knowing that the phrase would be taken out of context), the RNC was out with orders to play the comment as some kind of out-of-touch gaffe. Every radio head and every right-wing blogger was too happy to oblige (and never mind that what Obama said was true and good advice). You couldn’t miss it, which is the point of its broad distribution. It is designed to become another chink in Obama's armor, the death of a thousand cuts, the shot-gun approach for a Republican Party that is wrong about everything.

But we on the left don’t play that. Another "for instance" – yesterday, John McCain suggested his wife might enter the Miss Buffalo Chip contest at a drunken motorcycle rally in South Dakota. Which, by all accounts about the contest itself, means that he was offering for Cindy McCain to flash her tits at a topless beauty pageant. Far be it for me to wax sanctimonious about any of this (I have taken my shirt off on a stage before and, I’ll tell you, it’s not pretty), but this incident is interesting on a couple of levels.

First of all, if we lefties were taking talking-points from somewhere, every last one of us would be holding McCain up to public ridicule for even alluding to such a thing. However, even if we did, we wouldn’t have the power of the public airwaves to spread the smear. But, yes, we are better than that. We respect our audience more than to think they are going to be manipulated by such crass bottom-feeding, and we are not going to burn down McCain just to raise Obama. And it’s not because we don’t have to.

Secondly, there is my favorite party game, What If A Democrat Did It? Can you imagine if Obama had said the same thing about Michelle? The talking-point would go out to use it to ridicule the Obamas, speculate about what Michelle may have done to extract retribution behind the scenes afterward (after all, the castrating bitch story line worked so well against the Clintons), squawking about how such a thing runs counter to the feminist agenda and, ooo, this is going to piss off the Hillary supporters, etc. I mean, I can write this stuff for them myself, it’s so damn predictable. There would be no end to it.

This is the kind of stuff I’m fighting against. I usually have something like 200 hits when I post something and, if my encounters on the street are any indication, it is a quality 200. If I can use my little forum here to move the needle one way or the other in this national discussion, that’s great. But my goal here is to expose lies and tactics. The radio wing-nuts posing as jolly "entertainers" for gullible newspaper columnists have debased political discussion in the country and locally, virtually unchallenged, for many years now. It's way past time they be recognized for who and what they are. I'm here to help.

20 Years of Limbaugh

Columnist Patrick McIlheran, the Journal Sentinel’s unfortunate sop to the wing-nut demographic, thinks two decades of poison on the nation's airwaves is a great thing. He celebrated Rush Limbaugh’s 20th anniversary on Sunday with a warm fuzzy back-rub of a column that included not only loads of gibberish of his own, but also self-serving cameos from Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling, the top-two purveyors of the Dark Trade locally.

Not coincidentally, Limbaugh’s spawning from the cocoon of a failed radio disc jockey to the beautiful butterfly of GOP mouthpiece occurred the minute the paint was dry on the Reagan FCC’s termination of the Fairness Doctrine, which had kept radio airwaves on an ideologically even keel almost since the birth of the limited-bandwidth, federally-regulated medium. It was an obscure action at the time, but the right-wing had a plan and hit the ground running with relentless and unapologetic squawking from all manner of formerly repressed hamm radio hate-mongers who knew in their hearts that "equal time" was for sissies and Communists. With his smug, know-it-all demeanor and elitist I-got-mine-get-yours self-aggrandizement, Limbaugh was the perfect blowhard to take the "new" format (really, just McCarthyism with commercials) to fill the void on a musically-obsolete AM radio band grasping for something to do before and after sports programming.

What Limbaugh and his national and local ilk do is create an alternative universe where right is wrong, up is down and "callers" to their staged shows always agree with the host (and those who pretend not to are quickly convinced by the host’s brilliance) . When Bill Clinton was president for eight years, they ran a constant campaign of lies against him, 24/7, on radio shows across the country. For the eight years of Junior Bush, they have conducted an incredibly universal and tightly-scripted defense for the worst administration in American history. There has never been this kind of one-sided, talking-pointed political advocacy in the history of the electronic media and it has poisoned the political atmosphere in ways it has never been before.

What I don’t get is why McIlheran thinks this kind of slop is entertaining. "Better to be entertaining than tedious when talking of serious things," says Paddy Mac. Oh, really? Yes, dead American soldiers can be so tedious, let’s let Limbaugh play politics with their memories by claiming the Democrats don’t support the troops. That Katrina thing was tedious, was it not? Let’s make things more interesting by lying about the level of grief and death and let’s pretend the Bushies responded just great and it was all the black mayor’s and the female governor’s fault. There. How tedious can things be when you give yourself license to dance on so many graves?

To expand on his "points", McIlheran quotes Belling and Sykes. Hey, I know he’s just a former copy boy and not a real journalist, but McIlheran using Sykes to make his vapid points is like quoting your girlfriend. Sykes sweet-talks him by reciting the old talk-radio-is-just-an-alternative-to-the-liberal-media cannard, and Paddy Mac eats it up like last night’s chocolate strawberries. We "swim in a sea of liberal ideas", you see, and blowhards like Sykes and Limbaugh just provide "an alternative frame" for those who were suddenly not "alone". What a load of hooey. Right-wing nut-jobs were never in danger of being lonely or of not getting their message heard. But their supposed oppression and victimization is their stock in trade -- see, for instance their hand-wringing about the supposed reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine by the Democrats, something that they know is not going to happen.

Of course, the whole notion of a liberal media is complete nonsense. Before the right-wing slime machine got going on the radio, nobody ever got a daily show on the airwaves to drive political points, urge the election and defeat of candidates and propositions and otherwise argue all day long for any point of view. To compare the simple reporting of inconvenient facts – the truth being the real enemy of reality-twisters like Sykes and Limbaugh – to the 24/7 propaganda campaigns of the GOP shills that make up the entirety of right-wing radio, is ridiculous.

But, it’s one of those things that, repeated enough, become perceived as truth, which is a game the wing-nut squawkers play all too well. McIlheran plays the game himself, explaining the inexplicable appeal of radio lies by claiming "there are people besides us who don’t think America is the world’s foremost problem and who doubt that more government is the answer to all dilemmas". Yeah, except for the small matter that liberals don’t think that "America is the world’s foremost problem" or that "more government is the answer to all dilemmas". The notion that we do is one of those convenient lies told by people like Sykes, Limbaugh and McIlheran, who are doing nothing but playing their listeners/readers for fools.

But, for Paddy Mac (he says), it’s all about laughing at the unbearable pain of the news. "We’ve learned to laugh at the news instead of getting depressed," he writes. But, this, too, is a lie. Claiming that Limbaugh and Sykes and the rest of the wing-nuts are just harmless comedians gives them too much credit as entertainers (as a group, they are as funny as a heart attack) and not enough as committed, scripted ideologues. They know what they are doing and pretending to be entertainers is an effort to take themselves off the hook for their outrages and the fact that the Republican party should have to claim every minute of every one of their shows as an in-kind contribution.

See also: Whallah!

John McCain's Lost Soul

John McCain has always been my favorite Republican. Admittedly, that’s not saying much.

It has nothing to do with his political positions (he is almost always wrong) or occasional attempts to work with Democrats to get some things done once in a while. Unlike what we have come to expect from the slash-and-burn tactics of the sad Gingrich/Bush era, that’s what people of both parties are supposed to do once in a while. It’s not even his compelling personal story as a Vietnam POW; there are hundreds of POWs who did not insist on being president because of their long ordeal.

No, the thing I liked about John McCain was his sense of humor. In staged settings with the right lines, his eyes brighten, his timing is impeccable and he manages to have just the right level of self-deprecation while maintaining a happy dignity. There are very few politicians that have (intentionally) made me laugh out loud. It’s a gift you can’t fake, and McCain had it.

But now, McCain is about as funny that other comic talent who lost it all when he sold out to the Dark Side, radio wing-nut Dennis Miller (wanna buy gold or a steel building? Dennis is your man!). McCain claimed that the ugly, childish ad trotted out by his campaign today – repeating the right-wing talking-point, mocking Obama for supposedly being messianic, complete with Heston-as-Moses parting the Red Sea – was all in some sort of twisted jest. “We were having some fun with our supporters,” said McCain. Forgetting for a moment that McCain thinks it’s OK to entertain his troops with public ridicule of his opponent (can we run footage of McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and have a narrator speculate that he was already designing his political ambitions? Would we? Of course not), what kind of “supporters” would think it’s funny? Oh, yeah, I just wrote about this messiah nonsense on Monday.

Was the other ad released this week a joke, too? You know, the one where footage of Obama’s Berlin speech (and “o-bam-a” chants not from Berlin) are intertwined with pictures of celebrity nightmares Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton. Some have speculated that the juxtaposition of the two famous white women and the famous black man is racist (like the Harold Ford ad in Tennessee); all those who think I see racism in everything Republican, please note that I do not see it here. Spears and Hilton (regardless of how Hilton gained her initial, er, notoriety) are too damaged to elude forbidden sexual energy like the “call me” model in the Ford ad. The problem with the celebrity ad is that Obama is trivalized for the sin of his own notoriety, the bulk of which he has very little to do with. It's like blaming McCain because the media (still) sucks up to him. Like he should talk.

And how about McCain being sent out by his handlers to pretend he was offended that Obama had “played the race card” by saying something innocuous he has said a dozen times about not looking like the old guys on dollar bills? Talk about a joke. But this is the game they are playing. And, contrary to his pledge to play nice and let his surrogates do the dirty work, McCain jumped in this week with both feet.

Back more than a year ago when he started running, McCain looked like he was wearing a straight jacket, literally and figuratively. Even Republicans – not known for demanding much of their candidates – didn’t like this empty shell of his former self that someone was filling with bad lines and bad ideas. He almost dropped out of the race. Then he fired everyone (well, he was broke) and went back to his instincts, becoming the GOP candidate by default out of a miserable field of hacks and losers. The hard-line Republicans gave him some slack until he became the presumptive nominee. Now, he’s back in the straight-jacket, saying things he doesn’t believe to GOP regulars he can’t stand. His sense of humor also went out the door – who can laugh when you feel that much like crying?

Although Obama’s two books have been dissected backward and forward by the media, Robert Kaiser at the Washington Post actually sat down and read all five of McCain’s “as told to” books (Obama personally wrote his), looking for clues into the “curious mind of John McCain”. Kaiser relates McCain’s back-and-forth positions on the Confederate flag flying over the statehouse in South Carolina during his 2000 campaign against Junior Bush. He was against it, then he was for it, then he admitted in his book years later that he really was against the flag flying over the SC capitol, but lied about it for the short term political advantage. Writes Kaiser:

• "I had promised to tell the truth no matter what," McCain wrote in the book. "When I broke it, I had not just been dishonest, I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable."

Flash forward to 2008, and here we go again. If McCain felt his soul slip into cowardice then, how do you think he feels now, as he lets his Rovian henchman talk him into personally engaging in mocking ridicule of an opponent he pretends to respect and pledged to honor during the campaign? This is one thing he can’t blame on his famous purple rage – these personal attacks he is conducting are fully scripted, poll-tested affairs. Is the presidency really worth it for him to jettison his hard-won reputation for “straight talk” (the Keating Five, notwithstanding)?

Well, there is at least one positive part of McCain stepping away from his own campaign and letting the goons fill his empty suit. Now, it doesn't matter that McCain hates Mitt Romney's guts (another reason to like him) -- New McCain can now go ahead, suck it up, and pick him for his running mate. I really hope he does -- I miss the smarmy Captain Underpants and would love to have him back on the trail, hopefully playing the Bob Dole hitman role from 1976. Now that would be funny.

But, I guess today’s reaction tells us that McCain is going to explain away his excesses in the future by saying that it was all some kind of joke. It might be to somebody, but it - and he - is not funny anymore.

A Blog Interrupted

Monday nights are usually a good time to get some blogging done. The work week begun, more right-wing outrages built up over the weekend to expose and respond to, few distractions....

Ouch, Soriano just hammered that pitch off of Sabathia...lucky it was just a double...that’s the hardest smack I’ve seen off the Big Guy...OK, pop-up...maybe we’re alright...oops, that’s a run...

It has been determined that, for the third time in a row, the presidential election is to be a referendum on the Democratic candidate. Thus does the Dem candidate get held to a higher standard than the Republican. You expected Junior Bush to be stupid, you expect John McCain to be lame and you always expect the Democrat to be a serious person and a public-policy grown-up as opposed to a sound-bite spouting hack. Once it’s set up this way, all the Republicans have to do is pick apart and exaggerate real and imagined minor flaws in the Democrat. Once they make you feel uneasy enough about the person you agree with the most, they win, but only by default.

Is Braun going to start getting the Barry Bonds treatment the rest of the year? None of those pitches were close...OK, Prince, way to work it, baby...Hart has been so clutch all year...yipes, not this time...

And so we will be treated for the next 100 days to the shotgun approach, with the right-wing trying to find or invent something, anything, to make you feel bad about Barack Obama. The Rev. Wright thing got some major traction, raising Obama’s negatives 15 points or so – and they are going to keep working it as the election gets closer. But the thing they have really committed to recently, from the top dirty dogs Limbaugh and Hannity to lowly compliant local bloggers is this whole Obama-as-Messiah nonsense. The word has gone forth, as they say, to drive people away from Obama by portraying him as full of himself and his supporters as naive, starry-eyed dupes.

Double-ouch...Soriano seems to have CC’s number tonight...can we walk him next time?

Being a savior or messiah is not anything Obama or any of his supporters has ever claimed or wanted, but the truth has never got in the way of a talking-point the GOP thinks will play with uneasy voters. Right now, they are in saturation mode, where they hammer the lie from all corners of the echo-chamber. The national wing-nuts now call Obama "messiah" at every mention of his name. In print, right-wing columnists and bloggers can barely conceal their glee in capitalizing "the One" and "He".

Come on, you guys, it’s Ted Lilly, fer cryin’ out loud, not Cy Young...

Beyond ridiculous are the attempts to put the Obama story into faux biblical language. Some British knob – in a Rupert Murdoch rag, natch – not only wrote a long imaginary passage about the path of "the Child", he read it into a microphone for the benefit of (double-natch) Fox Noise. It was looked on by Charlie Sykes, who pretended to be wildly amused, and Patrick McIlheran, who hilariously opined that the Murdoch lackey had produced "the most brilliant words out of Berlin".

Nice defense in the last couple of innings...jeez, it’s the 6th, let’s get something going...Yeah, J.J.! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!...Braun! Baby! What a stud...OK, now I feel better...Corey Hart...what did I say about clutch??...

Milwaukee’s local right-wingers have of course rushed to contribute to this group fictional effort to diminish....Hang on a minute...

One out, bases loaded, Lee and Ramirez...let’s see what you got, CC...ugh, full count to Lee...double play ball!...what the hell, Rickie!!...

Milwaukee’s local right-wingers have of course rushed to contribute to this group fictional effort to diminish the stature of the Democratic candidate. One of the first to raise the phony religious specter about Obama was the current holder of the McBride Chair at formerly respectable WTMJ, James T. Harris...

Branyan!!!

...who used his I’m-a-right-wing-black-guy license to christen him the "Chocolate Jesus" (since appropriated by the Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger and others) and to try his hand at the drafting of supposedly Obama-esque bible verse. And Rick Esenberg embarrassed himself with his own attempt at Obama-as-Messiah ridicule this past weekend.

• "Barack, being called to redeem the world by the will of God and our brother Chris Matthews, to the ones that have awaited me in the Tiergarten that is in the city of Berlin, called by me to be more than they have been and to arise from their indifferent lives, together with all those in every place yearning to be My Ones and to learn of what change they should believe in, My peace and that of your mother Michelle be upon you, this is the moment and Ja, können wir."

Good grief, what a lot of noise. "Yearning to be My Ones"? "Your mother Michelle"? Where is the truth that supports the satire in any of this ungodly mess?

Damn, that's what happens when you walk guys...How many hits has Derrick Lee sliced to right that way?...Come on, Billy, go get that ball...Damn...

Somewhere, this attempt to ridicule Obama by pretending that he thinks he's the messiah must test well. I guess it sets them up to deride Obama's eloquence by smirking that it came from the Mouth of the Annointed One. But I think the very strangeness of the unhinged campaign shows a grasping-at-straws desperation.

I suppose it's too much to ask for a Marmol break-down tonight. Wait, there a walk! Kapler swings...Back, back...nope. But it is great to see that play-off atmosphere at the ballpark, even if there are too many Cubs fans. We'll get 'em tomorrow...

Plaisted Writes, Sykes Reads, Commenters Fail

I seemed to have struck a few sensitive nerves with my last post about "thug" being the new N-word. That’s OK. I’m all about striking nerves – especially those of people who get whiny and defensive when challenged about their deliberately divisive and, yes, racist political tactics. The reaction in my comments, right-wing blogs and even a radio show said a lot more about them than it did about anything I was saying.

My headline was deliberately provocative, and I was pleasantly surprised while driving in to court when I heard no less (and no more) than the Journal Company’s full-time GOP message-boy, Charlie Sykes tease listeners with the question "is ‘thug’ the new N-word?" before his show on Tuesday morning. Tracking Rick Esenberg’s predictably critical post almost word-for-word (including the oh-so-clever "Plaisted should talk about name-calling" line), the unoriginal Sykes read about half of my post to his unfortunately large audience, while setting up his (really, Esenberg’s) punch-line that I had used the word "thug" in a different context 6 months ago.

Listening to it later on the podcast, I couldn’t help but enjoy Sykes’ reading of my own words to a statewide audience. I am always fairly self-critical, but I have to say that my turns-of-phrase bore up pretty well under Sykes’ speed-read, even if he was strategically skipping over some of the good parts (like my still-unmet challenge to those who predicted Big Trouble at the free summer festivals after RiverSplash to explain all those peaceful, incident-free festivals since then). There was something surreal about hearing Sykes read my observation that "right-wingers play these race-baiting games and then act offended when someone calls them on it" while he was in the process of playing these race-baiting games and acting offended because I had called him on it. But then Sykes, who glibly race-baits as good as anybody (such as calling Al Sharpton a "pimp"), is the king of the smug dismissal, his elitist nose high in the air as he sniffs at mere mortals who don’t have the benefit of his 50,000 watt radio presence and right-wing "think"-tank funding.

Although Sykes’ snarky games are sometimes inadvertently enlightening – like him referring to me only as a "lefty lawyer" for the first five minutes of the bit, mentioning my name only when springing Esenberg’s supposed gotcha – the increasingly hysterical comments to the post by mostly anonymous right-wingers (now at 46 comments and counting) are even more revealing of the defensiveness and pretzel logic of those who would defend racist name-calling by a fellow-traveling blogger. The strategies implemented by the commenters – including (especially) their cowardly anonymity – are not unfamiliar and display a tiresome broken-record sameness that infects their uncreative ilk.

• "We call all kinds of people thugs": Republican-for-hire Brian Fraley steps in first to inform me that, since he and others (over)use the world "thug" to describe all kinds of foreign bad-guys and violent criminals like the Jude cops, they are immune from accusations of racist language for using the word to describe a black politician who is doing something politically that they don’t like. This is like saying, if they use the word "queer" to describe curiously weird phenomenon, then it’s OK for them to go around using it to describe gay people. As always, it is all about context, combined with harsh intent. Exaggerated scuffles in the Courthouse notwithstanding, Lee Holloway has done nothing to earn the use of a term otherwise reserved for brutal dictators, violent cops and gangbangers. It was used by Eggleston to smear Holloway and diminish his status as a man and a human being in order to beat him on a political issue, which is the definition of a politically-motivated racist tactic.
• "Hey, Plaisted, you used the word ‘thug’ once, so na na na boo boo": Like I said: context and intent. When I accused some national commentators of infecting the MSM with right-wing quasi-intellectual thuggery, it was not in a racial context and an attempt to describe, not to smear. Rick Esenberg, right-wing Milwaukee’s chief apologist, pulled a not terribly clever google (Plaisted + thug) and proclaimed me a hypocrite for complaining about someone else using the same word. But Rick – Milwaukee’s chief Obama-phobe who will find all kinds things to worry about from everything that comes out of Obama’s mouth, former church or campaign – will give the benefit of the doubt and find any way to excuse all right-wing racial smears. As usual, he dodges his own responsibility for enabling the racial tactics. "I wouldn’t call Holloway a thug," he says, which sounds a lot like his comment that he "would have strongly counseled against" Gableman’s racist Willie Horton ad during that sad campaign.
• You have appointed yourself the language police; crying "racist" all the time is like crying "wolf": Hey, I’m not the damn police. Like I said, they can do what they want; I’m just encouraging them to take some ownership of their own tactics and quit being so defensive when challenged. As for calling them on their racist tactics too often, well, maybe they are giving me too much material to work with. I do have a zero-tolerance for this sort of thing. If I sit around and wait for them to agree with me...well, it ain’t going to happen.
• Many Democrats were racists in the South before the Civil Rights Act: Well, sure, but what has that got to do with a) this discussion and b) with the world as it is today? The Republican’s Southern Strategy under Nixon -- to peel southern racists away from the Democrats by portraying them as a bunch of N-lovers -- put an end to that a long time ago. The GOP now proudly owns those people and that tradition, and they can have it.
• Personal/Professional attacks on me: The last refuge of the desperate anonymous wing-nutter. Hey, did you hear I’m a criminal defense attorney and represent, er, criminals? The nerve of me saying anything about anything. My favorite is the guy who claimed that he "looked up" my "record" and claimed that I had "lost" 20 cases in a row. When I pointed out that such a search was a) impossible and b) just flat out wrong, he backed up to say that he didn’t like my suits. Sometimes I like to let this kind of desperation develop and just watch them trip over their own words. It makes such a nice splat when they hit the ground.

"Thug" is the New N-Word

The right-wing blogs and radio hosts have circled the wagons and spun into hysterical defense mode after real journalist Jim Rowen called out one of their lesser members for calling County Board Chairman Lee Holloway a "thug" last week. Rowen correctly pointed out the "race-baiting" use of the epithet and generally bemoaned the "heavily-racialized public debate that is endured here". In a follow-up, Rowen links to this helpful discussion of the modern use of "thug" to attack African-Americans from the Atlanta Constitution.

The talking-pointed responses from fellow-travelers of the offender – Steve Eggleston of No Runny Eggs – include predictable denials of the intended racist use of the word, predictably-inflated episodes trying to establish that Holloway really is a thug, a hilarious linguistic review of the origin of the term (from a murderous "Hindu cult" in India) and blah de blah blah.

Rowen is right. "Thug" is the new N-Word, usually trotted out by right-wingers only in the context of African-Americans who are doing something they don’t want them to do. [Eggleston tries to provide cover for himself after the fact by presenting people like Hitler and Stalin as examples of "thugs", which again makes one wonder how Holloway got in that catagory.] Unapologetic racists like Mark Belling brag about using the term and dare others (usually politicians) to do the same. The last time we heard the "thug" blather was after the late-night RiverSplash violence earlier this summer. There was no doubt Belling and the others who are always there to capitalize on racial divisiveness were talking about black people causing the incident, although that fact was suspiciously missing from any straight news. In the deliberately race-baiting atmosphere of what passes for right-wing "thought", "thug" is shorthand for blacks behaving badly.

[By the way, whatever happened to the other "thuggery" that the right-wingers predicted was going to happen at free festivals all summer after RiverSplash? I seem to recall Bastille Days being particularly at risk, but it went off without a hitch (with a wonderfully diverse crowd, at that). To say the least, this is not the first dire prediction made by the right that didn’t come true; it also is not surprising that none of them bothered to note how peaceful the rest of the summer festivals have been.]

It is one thing for right-wingers to call out-of-control kids on the street "thugs" – unfortunately, Mayor Tom Barrett has taken up their divisive challenge to name-call – but it is quite another to insert "thug" as the middle name of a strong, African-American elected official who has proposed something (a tax increase) they don’t like. As they always do, afraid that they will fail on the merits of their arguments, they conduct ad hominem personal attacks and, where possible, throw a little racist sentiment in there to boot.

One thing I never understood is why right-wingers play these race-baiting games and then act offended when someone calls them on it. They should be proud of their clever divisiveness. They should stop hiding behind code words – after all, their favorite black guy just loves to use his self-hating license to use the N-word whenever he can. Come on, right-wingers! Stop hiding behind the skirts of your pretended outrage. Show us how race-neutral the term "thug" really is – show us what racist thugs you can truly be.

Breaking News: Bush Devalues Life

The Bush administration has decided what an American life is worth and, guess what – it’s less than it was before.

Thus does the Bush legacy continue: the dollar, your house, our international standing and dignity...you name it and it has been diminished by what will be known in the history books as the Bush Disaster. After all that, why not the value of life itself? I mean, have you felt at anywhere near 100% while living through this crap for the last seven-and-a-half years?

Of course, the "value of a statistical life" as determined by the Environmental "Protection" Agency (there will be a ceremony to remove the quotation marks on January 20, 2009), like everything else in the politically compromised Bush bureaucracy, has little to do with real life and much to do with the manipulation of information to reach specific big-business goals before the Bush gravy train leaves the station. By valuing each individual life at $7.22 million rather than the former obviously inflated figure of $8.04 million in order to measure the cost-effectiveness of measures that, well, might prevent the killing of humans, the industry flacks in the severely-compromised EPA are able to squeeze an extra $820,000 of leeway to avoid expensive regulations that might save those unfortunate enough to be considered too invaluable to save.

It seems to me some have suffered – at least – public relations difficulty by playing the same not-worth-it analysis when it comes to human life. The Ford Motor Company famously placed a $200,000 value on a human life in 1968 when it came time to calculate whether it was worth it for the company to keep a rolling bomb called the Pinto on the streets (Ford’s answer: yes, it was worth it, and, oh, sorry about your dad.) Maybe the Bush figure is just $200K adjusted for inflation.

Actually, given how the Bushies have treated life as so damn cheap anyway, I thought the EPA figure was a bit high. How does that figure work into our continuing tragedy in Iraq? Let’s see...$7.22M x 4,125 dead soldiers = $29,782,500,000. Holy shit. Does that get added to the national debt, too, now, or what? I think the $7.22M figure is just to make the Bush people look generous and good – they sure didn’t treat all those poor people in New Orleans like they were worth more than a plugged nickel after Katrina.

The only human organisms which they even pretend to give any value at all to are fetuses, potential life that must take precedence over all other considerations, including (especially) those of the fully-grown adult mother. Maybe this is one way to fire up the religious zealot wing of the EPA (every agency now has one) and get them to actually protect the environment. Who cares about the ten thousand post-born threatened by some pollution or other – a hundred or some of them may be carrying the Sacred Fertilized Egg. Screw the adults, but save the Potential Children!

Who knows how the EPA came up with this particular figure (my guess: it was one of ten numbers stuffed in a hat), but you’d think it would be some kind of average. Otherwise, there would have to be some sliding scale, depending on whether the EPA administrators are fond of the settlers in one area or other. If I were to engage in this kind of morbid god-playing (I wouldn’t), I would value my son, family, friends, clients and the Milwaukee Brewers (minus a couple of late-inning relievers) a lot higher than your average man-on-the-street, while still holding them in fairly high regard ($20M at a bare minimum). On the other hand, if there was an environmental regulation somewhere in North Carolina that kept only racist/homophobic pig Jesse Helms alive for an extra ten years, I could have lived without that rule – or at least not enforce it. I understand the Naval Observatory and other undisclosed locations darkened by Dick Cheney over the years have some environmental hazards here and there (if they didn't before, they do now), but there’s no use letting those go – Cheney has an unfortunate knack for getting young people to do his dying for him.

Of course, by law, the EPA cannot play the same kinds of games with the other endangered species they are supposed to protect – not that the current regime wouldn’t like to. The spotted owl, the snail darter...neither would get you more than a buck-two-eighty on the open market, and they can’t even vote. But, unlike humans, they are (for now anyway) priceless in the neglectful-by-design eye of the Bush EPA.

But humans...let’s see how this works: let's say a regulation would save 100 lives ($722M worth-o-people), but industry claims it would cost a couple billion or so to comply. Sorry, suckers. You’ll eat chalk (or whatever) until you choke...or end up in the hospital, and don’t come crying to us for your damn medical bills.

This is economic Darwinism at its finest and government at its worst. Those at risk fall at the mercy of the cost of cleaning up the poisons left by others. Perhaps some of the deluded creationists are hoping that humans would use one of the adaptations in Darwin’s evolution, which is for endangered organisms to simply move out of harm’s way. Can’t afford a U-Haul? Tough. "If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population," said Dickens’ Scrooge in one of his more prescient, Cheney-esque moments. It’s called personal responsibility, pal, now go get some. Maybe the government can hand out $40 coupons for a trailer, like those things they are handing out so poor peoples' TVs work after February (as they say, stay tuned for that damn mess next year).

There is a limited amount of time for still-president Bush and his greed-headed acolytes to play these kinds of games with people’s lives. Everything they do now is just an example of what we should not even try later. Like every other agency, the EPA will have to be cleaned, fumigated and re-built from the ground up after the Bushies are gone. And the first thing to go should be the actuarial tables with the careful calculations of what a human life is worth when it comes to environmental protection or anything else.

What So Funny, Part 2

My post about the interracial harmony at the Earth Wind and Fire show at Summerfest seemed to strike a nerve with Rick Esenberg over at his Shark and Shepard blog. The good professor ignores my main theme, accuses me of making several others and generally misses the point. Well, at least I got his attention.

To say, as he does, that my primary takeaway from the event was "pride" that I didn’t "get mugged" is ridiculously simplistic and wrong. I didn’t expect anything but good to come of the night. My point was that the right-wingers on the radio and blogs (not necessarily Rick’s – like his eternal defense of the WMC, he takes on the defense of others, pro bono) would ignore such an interracial event unless something went horribly wrong. Then, we would hear all about it for days. All it would take is one shoulder-bump and angry glare at, say, Charlie Sykes or Mark Belling, if they were there, and it would lead to a week-long campaign of hand wringing and lectures about racism being understandable and black people getting what they deserve. As it was, no conflict, no story. Now, let’s beat up on Eugene Kane for defending the residents of N. 28th St. as victims and not purveyors of the violence in their own neighborhood.

It is "vainglorious", according to Rick, that I would revel in the beauty of those moments on the lakefront that brought us all together. "Dude, it was a concert," he scoffs. I didn’t get into it in the post, but the concert itself was just a notch above Vegas-pedestrian – for the most part, we carried the magic moments by playing the records in our heads. But, except for drawing us there, the music emanating from the stage had very little to do with it. The magic at the event was about us as people; as Milwaukeeans, for those of us who were. It was a family event – my kid, my brothers’ and friends’ kids, mingled with kids and adults from different backgrounds and we all came away with a nice glow of the shared experience.

It didn’t have anything to do with politics, except to the extent that the right-wing regularly politicizes racial division – the same politics of Fear played nationally by their Rovian counterparts. This was not an Obama rally, although it could have turned into one easily, with a little prompting from the stage. One of my friends who was there is a conservative big-shot at one of the major business law firms in town and the only thing controversial we got into was our relative waistlines. When I dismissed those who weren’t there and wouldn’t acknowledge the positive event if they were, I wasn’t talking about all conservatives – just those who exploit tragedy to inflame racial tension. There are thankfully few of them, but, unfortunately, they all have radio and blog platforms.

But, in the end, I think what really gets Rick is my "vainglorious" striving for a better world and my willingness to recognize it when I find it in small moments on a summer night at the lakefront. I still haven’t gotten an answer to the question I asked him yesterday in my comments: What is so funny about peace, love and understanding?

EW&F at Summerfest: Peace, Love and Understanding

The gloom-and-doom radio and blog wing-nuts who celebrate every inner city tragedy and interracial dust-up with sanctimonious hand-wringing and calls for change are going to have a hard time dealing with what happened at Summerfest last night.

When ‘70s soul-and-funk icons Earth, Wind and Fire appeared on the south end of the grounds Sunday night, so did an impressively-diverse overflow crowd of middle-aged music lovers, their children and grandchildren. Summerfest was created back in the late ‘60s as a bring-us-together event in the wake of the riots that marred the city in the summer of ‘67, but, with music acts creating often-racially exclusive niches, it seldom serves as a melting-pot. All that was different last night, as the sweet harmonies and thumping bass of what is left of EW&F tore through the warm night air, causing voices to rise and feet to move in joyful communion.

The space was jammed tight and it was hot. This is the sort of "tinderbox" that could lead to trouble if people were not as positive as they are, if given a chance. An eclectic mix of white and black Milwaukeeans moved slowly throughout the crowd, politely and positively making way for total strangers. There haven’t been this many black and white people bumping into each other since...well, since when? How often do thousands of us share the same space, much less in a free-for-all random admission situation? It was a rare event and spectacularly uplifting. And, you know what, [insert name of favorite race-baiting wing-nut here]? Not one flare of racial heat, not one flash of anger. The police did not need to be called, except to drop their batons and join in dance and song.

How many of us knew each other, but just didn’t recognize each other 30 years down the line? I probably knew many of these brothers and sisters back in the day; in high school, in the discos, at Peaches Records, where I worked in the mid-‘70s. I recognized the friendly smiles, the joy in music, the dance steps, the sing-a-long voices. We walked the grounds and connected with eye-contact, nods and winks; connected in ways we can’t be in our busy normal lives, where we get so isolated from each other and some of us imagine we are against each other, when we really aren’t. The illusion of racial animosity – exacerbated, as it is, by greedy hate-mongers on mainstream radio and elsewhere – falls away at times like this. The more chances we have to spend time together, the more we are not distant strangers to each other, the less we can attach our fears and insecurities to people we don’t know or understand.

We came – we sang – we danced. We laughed out loud at each other’s lame steps during "Boogie Wonderland" and stood shoulder to shoulder, swaying and singing to "That’s the Way of the World". "Where is that harmony?" asks Nick Lowe via Elvis Costello in the always-prescient "What’s So Funny (About Peace Love and Understanding)", but we found it this night. The night of unity and love put the lie to so much of the manipulative right-wing world-that-isn’t. They will squawk all this week about the shooting deaths on the north side, choosing to play up one sad story instead of reveling in the thousands of positive stories from a joyful interracial commingling at Summerfest.

Let ‘em. They missed it and who needs them anyway. Those of us who believe in the vibrancy of diversity will keep moving forward, leaving the professional haters in the dust of their own pathetic divisive agenda.