I’ve never read a book by E.L. Doctorow, but this essay has many locutions beautiful to my ears:

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills – it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

It is in these two paragraphs, a little gem of parallel construction, that Doctorow manages to encapsulate the damned insincerity of our President that so infuriates me. One might argue that Kerry is equally dissimulating, but I find the cries of “flip-flop” unconvincing. What is better, to give with one hand while the other takes away, all the time smiling, or to decide to give, then rescind the decision? Both are aggravating, but the first is more fundamentally dishonest.

Of course, since Berkeley is a place of extremes, it is no surprise to me that the few Republicans here are Extreme Republicans (TM). They’ve decided to invite, along with the “California Patriot,” noted bigot and revisionist historian Michelle Malkin to speak on campus and make the case that Japanese internment during WWII was a good thing and that we should do lots of racial profiling now. I’d go, but I have way better things to do with my time.

I have the Dead Kennedy’s California Über Alles blasting through my crappy office headphones. It seems oddly appropriate now that we have an Austian governor, though Arnold and Jerry Brown don’t really fit together in the same space in my head. Of course, Jerry Brown is now running for Attorney General, so maybe the song will make a comeback.

California is so weird.

Apparently the Ohio Republicans are in the Bertholt Brecht Room at the convention. I’m not sure if I should be horrified or amused. Probably amused.

A thought that I had over this whole “Intelligence Czar” business was that perhaps there is an uncertainty principle thing going on. Let I denote the uncertainty about some fact (e.g. existence of weapons of mass destruction), and D be the amount of decision-making power you have. Then the law states that

I/D > C

for some appropriate constant C, possibly involving Planck’s constant.

We are bunny-sitting our landlord’s bunny. I have named her Ms. Floppity Hop. After spending much of the early evening hiding in corners or in her cage, Ms. Hop (or should I call her Floppity?) started roaming around the room as soon as John Edwards started talking about living week to week on our paycheck. I take this as a sign that Edwards has truly reached out to the bunny community — they too want One America.

Obama’s speech. Read it. I can’t find the real audio link or I’d put it here.

Nick Confessore over at TAPPED writes:

To put it crudely, Obama is the black candidate African-American voters and middle-class whites both feel good about.

And it’s too true. From what I could garner when I was back home, the view of Obama in middle-class white Illinois is that he’s like the black orphan that the nice white family adopted and oh how generous they are and how well-spoken he is oh my. The palatable black man. This is not a criticism of Obama, or that he should position himself as anything other than what he is. He did not grow up in the hood and to posture like that would be disingenous and detrimental to his campaign. For all the excitement I have about him, his meteoric success is a sad indication of how far we have yet to go in this country.

Via CraigBlog (of Craigslist fame):

The theme of the 2004 summer Olympic Games is “celebrate humanity,” yet the workers who make the gear and clothing for the upcoming Olympics suffer terribly inhumane working conditions and have few rights. Workers in official Olympic manufacturer Fila’s factories endure forced overtime, get fined for mistakes they make, and are intimidated out of joining trade unions. This is no way to celebrate humanity!

You can read Oxfam’s view and see how companies took the news, and then sign the petition if you so feel like it.