Southern Beale - January 29, 2011 | 9:27 pm · Link

This strikes me as the mother of all vanity projects and as such is destined to be a gigantic FAIL. However, the Villagers will all no doubt devote many column inches to analyzing every possible angle simple because this is a story made for Villager navel gazing.

So I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it.

Jim, Foolish Literalist - January 29, 2011 | 9:32 pm · Link

Mark takes the idea of honor very seriously, far more than most people these days

Yeesh. McCain’s not the only one in McCainland who’s living a life of delusion. If the McCainiacs, including the grumpy little rage-oholic, have such finely tuned senses of “honor”, did I miss the apology for unleashing Palin on the American body politic?

I don’t think much of Huffington, but “courtesan”? THat’s another embarrassing reflection on Salter.

Cat Lady - January 29, 2011 | 9:33 pm · Link

Oh fer fuck’s sake. They should all just get a room.

junebug - January 29, 2011 | 9:34 pm · Link

That all was just a few days ago—think about it. Muslims came together to protect Coptic Christians and it worked. And then the next thing is to protest the dictator who has had a state of emergency installed since he came into office.

Yutsano - January 29, 2011 | 9:40 pm · Link

“I think one of the keys to understanding Mark is to think of him as someone who probably should’ve been born 300 years ago,” said Republican consultant Todd Harris, who worked with Salter on McCain’s 2000 campaign. “He would have made a very good honor-bound knight, willing to duel and fight to the death if his reputation has been besmirched.

Umm…really? There were still knights fighting duels and defending their reputations 300 years ago? Maybe in Japan, and that’s not really the correct terminology, but somehow I highly doubt that’s what Harris is referring to here. I’m gonna call that a big ol’ swing and a miss and move on with my life.

Origuy - January 29, 2011 | 9:42 pm · Link

As Albion’s Seed points out, the South was settled largely by the Cavaliers who lost the English Civil War to Cromwell. They held on to the Royalist cause and doubtless felt vindicated by the Restoration.

asiangrrlMN - January 29, 2011 | 9:44 pm · Link

Why can’t I get a book published if this tripe is allowed to see the light of day?

MikeJ - January 29, 2011 | 9:49 pm · Link

@asiangrrlMN: Is your book entitled, “Why is the black black blackity black man so mean to me?” Regnery would probably sign you right away, and even arrange for a few thousand copies to be bought in bulk.

jl - January 29, 2011 | 9:51 pm · Link

The political literature fit for this age has all been written long ago. Not sure why or how that happened. Some adventurous scientist into researching clairvoyance, time warps, and epochal time shift synchronicity should look into it (before they gut the NSF).

Some fun ones that come to mind are
Troilus and Cressida (Shakes version)
Glengarry Glen Ross
Gilded Age
Naked Lunch
Dead Souls
Whatever the most deranged and loathsome thing Celine wrote is.

I didn’t mention anything by de Sade, since that is more of mid 20th century thing, IMHO.

For public safety and nurturing of our precious youth, we should make a list of edifying literature that should be read instead of these dangerous novels, lest any innocent be tempted, and be lead to intellectual and moral corruption, and a general ‘blah’ feeling that will not go away.

Edit: what is the Euripides play where the national heroes turn out to be greedy dull witted crazy emotionally sick halfwits who bludgeon people to death with clubs for no particular reason. That one too.

BruceFromOhio - January 29, 2011 | 9:52 pm · Link

Mark takes the idea of honor very seriously, far more than most people these days.

And ignoring the vast yawning chasm between real honor and the ‘the idea of honor’ appears to be a reflexive behavior in this case.

@asiangrrlMN:

Why can’t I get a book published if this tripe is allowed to see the light of day?

Because you have to write this claptrap anonymously, and you have to know the ‘correct’ email addresses.

Oh, and you have to sell your mortal soul into pitiful, wretched slavery for all your living days.

lamh32 - January 29, 2011 | 9:56 pm · Link

There is a God. Notice though, he won’t own up to his presidency’s culpability in what ’s happening now. Obama is attempting to clean up his mess!

Bush: I’m Done With Politics[W. says he won’t campaign, fundraise, or criticize Obama]

You won’t see George W. Bush hitting the campaign trail in 2012; he’s sworn off politics for good, he tells C-SPAN in an interview airing tomorrow night. “I don’t want to go out and campaign for candidates, I don’t want to be used as a perpetual money-raiser, I don’t want to be on these talk shows giving my opinion,” Bush said, in an excerpt spotted by Politics Daily. “Despite the fact that I’m now on TV, I don’t want to be on TV.”

Bush also reiterated that he doesn’t want to second-guess or criticize President Obama. “I think it’s bad for the country, frankly,” he said. “It’s tough enough to be president as it is without a former president undermining the current president.” He said he wanted to “regain anonymity, to a certain extent. And being out of the press … is something that makes me very comfortable, and its somewhat liberating, frankly.”

Yutsano - January 29, 2011 | 9:59 pm · Link

@KG: Not sure if I would describe either of the characters involved as knights, but IIRC that led directly to the outlawing of dueling in the US. Or it was on its way out and this was the final straw or something like that. But when Harris says knight he’s not describing Aaron Burr methinks.

jl - January 29, 2011 | 10:01 pm · Link

@asiangrrlMN:

You need to study this type of novel very carefully, and practice in writing the zero dimensional characters, trite situation, the 1000 percent unlifelike dialog, and utter emotional, intellectual and spiritual emptiness of the worldview.

I don’t mean to offend you asiangrrlMN, but I am just not sure you are down to that standard. Ask yourself, ‘Can I really write that badly?’ Be honest.

I could end with the advice that you should go and live that life, and gain that life experience, but that would be a kind of wickedness that might get me sent down to hellfire fer sher.

Hope that helps.

junebug - January 29, 2011 | 10:02 pm · Link

@asiangrrlMN:

Nobody cares. Or you signal it all for free. Is there a pie filter for you?

Jim, Foolish Literalist - January 29, 2011 | 10:03 pm · Link

also, too, how does publishing what is essentially a hit piece anonymously square with “honor”?

dmsilev - January 29, 2011 | 10:06 pm · Link

@lamh32: Based on their behavior after leaving office, Bush is a better person than Cheney. Now, I freely grant that this is setting the bar so low that even the best of today’s mining technology can’t reach low enough to retrieve it, but at least it’s something.

dms

dmsilev - January 29, 2011 | 10:08 pm · Link

@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well, he was going to slap Obama with a glove, but decided that getting shot by the Secret Service wasn’t worth it. Quasi-anonymous hit pieces are only slightly less honorable.

dms

The Dangerman - January 29, 2011 | 10:13 pm · Link

“O: The Presidential Novel” anagrams to “Deep Vitriol Heals Noten”; other than a bit of a spelling problem, it seems apropos.

hilts - January 29, 2011 | 10:15 pm · Link

@Southern Beale:

That was a great analysis.

Speaking of why America is so afraid –
John Bolton and Mark Levin dissing the protesters
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/.....acy-bolton

Chad N Freude - January 29, 2011 | 10:16 pm · Link

The LA Times didn’t think much of the book. Sample:

. . . the editors of Simon & Schuster, none of whom knew the author’s name, worked on the final version. What that says about the condition of the manuscript as submitted or, more worryingly, the decline of standards at a distinguished publishing house, are topics for another day.

A warning to those among us who have knee-jerk reactions to references to writers they don’t like: The reviewer, Tim Rutten, whose work I like, has nice things to say about Joe Klein in his review.

Chad N Freude - January 29, 2011 | 10:18 pm · Link

@lamh32:

“Despite the fact that I’m now on TV, I don’t want to be on TV.”

So who is making him go on TV against his will?

asiangrrlMN - January 29, 2011 | 10:23 pm · Link

Self-promo here. Thanks to everyone who voted on my poll over at ABL’s place as to what my ‘nym should be. It was a difficult decision. You can read the results here.

Benjamin Cisco (mobile) - January 29, 2011 | 10:24 pm · Link

This word he keeps using, ” honor.” Definitely does NOT mean what he thinks it means.

Chad N Freude - January 29, 2011 | 10:28 pm · Link

@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This “When I do it it’s Good and Pure” is nothing new. Ayn Rand was a supernova of hypocrisy.

jl - January 29, 2011 | 10:32 pm · Link

@Southern Beale:

I liked first part of the piece that concentrated on the rickety and dishonest foundations of post Cold War US Security and financial regime, and what that has meant for the many of the people of the Middle East.

But I can’t agree with this part:

“There is bound to be great suffering in Egypt, we pray for a smooth transition, but if the Egyptians are only left to handle their own affairs, who doubts that the polity that will emerge from this chaos will be more responsive to human rights, and will strike a blow against the fetters of anti-Arab racism that have chained the American mind.”

I think any sensible person can both “pray for a smooth transition” to something better while they also doubt that “the polity that will emerge from this chaos will be more responsive to human rights”.

In revolutions, force and chance may decide what happens, and great progress may be made, or they may be thrown back into repression. Or chaos may continue. That is the nature of revolutions, like it or not.

I am very glad that the French threw off tyranny but the process was long, terrible, and heartbreaking.

I also wonder if the author got a little caught up in the Palestinian issue. Perhaps the mass of the people in Egypt see it as about Palestine too, but that would be a dangerous mixing of too different issues. What would be the result of a revolutionary Egyptian government that saw much of its rationale as being ‘about Palestine’. Seems to me, a good chance of armed conflict, or economic turmoil that would hurt any progress in Egypt.

We simply do not know what will come of this. I watched a youtube clip of an Egyptian talking about the revolution, and he got so chocked up, he could barely speak. It was very moving and inspiring, but given the uncertainty and the great stakes, also very sobering.

I hope things go well, and the wingnuts’ and neocons’ fantasies are not taken seriously, since that would mess up things even further here, and mean little good for Egypt or Tunisia, or Lebanon.

hueyplong - January 29, 2011 | 10:35 pm · Link

Maybe his doppelganger would be “M”.
——-

So it would be a central European child killer in a Fritz Lang movie?

Well, maybe so.

General Stuck - January 29, 2011 | 10:40 pm · Link

@Southern Beale:

The reason is simple as American Pie. We are congenitally a people primed for instant, or short term gratification. Not only in economic and financial matters, but in everything we do. And foreign policy is certainly no exception. And when it comes to the ME, we have multiple personality disorder. We want everyone to have democracy, not only for something to share in common with them, but because everyone knows, it is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

So we prop up corrupt dictatorships for the return of stability, at the cost of alienating entire worlds and countries, for whatever immediate gratification, or fear. With the ME, it is primarily oil, at this point in time, that keeps our engines running for the instant gratification of soccer moms and Wall Street tycoons, with a system of money fueled politics. And to get that oil, we need stable countries that have it, and to get stable countries, we have to interfere with that countries natural pol ecology and social evolution. All for short term interests, always money, except for Israel, and even that is for money to a large degree. And when you essentially damn up the hopes and dreams of the citizens of these countries, and render them powerless to design their own fate, we get what we see in Egypt. I use the analogy of US long term policy of fighting and putting out every forest fire in this country, going back decades. Intervening in natural ecology that is the forest fire, allowing unburnt fuel to build up and that create a white hot inferno that is unstopable.

At this point in time, Israel can fully defend itself, though they are still a major factor in overall stability in that part of the world. So we are left with oil, and the addicts eternal denial of the next fix will make everything all right, for a while, until it turns about and nothing will make it better but complete abstinence, and letting the chips fall where they will. And unless some genius soon discovers the mystery of Fusion, and releases us from our oil addiction, we are headed for more military involvement in the angry sand box, and have no one to blame but ourselves for not doing everything we could to not let it come to that.

This has been an authorized hot air release

Southern Beale - January 29, 2011 | 10:42 pm · Link

What is with these hacks writing anonymous books about campaign novels? First Joe Klein and now Salter?

Pfft. Get a real job,

I bet Sarah Palin “writes” one … oh wait, forget it. The anonymous part is a deal breaker for her.

jl - January 29, 2011 | 10:42 pm · Link

@Southern Beale: Neither am I, so even though I disagreed with the last half of the article, thanks for posting it. Gave some interesting leads for further reading and blog searching.

Chad N Freude - January 29, 2011 | 10:48 pm · Link

@Southern Beale: But her ghost writer would be anonymous.

Chad N Freude - January 29, 2011 | 10:51 pm · Link

@hilts: She reads all of ‘em.

Anne Laurie - January 29, 2011 | 11:12 pm · Link

@Origuy:

As Albion’s Seed points out, the South was settled largely by the Cavaliers who lost the English Civil War to Cromwell. They held on to the Royalist cause and doubtless felt vindicated by the Restoration.

Well, to strip some of the gilt off that statement: The white South was settled largely by the bloody-minded, incurably tribalist losers to the cutting-edge technology that made it more profitable for the early-eighteenth-century Masters of the Universe to farm sheep than people. A handful of weathly aristocrats with inadequate social timing were sent to the “New World” to supervise the vast supply of excess peasantry, aka indentured servants, from those (literally) beyond-the-Pale regions where they’d spent many centuries refining their skills at hardscrabble farming and border raids. When those ‘Scots-Irish’ tenants proved unsatisfactory for the new factory-farming of tobacco, cotton, and indigo, the entrepreneurial class replaced them with actual slaves, mitigating the insult (and ensuring that the new African immigrants would not be able to find common cause with the ‘hillbillys’) by inventing a form of caste isolation that their cousins on the other side of the world would eventually label apartheid. It was a truly genius move by the top ten percent or so of the new class of Southern Gentlemen, and the rest of us are still paying for their “success”... not least the sullen no-hopers still waving Confederate flags and using what little political power they have to guarantee that they, and their children, and the rest of us will all continue to suffer.

Origuy - January 29, 2011 | 11:40 pm · Link

@Anne Laurie:
Yeah, I was being sloppy. The Cavaliers, as the upper class, set the tone for the culture.
I didn’t finish Albion’s Seed, by the way. I had to take it back to the library before I got to the part about the Scots-Irish. Been meaning to get back to it.

Svensker - January 30, 2011 | 12:01 am · Link

@asiangrrlMN:

Lemon meringue and black satin, maybe that’s junebug’s favorite color scheme?

Jim, Foolish Literalist - January 30, 2011 | 12:13 am · Link

@Calouste: I don’t know, it would certainly have been more accurate, but some editor saw that, and they kept it. Crude choice by Salter, sloppy work by the editor(s).

Anne Laurie - January 30, 2011 | 1:00 am · Link

@Yutsano:

There were still knights fighting duels and defending their reputations 300 years ago? Maybe in Japan, and that’s not really the correct terminology, but somehow I highly doubt that’s what Harris is referring to here.

Those were the illusionary Victorian knights of Walter Scott’s inflamed imagination. If you’ve never read LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, it’s still got a lot to offer about the South, in all its resilient-as-any-other-zombie “glory”.

Anne Laurie - January 30, 2011 | 1:13 am · Link

@Calouste:

I think the word Salter probably was looking for was “courtier”.

No, the anti-Ariana slant any time for the last several decades is that she, well, chose the men in her life with an eye to the main chance. The nasty stories go back to her Cambridge days (according to someone who was in the debating society at the time), but Vanity Fair’s coverage of her marriage to Michael Huffington, his ensuing political career, and the messy ending to both his career and their marriage permanently cemented the meme.

Heck, no good Villager would ever diss the noble career of a courtier!

Yutsano - January 30, 2011 | 1:28 am · Link

@DW:

I’m a little confused – how exactly was Salter’s honor insulted?

He let someone below his station get the better of him. Duh.

bob h - January 30, 2011 | 5:44 am · Link

How can one be bitter about an electoral defeat and reputational collapse that was entirely due to the candidate’s own inadequacy?