Josh Marshall’s Political Toxic Waste

One is immediately stumped when searching for words that aptly describe the bilge sinking the increasingly cumbersome and tedious vessels that comprise the patently venal fleet of Obamablogs. According to one writer who has a predilection for reinscribing misogynistic tropes in almost every essay he pens, Hillary Clinton is “[t]oxic,” for she has the temerity to situate the controversy surrounding the seating of the delegates of Florida and Michigan within the august traditions of Voting Rights and Civil Rights that define the modern Democratic Party. Somehow that writer is convinced that Clinton’s desire to provide representation to two states Democrats must win in November will rent the Party asunder. I quote:

What she’s doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she’s gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her — a belief many won’t soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there’s every reason to think she doesn’t even believe in. [sic]

Because the last sentence of the passage I quote is grammatically awkward, I will not attempt to determine the rationales and arguments the writer cites. I will, however, note how he views a female candidate and her supporters as irrational and easily aroused dupes, which according to him renders them “toxic.” I guess Hillary and her supporters are a group of impure and unruly amazons who must be tamed by Democratic men in the name of Party unity. For men and only men are arbiters of truth and purveyors of knowledge, and these men want their women to be pure tabula rasas onto which they can imprint their specular image. And this, of course, will only occur if women and the men who support them shelve what we understand to be incontrovertible evidence and predicate our arguments on the same axioms the writer I cite recklessly hypostatizes in his essay. I quote:

Never mind of course [sic] that even if you [sic] count Michigan and Florida she’s still not ahead in the popular vote without resorting to tendentious methods of counting.

I’ve always assumed, as I think most people have, that once the nomination is settled the Florida and Michigan delegates will be seated. And I can see if Sen. Clinton wants to embrace this issue to claim a moral victory even while coming short of her goal of the nomination. [sic] As things currently stand, seating them would still leave Sen. Clinton behind in delegates.

One’s mathematical skills are considered tendentious if one counts verifiable votes cast in primaries for a candidate whose name appears on the ballot. One is also considered dogmatic and unyielding if one believes the states of Florida and Michigan should gain representation before the outcome of the nomination process is determined. In other words, representation is actually its antonym, nonrepresentation, and any attempt to rely on a particular word’s proper signification will be dismissed as nonsensical, for the author has decided that all words should be treated as enantiosemes, or signs that signify their opposite. After all, Clinton is behind and shall remain behind. And besides, any attempt to change that predetermined scenario will be viewed as “breathtaking in its cynicism,” for Obama dismisses those who have not mindlessly consumed his commodified politics of postpartisanship and postmodern unity as unworthy and undereducated “cynics.” Only the voracious consumers who comprise the unimaginative “creative class” are capable of formulating thoughts, I guess.

Obamabots are fond of the word “discourse,” but they fail to understand the phenomenon of intertext, which is the product of an utterance’s situation within a broader discursive field. If they understood structuralism before attempting to (mis)use its key terms, they would know that all texts are the products of other texts. Mr. Marshall’s text, for example, is the product of all the texts generated by the campaign of the candidate for whom he serves as echo chamber. But what is insidious about his repetition of the claims propounded by the Obama campaign is the uncritical reification it enacts. Indeed, he reifies them to the point of a tautology. Misinterpreting the bankrupt assumptions of a politician as so many facts to be taken as axiomatic, Marshall misleads his audience with what can only be described as political toxic waste of the second order. For the waste he generates is a mere product of the toxic information with which the Obama campaign floods his inbox.

Discursive waste, I guess, simply begets more discursive waste, especially when such waste elides the following: Harold Ickes served on the Committee that sanctioned Florida, not Hillary Clinton; Michigan and Florida Republicans in those states’ respective state legislatures ignored the rules the DNC outlined for the primary, not the Michigan and Florida Democrats who cast votes with which Marshall and Obama disagree; Obama promised to seat the delegates of Florida when he violated the pledge his campaign made with other Democrats during a press conference he held in Tampa, Florida, last September; Obama also violated the pledge when he advertised in Florida during the month of January.

Because Obama violated the pledge in Florida, he is pure. Clinton, however, is cynical and toxic, for she upheld the pledge in Florida. Moreover, she understands the rules, which stipulate that Democrats in a particular state should not be penalized if they made a concerted effort to ensure their respective state legislatures adhered to the DNC provisions when choosing a date on the primary calendar. But none of this matters at TPM, where purity is toxicity and toxicity is purity. I guess this redefinition of words is one of those “tactical necessities of the moment” Marshall describes as so much politics. And I guess this obliges us to view his failed and tendentious attempts to transvalue words, rules and events as yet more vacuous prose secreted by a warped mind suspended in a vat of politically partisan toxic waste.