Patriarchy, nannies, and terrorism

I'm reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner right now and it's completely brilliant. Weiner is a reporter and foreign correspondent for NPR. In the Geography of Bliss, Weiner is trying to figure out what makes people happy. So to travels to happy places -- like Bhutan and Iceland (yes folks in Iceland apparently are incredibly happy) -- and unhappy places like Moldova -- and interviews people to find out what is making them happy or unhappy. He's a funny writer and the book is a nice road trip test for a lot of the happiness research that is starting to emerge.

But what caught my eye last night was a paragraph in his chapter on Qatar. In the book, Weiner travels to Qatar to test the theory -- does money buy happiness -- because apparently Qatar -- thanks to deep pools of gooey black liquid beneath their desert sands -- has lots and lots and lots of money.

But here's the 'graph that hit me:

A generation of Qatari children is being raised by nannies who don't speak their language and have no authority to discipline them. Boys are cherished and spoiled. "Once they reach thirteen or fourteen years old, the family doesn't try to discipline them anymore. They won't monitor their behavior in public. It's a living hell for the teachers, who often are foreigners with no real authority. They young men don't listen to anyone. Not even the police" says Abdulaziz.
--The Geography of Bliss, p. 135

Okay so here's what I want to pair that quote with -- Sam Harris, writing about the socio-economic backgrounds of the 9/11 terrorist. The genius of Harris is that he shows that ideas (particularly religious ones that shape behavior) have consequences (in the case of radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity -- often disastrous consequences). So he's able to calls BS on liberal arguments that the 9/11 terrorists are probably just understandable products of poverty while also calling BS on conservative leg humping of religious fundamentalism. His reminder that the 9/11 terrorists were largely middle class and college educated is important:

While the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise.
--Sam Harris, November 2006 in The Huffington Post

With the important caveat that the 9/11 hijackers did not include any Qataris (they were primarily Saudi) -- does the 1st quote above start to explain the 2nd quote? Namely does a culture of male privilege -- in which even young boys have more power than adult women -- in which there are never any checks or balances or consequences or punishment for childhood misbehavior -- lead to adult suicide bombers? Are suicide bombings, from a psychological standpoint, merely childhood temper tantrums from adults with access to lethal technology?

And is it bigger than this -- namely isn't George W. Bush also the product of male privilege, nurse-maid parenting, and a lack of proper discipline in his life? Aren't most dictators across the globe also the direct consequence of the way that male privilege in wealthy households stunts proper moral development? Might the countless corrupt governments and senseless wars across the planet and throughout history be the product of a worldview of male gender superiority that results in boys not ever getting challenged in ways that humble them and lead them to acknowledge and work with "the other" -- whether that "other" is women, people of different races/ethnicities/classes, or our environment?

Look, just so we're clear, I think nannies are great. And in the U.S., nannies often enable women to return to the workplace which further amplifies gender equality. But in petrofamilydictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- where wealth without work (certainly not for the royal family and all of their kin) is combined with pathological (and religiously enforced) patriarchy -- does contracting out parenting and undermining the power of women to discipline and raise respectful boys -- lead to adult man-cubs who just love to blow shit up?

Incredible video from Gaza

You have to see this video. It's incredible. Korean television has footage of a woman, unarmed, with nothing more than her voice and her unarmed body as she tries to stop two Israeli soldiers from firing on Palestinian protesters. Turn up the sound and listen to what she says. Even if the Israeli soldiers were firing rubber bullets -- at point blank range (and even over longer distances) those shots would be fatal. And yet she sticks out her hands to block the muzzles of the guns and keeps talking to the soldiers to tell them to stand down.

It's the man with the groceries standing up to the Chinese tanks motoring towards Tiananmen Square all over again.

From Americablog:

I'm always very divided about issues surrounding Israel. I think many Americans on the right have a knee-jerk support of Israel (either for strategic reasons, or because they're evangelicals who believe Israel will bring about the Second Coming, and who then believe that 2/3 of the world's Jews will be killed in the Rapture because they haven't embraced Christianity - funny, but I don't call that "support"), while many on the left have a knee-jerk support of the Palestinians as the "underdog," without recognizing that Israel and Jews have just as much a right to that claim.

In any case, this video below is transfixing. About a minute and 15 seconds into the video you'll see a young American woman walking up to an Israel soldier and pushing his gun away, while trying to logically talk him out of firing on Palestinian rock throwers. It's absolutely fascinating to watch, regardless of your views on the issue. And I think this woman, and the troops in the video, all showed exceptional restraint. Watch it. (Hat tip, Juan Cole.)

I've seen it three times now and wept every time.

Juan Cole:

The young woman is being identified by my facebook friends as Huwaida Arraf, a Detroiter married to Adam Shapiro, a University of Michigan Poli Sci graduate, and a founder of International Solidarity Movement, a nonviolent activist organization.

A commentator on Americablog points out that this young woman's actions are similar to those of Rachel Corrie -- who lost her life trying to block a bulldozer from leveling a Palestinian home in the Gaza strip.

Domination not education is the name of this game

I want to string together a few sentences that I spotted in yesterday's paper together with some thoughts I've been carrying around in my head for a while.

1. By their own admission, most of the students turned down by Ivy League universities -- could do the work if admitted. At the same time, the endowments of most of these universities (until recently) could easily support two, three, or four times more students than they currently admit -- without sacrificing quality (with comparable facilities, faculty etc.). So then the question becomes -- why aren't each of these universities two, three, or four times larger? What is their mission if not to deliver the best education to the MOST students they possibly can?

2. Anyone who takes the SAT, GRE, GMAT, or LSAT knows these are not tests of knowledge or skill but rather they are tools that test one's ability to take a test. Said differently, the SAT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT test one's ability to hire a test prep coach or enroll in the right test prep class. So why do colleges and universities use these tests as entrance requirements? Or said differently, what does the use of these tests tell us about what business these institutions are in?

3. By any measure -- the financial meltdown on Wall Street is an indictment of our educational system in this country. The (mostly) men on Wall Street who stole the retirements of millions of Americans before raiding the U.S. Treasury -- are the top students from the most elite colleges and universities in the country. And they are complete crooks -- literally stealing trillions of dollars without concern for those hurt by their actions. They are immoral monsters with high IQs. Clearly morality, ethics, and character, economics, and responsible financial management were not on the syllabus. But again, maybe that's not the business that these universities are in (points #1 and #2 seem to point away from the notion that our top universities are about education or the search for truth in any meaningful sense of the word). Apparently the SAT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT -- are not able to screen out people who intend to later steal trillions of dollars from America's retirees.

4. The value of credit default swaps -- non collateralized insurance bets on risky mortgage bonds -- is equal to the entire gross domestic product for the entire world. That's when the bubble popped -- when the value of fantasy financial products not tied to any real asset was greater than all the actual physical products produced by the entire planet. The Wall Street firms literally bought the world and sold the world -- but with no actual world (or asset of any kind) attached as collateral. The giant sucking sound you hear is Wall Street firms sucking all of the financial worth out of the entire world -- including our government treasuries -- to continue their lifestyle of bottle service and parties in the Hamptons.

5. Christopher Caldwell in NY Times (Jan. 2): “To be blunt, credit is successfully re-established when financial elites say, ‘When.’ Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class."

6. "No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between the ability to get in and out of Princeton and a talent for taking financial risk?” from Michael Lewis's brilliant article, The End in Portfolio magazine. Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker chronicling the investment bank excess of the 1980s -- which pale in comparison to the greed and corrupt of our current financial firms.

7. From Malcolm Gladwell's article, Most Likely to Succeed from the Dec. 15, 2008 New Yorker,

Perhaps no profession has taken the implications of the quarterback problem more seriously than the financial-advice field, and the experience of financial advisers is a useful guide to what could happen in teaching as well. There are no formal qualifications for entering the field except a college degree. Financial-services firms don’t look for only the best students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial adviser different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.

“A question I ask is, ‘Give me a typical day,’ ” Ed Deutschlander, the co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis, says. “If that person says, ‘I get up at five-thirty, hit the gym, go to the library, go to class, go to my job, do homework until eleven,’ that person has a chance.” Deutschlander, in other words, begins by looking for the same general traits that every corporate recruiter looks for.

If it doesn't hit you right away, walk through that quote again slowly. There is no mention of financial acumen, interpersonal skills, merit, or skill of any kind. What Deutschlander is testing for is domination -- the ability to dominate one's own body -- which presumably translates into the ability to dominate others in the financial field. Look how well that turned out.

8. Look I think that it's great that homegirl from Princeton created Teach for America. It seems to be injecting some new talent and corporate dollars into the educational system. But if the corporations that are contributing to Teach for America were paying their fair share of taxes (and not stealing the retirement savings of millions of Americans) the American education system wouldn't be in shambles in the first place. Said differently, if homegirl from Teach for America had gone into politics and worked on raising taxes on these classmates, er, corporations, it could have produced even great gains for our educational system. If the ruling class hadn't totally destroyed the public sector in the last thirty years, there would be little additional need for a gal on a white horse to have to ride in and save it.

Isn't the lesson of the financial collapse that our education system is built to reproduce the ruling class? And the way it reproduces the ruling class is by teaching, indeed, dedicating its mission to instilling the value of domination. That's what the entry requirements are all about, and the insane workloads, and the all nighters, and even the emphasis on sports. It's not about the content -- it's about the form. And this educational system fits perfectly with the interests of the ruling class because our entire economic system is built on domination. Isn't that what Wall Street and indeed most of New York City is -- quite literally a laboratory of domination? That's what the tall phallic buildings are all about and the rudeness and the busyness of it all. The rush of New York is the rush of domination. Wasn't that what the Middle Passage, Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Bush Doctrine are all about? Isn't that, at the end of the day, who we are as a nation, in spite of the marketing camouflage we tell ourselves about liberty and equality and character (the same marketing front used by universities I might add)?

If you want to follow the path of domination -- the steps are all laid out -- by schools, by recruiters, by incentives and financial rewards, by potential life partners who have bought into the system, by the doctors and pharmacists who will patch you up and pump you up to put you back in the game. But if one wants to resist the culture of domination, it's a heavier plowing. To begin with, if everything one has seen is the product of a culture of domination, one's instincts will all be conditioned to reproduce that. Even if one is trying to intentionally go in a different direction, most of the neurons in our brains are wired to reproduce what we've seen, so even our subconscious decisions, the ones we trust, our gut -- will lead us to reproduce the dominate system. That's why so many non-profits are a mess -- women's organizations that are patriarchal, labor groups with lousy working conditions -- if folks haven't done their own internal work, it's really easy to just reproduce the same old madness in a new context.

Finally, isn't the challenge of modernism, the challenge of the total collapse of both communism and capitalism within the space of 18 years -- a challenge to develop a system, a structure, an entire world economy and culture based on love rather than domination?

In the meantime, Wall Street and all the "well-educated", pinstripped, white-male, domination-obsessed mutherfuckers who worked so hard to produce this second great depression -- can go fuck themselves.

Update #1: Four months after I did this post, Frank Rich at the NY Times picks up the ball and runs with it in a column called Awake and Sing! The money quote:

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. The Harvard Crimson reported that in the class of 2007, 58 percent of the men and 43 percent of the women entering the work force took jobs in the finance and consulting industries. The figures were similar everywhere, from Duke to the University of Pennsylvania. Dan Rather, on his HDNet television program in December, reported that at Penn this was even true of “over half the students who graduated with engineering degrees — not a field commonly associated with Wall Street.”

Which is EXACTLY my fucking point. To have 58% of Harvard male undergrads going into finance or consulting is FLAT OUT EMBARRASSING. It shows that the goal of these institutions all along was to reproduce the ruling class, NOT to seek out the good, the true, or the beautiful in any meaningful sense of those words. It's the worst kind of sophistry really -- young men and women excelling in math for example so that they can develop sophisticated financial instruments to suck the wealth out of 401(k)s and the U.S. Treasury so that they can buy a nice house in the Hamptons and drink $500 bottles of Ciroc Vodka. It's domination for domination's sake, elite universities training our best and brightest for nothing more than an elaborate pissing contest or game of quien es mas macho -- while bankrupting the country.

The enduring value of monasticism

Perhaps the enduring value of monasticism is that it takes the most religious people in society -- the zealots and the fundamentalists -- removes them from the general population, silences them, and causes them not to reproduce.

From a sociological standpoint, what if the actual contents of their practice don't contain any wisdom at all -- but rather the value of the tradition comes from its unintended Darwinian outcome of gradually removing religious extremists from the gene pool?

Notice that the the two centers of religious extremism in the world right now -- the U.S. and the Middle East -- don't have a monastic tradition.

When did the Catholic Pedophile Priest Problem begin?

(updated two times, see below)

I've been meaning to do this post for a while so here goes...

By now, most folks who own a TV or subscribe to a newspaper know about the Catholic Pedophile Priest Scandal. Even the Catholic Church's own numbers from the scandal are shocking:

• 4,392 US clerics accused of abuse from 1950-2002:
• About 4% of the 109,694 priests serving in the U.S. during those 52 years were charged with abuse.
• Over $1 billion in settlements to victims of these priests.

The likelihood is that these numbers are a dramatic UNDERCOUNT of the actual problem. John Walsh reports that more reliable estimates peg the number of pedophile Catholic priests in the U.S. at closer to 10,000.

Okay but here's my question: When did the problem of pedophile priests begin in the Catholic Church?

We know from accounts of survivors and confessions by priests of cases that go back as far back as the memories of anyone living today (basically to the start of the 20th century). The statute of limitations is such that once an accused priest has died, the pending cases against him are dropped (which limits our ability to know about cases going back further in time). But surely the problem didn't magically start 80 years ago. Rather it seems more likely that this has been going on for a long long long time.

Those who know they can get away with a crime are more likely to commit one aren't they (power corrupts and all that)? So it seems likely that when the Catholic Church ruled all of Europe, taxed people through indulgences, and routinely tortured and burned people at the stake (particularly women) -- that sexual abuse was likely widespread too. When the church is the law and above the law at the same time, wouldn't abuse have been rampant -- even worse than today? And if the person abused is more likely to become an abuser, isn't it likely that the cycle of abuse in the church has been going on for over a thousand years? Literally.

So what's changed is NOT that the church suddenly developed a pedophile priest problem overnight (or even in the last 80 years). Rather, what HAS changed is that the rights of victims and the rights of children have become more advanced in the last 50 years -- allowing a problem that has always been there in the church to finally come to light.

The craziest thing to me in all the reporting on the pedophile priest problem is NOT ONCE have I ever heard a reporter ask the question as to when the problem began. It would seem in fact that any common sense guess as to the origins of the problem would trace it back to a time when the church first gained the power to commit abuse and get away with it -- which would trace it back at least a thousand years and even as far back as 1700 years ago.

Update #1:  Melinda Henneberger, on the March 19, 2010 Real Time with Bill Maher (Episode 177) on HBO said two things that support the assertions in this post.  Henneberger, a practicing Catholic, is the editor-in-chief of PoliticsDaily.com and was the Rome bureau chief for The New York Times.  She said: 1.) that 'Catholic priests don't view sex with boys as actual sex' -- just as some American politicians don't view oral sex as actual sex.  2.) 'that it has always been thus'; namely that the Catholic Church has had a problem of priests molesting boys for its entire history.  I found both of those details shocking, but Henneberger presented the information in a nonchalant -- everybody already knows this -- sort of way. Wow.

Update #2:  So now we have confirmation that Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) was aware that a pedophile priest would be returned to pastoral work and did nothing to stop it.  "Pope Was Told Pedophile Priest Would Get Post: Informed as Cardinal Document Trail Shows Benedict Got Copy of Church Memo." March 25, 2010.  "The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish."   If you drive the get away car in a bank robbery, you go to jail because you are an accessory to the crime.  So too, Pope Benedict, by not preventing a known pedophile priest from being transferred to another parish where he would strike again, should go to jail. 

Is Prozac causing all of these stock market bubbles?

Way back in March of 2000, Slate.com ran a story titled, "Is Prozac Driving Wall Street?" It included the following nugget which now seems prescient:

Randolph Nesse, author (with George Williams) of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, estimates that about 20 million Americans are on antidepressants. And at least some people who take these drugs "become far less cautious than they were before, worrying too little about real dangers. This is exactly the mind-set of many current investors." If indeed "investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs," a Wall Street bubble "could grow larger than usual" before popping "with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences."

Prozac and other anti-depressant use became widespread starting in the early 1990s. In fact, according to the Washington Post, the use of such drugs by all adults has nearly tripled in the last decade (nearly 1 in 10 adults in one one of them). And the massive rise in antidepressant use also corresponds with the ending of one recession (1992) and three subsequent enormous stock market bubbles and busts (internet, telecom, and housing).

But while the correlation is dramatic, causation is difficult if not impossible to prove. I think a more likely explanation for all the stock market bubbles is that corporate power has grown so dramatically over the last 30 years that passing effective regulation became impossible. With the corporate titans, left to self-police, it became inevitable that we'd see a massive game of financial musical chairs as they pumped all of the wealth out of one sector of the economy after another (they basically sucked all of the wealth out of retirement funds, real estate, and the public treasury over the last 10 years).

But here's my point -- I believe it is precisely the rise in corporate power -- that is causing the rise in anti-depressant use (not the other way around). It is precisely the way that corporate power tears down communities and families and dehumanizes our world that plunges so many people into anomie and despair. So for example, when Wal-Mart comes into a town and destroys all of the small retail businesses and the middle class jobs and community that went with them -- and forces people to work at low wages so we can all buy cheap Chinese-made imported goods -- that has GOT to cause an increase in depression in a town. Now multiply that by thousands of sectors of the economy that have been overwhelmed by corporate power over the last decade or two and you have the depression epidemic we have now.

Look, I'm not saying that depression isn't a real medical condition. I believe it is and I want people who experience depression to find healing. If that's in the form of a pill, great. But, do 1 in 10 Americans suffer from this medical condition and has the rate of this rare medical condition suddenly trippled over the past ten years? I think not. My point is that -- IF indeed the leading cause depression is not some unexplainable medical phenomenon but rather the very real suffering caused by the very awful corporations who have come to dominate our lives -- THEN we've got a huge problem on our hands. Because under ordinary (pre-Prozac) circumstances the rise in human suffering might cause people to ask the question -- "Hey how come everyone is so miserable?" And we might reach for collective solutions that work to change the conditions in which we all live. Instead, the problem is now INDIVIDUALIZED AND MEDICALIZED -- "individuals have medical problems it's not society's fault" -- and through massive prescription drug use, we may be silencing the very canaries in the coal mines we need to save our society from further ruin.

Just some food for thought ya'll.

Will the last capitalist to leave please turn out the lights?

In the space of just 8 years, George Bush managed to destroy the entire capitalist system. Think about it -- AIG bankrupt, Lehman Brothers bankrupt, General Motors bankrupt, the entire banking system -- frozen or bankrupt, the housing industry -- in complete freefall. We often think of capitalism as this permanent, timeless, immovable force. And yet after just 8 years of George Bush, or rather, after 8 years of this experiment in almost complete Chicago School neoliberal economic policy with no regulation, minimal taxes, and no oversight -- the entire capitalist system is on the verge of collapse (and indeed would have collapsed if the federal government hadn't stepped in to take over). That's kind of incredible don't you think? Capitalism is in fact a very fragile system -- all it takes to kill it is to leave the wrong guy in charge for 8 years. It makes you wonder if perhaps communism might have survived if only Gorbachev hadn't decided to just say fuck it and sell out to the west.

Look, as Milton Friedman himself would probably say if he were still alive, capitalism was a great idea in theory, it just didn't work that well in practice.

All these years, lefties have been starting nonprofits and running NGOs and publishing journals full of revolutionary ideas that went nowhere -- when all they really needed to do to bring down the capitalist system was to let Republicans run all 3 branches of government for a few years.

So a couple lessons to draw from all of this. First, those who crowed about how the downfall of communism proved the virtues of capitalism can shove it up their ass. Capitalism would fellatiate itself to death if it wasn't for the occasional checks and balances provided by lefties (and indeed capitalism itself apparently has to be completely taken over by a massive federal intervention every 50 to 75 years or else it would not exist).

Second, if we can suddenly find a trillion here or a trillion there to bail out banks, investment banks, insurance companies, the auto industry, and the housing industry -- then we can sure as heck provide a trillion here and a trillion there for universal single payer health insurance, universal college education, social security, clean air, clean water, and decent roads, bridges, hospitals and schools.

Finally, before the Republicans run off to hunker down in the Hoover Institution to come up with a blueprint for how to once again unite Wall Street and broke ass conservative rural voters in another unholy alliance to take over the country and rob the treasury again -- before they lawyer up and grant each other pardons and send their surrogates out to the cable TV networks to preach the virtues of bipartisan cooperation -- before all that -- it'd be really nice if Republicans just stopped for a minute and gave us all an apology. An apology for being asleep at the wheel during 9/11. An apology for sending over 4,000 American men and women to their deaths in Iraq. An apology for completely blowing the federal surplus on tax breaks for people who own private jets. An apology for bankrupting the auto industry and killing the financial services industry, and bankrupting the treasury. Because before we can even talk about working together for the good of the country -- it'd be nice, really nice for Republican to take responsibility for COMPLETELY FUCKING UP EVERYTHING THEY'VE TOUCHED FOR THE PAST 8 YEARS.

A brother can dream right?

"This is your brain on morality"

Gosh this is good:

Sam Harris discussing "Bounded Utility."

Harris is such a great speaker, it seems like a simple idea. But it's really a revolution -- in just 15 minutes Harris articulates a higher order morality, beyond post-modernism, that brings the best brain research to bear on the most important questions in the world.

Some tuneage for Friday

If Joe Cocker and Michael Hutchence had a love child it would be:

Kings of Leon

Definitely worth a listen.

The Palin Phenomenon: "Like Care Bears meets Jenna Jameson"

For a woman with a net -10 favorability rating, people sure are talking a lot about Sarah Palin.

It seem to me that the Palin Phenomenon boils down to one simple fact: Sarah Palin is the first woman candidate for a national office in the United States who is sexy.

That has never happened before. We've had sexy candidates who are men -- John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama. But there has never been a sexy woman candidate for national office in the history of the United States.

Think about it:

On the Republican side:

Elizabeth Dole? Not sexy.

Condi Rice? Not sexy (nonwithstanding the fact that George Bush calls her his "office wife" -- the racial undertones of which are so creepy I don't even want to go there).

Barbara Bush. For the love of God, not sexy.

On the Democratic side:

Barbara Boxer? Diane Feinstein? I love 'em both (well Boxer more than Feinstein), vote for them every time. But, not sexy.

Madeline Albright? She stopped the genocide in Bosnia and probably deserves a Noble Prize but, not sexy.

Hillary Clinton? Probably the most skilled politician in the country, but I've never heard "Hillary Clinton" and "sexy" in the same sentence.

I'm not saying a woman candidate should or should not be sexy. I'm just saying we've never had a sexy woman candidate for national office before.

In some respects it could be seen as a sign of progress. It could be a sign that women can be viewed as both traditionally professional and sexy at the same time -- that those two traits are no longer seen as mutually exclusive. Except, by most accounts, Palin has not excelled professionally. She appears to have been a lousy mayor and her record as Governor is flimsy at best (corrupt and despotic at worst). No in fact, the Palin Phenomenon is not the realization of the feminist ideal of being able to have it all (respect as a parent, professional, and partner). Because all Palin is selling is Jenny McCarthy slutty girl next door sex appeal, the Palin pick reinforces the very worst of the existing sexist culture by turning women entirely into sexual objects -- your 401(k) and national security be damned.

As one Republican pundit after another writes these long love poems to Palin about how they want to fuck her, the soft misogyny of low expectations becomes sickening.

Rich Lowry at the National Review Online clearly wants to fuck her.

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

[In reply, Kos commented: It's like Care Bears meets Jenna Jameson!]

David Brooks, judging from his column today, apparently was masturbating WHILE watching the VP debate. Money quote:

There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths.

And Donny Deutsch flat out said, "I trust her. I want her watching my kids. I want her laying next to me in bed." (The link has the video.)

The Palin Phenomenon has turned the men of the Republican Party into the drooling drunk banker at the strip club.

There's a reason why the McCain campaign appears to have bought the domain name VoteForTheMilf.com right after her nomination was announced. Now maybe it was just for defensive purposes (to keep it from being used by anyone else) but they clearly had a sense of the phenomenon they were about to set into motion.

Now all of this would merely be interesting from a sociological standpoint if the stakes weren't so incredibly high. The fact that the fate of the Supreme Court, national security, and the entire economy rests, partly, in the hands of voters who think they're in love with a sexy-librarian-stripper with a heart-of-gold, is a little bit frightening.

I think the day will come when we do have a woman candidate who is both smart and sexy. Michelle Obama fits that category and I'd be more than happy to vote for her in 2016. Heck, I voted for Hillary Clinton this cycle. But for now, we don't actually have a smart and sexy woman on the ballot. Just sexy. And for some voters, that's gonna be enough (and, like David Brooks, they'll come up with elaborate intellectual rationalizations for their vote after the fact). For others, not so much.

Update #1: "Bible Spice" has got to be the best nickname yet for Palin. (hat tip to JC)

Update #2: The nickname "Bible Spice" becomes a hit on Twitter. At least one writer credits Tbogg from Firedoglake for coining the term. Anyone want to make a wager as to whether Saturday Night Live uses this nickname tomorrow?

Update #3: Ooooo snap! A reader at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish completely smacks down Rich Lowry's absurd Palin slobbering:

In reaction to Rich Lowry, I'm sure I'm not the only woman who, upon reading his words, sat up a little straighter and said, "Is he kidding? Is he goddamn kidding me?" Is this the kind of reaction the women in this country should want men to have to the possible first female Vice Presidential candidate in history? Holy hell.

I thought Palin's performance at the debate was downright embarrassing and on top of that I have to read this clown's blog, stating more or less that Palin gave him an erection? Little starbursts my ass. Here's what I thought when Palin "dropped" that first wink at us: "Did she just wink at us like she was America's cocktail waitress?" Rich Lowry is on the verge of slapping Sarah Palin on the ass and asking her for another of those fantastic whiskey sours.

Hat tip to Scout Finch at Dailykos for the catch. Also hat tip to Naked Capitalism (a fantastic progressive economics blog) for linking to this post.

Update #4: Double snap! Keith Olberman calls out Rich Lowry for his sexualized ode to Palin (hat tip to Attaturk at Firedoglake):



Update #5: Oh so THAT'S why the cable news networks talk about Palin so much -- it brings in the eyeballs. I just checked my Google Analytics and discovered that this post has been the most read post in the history of my blog -- setting a single day record that is FOUR TIMES HIGHER than my previous single day record. That's craziness (to be specific: it's crazy that more people would read a post on Palin than say, my illuminating writings on framing for example). The cable networks, newspapers, and magazines know that they need to sell advertising and that sex sells so that's what they are selling -- regardless of the polls, regardless of the national economic meltdown or the state of the endless quagmire in Iraq. Fascinating.