How Cool Is It That Spitzer's Main Girl Is Also Jewish?

Really double-plus a lot is the answer. I'm absolutely loving that There are a million bad things I can say about Eliot Spitzer and this whole situation but I give him and her a hell of a lot of credit for changing our image in America. Horny fucking bastards we are, every single one of us, men and women, straight and gay. From now on when you think "Jewish guy" don't think Joe Lieberman, think Ron Jeremy. When you hear "Jewish broad," don't think Dianne Feinstein, think Spitzer's Twister. Tired of this shit.

And now that I have everyone's attention it's time to ponder emigration, immigration, lamebrains and brain drains and Spitzer is as good a jumping off point as any.

He got caught by the same Patriot Acts he favored, those which compel banks to provide the government with SARs (suspicious activity reports), meaning any transaction they feel like reporting. Every single phone call to or from overseas is recorded. Every cell phone call at all is recorded. Every American's picture is taken by stationary cameras 50 times a day. Something called "Real ID" will function as an internal passport. Very soon if not already, any American planning a trip outside the United States must provide the Department Of Homeland Security with an itinterary.

Let me pause here for a second. I don't censor comments EVER on this blog. But if anyone writes in anything to the effect of "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about," I will write a comment in response that will hurt that person's feelings in a profound way. My response will neither threaten, harrass nor break any law. I merely promise to insult that person in a truly ugly fashion.

The truth is that everyone is doing something wrong every minute of the day according to the Patriot Acts, the companion Executive Orders, and Mukasey's interpretation of sedition (yes, he interprets "expression of dissatisfaction with the United States of America" as sedition).

I had my own less political, more practical reasons for emigrating, basically having to do with my work, whicn had poltiical overtones but that's another story. I considered myself a very good citizen, definitely a net plus. I didn't break the law. I paid my taxes. I served jury duty. It is extraordinarily unlikely that I will live in the United States again. It is not likely I will visit terribly often nor terribly soon. I live in one city in South America. In the same city, there are hundreds just like me. Self-employed folks who make money in speculative markets who are able to speak Spanish and are holders of at least a BA or BS from a top U.S. university. Gallows humor amongst us is the order of the day and you'd best believe the stuff we joke about when we're together would make Reverend Wright's "God Damn America" sound like "God Bless America" by comparison. Oh, for example, we make some jokes about Bill Frist that I wouldn't even retell in this open forum. When Barack Obama campaigned against gambling in Nevada, you can bet some tasty Obama jokes were flying around the various VIP rooms here. The Bush and McCain jokes are cruder still!

One city in one country in South America. 50 or so educated guys. Multiply that by a lot of cities all over the world and what you have is a brain-drain of the equivalent of the Republic Of Ireland in the early to mid 1990s. The agricultural and fishing sectors were dying, there was a huge problem with alcoholism, young people were sick and tired of having no opportunities, and most of all were sick and tired of letting a strong central authority, the Roman Catholic Church, do their thinking for them. The Irish Republic until the formation of the EU could not keep its brightest young people in the country.

Sometime around October when the polling shows a close race between Obama and McCain, many of you will hear some of your contemporaries absolutely declaring that if McCain wins, they're leaving the United States. They are poseurs and that line is horse-puckey. No middle-aged farts are moving anywhere because a Crazed-Up White Fascist beats an Indifferent Black proto-Fascist.

Leading that charge will be usual suspects like Katrina vanden Heuval and Katha Pollitt of The Nation. Expect Cornel West to chime in. Expect some of your friends and neighbors to do the same. Think about the reality, though. What are vanden Heuvel, Pollitt and West really going to do? Come down to Panama to play 50-100 No-Limit Omaha for a living? Write for La Prensa? Teach at the University Of Panama? They fuck they are. McCain and war are not just great business for the right. They're great business for name-brand liberals, too. Nobody cares about vandenHeuvel or Pollitt's schtick on South American TV. What's West going to do teach African-American studies at a university that doesn't have an African-American studies department and even if it did would only pay him $50,000/year? But their schtick plays super in the USA no matter who's president.

There's nothing so special about name-brand American liberals in South American, Europe, Canada, Oceania or anywhere else. Katrina vandenHeuvel and Katha Pollitt and their ersatz progressivist feminism wouldn't really excite anybody who can't understand English yet is a resident of a country whose last president was a center-right woman and whose next president will be a center-left woman. What else can West do? Say "Allah akhbar, my brother" to his "brother", Representative Roberto "Chama" Butcher? Butcher may be an African-American by ancestry but he can't speak English and would have no time for a funny little goofball with a beard and glasses who speaks this odd patois that doesn't even sound like the English "Chama" hears on TV. Butcher's got local projects to get through council. Unless, Dr. West can throw some money around the district, the "allah akhbar, my brother," would just be a clanger. As in "crickets." As in "disculpame, senor, no entiendo." That settles that.

Your friends and neighbors who make the idle threat are just showing off. They'd sooner cut out their own livers with a pen-knife than leave the States. Be sure to remind them of that a year or so into McCain's presidency. If I seem a little gratuitous and "unfeeling" on this subject, excuse me. I kind of thought I'd be watching my son's Little League opener on Sunday. And poseurs suck. Donkey dicks.

Middle-aged farts like me only did it because we had to. Young, college educated people, however, WILL leave that because of a simple economic principle called "switching costs" -- theirs are low -- and that's the problem.

There will be efforts to halt the exodus of talented American youth -- the aforementioned REAL ID, the DHS itinerary lists, no-fly lists, very strong visa and passport controls...I could go on. But the young want a chance to do something with their lives other than die in Repulbicrat Wars or work at Starbucks.

The lamebrain American leadership and press, however, have mistakenly bought into a bad framing of the immigration issue. The reality is that liberal immigration laws would cushion the damage of the coming brain-drain. The way the "immigration problem debate" is framed is binary and both options suck. There is John McCain and George W. Bush's "liberal" plan to punish as many immigrants as possible, place them under a mountain of debt via federal fines, and then create a huge class of minimum-wage indentured servants. Tom Tancredo and Joe Biden's plan -- the more popular -- "consevative" one, is maximum punishment and maximum deportation. Any other idea, like just letting well enough alone, is considered "amnesty" and is much poltical poison as "affirmative action" is. Clinton and Obama lean to the McCain viewpoint and both are clearly very, very bad on this issue.

With a declining replacement birth rate and such stringent immigration controls, how exactly do America's leaders and their press think that the country will sustain itself? Who'll do the work? Who'll go to college and grad school? Who'll reproduce? I know the answer the leaders and I do include Clinton and Obama in this. The plan is for PHYSICAL EMPIRE, of course. Neither Clinton nor Obama are leaving Iraq? Are you crazy? Both would aggress on Iran if given a chance. They are only better than McCain because McCain is so angry and psychopathic he has no plan even for PHYSICAL EMPIRE. Global thermo-nuclear war will work just fine for him.

Because America has been so hard-hearted on immigration over the past 7-years and probably will continue to be this bad or worse for the foreseeable future, you will notice that most countries have made the immigration rules on Americans tighter and tighter. If an American doesn't have pre-arranged work or cannot invest a rather large amount in most countries, they cannot get legal residency. Political asylum? After years of McCarran-Walter and various other laws which only allowed asylum to immigrants from communist countries, there are very few countries on Earth in a big hurry to grant asylum to any American immigrant.

Young. educated Americans are resourceful, however, and will find ways legal and illegal to get out, make their way in the world, start families under less restrictive social conditions and live the lives they want.

Meanwhile, as the US keeps adding more wars to its portfolio, taking on more debt, maintaining global instability to ensure high commodity prices and an ever falling dollar, there will come a point of inflection. The price of oil will get so high that at Purchasing Power Parity there will be no reason for any Caribbean and certainly no Mexican (which is very rich in crude oil but has no war burdens) to WANT TO LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES. And then the "immigration problem" will go away in the press. The U.S.'s "dirt cheap standard of living" will, future U.S. leaders hope, indeed draw by the millions those same awful brown people they now want to keep out.

Those of us who've left will be grandparents whose grandchildren WILL NOT BE AMERICANS. They won't speak English. They won't give a rat's ass about the fabulous American flag, unless it's for a geography project or something. Their flags, their anthems, their cultural signifiers will be those of the countries of their birth, from Panama to Lebanon, Argentina to Kazakhstan.

Our grandkids will be laughing at our funny accents and our odd interest in news from that big dictatorship no one wants to live in anymore.

And we old men will probably still meet at the 24-hour cafeteria pa' una Coca-Cola en lata un cubano bien planchado y un orden de alitas "Buffalo" picante afuera, porfis, after playing cards. I'm sure we'll be telling the same old crude jokes about Bill Frist, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and John McCain, four forgotten villains of a forgotten war.

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