Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret:
Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him.
I can't remember exactly, but I think I voted for Kerry, mainly because the nomination was sewn up by then. More importantly, though, I voted for Illinois State Senator Barack Obama (D-13th) in the primary to fill the US Senate seat of retiring US Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R). My guy won that election (if you recall), and I got to go to the victory party on primary night. Fun!
* See, e.g., this clip from 1988.
As far as I know, I'm moving in 2½ weeks, though the exact timing of both real-estate closings remain unknown. Last time I moved it took me about 38 hours to pack and 15 to unpack. This time I expect it to go faster, in part because I'm not spending as much time going "oh, I love this book!"
I'm taking a quick break and catching up on some reading:
Finally, a new survey says Chicagoans swear a lot less than most Americans, with people from Columbus, Ohio, swearing the most. Fuck that shit.
In just a few minutes I will take Cassie to boarding, then head up to Northwestern for a rehearsal (I'm in the chorus at Ravinia's upcoming performances of La Clemenza di Tito.) I'll then have to pack when I get home from rehearsal, then head to a hotel by O'Hare. Ah, how much fun is an 8:30 international flight!
As I'll have some time at the airport in the morning, and no time now, I want to queue these up for myself:
All right, I'm off. After I pack.
But he still has a lot to say about what he calls "successor ideology:"
The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.
In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)
And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.
Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:
It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy.
Personally, I favor liberalism, and I always will. We have the most successful multiracial society in history. We can do better; we must do better; but damn, we're not all good or all evil.
After taking Cassie on a 45-minute walk before the heat hits us, I've spent the morning debugging, watching these news stories pile up for lunchtime reading:
- The US Supreme Court once again upheld Obamacare, with only Alito and Gorsuch dissenting.
- The Illinois legislature passed a common-sense gun control law, supported by the State Police, that largely brings us back in line with the rules we had in the 1990s.
- Illinois Deputy Governor Dan Hynes has resigned (ahem) ahead of the 2022 election.
- The BBC fact-checks this week's Iranian elections.
- Dana Milbank fact-checks Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has started repeating Republican Party lies about BLM and our election. Writing in the Atlantic, Anna Nemtsova says Putin has nothing to offer the West because he has dropped all pretense of liberalism.
- National Geographic has a photo essay of 20 natural wonders that disappeared in the past few years.
- After the warmest first half of June in history, Northeastern Illinois (i.e., Chicago) is in a severe drought that tonight's thunderstorms won't actually help. But Illinois has nothing on the southwestern US, which has it far, far worse, including forecast 50°C temperatures over large areas of Arizona and California.
Finally, Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has revealed conceptual drawings for a moon base.
Jennifer Rubin (a Republican, I keep having to remind myself) finds former President Obama's mockery of the current president impressive and effective:
In Orlando on Tuesday, Obama told the crowd, “Our current president, he whines that ’60 Minutes’ is too tough,” he said referring to Trump’s walking out of an interview last week with CBS News’s Lesley Stahl. “You think he’s going to stand up to dictators? He thinks Lesley Stahl’s a bully.” He does not need to say Trump is a “crybaby” or “weak”; he lets Trump indict himself with his own conduct.
Obama does not need to label Trump “nuts” or a “conspiracy monger.” Again, Obama simply needs to point out what Trump has done and asks the audience whether it’s normal. “[Our] president of the United States retweeted a post that claimed that the Navy SEALs didn’t actually kill [Osama] bin Laden. Think about that. And we act like, well, okay. It’s not okay.” He added: “We’ve gotten so numb to what is bizarre behavior. We have a president right now who lies multiple times a day, and this is not my claim. Even Fox News sometimes says, well, what he says, isn’t really true, he didn’t mean it. It’s not normal behavior. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a coworker. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a football coach. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. I mean, we might have to put up with it if it was a family member, but we talk about them afterward.”
With his relaxed body language and humorous delivery, Obama conveys in these short vignettes what pundits and psychologists have spent years analyzing. In doing so, he makes clear to those who do not follow politics routinely that this is not hard. You don’t have to be a political junkie or policy wonk to figure out something is very, very wrong with Trump.
And here we are, six days until the election, with the following polls-of-polls:
Know hope.
* Florida matters, because they will count all their ballots on the 3rd—in fact, they're already counting them. If Florida's 29 votes go to Biden, the president's path to re-election becomes nearly impossible.
On 30 April 2011, President Obama addressed the White House Correspondents Dinner.
The funniest bit starts 9 minutes in, when he takes on his successor, so many years before anyone thought that would ever be a true sentence. And at 12:45, roasts the 46th president, even more years before anyone expected that to happen.
And he's really funny:
Oh, one other thing. Don't forget that the next evening (Washington time), the US Navy killed Osama bin Laden, for which Obama took complete responsibility—as he would have done had the raid failed. Which Obama had ordered just a couple hours before attending the dinner.
After that, watch his roast from 2015 for another dozen laughs. Man, I miss him.
It's official:
I mean, we all knew this was coming, especially after Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden yesterday. Because, I mean, he had to. Lookit:
And finally, despite my grocery bill, I'm going to take a look at these upside-down drink recipes to preserve my liver through the crisis.
American late-night host Jimmy Kimmel wondered if there were differences between President Obama's announcement that we had assassinated Osama Bin Laden and President Trump's announcement that we had assassinated Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. He only found a few:
To quote The Untouchables, "We laugh because it's true."