This whole discussion is a terrible example of how the media can trivialize political discussion. The presidency is a serious job, the most serious job in the country. And here we are, asking the man to dress the part, to play-act the emotions. Give us satisfaction by just doing something, even if it’s all phony stuff, designed to give the impression of action.

Hmmm.  That sort of thing did work undeniably well for the last president, except when it didn’t, as Zakaria surely knows since he was part of it for so long.  Like the rest of the media, he and CNN fell hook, line, and sinker for the cheap “play-acting” that passed for a presidency for eight dreadful years, and might as well be criticizing the mirror, but the sentiment is certainly welcome.  Such a short time ago in our media, a president (who had been explicitly warned of such an occurrence and hadn’t acted), could sit in a classroom while the country was attacked, then hide all day and lie about it, and just pick up a bullhorn a few days later and be unanimously declared more heroic than Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill, put together.  The “impression of action” ruled the day, and long after Bush’s squeaker reelection, the media gushed over his “boldness,” “victories”, and “straight talk,” which to anyone capable of reading above the “My Pet Goat” level, looked a lot like foolhardiness, disasters, and the most obvious lies.

All through the various wars at home and abroad that Bush so elaborately staged, we were treated with made-up, comic-book tales of pluck and heroism like Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman,  Bush donning more costumes than Sonny and Cher, and insultingly unsubtle backdrops like the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore.  No one (currently employed) in the media ever mentioned how phony it all was, nor did they bother to point out when the stories inevitably collapsed later, so it is a bit astonishing to hear someone on CNN, no less, complaining about the shallow, dunderheaded media focusing on the theater of it all at the expense of the real-world implications entailed.  I think that the instant embrace of the meme, “Obama’s Katrina” has something to do with the deeply compromised (and perhaps, in their vestigial consciences, penitent) media that never tires of repeating it.  What they mean is, “our Katrina.”  That was when the media finally noticed that by sucking up to Bush for so long, they were, literally, killing innocent Americans, even here at home where it looks bad on TV, and they finally got some oxygen into their blow-dried heads.  Better late than never, I guess.

Still, it’s a not particularly satisfying to hear a confirmed Villager like Zakaria wax poetic about the journalistic duty to discuss serious events in terms of their policy implications and possibly criminality rather than the Q ratings and wardrobe of all concerned.  After all, the guy is saying this on TV, where wardrobe and Q ratings are what matters, and the rest is just boring minutia nobody cares about and will forget in a week, or less if needed.  Suddenly, this oil spill is “important,” and must be discussed rationally, when two wars, several drastic transfers of wealth upward, and the collapse of multiple sectors of the economy were deliberately and “boldly” undertaken and judged only on their cinematography, presumably because they were less important.  (And better TV?)

As long as the media is unwilling to connect the dots between their shallow, content-free coverage of the last ten years, and the many disasters their uncritical reporting has enabled through its relentless cheerleading, ol’ Fareed is just pissing up a rope, and pretty pathetically.  Thanks to our media, CNN included, Big Oil and its entourage have given us so many Katrinas; no wonder they want to re-gift some of them.  Thanks, but no thanks.

As was visibly and perhaps too inspiringly revealed in the “Beverly Hillbillies,” oil is about the closest thing to instant undeserved wealth our overtaxed earth has yet to produce, and, like waving a twenty dollar bill in a trailer park, it attracts thieves and charlatans like shit attracts flies.  Better yet, the instant riches created a class of welfare queens more demanding than the world has ever known, who’ve spent more than a hundred years manipulating the modern world into absurd, abject dependence on its tainted product.  Cities across the world, but especially in the US, remade themselves to accommodate excessive oil consumption, a thoughtless crime for which history will condemn us, that is if there even is such a thing.

As an energy source, oil is indeed a necessity of modern life; no less damaging or more sustainable replacement of oil for, say, jet fuel, may ever be harnessed.  But using such a precious and finite resource for such a mundane thing as personal transportation, which in itself destroys and impoverishes communities with publicly-funded pavement everywhere, is plain nuts.  As we’re seeing, the relentless and entirely preventable clamor for more oil that has made the most harebrained schemes for its extraction seem not just reasonable but a dire necessity, has put America in a fix any crack whore would be sure to recognize, ruefully.  We’re hitting bottom, in more ways than one.

Since there simply are no more places to get oil that make any sense, we have resorted to waging wars, destroying the biosphere, and generally making asses of ourselves to delay the inevitable for a few more years, while we mindlessly waste oil for such shoddy ephemera as a drive to the outlet mall or a crappy bag that will barely carry our purchases to the parking lot, but nonetheless will eventually form continent-sized messes in the ocean. Governments all over the world, but particularly here, have made such profligate waste a way of life; damn the consequences.

Shortly after 9/11, I decided to move downtown and get rid of my car, once and for all; I couldn’t stand knowing I was helping finance the Bush/Cheney regime with every tank.  It wasn’t all that difficult for me, since I’m a single adult who loathes driving and Portland has great public transit, but for most Americans such a choice is all but impossible, so successful have the oil/automobile industries been in eliminating all alternative forms of travel.  Even here, there are few family-sized apartments and no schools in the easily walkable downtown core, and the costs would be prohibitive if there were; like everywhere else, the older, outlying residential neighborhoods built around transit have long ago had the tracks ripped up, with no realistic attempt to replace them.  In other, more enlightened countries like Switzerland and Spain, heck, even China, massive investments are being made to take freight and personal travel off the highways in favor of high-speed, electrified rail.  Here, we fall asleep to the lullaby of “Drill, Baby Drill” in our cul-de-sacs, all the while spending thousands of dollars a year on our automobile habit, money that could go toward almost anything better, but instead enriches the very interests that made the mess.

Sadly, perhaps only a disaster like the one unfolding in the Gulf has any chance of redirecting us from the cliff we’re about to leap, but here it is.  What will we do with it?

For example:  Rand Paul

Now lil’ Rand is considerably more attractive than his Papa, which couldn’t hurt (except for that unfortunate white-fro on the top of his head, which appears to be some sort of comb-over alternative…), but Junior clearly didn’t get the Republican memo about Not Telling the Truth Until After the Election.  It’s ok to embrace racists, plutocrats, and scofflaw corporations, but public displays of your ardor are to be strictly avoided until after your swearing-in.  It’s unseemly, especially in front of the servants.  Reagan promised that tax cuts and a military buildup would create prosperity for all, Bush waxed “compassionate,” and whatnot not because they were closet liberals, but because they knew that their real views would go over like a fart in church.  Please, Dr. (!) Paul, make a note of it.  Or not, which I of course prefer.

The LA Times:

I’ve been a tad disconsolate that my old boyfriend, Ricky Serrano, has all but vanished from Los Tiempos; were his intemperate and unprofessional emails to me merely the nose-thumbing of yet another LAT short-timer?  It would explain a lot.  Fortunately, the Times has a new but decidedly not improved Ricky, in this case Ricky Simon, who is doing pretty good job of Keeping Ricky 1′s chair warm, as evidenced by his pathetically stupid article about Barbara Boxer today.  She’s partisan, you know.  The examples he was able to cull from an 18-year Senate career are so thin that if they were a person they would only need one earring, as well.  (Insert Valley Girl voice here) “Well, there was that time when she, like totally dissed James Inhofe.”  The time to which Simon refers is when, after their (first) richly deserved defeat in 2006, Inhofe filibustered a climate change hearing with his delusional claptrap and she had to explain that his bonkers party no longer controlled anything but Fox News, which Republicans naturally took pretty hard.  The other time she purportedly stepped over some partisan line (again, this is in 18 years) was when she corrected a lying and stupid general for repeatedly calling her “Ma’am,” which my own mother always told me all women under 80 hate, preferring, “Senator.”  Wow, that gal is uppity, or so Ricky thinks.  Sheesh.  Naturally, this leads the story to conclude that either serial failure Carly Fiorina or fruitcake diva Meg Whitman, neither of whom have a lick of political experience or brains, to be formidable challengers to Boxer.  Good luck with that LAT.  Can’t wait to see  updates after November.

The Oil Spill:

The whole redneck Riviera has suddenly turned hippie on me, and I love it.  Bobby (Brady) Jindal sounds like Al Gore’s adenoidal sidekick, and when the slick hits Alabama and Mississippi, you won’t be able to smell the oil for the patchouli and pot smoke wafting around Haley Barbour and Roy Blunt.  It couldn’t have happened to, uh, nicer guys.   From here on out, they’ll be making sand candles that really burn.

A Moody’s report released Tuesday on the potential impact of the oil spill on Florida warns it could hurt the state on a major scale.

Wait a minute.  I just heard BP say that this oil was just a thimble or so, compared to, you know, all the oceans on earth.

“The state’s high dependence on tourism dollars and jobs is significant and a gradually worsening disaster associated with any part of Florida’s 1,197 coastline miles could likely have long-term implications even greater than the recent global recession or Hurricane Ivan in 2004,” said Moody’s Investor Service analyst and senior credit officer Edith Behr.

In effect, the impact could simulate a double dip to the economy in a state already struggling more than most to emerge from one of the country’s worst recessions.

Oh, you mean the one that was caused by that other wave of deregulation you loved and profited from, Moody’s?

Here’s how the Moody’s scenario could happen.

Florida, as well as gulf coast cities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, may see credit ratings cut because of the BP oil spill, if tourism falls and property values drop. The spill may have “severe” effects if it reaches coastal communities on Florida’s Panhandle since they rely so heavily on tourism and the state depends on sales taxes from the region.

“Cities, towns, school districts, and counties will likely experience a decline in property tax values, which will necessitate a reduction in services or an increase in other revenue to maintain current rating levels,” Behr said.

In turn, lower ratings may raise borrowing costs for state and local governments in the region as investors in the $2.8 trillion municipal-bond market demand higher yields to compensate for increased risk.

Moody’s rates the credit quality of borrowers in the market. Tax revenue is likely to fall over the long term for coastal cities, which may force cutbacks in services, Behr said.

“A majority of statewide bonds are secured by special taxes including tourist taxes and sales taxes,” the report said. “Also, with sales taxes constituting the state’s primary revenue source, further reductions in this revenue would have negative implications on school district funding statewide.”

Here we go again.  The exact same people who caused the crisis are at the ready with “solutions” that, surprise, benefit them to everyone else’s detriment.  Nice work if you can get it.

It will all depend on the extent of damage from the oil spill. And that, Behr said, remains too early to tell.

The neatest thing about being a right-winger is that your failures, played right, can all turn into triumphs at the end.  You can destroy things and bet on their destruction, you can make money on wars won or lost, and best of all, you can make the whole rest of the world pay for it all.  You can blather on about “personal responsibility” while exhibiting none, be it with the environment or your generations-younger staffer.  Sadly for them, though, even once full-on corporatism has been accomplished, sometimes the corporations disagree, and in odd cases that can produce a situation in which actual citizens might get a vote on a matter.  Just like when the health insurers decided to double rates in the midst of the HCR debate, ol’ Moody’s accidentally punctured the notion that the teeny little unpleasantness in the Gulf of which BP et al daily spoke was anything but a world-changing catastrophe, innocently hoping to stir up a little business on the down side.

Like they did in Greece.  Can’t blame them for trying, of course….   It’s certainly worked before.

Would that the rest of us had such forgiving performances reviews as George Bush did in 2004.  ”Well, as a country we went financially quite a way from the black to the red already, with no end in sight , but your two other big initiatives, the wars, will at least provide us loss carryovers so we won’t have to pay taxes until 2125….  Great job!”   Or the bankster, “Well, you did crash the world economy and cheat your own best customers for personal gain in the process, but the way you got us all that free Fed money shows that you’re a real team player….  Here’s another billion, and a bigger plane!”  Sadly, those poor guys in the oil industry, who actually do something, or are at least supposed to, always get the short end of the stick.  Unlike Presidents or Wall Streeters, who ruin lives so subtly and at such a discreet distance that it almost seems genteel, and certainly tolerable, the oil boys do have to produce something to get paid, and unfortunately that thing is messy.

Years of playing “Battleship” with the American military, however, and being lavished with tax breaks and lax oversight by fawning politicians and compromised regulators started to make Big Oil think that they, too, had stepped out of the dreary and dangerous basement of heavy industry into the rarified, risk-free penthouses of magic money, but they’re finding out to their considerable chagrin that this isn’t so….   George W. Bush, never much of a believer in Murphy’s Law, nonetheless wisely chose politics when he found out that oil was too hard.  Then, in office, he set about making oil easier, with horrific results for all concerned.  Watch what you wish for, and all that.

There’s something intuitive, really, about the idea that poking holes 20,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth, in rough seas, to bring up flammable gases and liquids is a little tricky, and no matter how widely liability were spread, one good hit with Murphy’s Law and your company, industry, and reputation, not to mention vast swaths of aquatic life, are completely shot to hell for multiple generations.  It takes a particularly blind arrogance and an astonishing sense of personal infallibility utterly foreign to most of the real world to simply not bother to dot every “I” and cross every “t” before proceeding with something so risky.  What does, say, an engineer, or for that matter a waitress, think of people who show up for such highly paid work so dismally unprepared?  Not much, I’m guessing.

For this reason, I hold some hope that Americans will finally get some admittedly petroleum-scented oxygen to their brains from this incident and start to call a halt to the relentless abandonment of accountability at the top that has plunged so many of us into debt, destitution, or despair, while the perpetrators are complete strangers to the harsh and unforgiving retribution we would receive for such shockingly incompetent performance.  Apologists like Mary Landrieu (the Republicans have been uncharacteristically quiet…) only drive the point home further…   She talks endlessly about the importance of “jobs,” when everyone listening knows that had they done their “jobs” like BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, or for that matter George Bush or Citibank, did, they would no longer have them, and they would have a tough time finding another.  For real Americans,  Murphy’s Law has not been repealed, and sympathy for its deniers is pretty hard to come by.

For “journalists” so completely inadequate to their craft, 9/11 had the advantage of being understood without any cool, intelligent heads around to explain it; not so the wars, constitutional usurpations, additional attacks, hurricanes, and on and on that followed in its wake.  A sort of nostalgia has thus set in for that one time in the last ten years that they didn’t get a story completely wrong, and they would so love to step before the cameras again and be BIG, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.  Unfortunately, in addition to lacking any notion of journalism, they also lack all perspective; a lot of people got killed, after all, on 9/11, and the fanatical attention given to the underpants and Turf Builder “bombers” and their hapless ilk only serve to drive this point home, all these years later.

Sadly, a large portion of our political class also leapt up from deserved ignominy, like Rudy Giuliani, or obscurity, like Joe Lieberman, in the aftermath of 9/11, and by being loudly and maniacally wrong about everything from that day forward, have joined the media in the terror fetishism that plagues us to this day, when these idiots are brought on TV to blather on about inconsequential nonsense.   Thus, amidst a rapidly unfolding disaster like the oil gusher in the Gulf, too much coverage of which might offend advertisers, we are blessed with some content-free bloviating to push aside such discouraging topics, all the while burnishing the image of the political faction that caused the disaster and focusing Americans on the REAL problem, that too many brown people consider themselves citizens.  Ahhh, now you’re talking, Holy Joe, and thanks for coming on tonight.

In a media/political landscape utterly devoted into preserving the irrational (and not coincidentally, lucrative) fear of terrorism among Americans, huge things can happen: cities drowned, oceans befouled, taxpayers robbed, and the miscreants run off with the money, and if some nut unsuccessfully tries and fails at a fourth grade science project, it gets covered wall to wall at the dire expense of the reality currently unfolding.  I can’t decide if this is a bug or a feature, but if it’s a bug, it certainly is a recurring one.

Of course, Fox News is taking no chances; in addition to hopping on board the increasingly feeble terror train, it also dipped into the dregs of the barrel to scoop up Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, to darkly intone on air that the Obama Administration “wanted” the oil spill, for reasons only a worthless, addlepated layabout like Brown could hope to conjure.  In our co-opted media, reality is always so pulled and prodded to support the flimsiest and most discredited memes on any given day; the narratives were already chosen so the news will just have to fit.

And when the news can’t be shoehorned in, hope for Terror.

Looking at recent history, the examples of forced consumer decisions improbably dressed up as “choice” are legion, and always multiplying.  The crisis in health care, brought about by a bloated, monopolistic system that openly fleeced its captive customers was “solved” by forcing more people to buy the shoddy, unwanted product on offer.  Giant, arrogant, and world-dominating banks emerged from the disaster they created larger and more unavoidable than ever before, and the universally hated telecoms, unscathed by their wanton disregard for their customers’ privacy, went ahead and defeated Net Neutrality, and continued plotting the “synergy” that enables Americans to pay more for worse service than any telecom customers on Earth.

Now, as the Gulf of Mexico drowns in a gusher of oil, well-meaning but evidently feebleminded lefties are proposing that, somehow, “consumers” show their displeasure with the architects of the cataclysm by boycotting BP; good luck with that.  The list of businesses this global leviathan owns is long, but just like its co-conspirators, those that cater to “consumers” are few and far between.  Not buying a six pack at the local AM/PM Minimarket is not going to “send a message” anyone who matters is going to hear at ol’ BP, which is pretty much the way they like it.  I have to think that the merger of two of the crappiest nominal airlines, United and Continental, wasn’t rolled out until a cover of bigger corporate malpractice and buffonery was there to eclipse it; the famous “consumer” might have smelled a rat.

We have reached a point where the corporations extolling the “free market,” in which none of them could compete for 15 minutes, have finally arrived at that Nirvana-like (for them) monopoly, wherein they no longer need fear any consumer backlash, no matter how worthless, venal, and criminal they are in their practices, and hated by their customers, to boot. By the time citizens no longer have anything left but the boycott to show their wrath, the  ”market” has already made the boycott a risible irrelevance, even if the media monopolies who ought to talk about this did their 1st amendment jobs and did so, which they of course don’t.

Shopping, however wisely, is no longer the answer, as we see each day.

For decades, crackpot and utterly untested economic ideas were not only trotted out, but taught as gospel in business schools from sea to shining sea, and as non-rich people were systematically cut out of this sort of significant policy discussion, this risible nonsense became some sort of Holy Writ, until it inevitably collapsed the world economy, and then the blather about it stayed the same, only more so.  The “Free Market,” you see, only failed because it wasn’t “free” enough, which, roughly translated, means that a few rich people might have actually suffered, too, so every effort must be immediately undertaken to prevent the repeat of such an unpardonable travesty.   People being randomly killed, impoverished, poisoned, and whatnot is simply the price we pay for our freedom, as there are always plenty of overpaid dingbats running around on television available to tell us.

If you came from Mars, you wouldn’t believe such facially  sociopathic arguments, and so shoddily delivered, too, would still work, but sadly, if you’re like me, you aren’t from Mars, so you well know that dammit, they sure do.  You can already go to multiple oil industry astroturf sites and find out how government intervention, if not actually causing them, in fact only inhibits industry’s tireless and ongoing efforts to prevent such horrid, “no one could have predicted” cataclysms as the Gulf oil spill.  Please.  At least one more miner died yesterday at yet another coal mine that had 40 safety violations in the last month, and as the Goldman boys got some sort of oath-induced amnesia on national television, a huge oil spill is about to wipe out, biologically, much of the Gulf Coast, so why not prattle on incessantly about the perfidious Brownies, instead?  What would you do if you were in their relaxed fit pants?   (Or miniskirt, if you’re a girl…  somehow on the news there’s a bit of a body type double standard, but the message stays the same).

With a hearty nod to fellow Hag blogger RMP, what we are seeing is the schadenfreude that comes from the many years of watching righties get their way, and waking up with a richly deserved hangover.  Own Worst Enemy, indeed.  After years and years of regaling everyone with their overconfident allusions to facts “on the ground,” as with their wars so goes with their every other idea, down the crapper, and this one might even be too much for Rotor-Rooter.

As I said earlier, I used to be quite worried about November; that feeling is fading.  Democrats have one big advantage, anyway…  Their opponents.

*H/T Tugs Belmont, Seattle….  Long story, but interesting.