Fouy? Pfui!

Analysis: McCain Jumps Around in Bid to Stop Obama By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Filed at 3:43 a.m. ET (( body of message )) EDITOR'S NOTE: Beth Fouhy has covered the 2008 presidential campaign for The Associated Press.

As the Master has taught loyal Aristotelians, Mr. Bones, Form trumpeth content.

Accordingly I complain first about the profile of all pieces from the Associated Press that begin with the word "Analysis" like this morning's specimen. Corporations as such are capable of being analysed; active analysis is far beyond their limited cerebral capacities. For the latter, rational animals are required, as for example "Beth Fouhy."

The AP is either run by mystical Platonisers who err in their First Philosophy and think that "Associated Press" can be the name of a real agent, ‘real’ meaning one that exists outside courts and books of law. Or else the racket is run by a self-infatuated crew of EDITORS who are determined not to give their peons credit for their work if they can manage not to. Either hypothesis can account for poor Beth getting relegated to a footnote at the end, which is where the names of AP wage slaves almost invariably end up. As I recall, a few, but not many or prestigious, newspapers rearrange the format and exalt Beth to the message preamble where she belongs, where anybody but this one crumby pack of NOTE-crazed EDITORs would have put her in the first place. (Naturally they upper-case THEMSELVES. How not?)

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That was kind of fun, Mr. Bones. We have not done any Traffic Analysis in many, many years. (Where are you now, Alexander Dubcek?) [1]

Of course if Beth gets her name on it properly, she has to take the abuse from us keyboards that do not find her stuff altogether satifactory. Lingering on the Formal side briefly, though, it appears that the Barber College of Journalism has successfully taught her how to do a topic sentence. Behold!

The misadventures of Joe the Plumber were just the latest stumble for Republican John McCain as he veers from one idea to another in a thus-far elusive quest to slow Barack Obama's momentum.

Veer on and stumble, O Fabulous Flyboy! (Or why not "Flee at once. All is discovered"?)

Miss Beth could teach the Barbers their own business: who needs a whole sentence, when one's topic fits in a single thesaurus entry? A severe taste might prefer to have either ‘veer’ or ‘stumble’ separately, however, and made more impressive by isolation, like that statue of Ozymandias. But never mind that: whether you happen to like the Form after you disentangle it is subphilosophical, if not de gustibus altogether.

It will be interesting if the sweet puppies of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh take any notice of this scribble. After bein’ smacked in the kisser with Miss Beth's ‘Analysis,’ they would almost certainly take the line that she is bluffing -- she wants Samuel Josef, Freiherr von Wurtzelbacher, to be only another veer and a stumble and a swerve and a lapse and . . . and an aberration, but Miss Beth is (as WC and RL suppose) in fact scared that he is in fact nothin’ of the sort. Most of the sweet puppies are Lady Nixon's "cloth coat Republicans" who would never distress the more wombschooled neocomrades by attemptin’ an epigram, but some exotic wiseass señorito like M. Steyn or J. Podhóretz might conceivably rework Miss Beth's Stolpernmotiv into "John McCain has finally stumbled into the American Way: let him never depart thence hereafter!"

The puppies have never heard of Miss Beth, and probably won't now, but they do seem to like M. le Baron and account him, if not the greatest thing since sliced baseball and nightbread, at least the best Big Management Party product[ion] since Governess S. L. H. Paling of Alaska. Speaking of whom, Miss Beth really should have made more use of her, veer- and stumblewise. Her Excellency gets very scant attention indeed:

Policy proposals have been floated and postponed. Lines of attack have been launched, then abruptly changed. And Joe the Plumber, like Sarah Palin before him, was pushed onto the national stage without a complete examination.

Really toxic sweet puppies of AEI and GOP and EiB will maintain that the A.P. fiends must be scared of neocomradess Paling also and not want to give her any publicity. This hypothesis, however, is improbable. I think, Mr. Bones, we may take it for granted that Miss Beth and her EDITORS suppose the wasillacuda to have sufficiently self-destructed to be negligible on the national scene, though of course, like Von Wurtzelbacher, la Paling will be addressin’ covens and conventicles at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh for the term of her natural life.

I fear I veer. ("I stumbled," she mumbled.) The point I was attempting to arrive at is that Miss Beth and her EDITORs probably ought to worry about Von Wurtzelbacher a little. Even if this specimen were no more sustainable than any of the Fabulous Flyboy’s previous binges and lunges, it is nevertheless the final one. (Unless Big Management resolves upon another aggression overseas, that is.) Von Wurtzelbacher's Warhol-designated fifteen minutes will last through Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day.

Miss Beth and her EDITORs disagree and must attempt to make out that M. le Baron is passé already. They do not do a very good job of outmaking, in my opinion. They go about it like this:

'When you run a campaign without a strategy and everything becomes tactical and your tactics don't work, you respond by finding other tactics,'' Republican consultant Ed Rollins said. ''Unfortunately, that's helped Barack paint the guy who is clearly better prepared to be commander in chief as erratic and not stable.'' McCain has always said he prefers to be the underdog, and he rolled out a feisty speech this week vowing a spirited fight to Nov. 4. But he has at times also seemed exasperated with the state of affairs. In an interview with a North Carolina television station this week, the Arizona senator said he didn't know when he would return to the battleground state. ''You know, my schedule lurches from day to day,'' he said, an edge in his voice. Republican pollster John McLaughlin said the McCain operation is undergoing an experience very common among campaigns in their closing days. ''It's the thrashing between the events you can't control and what the proper message for the campaign should be,'' McLaughlin said. ''In the past week, we've seen the McCain campaign thrashing.'' McCain aides, meanwhile, carry on their duties with an acute sense of grievance against the national media, a group the candidate once jokingly referred to as his base.

At a different level of ‘analysis’ that stuff could be the ace of trumps: "Why, the GOP geniuses admit themselves that they are lurchin’ and thrashin’! Your Honour, the prosecution rests." If Miss Beth and her EDITORs were to reprint the same scribble a month from now, Senatorino O'Bama having been swept up into the blessed state of POTUShood Elect with sixty-nine percent (69%) of the popular vote and fifty-three (34) of the fifty-seven (50[+1]) states in the Electoral College, the present keyboard would not trouble to carp about any of it save the last sentence. That bliss, however, will be then, and this is only now.

Considered as a now scribble, the difficulty is that Miss Beth and her EDITORs attempt to dispose of Samuel Joseph, Freiherr von Wurzelbacher, generically rather than specifically. The specimen is assumed without discussion to be only another lurch-thrash-swerve-stumble-bananapeel from those wunnerful folks who brought you "The Freedom Means Peace Show." Very likely that is the case, but recitation of these generalities has not much tendency to prove it.

Here is the personal attention accorded M. le Baron, in full:

Joe Wurzelbacher was supposed to be the Republican presidential candidate's ace in the hole -- an average, working-class Joe whose dreams of something better might be thwarted by Obama's plans. The Ohio plumber challenged Obama's tax policies and got the Democratic presidential nominee to say he wanted to ''spread the wealth around.'' McCain told Wurzelbacher's story at the final debate Wednesday in a bid to paint Obama as a tax-raiser out of touch with regular Americans. But Wurzelbacher's story didn't quite hold up under inspection: [h]e isn't licensed as a plumber in an Ohio county that requires one. He owes $1,200 in unpaid taxes. The dream purchase of the plumbing company where he works is a long way off no matter who wins the election. McCain acknowledged Thursday he hadn't ever spoken to the man he'd suddenly made a central figure in his quest for the presidency; McCain didn't speak with Wurzelbacher until Friday. ''Sorry, Joe,'' the Republican hopeful said Thursday on ''The Late Show'' with David Letterman for bringing Wurzelbacher a tornado of public attention he never sought.

That is a bit more than in full, actually, since the final slice of baloney belongs to the Fabulous Flyboy rather than to Citizen Von Wurzelbacher. A very silly lurch-veer-stumble that baloney is, too, when it is plain that Samuel Joseph will dine out on this fuss until the sun goes supernova or MurdochNews goes bankrupt, whichever happens first. "Sorry," indeed!

But turning to M. le Baron himself, Miss Beth and her EDITORs are under the absurd misapprehension that havin’ been discovered to be a scab and a scofflaw somehow discredits the gentleman. Of course in beautiful downtown Rio Limbaugh it does nothin’ of the sort. Au contraire. Good ol’ ‘Joe’ would not be half so wunnerful if he belonged to a (gasp!) union, or paid his taxes (sigh!) punctilliously. Organised Labour is all thugs, and taxation is theft. Every wombscholar knows that much, for gosh sake! Obviously it is Miss Beth and her EDITORs who are -- lemme see, how she say? -- "out of touch with regular Americans."

Not out of touch alone, to be sure, since the Big Managers have communications difficulties also. Probably worse ones. Nevertheless, two contradictory wrongs do not add up to right, they only add up to a whole lot of wrongness goin’ ’round.

Freiherr von Wurzelbacher is scarcely discussable at the level of decent political adults, where nobody scores any points automatically for trotting out "regular Americans" and "the middle class." The closest Miss Beth and her EDITORs came to that long-lost elevation of discourse was "The dream purchase of the plumbing company where he works is a long way off no matter who wins the election." That is not close at all, for the Saga of Joe the Plumber could serve equally well or badly to expose Barry O’Bama as Leo Trotsky if it were admitted to be all fiction from end to end. Pointing out that bits and pieces of it really are fiction is a complete waste of time and energy from every point of view this side of tertiary educationalism and "knowledge its own end." [2]

Meanwhile, Flyboy and Party and Ideology err in claimin’ that Von Wurzelbacher's privacy has been violated totally. No organ known to the present keyboard has yet printed enough details about M. le Baron's financial life to make possible a reasonable judgment about the impact of Trotskyite taxation/confiscation thereupon. A realistic novel with hard numbers about how much Von Wurzelbacher borrows and who he borrows it from and what usury is exacted, about how many wage slaves he hires and what wages they slave for, about how much of what his customers pay him to get their leaks stopped is considered to be ‘profit’ rather than ‘overhead’ by Uncle Sam and Aunt IRiS -- a fiction like that would be a hundred times more worth talking about than anything we have yet actually heard, factual or factional.

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More worth talking about economically, that is.

When Princess Posterity's court historians come to evaluate the Pípulagningarmannssaga [3] definitively, however, I suspect economics will be only a minor aspect, overshadowed by another to which Miss Beth and her EDITORs are entirely blind.

Fortunately for us doves and donkeys and decent political adults, the Fabulous Flyboy is quite as blind as they, to judge from his latest emission, in which Freiherr von Wurzelbacher figures exclusively as an enemy of Psocialism:

"Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism," McCain says in his radio address. "And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines. In the best case, 'spreading the wealth around' is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn't sound like a 'new kind of politics.'"

(( The Commanderissimo of AEI and GOP and EiB (&c. &c.) is not merely blind to the better-than-economic Von Wurzelbacher, he manages to sound dangerously heretical about his own crew's mammonology, though who can doubt that he aims at rigid orthodoxy? Competent apologists for Big Management and OnePercenterdom, addressin’ the Chamber of Commerce after the dinner and before the orgy, do not come within a mile of opposin’ the idea of "spreadin’ the wealth around." They are all for that -- provided that the wealth is entrusted to qualified OnePercenters with MBA's from the Harvard Victory School, neo-gentry who understand how to do the necessary and desirable spreadin’ right. Diffusion of affluence is common ground here in the holy Homeland. Probably the Flyboy has spend too much time up in the wild blue yonder to understand the earthbound case for economic reaction properly. But God knows best why J. Sidney misunderstands. ))

To what are Flyboy and journalists blind, then? To this, from M. le Baron's heimatländisch fishwrap, the Toledo Blade

Judging by what he says alone, Wurzelbacher appears to lean even farther right than McCain. During the press scrum this morning, he seemed to lambaste entitlement programs and what he characterized as government paternalism. "Social Security's a joke. I have parents. I don't need another set of parents called the government," Wurzelbacher said. "Let me take my money and invest it how I please. Social Security I've never believed in, don't like it. I hate that it's forced on me." But hating government is not the same as hating the country, Joe made a point to note. "I want [my son] to live in an America that he's proud of. I'm tired of people downing America, saying that we're this bad country. I mean, that upsets me and my friends greatly."

There does not seem to be a proper transcript, and this keyboard is too lazy to prepare one from the picture show. The Duchessa di Sanseverino quoted a bit more of the baron's dilbertarianism on the radio yesterday, I believe, but Her Grace does not do transcripts either.

However, there is hope still for Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh! Samuel Joseph, Freiherr von Wurzelbacher, will be appearin’ on MurdochNews for the first two of his eventual 11,409 appearances this evening, Saturday 18 October 2008. If the Commanderissimo's hired handlers manage to perceive that "I'm tired of people downing America" is vastly more promisin’ for them electorally than eye-glaze about Trotsky v. Little Business, perhaps two-and-a-half weeks will be enough time for them to veer and stumble their way to the (pols' version of the) American Dream after all.

Miss Beth and her EDITORs cannot fairly be accused of attempting to murder this unpleasant possibility in the womb when they so obviously have not even noticed the pregnancy. And naturally if Von Wurzelbacher misbehaves with the Foxites, or remains overlooked by the McCainiacs despite behavin’ brilliantly, nothing will come of it.

So we shall see, and see pretty quick at that.

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[1] "Rational person versus decerebrated committee" would be one way of writing up the Prague Spring. On the other hand, that approach could easily end up boosting M. Václav von Havel, one of the greatest bores ever inflicted on Western Sieve.


[2] Not strictly true. Unfortunately detecting the fiction goes to swell the fatuous self-esteemism of a certain sort of liberal and progressive: "WE care enough to get the facts right, whereas THEY!" ("Yuck," he editorialised.)


[3] That is "pipe.layings.man's.tale," don't you know? Everybody understands Norse if you shout loud enough.