Outis

SF Gate: Editor Found Dead in Mexican Hotel Room. Par for course.

I don’t have the energy to synthesize – and why take my word for it – but reading at least the last six posts (they’re short, think “breath mints”) on the following blogs should give you an impression of one compelling consensus view on the election. Ranked in order.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/

For an interesting take on who the U.S. Congress should investigate first, along with similarly clever observations on strategy in practice, try http://plumer.blogspot.com/.

Finally, and via Digby above, The American Prospect Online documents the many dirty tricks employed by the Republicans to tamper with the U.S. election. (Evidence of equivalent Democratic activity welcome but I’m not holding my breath.)

p.s.

Some keywords: realignment, the South, the North, clarity, emergence, lying, lies, data, polls, truth, retreat, epoch, shift, pendulum, consensus, conservative movement. Does this do it?

I fully admit this journal is now even less useful to the welcome reader than yesterday’s weather report. That said, and with the events of the last two days on my mind, I would like to note that much of what has been posted in these “pages” has to do with the following two problems:

1) What do you do when the person who is addressing you is lying but you can’t believe they are lying

2) What are political consequences of interpellation – that is, of how we address someone and, especially, someone who is a foreigner.

In the first case, I fully admit to having resisted for a long time the idea that many Americans in positions of power lie. How can we be civic and yet permit the notion that our interlocutors are lying?

The second scenario is less difficult to parse. To that, I can only say thanks to my college professor Georges Dreyfus who taught a seminar on orientalism which had less to do with any particular “failure to communicate” but, rather, failures to communicate, in general, and the political implications of same.

I wish the syllabus for that class was available online – it’s not. Better yet, I wish it was a movie – or a running gag on the Daily Show.

Slashdot: DARPA Starts Ultimate Language Translation Project.

It’s, like, the Internet. But better.

A small pause before the long hard slough:

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious — a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games — can all be overcome. They just were.