Our Founding Fathers: No fun at all

Get to know your Founding Fathers -- those prudish elitists who despised the majority of their fellow Americans and thought the nation was going to hell in a hand basket:

But what the Founding Fathers called corruption, depravity, viciousness, and vice, many of us would call freedom. During the War of Independence, deference to authority was shattered, a new urban culture offered previously forbidden pleasures, and sexuality was loosened from its Puritan restraints. Nonmarital sex, including adultery and relations between whites and blacks, was rampant and unpunished. Divorces were frequent and easily obtained. Prostitutes plied their trade free of legal or moral proscriptions. Black slaves, Irish indentured servants, Native Americans, and free whites of all classes danced together in the streets. Pirates who frequented the port cities brought with them a way of life that embraced wild dances, nightlong parties, racial integration, and homosexuality. European visitors frequently commented on the “astonishing libertinism” of early American cities. Renegades held the upper hand in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston, and made them into the first centers of the American pleasure culture. Rarely have Americans had more fun. And never have America’s leaders been less pleased by it.

But the Founding Fathers invented a way to make Americans think fun was bad. We call it democracy.

And for those of you who think we tipple too much today, check this out:

During the War of Independence, Americans drank an estimated 6.6 gallons of absolute alcohol per year—equivalent to 5.8 shot glasses of 80-proof liquor a day—for each adult fifteen or over.

And that included drinking on the job, paid for by the boss!:

It was not only accepted but also expected to mix drinking with work. Laborers of all sorts drank beer throughout the workday and took frequent breaks for liquor and lounging. Construction workers and shipbuilders expected employers to provide them with beer at breaks. According to the historian Peter Thompson, even highly skilled artisans, the managers of early American manufacturing, “jealously defended heavy drinking as a right and a privilege.”

Bars and taverns were in more abundance then than today; and they were the first racially integrated public spaces:

Lower-class taverns were the first racially integrated public spaces in America. Black, white, and brown Americans came together through mutual desire centuries before the federal government brought them together by force. Although the law in all the colonies barred blacks from public houses, the law was often ignored by tavern keepers, white patrons, and by free blacks and even slaves. Early court records tell of drinking establishments across the colonies that disregarded the color line.

America's "Founding Fathers" Detested the Paradise of Delightful Debauchery and Freedom That Was 18th Century America

By Thaddeus Russell

December 23, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/books/americas-founding-fathers-detested-paradise-delightful-debauchery-and-freedom-was-18th-century

Voting should be preceded by an obstacle course

Hey, Democrat-district voters: your polling station is on the other side. 

"By and large, election officials, it's our job to make it easier for people to vote, not harder," said a Greene County election official in Dayton, OH.

Au contraire!  The ordeal of voting is a test of one's economic station and democratic mettle.  You should be willing to risk losing your minimum-wage job, and even swim across a moat full of man-eating alligators if you really want to get to your local polling station.  (Ideally, they'd have to pass through the Game like Kurt Thomas in Gymkata, but that would be too expensive to organize, unfortunately....)

Naturally, if you're fortunate enough to have a salaried position and your home county has excess funds to pay for early and extended voting, well... that's just one of the benefits that accrue to upstanding Americans who work hard, live right, and live in the right place.

To make sure that only the right people vote (wink-wink), we should make voting downright inconvenient and during work hours, when wage-earning commoners are least likely to go to the polls.  Because if they do vote, they'll just choose the candidates promising more government benefits that we property-owning lords of the manor must pay for.  And I say, harumph-harumph and tut-tut to that!  

Republican Voter Suppression Campaign Rolls Back Early Voting

By Dan Froomkin

August 18, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/QbM3q3

Rich: Last chance for Obama to grow a sack

I'm done hoping Obama will realize who his true friends are, and find his manly courage to fight -- not soothe -- his sworn political enemies who are out to destroy him. He is a passive tool of "the best and brightest [Ivy League] white guys" whom he obviously aspired to be like at Harvard: Jamie Dimon, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and the rest. Obama is a nice guy who means well but in the end toms to his "betters," those NE-coast pedigreed whites.

UPDATE (07.06.11): Matt Taibbi summarized well Obama's "central failure" as described by Rich:

"Rich in this way describes the central failure of the Obama presidency. Obama entered the White House in the middle of a great economic crisis, and his Geithner/Rubin solution was to spend mind-boggling amounts bailing out Wall Street, while extracting no conditions or reforms in exchange, and punishing no one. Then, by abandoning jobs programs and taking up the Tea Party’s 'austerity' model, he essentially asked ordinary Americans to foot the bill for this no-strings-attached rescue program."

Obama's Original Sin

The president's failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.

By Frank Rich

July 3, 2011 | New York Magazine

[...]

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust's innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet's father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they "are burnt and purged away."

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora's fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama's watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department's bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era's designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky "Fabulous Fab" Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

Even now, on the heels of Bank of America's reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice's blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan's Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.

Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. The administration's much-hyped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being sabotaged by Washington Republicans intent on blocking any White House nominee, whether Elizabeth Warren or some malleable hack, to lead it. "We can't let special interests win this fight," said Obama when he proposed the agency in October 2009. Well, he missed his moment to fight for both it and Warren, and the special interests won without breaking a sweat.

Rather than purge the crash's crimes, Wall Street's leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this "perfect storm," and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and ­Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan's first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it's bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS's reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America's total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what's most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he's done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at "fat-cat bankers on Wall Street"—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as "very savvy businessmen."

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama's humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous résumé as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he'd rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama's background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

[...]

Not until March 2010 did the White House get its first explicit, modest jobs bill through Congress. [...] The White House's repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

[...]

There's not much Obama can do to alter the economy by 2012, given the debt-ceiling fight, the long campaign, and nihilistic Capitol Hill antagonists opposed to any government spending that might create jobs and, by extension, help Obama keep his own. But the central question before the nation couldn't be clearer: Who pays? The taxpayers bailed out the elite; now it's the elite's turn to return the favor. Massive cuts to the safety net combined with scant sacrifice from those at the top is wrong ethically and politically. It is, in the truest sense, un-American. Obama knows this, and he hit a welcome note last week when he urged some higher corporate taxes for hedge funds and the like. But his forays in this direction are tentative and sporadic. You have to wonder why he isn't seizing the moment to articulate and fight for the big picture instead of playing a lose-lose game of rope-a-dope with the Republicans on their budgetary turf.

[...]

"A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous," Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There's nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it's essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there's a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Chomsky: 'Elite dislike of democracy is the norm'

Chomsky starts with democracy movements in the Mideast but manages to comment on EVERYTHING. Quite a feat, and still spot on!

"The U.S. and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. To understand why, it is only necessary to look at the studies of Arab opinion conducted by U.S. polling agencies. Though barely reported, they are certainly known to planners. They reveal that by overwhelming majorities, Arabs regard the U.S. and Israel as the major threats they face: the U.S. is so regarded by 90% of Egyptians, in the region generally by over 75%. Some Arabs regard Iran as a threat: 10%. Opposition to U.S. policy is so strong that a majority believes that security would be improved if Iran had nuclear weapons -- in Egypt, 80%. Other figures are similar. If public opinion were to influence policy, the U.S. not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it, along with its allies, undermining fundamental principles of global dominance.

"Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship."

Our flexible understanding of democracy

Time and again, the U.S.conditions its support for democracy to the furthering of social and economic objectives

By Noam Chomsky

April 21, 2011 | CBS News

URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/21/opinion/main20056069.shtml

W. Williams: 'Republics' for Republicans, 'democracy' for mobs

Then call us a "constitutional democracy," Professor Williams. Same thing. So there, I solved the "problem."

Actually, with the exception of Britain, I don't know of any Western democracies without a constitution. (And the last time I checked, the mob hadn't yet taken over Britain and voted themselves rich.) So when we say "democracy" it's the same as saying "republic" or "constitutional democracy." When America was founded that wasn't the case, but thanks to the success of the U.S. model, it is today.

I'm not entirely sure why some U.S. conservatives insist on these semantics, but I think it has to do with their basic disdain for and distrust of ordinary people -- just like our Founding Fathers despised and feared the lower classes and called democracy "mobocracy." Elitism and classicm are alive and well among today's Founder-fawning conservatives, despite all their Palin-esque airs of Average-Joe folksiness to the contrary.

Case in point, Williams intentionally provocative opening sentence: "It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements."

Williams tries to qualify this statement in his op-ed but a sentiment this ugly really can't be redeemed or clawed back.

Whatever the outcomes of these protests may be, they certainly are democracy movements, where the people want more of a say in who runs their government and how it operates. The elitists, er, republicans, are showing their true stripes in light of the 2011 Mideast democracy uprisings.

Democracy Versus Liberty

By Walter E. Williams
February 22, 2011 | Townhall.com

URL: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/02/23/democracy_versus_liberty

Limbaugh defines an unacceptable protest

If you have any doubts about what Rush and his ilk consider an acceptable protest, read this:

"I don't want to call it a mob, the protester bunch. And, folks, they're all leftists. They're feminists. They're avowed socialist, leftist, communists, environmentalists. I don't believe that this is just spontaneity. I think this is classic. This is rent-a-mob. I don't doubt that there are genuine grievances felt by some of the people in this group, but this is not a spontaneous, gee, nobody knew this was coming moment. This is the result of organizing. This is just classic community organizing in Egypt."

See, it had to be "spontaneous" to be genuine, meaning: every protester had to come independently and simultaneously to the conclusion that he needed to be out there risking his life and livelihood, fighting a corrupt and oppressive regime. Anything even slightly more collective than that is "community organizing," which as we all know is the 8th deadly sin.

"This is rent-a-mob," he said! Who rented them? How much did more than a million people cost to rent for 18 days, and were they paid in dollars or Egyptian pounds, and where did they pick up their money? Did they earn extra for getting hit with tear gas or pummeled with batons? I really wish Rush would elaborate on this shocking conspiracy.

Back to reality.... If we let these far-right bozos talk for 3 hours a day 5 days a week, eventually they can't contain themselves and reveal their true elitist feelings. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al despise normal people and democracy, that's all there is to it.

Media Jubilant Over Egypt Coup

February 11, 2011 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021111/content/01125106.guest.html

Ames: America's persistent problem is too much democracy

You may not like Ames but he is devastating. You teabaggers ignore him at your own moral peril. The GOP "braintrust" is anti-democratic at its core, just like our Founding Fathers were: Their greatest fear wasn't British tyranny, it was "mobocracy" by the unpropertied uncouth underclass. As the self-proclaimed true inheritors of our founding traditions, elitist Republicans hate democracy and majority rule.

Check it out, you beigists!

"What about the $23 trillion Republican bailouts? Well, again, we're too stupid to understand. The thing is, those bailouts had to be done their way in order to save us from the Road to Serfdom. It's hard to explain, but basically, the anti-government conservatives in the Bush Machine saved us from that Road to Serfdom by turning us into serfs. You see, all along it was the Road that they warned us about, not serfdom — that road is really treacherous, and government funded, and just a bad place to be. We weren't rational or strong enough to wean ourselves off of big government. So they saved us with their tough love, and stole the $23 trillion bailout for themselves before we could get our hands on it — which no doubt we would have done. In their hands, that $23 trillion debt makes us serfs, which is not as bad as the other alternative: we take the $23 trillion ourselves, leading us down the road to serfdom. Confused? If we were capable of studying economics, we'd understand the scientific logic of this reasoning."

And here's what Ames has to say about Tom Tancredo, keynote speaker at the Tea Party Patriots convention, who alongside Sarah Palin dvocated a return to Jim-Crow era voter literacy tests:

"*Note: In 1969, when Tancredo was finishing his four-year stint as pro-war College Republican campus activist, he received a note in the mail from the Draft Board calling him up for duty in Vietnam — so the wobbly-kneed invertebrate ran screaming and crying to the draft board appealing for an exemption from the very same war told everyone else to die in. After making a total abject ass of himself squirting into his underwear before the draft board, they finally gave in and handed Tancredo the yellow-striped coward's exemption he begged for — ruling him mentally unfit for duty due to "anxiety bouts" and "panic attacks." It was the only government job he ever turned down — he believed that "sacrifice" meant sacrificing other people's money and lives, not his own. After squirming out of the war, Tancredo spent the rest of his life sucking on the taxpayer teat, first as a junior high school teacher, then a state legislator, then a Department of Education federal employee (where he spent most of his time firing his colleagues), then Congressman, and finally, a Republican Party foundation-welfare queen."

Just like Cheney, Limbaugh, Dubya -- all of them actively avoided combat, although they're perfectly fine with "projecting American power" in every godforsaken desert and primitive sh**holte on Earth from the comfy environs of power.


Royal Tea Party Rebels: The Heroic Billionaires' Struggle To Overthrow The Tyranny Of Democracy
By Mark Ames
February 12, 2010 The Exiled

URL: http://exiledonline.com/royal-tea-partiers-the-heroic-billionaires-struggle-to-overthrow-the-tyranny-of-democracy/#more-17899

Hybrid socialist-capitalist Monster Fed in the making

This scares me:

... putting the Federal Reserve in charge as super-regulator is the path that leads to the corporate state. A limited circle of privileged players would enjoy a permanent line of credit from Washington, while their competitors in business and finance would struggle at great disadvantage. This top-down economy would combine the worst qualities of both socialism and capitalism.

More Easy Money for Wall Street
By William Greider
December 9, 2009 | The Nation

URL: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/greider

Hannity: Burger belies Obama's elitism

This is so over-the-top, but typical. Now Sean Hannity is accusing Obama of choosing elitist mustard on his "fancy burger." Some conservative bloggers are outraged at Obama's blue-blooded burger, too. Sorry to break it to you, but if you have dijon or spicy mustard in your kitchen, you are officially an elitist SOB. (You may also be an A-rab and a Muslim.)

BTW, a 10 oz. bottle of Grey Poupon will run you about $3.50; and 12 oz. Billy Bee Dijon Honey will cost you about $2.63. If you can afford to pay for such luxury, then please open your mouth and remove the silver spoon!

Yeah, and Dubya was a "man of the people" because he talked like a Texas village idiot and grilled his own hot dogs, even though he's a millionaire scion.

Don't ask me why.


President Poupon

As you all know, President Obama is a real man of the people. Tuesday, he dropped by a popular Virginia restaurant to grab a burger with his pal Joe. The Gateway Pundit blog pointed out that plain old ketchup didn't cut it for the president, who ordered his burger with a very special condiment:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: All right. I'm going to have a — just your basic cheddar cheeseburger, medium well. I just want mustard, no ketchup. If you've got like a spicy mustard or something like or Dijon mustard, something like that.

Dijon mustard? I think the president watched a little bit too much television as a kid:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP: GREY POUPON COMMERCIAL)

ACTOR IAN RICHARDSON: Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?

ACTOR PAUL EDDINGTON: You mean the mustard?

RICHARDSON: Yes, would you have any?

EDDINGTON: Would I or do I?

RICHARDSON: Both, actually.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

I hope you enjoyed that fancy burger, Mr. President.

[I hope you enjoy my foot up your ass, Hannity! - J]

UPDATE: It gets ridiculouser. Now the Grey Poupon people at Kraft are getting involved. -->

Goldberg: The lazy uninformed elect our leaders

This op-ed below, from a conservative Republican, is one of the most elitist (and ageist) articles I've read in some time. I mean, Republicans are supposed to be the defenders of Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber and "flyover country," while liberals are supposed to be snobby coastal elitists. Go figure. Nothing like an election to bring out a man's -- or a party's -- true colors.

Without a doubt there are many dumb Americans, on the left and the right. (And when you think about it, it's not exactly as if our two-party system encourages much creative thought or dissent; it's much more about the party faithful coming up with fancy new ways to market two very old and worn-out products.) Yet when it comes to politics, even smart people can be abysmally stupid. By "smart," I mean educated people who have experience, skills and knowledge that I will never have. A lot of smart Americans continue to believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, for example. Whereas most "dumb" (read: under-educated) blacks never bought into the rationale for invading Iraq, and are overwhelmingly against the war to this day. Turns out they are politically much savvier than the rest of America. Again, go figure.

So, accepting the above, and realizing that the right to vote is the most important right we've got, then by gum I want every eligible "idiot" in America to vote, and let the chips fall where they may. (The root of "idiot," by the way, means somebody who is rough, crude, or unrefined.) After all, it's their (your?) country too. And indeed, it might just be the idiots who save us from the smarty-pants who come up with brilliant, expensive ideas like invading and occupying Middle Eastern countries without provocation, and giving $700 billion bailouts to greedy coastal elitist bastards who knew better.

Also, consider this: common law requires convening, by force, a jury of your peers (read: a group of idiots) who are granted the legal power to take away your money, your freedom, even your life. We hail that principle as one of the great achievements of democracy and rule of law. Yet when it comes to our elections, our system makes it downright inconvenient for common idiots to cast a ballot. In fact, hundreds of thousands of registered voters can be deleted from the rolls within 90 days of the election, a clear violation of federal law, and our MSM and political elites say nothing. But in which case is the common man's vote more consequential, the 1 out of 12 life-or-death vote in a jury, or the 1 out of 100,000,000 vote in a national election where the popular vote doesn't even elect the president? Then why such outsized fear of "one man, one vote" in one little election? In fact, this is a very old and very elitist fear: our uber-"smart" Founding Fathers constantly fretted about the deplorable possibility of "mobocracy," hence they restricted the right to vote to white land-owning men, and established the Electoral College.

Finally, Jonah Goldberg's benefactor, National Review, spent a heck of a lot more time examining Obama's pastor and past associates than it did his policy proposals. Why? Because conservative elites correctly figured it better served their purposes to selectively inform their party faithful, in order to stir up their worst fears and passions with all kinds of half-truths, rumors, and fabrications. Media outlets like NRO, Human Events, Townhall, FOXNews, and right-wing talk radio did a horrible job of informing the electorate. (To put it more accurately, they did a great job of dis-informing them.) Over the past 21 months, rarely could they be bothered to talk about anything except Rev. Wright, Randy Ayers, Tony Rezko, Obama's "Marxist" mother, his "Muslim" grade school, his "terrorist" college roommates, his "missing" birth certificate, and the like. This pharisaic elitist Jonah Goldberg should remove the beam from his own MSM eye first.

Election Questions No One Asks

By Jonah Goldberg

November 6, 2008 | USA Today

No doubt everyone is relieved to have the election behind us, even if some of us are less than ecstatic about its result. The president-elect and Democrats in Congress very much want to move forward, talk about the future and get busy on their agenda. After all, the oceans aren't going to stop rising on their own.

Of course, how we move "forward" (quotation marks are necessary because one man's forward is another man's backward) depends very much on how we view the larger meaning of the election. Was this a vote for radical leftwingery or a vote for moderation? Is the electorate pro-liberal or merely anti-Republican? What did voters have in mind? What do they expect?

The nice thing about such questions is that you actually get real debate about them, and we'll be hearing lots of that in the weeks and months ahead. But there are other questions no one ever asks, in part because our political discourse is choked with stupefying clichés and gassy assumptions about what matters and what doesn't.

So while the election is still fresh in our minds, let us look at some of the goofy assumptions and buzzwords that defined so much of the coverage discussion this year.

Ever since the primaries, Democrats have been promising to be "agents of change" (which kind of sounds like a brand of James Bond villain; watch out -- he's an agent of C*H*A*N*G*E). It's a weird quirk of our television-soaked culture that we think change is a good in and of itself. The phrase "change the channel" is a ubiquitous explanation for voters' desire to be done with President Bush. Fair enough, but change has no moral content. Winning the lottery is change, and so is catching a ball peen hammer to the bridge of your nose. The desire for change for change's sake is the stuff of children and attention-deficit disorder.

Speaking of children, the national obsession with the "youth vote" is one of the great embarrassments of deliberative democracy. Why is the participation of youth so vital? According to "youth activists" themselves, it's because they bring so much "passion" to politics. Passion, again, is not necessarily a good thing. Mobs and small children are passionate. There was a time when voting was supposed to be a matter for sober, mature reflection. Now it's more like a fashion statement. "In America," remarked Oscar Wilde long ago, "the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience." The only difference now is they get to vote.

In fact, everyone gets to vote, or at least that's the hope of vote-voluptuaries. The country is experimenting with ever-more-novel ways to make it easier for people to join "the process," which makes democracy sound like a digestive phenomenon. Gone entirely is the tradition of Election Day. Now it's Election Week or even Election Month in some states. Voting by mail, online voting, even voting by phone are increasingly in vogue, all because it's assumed that we desperately need input from voters who couldn't be bothered to get off the couch for a normal Election Day but can be coaxed to vote if it doesn't interfere too much with their video game schedule. In Arizona, there was an aggressive movement to make voting into a lottery, where casting a ballot could also lead to a big payday. The logic seemed to be that having the same folks who hang out at the local liquor store or keno parlor move their action to the polling station would enrich our democracy.

Of course, helping the infirm, the handicapped or soldiers overseas cast ballots makes sense. But do we really think the outcomes will be improved if we triple the turnout of the lazy and uninformed?

Apparently, the answer is yes, particularly judging by the virtual deification of "undecided" voters this year. I understand why campaigns care so much about the undecided voter in the last days of the election: They're kingmakers of a sort. But the press lionizes these people as geniuses and, judging from some of the focus groups we've been subjected to, these proudly indecisive and lazy voters actually believe all their good press.

After each debate, some network would convene a focus group of undecided voters who then preened over their lofty status. Pollster Frank Luntz, CNN's Soledad O'Brien or some other enabler would gush over how fascinating it was to talk to "real people." Indeed, so exotic are these creatures, most of the journalists actually observed them from the other side of a two-way mirror, like visitors to the "Earthling Exhibit" on some alien planet in that old episode of "The Twilight Zone." During the debates, the creatures were monitored every second, their instant reactions to the candidates' every vowel and burp were charted, often in real time, for the rest of us to decipher and applaud. Invariably, they shook their heads, more in sadness than anger, and complained they didn't get enough "specifics," as if presidential debates are the proper source of basic campaign information.

And that proves the point. These people are undecided because they don't do their homework. CNN profiled an undecided voter from Nebraska the day before the election who said he is "definitely pro-life" and a single-issue voter on abortion. But, according to CNN, he was still trying to figure out which candidate was pro-life. Um, really? Don't strain yourself trying to figure that one out.

Brooks: Conservative Class Warfare

The Class War Before Palin

By David Brooks

October 10, 2008  | New York Times

 

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, "Ideas Have Consequences." Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn't believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

 

Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

 

Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

 

In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.

 

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

 

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

 

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

 

Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

 

George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, "Rebel-in-Chief," Bush "reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don't live along the East or West Coast. He's not a sophisticate and doesn't spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn't come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven't."

 

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

 

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it's 2-to-1. With tech executives, it's 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-to-1.  It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

 

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

 

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking "eastern elites." (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

 

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin.  Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the "normal Joe Sixpack American" and the coastal elite.

 

She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

 

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety.  It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.