Is it really condescension that motivates this loathing for our smoldering, downtrodden Bittering Classes on the part of the socio-cultural-economic elites ? Maybe there's some other affect or attitude that comes regurgitating into play here, whenever our pencil-necked nabobs stop their negative nattering long enough to envisage how things might play out with the white trash folks when they get to fondlin their .22s in their pickups on the way back from a stemwindin fire and brimmstone harangue from the Rev Wright or some trashy white demagogue equivalent, when they get to fixatin on those im-grunts stealing over the border in their swarthy droves to steal all ours jobs and such, and nobody doin nothin bout none of it! While ma wife's got to have that surgery over at the haw-spittle, but we can't ev'n afford nun a thatthere med-kuhl care!

Maybe what drives our intellectual snob pundit friends to recoil at the thought of such Bitter Mobs is not so much "condescension" as fear, a clammy fear that the stammering stupid folk might start channelling their class hatreds into physical or political action.

Or maybe not. Besides, what is "snobbery," anyway? Isn't snobbery just another word for prejudice, for claiming the right to pre-judge other people's beliefs or style without giving them a fair, even-handed hearing? And if we accept that definition, isn't it just as "snobbish" of the bitter gun-people to hate the overly articulate (if not always very bright) self-conscious bourgie types? Why does merely breathing the word "elitism" on a topic always mean we have to immediately bow and scrape and pander to the literal-minded, spluttering "prophetic" types?

In the end, I would argue -- as a true Vulgariste -- that the only type of "elitism" that can be said to menace the masses with a demonstrable debasement of their livelihood or psyche is financial elitism, the mindless preference for big numbers in discrete bank accounts -- a knee jerk reaction, if there ever was one. Vulgar Marxism and Christian fundamentalism have always had much in common in any case and maybe, if we are really determined to give the Bittering Classes their due, maybe it's time to offer up the godless rich on the offer of their trashy fury, let the poh folk be runnin 'em down, one by one, in their breakin down GMC pickups on a dirt road out by the county line after the chores is done some fine evening.

It would be very soothing for our culture! Heck, we could even make a reality TV show out of it. Tonight, Billy Bob will mow down Jack Welch in his Dodge Hemmie on Highway 29, then say a prayer over Jack's crumpled corpse . . .

Back in the day when I was a vulgar Fourrierite, cooking and cleaning for a household of vulgar Marxists (not enough attention to superstructure? Why bother?) I watched as this matter got kicked around endlessly. It was like reality TV without the TV or the reality. Fortunately it being the seventies, there were copious retreats into sex and drugs, bit there I am, bragging again.

So what's my point? First: ANGER MAKES YOU STUPID. The more you hate the rich, the less capable you are of doing anything about it. The more I saw Edwards waving the bloody shirt the less confident I was that he'd be able to do anything about the stuff that had him so angry. There's a level at which I want my politicians to be enraged by the same crap that enrages me, but I come from a long line of the disenfranchised and enraged and maybe ought to know by now that any decision you make while dancing with rage is a mistake you will later regret.

Obama's point was not that people SHOULD me motivated by anger at the people who've screwed them -- the banks, agribusiness, futures markets and insurance companies were just doing what they do. It's possible to look at the destruction of cities like Decatur and East St. Louis as inevitable effects of economic trends that, like the weather, we mah not like, but we can't change. If Obama had wanted to jack people up in anger at the rich and the technocrats that profit from the system as is, then he'd just be a demagogue, and he's not.

The Clinton hacks were satisfied with picking words out of the text and telling Pennsylvanians that Obama wants them to be bitter, and they're to smart for that. I should hope so, if that was what he really had in mind. But it wasn't what he had in mind and it wasn't what he said. His message was that the Democratic Party should not abandon the small towns and the red states, the way it did under Clinton and McAuliffe, but should instead try to offer the "base" some real hope that the things that make their lives hopeless and terrifying are at least as high on the federal priority list as the well-being of a handful of Oil Sheiks. That's the message that Howard Dean has been carrying to the party for the last four years and he's right.

For all their opportunistic claims to being Just Folks, the Clintons abandoned the working class in favor of a pure monetarist recovery program. While he was feeling your pain,l Clinton and Rubin were managing a disinvestment in the social safety net of which Herbert Hoover, or George Bush would have been proud. And Newt Gingrich, in one of the most amazing displays of political suicide ever seen, attempted his putsch and supplied the Clintons with both motivation and cover.

The problem is, the Clinton "war room" approach to issue management works best if you have an overreaching blowhard like Gingrich to be your patsy. HRC was praying for Mitt Romney the same way the Republicans were praying for her. McCain will, day in day out, take positions (like today's terrible position on equal pay) that will cost him and should make running against him into a long home-run trot. I might be wrong, but I don't think the way you beat a guy like McCain is with triangulation and war-room-generated gotcha games.