Apples and trees and dynasties.

What is it with politicians' kids that the media finds so fascinating? A few weeks ago it was big excitement in some quarters that John McCain's daughter is out of sorts with the radical racist right in the Republican Party; now the offspring flavor of the day is Cheney's daughter, Liz, who agrees with her nasty old man that Obama "doesn't stand up for America," the definition of which is, apparently, that you should never ever admit that you could be wrong or agree to meet other nations as sovereign entities.

I remember Cheney's other daughter Mary from the disastrous Edwards v. Cheney debate of the 2004 election cycle. Here John Edwards had the most black-hearted evil man in American politics sitting opposite him and he somehow humanized him with the horrible tactical blunder of harping on Mary's homosexuality. It was like asking OJ to try on the glove. Anyway, that's beside the point.

The point, I think, is that I'm getting tired of hearing what political offspring think (OK, let me rephrase: I'm getting tired of hearing from political offspring simply because they're political offspring). In general, it just highlights the nepotism of the system or, in the media's case, the way in which politics has been turned into entertainment -- celebrities and their children. Politics and movies are simply two different subdivisions within the ever-growing entertainment industry. On the one hand you have photos of Brangelina's brood; on the other hand you have sound bites from grown children of political leaders who wouldn't get the time of day if they weren't related to actual political figures.

Of course it's a juicy story when the child turns around and criticizes the positions and/or the allegiances of the parent, as in Meghan McCain's case (but wait...he's a maverick...she's got maverick blood in her too, pardner...mavericks....yeah), but still we all know that the only reason this story had any legs at all was that she's a McCain.

Liz at least has some political credentials. The fact that she gained all of them while her father was running the White House Vice President is entirely coincidental...OK, I exaggerate a little bit: she did work for the State Department under Bush the First while her father was --- wait for it --- Secretary of Defense. Yes, entirely different departments, so there could be absolutely no sign, no hint, no whiff of nepotism. None at all.

Anyway, it's not that Liz or Meghan or Chelsea or Amy or Jenna or Barbara or Ron or Mike etc. shouldn't have opinions. Or that they shouldn't choose to follow in their parents' footsteps in one way or another. It's that for the media, their opinions aren't the point: it's their relations. They are moons orbiting a star, and the media is all about the star system.

The Minister of Evil has spoken.

From his permanent seat on the Legion of Supervillains Security Council, former VP Dick Cheney has opined that the CIA should declassify evidence of torture's "successes." What Cheney doesn't actually understand is that torture is wrong. It's an ethical issue, but you'd hardly expect someone like Cheney to understand ethics. It's about following principles that set us apart -- or so we'd like to think -- from the rogue states out there that we routinely denounce.

Let's not forget that Cheney's the man who voted against pressuring the Apartheid government in South Africa to release Nelson Mandela, arguing that Mandela was a terrorist. Understanding right from wrong isn't exactly his forte.

However, in a move eerily reminiscent of late Senator Joe McCarthy, Cheney alluded to "reports he'd read":

I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.

This from a man whose administration had been caught several times "massaging" intelligence reports to suit its own agenda.

In related news, he also has announced that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I'm going where there's no depression.

I've been puzzling over the whole "Obama as Messiah" rhetoric I've been reading. I'm wondering where it started. What's the ur-text for the trope that goes under the name of Messiah, the Prophet, the One? It seems rather long-lasting for a bit of mud slung in a campaign that ended close to six months ago. Did it come out of disgruntled Hillary supporters? Did it come from disgruntled McCain supporters? Did it come from freepers?

I find it fascinating. I wonder if there's any history for this sort of demonization of President as false prophet or cult leader in the religious sense. I know with Reagan there was certainly a critique of the "actor as politician" charisma, but did it play out as religious fervor run amok? Perhaps a good place to look would be in the months following FDR's election. There are certainly similarities: a period of great financial upheaval following a long stretch of misrule, and a President with many plans for a new course.

It's fairly common of course for one side to see the other side's supporters as dupes of some kind, but it's the specifically religious aspect of this backlash that I'm interested in. I was thoroughly convinced in the summer leading up to the 2004 election that G.W. Bush wouldn't be in office come January 2005, given his already proven record of war crimes abroad and neglect at home. Sadly, I was wrong (thanks, Kerry). It never crossed my mind to think that anyone saw Bush as God, though. I figured his supporters were simply either stupid or protofascists (often the same thing) in the main.

The religious right, who sees the election of any Democrat as both a horrible event and a hopeful sign of the End Times, have long had the canned notion that the leader of a great nation (usually someone with faith in -- or at least the willingness to work with -- a world government like the UN) will rise up as the Antichrist, so I suppose for the really loonytune rightwingers Obama's just the latest in a line from Clinton and Carter who are eligible for that role. Still, the rhetoric is too pervasive for it to be the standard Tribulation Rap. Or maybe it's that the internet allows it to spread more virally. The last time a Democrat was elected on a platform of change was 1992, when social networking consisted of BBS and text-based email clients, so maybe the whole Messiah thing was there with Clinton and it just didn't get out beyond the remote armed compounds and John Birch Society meetings.

UPDATE: I was reading up on the Energy Crisis of the late 1970's and an article in The Progressive alluded to both Kennedy and Reagan's challenges to Carter's leadership as possible "new saviors," but the reference was fleeting and not an extended metaphor.

Michael Hayden: War Criminal.

So when's someone going to waterboard Michael Hayden?

This a-hole should be shut up in a prison (a real one, not one of his special secret black prisons) for human rights abuses. He most certainly should not be given platforms on national cable channels to spout his evil.

Lack of recognition.

Washington, DC, is many different towns, which sounds trite, but the most important aspect of that concept is that people outside of the District metropolitan area do not recognize DC as anything more than a symbol of the federal government.

In this world view, homes and neighborhoods don't really exist in DC. The District government is a joke, side show acts, like The Players in Hamlet, or maybe like the mock government some people played at in high school. People in DC work for the government, lobby the government, contract with the government, or don't work at all.

In part, it's not a terribly wrong impression, since DC so often becomes the plaything of itinerant powergrubbers who are completely unanswerable to the subjects on whom they conduct their experiments. However, it certainly passes over the lives of most residents of DC, who don't spend much of their time thinking about the federal government, or politics for that matter, except in the sense that everyone else in the US thinks about those things. Sure, it rankles to have no representation in Congress when you have a complaint or an issue, but it's not the sort of thing that creeps into your daily conscious state as you're trying to catch the L2 so you can hit the Safeway for groceries before it gets too late.

I should be thinking more about this bifurcated urban identity. The city as lived experience and the city as imagined space, in particular as tourist destination. London, New York, and Paris may be tourist destinations as well, but people talk about the experience of the cities. I don't know if people visiting DC think about it as a city so much as they think of it as a collection of monuments and museums.

An old theme.

March has caught me
sleeping, and I give a backward
sheepish glance
to a forgotten friend.

The buds peek green through brown shrouds,
morning frost still catching the less cautious.
These are days of renewal, yes,
but also moving on.

The School for Scandal

Looks like newly ensconced RNC chair Michael Steele is having his own Daschle moment (although in fairness to Steele the scale is not nearly as large as Daschle's own malfeasance), what with his disgraced former finance chairman from his 2006 campaign accusing Steele of directing campaign funds to his sister's company. In a "he said, he said" story, Steele's former finance guru, now a convicted felon, claims the sister's company didn't do any work for the money it received; Steele claims it was proper reimbursement.

Just proving how pathetically unethical the entire Republican Party is, Steele's major claim to fame is being part of former Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich's administration, specifically as Lieutenant Governor. That's the administration that was essentially a Bush Administration on a state level -- purging state agencies of qualified career adminstrators who didn't have the "right politics," spying on the constituency, giving away protected land to developers, etc.

And since I brought him up at the beginning, let's talk about Daschle. Proving how pathetically unethical the entire Democratic Party is, Daschle calls into question the entire appropriateness of someone who has no sense of day to day responsibilities to be in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. It's pretty much a good bet that none of the constituency that department serves would be well-acquainted with the proper tax line item to declare your car service or driver as a taxable benefit.

Daschle is a textbook example of the type of people Obama doesn't need in his administration.