Out of office message

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Hello. RubberCrutch will be unavailable until the year 2011. Thank you for your attention to this matter.



Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer, Morphine (2000, from "The Night," Dreamworks 00445-00562), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Childhood traumas revisited

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Christmas has two esses in it...

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...and they're both dollar signs.



Sad but true. I felt obligated to offer this light musical entertainment on Christmas Eve in order to soothe the nerves of Oil Can and Mrs. Harry. Last night's presentation evidently triggered a bout of post-traumatic stress in the little guy---something about somebody putting Coco on the rug or some such.

The milquetoast, Bob "Peace On Earth" Cratchit, is portrayed in this Stan Freberg production by cartoon voiceover actor Daws Butler---a brilliantly talented man who was, in my opinion, cursed by having to portray an endless procession of lame cartoon characters, mostly for the hack Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. Until digging up the previous link, though, I did not know that Butler voiced the part of Aesop's son on Rocky and His Friends.

Freberg's sentiments here as as bitter as any he ever expressed on record---but bitterly hilarious, of course. Various "Mad Men" of the day felt touchy about Green Chri$tma$, however, and worked hard to suppress promotion of the record and airplay of same for a few decades. To this day it's rarely heard out here in radioland. To this day, reality is an affront to the senses and sensibilities of some delicate souls.

Green Chri$tma$, Stan Freberg (1958, Capitol Records F 4097), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: if you pop outta bed one more time I'm gonna jak się masz you!

Ghosts of Christmas past

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Here is a Christmas entertainment that incessantly appeared on the family TV screen in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. I do not remember what Little Oscar thought of this. But our late sister, little Piggly Wiggly, was a huge fan of this throughout her life, and she was very proud to have located it on VHS in one of her last years and pass it on to several of us. She was a nut about all things Christmas, but I know that part of her nostalgia for this short was related to the name of the second "dwarf"---Coco---which she related to a 1950s incident in a Chicago-area restaurant involving myself, a broken bout of constipation, and my trudging into the dining area with little pants around ankles protesting about someone putting "cocoa" in my... well, never mind. Myself, I must confess that I only enjoyed this feature because it heralded the coming of Christmas (presents), and because the refrain of the elves' names was fun to sing in tiny ridiculous low voices, and because Peggy was so damned amused by the whole thing. For her whole time on earth, which ended in 2005, she addressed me as "Coco."

Anyway, if you were sentient in 1956 or later and watching Channel 9 in "Chicagoland" around Christmas, I'm sure you can sing along at least with the refrain. Now brace yourselves.



Here's the thing: with all respect for our dear sister, I'm afraid that this "story so queer" is, to me, is a hellish thing to watch as an adult. Just look and listen.

The misty opening scene is simple and gorgeous in its own right but, honestly, it begins looking like a set from The Wolfman and quickly morphs into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari---very expressionistic, but far out of whack, atmospherewise, with the season to be jolly. The face of Santa, reading a book entitled "Girls and Boys" with his eyes plastered shut, smiles in a fashion presaging that of the grave-robbing Mr. Sardonicus from the eponymous Castle horror film of 1961. The three elves succumb to that contagion by the end of the feature, and the penurious quality of the stop-motion animation completes the overall atmosphere of oppressiveness.

Then there's the soundtrack. The lead vocals for the verse alternate between a creepy-sounding reverberated androgynous chipmunk-style voice, a "dwarf" I guess, and an a capella barber shop quartet---both accompanied by a mellow choir of banshees. The female chorus that leads on the refrain sounds like an infernal calliope piping out church lady harmonies.

I don't mean to be a wiseguy, but I honestly don't understand how this animation became a Chicago Christmas "classic," as it is called in most writeups I can find on the web. I find it disquieting as an adult, and potentially even qualifying as raw material for toddler holiday nightmares. But it is what it is, and my pixie of a little sister adored it for decades.

(And incidentally, it's way past your bedtime, goddamit!)

Hardrock, Coco, and Joe: The Three Little Dwarfs, Stuart Hamblen (1961, Centaur Productions), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: while researching for this post I found an interesting thing or two about the composer, Mr. Hamblen, which serves to connect some dots between HC&J and a future Fish Fry in preparation... if I can remember.

OK, OK! Heh heh!

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I coulda sworn I told the little feller not to pop out of bed, but there he is jumping up and down on the furniture for an "encore." OK, Luigi: here is your... encore.



Holy Kazoozis---it's Grace Jones! (Grace Jones?!?) I don't recall seeing this lovely beast ever looking quite as comely as she does here, tantalizing Pee-wee Herman's inner homunculus after he almost cluelessly returned her to sender. It will not escape fans of The Dance that Ms. Jones begins her musical interlude with a coupla preliminary burlesque moves, but then loses herself in song without unhinging her outer candy shell or staying long enough for it to melt in one's mouth or hand.

I assume Reba's letter carrier union protected her from reprisals for the misdelivery. Had Mailman Mike still been on the Playhouse route, no doubt he would have tried unwrapping and poking around in the giant box before delivering it. And then Ms. Jones would have found it necessary to rupture every organ the poor guy had, leaving only one of them untouched.

Action-packed, Pee-wee!

The Little Drummer Boy, Grace Jones (1988, from the primetime TV special, "Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special," CBS), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

It's Bedtime!

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Since I'll be spending my holidays, as always, in the eye a typhoon fueled by booze, pills, and burlesque dancers, I will get an early jump on my Christmas posting. Which is to say, I have a video confection here for The 59er and, incidentally, the rest of you. As The King used to say on Peewee's Playhouse, "Let the cartoon... begin!"



Thanks to The 59er for suggesting that I dedicate a few posts to commemorating Christmas. I'm happy to be challenged to find my own take on a topic of interest to others in the small cadre of people who spend their valuable time checking this blog a few times a week. The text that follows is animation-related, not Christmas-related, so you can stop reading here if you're not interested in the former.

This cartoon is another in the small series of Color Classics by Fleischer Studios through Paramount, released in December 1936. This is a really good print, and includes the original title cards. My eye isn't educated enough to know whether the almost gaudy coloring is faithful to the original Technicolor print or a restoration job; even if the former, it's A-OK with me---much better than the version I used to watch with my sons on VHS tape.

The opening scene is a vivid specimen of the Fleischer "Tabletop" background animation technique. What they did was draw, paint, and build miniature theatrical sets on large turntables. The sets were rotated in front of a fixed camera to simulate situations like walking down a city street, but unlike straight 2D backgrounds a realistic parallax shift would be evident between the closer and more distant planes of depth. In this example the animators also use a zoom effect to simulate how it would look if we walked in the front door of the orphanage.

The manic Grampy is, in the Fleischer universe, a pal of the latter-day Betty Boop. Once he gets his noodle cranked up, he can sustain enough high-level frenetic energy to rival Popeye himself. And although I think the Flesichers intended Grampy to be kind and lovable, which he is, there is a certain unmistakable lack of full control in his lunacy. His compulsive laughter reminds me more than a little of Greedy Humpty Dumpty, who became unhinged at the thought of riches in the cosmos that did not yet belong to him. Yes, I'm afraid Grampy is a nut.

But just look how inventive Grampy is with found materials: he epitomizes American Ingenuity at its best. And since there doesn't seem to be any food, or any adults, around the orphanage, the tots probably won't have to bother dismantling the toys made of china and flatware. They'll die happy, which I guess is the eternal human goal when you think about it.

Christmas Come But Once A Year, A Max Fleischer Color Classic (1936, Dave Fleischer, Director; Paramount), via YouTube, public domain.

Editor's note: now get to bed, goddammit, and I don't want to hear another peep outta ya!

Without a poke [updated]

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This pig is only slightly more likely than I am to be the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Why the bad outlook? Because he says things out loud that the mainline Republican power elites only think silently to themselves or discuss in secure undisclosed whites-only men's social clubs. Alpha-Republicans and their shadow government of right-wing publishers, think tanks, and foundations may mostly be crypto-segregationists, but they know enough to hide their true philosophies and objectives from the light of day because even in this coarse age, polite society is still repulsed by intentional expressions of unvarnished bigotry. Buffoons like Barbour draw unwanted attention to the hidden agenda with their dewy reminiscences about how swell segregationists actually were---nice, neighborly sorts of fellows, actually (because it really felt like that to them, probably). Still, they get treated with lace gloves as if they "misremember" or are "confused." Bah!

The corporate news media will seemingly float a trial presidential balloon for any Republican who hasn't been photographed having sex with a 15-year-old outside Utah.

Update: in order to help explain the bitter tone of the text above I had meant to include this link to Atrios, who today excerpted a 1956 article by the legendary David Halberstam on "white citizen councils." Chilling shit.

Saturday Night Fish Fry [updated]

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Went to buy some cheap detergent
Some emergent nation 
Got my load



"Can't Afford No Shoes" (lyrics here, because it's hard to catch most of them without reading along) was not an evergreen crowd-pleaser in Frank Zappa's live performance repertoire, but I don't understand why. The Recession/Depression economics theme was surely of concern to Zappa's audience from the time this song was released in the mid-70s well past beyond the sunrise in of St. Reagan's Morning in America. (It certainly was to me, as late as 1983!) And the composition was about as straight-ahead of a hard rocker as Zappa ever recorded.

The instrumental arrangement is explosive, as you will hear if you jam in your waxy little earbuds and crank up the volume. The rhythm section is really punchy, and the guitar tones are aggressive. Based on the liner notes in both copies of this album that I possess, it looks like Zappa is playing the slightly unhinged slide/Dobro-sounding solo about halfway through. He usually delegated this sound to Denny Whalley, who was actually playing with him in 1975 (maybe an album-credit oversight?). If there's a harmonica down in the mix on this track, and I can't tell on this low-fi YouTube clip, it is being respirated by one Bloodshot Rollin' Red, known in the personal mythology of all Zappaphiles as Captain Beefheart, the charming avant-garde multimedia artist what I composed a humble eulogy for yesterday.

The vocals are, in my opinion, somewhat marred by the inexplicable self-mocking delivery that seemed to self-sabotage any number of Zappa cuts that had all other necessary elements for a big radio hit. Johnny "Guitar" Watson, one of FZ's musical idols, is credited with vocals on two other cuts of this album, but I'm pretty sure I hear him in a supporting role on this track as well.

I think this song is "low-hanging fruit" for some band to revisit today and hit big with.

Can't Afford No Shoes, Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention (1975, from "One Size Fits All," reissued as RykoDisc RCD10095), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Update: clarifying edits made to the first narrative paragraph in response to commenters. Thanks, commenters!!!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Momma was flattenin' lard with her red enamel rolling pin



On the way home tonight I heard on the radio that Captain Beefheart had died. It made me sad.

Beefheart, whose "straight" name was Don Van Vliet (sorta rhymes with fleet), christened his stage persona in honor of an uncle who used to brag that his schlong was the size of a beefheart; Van Vliet and his childhood companions nicknamed His Avuncular Highness "Captain Beefheart."

This tune, from his most influential album, Trout Mask Replica, features Mister Beefheart in what I think of as his radio reporter voice. A more common vocal style he used over the course of his recording career was actually a very profound (and piercing) channeling---not mere imitation---of Howlin' Wolf. (Follow the link provided by "Anonymous" in the comments section if you want to hear an example.) But here, in a suave, well modulated rap not rhythmically tied to the accompaniment very closely, he recites one of his lovely avant-garde poems. Like so many of Beefheart's lyrics, this one is full of vivid and absurd imagery that is not only entertaining on the face of it, but kind of starts making more and more sense with repeated listening. The Magic Band chugs relentlessly beneath the vocal track, sounding very rickety and odd. But, like the lyrics, the music becomes increasingly accessible with each playing.

There are plenty of accounts of Beefheart's important but sporadic lifelong artistic relationship with Frank Zappa, who produced the breakthrough Trout Mask. In many ways, artistically, Beefheart and Zappa perfectly complemented each other. I suspect that most of the regrettable personal problems between the two were driven by Zappa's need for ego dominance and recognition as the sole genius behind any project he was involved in. (Zappa is a major hero of mine, but one who wore two enormous feet of clay.) And it also seems obvious to me that Zappa's own lyrics owe much, much more to Beefheart's influence than he ever acknowledged. Also, Beefheart was notoriously poor at remembering the words to songs in live performance, and often got lost even when he was holding the lyrics right in front of him. You can hear this in a number of places on the 1975 Zappa/Beefheart album that centers on a live performance in Austin, Texas. This Beefheart idiosyncrasy must have made a maniac of Zappa, who was a tyrannical perfectionist and control freak.

Anyway, I earnestly hope that the good captain has ascended to a plane of existence where the poetic phrases he utters are instantly rendered into arabesques of painterly visual reality along the lines of the canvasses to which he dedicated the latter part of his career... and vice versa.

Old Fart At Play, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (1969, from "Trout Mask Replica," reissued as Reprise Records 2027-2), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I start out clean each day/
Shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down shoot 'em down



Music like this confirms to me that I'm not the typical older-generation crank to think that pop music became pretty uniformly bad starting in the 1980s. Why? Because along the way I've found a nontrivial amount of bands that have dug deep to innovate on the root forms, whether extending them in terms of form or rethinking how rock and pop should sound. I think that what this relative handful of groups has in common is that you can't point to much that obviously identifies them as eighties, nineties, or tenties music. Another thing is that they do not sound like the product of teen focus groups and coke-sniffing producers. In my view, they say something... whether there are lyrics or not.

Here is one of my favorites: Morphine. No historical or critical essays tonight, except to say I think it's funny that the recurring phrase they use in the framing passages sounds like a mild perversion of the famous Joe Walsh riff from "Rocky Mountain Way" (find it on YouTube if you don't recognize it by name; you should recognize it right away).

Now, you know the routine here at the fish fry: mash those earbuds into your head and turn up the volume to 11.

Test Tube Baby/Shoot 'm Down, Morphine (1993, from "Good," RykoDisc), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

President North Star

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At his December 7 press conference, President Obama declared his belief that this country was founded on compromise:

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal. This country was founded on compromise. I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union. So my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.

See, I thought that this country was actually founded on the basis of an uncompromisable "abstract ideal," namely the right of a peoples' collective and individual right to self-determination. This concept was concisely and eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Maybe what the President actually meant was that the U.S. Constitution was hammered out in an epic labor of debate and compromise so both the humble and the aristocratic founders could get behind it. If so, that's true. But you can't compromise if you don't negotiate. Obama allowed senior congressional Republicans to take the restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for the rich completely off the table before the first bag of Cheetos was opened. That's not compromise; it's a surrender to winner-take-all tactics. And it pivots the responsibility for intransigence onto his own party. Smooth move, President North Star.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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As of this afternoon I neither knew that James Moody was still alive nor that he died yesterday of cancer at age 85. My first acquaintance with this great saxophonist's music was in the 1970s, on a reissue of Eddie Jefferson's 1959 "vocalese" album The Jazz Singer. Jefferson was a genius at composing lyrics for famed instrumental melodies and performing them in a bop style, including all the inflections and phrasing idiosyncrasies of the originals. Moody's best-known melody originated in 1949 as an improvised solo based on an older composition called "I'm In The Mood For Love." Ten years later Moody played tenor on Jefferson's rendition, and in a funny turn of fate, he ultimately embraced the vocalese version and staked his own claim on it. Here is a 1991 performance of Moody's Mood featuring the great man on the vocal, in the company of other giants including Lionel Hampton, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, and Hank Jones. Just listen to how the melody unfolds, with inventive flourishes surely inspired by Charlie Parker.



Unfortunately and oddly, I can neither find a version of Jefferson's rendition nor Moody's 1949 seminal performance, so you can't gain a full appreciation for development of the melody or its nuances. Moody was a saxophonist, and his vocals were mostly novelty affairs along the lines of how his mentor Dizzy Gillespie would sing. His performance of Moody's Mood here, like others I've heard, is both heartfelt and hilarious, but it doesn't communicate the stunning greatness of the solo. But it definitely conveys something about the man.

I've recently bought several late 1940s recordings of Dizzy Gillespie's experimental bop big band---an ill-fated venture due to postwar music industry economics---and discovered that Moody was right there with Diz at the beginning of an era. I intend to pay closer attention to liner notes as I listen to these discs in coming weeks so I can try to better appreciate James Moody's earliest excursions into bop, even before Moody's Mood.

Moody's Mood For Love, with Lionel Hampton and the Golden Men of Jazz (1991, "Live At The Blue Note," Telarc Jazz), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Let freedom ring

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Hillary Clinton, from a speech on 21 January 2010:

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship.

The title of the speech, of course, was "Remarks on Internet Freedom."

It's funny, see?

The mask is off

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Just one more post about President Obama's cynical, stomach-turning political calculations, which I wrote about yesterday. I'm gratified to see that Paul Krugman reads this turn of events, politically, about the same as I do:

What’s particularly striking is that Obama seems passionate about denouncing his progressive critics, even as he has nice words for the people who have spent two years trying to destroy him. 

(Be sure to click through to the Tom Tomorrow cartoon that Krugman links to, by the way.)

I had intended to follow up my weekend posts about Obama's situation to add some coherence to my thoughts. I see no point now. If he had any cognitive dissonance about his role in life, which was only education speculation on my part, I'd say he's now found an effective denial strategy and is acting accordingly. Sleep well, Mr. President. Dream of your legacy: "At Least I'm Not George Bush or John McCain."

Arrogant and pathetic

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There is far too much to say about this three minute clip of Obama's press conference today than I have time or stomach for now. One or two paragraphs after the clip.



Yes, this is the debate we had about the public option all over again. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. The public option is the least-cost, least administratively complex way of providing universal healthcare to all Americans now. He knows it and so does everyone else. But it wasn't good for the insurance industry. So he compromised the best interests of the American people and fiscal responsibility away to the insurance industry. And, no, Obama has not achieved "healthcare for all Americans"; not even close. And his Republican successors, who he doesn't demand compromise anything substantive or enduring, will tear up his "signature piece of legislation" a day or two after he vacates the White House.

And today: the principle of progressive taxation with representation is not an "abstract ideal"; it's a concrete policy issue, and without it we would have had no "American Century." His compromises with enemies of tax fairness are not noble; they're cynical and craven.

This clip is the arrogant, sanctimonious manifesto of that phony kind of centrist whose truly abstract ideal is to imagine that he can raise himself above the fray of partisan politics. His statements are marred with faulty logic and festooned with distorted historic examples. He plays at distancing himself from the extremes on both sides of the spectrum, with a few stern words for Republicans (not in the clip), yet giving them them what they want. Then he deeply insults the ideals and motiviations of his base; in a year from now he will whine about his liberal primary challenger.

Underneath it all, what strikes me about this clip is the President's petty tone. I'm sure he's trying to sound defiant, but he sounds arrogant and wounded.

Voters did not elect Obama to be a centrist and an appeaser of failed right-wing ideologues, but President Obama pretends to believe differently. And because of that, in 2012 we will most likely have a new President. What a pathetic performance.

December 7: a suitable day for a nice stab in the back, I guess.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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If the Beach Boys had been able to continue in this direction, with Brian Wilson channeling his musical explorations back into a commercial rock vein rather than what Mike Love called "Brian's ego music," this group might have gained a whole new relevance in the late '60s and early '70s. Unfortunately, other things happened.



It doesn't take my ear much imagination to hear something very much like Chicago at their peak form during the "CTA" era. Swap out the low-rent piano and bass lines with something jazzy, use a larger drumkit played around the beats instead of straight up and down, throw some reverb on the horns, put Pete Cetera on lead vocal. I owe this observation in part to old pal Larry K., who reported to me some years ago that he saw a Chicago/Beach Boys mashup during the mid-70s in The Windy City, and Chicago did in fact perform Darlin' with Petey on lead vocal and other beach men participating. I can hear why that would have worked then by listening to this track.

Darlin', The Beach Boys (1967, from "Wild Honey," originally released on Capitol Records T-2859), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

OK, I gotta settle down now

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Between my current fevered speculations, which are intended to develop a plausible hypothesis about what is really wrong with Obama and his political flubs and miscues of the past 2 years; and some mind-bending reading about current events that I intend to comment on soon, I'm now ready for some west and welaxation. West and welaxation! That's right. So here's a nice-ish photo I shot last night from the back door of the garage.

I made the image on my mighty Nikon D700 using a Nikkor 24mm prime lens opened up to f/2.8 and with an exposure of 1/40th of a second (hand-held). Of interest to old-school photographers, I set the ISO to 6400---16 times faster than the old Kodak workhorse fast film, Tri-X. I didn't even bother to correct for visual noise, which would plague most digital images made at this speed on lesser cameras.

This picture astounds me in terms of how capable this camera is of capturing high-quality images in low light. The key light was a mercury vapor security light that inflicts itself on my property from the alley. I did very little postprocessing, just tinkering a little with the white balance to reduce the red/magenta tint of the light source, then applying the Adobe Bridge vignetting tool in the RAW processor to eliminate the "irising" effect at the corners of the frame, which is inherent to most wide-angle lenses.

I was amused by this sight last night because the patio looked all set up to host a conclave dedicated to booze and cigars, with the only obstacle being about 4 inches of highly packable snow covering everything. By afternoon today, incidentally, we had about 10 inches on the ground here in my small city on a swamp.

Eluding me: the obvious

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Eluding me where? Hiding in plain sight, as usual. What has eluded me? Democrat "succession planning" if President Obama were in fact experiencing the sort of collapse that a decent but naive man might suffer if he were psychologically unsuited to wield brutal, overwhelming power in the manner a U.S. President must deploy it.

If the President were in fact melting down, and if he did indeed want out, then we can assume that top Democrat leadership is well aware of it. Assuming that said leadership is not directly involved in a conspiracy to hand over the nation's full executive, legislative, and judicial authority to the Republican Party, then they will probably want to hang onto the White House into 2012.

Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution specifies that "In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President...." This portion of Article 2 has been modified and extended by the 20th and 25th Amendments, but the fundamental succession remains the same as it was in 1790.

If the President resigned owing to his inability to execute his duties, it would be unprecedented. But this has been a decade of unprecedented developments in our humble democratic republic. I'm sure you can think of as many as I could list here. Putting aside the personal humiliation that might go with a historic abdication, I can easily believe that an introspective, spiritual family man would at some point readily submit to this humiliation in return for the opportunity to salvage his soul and his life.

Were that to occur, the successor would be a veteran Democrat insider who may even be capable of rising to the occasion. And his successor to the vice presidency? That would depend on his own ambitions. But it could be either of two alpha females: Hillary, if Biden wants to retire or revert to the vice presidency; Pelosi, if he wishes to try on the office for a full 4 years. And in case it isn't obvious, all of this speculation falls into the category of thinking outside of the conventional wisdom; it amounts to guessing, not prediction. And I should also be clear that none of this speculation represents wishful thinking on my part.

For your "empty messaging" collection

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Yes, for sure! Progressive Democrats are certain to resonate to this kind of twaddle while the Obama White House is simultaneously busy with futile but chilling expressions of authority that will seem inexplicable and evil to any person who has grown up with open access to the internet. You know what kind of people those are: Obama's base.

I believe it's inevitable that President Obama will have a stiff primary challenge in 2012 from the progressive wing of his party, and that it will be strongly supported by the progressive wing of society at large.

Another Obama problem

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Independently of my speculations about the President's problems in my previous post, I think that a real on-the-ground problem he needs to solve immediately is the lack of a formidable chief of staff. Whatever reasons one may have to mock and despise Rahm Emanuel, by all accounts I've read he was well suited to the rigors of controlling access to the President and, for whatever fool reason, could inspire dread in a certain number of people. (Probably including Obama, regrettably.)

Interim Chief of Staff Pete Rouse, according to his Wikipedia writeup, has paper qualifications for the job. But he looks like kind of a pud to me, so therefore that must mean he's a lightweight (a portly one, nevertheless).

Perfect candidate for permanent Chief of Staff? Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. Perfect, that is, if you enjoy the Clinton brand of Davos democracy. Which I don't. But you must acknowledge that it would be an ace move on Obama's part that would drive Republicans berserk. Therefore, I say "make it so!" After all, we can't expect anything progressive from national Democrats now, at least not until Madame Speaker throws her granny shawl into the ring about a year from now.

Of course, it occurs to me that if Obama really did hire Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as Chief of Staff, it might ensure that Obama self-deposes about a year from January to clear the deck for Hillary and head Pelosi off at The Castro.

The "why" of Obama's problem [updated]

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Here's my contribution to the grand parlor game of Winter 2010, namely trying to figure out what's the matter with President Obama.

The "what" of the problem was evident pretty much from the start. He has kept his counsel with establishment Democrats and Blue Dogs while dismissing the priorities of the people who voted him into office. He has been preoccupied with "reaching across the aisle," pulling it back each time with another missing wristwatch or gold ring, for the futile pursuit of meaningful bipartisanship with adversaries who are intent on destroying his presidency. He fails to provide vocal, energetic leadership to achieve his purported goals, and fails to use his rhetorical skills to talk over the heads of bitter political enemies straight to "the American people." And finally, he concedes negotiation points to the predators and parasites in advance of the negotiating, which lets them know that they can make him cave on any issue. For a long time, cautious optimists felt that all these tactics were part of some super ninja political strategy that would, without warning, explode forth and overwhelm his regressive opponents. Myself, I discarded the idea that he was a 10-dimensional chessmaster upon his continual dereliction of duty during healthcare reform negotiations.

The "why" of it is a puzzle. Paul Krugman has an idea about it---an extension of observations he has been making for at least a year. The gist of it is that now everyone is seeing what Obama is made of: nothing. Could be. It's possible that Obama was never anything more than a legislator-poet; a guy with a great broadcast voice (when he's not stammering all over himself) and enough charisma to be able to make any of his ideas seem perfectly reasonable to a wide spectrum of people.

A competing idea, just as prosaic as Krugman's but with more of the ring of truth to me, is that while Obama really does possess the attributes of leadership, intelligence, ideals, and virtue that so many of his partisans clearly perceived during the election cycle, he is psychologically and unemotionally unsuited to the level of power he stepped up to. Only four years after logrolling small-time downstate legislators as an Illinois state senator, and having served barely enough time in the U.S. Senate to be oriented into its ways, voters granted Barack Obama his own DEFCON4-grade mansion, airborne command fortresses, bulletproof limousines, personal praetorian guard, and enough power to annihilate all but a dozen nations on earth with relative impunity.

Obama, the dedicated family man---kind, laid-back, hip, spiritual---must try to sleep every night under the inevitable weight of ordering or consenting in assassinations worldwide, the launch of predator drone attacks that kill innocent people, and "renditions" around the globe (I think we can assume that these have not stopped). Immediately upon his election, masses of ignorant, resentful people were whipped into a lather of hate for this well-meaning man, who epitomizes the so-called American Dream, by gleeful corporate news conglomerates, vicious national politicians, and demonic infotainers. He surrounded himself with bad (as in Evil) people in key positions, thinking it to be politically savvy because establishment Democrats told him it was "reality"), and has been cuckolded continually by their bad faith and world-destroying policy recommendations. Certainly he is now aware that he no longer has a significant political constituency---only a relative handful of people who think he's better than McCain would have been.

My current thinking, regretfully, is that Obama's talents and ambition got him to the Oval Office, but he had no idea what arriving at that destination would do to him mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It would be a miracle if he is not demoralized, despondent, isolated, afraid, and fed up. A sign of such a miracle would be if the President were behaving defiantly, deconstructing the malevolent intent of his political adversaries and proactively selling his own positions directly to the American people.

The increasing pace of Obama's political gaffes suggests to me that he's now doing it on purpose. It is possible that he is desperately hoping for a serious, qualified primary challenger. If one emerges and can poll at around 35 percent among likely Democratic voters, I'd have every expectation that he would be greatly tempted announce his intention not to seek reelection on similar grounds that LBJ pleaded after he was almost beat in the 1968 New Hampshire primary by Gene McCarthy.

A hypothetical primary challenger in 2011, like McCarthy in 1967, would most likely be a deeply dedicated progressive who is skilled at retail-level politics and at home in the corridors of power; somebody who has been in The Game for awhile. (No Blue Dog or Clintonista would even have a legitimate pretext for challenging Obama since he has been their cat's paw for 2 years now.) My guess at this point? Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

[Editor's note: I updated this post on Saturday morning to present a more nuanced viewpoint in the last several paragraphs than I was capable of accomplishing on Friday night.]