It’s the word “losses.”  What exactly makes that plural?  There has only been one Democratic loss lately, but the way it’s echoing across the continent it seems to have compounded.

Is it the gigantic Congressional majorities gained between 2006 and 2008?  Barack Obama’s sizeable margin of victory?  The string of Democratic pickups in special elections, culminating in the surprise victory by Bill Owens over the teabagger in upstate New York only last fall?

The narrative that the Democrats are tanking, or are somehow a powerless minority, has taken on a zombie life of its own, immune to facts.

Apparently, Scott Brown’s victory was so overwhelming it counted three times, maybe more.

Not Sarah Palin, who turned a Family Guy joke about her into one about her son and, by extension, all people with disabilities.  And now it’s a fracas that I’m sure her paymasters would rather not have happened.  Once again, the woman desperately needs a consultant who will advise her that it’s usually best to go against her own instincts, but it doesn’t seem like anyone wants that role.

I don’t want to take the tactic Bill O’Reilly used when he objected to something Randy Cohen said in the Ethicist one time and tried to make that the moral foundation on which the entire journalistic ethics of the newspaper rests, but it’s not like this particular institution loves Family Guy.  Deborah Solomon lashed out at Seth Macfarlane when she interviewed him in the magazine last September, for starters.

But the Times article is pretty damning.  They voiceover actress, whose advocacy-by-living-a-full-life credentials seem pretty much impeccable, says it all:

My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

Jesus.  That remark alone refutes most of the stereotypes about people with Down Syndrome.

And again, I think the really interesting issue is how News Corp figures this one out.  Can you have one wing of the company pissing off a prominent person who’s also on the payroll?  I’m inclined to think this will just blow over, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a diktat comes down telling Seth Macfarlane et al. to knock it off.

And I really thought this would have happened already with the The Simpsons–although to my knowledge they never had W. as a character, even if they had a Bill Clinton say “I’m a pretty lousy president,” and the one with George H. W. Bush as the Mr. Wilson-type neighbor was actually pretty brutal.  And totally hilarious.

Exhibit A: In the Philippines, people take karaoke so seriously that, when drunk people with guns get pissed off over bad etiquette, they kill.  Usually this happens during Sinatra.

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Amazing!  Lots of karaoke bars have to retain a fag on staff to break up the violence, because for whatever reason only they can defuse the tension.

Exhibit B: A wealthy British hypercapitalist named Guy Hands who’s in deep shit because his firm, Terra Firma bought EMI at the height of the bubble and ran it into the ground.  Radiohead and the Rolling Stones jumped ship.  He seems like the caricature of the douchebag exec who knows nothing about music except how to lose money on it.

In Britain, Guy Hands is a financial rock star. He has amassed a tidy fortune by snapping up undervalued assets like British pubs, European movie theaters and roadside concession stands in Germany and wringing cash out of them after borrowing the money he needed to buy them…

Mr. Hands owns a 12th-century estate in Tuscany, where he produces wine and olive oil. He has an enormous collection of karaoke records, and, on at least one occasion, has belted out “My Way” after an exhausting day of deal-making.

Send him to Manila!

Also, China is probably lying about everything.  Its incredible rate of growth (surpassing Japan as the world’s second  biggest economy later this year) and its staggeringly large corporatist bureaucracy simply have got to mask a trillion little lies.  That’s not a function of evil ideology, but rather of upper-level mandarins expecting middle management to outperform year over year.

Just like the NYPD’s massaging of crime statistics to make it more or less officially disappear, China is probably B.S.ing the world, especially its decidedly credulous ratings institutions–the same idiots who assigned AAA ratings to creaking, repackaged debt securities.

You can lie about facts and figures almost forever, if you’re not accountable to voters or shareholders (and even if you are) as long as the things in question remain abstract.  But you can only lie about pollution so much before the overwhelming visual evidence comes to get you.

Everybody knows Beijing is unbreathable 300+ days a year.  But here’s a nice picture of a swarm of dead floating fish.  It reminds me of that scene in Dante’s Peak where the heroic grandmother tows a rowboat with her family on it through the sulfurous lake, covered with smelt like they were lilypads.  China is burning through its water table like the acidic lake in an execrable Pierce Brosnan vehicle burnt through that granny’s dungarees.  Check it:

Pee-yoo.  China is basically twice as polluted as they were admitting.

At some point, China might leapfrog way ahead of anyone in mortality from pollution.  It might be rich enough by that point so that the elite are more or less sheltered while the rural peasantry and urban proletariat bear the brunt of things, kind of like an environmentally hobbled Brazil.  But considering how the world is heading towards apocalyptic ruin, there might not be much of a Pax Sinica.

Let me be clear: Tom Friedman wants these sorts of things to happen because it’s better for American pluck and resilience for China to wither.  I accept that they will be our new overlords in twenty years and wish them luck, seeing how badly we’ve fucked everything up.

Hillary is a castrating shrew, Janet Reno is Chelsea Clinton’s father, Al Gore is “practically lactating,” John Edwards “poofs his hair,” effete Barack Obama eats Dijon mustard.  And now Harold Ford gets pedicures.

To be fair, this is a fact rather than a rhetorical aspersion.  But naturally, it’s Maureen Dowd who’s the one revealing it to the world.  She has an endless fascination with Democratic male femininity and an eagerness to play up the cultural accoutrements of supposed elitism.

Her entire interview with Ford, the former Tennessee representative masquerading as a liberal to gain a toehold in Manhattan with the same power brokers who nodded in approval when the city’s richest man wanted to overturn the law to purchase his third mayoral term, is fairly disgusting.  She just sort of gushes and meows.

Or pretends to.  The column is titled “A Scrubbed Toe in the Race.”  (Maybe an editor called it that, maybe not.  I don’t get the pun or witticism there at all.)  But she seems to be kissing up to Ford the way she does to almost flavor of the month, brandishing his daintiness as proof that he might have been from Tennessee but never really of it, far more at home in the liberal cosmopolitan precincts of Union Square’s Coffee Shop.

It’s just so tired.  A scion of Connecticut wealth who adopts a Texas twang and loses his first congressional race in 1978 due to ads depicting him jogging goes on to clear some brush at a country manse ranch and be president, that’s fine.  It’s those damn Democrats who just lack the common touch–only it doesn’t matter in New York because the only people one needs to impress are as cosmo as you.

Because Ford really is a horrible Democrat.  He might actually be The Last Thing We Need.  Shameless attempts to reconstruct oneself as the opposite of what one strenuously claimed to be only a few years before need to be torpedoed, not abetted.

As he candidly admits, Ford’s candidacy is premised on the raw hatred the various moguls and dynamos have for Kirsten Gillibrand.  And if the VIPs are cool with Ford, so’s Maureen Dowd.  In the bizarro universe, where the media is effective, hucksters like that are called out and their careers die.

Look at Rudy Giuliani.  His claim that “there were no terrorist attacks during the Bush Administration” was universally criticized for being almost tragically inept.  But can we really write him off completely, as we should?   It’s not that his views have been repudiated; he just overreached, in what might have been a momentary lapse.  It’s the gaffe and not the heinous ideology that really buries you.

I don’t understand why the meritless shit Dowd practices is considered a net gain for the Times.  Maybe she’s like the SundayStyles section, retained just so the paper doesn’t hemorrhage female readers even faster than it already is.

She’s not even a journalist anymore.  The fucking piece contained one claim.   She wasn’t sharp enough to double-check Ford’s lie that Eleanor Roosevelt (who died in 1962) opposed Bobby Kennedy’s Senate run (in 1964), which just shows you how the elite hate outsiders.  Outsiders like former congressmen who work for Bank of America and who tour “the boroughs” by helicopter.

Too busy slurping a malt through a silly straw and wondering why no one’s asked her to go steady, mabes.

The irony is that almost nothing will happen.  If you’re gay and in the Army and waiting breathlessly until the moment when you don’t have to be paranoid anymore, you’re probably just going to be breathing a little easier and that’s more or less the extent of things.  Same unit cohesion as before, same semi-clandestine off-base shenanigans.  It’s going to be more like life in an office the day after the company offers same-sex partner benefits.  HR will be busier than usual, but that’s it.

(Spoken as a civilian who thinks war is tacky and gross).

But that’s going to be his epitaph, in terms of how he’s remembered: the Democrat who was against the war(s) after he was for it/them.  Wow, I can dimly recall a presidential campaign whose loss might have hinged on that same concept.  (I can’t, though, think of a cleaner illustration of the difference between a liberal and a progressive.  Strongly-pro labor people who won’t try sushi?  A progressive is a fighter while a liberal is a cowardly dinosaur, out of sync with his/her district, who will be replaced by a Republican when s/he drops dead.)

Because let’s not forget that Jack Murtha was one fucking corrupt bastard, and that’s what he should be remembered for.  That and calling his constituents racists.  Nancy Pelosi handpicked him to be her majority leader, and he lost to Steny Hoyer (although I don’t think I’ve ever heard a peep about any dissension after that incident).  Murtha earmarked $38 million for clients of a lobbying group in his district and gave plum jobs to his family members.

There’s lots of shitty Democrats like that, actually.   Lots of them wind up serving in Congress since 1974 or something–Charlie Rangel, Chris Dodd, the consummately unprincipled Arlen Specter.  I think I could support term limits if they were high, because institutional memory is an important thing.  But it’s really rare to find someone doing much good after 25 years in office.

But Murtha was dead weight for sure.  How the fuck can you vote to prohibit pregnant minors from crossing state lines to get an abortion?  That’s ghoulish.  Just because you think abortion is wrong doesn’t mean you treat teenage girls like a trunkful of cigarettes.

And that’s the point.  It’s almost perfect white noise, its conspicuousness entirely a function of form rather than content.  “I AM A POLITICAL FLYER” is practically the extent of the message.  There is definitely a strong performative quotient to the whole exercise; people get together and fulminate against this or that, they talk shit about consumer capitalism while wearing clothes that brand their alternative identity, some of them carrying a torch for half-forgotten or just plain weird causes.  (Plus legalization of marijuana, which will probably become the new gay marriage in ten years’ time.)

When I think about the unspoken need in political discourse to equate and balance the “freaks” on the Left and Right as if both were equally numerous, equally embarrassing and equally powerful, I have to laugh a little.  There’s no denying that the Tea Partiers are peaking right now, and really, there just hasn’t been media exposure shining on the left’s fringes approaching that scale for decades now.  Yet everyone knows they’re there, toiling in liberal enclaves (or, more accurately, in the impoverished enclaves of affluent, liberal metro areas).

Crusades to end The War on Women sound ridiculous to most people’s ears.  They cringe.  Even I cringe.  It bespeaks youthful disorganization and a crazy person ranting at a microphone.  The disjunction between the Dirty Fucking Hippies being right about most everything and the leprous aversion that anyone who commands power and respect has for them has been chronicled on a thousand liberal blogs, and it’s seriously amazing.  When I hear about a rally, I make sure not to be there.  Today’s clumsy March against Oppression breeds tomorrow’s more focused progressive leaders, but still.  I’m such a hypocrite.

On the other hand, I drove by a July 4 Tea Party rally in Monterey and really wanted to get out of the car.  I would have been like a bird that decides to check out what it’s like to swim with fish, but holy shit, I’m fascinated.  And while both hippies/Greens/malcontents and Tea Baggers want to reduce the power (read: ownership) that Finance and its high priests exert on the US political system, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” will never take root.  Both sides are quite powerless, although the Tea Partiers might be holding the conch.  If one were of a conspiratorial bent, it might seem self-evident that this is way it was planned to be.

Also, as dry as the judiciary is, lurid things like porn do come up a lot.  You can’t bank on judges’ discomfort with butt sex, because they’ve all had to read the case histories and they’re inured to it by now.  As Prop 8 was all about a vague feeling of distaste, couched in fearmongering and quasi-religious discourse only to gin up support, they might be screwed.  Especially since they’ve never demonstrated how two women getting married constitutes a concrete harm to heterosexuality or its adherents.

At the same time, here is a nice finding that crystallizes my irritation with same-sex marriage and why I always roll my eyes whenever some earnest citizen equates it with The Struggle.  As in:

A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.  None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Open relationships last longer.  Get that, people?  Open relationships last longer.  Not all people will be happy living monotonously, and, in my experience, the extra communication required to sustain an open relationship probably outweighs the jealousy factor.

As for my second highlighted passage, what a puker!  People form their own ways of relationships, and that’s great.  But to lie or cover it up because it might set back the movement is just awful.  Let’s fight for equality with some lies!

The idea that marriage has to be protected, out in public anyway, from “our” mutually permitted sexual shenanigans is really ghastly.  It’s undeniable proof that lots of people, gay and straight, get married to connvince themselves that they’re normal and to pre-empt neighbors and colleagues from thinking otherwise.  Marriage is an accessory to bourgeois living, before anything else.  Now there’s another added wrinkle of hypocrisy.  I say live in sin!

And 50%?  That seems really high.  I guess a lot of people are, well, closeted about their polyamory (or polyphilia or multiamory).  Which is fine, because it’s their business to share their business with whomever.  Although if more people were honest about it, it would probably help and not hinder the actual progressive solution to the marriage conundrum.  Which would be making marriage a totally boring, civil/bureaucratic procedure where you identify a person or persons who make all the decisions for you when you die or are hospitalized or whatever.  (Churches can do what they want, and in my progressive utopia, they wouldn’t have tax breaks so they’d wither away pretty quickly).  Your spouse would have to be a person because they’d have to consent and also be able to carry out your needs and wishes fully and faithfully.

So it couldn’t be a horse.  I’m going to draw a line in the sand and say that it’s wrong for a person to want to marry a horse.  I guess I fancy myself to be Mr. Supercool Lefty but I’m totally exposing my flank for anyone to call me out on what a reactionary I really am.  No mare-rriage!

There was a person who took the stand for the defense in the Prop 8 trial the other day and said that if we allow same-sex marriage, what’s to stop someone from marrying a horse [of the same gender?]?  That’s some really dumb shit, what that woman said.  Of course, my right to free speech is no more abridged or demeaned by her absolutely retardant utterance than her right to an opposite-marriage would be harmed by a equine-person union.