It’s unsettling when the particulars of violent incident fit so perfectly with the larger societal forces behind them. Such is the case with Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old kid walking home from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida, with candy, an iced tea, and a cell phone. He was confronted by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old prototypical case of white resentment run amok. Zimmerman shot and killed him in what is becoming increasingly clear was cold-blooded murder.

Keeping in mind that at its core, this is just a really awful and sad case in which an innocent kid was shot for–I guess–walking while black, it’s hard to ignore the implications because Fox News has made them so clear with its weirdly naked coverage.

Fox News taps deeply into what John McCain called “the ugly side of American populism.” Part of the fuel it runs on is the white racial resentment that is so disproportionately responsible for Republican electoral success over the last forty years. Fox not only failed to cover the murder of Trayvon Martin at first, but has made a bizarre pivot to using the incident to attack proponents of gun control.

Zimmerman is almost the physical embodiment of the stereotypical white male that conservative media caters to: threatened by the demographic reality that whites are becoming a minority, fueled by resentment that his opportunities are vanishing not because of a globalizing world and failed American economic policies (largely decided by the political faction he supports) but because of racial boogeyman at every turn. A member of a gated community’s “neighborhood-watch” project, Zimmerman had made upwards of 50 calls to police to report suspicious activity and ignored the advice of the dispatcher to not confront Martin.

Without pointing to “gun rights advocates” (because the last time I did that on this blog I got some responses that were borderline “file a police report”), one can draw such an easy line between outlets like Fox and the behavior of a certain core of white crusaders, that I feel like you have to be delusional to not see it. Fomenting racial hysteria has a long history on the American Right, and over time that tactic has had to be applied much more carefully–Fox’s bread and butter.

For instance, it’s absolutely impossible to separate the Right’s hatred of Obama from his background. Many conservatives do have honest disagreements with his policies (although even this is kind of stupid given that by one of their favorite metrics, spending, Obama has actually been more conservative than Reagan), yet Republican politicians and propaganda outlets like Fox took way too long to tamp down coded slurs that tossed kerosene on the delicate situation of the first black president. The birth certificate nonsense, his secret Muslim religion, his “Kenyan anti-colonial” behavior–all of this amounted to kind of coded language Lee Atwater so famously described:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites… Because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

That so many white Americans don’t understand this con is both sad and shocking (sort of). The Age of Obama did not create this situation but it has certainly exacerbated the last gasps of the white male majority, and the connection between Fox and Zimmerman, Atwater and Trayvon Martin, Obama and the decline of the white male vote all comes from this same long line.

Among some very predictable messages and e-mails I got in response to Monday’s RedEye column, “Bieber is not a reading level,” I did get one e-mail with which I totally agree. A fellow RedEye reporter named Georgia wrote to me:

Just wanted to let you know that I liked your column but felt you overlooked one key element of the debate. In your list of “read these” books, you didn’t include one written by a female writer. But the “Hunger Games” trilogy (and the “Twilight” books) were written by a woman. It’s possible that women, particularly young women, aren’t feeling their voices reflected in the works of people like Vonnegut or Nabokov. Not saying that trite crap like “Twilight” is good just because it’s written by a woman, but there is obviously something missing. I’d have liked to see you mention a woman in your list of books or at least give a nod to the possibility that women have something to contribute to the literary landscape beyond tween romances.

And she’s absolutely right. Reading back over the column in its final published version, it dawned on me that I had singled out books written only by women to deride and only by men to praise. I have no excuse for this except to say that the examples of Tweenization are driven by female writers (again, this is not the author’s faults or the teenage girls who read them) while my favorite books happen to all be written by men. I wrote back to Georgia and told her honestly that if I had to do it over again, I would have included on that list “Beloved” by Toni Morrison and “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl.

I regret that I didn’t because I do try to read female authors, especially in the last five years after I noticed how few books by women I actually read.

My point remains, however, and in sifting through the half-literate responses from both the column’s detractors and admirers, I find it kinda funny that they failed to see the irony in writing a sentence about what an “elitist” I am with half the words misspelled and the punctuation looking like my three-year-old nephew came by for a rewrite. There was also a demonstrable lack of understanding rhetorical points. You know how in fifth grade you had those homework sheets where you had to read the paragraph and then answer questions about what the author was saying?

Here’s what I wasn’t saying: I was not saying that Tween books shouldn’t exist, nor was I saying that teenagers shouldn’t read them in order to “open them up to the other possibility of other great books” (yikes). I wasn’t even saying that adults shouldn’t read them, and I openly admitted I read plenty of junk. What I was saying is this: adults’ obsession with books intended for 14-year-olds is a bit pathetic and obnoxious. Believe me, I feel a smidgen of shame when I’m reading my junk in public, so go ahead and guilty pleasure read, yes, just actually feel the appropriate amount of actual guilt.

Secondly, If you want to call a guy who has just his B.A. and who lived for most of 2011 on an income of less than $300 a week an “elitist” by all means go ahead, but wow, are we ratcheting down the standards for that word. The propagation of the word “elitist” strikes right at the heart of many of our current predicaments: it is now a desirable social and political trait to be a f***ing idiot. Interesting.

Imagine for a second that you’re an architect and you study buildings and structures because you want to build them nicer, better, stronger, and cheaper, yet all around you see a proliferation of wasteful, badly constructed strip malls that blow apart in tornadoes like plastic bombs going off. Wouldn’t you say to people, “Hmmm, you know there’s a better way to build stuff. Here it is.”

That’s how I feel about adults reading an abundance of junk books intended for Tweens. Sure, once in a while it’s fine to build a shitty structure, but why would you want it to be the only building you ever set foot in? This is what people who read exclusively junk are missing: there are a lot of really, really, really great books out there, and if you’re not at least attempting to experience them, if you’re living your whole life in this awful strip mall of chintzy crap, you’re missing out, man. You really are.

I’m down in beautiful, underrated Cincinnati this week while I muse about how best to hitchhike a ride back to Chicago, staying with my wonderful friends Justin and Loren (“Publish This Book” fans will recall these two). They are married with two young boys and I gotta say, being a useless, mooching houseguest of two adults who you can also make dick jokes around may be my new favorite thing ever.

Think about it:

1) Their refrigerator is fully stocked with food as opposed to my apartment where I’m lucky if I remembered to have both the cereal and the milk on hand at the same time. The other night while we were watching some Food Network show where you think you might get a heart attack just from the viewing, I said to Justin, “Damnit. Now I’m starving. How late is that Wendy’s open? What is it a mile away?”

“What?” he said. “Why? We have barbecue chicken in the fridge. Just eat that.”

And sure enough, I open their refrigerator and it was like coming over a rise and finding Shangri-La, meaning they also had cut-up pineapple and Girl Scout thin mints.

2) They’re just really nice. Justin gives me Bud Lights, and the other night I was about to go out and Loren offered to iron my shirt. First of all, I don’t own an iron and ironing board and wouldn’t know what to do with either if I did. When my shirts get wrinkly, I set them on fire and go back to Goodwill to restock. But they just own grown-up stuff like that, and after two minutes while I distracted their three-year-old by flipping him upside down a bunch and tickling him, she handed me back my favorite shirt, and it looked like it did the day I bought it.

3) They have a huge TV with all the good channels. My roommate Erik and I don’t have cable because it’s a pointless expense when you can watch everything on-line, but they have that kind of cable complete with every sports channel and NBA late-night Mavs-Nuggets game I can possibly suck down. They have HBO and Showtime. Last night, I re-watched the final hour of “Game Change”, caught an episode of “Shameless” for the first time and turned the volume way down for one of those weird sex shows that runs between 2 and 4 a.m. (I am, however, on a strict no masturbating policy in their house, although Justin would never believe me).

4) They go to bed at like 10 p.m. People with young kids are usually appalled by my sleeping schedule, which borders on schizophrenia. I’m never sure when I’m tired and can operate about the same on 2 hours of sleep as I can on 12. Their new baby, of course, wakes up in the middle of the night and they have to feed him. Justin and I have developed a regular date at around 3:35 a.m. when he stumbles from his bedroom into the living room bleary-eyed and exhausted to find the kid’s bottle and looks at me like I’m a used tampon he stepped on in the bathroom of a homeless shelter. It’s really cute.

5) I can be the cool uncle. With their older son, all I had to do was show up with a present and dance really weirdly to the music of all of his toddler shows, and let him steal the soccer ball from me every few minutes after he’s thrown himself all over the yard trying to get it. He thinks all this is incredibly interesting, including when I drew a picture on his chalkboard of his dad barfing. Yet at the same time I will never have to exercise any discipline with him or even remotely pretend like I’m an authority figure. This is great, and should a condom break, this will also be my policy with my own child.

As the “Hunger Games” film hits theaters this week, I have to vent for a second. Once—just once!—I would love it if someone would recommend a book to me that was not originally intended for a 14-year-old girl.

Watching people read on the”L,”I can only conclude that adults have entirely given up reading anything not written for young women who still secretly think they’re going to marry Justin Bieber.

I say this not as a total literature snob. This is not a direct broadside against the “Hunger Games,” “Twilight” or any other book series. I guilty-pleasure read all the time. Hell, I even read Dean Koontz novels, in which every main character has the exact same hyper-intelligent dog (don’t ask, and don’t read Dean Koontz). I just find it aggravating that our culture has almost entirely abandoned the pretense that it’s going to read a book written above a sixth-grade reading level.

My friend Scott calls this the complete “Tweenization” of culture. In our fractured media environment, 14-year-old white girls are the only consumer block passionate and devout enough to make any particular musician, novel or TV show explode in popularity. As different and older demographics take notice of these phenomena, they gather momentum in a severe feedback loop and suddenly college-educated adults are recommending clumsily written hackfests that are essentially rip-offs of a couple Stephen King novellas from the mid-80s (“The Long Walk” and “The Running Man”—look ‘em up).

Again, this is not to say everyone has to carry around “Notes From the Underground,” but can we at least acknowledge that people are becoming dumber, less-engaged readers and that this does not bode well for the future of the most important narrative form?

I remember getting into a massive fight with a once-girlfriend about Dan Brown after she implored me to read”The Da Vinci Code,” which is reason enough to break up with anyone. I spent that entire book wondering if “Dan Brown” was a fourth-grader who for some reason never had access to a thesaurus.

As tweets and Facebook posts become our predominate form of literature, explain to me why it won’t be more and more rare that people pick up a book that just floors them. I mean the kind of book that makes you glad to be alive. A book that’s like adding an entirely new wing to your brain. I remember the first time I read those books: “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov,”The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.

A novel is like no other artistic form. A film ends after two hours. Music sits in the background. Even the greatest painting disappears into the wall after you look at it long enough. But you have to live with a novel. You have to spend time with it and give it your attention. When you’re reading a brilliant book, it’s like you lend a part of yourself to it.

Having said all that, readers should look forward to my upcoming novel, “VampBieber Games.” It’s Justin Beiber fighting vampires for 300 pages. I’m going to make a billion dollars.

It should come as no surprise that as a happy proponent of vulgarity, I don’t think there’s much point in TV, radio, newspapers and other media censoring language.

Let’s focus on a specific case: the word to which my parents referred when I was very young as “the S-H word,” always warning me not to say it before promptly applying it in all manner of situations, from describing the head of my mother’s boss to my father’s reaction when I yanked the banister out of the wall while playing “Back to the Future.”

This specific word has gained a measure of mainstream respect lately, all but working itself into the title of William Shatner sitcoms and Internet memes that media must then report on as “‘Stuff’ White Girls Say.” (Spoiler alert: It’s mostly about “The Bachelor” and/or pretending to not know about “The Bachelor.”)

This begs the question of why we still purport to call this a “bad” word. First of all, vulgarity is good for art. It’s good for creativity. The poet Carl Sandburg once said that slang is “a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” Therefore, it’s bizarre that the collective wisdom of mainstream media still believes that if you bleep a word or use an absurd “#$%!” stand-in, somehow that raises the discourse rather than making everyone feel silly.

Secondly, language has only the power with which we imbue it. A century ago, religious blasphemy and words such as “damn” were considered the height of profanity, but obviously we barely register those examples consciously today. In 100 years I find it unlikely anyone will think twice about this word, and people’s agitation will arise from some as-yet-unknown slur, which future namby-pambys will deem vulgar—perhaps even “namby-pamby.”

Take the example of presidential candidate Rick Santorum, whose name—thank you, Dan Savage—will continue to hold its lunch-losing definition long after he vanishes from the national scene. There is no reason to fear the word “plonder” right now, but if I were to launch an intensive campaign to define “plonder” as a “monkey placenta one hollows out to lose his virginity to” you can bet the Tribune Company and its affiliated papers would no longer be able to include it in print.

We descriptivists understand that language is fluid and that even the worst of today’s vulgarity could turn up as tomorrow’s “Gee willikers, fellas, this rhubarb ain’t even ripe yet!” (For some reason, all my fantasies of the future involve gangs of “fellas” picking rhubarb.)

Finally and most importantly, I’ve always found it totally counterintuitive that we hardly blink an eye at all kinds of societal vulgarity yet are so firmly wedded to our outdated ideas of supposed indecency. God forbid a kid sees a boob on TV or hears a slang description of feces while political leaders lie us into multibillion-dollar wars, financiers set the economy ablaze, fossil fuel industries fund anti-scientific propaganda campaigns while the world burns, and cults of old white men tell women what they can’t do with their reproductive organs.

These are perfect examples of society’s actual vulgarity, and frankly, all of those namby-pambys—they can eat my plonder.

(HBO)

I have a new favorite sexytime thought, which is Julianne Moore playing Sarah Palin.

Let me just dwell on this for a second before launching into my thoughts on the HBO docudrama “Game Change” because Moore is one of those actresses who no adolescent male who ever saw “Boogie Nights” has been able to get out of their heads in the subsequent 1.5 decades. Then she’s popping up all the time in great films like “The Kids Are All Right” to remind us just how twisted our fantasies of a woman 20-30 years our elder actually are, and to top it all off she goes and plays Sarah Palin–hands-down the most attractive national political figure of all time (all apologies, Millard Filmore).

As for “Game Change” the film, it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect: a tasty guilty pleasure flick with no new or unsurprising information, a docudrama that injects you into the machinations of the doomed 2008 McCain campaign, offering a hyper-speed narrative of one of the most disastrous decisions by a presidential candidate in American political history.

To absolutely toot my own horn for a second (which is ultimately the point of blogging), I wrote an essay for RadarOnline about terrible vice-presidential choices right after McCain picked Palin, high-lighting some of histories worst VP nominees (no longer available on-line, sadly). This was just before Palin’s gangbusters convention speech, after which somebody wrote a comment to the effect of, “Looks like you’re eating your words, Markley.”

To answer your question, yes it really is tough being so right all the time. “Game Change” dramatizes what any observer could easily see about Palin as soon as she became the choice: she was way out of her depth, both emotionally and intellectually. While there may be a few dittoheads still convinced she’s a savior and that the liberal media screwed her from the start, this was evident to any remotely fair observer both now and at the time. It also says something particularly bleak about American politics that a character like Palin could so easily enrapture so many people when she was clearly a figure of such slight substance.

This is perhaps not giving Palin enough credit though. Best summarized by Joshua Green’s fascinating piece for The Atlantic, Palin actually fought the Alaskan Republican Party tooth and nail to enact a number of very smart reforms. Her rise in that state was almost more remarkable than her selection as VP, a testament to her connection with a certain subset of voters.

That connection with voters is, unfortunately, very real, and the film touches on that quite well. When people accused Barack Obama of being an empty vessel, they wildly misunderestimated the man, his intellect, and his understanding of American realpolitik. His political opponents and enemies have basically sought to unseat him as president by watching the world burn and objecting to just about everything he does, tries to do, or thinks about doing, which has left this country far worse off. Palin on the other hand really was the ultimate celebrity, and when one of McCain’s advisers calls the 2008 election a “reality show,” he’s exactly right. That effect on politics has not worn off, nor will it in the 2012 election. It’s actually the reason the Republicans would probably be better off nominating a celebrity candidate–not Palin, but Palinesque–than the interminable Mitt Romney. Romney is so far from an ability to connect with a voter on an emotional level–however misplaced and disorganized those emotions and the thought process leading to them may be–that he’s on the other side of the planet from a Sarah Palin. His nomination will probably be a disaster in the exact opposite way.

Other than Moore’s eerie Palin channeling, “Game Change” features a fantastic performance by Woody Harrelson as campaign manager Steve Schmidt and a solid Ed Harris as John McCain. If the film has a flaw, it’s that I’d much rather be in McCain’s head than Palin’s. I get Palin. I have friends back in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who remind me exactly of Palin: great people, wouldn’t want them to be on the school board, let alone president.

McCain is the more interesting story because he essentially spent eight years learning the lesson of 2000 in the exact wrong way. Cornered by history, he took a chance on a woman who would have been a complete catastrophe had the stresses of office put him in cardiac arrest after year one. His gamble was really more our gamble. As played by Harris, McCain seems shockingly uninvolved and disinterested in his historic blunder and it reconfirms why he was ill-suited to serve in the office he was seeking.

“Game Change” is by no means art. It’s a dizzying spin through an interesting piece of history, much like director Jay Roach’s other smart political time capsule “Recount.” It’s mostly a guilty pleasure for political nerds. Yet its lesson could not be more important to remember: substance and competency, above all else, matters in an elected official. That may be boring, but I’d rather have a boring rule of thumb than another interesting situation like the rise and fall of Sarah Palin. We should prize good policy over good HBO flicks.

Dear American Right-Wing,

I’m confused.

Let me just check and make sure I have this correct: we’re still doing the whole, Obama, the Radical Afro-centric Leftist thing?

Like, you, Right Wing, you’re still on this whole fantasy that our President, Barack Obama, is secretly a radical socialist who can’t wait to give black people reparations? That’s what you deduced from this new video where, 20 years ago, at Harvard, he defended a professor named Derrick Bell? This, Andrew Breitbart, was your parting shot? And this, Sean Hannity, was what you were masturbating over? Maybe I just don’t understand.

Had this been 2008, I might have gone in to defending some of Bell’s controversial views or pointing out that in this supposedly scandalous video, Obama is not defending any of Bell’s views but speaking on behalf of diversity in higher education, but why bother now?

More importantly, I’d like to understand if we–you and me, Right Wing–even exist in the same reality. Because while you are still trying to prove that Obama secretly wants to appoint Bill Ayers Secretary of Education and free Mumia Abu-Jamal in order to put him in charge of HUD, I’ve been watching a guy who invaded a sovereign nation we’re not at war with to put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s head.

I’ve been watching a dude, who regularly sends unmanned drones all over the world to assassinate by presidential fiat those who may do America harm, and I stress “may” since all these extrajudicial assassinations are not subject to any kind of oversight. This lefty sent his Attorney General to tell us that all of these activities even apply to American citizens.

So I just want to make sure that we’re talking about the same guy. The “socialist” who enacted a health care reform package designed by the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation and who wants to control pollution through a method designed by Republicans and enacted in different circumstances by a Republican president to stop acid rain.

This is the same Obama–and stop me if I’m wrong–who’s actions to save the world from economic catastrophe involved virtually no penalties for the financial actors that caused it? Because one might assume that a “radical leftist” when given the perfect opportunity with his boot on the throat of American capitalism might have at least applied pressure? I don’t know, I’m just spit-balling here.

And your ideas are to re-litigate the use of birth control, end Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as we know them and redistribute that money to the wealthiest people in the economy? That’s what you’re saying?

Jeez, I’m just such a dummy, I guess I can’t quite understand: Because Obama does not want to immediately bomb Iran back to the stone age, this means that he is “feckless”? So the new threshold for being a “not feckless” president is to immediately begin wars without a second thought? And the guy who used an international coalition and American air power to unseat Libya’s dictator who reigned for over thirty years, this is the guy we’re talking about? The guy “apologizing for America” who just shocked China by tying up the entire Pacific in a U.S. military and economic sphere of influence without anyone even realizing what he was up to? We’re talking about the same person? As I keep saying over and over again, if Barack Obama were named Bill O’Brien and had a (R) by his name, everyone left of Rick Santorum would be worshipping him as the Second Coming of Reagan.

And I keep getting even more confused because sometimes you call him this radical socialist who’s ruining the country with his extreme agenda but then you’re all like, no he’s a weak and ineffective Carter-esque loser? These are both simultaneously what you think even though they are completely contradictory in every way?

Ok, just checking.

NOAA/NWS

This weekend saw the largest tornado outbreak for the month of March on record with 279 tornado warnings issued and at least 38 people killed. Entire towns were ripped out of the ground across Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia following Illinois’s outbreak days earlier.

Without a doubt we have not seen the end of this spring’s deadly tornadoes. 2011 had the most tornadoes in U.S. history but no one will be surprised if 2012 proves worse.

And the villain here? Climate change.

Climate scientists have long predicted that all storms that get their fuel from latent heat and water vapor will become more powerful, including severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes. Because we are changing the atmosphere and heating the planet so quickly, it’s hard to look at any severe weather outside of the context of those factors. If some of the complex computer models bear out, we can expect to see tornado season earlier due to a warmer winter, more severe, and moving geographically from the less populated states of Oklahoma and Kansas into the southeast and Midwest where the potential for damage and loss of life increases.

Obviously the specific science is incredibly complicated and the link remains difficult to prove conclusively, but as Elizabeth Kolbert, one of the most gifted journalists writing on climate, put it after last year’s Joplin super-tornado, “The underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.”

What I find most frustrating, however, is the media’s utter inability to put anything happening in the world in the context of the most powerful force that in human history. From Texas drought to unrest in Syria to destabilization in Pakistan, extreme weather events, fueled, caused and owing directly to our warming planet are driving social, political, and economic chaos. Yet no one is talking about these forces or attempting to put them in perspective for a public that is disengaged and apathetic. And it’s not just the know-nothings in the Republican presidential field or climate denialist organizations. From our President to network news to Jon Stewart, there has been a failure of communication and urgency that cannot continue.

On a mini-side note, as if we needed further evidence that Ron Paul is a kook, he claimed that “The people who live in tornado alley, just as I live in hurricane alley, they should have insurance.” Adding, “There is no such thing as federal money. Federal money is just what they steal from the states and steal from you and me.”

Putting aside the basic inanity and uselessness of that comment (yes, because I’m sure all the people living in poor rural areas slammed by a global recession are putting tornado insurance as their first priority ahead of car payments, home payments, heating, electric bills, food, rent, diapers, etc., etc., etc.), it also demonstrates (Wait, one more thing: there’s no such thing as “federal” money but there is such a thing as “state money”? Don’t states need to tax people to get that money and isn’t that the exact same socialist nightmare as the federal government taxing you? Libertarians are such morons) exactly the conundrum we will face in the age of austerity. These disasters are going to come faster and harder and the amount of money we are putting into disaster relief is anemic at best. FEMA’s budget will have to grow if we’re going to keep states like Louisiana from total collapse.

Taking the Bayou state as an example, if it weren’t for enormous amounts of federal money the triple disasters of Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, and the Gulf oil spill would probably have turned that entire region into a ghost town. When we’re suffering through these types of tornado seasons, followed by spring flooding season, Hurricane season and wildfire season, the federal government will need to be armed to the teeth with relief plans, resources and funding.

(Josh Sullivan, Getty photo / February 29, 2012)

With Super Tuesday a kind of Romney-leaning wash, it appears as if the Republican field will march forward on their snipe hunt. Even though I still think it’s mostly inconceivable that Romney won’t be the nominee, I’m done predicting anything about this cluster.

Well, except for this: there’s been a lot of chatter in political gossip circles about a “white knight” candidate coming in at the last second to join the field or a brokered convention in which an alternative to the Romney-Santorum-Gingrich-Paul fiasco snatches up the nomination in a shocking twist. Bill Kristol basically writes a column a week about how great it would be if another candidate entered the fray. Oodles of blog inches have been given to the weird delegate rules in several states because apparently these guys aren’t actually bound to vote for the candidate who won in their state (begging the question, why bother with a primary or caucus?). Way too many smart people have this fanciful notion that a candidate could shock the conventional wisdom by jumping into the race.

I promise you this will not happen for several reasons.

First of all, none of the candidates Republican apparatchiks like Kristol are talking about are any less flawed than a Romney or Santorum. New Jersey governor Chris Christie has near-liberal positions on several key issues (like immigration) and always looks like he just got done eating a hoagie. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels may have the political skills to win a couple of statewide races in a conservative state, but he’s a soft-spoken, unfiery guy–hardly someone the base will barnstorm for–and he made the downright heretical comment that Republicans should lay off the culture wars. Jeb Bush has his brother’s abysmal legacy to contend with, not to mention the Republican field has moved well to the right of Bush-era policy positions (Jesus, how weird is that to say?). Paul Ryan, the moment he got into the race, would face a bombardment of SuperPac ads that would tout his plan for Medicare as a way to pull the plug on granny.

Secondly, what people like Kristol and many in the punditocracy never acknowledge is that running for president is really, really hard. There is so little room for error. Every comment, every past screw-up, every action, thought, and word uttered faces an obscene amount of scrutiny. Take Rick Perry for example. There was a guy who looked perfect for this year’s Republican contest in every way. Even I thought he had the strongest chance of winning the field, and yet a few lousy debate performances later and he became a laughingstock. Or take little Timmy Pawlenty, T-Paw, as we call him. That guy had a few weak-kneed answers, lost the Ames straw poll to Michelle Bachmann and went down in flames because he couldn’t raise money.

That’s why candidates spend years learning to run for president, and especially why the Republican field usually nominates the guy who’s next in line. People rib Barack Obama for starting his run for president as soon as he got to the Senate, but in reality, most candidates spend years preparing to run, and to think that you can just hop in on a whim and grasp the enormity of the task is absurd.

Finally, one of the reasons the Republican field is having such a weird, tough, harsh contest is because of the consistent right-ward march of the base. The Republican Party base essentially exists in its own talk radio, Fox News reality where they all sit around repeating the same myths and falsehoods to each other about everything from the auto bailout to climate change to the housing crisis to contraception. They want purity, which is part of the reason they’re so hesitant to give it to Romney and why even a staunch Movement Conservative like Rick Santorum gets raked over the coals for some of his “big government” votes during the Bush era, which these whackos now imagine as some kind of liberal plot.

Everyone knows that if the Republicans were to nominate a hard-line candidate to the base’s liking it would spell total doom in the general election, yet their more electable candidates are considered heretics by the base. It makes finding the right nominee to take on Obama fantastically difficult, and it doesn’t matter if Ryan, Daniels, Christie, Bush, Rubio, Haley, and Huckabee all got into the race, they would still face the same conundrum.

(REUTERS/Micah Walter)

This may be an unpopular point of view, but why exactly was everyone clamoring for Rush Limbaugh to apologize? I don’t understand.

When he called Sandra Fluke, advocate of expanded access to birth control, a “slut” and a “prostitute” he got exactly what he wanted which was wall-to-wall media coverage. Both the “mainstream” and progressive media spheres gave him exactly what he craves.

Obviously, I completely agree with Fluke on the merits of her argument and do not with Limbaugh, to say the least. But look, guys, Limbaugh is a caricature of himself. He’s a loud, idiotic spouter of nonsense, conspiracy theory and general claptrap, who hasn’t been worth acknowledging for twenty years. His job is to say inflammatory things that stick it to all those he perceives as his enemies, so it’s not like he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when he says stuff like that. Sure, I’m glad that he’s losing sponsors, including Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert, the owner of my basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, but they will be replaced and talk radio will march forward regardless.

Furthermore, we’ve got to get out of playing the umbrage game every time someone says something un-PC. Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a “faggot”. Trent Lott says segregationist Strom Thurmond should have been president. Barack Obama makes light of the “Special Olympics” on Leno. So what? None of this stuff is ever worth the column inches and talking head exasperation devoted to it. What would be better for everyone involved is if we started treating anti-intellectual squawking loons like Coulter and Limbaugh as the ghettoized weirdos they are. Instead of demanding apologies from people who don’t mean it, can’t we just let Stewart and Colbert take care of this?

Plus, I’m basically a free speech absolutist. Unlike, say, dumping money into a congressional race to protect the interests of your extractive industry, this is actually a case of free speech. Limbaugh has every right to say something that strange and incriminating. I mean, come on: if you think a thrice-divorced, balding, overweight, spittle-flecked, wealthy woman-hater like Limbaugh, who in his box of hyper-masculinity so clearly feels threatened by any woman who appears smarter than him (which is obviously many of them), hasn’t employed the services of an actual prostitute, I’ve got a talk radio show I want to sell you.