Mostly outrage is being expressed here about John Edwards' admission of having an affair. A sampling from the previous thread:

georgia10:

Fuck John Edwards.  I have zero respect for his self-serving ass.

I don’t really care what he does in his private life.  If he wants to screw around, fine.  I don’t agree with it, obviously, but it’s ultimately between him and Elizabeth.

But he chose to be a presidential candidate, cheating on a wife with cancer, and then running for the Democratic nomination with that fact tucked away waiting to break out as an October surprise.  Not only is that an incredibly selfish act, but he could have single-handedly given us another 8 years of Republican rule if he won the primaries.

His hubris makes my blood boil.  To think that he ran with this thinking he wouldn't endanger not just the presidency but this country too is just repulsive.

hekebolos:

I'm not going to listen to anyone who says "oh, this is just between him and Elizabeth" because that's not how we treat Newt Gingrich.

And second: what if he had become the nominee and this came out?  He would have basically handed the presidency to the Republican nominee.

Self-serving egomaniac with a distinct lack of moral fiber.

pat 208:

He had an affair, THEN asked us to nominate him.

He's not getting any more invitations to my Christmas parties, that's for sure.

I am SO glad he's not our nominee. But he put us all at risk by asking running.

And some objections to the expressed outrage:

RNinNC

WELL over 50% of married people have affairs. Especially men. McCain as well, but there's no massive MSM shock over that one. We can judge and throw rocks all we want, but dismissing someone for an affair is way overblown.

I'm stunned to see this place explode like this.

MrHinkyDink:

Jesus, you'd think JE was the first politician to have an affair, when they've been doing it for thousands of years.

Is it wrong? Yes. Does it erase all the good things about JE? No.

He's not evil. He just made a huge mistake. It's one he should have to pay consequences for, but it's certainly not an unforgivable sin.

And, of course, the top recommended diary right now by David Mizner:

This is none of our business.

This is an American sickness, this need to know--the belief that we're entitled to know--about the sexual lives of politicians.

But but but, you don't have a problem with the sex, you say, you have a problem with his lying about it. Yeah, that's what Ken Starr said too.

And a counter-argument to the recommended diary, this comeback by Meteor Blades:

You’re an asshole, John Edwards. Adultery is a private offense, of course, a matter to be resolved between you and your wife. How she chooses to deal with this ought not to be something that holier-than-thou pundits argue she should behave the way so many did in the case of Hillary Clinton in regards to Bill’s philandering. If she forgives you, as millions have done for their straying spouses, then count yourself lucky.

But I don’t forgive you. And I suspect many of your long-time supporters will not either. How can we? Your betrayal of us and the Democratic Party was not a private matter.

The latest from the DNC, "Maverick No More."

The only thing predictable about politics is that nothing is predictable. When I first decided to run for elective office I had no idea where it would take me. No politician does. But one place I never could have imagined being was in the back of my clothes closet, late at night, talking on the telephone to the president of the United States.

-- Robert Wexler, Fire-Breathing Liberal: How I Learned to Survive (and Thrive) in the Contact Sport of Congress

This thread is declared officially wide open.

Right on the heels of Monday's revelations from TPM about maxed-out, five-digit donations to John McCain from low-level energy company employees, comes news this morning of another nest of suspiciously generous working class donors, this one in Southern California, according to the Washington Post:

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton....

Some of the most prolific givers in Sargeant's network live in modest homes in Southern California's Inland Empire. Most had never given a political contribution before being contacted by Sargeant or his associates. Most said they have never voiced much interest in politics. And in several instances, they had never registered to vote. And yet, records show, some families have ponied up as much as $18,400 for various candidates between December and March.....

Donors reached by phone or interviewed in person declined to explain who asked them to make the contributions.

Ibrahim Marabeh, who is listed in public records as a Rite Aid manager, at first denied that he wrote any political checks. He then said he was asked by "a local person. But I would like not to talk about it anymore." Neither he nor his wife is registered to vote, but the two donated $4,600 to Clinton and $4,600 to Giuliani in December.

Funny how McCain's donors seem as confused about their campaign contributions as their candidate is on ... well, just about everything else. This is going to be fun to watch unfold.

(Discussion also underway in smash artist's recommended diary.)

I'm reading Robert Wexler's Fire-Breathing Liberal: How I Learned to Survive (and Thrive) in the Contact Sport of Congress, and I just ran across this great story from his first campaign for county commissioner, when he and his father, dressed to the nines, their car plastered with campaign signs, are racing along a back road in Florida, and ...

... out of nowhere a big dog darted out into the road. My father swerved, he slammed on the brakes, but there was really nothing he could do: The car slammed into the dog.

Within seconds, what felt like a thousand kids and their parents had gathered around this dead dog, all of them standing directly in front of the station wagon, which was covered with Wexler signs. It was just awful. If there is anything worse for a political campaign than a photograph of a crying little boy hunched over the body of his dead dog, and the car that killed the dog emblazoned with the candidate's name, I have yet to find it.

We were late and getting later, but beyond trying to console the children there was nothing we could do of any value but wait there. The only thing that came out of this incident was that a lot of people who had never heard my name before would would never forget it.

Use this as your customary open thread.

Too funny:

McCain also called on Obama to join him in calling for Congress to return from its August recess to pass a comprehensive energy policy.

This from the guy who's been absent from the Senate a majority of this session, and who's missed nearly every major vote.

Yeah, we're sure we'll see you attending a return from recess, sport.

(Hat tip to nowheredesign)

What You Missed on Sunday Kos ....

• What previous presidential election does the current contest most resemble? Four contributing editors provided essays in a Sunday Kos symposium making arguments for their favorite historical analogy. For DHinMi, it's 1932; for smintheus, it's 1968, for Devilstower, it's 1976; and for DemFromCT, it's 1980.
• kos examined the media coverage of Netroots Nation versus the women's blogger conference going on at the same time in Women, Blogher, and Netroots Nation.
• SusanG reviewed novelist Russell Banks' first foray into non-fiction, Dreaming Up America.
• And not Sunday Kos, I know, but on Saturday, two terrific essays on energy delivered a one-two punch. Devilstower brilliantly broke down the nuts and bolts of the real resource picture in Oil: Behind the Big Numbers, and Hunter outlined the reasons behind his sense of deja vu in From Enron to Exxon.

Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld over at TPM are sniffing out some interesting stuff today on John McCain's ties to a "leading global independent energy company"--and the interesting timing of campaign contributions from its top executives. First, as Markos linked in the open thread, there was this tidbit:

Ten senior Hess Corporation executives and/or members of the Hess family each gave $28,500 to the joint RNC-McCain fundraising committee, just days after McCain reversed himself to favor offshore drilling, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

Nine of these contributions, seven from Hess executives and two from members of the Hess family, came on the same day, June 24th, the records show. The total collected in the wake of McCain's reversal for the fund, called McCain Victory 2008, from Hess execs and family is $285,000.

But things have gone from curious to curiouser and curiouser in the past few hours, as Sargent turned up this doozie:

The FEC filings show that Alice Rocchio, who's identified as a Hess office manager, and her husband, Pasquale Rocchio, who's described as an Amtrak "track foreman," each separately donated $28,500 to the RNC-McCain fund, which is called McCain Victory 2008. They gave the money on June 24th, the same day that the ten Hess execs and family members each shelled out the same amount.

So the Rocchios, who live in Flushing, Queens, donated a total of $57,000 to McCain's efforts.

Sargent actually got on the phone and talked to the office manager about the contributions, and she adamantly claims the contributed funds are entirely their own. Then he followed up an hour or so later, discovering the Rocchios are well-off enough to give over $50,000 to a political campaign, yet they don't own their home.

Dreaming Up America
By Russell Banks
Seven Stories Press
New York: June 2008
144 pages, $21.95

There are unavoidable, direct links between economics and culture, especially when we're talking about those aspects of culture that are expensive to produce—films, public music, theater—or to own, like paintings and sculpture.

**

It's a kind of madness to think that you can always improve your life, financially, economically, generation after generation, with each generation succeeding further, and not recognize that this is simply an impossibility, one that ultimately, inevitably, like any Ponzi scheme, will lead to failure. And the economic demands and expectations that back this distorted dream are always going to be in conflict with the ideals of democracy. They demand and expect one person to trample on another. This conflicts with the democratic ideals in our sacred documents and in our hearts.

For a slim book, Dreaming Up America packs a hell of a wallop.

The work began in another medium, as narration for a documentary by French filmmaker Jean-Michel Meurice in which acclaimed novelist Russell Banks was asked, in his words, to "play talking heads in a film he was making for the French television channel, Arte. The film ... was to be about American history as told by American cinema--from The Birth of a Nation to Blackhawk Down." Once he was given the hours of recorded interviews to review, he realized he had the makings of a book in hand, and here we have it.

Interestingly, it's impossible to detect without Banks'  introductory explanation that the book sprung from an examination of popular culture. Small references to very American movies are made here and there, but no more than would be usual in any work looking at America's society and politics. In fact, Dreaming Up America seems far more about American character, and the historical events that led to the nation's individualistic, isolationist, can-do, religious persona, than it is about culture--or film--at all.

Banks opens the work by looking at the beginning of America, at the diverse countries that were racing to claim the land and, more importantly, the three dominant ideas that sprung from the original divergent national cultures that were competing for dominance on the newly discovered (by Europeans, at least) continent. He suggests that there is no single dominant note for "the American Dream," but rather a threefold pitch: the salvational aspect of the Puritan settlers who wanted to found a City on the Hill, the get-rich-easy streak represented by Cortez's and Pizarro's search for the City of Gold, and Ponce De Leon's quest to find the Fountain of Youth.

We can think of there being three braided strands, or perhaps three mutually reinforcing dreams: one is of a place where a sinner can become virtuous, free from the decadence of the secular cosmopolitanism of old Europe; another is of a place where a poor man can become wealthy; and a third is of a place where a person can be born again.

The three together are much more powerful than any one of them alone. And they are there at the inception, at the very beginning of colonial America....

From this premise, Banks spreads out to look at how these three strains have shaped our history, how they have, as he says, "braided" themselves together, but also how they've competed, and when, and where. And he looks at how their sometimes competitive demands cancel each other out, creating an at-times schizoid American face--and foreign policy--to the rest of the world. He observes, for example:

American objections to and mistrust of international organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations are connected to the fact that in our minds we already have all the partnership we need through our special relationship with God.

Yet as a nation, we have (or claim to have) an inherent impulse to "spread democracy"--an undertaking Banks clearly perceives as a ruse for citizen rubes, with capitalism driving that particular goodwill engine. And while the average American citizen may currently buy into the sacrificial "spreading for democracy" theme, Europeans, he claims, have a much more realistic sense of what America is all about and have learned to be skeptical and wary of our ways.

The turmoil and brutality that erupted in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the assassinations of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and the urban riots—that whole sequence of events altered the European perception of America in a significant way. Where before we had looked to them like the golden child, we now began to take on a somewhat different appearance. The United States now looked like a bully, out of control, violent, angry, short-sighted. No longer were we the brilliant innocent.

In Banks' view, one of the main reasons Americans themselves seem so unaware of their country's contradictions is a basic blissful ignorance about our own violent history. The American Revolution, he says, has been sanitized; in the first years after the war for independence, that conflict was indeed realistically perceived as a brutal, bloody wrenching-away and a violent beginning. However, the French Revolution's beheadings in the following decade dominated the international imagination afterwards, and in the century after that, the horrors of our own Civil War blotted out from our national consciousness this country's brutal birth. Today, Banks asserts, Americans are more inclined to think of the Founding Fathers less as warriors than as savvy political activists, huddling in taverns debating the rights of man, or meeting in Philadelphia to craft the Constitution. We overlook our violent founding at our peril, for it haunts us still, echoing down the centuries--subliminally, which makes it that much more uncontrollable.

This leads to a stark and unhealthy blend of Christianity, Capitalism and Civilization (appropriately capitalized when used together, as Banks does often) that comes out sometimes in a sort of cannibalism; when we don't have any native tribes to wipe out or Middle East countries to invade we will turn like wolves on our own, often the weakest of our own, and the results can be appalling. Turning our youngest into consumers (there's the capital "C" Capitalism at work), he maintains, is a disgusting form of colonization.

] It's a very dangerous situation. We've colonized our own children. Having run out of people on the planet to colonize, run out of people who can't distinguish between beads and trinkets and something of value, having found ourselves no longer able to swap some beads and axes for Manhattan Island, we've ended up colonizing our own children. We're now engaged in a process of auto-colonization. The old sow is eating its own farrow.

And worse, there's no end in sight because of our willful fetishization of our country. Banks points to one of the most disturbing collective psychological disturbances displayed by the official face of America to the world --the dark side of his triumvirate of God, cash and eternal youth -- the confusion of self and nation, of religious devotion to country confounded with patriotism, a brew that makes up one of the weirdest traits of American character:

I regard nationalism as a kind of secular religion, a substitute religion, where the state itself and one's identity as a citizen of the state takes on a religious intensity and passion. I suppose there is a lack that's highlighted by that identification. It has behind it the notion that one's identity as an American is some kind of ultimate definition of oneself and, therefore, without it one has no identify of one's own. One's citizenship isn't merely one's group identity, it's one essential identity.

Nationalism can do that to you. It can strip you of your individuality. And in periods of strong, nationalistic fervor in the United States, it has taken on a stubbornly religious quality.

Despite America's dark side, which is explored at length in this work, Banks also emphasizes throughout the nation's energy, innocence, determination and optimism. Indeed, in the end, he himself expresses a cautious optimism that we can regain our senses and become a force for good in a way that we only dream of now:

...I begin by recognizing that the way this country was formed, and the way it is still coming into being, is a powerful, combustible combination of energies. We would do well to recognize that we haven't yet finished making ourselves, and that we can still take mindful control of that process. Our American history is taking us somewhere. We just don't know where yet.

Dreaming Up America is a powerful, powerful work, but I recommend it with a word of caution to fans of Banks' fiction: this book is nothing like his novels, which I've always considered meticulously crafted and almost perfectly (if depressingly) shaped. This reads very much as an oral musing, completely unlike his other work, and at first this can be disconcerting if a reader comes to this (as I did) expecting to read this as a master wordsmith's first foray into a new non-fiction form. I suspect there's very little editing beyond taking out verbal fits and starts and ummms, and the book's genesis as narration to a documentary is quite apparent throughout. Once this expectation for polished prose is set aside, readers can get on with the absorption of the ideas and it's well worth the read. However, I will admit, on closing, that I would welcome a set of well-considered non-fiction essays from such an author and hope to see such a volume in the future.

Coming Up on Sunday Kos ...

• DHinMI will kick off a Daily Kos Sunday symposium by revisiting his argument that this election could be a transforming election, similar to the 1932 election.  In 1932 economic devastation and intense disgust with the Republican party of president Herbert Hoover put Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in to the White House, gave him massive majorities in the New Deal Congress, and helped solidify an electoral coalition that lasted roughly 50 years.  The similarities between this year and 1932 are not only that Democrats are poised for a major victory in November, but that the action propeling the possible victory are not transient political currents or "waves" but deep, underlying changes in the nation's political, ideological, social and demographic geology.  If Democrats use their expected big majorities the way parties have in the past when presented with moments of mandate and massive majorities, they could move the country in a markedly more progressive direction and solidify their gains for decades to come.
• In the 1968 presidential election Hubert Humphrey, as a quasi-incumbent, found that his campaign was held hostage to an inherently unstable and unpopular foreign policy that he had little control over. The lame-duck LBJ was trying manage an unpopular war with an eye mainly toward his own legacy, and with relatively little regard for how unexpected changes in policy tended to leave Humphrey in the lurch. Ultimately he Vietnamese government seized the initiative, pushing both LBJ and HHH into a ditch. In Paris Peace Talks, 2008, smintheus will discuss the parallels to 2008 as John McCain tries to ride to victory on a rapidly changing Middle East policy over which he has barely any influence.
• A choice between a milquetoast successor to a disgraced imperial president and a man running on hope and a smile, an economy reeling from the shock of rising oil prices, stark choices on a growing budget deficit, a military in transition after years of adventurism abroad, and a new Democratic majority in Congress still dealing with the abuses of the previous administration. Devilstower says we've seen 2008 before -- in 1976.
• DemFromCT will look at the election through the prism of 1980. In that year, the incumbent and the challenger ran a close race until the challenger satisfied the country about his risky candidacy. BTW, 1980 was also the beginning of the eight year Iran-Iraq War, the year John Lennon was shot, the year Mount Saint Helens erupted, the year of the 1980 Lake Placid Miracle On Ice, and the year Japan became the worlds largest auto maker. The average cost of a new house was $68,700.00  and the cost of a gallon of gas was $1.19. There’s no going back.
• kos will consider why Netroots Nation received far more media coverage than the BlogHer conference taking place that same weekend.
• SusanG will review Russell Banks's Dreaming Up America.

Offered for your pleasure:

Country music star John Rich wants like-minded voters to join him in "Raising McCain."

The other half of the Nashville duo Big and Rich, the singer/songwriter has penned lyrics for a rock-infused anthem focused on the 5 1/2 years Republican presidential candidate John McCain spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and his refusal of an early release.

"He stayed strong, stayed extra long til they let all the other boys out. Now we've got a real man with an American plan, we're going to put him in the big White House," the song says. Its refrain: "We're all just raising McCain."

Not sure what to say about that, beyond the fact that the song, the artist and the candidate drew a vast crowd of ... um ... several hundred yesterday. Let's be kind and simply observe that it wasn't exactly Berlin.

Coming Up on Sunday Kos ...

• DHinMI will kick off a Daily Kos Sunday symposium by revisiting his argument that this election could be a transforming election, similar to the 1932 election.  In 1932 economic devastation and intense disgust with the Republican party of president Herbert Hoover put Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in to the White House, gave him massive majorities in the New Deal Congress, and helped solidify an electoral coalition that lasted roughly 50 years.  The similarities between this year and 1932 are not only that Democrats are poised for a major victory in November, but that the action propeling the possible victory are not transient political currents or "waves" but deep, underlying changes in the nation's political, ideological, social and demographic geology.  If Democrats use their expected big majorities the way parties have in the past when presented with moments of mandate and massive majorities, they could move the country in a markedly more progressive direction and solidify their gains for decades to come.
• A choice between a milquetoast successor to a disgraced imperial president and a man running on hope and a smile, an economy reeling from the shock of rising oil prices, stark choices on a growing budget deficit, a military in transition after years of adventurism abroad, and a new Democratic majority in Congress still dealing with the abuses of the previous administration. Devilstower says we've seen 2008 before -- in 1976.
• DemFromCT will look at the election through the prism of 1980. In that year, the incumbent and the challenger ran a close race until the challenger satisfied the country about his risky candidacy. BTW, 1980 was also the beginning of the eight year Iran-Iraq War, the year John Lennon was shot, the year Mount Saint Helens erupted, the year of the 1980 Lake Placid Miracle On Ice, and the year Japan became the worlds largest auto maker. The average cost of a new house was $68,700.00  and the cost of a gallon of gas was $1.19. There’s no going back.
• kos will consider why Netroots Nation received far more media coverage than the BlogHer conference taking place that same weekend.
• SusanG will review Russell Banks's Dreaming Up America.

Simplifying rhetoric to make it more accessible to the average citizen is a laudable enterprise, but at some point simplification becomes oversimplification, and the line between the two is often difficult to define, especially in a polity committed to democracy.... When presidents lie to us or mislead us, when they pander to us or seduce us with their words, when they equivocate and try to be all things to all people, or when they divide us with wedge issues, they do so with an arsenal of anti-intellectual tricks with rhetoric that is linguistically simplistic, reliant on platitudes or partisan slogans, short an argument, and long on emotive and human-interest appeals.

--Elvin T. Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush

The REAL Britney, courtesy of Progressive Accountability:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin today:

Women voters aren't warming to 'cool' Obama

July 30, 2008

BY CAROL MARIN Sun-Times Columnist

The Obama campaign has a woman problem. How big? How small? It's not clear, but in a close election, small can be big.

Terrific lede! Except ... Obama's polling among women actually IS quite clear, according to a Research 2000 poll released three days ago:

QUESTION: If the election for President were held today, who would you vote for if the choices were between Barack Obama, the Democrat, John McCain, the Republican, Bob Barr, the Libertarian, or Ralph Nader, an Independent?

       OBAMA  MCCAIN  BARR  NADER  OTHER  UND
                                               
ALL     51%    39%    3%     2%     1%     4%

MEN     45%    45%    4%     2%     1%     3%
WOMEN   56%    34%    2%     2%     1%     5%

That's a 22-point lead among women overall, Ms. Marin.

But don't let a little thing like empirical evidence mess with the premise of the day's "Obama's got a [fill in the day's demographic] problem!" story. Especially when you have a whole lot of anectodotal crap to cram into a column somewhere, like how Michelle Obama pleaded for support in a roomful of well-off, well-dressed women who seemed disposed to vote for her husband, but hey ...there is still a woman problem, damn it, because the writer has to shoehorn in a little "human interest" crapola to justify her columninizing existence. Enter ... Sarah, angry McCain-supporter news junkie who thinks Obama is "like the organic chicken at lunch. Sleek, elegant, beautifully prepared. Too cool."

But the women Obama needs right now are the ones who do not dine downtown. They're the ones who can't afford organic anything, forced to choose between a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk because they can't buy both on the same day.

Women like Sarah.

What's particularly irritating about this column is that near the end, Marin actually does cite a poll ("The July 15 Quinnipiac University poll shows women overall backed Obama over McCain 55 percent to 36 percent.") ... yet we're delivered the stupid lede and premise anyway. So it's not even the case that she's unaware of how Obama is polling among women overall.

Yeah, Obama might have a woman problem, all right. It just might be Carol Marin.

Update by kos: For more context, check out the 2004 exit polls. Kerry won the female vote 51-48. So while Kerry won that vote by just three points, Obama leads that demographic by 22.

A real problem for Obama, yes.

I regard nationalism as a kind of secular religion, a substitute religion, where the state itself and one's identity as a citizen of the state takes on a religious intensity and passion. I suppose there is a lack that's highlighted by that identification. It has behind it the notion that one's identity as an American is some kind of ultimate definition of oneself and, therefore, without it one has no identify of one's own. One's citizenship isn't merely one's group identity, it's one essential identity.

Nationalism can do that to you. It can strip you of your individuality. And in periods of strong, nationalistic fervor in the United States, it has taken on a stubbornly religious quality.

--Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America

What You Missed on Sunday Kos ....

• DarkSyde reviewed Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming, which gives "the skinny on past climate change, current observations, future predictions, economic and geopolitical considerations; on and on the science marches; three decades worth of research compressed into 207 colorful pages."
• Devilstower conducted a wide-ranging survey of the energy landscape, both past and future, managing to link together Thomas Jefferson, Donald Rumsfeld and Dr. Thomas Gold in Thoroughly Modern Mastadons.
• SusanG reviewed Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book of essays, This Land Is Your Land, which features pieces on the slide of the middle class, encroachment of civil liberties, the state of feminism in the modern era and much, much more.
• MissLaura posted a masterful meditation on the meaning of community in the online era, prompted by Netroots Nation, in Building Community Builds the Movement.
• BarbinMD documented John McCain's clear-cut slide into public dishonesty and personal dishonor in McCain Would Rather Lose His Honor In Order To Win a Political Campaign.
• Reflecting upon his first attendance at Netroots Nation, brownsox shared his thoughts and enthusiasm for real world gatherings of online activists in Now I Know What I've Been Missing.