Like most he-said/she-said political fiascos, I missed the original provocation on the Obama small town bitter quote and I'm still confused about what all the blather is about. Presumably it's the source of Richard Crowson's Wichita Eagle editorial cartoon today:

Admittedly, I'm generalizing a bit from Kansas, but the main reason small towns exist is because of agriculture. Small towns exist in the middle of an area of farms. (In Kansas they were literally, repeatedly laid out with one small town in the middle of each 6 x 6-mile block, with the county seats eventually rising to relative prominence.) For every so many people living on farms, there's a corresponding number of people in small towns doing business with them. So what's happened is that as the farm population shrank, small towns shrank with them. And those forces have been further exacerbated by small towns aren't big enough to support the schools, hospitals, cultural centers, and the more complex companies you find in larger cities.

One result of this is that small towns have effectively been forgotten about by most people in big cities, especially on the coasts, and that includes the private sector as well as government. For all of Clinton's economic growth in the 1990s, damn little of it occurred in small towns. (In KS the small towns that grew were the ones willing to tolerate the environmental distress of feedlots and a mass influx of Mexican laborers.) Are people in small towns bitter? I don't know, but one thing that is pretty clear is that they've been shunted off from most of the economic progress there has been recently. It also looks like they've tried to make up for this by embracing America's standard pieties. In particular, small towns provide a very disproportionate number of military recruits. There's no single explanation for that, but one large factor is the lack of other job opportunities.

I suppose one reason the "bitter" remark is seen as controversial is that embracing religion and/or patriotism is fundamentally a hopeful response to stress -- if anything, it's a form of denial, where one thing they're denying is bitterness. On the other hand, scapegoating others, be they illegal immigrants or Democratic elitists, does show one's bitterness, and there's more than a little of that, even if you don't want to admit it. The two reactions are intertwined enough that it's hard to sort them out. After all, today's hopeful enlistee is liable to turn into tomorrow's mangled, shocked vet.

The Democrats lost a lot of ground in small towns and poor rural areas -- West Virginia is the worst case -- during the 1990s when Clinton was wooing Silicon Valley and making hay for New York bankers. Robert Reich figured there'd be no problem sending low-paying jobs overseas because he'd raise scads of money to retrain everyone to become high-paid symbol manipulators. It will be hard to make that up because nobody has any real solutions to rural poverty, but it should at least be possible to show that what the Republicans have to offer is even worse. Small towns are hurting not just because they're small towns. They're hurting because almost everyone in America is hurting, because the Republicans have been siphoning wealth off to the already rich, squandering even more wealth, and sticking the rest of us with all the risks -- what they call "responsibility."

The Wichita Eagle has taken to quoting bits from their website blogs on the editorial page. Oftentimes the writing and thinking is much sharper than their editorial writers can muster. For example, on April 13 they had an item about how please Sen. Pat Roberts is with Gen. Petraeus, followed by an item titled ". . . But Iraqis unimpressed by Petraeus testimony":

While Congress lavished attention last week on the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, most Iraqis weren't listening, according to the Washington Post.

"The Americans have hundreds of meetings and testimonies like this, and what has it done for the Iraqi people? Nothing," said a carpenter in Baghdad. "So why do we care? We just want all the foreigners to leave and stop causing disasters for our country."

Sami al-Askari, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said Iraqi politicians weren't following the hearings. "To be honest, no one expects anything different in the report or believes that it will have that big an impact on Iraq."

Not exactly a vote of confidence from those we're supposed to be helping.

Another item: "Glickman laments rising cost of campaigns":

Dan Glickman, former 4th District congressman and current chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, was back in Wichita last week. He helped campaign for state Sen. Donald Betts, who is running for Glickman's old congressional seat, now held by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard.

Glickman told The Eagle editorial board that he spent only $100,000 when he first ran for Congress in 1976 (less than $400,000 in today's dollars). Now, he said, members of Congress continually have to raise money and often are paralyzed from doing anything that might upset their donors. "It's an insidious system," he said.

They didn't explain further, but my understanding is that Tiahrt entered the campaign season with a warchest over $2 million. He is for all intents and purposes Boeing's bag man on Capitol Hill, so thoroughly wed to the tanker scam that Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd. The only way I can imagine anyone challenging him is if they run against the money, making Tiahrt's sponsors the great issue of the campaign, driving that message home everywhere using a cheaper medium, paper.

The Eagle also carried a letter by Rev. Michael Poage, titled "Selective Morality," which started:

Sometimes a boycott is helpful and important. However, the idea of President Bush considering a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in China strikes me as ludicrous and hypocritical. This is someone whose arrogant and oligarchic reign has had lies, violation of human rights, torture and an illegal war as the foundation of his presidency. His administration lied to get us into a war in which we have practiced the disregard for human rights through various torture techniques.

Personally, I can't see why Bush, or any other US president, would want to attend the opening of any Olympics outside of the US, or why any other nation would want Bush, or any other US president, to show up. Quite simply, the security hassles on top of every other fool thing should be prohibitory. The Olympics has gotten to be such a gargantuan national ego thing that one hardly needs any other reason to want to stay clear. For China this amounts to a national coming out party, a symbol that they're one of the big dogs now, which of course merely validates what's already the case. I imagine that India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and further down the line Iran, will want to follow in the same line.

As for the anti-Chinese protests, my immediate reaction is: I think it is lazy and cowardly for any American to protest a foreign government more strenuously than they do opposing their own when it is engaged in comparably bad behavior, as the US government most certainly is. (Maybe you can make an exception for individuals who have immediate ties to affected people, but that is very rarely the case here.) Part of this is that it's just too easy to get people to turn against some other government, especially when it doesn't challenge one's own -- China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe are all easy marks, but you don't see much agitation over Egypt, Colombia, Ethiopia, or other so-called allies with equally dubious records. When such protests occur, one suspects some sort of hidden agenda, the work of some secret sponsor. I don't know whether this is the case here, but the CIA (for instance) has a long track record of orchestrating protests. We know that China is viewed warily by the neocon right -- one reason they so missed 9/11 was that the US was so busy war gaming against China.

Which leads to another problem with Americans protesting China, or virtually any other country except the US: all protests default to demands on one's own country, and the US has a long history of acting badly even when a protest goal is virtuous. Part of this is because the US tends to act unilaterally (with or without token followers), and such actions primarily serve to undergird US power throughout the world, which ultimately does more harm than good.

My reasoning here is a little more subtle than Rev. Poage's, but his instincts are right, including his proposal for a war crimes tribunal to try Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. After all, anyone who wants the right to criticize others first has to clean up their own act.