New York alert: Cliff Schecter of "The Real McCain" joins Laughing Liberally tonight to vivisect (one hopes) Young Johnny McCranky

Who is John McCain?
What are his politics?
And what was his boyhood in the 16th century really like?

-- questions to be tackled
tonight at Laughing Liberally's
John McCain Comedy Jaunt

Incredibly, we keep hearing that people "trust" Young Johnny, that they think of him as a man of "principle" and "convictions."

I'm guessing fewer people think that way than was once the case, and that's in no small part thanks to the tireless researching and crusading of our pal Cliff Schecter, principal author of The Real McCain -- and now a political blogger at Firedoglake. (This morning Cliff brings us breathless news that McCranky "is aware of the Internet"! Makes you wonder how he found out.) So I want to make sure New Yorkers know that he's scheduled to join Laughing Liberally's John McCain Comedy Jaunt tonight, along with Paul Waldman, coauthor with David Brock of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, and a slew of comics gathered to try to answer questions like those above.

It's true that word of McCranky's sleazy ethics and cynically opportunistic ideological flip-floppery (though there seems little doubt that he's a true-red reactionary) hasn't reached elite pundits like D.C. Village elders David Broder and Richard Cohen, but jeez, do you really want to be farther out of the informational loop than those bozos?

The John McCain Comedy Jaunt is tonight at 9pm at the Tank, 279 Church St., between Franklin and White Sts., below Canal, and I certainly plan to be there, armed with my copy of The Real McCain for Cliff to sign. (Hmm, I should probably pick up a copy of Free Ride.) It's listed as "FREE / $10 Suggested Admission." Make it $100 -- or $1000 -- and it sounds like a pricing policy the "straight-talking" McCranky could get behind.

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DOES McCAIN HAVE A PROBLEM WITH WOMEN?

Last night John Stewart didn't go into McCain's eye-popping record as a misogynist and the way he has always denegrated professional women. Instead, he shared something with his audience that only people who had read Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain-- and people who read blogs like this one-- knew. As my friend Mike mentioned, "Watch it, you'll plotz!"

McCAIN STILL ISN'T TAKING A LIE DETECTOR TEST

A few days ago, Arianna Huffington mentioned on her blog that John McCain had told her at a dinner party in 2000 that he hadn't voted for Bush. I'm sure it seemed unremarkable and perfectly sensible at the time and no one who heard him, thought much about it. However, now McCain has transmogrified himself into McBush and he very much needs the remaining 25-30% of Americans who still admire George Bush to vote for him in November. So he immediately had some of the lobbyists who drive the Double Talk Express try doing a hatchet job on Arianna.

Unfortunately for McBush-- who is now denying this in person, not just through the sleazy cadre of lobbyists-- there were other witnesses.

But actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, who played White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman and communications director Toby Ziegler on the show, told the New York Times-- at Huffington’s prompting-- that they too heard McCain’s confession at the dinner party at actress Candice Bergen’s Beverly Hills home.

So will McCain agree to a lie detector test-- even if everyone promises to just ask him about this and not about any shady real estate dealings or about any other unethical or illegal activities he's been involved with?

From the bookshelf: If you've been waiting to order your copy of "Nixonland," now's the time to get cracking--plus some other book notes

One thing that should be obvious by now is that the final descent into right-wing darkness marked by the Age of Bush has also stimulated and focused a wave of progressive writers like gangbusters. Howie is the DWT book guy, and he keeps you apprised of the books he's devoured. Me, in my 9-to-5 grind I mostly dream of finding the time and concentration for so grand a project as, you know, reading a book.

Now word comes from our friend Rick Perlstein that for-real retail copies of his long-awaited Nixonland : The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America actually exist and are being shipped to buyers. ("I can't really believe it myself," Rick writes. "I signed the contract for the thing in November of 2001, first started thinking seriously about it in 1998, and wanted to write just this book since I was sixteen years old.")

If you haven't heard about Nixonland, what you need to know is that Rick Perlstein has always been a close observer of the right side of the great left-right political split that erupted in the '60s. His 2001 book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus looked at how the seeming conservative debacle of the 1964 presidential election in fact laid the groundwork for the ascension of the new Right. In Nixonland, I gather, he's carried that chronicle (watch out, it's 896 pages and weighs a whopping 2.4 pounds) forward to the years 1965-72 and the emergence of the conservative movement as a political force, with emphasis on how those culture wars looked from the other side.


WHY NOT TOSS THE REAL McCAIN IN YOUR SHOPPING CART?

If your book source of choice happens to be Amazon, you'll notice that the hefty discount offered on Nixonland, which brings the price down from $37.50 to $24.75, also drops you below the magic $25 mark for free shipping. If you're as cheap as I am, this is a problem.

Now we've probably all got so many books on our reading list that the solution is obvious: piggyback one of the others onto your order. I'd been meaning for weeks now to get hold of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain, the book I'm hoping will provide both a framework and a lot of raw material for penetrating the fake halo of that double-talking phony McCranky and keeping his sorry ass out of the White House.

Probably you already know that The Real McCain was conceived and substantially written--by Cliff and another of our favorite writers, the patrician Bob Geiger--before the embarrassing collapse of the McCranky campaign, which seemed to drag the book down the drain with it. Until, with the GOP presidential field looking like some sort of circus freak show, the McCranky campaign was reborn, and The Real McCain was back in business.

By tossing The Real McCain in my shopping cart, thereby getting free shipping on both books, I added only about six bucks to the total I was about to pay for just Nixonland.


AND ONE LAST BOOK NOTE: PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE

I don't want to leave the subject of important new books without a quick mention of Jeffrey Feldman's latest, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right is Poisoning American Democracy, due out May 1 from enterprising progressive publisher Ig Publishing.

You probably know Jeffrey from his Frameshop blog, in which case you know that he is a careful student of language. I've been tinkering with a set of advance galleys of Outright Barbarous, with a view to bracketing it with one of the most remarkable books I know (as much for its genesis as for its actual content), Victor Klemperer's LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich): A Philologist's Notebook, the study of the Nazi perversion of language which Klemperer (a first cousin of the great conductor Otto Klemperer) extracted after World War II from the remarkable diaries he kept secretly all through the reign of National Socialism. (As it happens the book I'm trying to get through now is the final volume of the Klemperer diaries, from 1945 throuh his death in 1959. It's a tough subway read.)

All smart politicians know that language is important. Smart totalitarians, however, understand that control of language is crucial. Manipulation of the language was a key factor in the rise of the American Far Right. One of these days we need to talk about this a little.