Tampa and the will to power

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on Truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt.  So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life" we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians; despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then, there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere who enlightens us with lies like:

 "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama" 

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings  while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage.  Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect?  The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then There's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what - even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies.  Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself.  I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president. Ryan, following in the tradition of accusing FDR of  causing an economic crash that started three years before he was elected. And there's Ryan condemning from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned. Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican?  Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true.  That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is Liberal. Hell you can't even hear History, it speaks in timorous whispers while the Right Wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporate owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all.  He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power.  It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness; it's about power, power and more power and such such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose and yet has the power to destroy the world. 

The eye of the idiot

"For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have inclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet."

 On August 28, 1963, a year short of 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King told us he had a dream.  I wonder if anyone still does. 

Watching and listening to the madness growling and the lies howling across the country, I have mostly nightmares.  If  "America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned" it's now intent on defaulting on any promise it has ever made to anyone but the corporate robber barons, the rabid Christianist insurgents and the anarchists.

We have a self described Anarchist group of US military personnel, a militia plotting to overthrow the government by violence, some members of which are now on trial for murder. We have the most popular cable news network inventing calumnies against our elected government and some of our wealthiest citizens and businesses spending billions on so distorting the truth that we can't remember how we got here and are eager to repeat everything we did to cause the two largest economic catastrophes  in the last hundred years. We have widespread attempts at voter suppression.

No, you can't get to the truth easily these days, but you can bet that if the Republicans are screaming about all the things the demon Democrats and the Beast Obama have done, are doing and are about to do at any minute, you can be sure the truth is that the Republicans have done the same or are engaged in doing it or plotting it.  Yesterday I received a thick envelope in the mail, ostensibly from John McCain but certainly written by others.  Designed in every way to generate a sense of emergency, it insisted that I take the opportunity and use the express mail envelope (postage not included) to mail $2000, or maybe a little less if I want to risk an accusation of Marxism, as AN EMERGENCY DONATION to "stop the billion dollar Obama fundraising Juggernaut." 

Whether or not Jesus cares enough to weep any more, I do.  I do at least when the growing rage allows it.   Yes, yes, I know.  You poor victims of truth, justice and common decency will tell me as you've been doing since you turned the most prosperous nation on earth into the largest debtor with a cynical smile on your face -- you'll tell me I'm simply wrong and generally stupid because I'm angry at the "legitimate rape of America."

It's the logic of liars, the argument of the evil and if God has forsaken us, or left us behind, which may be a better translation, we're still too stupid to know it. We're legitimately stupid enough to see God's will in our own evil that we nod together like hollow bobble heads and agree with the Robertsonians that God saved the Republican convention from getting wet but if an asteroid fails to fall on the Democratic convention, it will mean nothing.

But in a way, that's true. This is America and meaning is in the eye of the idiot.

Matt and Mitt

And all that shit.

You can't say they don't try to please everyone, and since most people are idiots, or at least made equivalent to idiots by their ignorance, their faiths, beliefs, prejudices and anger; the way to please one idiot without offending the other is to make ambiguous hints, to use a  mouthpiece to provide plausible deniability and to make it sound like it's only a joke. You libtards got no sensa humor! Just jokin' here.

"No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this the place that we were born and raised.”

For example, we have Willard Mitt Romney "joking" that everyone knows where he was born ( not like that watermelon thief hiding in the woodpile) for the benefit of  Detroit's demented minions who might suspect that WMR is secretly one of the boys.  Indeed Mitt is good at making everyone think he's secretly on their side rather than being simply ambitious for power. 

My memory is good enough to remember son Matt ( how cute) bloviating his Birther bullshit last year,  of which  Raw Story is good enough to remind us.  I also remember  Plastic Matt  "joking" about how Plastic Mitt would release his tax returns after Obama would release his (already released) birth certificate. Just adorable, who cares if it's true?

Reminds me of all the folks I know who take pains to be polite in public but trot out the racist epithets in conspiratorial tones when they feel safe. Yes Rombo and company are good at playing both sides of everything without actually stating any principles and their constituents are really bad at noticing.  Have you noticed?

OMG!

Could it be that Anne Coulter just said something I agree with?  I think I need to wash out my brain with Lysol.  But I guess it's not quite that bad.  Yes, I do believe that the oh so Typically Tea Twit Tod Aiken is a swine, but I would stop short of using nuclear weapons on him as she demands ( rather messy at best) but I don't think he's not a real Republican as she asserts and I certainly don't, as most of my saner readers will agree,  think the Democratic Party financed his campaign just to make the Republicans look ridiculous.  Hell. they've looked ridiculous for over 30 years.

“What he cares about is his own ego,” said Arrogant  Anne of the Thousand Ton Ego on Insanity Hannity's Fox News show.  She complained about his lack of knowledge of medical facts, as well one could expect of a propagandist who carefully researches and checks her facts to be sure none of her assertions actually corresponds with any.

I probably should rephrase that to use the word 'whined' in ironic emulation of her favorite phraseology:  Anne went wah - she went wah, wah wah.

The legitimate Rape of Freedom

I went to bed ruminating about the predicted course of Tropical Storm Isaac which had it ravaging the West coast of Florida from fort Meyers to Tampa next week.  Am I a bad person for dreaming that a random raging force of  nature might do what our miserable excuse for a righteous God never seems to do and tear the Tampa Convention Center to pieces, rending flesh from barbarian bone and yet somehow leave the Tampa General Hospital just across the channel intact to tend to any decent folk who got caught out in the storm?  Perhaps I am, but the teeth and claws of the GOP are as visible to anyone with eyes to see as if they were painted red with gore -- as indeed they are -- and who will be there to rescue us when the wolf has eaten Grandma (and blamed it on Obama?) Sadly today's National Hurricane Center prediction shows Hurricane Isaac passing to the west of Tampa, leaving only some wind and rain to drown out the demented cries of a dying country.

It won't be quite loud enough of course, to obscure the lies and libels, the slanders, the fabrications or the calls for armed insurrection against the decent, the humane or the lovers of freedom  -- nor wet enough to wash away the Tea. But don't bring your guns to Tampa.  It was OK for the toothless Tea Whores to bring firearms to Democratic meetings and threaten to use them, but the GOP has banned guns at their sabbath.

There will be and there already are howls about spending and taxes and budgets, but put in the form of a passion play that has more to do with reversing the guilt for having started a war on invented information -- the most expensive war in our history -- and proposed that it would cost nothing if only we relieved the richest of us of a few more percent in taxes. They'll go on pretending that a middle class tax cut was a tax hike, that no additional gun control was somehow a "gun Grab" and that restoring Ronald Reagan's tax relief for the richest Americans, many of whom like Mitt Romney paid paid nothing and are still paying almost nothing was "the largest tax hike in history" and a flirtation with Marxism.  They'll continue the tradition of posing pornography, legal birth control, the "personhood" of fertilized eggs and abortion as the great issues of the day and the same people who claim that the universe is only a few years older than the pyramids will howl like idiots about how 14 year old girls won't get pregnant if the rape wasn't forceful enough and how women with hydrocephalic babies can't actually die in childbirth. They'll stand on the bloodstained platform or their vampire religion and call for the subjugation of women, the abandonment of the old and sick and weak and claim we simply can't survive if we do what everyone else in the free, modern world does.  They'll suggest a country with a double standard of morality, where the government sleeps in your bed but not in theirs and where they pay nothing and obey no rules. 

No, sorry Messrs. Romney and Ryan, I'd like you and your numbered accounts in Bermuda and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein washed out into the Gulf, never to be seen again and soon to be forgotten by the madmen, the congenitally stupid, the misogynists, the sexual perverts who support all the silly, stupid, racist rhetoric. I'd like to drown the contempt for facts, for science, for mathematics, for history and of course  your contempt for anyone who didn't lie cheat and steal their way to wealth and power, but of course I can't.

I can't because this is a stupid country, a petty, angry, prejudiced, bigoted, selfish and deluded country who thinks it would be better off and safer with no government at all. We're the country that elected George Bush twice and Richard Nixon twice and Spiro Agnew and savaged everyone that spoke up. This is the party that was outraged at anyone who said the economy was unsustainable and now sneers and snarks about how the economy is unsustainable.  This is the country that cheered at the biggest borrow and spend spree and now looks at the spendthrift culprits as saviors. Perhaps we deserve our fate. Perhaps we deserve even worse.  Perhaps a better nation might some day emerge from the stinking wreckage, but probably not and probably some other power will come to dominate the world -- a power who cares less for the kind of country we pretended to be and insisted we were while we danced around a bonfire chanting as America died.

You've got to be kidding, part III

When is a joke not a joke?  When it's about Allen West the convicted war criminal winning the Republican primary for Florida's House District 18 yesterday. He has been running as a war hero of course, Florida being a kind of Bizarro World where things are their own opposites. 

It's considered a swing district and is a snake pit of  Tea Party sentiment. So much so that his opponent  has been ostracized from the Republican party for even suggesting himself as an alternative to West, that Fascist son of a bitch. That was enough to christen him and all his supporters as Communists in the minds of the local Teabastards.  Crowder, a formerly popular county sheriff lost abysmally of course,  having only a few thousand bucks, decades of intimate familiarity with the district and good job performance to advertise as opposed to West, who never has lived in the district but had the bottomless pockets of the terrorist Right to fund him.

It remains to be seen who will prevail, but the completely unknown 29 year old Democratic candidate is unlikely ever to win in this Republican cesspool although there once was a one term Democrat in that office after the traditional values Mark Foley made a fool of himself with teenage boys.  

I'd call it another unfunny joke that  former State Representative William Snyder also carried away the nomination to Replace the pariah Sheriff Crowder. Snyder, as our State Rep strongly supported an Arizona Style "show me your papers" law, which of course made him very popular in this overwhelmingly pretend-Christian area where there are more Churches than dentists and Fluoride is banned in the water supply because it's a Communist plot but only "Liberals" worry about the Arsenic and pesticides and Mercury.

Of course our future as a nation is a pretty unfunny joke too, isn't it?

Damn the lies -- part II

Perhaps you'll recall my post entitled Damn the Lies the other day about the latest act of treason from the Republican Lie Machine, or Fox news as it's sometimes called.   It was about a totally fictitious story warning us about how if  "Obama gets his way" voting rights of military personnel would be restricted in Ohio. I suppose that adherents to the Obamahate faith accept unquestioningly that the POTUS writes election laws unconstitutionally in the State of Ohio. I suppose Fox Folk are actually stupid enough, or at least so disgustingly desperate enough  to legitimize their hatred of  our uppity president that they will believe anything without question and guard the lies with their miserable lives.  But needless to say, the most polite thing an honest observer can say about Fox Fraudster Shannon Bream is that it's a filthy, contemptible lie worthy of tar and feathers.

But who cares?  This isn't actually reality you know, it's a kind of  fantasy amusement park for deranged sociopaths and other borderline personalities with room temperature IQs and it isn't nearly possible for even a well funded and staffed effort to counter the lies or disseminate  the facts.  It's not just that there isn't enough money outside of the insurgency, it's also that believing the lies is a mighty fortress of faith. If you don't like the Flavor Aid, why then, you're a Liberal and that's that.

So, sure "that Obama" hates soldiers or "warriors" or "warfighters" as the anger merchants like to call any GI who ever peeled a potato.  It's all just another passion play.  So why get angry about the latest round of TV adds, paid for by unidentified "concerned citizens" who actually are the Koch's Folks or Rupert's Raiders which insist in full snark mode that "that Obama" has removed the Work for Welfare system put into place by that other Commie, that most far left Liberal ever, not the real president; that one-term-at-most Bill Clinton. 

Do I have to tell you it ain't true?  Probably not if you've read this far.  Should I mention that not only is it not true, even in part, but that what the White House is trying to accomplish with further Welfare reform is to accede to the long time requests of  Republican Governors to allow them the flexibility to tailor their State's programs to their needs? 

Perhaps it's galling to the Fascists and Bigots and Brown Shirts masquerading as Conservatives that, as it was with Bill Clinton, the man they tried to portray as another Trotsky was actually more conservative than they were in some respects and no further to the Left than the center.  It's nearly as galling to me that a mob of irate patriots doesn't put these lying bastards, these unscrupulous despoilers of liberty, Truth, Justice, Democracy and Decency in a pillory and piss in their faces.

You've got to be kidding -- part II

There's something infuriating about those election year robo-calls.  For me, it's because of the feeling of helplessness.  You can always interrupt a human or even a sub-human caller, or if one has fallen into an incoherent, blubbering rage, can hope for some small effect by slamming down the phone on someone whining obscene untruths in your ear.

I had just finished an annoying conversation with my mechanic yesterday about being in line for a very expensive marine engine repair and before I could stand up, go outside and scream at the top of my lungs, the phone rang again.  I normally screen my calls because the majority of them are from people I've never heard of trying to sell me everything from Viagra to mortgage scams, but this time I didn't look at the caller ID. I just picked it up.

Before I could issue a surly "hello" I was blasted by a wild and frenzied voice demanding that I make "an emergency contribution to help Romney fight Obama's disastrous policies."  Well, of course it was a recording and no human was offended by my returning the handset to its cradle just a bit harder than the Chicxulub asteroid impact, but the real pain was not so much that I couldn't vent my rage but rather that there was no possibility of asking the paid actor just what those "policies" might be.

Doesn't it seem that the reference is always to unspecified policies?  Why would that be but to harness the inchoate rage of the Teabastards while allowing them to preserve the illusion that that rage had anything to do with President Obama and his policies -- and not his ancestry.  Perhaps it's no different than the constant reference to "liberals" rather than to people who are opposed to the various scams and handouts and outrageous intrusions into private life that constitute the Republican political platforms of recent years -- things like the war on birth control, the war on pornography, the battle against public education (because as Rick Santorum told us, it promotes "elitism.") and the continued persecution of people who don't wish to be bound by religious taboos or would like to speak Spanish now and then.

Yes, I would have liked to get Mr. Roboto in a stranglehold and demand to know why Obama is to blame for paying for Bush's war and Bush's Medicare prescription plan and Bush's gifts to the oil cartel and why Obama is to blame for giving a tax break to the 98% of Americans who are not in the upper 2% of income earners rather than telling them to eat cake and giving an extra 2% to the Koch brothers and their ill bred ilk. I'd like to know whey that had nothing to do with the recession that started under Bush.  Really, the only "Obama Policy" of any stature I can think of is the health care plan written by one Willard M. Romney in conjunction with the health care industry and the one that hasn't really gone into effect yet, nor has it been a "disaster" to Massachusetts.

So what are these "Disastrous Obama Policies" other than paying the bills, other than being unable to remove the Bush tax structure, being unwilling to actually increase the policy that basically broke the back of the economy by neglecting to pay for the Most Expensive War in American History because the Tax Fairy would somehow bail us out by making war profiteers even richer.

Let's face it Tea Twits and  Secessionists and all you dishonest hordes of political whores yearning for a scapegoat to excuse the way you've been fighting to ruin life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America -- repeating lies that you hear because you can't admit that you've been wrong, because you can't admit that you don't know a damned thing about history or economics, because you can't admit that you've made mistakes and because you can't accept that "I've got mine and fuck you" isn't the definition of Capitalism, Democracy or even decency -- let's face it:  you applauded everything that got us here, you mocked and persecuted everyone who warned you and you ignored the history you should have learned from.

It's your damned fault, not "the Liberals" the Mexicans, the people who told you that no, there were no Goddamn nukes in Iraq and no way to build them: the people who told you that al Qaeda was a menace when your cowboy president shut down the anti-terrorism team right before 9/11 -- it's yours.

Who was it who told us we hated America when we told you slashing the upper bracket would pour a torrent of capital into the markets and hedge funds and real estate, creating the same bubble and bust we had in the 1920's?  It was you, you smug, self pitying, Velveeta and white bread eating, Pat and Rush and Ann cheering sock puppets.

Time to suck it up and take responsibility. There's no way to undo what you've done, no folksy homilies and vague generalities, no Mighty Mitt to save the day.  The debt can't be paid down by putting the old and the sick and the young and dependent on an ice floe. You can't fix things by "deporting" people for their political opinions like that malignant Republican war criminal parasite Allen West suggests. We can't "decrease the size of government by spending even more on Homeland Security the largest Federal Agency ever or by building more carriers and bombers to counter the defunct Soviet Union.  We can't raise taxes enough to do it.  We're going to see inflation - lots of it, at least those of us who can't hide billions offshore like our corporate citizens do, like our Republican supporters and candidates do. We're going to see enough devaluation that foreign countries can hire our non-union, no minimum wage serfs for less than they hire Chinese peasants to work in sweat shops until your grandchildren and your great grandchildren curse your memory, dig up your miserable bones and grind them for fertilizer.

You've got to be kidding

Paul Ryan -- yes, I know it's already old news, but Jesus. . . . Paul Ryan? 
What is it with the GOP that they didn't learn from the Palin experience; that they didn't learn that you don't balance out a weak wishy-washy, candidate (which in Gopspeak means there might be hidden traces of sanity lurking within) by pairing him with some radical anarchist wackadoodle?   Ok, ok, it worked with Dan Quayle, but Dan was just an oaf and an ignoramus and after all George I had to protect himself against impeachment. . . .  but Jesus. . . . Paul Ryan?

Damn the lies

If some day, someone erects a cenotaph somewhere in the arid and polluted desert that used to be called the United States of America, some inscription marking two vast and trunkless legs of stone, it should give credit to Fox News.  Amongst the other factors that contributed to the fall of "The Greatest Country there Ever Was" Fox must stand out -- Fox must at least be in gilded letters or garish neon lights, because no day and few hours have passed since its inception wherein some grotesque lie, libel or hyperbolic defamation designed to undermine truth, decency and democracy has failed to appear.

“If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of America’s finest will be eliminated,” host Shannon Bream said Friday night. “The campaign is suing to keep members of the military from having extra time to cast their ballots in one key battleground state.”

No it isn't.  The suit does not seek to impair voting rights for anyone but seeks to reinstate rights taken from the general population by the Republican controlled Ohio Legislature and if there were a God anything like the fire and brimstone scourge of iniquity people dream about, the earth would open up and swallow Ms. Bream, and Roger Ayres and Rupert Murdoch would become pillars of shit. 

The Suit by the Ohio Democratic Party and the Obama Campaign argues that Ohio's new law creates an unconstitutional tiered voting system, where early voting is only allowed for military personnel. As Jonathan Terbush writes at Raw Story:

"The suit would not prevent military members from, “having extra time” to vote, as the Fox report insinuated. Rather, it asks that the court, by blocking enactment of the new law, reinstate the extra time all voters used to enjoy for casting their ballots."

You may suspect that I've lost faith in this truth forsaken land and its lunatic tribes and you'd be close to the truth.  Our once powerful and always dishonest country won't be powerful forever nor will its self-righteousness last forever.  The worms, the maggots chewing on the gangrenous  flesh of America are employees of Fox and Shannon Bream is a liar -- if not damned by God, then at least damned by decency.  God damn Fox News. God damn them all to hell.

Keepin' it white

In general, I support the laws allowing most licensed and qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons in most places.  Here in Florida someone who has a permit does none the less, not have the legal right to carry weapons in many areas, like courthouses, police stations, schools, stadiums and of course, bars.  A national political convention however, where emotions run high; where the attitudes resemble the local stop-and-sock tavern, and people whom other people would like to harm are present, would seem to be another proper exemption. 

I'm afraid it's not so in Florida, where during the upcoming RNC in Tampa, squirt guns, pieces of chain, ropes and other items which might be used to harm or at least get people wet are strictly illegal, Republican Governor Rick Scott seems likely to refuse the City Council's request to keep guns out of the convention. You can bring your Beretta , but leave the Super-Soaker at home.

There are other reasons of course, to wonder how Scott gets away with avoiding the other common nickname for Richard.  No, I'm not talking about his rejection of Federal funds because as he says, hiring people kills jobs -- and I'm not talking about the dozen or so felonies his company committed in a billion dollar orgy of Medicare fraud.  I'm not even referring to his recent attempt to "purge" the Florida voter rolls  of likely Democrats.  This time "Rick" deserves a nice cold blast from one of those banned squirt guns for neglecting to tell nearly 18,000 Floridians that their voting rights have been restored and that they can now register.  I'm sure he has forgotten how a few hundred votes can put a President who the majority of voters did not vote for into office.  Otherwise he would be ashamed, right? 

Or maybe he is out of the loop once again. Maybe he just didn't know, the way he didn't know about the 1 billion, 700 million dollar Columbia/HCA medicare fraud; in charge but not guilty by virtue of some ineffable virtue and of course well deserved of his severance package of  10 million dollars, 300 million in stock and a million a year "consulting" fee.

I wonder what he'll make for his part in defrauding America this time; his help in making the White House white again.