"They [Republicans] haven't talked about the fact that I was a civil rights lawyer; they haven't talked about the fact that I taught constitutional law; they haven't talked about my work in the state legislature, in the United States Senate," he said. "They're talking about the three years of work that I did right out of college ..." -- Obama response to Palin's speech.

Usual Obama disingenuousness. The Obama commercials running in my state themselves talk about how he passed up a supposed high-paying job on Wall Street to become a community organizer for only $13,000 a year -- the starting salary for a 2nd lieutenant in the Army at that time, by the way. He's the one making a big deal of it in his own commercials!

And there's plenty of talk about his time in the state legislature, about how he bravely voted "present" 130 times and how he voted three times in favor of infanticide -- and then lied about it!

Obama thinks everyone but him is an idiot, and based on his swooning fans, he's right about some of them.

We could add the failure to regulate crooked financial speculators, the terrible state of U.S. public health care, and the tanking economic situation.

As far as the situation in Iraq, you really have to look at the international press coverage.

Someone claimed that the Awakening Councils have changed the situation in Anbar, but if you want the whole story, look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op2wDLvFYNE

Inside Iraq- Awakening councils in Iraq- 29 Aug 08- Part 2

Bin Laden's been waiting for McCain at the gates of hell for years now. But I guess they'll all end up there eventually. And they'll probably have a beer with GW Bush. Even Bin Laden admits he's quite the personable one.

Re: "one symbol (woman) going after another (an African American)."

They're casting Obama not as an African-American, but as a Muslim/alien/terrorist. Palin, with her gun and her Bible, is defending the home/family/culture and John McCain (John Wayne) is defending the country.

The people this narrartive will appeal to are not swayed by logic.

If the Dems don't start taking heads, we'll all wake up on Nov. 5 with mccain/palin........at that point, we'll once again hear about,"oh yeah, I should have responded more agressively".........it's getting to be The Party Mantra.

This is a war folks.and we're not fighting.......and we;'re not leaving the impression, in this warrior culture, that we have the will to fight for our rights.

When teen pregnancy is sold....and bought , as a republican value, I think WE have lost the field completely..........and this truce/ceasefire that Our Party self-imposes is nuts.

Sarah Palin, a woman, obviously doesn't let others define who she is. She demonstrated that last night.

Rrrrriiiggghhtt. She gets to decide all by herself who she is, and you'll squeal like a stuck pigs if anyone dares to disagree ... or as they did in Minneapolis, arrest anyone who has the temerity to do so.

All on a par with the folks like Palin that want to ban books.

Cheers,

Oh, brother, I suppose it was inevitable that on a site such as Salon the postmodernist loopiness about "narratives" and other such bullshit would start.

Denial and unreality meet insanity.

Were she not a Republican, she'd be considered a strong feminist.

You misspelled "RW Authoritarian". She that whether Republican or not.

Cheers,

You are overlooking the financial power of the infanticide lobby. You know they control everything. Even the Jews and Evangelicals don't have as much pull as the Infanticide lobby. That is why most politicians vote three to one pro infanticide, and why we have a pro-infanticide supreme court. They even got to GW Bush, who is apparently a closet infanticidal maniac.

Its slow work T. Suarez, but I know you're out there every day fighting the baby killers. What is it exactly that you do to stop infanticide?

It actually started in the WSJ by a fellow conservative pal of yours, Peggy Noonan. See what happens when you only read Salon? Newspaper subscriptions are at an all time low, it would be a good time to read the paper a few times a week, so that you don't have to rely on Salon for everything.

In a powerfully explanatory essay in The Chronicle (April 2, 2004) (link below), political scientist Alan Wolfe describes the work of the fascist philosopher, Carl Schmitt, and how the US Republican Party executes with maniacal enthusiasm the political strategy and tactics of Herr Schmitt, and also why liberals are so ineffectual in promoting their own political agenda to the extent it differs from that of Conservatives.

Here are some excerpts from Wolfe's essay:

"Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves. (my emphasis)

"In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics.

" 'The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism,' Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.

"Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to The War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. 'Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam,' she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire." (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically 'lucky' for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.) Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe."

"Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas 'all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.' Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it."

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i30/30b01601.htm

The major weakness in Wolfe's essay, as powerful as it is, is his failure to address the question of by what means of transmission the ideas of Schmitt have been adopted with such vehement fervor by the majority of the Republican Party and by virtually the entirety of its Conservative base.

My own hypothesis, without having myself attempted to trace the intellectual lineage of Schmitt's concepts from the 1920's to contemporary America, is that the concepts tend to be primarily the generic property of people who answer the description of authoritarians in the work of Adorno, Altemeyer, and Alice Miller, i.e., they are more psychological than consciously acquired ideological characteristics.

The whole question of the transmission of ideas from person to person and from generation to generation is a profoundly interesting one.

What non-authoritarian, i.e. "classical liberals" or libertarians can do to thwart the fascistic designs of authoritarians in both the Republican and Democratic parties is a subject for another post.