Audacity

We're all aware that one of the rhetorical games people use to portray political opponents negatively is to call them name callers. A skillful user can frame any kind of protest as a hatefest and in our time, when the most vociferous denunciation of the sin of homosexuality seems to come from people who hire male prostitutes, it's not surprising that the angriest political protesters spend more time accusing others of the sin of anger. So the people out in the streets flaunting weapons and sometimes vicious signs make it a point to take offense at those "hate-filled" liberals who like to point out not only the misspellings, the sometimes amusing disparity between facts and their beliefs and often vicious rhetoric. "Look at the way they call us 'Teabaggers'" say the offended parties, foam on their lips still fresh from calling the President a Communist, Kenyan, Maoist disciple of Adolph Hitler. "Liberals are having a field day of hate."

What will they call me for pointing out that they were the first to use that silly term themselves? Jay Nordinger writing for the National Review Online has to admit it, but can't do it without repeating the calumny -- those liberal extremists like Rachel Maddow are nasty, childish name callers -- never mind that we "patriots" started calling them Nazis and Communists years ago for valid criticism of the Republican Administration: baby killers! Grandmother killers! America haters! Terrorist supporters! They should be more respectful or at least neutral.

Sure, there's name calling and there's name calling. Massive tax cuts intended to boost the economy were just that a few years ago, but now they're irresponsible and massive debt increases according to "Tea party patriots" ( to use the term that Nordinger insists we should use if we really were fair minded) and aren't I just a nasty name caller for pointing out the stunning hypocrisy? Isn't this just a hate site for publishing that? No, the Liberal Media like the National Review, controls the discourse and that is why it's become so nasty. By Liberal Media of course, I mean those terrorist sympathizers and Trotzkyites who want to grab your guns and turn your children Gay.

I'd hate to play poker with such people. It's more than just Botox that enables the propagandists and media manipulators and their candidates to say such things with straight faces. So when the Republican candidate for the Governorship of Florida comes on the air last night and with the flippant demeanor of someone explaining to preschoolers that fish swim and birds fly, tells us that "Obama thinks that more government is the solution to all problems."

I have to be in awe of his training, self control -- the sheer dishonesty of his audacity. As he was speaking, of course, one of our time's greatest ecological disasters was and is poisoning vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico and soon to poison a good part of the Atlantic ocean and all the sea life -- and all the result of taking government mandated safeguards out of the equation: the sum total of the Bush energy policy as written by BP and Exxon and Halliburton. When BP drills elsewhere in that oh so socialist world, they have to use a device that would have prevented this spill, but thanks to core Republican policy they got to save $500,000 and cost us untold billions. God only knows what the final cost of this disaster will be or how many decades it will take for the Gulf to begin to recover.

But there you are, I'm indulging in "hate" again when I should listen to Rush and accept that mane made disaster is "natural" and after all, oil is part of nature and it's a liquid just like water and nature itself wants the oil cartel to make billions and billions and billions -- far more than it wants us to be healthy and prosper. I do try, but as they tell me I'm a liberalcommiefascist, it can't be easy to rid myself of that ugly old hate and go along with the flow.

Freakolitics

Freakonomics was such a big hit, I had to wonder why nobody has published Freakolitics, but of course in our America, that's probably redundant. Still, that all these weird parallels and weirder contradictions go past us without remark seems worth talking about.

John McCain's medical records, for instance. He used to give us straight talk and his medical records were open for inspection - until after 1999 when he was treated for Melanoma, a very deadly skin cancer. Now, despite promises, no records are forthcoming. Freaky coincidence? Maybe.

But nobody can really accuse Americans of foolish consistency; it's our inconsistencies that distinguish us. Republican owned media generally encourage people like Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to cross boundries of decent behavior and the public laps up the idea that they are rebels against a Liberal minority, yet it was the real liberal media; namely Air America that booted Randi Rhodes off the air for calling Hillary a whore. Ann seems only to have benefited by calling Edwards a "fag." We still hear about he Liberal Media bias.

The boot licking Bushites still insist that people who don't believe we should have invaded Iraq; that don't believe Saddam had no WMD, that don't believe Saddam helped blow up the WTC, that don't believe Saddam wasn't training insurgents for al Qaeda - even if at one time or another the very government that thought up these things has admitted they weren't true, insist that it's only a Liberal Lunatic fringe who disagree. Recent polls show that the lunatic fringe is over 80% of the public.

I was resoundingly chastised for mentioning in several blogs, the loud boos the President received the other day. I was reassured that it was only a "vocal minority" as Nixon used to call the vast majority of us. Perhaps though, the stands were packed with historians. Crooks and liars details a poll of historians that overwhelmingly ranks Bush as the worst president ever. Tell it to the bleachers.