Thanksgiving turkey

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes it's just what it looks like. Sometimes, when the fat man sucks on it, all hell is smiling.

"The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed."

Said Rush to a caller and President Obama is hiding that fact behind an honest account of history. No, that's not just a cigar and of course we didn't get tobacco from the Indians - what are you anyway, a Communist?

Rush Limbaugh has long since run out of relevance, run out of ways to prove that president Obama is a Kenyan, anti-colonial (would he rather have him be a pro-colonial?) Muslim Christian extremist who hates white people and is an avowed communist, atheist, trotskyite, racist antiChrist ultraLiberal Fascist. He's exhausted every epithet of every stripe -- and it seems he's now reduced to the even more pathetic state of turning the most mundane acts of traditional presidential sentiments and statements into fuel for his bonfires. Lapel pins, terrorist fist bumps; leave that to the girl scouts. Rush Limbaugh is the Big League.

What would have been, to anyone else and by anyone else, a tepid, ritual recognition of the long standing American myth that the Plymouth colony was helped in adapting to the harsh climate and unfamiliar environment of 17th century Wampanoag territory by some of the native people living there has been taught to school children for at least a century and of course it's filled with inaccuracies and covered with a sloppy whitewash, but only in the cigar sucking mind of Mr. Limbaugh does that 3rd grade pageant constitute a damnation of Mr. Obama.

In the White House thanksgiving proclamation, the president says

" A beloved American tradition, Thanksgiving Day offers us the opportunity to focus our thoughts on the grace that has been extended to our people and our country. This spirit brought together the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe -- who had been living and thriving around Plymouth, Massachusetts for thousands of years -- in an autumn harvest feast centuries ago. This Thanksgiving Day, we reflect on the compassion and contributions of Native Americans, whose skill in agriculture helped the early colonists survive, and whose rich culture continues to add to our Nation's heritage. We also pause our normal pursuits on this day and join in a spirit of fellowship and gratitude for the year's bounties and blessings."

Jesus Christ. No, really -- Jesus Christ. this could be a Sunday Sermon preached somewhere in Middle America to a pastel congregation painted by Norman Rockwell. To The Palm Beach tycoon however, it's occasion for a racist sneer about casinos and

"So, we were the invaders, we were incompetent idiots. We didn't know how to feed ourselves so they came along and showed us how and that's what Thanksgiving is all about."

Tell that to every school kid who had to make Pilgrim and Indian costumes complete with anachronistic flintlock blunderbusses and buckled shoes -- the America hating little bastards.

"He says nothing about the Constitution in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation because he's got a problem with it,"

Limbaugh continues to rant and in the absence of any supporting information for it, fails also to tell us how a document written nearly 170 years afterward would be have any relevance to the Thanksgiving holiday other than one only obvious to a malicious, neurotic saboteur grasping for any wrench he can toss into the works of truth, honesty and human decency.

But of course thanking a long ago vanished tribe, acknowledging the cultural tributaries of our nation and being grateful to whatever name one attaches to providence that our country ever came to be, is no more a qualification for venomous condemnation than saying good morning or asking what time it is. Failing to mention the Constitution of 1789 means no more than failing to mention the Emancipation Proclamation and it says nothing about Obama or the United States of America founded so many years later and mostly by other people. The only uniting element in this or any Limbaughean argument is the desperate attempt to make Obama an "America hating" alien in order to make sure we continue making the same arrogant, ignorant mistakes we pridefully ignore. If the President came out against slavery and wife beating we can be sure Rush would show us just how this was the one-way door to communism and the terrifying notion that Rush may have to earn an honest living. But Rush reveals so much with every word.

"Somebody is toying with me. Somebody is seeing if they can get one past me. Somebody is trying to take advantage of me being not as focused on the day before Thanksgiving and falling for this prank."

That's right, it's not about an alliance of convenience between the Wampanoag and a ragged group of Englishmen who had suffered serious losses in the previous winter, it's about Rush. The President isn't following tradition, isn't being aware of history, isn't telling the truth, isn't being a general good guy in that love thy neighbor and let's work together, and can't we all get along mold. He's trying to trick Rush, take advantage of Rush and interfere with Rush's millions, with the profits of his betrayal of my country, the malignant, hyperbolic, fabrications intended to sabotage everything good and decent and true.

No, it's true Rush. You're right. The long, slow and erratic movement toward freedom and responsibility and justice you're trying to retard is only something designed to get around you and your mission. There's nothing else behind it but an attempt to "get around" you and Obama's not the only one. We're all trying to trick you and in fact history is trying to trick you, the truth is trying to trick you and come to think of it, Satan himself is trying to trick you into thinking that's just a cigar.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Yes, those were the days Archie and Edith Bunker sang about and the man who led us from market crash and credit crunch into full blown depression by blaming the workers instead of the actual causes. Somehow we've forgotten that Archie the lovable, small minded bigot and ignoramus was supposed to be a joke.

I admit it, I went and hid my head in Caribbean sand for a week so I wouldn't have to watch the madness, the hysteria and the lies, or endure the Fox News fits and fables -- or most of all, witness the continuing spectacle of my country eating itself alive out of a desperation to keep doing what always produces everything we're trying to fix. Sooner or later however, and Hurricane Tomas argued for sooner, one has to come back and face the discord.

It isn't easy. It isn't easy to accept that Americans will support politicians that truly are nowhere near as smart as a fifth grader and that Americans will elect politicians who don't think the government has any business interfering with our "right" to abuse and exploit and segregate other Americans or to accept that Americans will just childishly stay home and let some 20% of the voters put a plutocrat affiliated with a billion dollar medicare scam in the Florida Governor's mansion out of contempt for "elitism" and because Obaaaaaaama and the 'Librils' haven't restored the Bush bubble, the Bush soaring debt, the Bush job loss, the Bush expansion of Federal size and power, the Bush redistribution of wealth, the Bush disenfranchisement of voters and infringements upon civil rights soon enough to please them. Yes, that's a hell of a long sentence, but how we sank this low is an even longer story and when it comes to telling it, it's not me whose head is buried in the sand.

No, after 8 years of job stagnation, job loss and declining earnings, all we'll be hearing about is about that 9.6% unemployment Obama created without any help from Bush's tax cuts and wars -- and we won't be remembering the 9.5% unemployment in Reagan's first term. ( nor his tax increases nor the effect they produced) We'll hear the gloating and bragging about the president's low popularity although Reagan's was lower at the same point in his career. We'll hear about profligate spending, but not a word about the payback with interest that tells a different story. We'll keep hearing about the debt, but not the policies that produced it and how it can only be solved by a policy that has produced the largest government sponsored redistribution of wealth in our history without creating a single new private sector job -- a policy that must be maintained for fear of Communism. Like Archie, we'll keep longing for that romanticized version of a Hobbesian hell with every white man for himself, minorities in the minority, stragglers will be shot and no prisoners taken. We'll keep ignoring reality and we'll keep repeating the slogans as we count our beads, fabricating facts and citing false history when we pay attention to history at all.

Meanwhile the sand is warm and the hurricane is moving out to sea. . .

Absalom

But, oh! for Absalom,--

For his estranged, misguided Absalom,--

-Nathaniel Parker Willis-

What could be more fun that spending a sunny 73 degree Saturday at the County Fairgrounds with hundreds of fellow Hams, looking at equipment, attending seminars on ionospheric science and space weather and browsing the flea market? Perhaps a day free of Obama Derangement Syndrome; a day without having to hear that the roads are so bad in Chicago because "that's where Obama's from." I'd like to be able to discuss APRS without hearing that "Obama turned off Loran-C in order to make us all helpless so that the USSR will have an easier time taking over and making us all Communists. Obama, O-BAHma, OOOOH-Baaaaahma; the braying of asses in the Florida sun.

I'm tired of hearing that Shirtless Joe from Snakeshit Junction doesn't feel safe from Pelosi and the Gummint Gungrabbers with only 10,000 rounds of .223 in his house in the swamp or that "if taxes get any higher we're gonna have to have another revolution." Joe's actually getting a tax break this year, but I guess he's worried to distraction about how Warren Buffet is going to like the extra 2%. He never said a peep about the three trillion dollar war because he supported the troops. He'll never in his life make enough to approach that bracket.

I'm tired of the daily delivery of e-mail lies about health care reform and how everything from the Postal Service to the Pentagon is not only dysfunctional, but Maoist, Trotzkyite, Marxist COMMINISM! I'm fed up with hearing about Obaaaaaaaaaaaahma's plan to import and support illegal aliens at public expense, make Capitalism illegal, turn the schools into brainwashing centers and do away with private property.

Two years ago I watched my mother die, her brain eaten away by disease until she was unrecognizable and recognized no one, and I feel the same way watching my country turn into a pit of bloody, barking dogs tearing themselves apart. Unwilling to be governed and unwilling to participate in government, demanding the lawless freedom of the wild animal and total protection from all harm and all at no cost we howl at the moon. Suspicious and angry of everything and everyone; we're not the patriots who founded a secular, democratic republic and we don't even remember our real history as we brag endlessly about freedom.

No, Jesus was mocked, abused and scorned once again in the streets of Ohio as he's so often been and by the same kind of people -- whether it was in Salem or Selma or Jerusalem or Birmingham, and nobody cares. We brag endlessly and lie constantly about "Christian" values none the less; force Christian oaths on ourselves and demand the tyranny of Natural Biblical law instead of Democracy and we call the radical treason "conservative."

What does one do, powerless to stop the mortal decay of our closest kin, whether it's a mother, a father, a son or a country, yet unable to bear the sight of it?

. . . misguided Absalom,--

The proud bright being who had burst away

In all his princely beauty to defy

The heart that cherished him--for him he poured

In agony that would not be controlled.

The French confection

Bob Greene made me laugh this morning, writing about the magazine ad for a Hermès suitcase priced at $27,100. He thought at first it was a joke until the Hermès store in Naples Florida told him that it wasn't even their most expensive bag, which of course is diamond encrusted. This one isn't. It's trimmed in "Evercalf" leather which I suspect to be much like the "rich Corinthian" leather of Chrysler Cordoba fame, which means most of the cost -- at least $27,000 of it -- is in the trademarked name for a perfectly ordinary material. Otherwise it's just a canvas bag, or "officer canvas" as they call it, which means you may have to salute it if you're wearing a Hermès hat.

Why? Greene keeps asking, although I know and you know exactly why anyone would actually buy one at a time when more Americans are cramming their things into shopping carts and Hefty bags and wandering the streets. It's precisely because it cost $27,100 and you can't afford to toss that kind of money away on nonsense, hand stitched or not.

It's not the sort of bag most people would really notice, except that it doesn't have the silly handle and wheels that make our airports seem like farmyards full of goat carts, but then it's designed for another purpose, it's designed both to remind you and to help you forget that there are people -- millions of people trying to support families on one Hermès suitcase a year.

Hey, don't get angry. It's your money and you're taxed enough already. Under Reagan's tax structure you'd have had to make do with Louis Vuitton or, perish the thought, Hartmann, so the country owes it to you and you needed to buy it now, before that Marxist in the White House restores the tax rates of that prince of Capitalism -- right?

It's not true

Nothing is true, all things are permitted
- Hassan i Sabah -

No, I didn't watch the State of the Union Address Wednesday and I haven't read the transcript and I don't care what it says because it doesn't matter. As Justice Alito said, "It's not true." Nothing is true, at least nothing that the opposition, the enemy says and we're all the opposition and we're all the enemy, listening only to ourselves and the prophets who repeat what we want to hear. We're all the majority of course; silent or otherwise and if we're also the persecuted minority, vide supra. The other guy is always Guy Fawkes, plotting to destroy order, even though order itself is the enemy and war is the goal and peace is for the weak.

As the persecuted minority, anything we do is permitted; anything even if it means selling our country to global robber barons and promoting 'every man for himself' anarchy and if we fall down, if chaos comes, we will just deny it and chant the doctrine of less government or more government or whatever it is, because nothing is true and all things are justified.

No, frankly my dear reader, I don't give a damn. I was foolish to hope that the dogs of the fallen regime wouldn't bring down the next one and that the cancer it planted in the court wouldn't aid them in setting the stage for our next Republican president, our first wholly owned president and a subsidiary of Exxon or Humana, or KBR or Halliburton or the People's Bank of China. It's a small world after all and there are a lot of hungry giants.

Yes, they failed to privatize Social Security, they only partially succeeded in privatizing the military, but the goal of privatizing The Legislative and Executive branches is about to follow the privatizing of the Court. Behold the United States of America, inc - or GmbH or SA or Ltd or whatever floats the global boat. But it's not true, as the judge said. You never really wanted reform, did you? No, it never happened and this isn't happening and it's all going to be all right -- just look at the light.

Back to the future

Only a year into Ronald Reagan's first term, some pundits were calling him a one-term president. Only hours into Bill Clinton's first term many were saying the same thing. Barak Obama hasn't been spared the would-be self fulfilling prophecy either. Republicans and the corporate interests who own them have been focusing on the upcoming elections since November 2008 and now, the Supreme Court has given them what may be just what they need to make their reconquista possible. Indeed the midterm elections may have their outcome affected by new, less restrictive rules regarding campaign spending by corporations.

"Our nation's speech dynamic is changing, and informative voices should not have to circumvent onerous restrictions to exercise their First Amendment rights,"

wrote Kennedy for the majority, setting aside a century's limited progress in separating the power of money from the power of the vote. By "informative voices" of course, he means The Insurance industry, the Health care industry, The Oil Companies and all who seek to profit by influencing and restricting our choices. That's one small step for KBR, Halliburton, United Health Care, Exxon and Cargill -- and one giant step backwards for you and me.

At a time of national outrage as concerns the true loyalties of our elected representatives, could this affirmation of the power of money over the power of the individual come at a worse time?

Today's ruling, by Big Money's representatives in the court may not change much, considering the ease with which corporations have been able to influence every last detail of our lives as it is, but it's a bad step in a bad direction.

The plain sense of things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

-Wallace Stevens-
___________________________

Remember when Obama was "the most liberal Senator" in the whole, wide world and we were supposed to tremble at the thought of his limitless liberalness making Capitalism illegal while the Government Printing office was strained to its limit printing little red books? Wasn't long ago.

Now what seems like a majority of those who voted for him are asking what things would be like if he really were a liberal. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi -- they don't seem much like the little red " far left liberal" devils we were warned about. In fact, with a health care bill that seems to have been written by the Health Care corporations and the anti-abortion Religious Right, some are asking if this isn't indeed a country for old men; the same old men whose exclusive country club it's been all along.

No, it's not like the crazy bastards we had for the last 8 years are back and in fact I think we'd have been far worse off had the Republicans won the White House once again, but still. It's like we had come to an end of the imagination -- a fantastic effort has failed, a repetition in a repetitiousness of men and lies.

The unbearable madness of America

Rush Limbaugh may get his wish and what used to be a viable, if flawed democracy may just disappear into the kind of thing that used to go on in Michael Vick's back yard. Barking, snarling bared tooth and bloody clawed madness is everywhere, in the wild, outraged e-mail I got last night showing Barack Obama "refusing" to salute the flag on Veteran's day, to a new attempt to propagandize small children into supporting mad-dog mentality and bigoted mockery against liberal political figures, Jews, and gays. Even Geraldo Rivera, of all people, is calling Fox and Gretchen Carlson "preposterous and irresponsible" for insisting that trial by jury is dangerous. That may be the first time I've caught him in an understatement.

It doesn't help any more to refer the hoax spreaders to Snopes.com or FactCheck.org, since there are ten thousand web sites telling us that these sites and the facts they cite are wildly biased against the Gospel of Obamahate and never mind the unimpeachable sources they reference. Fox news? The voice of God, of course and we never question it. I don't think we have any chance to survive it.

It's chic to disparage American products. We can't make cars Americans say, but in China? They'd really rather have a Buick and the US is seen as an innovative technological leader with a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. We have the best health care we insist although our nation's capitol has a higher infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka. Socialism and terrorism are our biggest fears yet acetaminophen alone kills many times more people in a year than have ever died in all the terrorist attacks on our country while the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous, free countries offering the most opportunity for advancement are described as Socialist, third world hell-holes by people who can't find Denmark on a map.

The nativists are restless, the bigots are howling like banshees, the Christianists are speaking in tongues while we roll our eyes and babble about birth certificates, our Muslim president and Sarah the Rogue Palin who wants to lead us into a future although she insists the end is coming any day and traffic accidents are the result of witchcraft. Millions of my countrymen are as out of touch with reason and objectivity as anyone languishing in a padded cell ever was and I'm without hope. There is a tide of hate and madness in the lives of men and countries and I'm beginning to think we're surfing it straight to hell.

Ugly American

Have we become a nation of skateboard and spray can street brats who live just to piss off the adults and piss on everything we can just for the fun of it; laughing with idiot glee while impressing our idiot friends?

Maybe not all of us, but certainly the Tea Baggers and the third of us who think Sarah Palin would make an outstanding president and most assuredly the idiot CNN reporter who thought she could get noticed by wearing a T-shirt with the president of the US dressed as Mao Zedong in a Red Army uniform -- not at some idiotic Republican rally, not in a high school parking lot, but in the streets of Shanghai and while Barak Obama was making a historic visit to convince the world's largest country we're rational and dependable and trustworthy.

That's right - look at me folks, I'm an American and I'm an offensive and ignorant twit! One wonders at what feelings such a spectacle elicits to the Chinese. Mao, after all and after all the horrors, is still a hero of the "anti-Japanese War" and the man who ended much of the horror of Chinese history, albeit by instituting his own horror. Still, his picture looks down at Tian an men from the gates of the forbidden city.

Is this statement meant to say: "look, our leader is just like your great founding father, which might be an insult? Perhaps it means "look, your leader was a monster and so is ours" which would be a very confusing concept since drawing any parallels or valid comparisons between these two men is the stuff of foil hatted and straight jacketed ravers -- or unscrupulous reactionary propagandists. What must it seem like when a representative of the country that has everything China wants mocks the system that gave it to them by comparing it to the dark days of starvation and violent oppression?

Who knows, but if we hark back only a handful of months to when criticizing the US or it's leaders while abroad was considered treason - at least when non-Republicans did it, it would be confusing to anyone. No Chinese thinks Obama has anything to do with Communism, much less with the dictatorship of the Party or the Gang of Four or the Cultural Revolution.

Emily Chang, a Chinese based CNN reporter was hassled by Shanghai police who had put a ban on such display in order to avoid offending America. That an American news network would make an effort to openly flaunt it rather than some anti-American local must have seemed as strange as it seems to me, but perhaps no stranger than the tokens and tags of the domestic brat culture with its graffiti, self mutilation and 'attitude.'

Nice job Emily. Thanks for reminding the world that we're as sophomoric and scatter-brained as we ever were and the world can feel safe with us, our massive nuclear arsenal, our worshipful militarism, our xenophobia and the joy we feel in our disrespect for everything and everyone.

Rape, racism and Republicans

A friend of mine used to have the job, back during the Vietnam war, of flying a helicopter over dangerous areas so as to draw fire from hidden gun emplacements, flushing out the enemy so that we knew where they were. Barak Obama has been a bit like that and sad to say, I've now identified far too many enemies, some that I thought were friends.

I got another e-mail this morning, from someone I would hardly call a redneck: a northeasterner, ex military intelligence with a long career at the Pentagon. "I despair for the country" was the title and it had a link to a YouTube video wherein the President confesses to being a Muslim. It's an obvious cut and paste job that wouldn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled -- and there's the rub. Too many want to be fooled and bask like pigs in the warm and stinky deception. The hate and fear of our President long preceded his election and for some it preceded his birth. The closeted racists of America desperately need such insultingly stupid stories as a defense against the obviously true accusations of racism.

I grew up in the 1950's and I'm no stranger to segregation or blood in the streets for that matter, but still I'm amazed at the breadth and depth of the long concealed and highly fermented racial and ethnic hatred that's been lurking in the jungle and is emerging like tracer bullets whose dotted line shows the way, right to their source.

I can't count the outraged e-mails and comments I've seen about the recent California schoolyard rape, which of course has allowed the haters to vent their paranoid fear and loathing of Hispanics. It was of course a Hispanic girl who reported it, not a "regular" American as Archie Bunker would have said, but no matter. Hate has its own sort of statistics and only needs an example to declare it "typical." Indeed, it doesn't even have to be true if you have even a mediocre shareware video editing program.

In its own way, this sick and disgusting incident seems not to be out of context of what is happening in many disparate groups, even of white, Anglo-Saxon protestants, marching in the streets for lower taxes as though Obama had actually raised them; showing pictures of Nazi death camps as though any sane person connects piles of murdered bodies to a government administered health plan -- the people who call the Democratic health care bill "Obamacare" but never think to call Social Security Roosevelt Retirement or identified the GI bill with Communism or call the public library the Socialist Book Store -- or identify the recession with Republican economic policies. These things and more are part of the Us against Them view where the government is "them," the 15% fringe element and the corporate lobbyists are "We the people," the government is the enemy and only illegitimately exercised authority is legitimate.

The twenty or so witnesses to this crime, if they had any compassion at all, were prevented by the entertainment value and hatred of police and the Maverick mentality from doing anything or reporting anything. The criminals are The People, the cops are not and the law is the enemy because it interferes with our freedom to commit crimes ad libidum. Is that really different from not caring how many innocents are killed abroad in a war started and continued under false pretenses and appeals to fear and patriotism? Is that different from not giving a flying damn how many millions die, how many sick children clog the emergency rooms and drive up the cost of insurance and spread disease, or how many lives are ruined by insurance companies? Its them against us and 'them' are the unfortunate, the minorities, the sick the old and unemployed. Who wants the damned law and the government to help them even if it protects us too?

Perhaps you find the connection tenuous or even far-fetched, but I don't. There is no "us" in the US any more unless it's in the context of us against them and that miserable, militant and malicious group who flatter themselves with the stolen title of 'Conservative' are as much to blame as anyone for the rape that is our for-profit, cartel run health "system." Anyone who brings the government in is a "snitch."

Oh no, it's those liberals who insist any criticism of the President is racist and we're not racist at all - it's just that he's a foreign born, Marxistnaziterroristracist who "hates white culture" (whatever the hell that is) and murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours. It's because he's trying to reconstitute the Auschwitz death camp by giving us health insurance, not because he's a Ni - I mean black.

Hey, we're not responsible for not reporting a vicious and nearly fatal rape, it's because we can't trust the cops, the cops are the problem, the government is the problem and we want less government, you know.

Elsewhere

Ok, I give up. It's impossible to win an argument with someone as totally dishonest as Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or as stupid as their followers. The relentless, rabid and utterly false accusations of forced euthanasia, "death panels" and health care rationing continue despite the fact that the most rigorous reading of HR 3200 reveals nothing of the sort - and indeed nothing of the other sorts of lies they're telling. You could go look, but you won't and if you're a Republican you'll read one thing and swear you saw another, just as I could roll up the president's birth certificate and shove it up your nose and you'd go on asking for it, insisting it wasn't there, you flat-Earth bozo with too few dendrites to make a synapse.

So go ahead you demented, perverted self-righteously dishonest enemies of everything good and true. Go ahead; sit in your mother's basement with the spiders and watch Fox lies. E-mail everyone you know and assure them Obama's going to murder your kids and eat your grandmother and take away your guns too because Beck says so. I don't give a shit. A country with ten people like you in it wouldn't be worth saving anyway. Take it all you deranged psychotic cretins - whatever's left. You deserve the kind of shithole country you are making this into and you can have it.

Sayonara, assholes! I'm elsewhere.

It's not my fault

It's no surprise that the economic devastation trickling down through my part of Florida is behind the rising violence levels. It's not just the home invasions, the bank robberies, the muggings, although their numbers are small enough when they occur in a large population that chances are I'll never witness anything like that. Domestic beatings, assault and abuse however are dramatically rising in the large population of people who have been living close to the edge; a paycheck or two from disaster. That's a lot of people. Real unemployment is in the double digits here.

Of course we're going to hear a lot more about banning "assault weapons" since assault is already "banned." It's much easier to talk about steak knives and baseball bats and hand guns than to address the real reasons -- and there are many -- for the fear and anger and the violence it engenders. Some of those reasons have to do with the freewheeling markets of the Bush years, the absence of oversight, regulation and basic prudence that were supposed to make the rich get richer so that they could patronize us more effectively. That sacred idea is under attack and must be defended by distracting arguments: by rants against immigrants, illegal aliens, weapons, atheism, work "ethics," Liberals and their desire to give money to people who are suffering and desperate.

So we will continue to tell ourselves that violence and irrational anger and domestic crime are a "lifestyle choice" having nothing to do with our righteous selves. It's a matter of personal responsibility after all, and so we're not going to spend a dime on shelters or counselling or, God forbid, letting the tax breaks for the 1 percenters expire. That would not only be heresy, it wouldn't only be farleftliberalextremist Marxism, but it would be an admission that all the loving support we gave Captain George the Pirate was the dumbest thing we ever did.

The nightmare before Christmas

No one expects this to be a Christmas season retailers will celebrate. Even people with reliable income are cutting way back and when I read that local stores would be open as early as 4:00 AM today, I pictured yawning employees drinking coffee, trying to stay awake.

Nope.

A Wal-Mart on Long Island had its doors literally blown off the hinges just before 5 O'Clock this morning and the stampeding mob trampled anyone who got in the way. A 34 year old stock clerk tried to control the crowd and was trampled to death. Merry Christmas, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis - and we don't mean you, Wal-Mart shoppers.

We don't mean the commenter on CNN.com either, who wasted no time before blaming it on the Liberals and African Americans who will, no doubt, now that Obama is waiting to go to Washington make this sort of thing commonplace from now on.

"Get used to this folks. These are the kind of people that liberalism has created. After four years of Obama and the food , power shortages, and gas shortages that will be engineered by the marxists in order to take down this country, this kind of thing will become routine."

Joy to the world.

The horror

While I'm on the subject of the Republican hate culture, I have to show you one of the greatest monuments to purely irrational and vicious hatred you're likely to see. I picked it up at The Swash Zone yesterday. The clip speaks for itself really, and although I'm tempted to refer to historical, artistic and literary events and depictions, you don't need to hear it.

People you know, people you deal with every day, people you have no reason to suspect of being walking volcanoes of boiling rage and irrational resentment. Proudly ignorant minds filled with fantasies and fears and phobias to rival the undeniably insane: such people hate Barak Obama, hate Democrats, hate anyone educated, hate anyone they suspect of being smarter and Black. They hate what Sarah Palin and John McCain and the Republican Party tell them to hate.

Although I do believe there are enough of such quotidian monsters in any country to staff the camps and carry out the horrors of any mad tyrant, it's agonizing to see it in my country. It's painful to have to admit that this is my country and not just a gathering of demons.

But here I am expounding on what doesn't need to be interpreted. Just watch it.

Reading the riot act

The riot act - although I've had it read to me many times in a metaphorical sense, I really don't know if Sarah Palin can be prosecuted for inciting people to riot when she stands there and smiles as someone in her audience calls for the Murder of Barak Obama after listening to her call him a terrorist. I do know that the cornered animal metaphor seems more of a literal thing now that the Republicans are facing the prospect that the revolution may soon be over. The mad blood is stirring all over moron America.

I've only heard of a few examples of threatened violence, but I can't get through 10 minutes without hearing accusations that Obama is a Terrorist and that Chriss Dodd and the socialist, commieliberal Democrats are solely responsible for the credit crisis. The animals are angry and they are angry at the targets they are given by the Republican lie campaign. "Joe sixpack" as Sarah likes to call her supporters, really doesn't know who the players are - or doesn't want to know the guilty parties if he's a Republican.

He never heard of Bill Ayers and the group that tried unsuccessfully to stop our last fraudulent war using violence back when Obama was a little kid. He has no idea that the Annenberg Foundation, founded by a right wing Republican is about funding the arts and improving schools, not about Islamic Jihad or about running Obama for president. He would poke his eyes out before reading a list of nefarious characters nearly every candidate including McCain has been linked to. Basically, the issue which in the last couple of days has become the central argument - or perhaps the central distraction is a distorted fabrication of no importance. This disgusting insanity, worthy of the most disgusting dictators and tyrants of history, is effective enough that I fear Obama's life is in danger. I know our country is in danger.

Whether or not anyone would contemplate an assassination if they hadn't listened to Palin's hate session, it certainly doesn't speak well for a prospective leader to stand by and smile while it happens rather than take a stand for decency and the law. Then again, what do you expect from someone who idolizes a man who had an innocent woman shot at and run out of town for being a witch? It doesn't speak well for the "uniter" image the bitter and angry old McCain wants to project. That he didn't comment, that he hasn't given us a glimpse of leadership during this financial catastrophe, no calm voice, no steady hand on the helm, but only snarling, whining and petulant accusations, speaks very poorly for him and his character. That he won't admit that the policies that got us here have been the main mission of the Republicans for decades and won't admit his part in it; that he won't admonish Palin for raising a lynch mob are more damning than his empty promises of "I know how to fix it."

If there is any consolation in the collapse of America, it has to be that it will take these evil trolls down with it; bloody hands and forked tongues and all.

Fight or flight?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This may be an existential moment for America; a "to be or not to be" dilemma. Still, not all of us are concerned with questions about whether to bail out the banks and brokers or to suffer the slings and arrows of market forces: some of us are more concerned about why God is allowing his chosen country to suffer.

The answer most satisfying to the Evangelistic ego of course is that, like most events tectonic and atmospheric, the credit crisis can be blamed on sex; gay sex.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies posted on the National Review's web site that he is sure that Washington Mutual's collapse is to be blamed on open minded hiring practices and not predatory lending and the risky loans it produced. Hiring Blacks, Gays and Hispanics with no regard to their dirty minority private lives or unacceptable ethnicity pisses God off.

No, this whole debacle is about sex and tolerance, not money, not debt. God likes money far more than tolerance after all, and as the late Jerry Falwell told us, you have to give money to God if you want to succeed. But you have to stop giving money to people who believe in abominations like birth control, says Christian leader Mike Heath. The credit crisis is about our "sinful sexual culture, and the acceptance of gay unions"

So perhaps if I were Hamlet and had to choose between opposing our troubles and ending them: or to die, to sleep no more, to end the heartache. If I had to choose between caring what happens to this country and walking away, taking leave of the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, I would simply sail away, another orphan.

Bye bye Miss American Pie

Indications are that a majority of Americans still oppose anything like a bailout for financial institutions. An unscientific CNN poll today has 59% answering "let risk-taking financial institutions fail." A Time Magazine article says much the same thing.

I think many people underestimate the risk of doing nothing. I think the smug, Reagan era idea that Government is essentially bad, can't fix anything and can only make things worse, plays a role and I think it's only human nature to distrust a plan drafted by the people who not only told us only days ago that it was foolish to think ( or to whine ) that we are experiencing recession; the people who have been preaching deregulation and advocating "anything goes" markets for decades, the people who refer only to dogma and ignore reality.

I have to admit that a part of me wishes it would all fall down and plunge us into depression simply to punish the slight majority who have been mocking reality and the people who recognize it, and mocking anything to do with government participation in anything but warfare. Of course I know that even bread lines and 30% unemployment wouldn't change such minds; they would simply blame it on Liberals with the same instinct that causes a land crab to run for the darkest place when you're trying to chase it out of your garage. Conservatives blamed the Great Depression on lazy shiftless workers. Not much has changed.

So seeing the intransigent stupidity and self-delusion of America, I have to believe we're in need of some kind of rescue; some kind of government intervention. Judging from events elsewhere however, I think the Post-bailout America would be only marginally different from the post "let them fail" America and either way, we're in for 5 years to a decade of high unemployment, inflation and increased marginalization of our position in the world. We're in for a long period of blaming, scapegoating and scurrilous propagandizing. Faced with a stalemate in Iraq, a rapidly declining position in Afghanistan and a Pakistan that cannot control its borders or prevent itself from being a haven for al Qaeda, it's hard to be optimistic no matter what is done, who wins the presidential election or which party controls the Congress.

I would like to believe that we will eventually see a leaner, more fiscally fit and saner America, but I don't believe in our ability to learn from mistakes, to recognize that we have made them or to see beyond the rhetoric and dogma and slogans when looking for solutions. Instead, I see more excuses for cute and perky incompetence, more praise of folly and more of our eternal hunger for fast food, fast solutions and the comfort of false certainty.

America - I wish to hell I could quit you.

Bridge of lies

But wait -- what light through yonder window breaks?

My gloom at the impending election of another dynamic duo of dimwitted and larcenous liars has brightened a little bit. Michael Stickings at The Reaction tells us that the Sarah Palin "thanks but no thanks" trope the Republican ringmasters have been trooping about may have had a hole punched in it. The Mainstream Media has begun to sober up a bit and admit that it's a lie. Now before you put your hands over your ears and start babbling "liberaliberaliberal" I'm talking about Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Let's hope the collapse of that hot air balloon brings the campaign back down to ground level where we can begin to see and smell the lies. There are a lot of them.

Of course much of the momentum of the Bullshit express depends on the fable of the inherent soundness of our crumbling and increasingly corrupt financial institutions and the health of our economy.

" When the history is written on the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it will go down in the annals of corporate scandals as one of the greatest accounting scams committed in broad daylight"

says Jonathan Weil, writing for Bloomberg.com Perhaps, but then the scams that started the Iraq war will ultimately be far more costly. The scam called Supply Side Economics may prove disastrous once again. It remains to be seen whether or not our slide into penury and depression will continue; whether it can be brought back to health with competent management, but of course we're still trusting the people that sold us that scam; expecting more Supply Side economics and more fraudulent accounting to cure the illness it caused. The scam that is the McCain campaign offers nothing else but more of the same and more lies about the opponent's ideas.

The scam that is the McCain campaign: the pandering to small town, small-minded bigotry that is the Palin promise; in saner times and saner countries, such revelations of dishonesty and incompetence would topple a government. Unfortunately we're in 21st century America, still fighting against the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, still hunting witches and still believing in believing. Odds are that we will continue to elect anyone who appeals to class snobbery, religious bigotry and nationalism -- but maybe -- just maybe, there's a glimmer of hope.

This is how it ends

As disturbing as is Mrs. Palin's former membership in The Alaska Independence Party may be, an explanation of who that party really is is far more alarming. It's basically the Constitution Party in a Parka. The goal of the Constitution Party, according to Ezra Klein is

"to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations."

That is of course complete double-talk and couldn't be flown past a competent legal historian without being swatted down like a pregnant mosquito, but it certainly fits with her views of Christian Reconstructionism, an idea I consider to be more treasonous than her support of Alaska going the way of the Confederate States of America. The AIP asserts that Alaska is not a legitimate part of the Union. Indeed, it's obvious to everyone but her fatuous supporters that her appearance with a "country First" banner clashes violently with the AIP's motto: Alaska First -- Alaska Always.

McCain's knee jerk reaction has been to deny her membership, but it would be hard to explain her having appeared at their State Convention this year by video and harder yet to discount the affirmation by the party itself. Voter records show her husband was a member as well.

The CP is a Theocratic movement, having the clearly stated objective of replacing our constitution with some vaguely defined word-wooze about Biblical authority. The AIP in addition is opposed to any environmental regulation whatsoever. It's opposed to abortions in the case of rape or murder or danger to the life of the mother. It's opposed to stem cell research.

Of course, whether or not McCain was aware of or cared about her affiliations with organizations committed to the destruction of the United States as we have known it, he was aware of her iron clad and intransigent commitment to stamping our Roe V. Wade and to something sufficiently close to Dominionism as to be indistinguishable. She's a creationist. There is evidence that she favors censorship of literature not compatible with her religious beliefs.

Did the Council for National Policy tell McCain all this when they forced this Manchurian Candidate on him, or did they simply insist that he accept her without question in return for the support of the Theocratic Right. I doubt we will ever know, but I do know that far more than being a question of whether to continue on with Failed economic policies, continually weakened civil rights, growing poverty, everlasting military conflict and shrinking liberty, this election is about the short term survival of The United States of America as a free, democratic, constitutional Republic.

The McCain ticket may be the most dangerous internal enemy this country has had, at least since the Civil war. If Americans gleefully accept this grotesque slate of candidates, it certainly deserves to descend into the third world, totalitarian morass it will inevitably experience. This is how freedom ends, not with a bang but a brass band and the cheers of the ignorant.

Cross posted from The Reaction

The Thrilla from Wasilla

Little Georgie won't be at the Republican convention in Minneapolis tomorrow, or so say the people who interpret his inchoate mumblings for us. The official story is that he "has concerns" about hurricane Gustav. The real story is probably different, but we'll never know whether he's been dis-invited or is simply having too much fun riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland. I hear he's finally finished My Pet Goat and needs something else to do. Perhaps he'd like to surpass his already record number of vacation days and go for 1000.

The former Miss Walissa will be there with her pet goat however, while the Gulf Coast boards up and heads for high ground. It's harder to know what to do with the far greater national disaster looming ahead for this crumbling country as the idiots and the madmen and religious insurgents hold their quadrennial war dance and camp meeting. The storm surge of nationalistic, religious and anti-intellectual frenzy won't subside by Tuesday as will Gustav and there is no high ground to provide refuge from the "farleftliberal" screaming tsunami.

Of course it's possible that Bush is simply trying to be Georgie-on-the-spot in order to smooth over the inevitable memories of his legacy of uncaring incompetence and the images of him playing air guitar while New Orleans drowned. After all, as the representative of Petroleum, he has a vested interest in continuing their reign by electing McCain, but all in all, it really doesn't matter. This nation of enthusiastically ignorant saps will be so entranced with Miss Wasilla's little behind, we'll miss the best and possibly last chance we have to prevent our new century from being the last stand of western liberal democracy and becoming the bottomless tar pit of freedom.