Classes start tomorrow, and I’m getting organized tonight: doing computer chores, setting up a new printer, making sure I know where I’m going and when, and finding out whether I’ll be “behind” on assignments before I even locate the classrooms… So I’ll have to add more later. But what follows made me laugh so much I’m using it fill the “dead air.” I don’t know who did the transcription, where to find it (I’ve googled), or which Prairie Home Companion show it was on, but apparently the ELCA statement on same-sex relationships made the “News From Lake Wobegon” (thanks, JC!). I don’t think anyone will ever characterize the text more perfectly:

By Garrison Keillor

Pastor Ingqvist was so glad about the snow. He was thinking he might have to do a sermon on the Lutheran church, its announcement of its commission on its position on same-sex relationships and the ordination of same-sex people. But then he thought, “No, I don’t really need to do that. People are thinking about snow.” Nobody had really asked him about this commission report, which was a masterpiece of muddling through - just a masterpiece. It was a beautiful piece of writing

It’s a case where you establish a commission to take up a question that militants on either side are waving their bright shining swords, and they’re up in arms about. And you put a commission in there, and it takes three years to work at it, and it puts out a report which nobody can understand, which says that essentially nothing has changed, and yet, some things have changed, but we don’t approve of that, and yet if you went ahead on the basis of conscience and did what you wanted to do, don’t worry about us coming after you, because we wouldn’t do it. It’s sort of a “don’t ask, don’t tell, never mind” position.

And it’s beautiful. It’s a Lutheran art to take a controversial subject, and to restate the question so that nobody understands it, and then to write the response so that it has to do with nothing whatsoever. And out comes the report, and nobody can really be that angry about it, because it’s made up of all of this mishmash, this beautiful mishmash, and these sentences that are like extruded marshmallow. And so all of? the militants who would be tempted to go to battle over this… Peace is kept! On the basis of confusion! A Lutheran art, to achieve strength through indirection and vagueness. This is an irritating quality about Lutherans, and people have become angry at Lutherans. “Why don’t you say what you mean? Tell us what you think.” Well… no! No.

No matter how many militants and absolutists there are, there’s a great tide of moderation in my little town of Lake Wobegon. Moderates are people who have experienced back pain. Lower back pain. That’s what makes a moderate. When you’re your age, when you’re young, you can be extreme on these things and pick up the flag and carry it forward. But you get to be my age and you’ve experienced lower back pain and you realize, this is the crucial thing. These questions of principle and so forth, these can be put off until later.

So when I was your age, in the wintertime I used to see a piece of ice and I’d run towards it. I would run towards it and I would slide across it. And then I got to be towards my age, and I realized how treacherous the world is and how, even though you’re very careful, you can step just the wrong way off a curb, even if it is shoveled, or you can climb up over a mountain of compacted snow and ice there on a corner, and you just take one little misstep, and there’s a twinge in your lower back and now this becomes the focus of your life for a long time. This has happened to people. They go to specialists, and the specialists do X-rays, and they look at them and they murmur for a while.

And they have tried different healing solutions, and some people have, in their pain, they have left the Lutheran church, and they have gone off to the South. They have gone off to churches where people stand, and they hold their hands up in the air. Which feels good for your back. Or they encourage crying out, and shouting, which people who suffer from lower back pain often are tempted to do, anyway. And you go down to these churches, these Southern churches, and they do certain laying on of hands. Now we don’t go for that in the Lutheran church, but they do that down South, the laying on of hands, and so forth.

But it just doesn’t work, you see. Because they believe in positive thinking. They believe in putting away all negative thinking and creating positive expectations that create an aura of possibility that is powerful and that attracts success. This may work in economics. It may work in government. It doesn’t work for lower back pain.

Complaining. That’s what works. That’s what never fails to make you feel better. The moderates sit there in the Chatterbox Cafe and they talk about this weather. They just cannot believe it. It is so cold. It is so miserable. They can’t wait for winter to be over. They’re complaining. They’re Lutheran. It’s winter. They’re happy.

That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

I have time for a quick check-in. We’re in the midst of electrical work that turned out to be more of a safety issue than a mere upgrade. Renting a 1929 San Francisco house has its charms and its… nailbiters. In any case, power is on and off, and when it’s off, there’s no phone or DSL.

Do see this very moving Auschwitz memorial piece by Aharon Appelfeld.

I watched Bush’s hastily called press conference Monday. I saw him being surly, impatient, sarcastic, insulting, and irritable. Kathryn Jean Lopez, a conservative observer, apparently saw the same press conference and declared “wow, was he in a good mood. You almost get the impression he enjoys doing these now.” That was a good mood? It must be the thrill he gets from insulting people and making them beg for information. (Did you read the transcript of the whole thing? Did you see how often the president “chuckles”? Substitute “snickers” for “chuckles” and you’ll have a much more realistic picture of the event.)

And while we’re entertaining ourselves with word substitutions, check out Michael Berube’s version of the inaugural address.

Bill McKibben, at a conference on climate change, discovers the “state of the union” in a disturbing Powerpoint presentation. This is short and worth reading.

Douglas Feith has resigned (via Atrios) “for personal and family reasons” which probably include - as Juan Cole points out - a worrisome FBI investigation.

Another conservative commentator being paid to promote Bush policies… That’s three, that we know of?

Infuriating: why the US media dismissed the Lancet study of 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead. If you have time, link through to the longer Chronicle of Higher Education story.

Molly Ivins’ reflections on Bush’s inaugural address:

…Unfortunately, the rest of the world is skeptical of Bush’s benign intent, mostly because he invaded a country that not only hadn’t done anything to us, but also was no threat to us. (There is a new line on the right that goes, “But everybody in the whole world was saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Actually, everybody wasn’t. Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors had been unable to find any, even though we claimed we knew exactly where they were and had pictures of them. Quite a few people were beginning to doubt the existence of WMD, and what “everybody in the world” was saying at the time we went to war was, “Give the inspectors more time.” In retrospect, it was quite good advice, wasn’t it?)

At other points in the speech, one was left wondering, as one so often is, about Bush’s grip on reality. Talking about his “ownership society,” he said, “By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.”

He’s delusional: He cannot possibly believe his tax cuts are making this country more just and equal — they are making it more unjust and unequal every day, not to mention getting us ever deeper into debt. One does not provide “freedom from want and fear” by privatizing Social Security. We’ve been there, we’ve done this — we tried unregulated capitalism at the end of the 19th century, and it was awful.

She also nails it on the ridiculous language war the administration is waging on “privatization.” It’s particularly amusing to watch this play out, because the press has been so completely obliging to the administration - carefully refraining from using the words “privatization” or “private accounts” - when Bush himself can’t remember his rule.

Of course Rice was confirmed, but some Democrats (and Jim Jeffords) exhibited integrity.

If the 52% who re-elected this president aren’t - as of today’s press conference - really regretting their decision, I’m scared of all of them. The (short-tempered, irritable, ill-prepared) president and his supporters. I’ll link to the transcript when I can find it (Update: it’s here.). In one gem of a statement, he acknowledged that we must be sensitive to mideast cultures and traditions and then said (essentially; I’ll find the exact quote when the transcript is up) he’d make them understand that democracy is superior. (Update:“And — and so I fully understand developing a democratic society in the — adhering to the traditions and customs of other nations will be a work in process. That’s why I said we’re talking about the work of generations. And so in my talks, in my discussions with world leaders to solve the problem of the day, I will constantly remind them about our strong belief that democracy is the way forward.” And - my mistake - it wasn’t specifically about the Middle East.) He insulted, snapped, “misled,” twitched, grimaced, clenched his teeth… He told a reporter he was acting like a “senior citizen”: “faulty memory.” He barked answers. He told reporters he would only call on the ones who didn’t yell. He interrupted a reporter before she managed to ask her question and then completely mischaracterized her question. This angry, impatient man is in charge of our “security”? God help us. I’ll try to link to the transcript before my power goes off this morning.

Do you find there are days when reading the news is just too maddening, and that your mental health is better served by ignoring any mention of the Bush administration and its abuses of power? I’ve been having a lot of those days since the election (”gee, no kidding” say those of you loyal readers who pop in almost daily to see if the blog has been updated), and today - as Democrats do their pointless swaggering even as they admit that Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation is a sure thing, and Bush asks for another $80 billion for his immoral war in Iraq (gosh, some of that missing money would be handy right now) - is definitely one.

We’ve been trying to restore order to our garage since the new furnace was installed. Part of the plan was to put back fewer boxes than we moved before the work began. That has meant spending many hours purging papers and junk in a marathon effort that must end before school starts next week. One of the “treasures” I found was an old copy of Congressional Quarterly, dated November 12, 1994. It’s sitting right here next to me, a scary picture of Newt Gingrich on the cover, and one inside of Newt with his second wife Marianne — the one he dumped when he learned she had a condition that could lead to MS (that was the one after the one he dumped while she was being treated for breast cancer). Under the headline “New Speaker, New Order” are three subheaders: “Gingrich Proclaims A National Mandate To Upend Government,” “Historic GOP Sweep Brings Big Burdens With Hill Control,” and “Clinton, Democrats Seek New Identity From Election Debacle.” (Emphasis mine.) Same song, new decade.

I think the cover is casting some kind of depressive spell over me (no doubt something involving an eye of Newt?) because the longer it sits here, the worse I feel. Let me hasten to the recyling bin…

Remember, Bush calls them his base. In a Nation column, Micah Sifry tracks down an “elite” Bush donor/fundraiser and discusses the perks of being a mega-donor.

Johnny Carson, 1925 - 2005. My favorite moments of “The Tonight Show” won’t surprise some of you: they were the animal segments (although any Tim Conway visit was a close second). For a long time, I desperately wanted Joan Embery’s job at the San Diego Zoo, and my parents always let me (in those wee younger years) stay up to watch her appearances with Johnny. Johnny Carson milked more hilarity out of those animal segments (not just with Joan Embery, but with “Jim” from “Wild Kingdom,” with Jack Hanna, etc) than anyone before or since, and viewers always managed to learn something about the animals at the same time. I still love watching those clips.

Speaking of inspirational animal people, naturalist Miriam Rothschild also passed away this week.

I’m really trying to puzzle this out. San Francisco wants to tax all grocery bags, plastic and paper, in order to reduce littering and to recover the costs of recycling the paper bags. “Officials believe that the city spends 5.2 cents per bag annually for street litter pickup and 1.4 cents per bag for extra recycling costs.” Do officials know this, or believe this? If it’s true, why charge the same tax for both, when recycling costs less than cleaning up? And what if this policy ends up compelling shoppers to make smaller but more frequent shopping trips — in their single occupant vehicles?

If you think the earth is 6000 years old, this item won’t appeal to you. Investigators in Ethiopia have found fossil remains from 9 individual early hominids (4.5-4.3 million years old), including fossilized foot bones that indicate the species (Ardipithecus ramidus) probably walked upright.

The news reminds me… In early January, Michelle Goldberg had a very disturbing story in Salon (and now via Truthout) on the Dover, PA school board’s decision to teach creationism - excuse me - “intelligent design.” In December the SF Chronicle had a similar feature about the nationwide trend. It ends in a special kind of twilight zone:

“I happen to believe both in God and evolution,” (Jeff Brown) said, and his wife nodded: “Hear, hear.”

The Browns appear to be in the minority. Although public schools have been teaching evolution for decades, a national Gallup poll in November 2004 showed that only 35 percent of those asked believed confidently that Darwin’s theory was “supported by the evidence.” More than one-third of those polled by CBS News later in November said creationism should be taught instead of evolution.

“A guy came up to me and said, ‘Wait a minute, you believe in God and evolution at the same time? Evolution isn’t in the Bible!’” said Brown, nibbling on a deep-fried mozzarella stick at the Shiloh Family Restaurant on Route 74. As he became more agitated, his voice grew louder, and other customers — mostly gray-haired women and elderly men in baseball hats — turned their heads to look at the couple. Carol Brown kept putting her index finger to her lips, gesturing for her husband to be quieter.

After the Browns left the restaurant, a waitress in her 30s slipped a note to a Chronicle reporter.

“Beware,” it read. “God wrote over 2,000 years ago that there would be false prophets and teachers. If you would like to know the truth read the Bible.”

OK, the original 1929 60-amp fuse box is being replaced/upgraded tomorrow (and probably the next day, and the next) which will be a very good thing in the long run, but will mean day-long brown-outs in the short run. I’m working from home tomorrow to make sure dogs, cats, bicycles, tools, etc. don’t wander out of the garage while the electricians are coming and going. That means I’ll need to conserve my computer battery for work-related activity. But if I can bring myself to read any news, I’ll blog at night when the power is back on.

Sunday Night Dog Blogging

Sunday Night Dog Blogging
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

This hardly requires comment…

Global warming has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world’s top climate watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and called for immediate and “very deep” cuts in the pollution if humanity is to “survive”.

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too “aggressive” on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, “replaced at the request of the US”. The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favor of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the “let’s drag our feet” candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalized American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India’s Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a “very courageous” challenge.

He told delegates: “Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose.”

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached.

Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colors and turn a ghostly white.

Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world’s corals have been destroyed.

And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.

The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January “heatwave”, with temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.

He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of control.

He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth’s natural systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He concluded: “We are risking the ability of the human race to survive.”

So, here’s an interesting sequence to ponder some sleepness night: (1) Studies reported last week and last month suggest that the most likely cause of the mass extinction known as the “Great Dying” (250 million years ago) was not an asteroid or comet, but climate warming caused by volcanic gases. (2) Bush’s own handpicked climate change lobbyist thinks global warming is accelerating out of control. And (3), many scientists believe we have entered another - the Earth’s sixth - mass extinction. Here are two good info “portals” - one on mass extinctions and one on climate change.

19-year old Web, sunning

“Friday Cat Blogging”
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

I figure this blog hasn’t really earned its stripes until it contributes to the Friday Cat Blogging phenomenon. Above is 19-year old, 7.5 pound Web, who is one of the sprightliest 19-year old cats you’ll ever meet. This is her favorite early morning spot for sunning.

I recently finished James Wolcott’s delightfully snarky Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror. There’s a chapter in there on Peggy Noonan which begins:

No matter what it says on the marriage certificate, Peggy Noonan is a bride of George W. Bush. He is the butch side of her, she the femme side of him, and together they are ideological lovebirds, united in holy sanctimony. They share the mission vision of world transformation through American might, subscribing to the same polarities of good and evil, innocence and guilt, love and hate. Both draw a line in the sand between those with us and those against us, seeing the world in black and white (even if Noonan’s prose style tends to misty watercolors)…

So imagine my surprise to read (TheRevealer linked to it) Noonan’s column about the president’s inaugural address:

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush’s second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president’s evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty.

No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a miscalculation.

It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists–the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power–President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance.

The administration’s approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the “reality-based community.” A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.

This world is not heaven.

The president’s speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. “The Author of Liberty.” “God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul.”

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. “Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people.”

The speech did not deal with specifics–9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract.

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.” “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.”

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.

There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. “Renewed in our strength–tested, but not weary–we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”

This is–how else to put it?–over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

Is their honeymoon finally over?

I’ve begun reading Michael Berube’s blog regularly, and here is a hilarious reason why:

Women barred from Harvard presidency by “genetic predisposition,” study finds

CAMBRIDGE, MA (AP)– Researchers unveiled today a startling new study that suggests women are “extremely unlikely” to become president of Harvard University, and that women’s “distinctive genetic makeup” plays “a decisive role” in preventing them from becoming top-level administrators at the nation’s oldest college.

“Traditionally, presidents of Harvard have been men,” said Harvard geneticist Charles Kinbote, the study’s designer and principal investigator. “Now, after almost 400 years, we know why. To coin a phrase, it’s in the genes.”

According to Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess. “For one thing,” noted Kinbote, “it has long been one of the president’s tasks to deny tenure to promising female scholars– personally, without stated cause, and after a department, a college, and a battery of external referees has approved her. My study shows that the X chromosome contains material that, in combination with another X chromosome, inhibits a person’s ability to do this.”

Men are also more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added. “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working may mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes, “and that’s not even counting all the time he needs to try to figure out why women aren’t as skilled at abstract mathematical thought.”

The X chromosome also seems to play a role in suppressing the ability to make fatuous remarks in public forums. “If you want to be president of Harvard,” Kinbote said, “you have to be willing to get up there and just let it fly, no matter what the facts are and no matter what the consequences may be. Not just in off-the-cuff remarks– anybody can do that– but in carefully considered, prepared statements. It appears that once again, the X chromosome works, when paired with another X, as an inhibiting factor in all but a tiny fraction of the female population.” That tiny fraction, Kinbote suggested, would be the subject of a subsequent study into the biochemical basis of Coulter Syndrome.

Here’s a story about the Harvard president’s enlightened remarks. Update: He’s sorry.

Along with avoiding any visual or auditory contact with inauguration coverage, I’ve been trying to ignore - for the most part, successfully - the Condoleezza Rice proceedings. But I had a couple of accidental, unavoidable encounters with network news recaps, and was forced to contemplate what I heard. First, her unbelievable words, “the time for diplomacy is now…” They left me gap-jawed. Second, what happened to Joe Biden’s backbone? What is the point of voting yes ‘with a little bit of frustration and some reservation’??? Guess what? - it’s only the “yes” part that counts. Third, thank God for Barbara Boxer. Again.

Speaking of the (3 years overdue) “time for diplomacy,” the world is trembling at the prospect of another Bush term. Of course, the Bushies get off on that…

A poll of 21 countries published yesterday - reflecting opinion in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe - showed that a clear majority have grave fears about the next four years.

Fifty-eight per cent of the 22,000 who took part in the poll, commissioned by the BBC World Service, said they expected Mr Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, compared with only 26% who considered him a positive force.

The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general.

The military is stretched to the limits in Iraq, recruitment and retention are plummeting, retirees are being called up, and the army is apparently considering outsourcing desk jobs in order to switch those folks to combat duty. But the Bushies are swaggering around Iran. War without end. Which reminds me: Do read Seymour Hersh’s “The Coming Wars”, in this week’s New Yorker, which describes the extent of the preparations already underway for Iran.

This is just the kind of thing that gives me hope about outlasting the lunatic fringe: eventually, they become so convinced and enamored of their righteousness that they overreach, and their lunacy becomes apparent to everyone. Parents, your children are receiving pro-homosexual indoctrination via Sponge Bob.

Ouch.

On Thursday, the fairy king of fairyland will be recrowned. He was elected on a platform suspended in midair by the power of imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most powerful person on earth.

How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? To find out, take a look at two squalid little stories which have been concluded over the past 10 days…

Read the rest of George Monbiot on the “so-called liberal media” here (or here).