Categorical Aperitif

Listening to Karl Rove talk about bipartisanship is like listening to the Marquis de Sade talk about Valentine's Day.

If you read this recent WSJ piece of his, you'll notice that it's structured kind of like a porn movie: there's a bunch of fancy-looking numbers-and-statistics-laden "analysis" of the Democratic race at the beginning, but this seems tacked on mainly to avoid the inelegance of cutting straight to the grunting and the money shot at the end:

The Democratic Party has two weakened candidates. Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement, the absence of a clear and optimistic message, the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power, the phoniness and the exaggerations. These problems have not diminished over the long months of the contest. They have grown. She started out with the highest negatives of any major candidate in an open race for the presidency and things have only gotten worse.

And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are "bitter" and therefore "cling" to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

Um, no. As anybody who watched last Friday's Bill Moyers Journal will know, it is a serious mischaracterization to say that Reverend Wright wants God to damn America. That now infamously quoted-out-of-context line came at the end of a long list of examples of governmental immorality, amorality, and hubris. Wright's point was that, like it or not, America fits into a disturbing pattern:

REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

Millions of Americans profess to take the Bible at least as seriously as Reverend Wright does; perhaps the real meaning of "damn" in this Jeremiad will make more sense to them upon further reflection—and once the full context of the quotation is clear. At any rate, for at least one reason for Mr. Obama's supposed "weakness among blue-collar working class voters," Mr. Rove need look no further than the work of greasy, lying political operatives like himself.

P.S. I think that that big-ass sentence about Hillary Clinton would be clearer with semicolons, as at least one item in the series contains an internal comma:

Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement; the absence of a clear and optimistic message; the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power; the phoniness and the exaggerations.

But perhaps proper punctuation is for the little people.