The U.S. in this time of uncertainty and confusion is not a banana republic, as overseas foes have gloated, but it is distressingly reminiscent of the most bilious days of overexpanded imperial Rome, when talentless emperors ruled at the courtesy of the army, when the bureaucracy was bloated and weak and when ruthless, third-rate politicians and new-money men knew how to inflame a fickle, urban populace to thwart the will of a divided and paralyzed Senate.

As a registered Democrat who voted for the vigorously principled Ralph Nader as a protest against the corrupt, cynical superstructure of my party, I was mortified by the atrocious behavior of Democratic operatives in the first days after last week’s abortive election. What callous, deceitful inflaming of popular passions, what reckless disregard of the public good!

Given the sensitivity of the situation as well as the closeness of the election nationwide, the strident and premature claims of racial bias by Jesse Jackson (for whom I voted in the 1988 primary) on his intrusive visits to Florida did serious damage to race relations in this country. Furthermore, the high-level Democratic decision to make Gore campaign manager William Daley a principal point man in the dispute was — given his Chicago family’s notorious political history — foolish and needlessly divisive. A hoarse, exhausted Karen Hughes, the normally articulate, high-intensity spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, was also excessively harsh in the first 48 hours of the crisis.

The Northeastern major media betrayed their liberal bias by the malicious selectivity of their initial reportage, which did not stabilize until the weekend. Two days after the election, the once superb but now sadly degenerated CBS national radio news was still pumping out Democratic party-line propaganda about the legality of the balloting in Palm Beach County and elsewhere in Florida. It is grossly unethical for the media to sow seeds of baseless resentment among minority citizens across the country.

But there were more critical failures, like President Clinton’s lackadaisical half-day’s delay in making a public appearance after the election stalemate of the prior night. Clinton was apparently too busy with his wife’s business in New York to bother with the potentially destabilizing effect of the news emanating from elsewhere in the U.S. Because of the difference in global time zones, events taking place in the middle of the night here rippled across Europe and points east in the midst of a business day. Few foreign observers knew of our protective 75-day delay between the election and inauguration of a new president. The U.S. looked rudderless. Hence Clinton should have gone before the cameras to make a calm, reassuring statement by breakfast time at the latest in Washington.

As for the Electoral College, I’ve always viewed it as an inexplicable, elephantine antique — but never has its importance in American politics been better demonstrated. The instant success with which the national Democratic Party, using banks of commercial telemarketers, was able to whip up mob hysteria in Florida shows how vulnerable democracy is to demagoguery. The Electoral College respects the regional complexity and diversity of the United States. By giving weight (as the U.S. Senate also does) to less populated areas, it acts as a block against conspiratorial machinations and peer pressure in overpopulated metropolises.

The chaotic lack of standardization in balloting and vote-counting procedures in the U.S. has shocked virtually everyone. My district uses the grand old style of lever-operated voting machines — one of which broke down within hours and had to be serviced by a roving emergency technician. Waits of two hours were not uncommon at polling places in regional Philadelphia. There are also too many disturbing reports of abuse of absentee ballots around the country. Local talk shows, for example, were seething in the week before the election about absentee ballots being distributed and compulsorily collected during services at African-American churches in Philadelphia.

Neither of the presidential candidates has been impressive over the past week. Gov. George W. Bush, with his patched boil and befuddled manner, has looked like a nervous student reporting for his orals examination. Vice President Al Gore, posing in a clunky game of touch football, exploited his family once more for a photo op, then muffed two public statements, one by pomposity and the other by grinning vacuity. The negligibly talented Bush is in over his head, while the schizoid Gore is a conceited mannequin choked with his own sawdust.

Alas, I suppose I must comment on the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the U.S. Senate — a post that belonged to six-term Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey, the former assistant secretary of state of New York who was forced to roll over at Hillary’s invasion, enforced by the upper echelons of the national Democratic Party. The nation is now condemned to an eternity of Clintonism — which means, among other things, the parasitic interconnection of Democratic politicians and activists with witless, deep-pockets, showbiz celebrities. Socialite liberalism, as I have argued in prior columns, is a narcissistic dead end for the American arts.

Hillary’s campaign would never have succeeded without the open collusion of the liberal major media, which studiously ignored her misuse of the Secret Service and her profligate waste of taxpayer dollars for private ambition and which let her stage a campaign from soft, hospitable entertainment shows rather than from issues-oriented talk shows where she would have been systematically questioned and tested.

But Rep. Rick Lazio, her vanquished opponent, must also be faulted for his poor choice of a campaign manager: the liberal media’s hokey (because intentionally anti-Bush) infatuation with Republican Sen. John McCain misled Lazio into borrowing political hired gun Mike Murphy from McCain’s staff. Not only is the Virginia-based Murphy not a native New Yorker (unlike Hillary’s cadre of advisors), but on the evidence of his battle plan for Lazio, he’s a blithering mediocrity who gave the candidate bad advice and never helped him close the “stature gap,” which required major policy speeches as well as more consistent, dignified deportment.

Lazio should have beaten like a drum his vastly superior, practical experience with collegiality and the art of congressional deal-making and compromise — of which there is a total absence in Hillary’s career, which has been marked by temperamental behavior and a cyclical pattern of authoritarian coercion and sulky withdrawal. As shown by my articles and interviews from 1992 on, I was an early Hillary fan who became disillusioned by her arrogant mishandling of healthcare reform, her anti-feminist toleration of her husband’s history of sexual harassment, her stonewalling and legal maneuvers and her refusal to acknowledge the role she played in this administration’s disasters, which degraded the presidency and subjected the nation to pointless suffering.

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton has now been duly elected by the people of New York. She must be allowed the freedom to achieve. Her own behavior will determine either her rehabilitation or the perpetuation of her ignominy. (See Richard Poe’s “A Dispatch from Occupied New York” in Front Page magazine for its worrisome survey of the Hillary cult among foggy females.) If she treats the Senate as a platform for divalike demands and fiats, then Hillary deserves what she gets. But if she subordinates herself to public service, she will eventually convert many present opponents.

A reprehensible feature of the late weeks of the campaign was the vicious assault on Ralph Nader by liberal activists and even by the liberal press itself, via editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post. The nagging, hectoring and whining were not to be believed. How dare anyone rebuke so accomplished an exponent of free thought and ask him to fall servilely in line behind the mercenary Democratic establishment?

The notion was preposterous that Naderites “owed” their vote to Al Gore — who in and of himself managed to alienate Bill Bradley-supporting Democrats like me (in just over the past eight months). Nader’s superb speech at his final Nov. 5 “superrally” in Washington, as broadcast by C-Span, reconfirmed my enthusiastic endorsement of his views. He was the only presidential candidate addressing the decline of public transit or making a connection between entrenched budgetary excesses and underfunded public education. He was the only candidate speaking for exploited, non-unionized workers in chain stores and fast-food franchises and the only one who denounced the hypocrisy, injustice and futility of the war on drugs.

The political news has been so exhausting and nationally embarrassing this past week that popular culture seems overwhelmed. But my pop contribution for this column would be Turner Classic Movies’ recent broadcast of a superbly restored print of “Let Us Be Gay,” an obscure 1930 film starring Norma Shearer as a nice gal feigning madcap socialite. Marie Dressler, a longtime favorite of mine, is wonderful as a grumpy dowager with a bracingly snappish style.

Shearer, the saccharine heroine of the 1939 camp classic “The Women,” has never interested me in the least, so the piquantly named “Let Us Be Gay” was a revelation. In her free body language, sharp intelligence and facial mobility, she seems as absolutely contemporary as Ashley Judd or Gillian Anderson. Born in Montreal, Shearer was the sister of pioneering sound technician Douglas Shearer and the wife of MGM’s brilliant producer, Irving Thalberg. After Thalberg’s tragically early death in 1936, her career languished, and she left Hollywood in the early 1940s — a truncation that was a great loss to film.

There were two amazing football finales since my last column. First was Notre Dame’s first-ever overtime victory in its Oct. 28 game against Air Force. Freshman quarterback sensation Matt LoVecchio made a fake option right on the 9-yard line and then whirled to pitch the ball back to split end Joey Getherall, who raced around the left end and did a flying dive across the line for the winning score. The telepathic precision and graceful, forceful execution of that surprise play put me into one of my blissed-out “Men are wonderful!” moods.

The second magic moment ended the Minnesota Vikings-Green Bay Packers game broadcast on Election Eve by ABC’s “Monday Night Football.” The Packers’ legendary quarterback Brett Favre made a long pass down the right sideline from the 43-yard line in Viking territory. Viking cornerback Chris Dishman thought he had broken up the play and kept running hard past Packer wide receiver Antonio Freeman, whom he had knocked flat on his back.

But the ball, after hitting Dishman’s hand and bouncing up to his shoulder, rolled off and was perversely lifted by the wind — so that it ended up landing on the prone receiver’s chest. It then bounced again and arced up to land in the palm of Freeman’s conveniently outflung right hand, inches above the ground. He automatically hunched and cradled the ball to his stomach, and there was a pause on the field as everyone assumed the play was over.

With great presence of mind, Freeman suddenly realized he hadn’t been touched by a defender after he caught the ball. Before the Vikings could react, he leapt up and, veering on a diagonal toward the middle to escape Dishman, dashed 15 yards into the end zone for the winning touchdown. Replay after replay proved to the stadium and the TV audience that this was truly one of the mesmerizing, miracle catches in football history.

At the book signing after my lecture on “The Internet Revolution” last weekend at the Chicago Humanities Festival, I was very moved by the personal testimony of so many artists and writers who thanked me for my militant defense of the arts against p.c. ideology. Their words of support mean a great deal to me, since I am still fighting on several fronts of the culture wars.

My quick visit to Chicago impressed me anew with this pressing national question: Why can’t the U.S. guarantee a first-rate, fast-food hot dog to every citizen? Even the McDonald’s outlets at Chicago O’Hare International Airport were selling fat, delicious, juicy bratwursts. The taxi rides in and out of the city were tantalizing torture as an endless series of beckoning, neon-lit, hot dog emporiums flew by.

The classic American hot dog fell in prestige after the health-food movement of the late 1960s and ’70s and can still be savored in its original glory only in scattered regions of the U.S. I lamented this cultural disaster in a feature I did with host Bill Boggs for “Talking Food” on the TV Food Network in 1995, where we sampled sizzling hot dogs at the upper Broadway branch of Papaya King in New York.

A well-run Nathan’s Famous — like that at the Molly Pitcher Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike — hawks a credible dog, and clearly Chicago, with its history of stockyards and meatpacking, remains a dazzling citadel of the frankfurter triumphant. But the decline of this once-ubiquitous populist symbol is an American tragedy that needs remedying. Why can’t McDonald’s or Burger King market veggie or turkey dogs to the masses? Where is the shrewd entrepreneur who will ride to the rescue?

The sketch ends by showing Farajin and his “Watan ala Watar” colleagues one year later, silently clowning around, suggesting that even if Mughani and his government cohorts muzzle them, that won’t stop the comedy crew’s high jinks.

Those high jinks have been a runaway success since “Watan ala Watar,” aka “Homeland on a String,” hit the airwaves in 2009, the first political satire show ever broadcast on Palestinian TV. The weekly 15-minute show’s three creators became local celebrities in the West Bank capitol of Ramallah, where they live and work, and episodes became a must-watch phenomenon, especially during Ramadan, when the show ratchets up to a nightly schedule. The holy month is akin to a U.S. “sweeps” period, with everybody at home by the TV. Last year, a local polling organization found that 60 percent of those in the West Bank and Gaza who’d seen “Watan ala Watar” actively approved of it — far higher approval ratings than those of either Fatah or Hamas, the two major political parties.

From the start, the show enjoyed a surprising amount of editorial freedom, considering that it aired on state-run television in the Middle East. “We told officials there would be one condition: no censorship,” says the show’s 30-something co-creator Manal Awad, who dresses in stylish, modern clothes and speaks English with a heavy British accent, courtesy of her time in London where she got a master’s degree in theater directing.

Palestinian officialdom agreed, allowing the show to air a sketch in which progress on an Israeli peace deal is announced by Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — that is, Mahmoud Abbas the 13th, at a time 500 years in the future. Hamas, the Islamist party governing the Gaza Strip, received its share of knocks, too. One skit featured an Islamist judge making eyes at a male courtroom reporter. While Hamas’ Ministry of Information has called “Watan ala Watar” “an example of black propaganda,” the show has long enjoyed the blessing of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of President Abbas’ closest advisors and head of Palestine TV, even played himself on the show.

Most promising of all, during this year’s Ramadan, “Watan ala Watar” had competition: “EscotChat,” a new sketch comedy show that aired 20 minutes later. “Five years from now, you will find comedy clubs and comedy series here, and not just ‘EscotChat’ and ‘Watan ala Watar,’”says Ihab Al-Jarere, “EscotChat’s” creator.

“Watan ala Watar,” it seemed, was helping Palestinians ascend the Middle Eastern comedy ladder, the unofficial scale in which Egyptians are considered to be the funniest of the funny and the Jordanians the exact opposite. (As one Palestinian joke goes, “Have you heard the one about the Jordanian businessman? Every morning before work he puts on his shirt, tie and angry face.”)

But then, two days after “Watan ala Watar’s” skit about the attorney general sketch aired, Palestine dropped a few comedy rungs closer to Jordan. Mughani, in a move reminiscent of the skit itself, pulled the show off the air.

It had told one controversial joke too many — and Mughani and his cronies weren’t the only ones not laughing. Recently, the show had diversified its subject matter, turning its satirical gaze upon Palestinian society itself. “We criticize all the governments, Hamas and Fatah, but they haven’t changed since we started,”says Awad. “We needed new figures to criticize.”

That’s why in one recent sketch, the show took on the local medical industry’s outdated practice of settling malpractice issues outside of court with informal payoffs, depicting a doctor and a grieving mother bargaining over a dead baby as if haggling over prices at the market. Another episode satirized the shabbiness of Palestinian Authority police. In the skit, officers on the lookout for drunk drivers couldn’t afford breathalyzers, so they’re forced to smell the scofflaws’ breath — and get drunk themselves off the fumes.

Those jokes didn’t go over so well. While local politicians had been fair game (maybe because in territories still controlled by Israel, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have much authority at all), the Palestinian elite apparently was not. The local police and the physicians’ union filed grievances, and “Watan ala Watar’s” creators say that for the first time ever, officials censored them. Meanwhile, newspaper opinion pieces called the show a disgrace, and somebody hacked the TV show’s Facebook page, causing it to lose 40,000-plus fans.

Then, on Aug. 16, the attorney general, noting the complaints, pulled the plug. “Watan ala Watar” hasn’t been on since, with “EscotChat” moving into its time slot. “I thought this season was going to be a really, really huge success,” sighs Awad between puffs of an ever-present cigarette. “I didn’t expect this really aggressive reaction against us.”

This wasn’t the only recent aggressive reaction to artistic rabble rousing in Palestine. In April, a masked gunman shot and killed Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, a murder that’s still unsolved. While Palestinians mourned his death as a national tragedy, some weren’t surprised: Mer-Khamis was a half-Jewish artist and activist who was always pushing the cultural envelope, staging versions of Animal Farm that featured boys and girls onstage together, wearing pig masks and criticizing the revolution. As Awad says of Mer-Khamis’ murder, “You can’t force new thoughts on people. Bit by bit, you have to work with them.” Maybe Awad and her colleagues had been guilty of the same mistake.

Do such developments suggest the people here aren’t yet ready to laugh at themselves? Is comedy in Palestine as stagnant as the peace process?

Far from it, in fact. There has always been humor in Palestine,” says Sharif Kanaana, a Palestinian folklore professor who’s been collecting local jokes since 1989, from the jubilant highs of the two intifadas (where many zingers involved street kids getting the better of Israeli soldiers) to the disillusioned lows in between. (A typical post-intifada joke goes, “Several heads of state meet with God and make requests for their people. To each, God says, “Not in your lifetime.” Then Yasser Arafat asks for his people’s freedom and God says, “Not in my lifetime.”) “It’s not just fun and entertainment,”says Kanaana. “It is a pan-human way of people expressing themselves.”

And in a place defined by absurdity — where the beach is a few miles away but people in the West Bank have to hopscotch though Jordan and Cyprus to get there — if Palestinians aren’t allowed to express themselves through laughter, what else do they have left?

That’s why the people haven’t taken “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown lightly. Hundreds have signed on to Facebook campaigns such as “People against the decision to stop broadcasting Watan ala Watar,”and “People want Watan ala Watar,” and in Bethlehem, protesters marched against the decision.

Many officials agree with them. “This decision of the attorney general is bad news and, in my opinion, is wrong,” says Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “I think I speak for Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as well.” Politicians such as Fayyad are savvy enough to know that in a period where Middle Eastern dictators are falling left and right, now is not the time to crack down on free speech.

While “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown could be bad news for the Palestinian Authority, it could end up being good news for the comedians behind the show. Headline-grabbing controversies, after all, are a comedian’s bread and butter. Awad hints that Watan ala Watar is already fielding offers from other media outlets, and the hubbub may even score the show attention in Israel. “I haven’t heard of them, but it’s a shame that they were shut down,” says David Kilimnick, an Israeli comic who owns the Off the Wall Comedy Basement club in Jerusalem. “I wouldn’t be against giving them a stage here.”

In the meantime, Palestinians can catch a glimpse of “Watan ala Watar” at the three comedians’ weekly live show at an upscale open-air restaurant in Ramallah. Two days after being pulled off the air, the trio took the stage there armed with timely material. As television news cameras rolled, the three apologized for being late. They said they had been detained at Attorney General Mughani’s house. “Watan ala Watar” may be muzzled by the authorities, but that’s not going to stop them from clowning around.

Joel Warner, who blogs for Wired.com and Psychology Today, is co-authoring a book about traveling around the world with a humor professor in search of what makes things funny. Find out more at Humorcode.com and on Twitter @HumorCode. 

But it’s still totally OK to hate the guy.

Seriously.

Seven months ago the guy introduced a bill that would automatically strip Americans of their citizenship if they were charged with “a terrorist act.” He named it “the TEA Act.” Why did he do that? Because he’s a political troll. Not in the “living under a bridge eating goats” sense, but in the old Usenet sense of someone who purposefully enrages and frustrates members of a community, while pretending to have no idea what he’s doing.

Joe Lieberman gets his kicks trolling the left — how else to explain why he nearly torpedoed the fragile healthcare reform process by blatantly reversing himself on the Medicare buy-in?

Liberals used to be told that while Lieberman was a hawk, he was a reliable liberal Democrat on domestic issues. That reliable liberal Democrat recently promised to fight to his last breath to protect the rights of our richest citizens to have smaller tax bills.

Even before Iraq, this was the guy who took to the Senate floor to ponder “the moral consequences for our country” of Bill Clinton’s misbehavior. He regularly flirted with banning “indecent” music and video games. Before Al Gore picked him as his running mate — whereupon Lieberman did all he could to sink the campaign from within, by throwing his debate with Cheney and repeating GOP talking points during the recount — Lieberman even voiced support for Social Security privatization.

That whole miserable history of sanctimonious opportunism aside, it’s true that Joe Lieberman has always proudly fought for the rights of gay and lesbians to serve openly in our armed forces.

While his opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell” is one of the handful of positions Joe Lieberman hasn’t reversed himself on, his support for gays in the military is pretty much directly tied to his blood lust. Of course he wants gay people in the military — he wants everyone in the military, and he wants the military everywhere. He supports the right of every American to serve his or her country regardless of race, creed, color or sexual orientation, and he also supports making those brave young heroes invade and occupy the entire Middle East, forever.

So you’re still OK hating the guy.

An earth tones joke. In the year 2010.

The “earth tones” thing was a completely fictional story invented, almost simultaneously, by the entire 2000 campaign press corps, because the narrative everyone had decided on was that Al Gore was a phony and a wacko weakling liberal loser. MoDo led the charge, and has clung to that caricature, despite its basis almost entirely on complete fabrications, ever since.

As far as I know Maureen Dowd has never acknowledged — let alone apologized for — her relentless, inaccurate smearing of Al Gore. (In 2007 she pretended to apologize, in the voice of Clarence Thomas, but I’m not sure she’s actually self-aware enough to get the real joke she ended up making.) And her blithe willingness to go back to the “earth tone” well illustrates both her lazy hackishness (it’s been a decade, Maureen) and her complete disregard for any truth beyond the idiotic fantasies she constructs about public figures.

That, as I said, is only the very first sentence.

The “earth tones” crack is because there was some utterly inane pseudo-news over the weekend about the Oval Office getting redone. Which, obviously, is a subject of much more interest to political opinion columnist Maureen Dowd than a “war,” because it is utterly inane pseudo-news.

So! She refers to the Oval Office as President Obama’s “redecorated man cave,” because “man caves” are a trend thing she read about, in the year 2005. She then throws in a gratuitous reference to the terrible, trashy taste of those awful Clintons, another Dowd pet topic.

And then the column ends with a dreadful series of Dowd’s trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references. (“Cool Hand Luke.” “Jaws.” “Scarface.” “Body Heat.” Yes, “Body Heat.”)

Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer-winning columnist.

So I thought I’d try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you’re reading the book. Every few days I’ll write about what I am learning, and anyone who’s reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with “Going Rogue” next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

I have to start by saying Taylor Branch’s trilogy, “America in the King Years,” is my favorite work of history. He brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive for me. And to see my favorite civil rights historian — so far, there are some up-and-comers that deserve a look, too! — grappling with the president who, until Obama, thought and did more about civil rights than any president before him, well, it’s a thrilling combination. The book opens with the pair believing they are fulfilling the movement they’d worked for as young men, convinced Clinton can do so much to advance King’s goals, though we know that eventually politics got in the way. Still, it’s important to remember that civil rights was the mission that animated Clinton’s, and Branch’s, passion for politics.

One hundred pages in, here’s what’s fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush’s life, so W. wouldn’t have to start a war!); the disappointment of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on healthcare reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that’s the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework), well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic senators to tell Clinton why they’ll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don’t dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!). Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines: “I couldn’t tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window” as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors.

But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn’t tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horse-trader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped policy, or even the silly idea of what’s right or what’s best for the country, in every single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama’s battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama (after compromising) won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma’s Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan. (Hello, Max Baucus!) The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They’ve been the party of no for 16 years, even switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they’re suddenly worried about deficit spending (after eight years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and healthcare, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton’s strange passivity with the press — he just accepted that they’re against him, and he put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American (who’d apparenty been in Clinton’s “Faces of Hope” campaign materials), and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won’t compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? [In fact, the R.S. interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: "Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on."]

Clinton “kind of went off on him,” he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for … He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn’t really care about results in the world … He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don’t mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness.”

Clinton took a breath. “I did everything but take a fart in his face.”

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory (although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it). You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It’s fun.

Here’s Clinton’s retort, verbatim, with some narration from R.S.:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke — an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

“But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

“I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, ‘Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?’ So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

“Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

“But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill.”

[At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell.]

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

“That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here.”

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration’s dilemma in 2009:

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.”

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it’s just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson (whose rant maybe went over the top,) even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic healthcare plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson’s string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on the rhetoric war. I tried. It’s going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.

Anyway, I know some people go to anger management therapy but I’m not sure that is for me. You associate that type of therapy with people who have snapped, people who have abused people physically as well as verbally. My anger is merely my own; I don’t lash out; I just despair, because I know lashing out would cost me (my job, family, friends).

BTW, I have been on Prozac for about 15 years for mild chronic depression. Normally I feel like Prozac has been good for me, keeping away the blue days and making my skin thicker. I also exercise a lot, running three times a week and playing soccer, but lately I’m pissed off even after a good workout! I eat pretty well and drink moderately. But lately I’m thinking my chemistry is not right (though dropping the antidepressant sounds very risky).

Can you or Salon readers offer any advice? I fear I am on a path to becoming an urban hermit, joylessly working toward retirement, and maybe not giving a toss when I get there.

Anger Issues

Dear Anger Issues,

Some of us who think of ourselves as liberal, rational, freethinking, freedom-loving patriots have a special problem with anger. We are deeply affected by what we see going on in our country. We see a symphony of outrage heaped upon outrage; we see the brazenness of it, its roots in years of secret plotting; we perceive intricate patterns in its serpentine, many-tentacled, conspiratorial vastness; we see our sacred precepts violated, sacred vows trashed; we jeer the garishly painted faces of evil as they trot onstage, and our jeers do not seem to be heard and this compounds our outrage; we join our compatriots in outrage, and our righteous anger grows.

We think our anger is justified. The abuses are so obvious, the perpetrators so shameless, the crimes so awful and historic. Who would not be angry? How could anger be our problem?

But our anger is our problem. At historic moments like this, we are called to come up with something better than anger.

If you are not sure whether anger management classes are for you, then the intelligent thing to do is to go to a few sessions and see what methods are being used. Fearlessly investigate and make an honest assessment. If it appears that others have benefited from these methods, consider how you might adapt those methods to your own situation. Your situation may not be as dire as theirs. Use what is useful. Leave the rest. Participants in the workshop are likely to be at different stages in their anger. Some may have lashed out physically. Some may have suffered legal and financial consequences. Others may just be curious, or feel that they are not skillful enough in their management of anger. You may learn from all of them. And you may have things to teach them as well.

By beginning in this individual way, we have a chance to demonstrate the collective superiority of another approach. The country’s response to 9/11 was a response of anger, as if anger would suffice. The country responded to a cunning, devastating blow with brute anger and was led into a trap. We responded as the enemy expected, with blind, misguided, disproportionate violence, like the one-eyed Cyclops stumbling with rage, outwitted in the cave by a nimble Ulysses. If Enlightenment ideals are to prevail over religious tyranny once again, anger will not suffice. We must be more cunning, more devastating, wiser, more full of resolve, better controlled, more far-thinking, more strategic. We must be better statesmen, better orators, better historians.

When angry we cling to what we feel will shield us and we drop what we sense is a burden or an encumbrance. Collectively, as a nation, in response to the 9/11 attacks, it could be said that we clung to our pride, our feelings of masculine superiority and our addiction to ease and consumption; we held on to our simplicity of feeling, our belief in our goodness, our woundedness. And we dropped our love of ideas, our belief in ideas, our faith in a future of law and reason, our reliance on intelligent pragmatism, our unshakable reliance on constitutional principle.

We dropped what we needed and clung to what was useless. Now we are in a pickle.

Those of us who saw this happen feel a sputtering rage. But we must not fall into the trap again. We must work as individuals to let go of our anger so that collectively we can think more clearly and see what is before us.

Letting go of anger is hard. It’s like letting go of money. We give up, we pay, we sacrifice what we have held dear, but we bring home peace of mind in a big shiny box with a bow on it. What could be more American than that?

But seriously, in seeking peace of mind, it can be most difficult to let go of the anger we think is justified.

So I do hope you will look into these anger management sessions. But you can go far beyond that. You have much to gain by working with your anger. It may be the doorway to a new way of thinking and living.