Hey! I am a 16-year-old high school junior from Methuen, Massachusetts. “Bush Was Right” is AWESOME! I heard the 49 second clip from RightMarch.com, and I just purchased the CD single. Nearly student at my high school is conservative, and I can’t wait to share it with them. I contacted KISS 107.9 FM, our local radio station that nearly everyone between the ages of 14 and 24 listens to, and I asked them to consider playing “Bush Was Right.” I’m sick of hearing Eminem and Green Day trash our great leader and our military, and so is everyone else up here in Methuen. If radio will play biased music, they must, in my opinion, play music from both sides of the political spectrum. Our beliefs are not being represented by Eminem or Green Day. Our beliefs are being represented by bands like you. The next time you’re up here in the Boston area, look for me in the crowd, because I’ll be there!

Good luck, and best wishes,
– D.J.: Methuen, Massachusetts

I remain puzzled. When the hell did our teenagers become politicized to the point where their identities are located as “liberal” and “conservative”? (Yes, even in suburban Methuen, Massachusetts, where “Nearly student […] is [according to D.J.] conservative” and thus would be highly susceptible to the music of “The Right Brothers”, which the Boston, Massachusetts-based station KISS 97.9 (I looked it up… it comes from out of Boston, that evil liberal bastion. Obviously it’s official call letters is not “KISS”, and — that being the Eastern United States, starts with a “W”.)

I also have an additional thought: are they really sure they want to have this song (possible video found here) on MTV’s “Total Request Live”? Have you ever seen Total Request Live? Do they know what they’d be getting into if, by some bizarre flucuations of events, the video to thie Billy Joel riff rip-off Right-wing agit-prop found its way onto the video? If it’s anything like it was last time I saw any of it a few years back, it’s the video, cut off with distraction after distraction, email messages crawling on the bottom proclaiming the awesomeness of the song/video being (sort of) played, every 15 seconds footage of a teenager yelling something about how “hot” a member of the band is. All of which lead me to wonder: is the attention span of my generation (skew a few years younger than I) roughly that of a water-logged sponge? I don’t know.

And by the way: in the wake of 9/11, the pop universe was saturated with songs about “Heroes”. The zeitgist marches forward.

I’m a bit puzzled by the cover feature in the latest New Republic on Russ Feingold. It’s largely billed as exploding to his Dean-ish early followers who “know him for his lonely vote against the Patriot Act and for his call for a time-table for withdrawal from Iraq” … the parts that would break their heart. But I don’t get it. This is the Case Against Russ Feingold???

In Washington, Feingold has maintained his processorientation–to the frequent dismay of his fellow Democrats. The most obvious example is his relentless advocacy of major campaign finance reform in the late ’90s and early ’00s. When he teamed up with John McCain to pass new campaign finance restrictions a few years ago, many Democratic party officials felt near-panic over the legislation’s ban on “soft money” fund-raising by the national parties, a cash stream that was far more important to Democrats than to Republicans. (McCain-Feingold’s long-term effects are still uncertain, though the rise of Internet fund-raising has spared Democrats for now.) But Feingold didn’t care: This is a man who demanded that the Democratic party stop running ads in support of his own 1998 Senate campaign because he opposed soft money-funded ads in principle. “Get the hell out of my state with those things,” he said at the time. “It was kind of frustrating,” says his friend Newby of the afl-cio.

On its own, this would be enough to give Feingold a hall-monitor reputation. (“He’s like the kid in class who tattles on everyone else,” says one Democratic Hill aide turned lobbyist.) But maybe nothing annoys Feingold’s colleagues as much as his fights against annual cost-of-living raises granted to senators. Such raises now kick in automatically by law, but Feingold has tried to change that, and he routinely battles to force an invariably embarrassing Senate debate–and recorded vote–on them. “It’s not my favorite time of year in the Senate,” Feingold concedes. (Although Feingold is a pauper by Senate standards, he refuses pay raises and donates anything over his $162,100 starting salary for deficit reduction–more than $50,000 so far.)

He diligently guards against the Corruption of Lobbyist Money, and has alienated his Senate colleagues by being unscrupuosly CLEAN and uncorruptable? THE HORROR OF IT ALL! He’s facilitated a change in the Democratic process, moving the party from relying on huge money contributions to the smallest of Internet (grassroots) donors? GASP! Get me K Street please, and tear down the life support line of this Threat to our Psuedo-Democracy!! How deeply entrenched is the New Republic suckered into the rarefied air of Beltway Washington?

The other sins of Russ Feingold to a Democratic primary voter, and “Deaniac”: his demurring to the president on his nominations? That would be John Ashcroft and John Roberts. This would not be a problem if he were president, would it? Actually, I point out something else that is key: when he does oppose a nomination, it ends up carrying a lot of weight — which is to say JOHN BOLTON, who Bush ultimately was stuck recess-pointing into the UN.

I have one comment to make about this paragraph:
Maybe the ultimate Feingold heresy came during the 1998-1999 Clinton impeachment fight. When Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia offered a resolution to dismiss the charges against the president, every Democrat voted for the resolution but one: Feingold. Again, the issue was process. Feingold argued that Republicans deserved a chance to make their case and put it to a vote and that the Byrd resolution would “in appearance, and in fact, improperly short-circuit this trial” and “call the fairness of the process into question.” The vote was a disaster among his Democratic constituents, according to the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairwoman, who told The Washington Post: “We’re getting a lot of very upset people calling. … Elderly people crying, other people yelling. … They’re just mad as hell.” Feingold ultimately voted against impeachment. But watching him explain his interim vote promises to amuse. One adviser to a potential 2008 rival said he could envision cutting a “Feingold favored impeachment” ad. That’s hardly a winning position with the Democratic base–not to mention a touchy debating point on a stage with Hillary Clinton.

I point to a part of the Christopher Hitchens anti-Clinton book Nobody Left to Lie To, where a single Democratic Senator is having a trouble of conscience about how to vote on the Vote to Impeach Clinton, and is confiding in Chritopher Hitchens. He ultimately votes “no”, but I had wondered who the hell this could possibly be. I thought the only two Senators that would be travelling in Chritopher Hitchens’s circle would be Russ Feingold and Paul Wellstone (today, his cheerleading for the Iraq War has him the other camp)… does this signify anything? I don’t know.

“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region … Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the US can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily”

“Congressman Murtha is a respected veteran and politician who has a record of supporting a strong America. So it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party. The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists. After seeing his statement, we remain baffled — nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer.”

“The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out.”

“I like guys who’ve never been there that criticize us who’ve been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.”
………………..

Just shifting for the quotes, as the Republican leadership tosses up their “bafflement” that John “Hawk” Murtha has “endorsed the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing”, I notice this bit of comedy from David Horowitz’s web version of his magazine: Rep. John Murtha pushed the national argument on the Iraq War further towards the International ANSWER/MoveOn agenda.

And here’s a prescient remark about the current Bush line of attack: If Bush castigates Democrats for changing their minds on the war, he might wind up alienating Republicans who have done so, too.

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

Contributing to the echo-chamber of Internet bloggery with the latest big “Check this Out” thingamajing: I notice a genre that crosses all media of sort of (heavily handed and somewhat cluelessly) youth-targeted low-budget Right wing agit-prop. It’s not quite as flooded as youth-marketed Fundamentalist Christian schtuff, but we’ll get there. Remember the comic book about how a cy-borg versions of Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North in a future Liberal Dystopia would kick Islamo-Fascist and Liberal Ass to save the world? Well… tear down the science-fiction motif and The Right Brothers provide the soundtrack. (And here I thought that all of the Country Music Industry provided the jingoistic tics to get us moving?)

The Right Brothers, a conservative music duo out of Nashville, has released a new song that does what needed to be done: it tells the TRUTH. Titled Bush Was Right, the song hits the listener with fact after fact after fact – but the tune is so catchy, and the music is so driving, you can’t help but sing along (especially on the chorus)!

WILL YOU HELP US? We’re putting together a “kickin'” music video right now, and we’re preparing a HUGE grassroots campaign to get hundreds of thousands of people to request Bush Was Right! on MTV’s “Total Request Live” show… leading to our demands for it to be played in regular rotation! If they DON’T – then we’ll hit the media in a BIG way, showing how MTV plays left-wing videos while CENSORING conservative videos!

The Chorus that you can’t help sing along with:

Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

added to that after subsequent verses:

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

This is actually their second “hit” single to strike (however negligibly) the public conciousness. If you’d surf through right-wing talk radio, you’d have stumbled upon their “Hey Hollywood” song… “We heard your message and it don’t sound good.” Other songs from the “Right Brothers” catalouge… “Somewhere in Baghdad”, about a woman and her child newly liberated in some Iraq that… maybe there is a science-fiction motif to these songs after all, because this song appears to take place in an alternate universe:

She can’t believe the changes that she’s seen
She’s got a new job, a TV and a kitchen full of food
She’ll be making lunches while the kids both sleep
‘Cause tomorrow’s the first day at their new school

Or the ode to Reaganomics, “Trickle Down”, which asks the question “When’s the last time a poor man gave you a job?”

Trickle down, trickle down let the money trickle down
It won’t do anybody good buried in the ground
Trickle down, trickle down let the money spread around
And one day it’ll be my turn and mine will trickle down

Nothing like dancing to the beat of Trickle Down Economics! Urm?…

They tried to stop “The Passion” but they think the truth is in “Farenheit 911”
They hate the Constitution but they love judges legislating from the bench
If Michael Moore became the president they’d think they’d died and gone to heaven
Can’t stand “fair and balanced” but can’t get enough of the U.N. and the French

Okay. Enough of this. Turn it out. Toss on the “American Idiot” Green Day album. Ayn Randians can throw on that goddamned awful Rush album, “2112”. The Neoconservatives will just have to wait a while longer for their soundtrack…

Some words from Charles Cook: At this point in their second terms, the Gallup poll showed President Eisenhower with a 58 percent approval rating, President Reagan was at 65 percent and President Clinton at 61 percent. President Nixon, shadowed by Watergate disclosures that would eventually force him to resign, was at 31 percent.
Indeed, in the entirety of their second terms, Eisenhower never dropped below 48 percent, Reagan never got below 43 percent and Clinton never dipped below 54 percent in Gallup polling. Clearly, we don’t have much experience with second-term presidents facing these kinds of numbers. There is no textbook telling someone in the position Bush finds himself in how to battle back and find success pushing his legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.

It has become a little too easy and has become a bit too easy a Conventional Wisdom cliche to say that Second Terms are Hell on the President. The reality is that — second terms can be quite successful. Reagan defeated Communism, right? Clinton continued his period of Economic Prosperity, and passed through his negligible minor-key agenda (he fancied himself the second coming of Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland, you see…). (Matthew Yglesias has a way to consider the Clinton Presidency, and what he accomplished when.) Are these not “successes”?

But today… we are in some mighty bizarre political waters here. Bush’s push-back strategy at the moment, to attack the Democrats for voting for his Iraq War Resolution in the first place… a conceit that makes me wonder why in 2002 he wasn’t out there campaigning on behalf of Senators Max Cleland, Mary Landrieu, Tim Johnson, and Jean Carnahan for their, (ahem) “Clear Eyed Realism”. (Yesterday, the Republican Party rebuked Bush on the Iraq War … sort of kind of… by stripping the Democratic Party bill to demand a timeline from Bush of any meaning and passing something of the sort. A cruious sign of how the political climate has changed drastically.)

Do I choose to believe the rumours emitting from The Washington Times. I’d become accustomed to these stories from the spurious website “Capital Hill Blues”. Now we have received them from a right-wing source… a Pravda. To read The Washington Times is an exercise in Sovietology, and I do not know what to make of this story. Oedipal or Nixon… Nixon or Oedipal? Can things really be falling apart like that? And why am I not feeling any schaudenfruede?

There oughta be a law. A president who cannot muster an approval rating over 40 percent for a month’s duration shall be removed. He shall be replaced by a member of the same party who has successfully positioned himself apart from the president. (The second part of this law will help clear up a wee bit the Woeful state of the Senate — where a party wraps themselves tightly around their man in the White House, Legislature becoming Parliament, political Independence Lost for fear of how a weakened Party figurehead will tear your political fortunes down. In the current climate… may I suggest Chuck Hagel (Soitenly not goddamned John McCain.) I’ll work out the mechinations of this new rule later.

The three most notable negative campaign ads for the 2005 off-off year elections… or, to enhance the amusement factor, the simple thrust of them… the core attack.

Jon Corzine’s ad against Doug Forrester. “Doug Forrester is George Bush’s Choice. Is he yours?” (Had Forrester used that ad in his 2002 Senate campaign, he just might be Senator today!)

Doug Forrester’s ad against Jon Corzine. Jon Corzine’s ex-wife is on the screen, and says “Jon Corzine let down the family. He’ll let down New Jersey too.”

Jerry Kilgore’s ad against Timothy Kaine. “Timothy Kaine opposes the Death Penalty. Even for Adolf Hitler!” (The pundits believe that this ad back-fired on Kilgore. I imagine that Kilgore should have gone for the jugular, and used the morphing motif — blending Kaine into Hitler. There‘s a commercial!)

I don’t know which one comes from the deepest part of the gutter. A contest is needed to decide such matters.

I can’t help but think that the 16-year old Doc Hastings fan is going to end up writing a piece in her school newspaper about her online crash-course into a middle-level snarky liberal political blog.

I was wondering what her follow-up to this mild debacle would be. I guess this is it.

Bemusing as this may be:

OMG!! Y R U PPL LIKE MAKEING FUN OF TEH YOUNG CONSERVATIEVS MORE MUSLAMO_FASCISTISM FROM THE FAR LEFT I GUESS?!?! WHY DON”T U PPL GO AND FIGHT WITH UR BROTHERHOOD AL QA’AE’DA?!?!?!?! OMG!! FROWNY FACE!!!!!
extremebushsupportdude88

Or… I was picking on Doc. I think she is exceptional.… Except I’m struggling to figure out where the original post “picks on Doc”.

I already went through what makes up the political life of a typical student body. Come to think of it, I can think of a couple other ignoble examples. Middle School brought the Student’s battle to suck on pacificers. (It warranted no news coverage.) High school brought with it a strangely pointless fight over a slightly strengthened enforcement to get the kids’ pants somewhat higher up on their waists. This, apparently, warrented local tv news coverage. It was embarrassing viewing watching a selection of student’s sound off on their right to drop their trousers, replete with footage taken at a curious angle that spotlighted just how big these pants are of smirking teenagers — my thought being “Just Pull your goddamned pants up.” As these things go, there was no discernable change in students’ dressing fashion within a couple weeks and for the duration of my high school career, and the slightly strengthened enforcement against falling pants faded away. But something odd happened with the video footage. A few months later, a sad death of a fellow student occured (shot at a party) — and the station recycled the footage of the baggy trousers with the grinning teenagers. The effect was jarring.

I blinked a lot, and forced myself to trudge through the absurdity and smallness of this self-contained world that evaporates within four years.

Which, to be sure, was the mindset I had when I tossed up a website on geocities. But today I ponder this: The past few years have certainly seen a marked increase in youth adoption of internet communication tools; this has been the case since the onset of the web, and will probably be true for many years to come. We can assume that IM, blogs, Livejournal, MySpace, Friendster and the like are all helping support local relationships among kids, but to what extent are they allowing them to escape their hometown? When teenagers feel trapped, oppressed, and ultimately fatalistic, to what extent do they now turn to a kindred spirit somewhere far away? My guess is that today’s youth have even more solidarity than they have in the past, but it is certainly a topic that needs further exploration.. Good, for the most part… though in my case… my site was my site was designed to be random, a little anonymous, and a bit puzzling. I suppose in the earliest moments of that website, my biggest concession to something concrete about myself was a series of travel stories about a trip to Russia my parents and I had gone on. (And I gratuitously tossed out the place “Kargasok”, as a weird message in a bottle to the couple from Kargasok who veered us into relatively remote Siberia.) But had someone picked it up and trashed me, the only way I would be able to properly respond would be through some weird dadaist murmurings.

Livejournals are a different creature, and by design are… well… diary-like. Write one entry mumbling on a politician, and a section of the politically-active blogosphere will be able to pick up on it… and pounce on it. And I’m not sure a 16 year old shouldn’t be picked apart, at least with regards to any politics they may throw up. It’s… politics… (Actually, I believe one reason this 16 year old’s blog was “picked up” by a mid-level liberal blog was because of the scarcity of blog entries on Congressman Doc Hastings. This seems to be the end all and be all of blogging on Doc Hastings, and in guesting “Jesus’s General” — he wanted to “do” something — anything on DOC HASTINGS.

……………………
*Today I hear calls for a more universal college enrollment — which strikes me as an excuse to bump some things to college that should be covered in high school, a disturbing-enough trend that has our society prolonging adolescence, and a depressing doubling requirements to join the job market in proper fashion… what, with the out-sourcing of jobs creeping faster and faster up the pay-chain. If you toss in the call for universal pre-school, I’m not sure we’re heading in the right direction.
…………………….

I once saw in the comments of politics1.com some comments from a high school student who was posting away on his lunch break… somewhat effusive Democratic Party cheerleading. Some other commenters came in, saying “You’ve gotta be the weirdest high school student I’ve ever met”, and “Shouldn’t you be more interested in high school dances?” The student defended himself somewhat — saying that he was with his friend at the time. I didn’t really understand the derisiveness toward the political geek. Civics mindedness… better sooner than later. Should they not heed some of Mr. Weatherbee’s commentary?