Angertainment

It's the biggest thing in America and Fox News is the dominant purveyor. Their sole purpose is to select, modify, slant and sometimes create stories to make you angry at people or things selected by their owners and sponsors.

Using animatronic devices like Britt Hume, whose synthetic skin hangs from it's metal underpinnings which in turn no longer have the ability to mimic human facial expressions, Fox sells anger and unlike our automobile industry they can come out with a finished new product in minutes.

The current angertainment opera has to do with President Obama's seemingly hasty and harsh comments about the Cambridge Massachusetts police force. That occurrence has been welded together with another twisted work of fiction in which he has been touring the world "apologizing for America" to come up with the logically contradictory premise that he is "arrogant" and too arrogant to apologize even though he apologizes too much.

The subtext is that the country never has done anything it shouldn't have and we are always perfect because of our military strength and number of privately owned Hummers and that of course is a position broadcasting megawatts of arrogance like some annoying beacon.

Of course that Obama actually has apologized and in addition arranged to mediate between the two contestants goes unnoticed by the corpse-faced Hume and to the Fox Flock who only listen to the Fox product, that never happened and so presto chango, the wimp Obama becomes the arrogant Obama all at the same time. It's all angertainment.

Who cares that self contradictory arguments based on little but manufactured tribal anger are by nature false and in effect are crippling and disuniting our country? It's angertainment and it makes money and it takes power and it feels so good to be part of an angry tribe with an enemy to be attacked!

“The president could have said ‘that was a stupid thing for me to say,’ but he can’t say that for some reason"

said Hume yesterday. It could also be that Obama's actions speak louder than Obama's words and it could also be tragically humorous since he follows the most arrogant president in our history who admitted no fault while dragging us all to ruin and lawlessness. Of course Hume and whoever runs his software never wanted you to be angry at Bush who apologized for nothing. They wanted you to be angry at his critics and they remain far too arrogant to sum up their entire malignant war on truth by saying "that was a stupid thing for me to say."

Dishonesty is strength

Dick Cheney is a man of short declarative sentences. He packs a lot of venom and a lot of mendacity into each one.

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which he’s gone to Europe and seemed to apologize profusely, been to Mexico and seemed to apologize there,” said Cheney to Raw Story's David Edwards. “The world out there, both our friends and foes, will be quick to take advantage of that… I don’t think we’ve got much to apologize for."

"Seemed to" shouldn't slip past the reader unnoticed, since it's an attempt to elevate a convenient assumption to the point where his baseless argument can pivot on it. To be equally as curt and declarative: Cheney lies. It didn't seem so to me or to those who listened to all the words, rather than the tendentious extracts wrapped in tactical opinion we got from Republican sources.

It doesn't seem beyond the pale to recognize that swaggering "kiss my ass you dirty wogs -- I'm AMERICA" foreign policy that has been the joy of the thundering classes who see the world as ungrateful and arrogant for wanting some measure of independence. It doesn't seem like an unqualified, abject and grovelling approach when Obama says we haven't been fair to the world all the time either. It sounds, in fact, like honesty and of course to the man of the perpetually undisclosed location, who keeps his lunch and shopping list in a vault, that's a sign of "weakness."

It's "weak" to disclose that we tortured people to death and lied about it. It's weak to shake hands with Chavez, says Cheney -- but only if a Democrat does it -- and of course any sign of honesty, humanity or willingness to promote peace that does not depend on unqualified, abject and grovelling acceptance of American Empire can be a fatal weakness.

I have trouble understanding the level of fear Cheney lives with; the kind of fear that drove him and his puppets to military aggression, pathological secrecy and a domestic paranoia that led him to think the suppression of civil rights and constitutional law is "nothing to apologize for." It's harder to understand than starting a war on false pretenses for his own profit.

Paranoia: the feeling that even our friends will take advantage of us if we're not unrelenting in our refusal to admit mistakes and uncompromising in our rage for dominion; law, morality, truth and justice notwithstanding. Quite an opinion and what better place to discuss it than with Sean Hannity and what better audience than the people who still watch Fox News and who are sure to fail to notice just how Cheney and his party equate ganging up on a new administration in time of extreme crisis as patriotism, but of course these are the people who accused the Democrats of caving in to terrorism in 2001 even after they voted unanimously to support George W. Bush.

Accepting the consequences of your actions is so unmanly.

It's safe for rabbits - for now

Whew! What a relief. I expected, now that we have a wuss in the white house who thinks this isn't a "Christian nation"that the Liberal/atheist/fascist/Marxist pansies would begin the assault on Easter I've been expecting for so long. After all, no one would attempt to make Christianity illegal and leave Easter intact.

But it didn't happen. We held a small party for friends on my boat and passers-by wished us a happy Easter and a happy holiday in equal numbers and not a single shot was fired. This morning, I can see two of the long eared symbols of Jesus crazing on my front lawn oblivious to the danger of Constitutional law. No more skulking down back alleys, collar turned up.

Maybe I shouldn't stop worrying though. Even though it's quiet on all fronts of the war, maybe it's too quiet.

Fox and Hounds

The Impolitic, one of my favorite blogs, asks us why "conservative" humor isn't funny and little more than gleeful gloating at the misfortune of people we secretly feel inferior to: empty mockery based on ignorance or false information. I can't really answer that, but Red Eye, Fox's "Me Too" attempt at cashing in on the trenchant, cynical and wildly popular comedy of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, is a cornucopia of examples. Red Eye is little more than a Punch and Judy show for the kind of "conservatives" who at an earlier time attended public whippings and executions in order to enjoy the plight of others being more humiliated than themselves.

In the eyes of Fox Fans, the supply of whipping boys and scapegoats they desire can't fill a Colosseum as large as Fox's and so they have invented and exploited domestic "Liberals" and "elitists" and have tailored cardboard images of foreigners as liberal elitist fodder for wild beasts comedians to tear apart.

Fox, the primary cheerleader for every dubious battle and misbegotten military enterprise needs cardboard cowards and so we have the Fox French and the Fox Canadians to pillory along with any other "surrender Monkeys" who doubted the long disproved reasons for our Iraq war.

The Canadians are easy targets for Greg Gutfeld and his creepy chorus. They're almost French after all. To those who don't know that the Canadians are in fact fighting in Afghanistan, Gutfeld and his monkey house mob must be as funny as a chimpanzee ripping off someones face. But of course the Canadians are there and have lost well over a hundred soldiers. In fact on March 17th, as Gutfeld was calling Canada "a ridiculous country" and another of his "comedians" was saying

"I didn't even know they were in the war. I thought that's where you go when you don't want to fight. Go chill in Canada"

4 more of Canada's brave youth were being brought home in boxes. It's funny - so very funny.
As funny as a bunch of apes sitting on a comfortable couch pretending to be mighty warriors and mocking the brave and the dead.

Of course it caught up with Gutfeld as these things so often do. Of course he gave a sneering "apology" and said, as people like him usually do, that he'd been "misunderstood" which is no apology at all, but an attempt to tell us that the people who misunderstood him need more of his mockery.

Of course Red Eye is a failure in progress. It isn't funny as much as it is creepy, embarrassing and to those with some awareness of reality, infuriating. If there is any humor in it at all, it's only the low and inadvertent humor involved in watching people grasping and gasping and drowning in ignorance and failure and too damned stupid to realize it.

See for yourself:

Guillotine! Guillotine!

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. They report, you decide.

One doesn't expect the spokesmen for conservative interests to be using the French Revolution as a model for future action. Of course I'm no kind of cynic and so all the calls for blood, all the evocations of victims carted off to some public square to be guillotined or of some Supreme Court Justice bleeding to death in his bathtub like Marat aren't at all hilarious to me when I watch Fox News.

"Whether it’s terrorism, international crises, domestic crime or, in this case, excessive corporate greed, some conservatives seem unable to see problems as anything other than a nail for which the only solution is a hammer."

says Think Progress. Fox's solution is a Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer, who like so many Fox denizens looks like he's overdone the Botox, told us all yesterday that we should hold public executions for AIG executives whose contracts include a bonus.

"Have it in Times Square, invite Madame DuFarge. You borrow a guillotine from the French and we could have a party. If that’s what it takes to maintain popular support, let’s do it."

Conservative Mort Kondrake just wants to boil them in oil.

Ok, so it's hyperbole although with paralyzed faces like these guys have, one has to make some guesses as to what they really mean. But inflammatory rhetoric in such times as these is like flicking your Bic with gasoline all over the floor. Put them together with Ann Coulter who has advocated poisoning judges and with Rush who would rather have the country collapse than accept any offense to his "principles" and we have not only an assemblage of rogues but a perfect example of people who are not conservatives any more than were the Parisian mobs cheering as heads rolled in the Place de la Concorde in 1793.

It's a Doocy, all right

I think we'd all feel better if we stopped fretting about things and realized that the world we live in is no more than a huge, slowly revolving madhouse with no walls. It's the notion that things and people ought to make sense that drives us crazy -- because they don't. You only have to tune in the news for all the evidence you might need. Take Fox, for instance: any one of those shows with giggling night of the living dead zombies batting fallacies, conjectures, hypertrophied hyperbole and lies back and forth like a game of three-way badminton.

CNN is a communist organization says Steve Doocy on Fox and friends. Like "Liberal" It's a term without fixed meaning, used often enough on Fox that it really means little else than that the victim doesn't have rabies and doesn't preach abject obedience to Fox approved authority and doesn't exhibit a Pavlovian rage response on cue. That certainly describes CNN, who sometimes actually does indulge in honest reportage rather than to derive stories from the Ouija board used by Fox and Friends. But anyway they are all Commies - perhaps some of the few left in the real world and they don't need to tell you why or how. All the proof you need is that a former CNN employee, MauricioFunes , has been elected President of El Salvador. Elected, not installed by a military insurgency or people's revolution or quasi legal action by the courts. Elected by popular vote. Elected as in Democracy.

So anyway, by the law of sympathetic magic, or perhaps something even more arcane; because he isn't Augusto Pinochet or any of the other murderous, fascistic, peasant slaughtering, protester torturing, nun raping, drug money laundering anti-communist Generalissimos the US traditionally supports and supplies, he's a communist and CNN is the "Communist News Network." What's more, the liberal party he belongs to has, according to Mr. Doocy "allegedly ties to Caesar Chavez," a man that those without heads spinning from Fox Poisoning will remember is long dead. Of courseDoocy's duezy was not only to confuse Hugo with Caesar, but to confuse a baseless, irresponsible, malicious and speculative accusation with fact. That's Fox. That's what Fox is about: the voices from Neptune for a mad, mad, mad world.

I happened to be perusing an auction catalog over coffee, early this afternoon; thinking about the things I might have been bidding on if George Bush's irregulars hadn'tstolen everyone's money and there were a couple of lots of antique Chinese opium pipes and accessories. That's right, drug paraphernalia and legitimately so because you really can't smoke anything legal in an opium pipe.

Of course the water pipes Tommy Chong once manufactured worked quite well with tobacco, that highly addictive, highly toxic and legal drug, yet Tommy went to prison and lost nearly everything he had. What's the difference between selling legal drug paraphernalia and illegal drug paraphernalia? Nothing beyond the personality involved. We have all sorts of laws enforced only to advance the careers of law enforcement, because, just like the traditional, criminally repressive generalissimos we traditionally support in Latin America, our Justice Department Buccaneers can make an honest man into a criminal as easily as Fox News can make Thomas Jefferson into a Communist and Jesus into Attila the Hun.

If you care about this insanity, you can't expect to survive intact and so I try very hard not to. Sure, I lost almost 80% of my net worth and the people who made that possible are fighting against any attempt to restore order; screaming like demons about Commies and Liberals and Witches and welfare queens but although I can still pay my bills, I can't afford to care. I've still got my house and my boat and a big ocean to float it in and as of today, I can even blog while afloat, hiding in my escape capsule from the madness of the world.

Fox, Felons and kiddy porn.

Devotees of Fox News know all kinds of things to be true, from the terrorist fist bumps of the Obamas to the "fact" that Marquette Michigan bans Christmas trees and the colors red and green in an attempt to erase the holiday and Christianity itself from America.

Devotees of Fox News don't know all kinds of things that are true, but embarrassing to the Murdoch empire: things like the fact that Marquette does not and never has done any such thing and fist bumping is just another kind of handshake your kids know all about.

Then there's the interesting case of Fox News Channel producer Aaron Bruns, who was arrested yesterday for distributing child pornography: interesting because so far, the Fox has kept the story in it's burrow along with all the other creepy, crawly things.

It's worse because Bruns is a repeat offender, having been arrested with some 6000 pornographic images of children ten years ago, a felony for which he was sentenced to probation and dropped out of the University of Michigan. Fox made him a producer anyway, which is not surprising when one considers the thoroughness with which they air unsubstantiated rumor and make-up stories while throwing on-the-air tantrums about the very techniques they use so often.

Did Fox know when they hired him that he didn't actually graduate from College? Did they know he was a pervert of the sort they love to become hysterical about? Either way, one expects better from the National Enquirer and usually gets it. They've dropped the "fair and balanced" title as well as the "we report, you decide" hokum. Is it only a matter of time until they buy "Belive it or not?" from the Ripley people?

Death and Foxes

There's often some good to be found in our increasingly entropic economy -- like a pearl in a tainted oyster. I take comfort in the cosmic joke that is our mortal life; knowing that Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney and everyone at Fox News will go the way of Pol Pot, Nicolae Chaucescu and Madman Muntz in due time. But even before all the chips are cashed, it's good to know that News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the parent company of Fox, is down by the bow and taking on water; nearly six and a half billion dollars worth of water, that is.

Blaming the grim economic situation, the obvious precursors of which the Fox fabricators have been denying for years whilst mocking the "Libs" for their warnings, Murdoch told the International Herald Tribune:

"While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer-lasting than previously thought."

Who could have foreseen that? Well I for one and other, better prognosticators heard only dimly through the angry roar of the Fox filibusterers. Remember when Fox claimed that the robust economy was being "talked down" by "the Liberal Media" and offered statistics showing the "proof" in the fact that there was more bad economic news than good?

"We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate."

said Murdoch, and of course I have a list of candidates for decapitation, but before we get to feeling smug, the bad news in the good news in the bad news, is that amidst the general Murdoch meltdown, Fox News itself reported income of $428 million, which is up $91 million from the previous year. Fox News increased its operating income by 32 percent. Is this also a reflection of a desperate America's increased thirst for lies, damn lies and hysterical hatred? I'm sure that when the statisticians stop chewing on the news, we'll find that alcohol consumption has risen by a similar amount.

In any event, I'm sure that the global meltdown will some day fade into redacted and ill remembered history, but I'm not so sure about the United States of America as we know it. America is failing, Fox News is why.

Et evasi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi.

Foxed up

President Obama has made so many egregious mistakes that we're all in terrible danger. He's sending the "worst of the worst" from Guantanamo to your children's playgrounds. His appointments can't be trusted and most "shocking" of all, even though Mike Wallace all but forced Chief Justice Roberts to swear him in the second time, Obama isn't really the president because he didn't have his hand on "the Bible." No, I haven't gone completely insane, I'm quoting Fox News. If you watched The Daily Show Thursday night, you saw the following clip:




You see, I'm not making this stuff up. The same people who told you we have to, in the name of freedom and our safety obey the Führer president and who supported each and every act that brought on our dire predicaments, who insisted that economic collapse was a liberal lie, that we were about to "win" in Iraq every day since we arrived, are telling you this one really can't be obeyed. Of course those with longer memories remember when Bill Clinton wasn't, for some Foxed up reason I no longer remember, really the president either and shouldn't be listened to.

So whether or not Fox lives up to its promise of revealing some hideous hidden "truth" behind every aspect of the Obama presidency once a day for the first hundred days, I won't be watching them. Unfortunately others will and for them the fiction will seem real and the fear will grow. I find it hard to feel any kind of optimism and those who think that we've "won" and that things are in good hands now may soon find that the process of losing started on November 20th.

The people who watch Fox usually don't watch anything else. They have no idea that the lies and distortions they've been hearing are often repudiated and disproved by all the other news services. They haven't a clue that one of the largest anti-American campaigns, indeed the most organized program of treason against truth, justice and democracy is broadcasting 24 hours a day. Fox is using and will use everything they can find to undermine confidence in our government and anything it does and as you can see is hoping our country will fall and our hopes will fail. To me, it constitutes as great a danger to our future as any foreign enemy or global economic collapse. Traitors, saboteurs, liars and purveyors of irrational hate, Fox News is the enemy and anyone who hopes not just for our survival, but our improvement owes it to the world to use every opportunity to expose them.

Poor George

My jaw has been dropping often enough that I've got bruises. After getting over Frist's announcement that Bush has left the world a better place than when he oozed into office, I find that all the major failures of his administration were things, like his personal fortune, he inherited: or so says Fox News.

Bush inherited the 9/11 attack. Bush inherited a recession and the tough times on Wall Street, according to Martha MacCallum and Wendell Goler. Either they deserve the Nobel Prize for physics for having invented a Causality Reversal Time Machine -- or a week in the pillory. I'm sure they'll get neither.

Isn't it interesting how Bush can be given credit for turning around the recession they blame Clinton for, while all the while they claimed there was no recession, but that the "libs" were simply talking down the thriving economy? Interesting, of course is my polite way of combining words like fraud, deceit and lie.

Isn't it interesting that Bush chose to do nothing about terrorism, to essentially disband all investigations into terrorism and ignore direct warnings about terrorism; isn't it interesting that he did inherit the USS Cole attack and did essentially nothing; isn't it interesting that Fox can run it through the Roger Ailes Reversotron and blame this on Clinton, whom they attacked for attempting to retaliate against al Qaeda with cries of "wag the dog?" Interesting indeed.

Far more than interesting though, is the question of how and why Fox continues to produce propaganda for the small minority of people who still think W & C0. are victims. I think the answer may well be found by asking ourselves: whom do the lies benefit and who can afford to produce and distribute them?

Holiday of Hate

Michelle Malkin is talking about Christmas cheer. Yes, it's like Kim Jong Il talking about threats to civil liberties, only worse, because we don't have Fox News bleating his demented ravings or calling them "conservative comment."

Yes, it's the atheists, as though they were a group: it's the atheists, the non-believers who are getting in the way of her cheerful enjoyment of Christmas and the atheists who should be treated like "Internet trolls." That, I presume, means to ignore them. Of course, in Fox speak, that means to continue their mythical battle between retail Christianity and the nefarious forces of religious freedom.

Gretchen Carlson, who apparently has a good shot at surpassing Malkin for sheer vituperative viciousness disagrees, saying that religious freedom will be the death of Christianity.

"If you don't stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear! I'm talking about Christianity!"

No, you're not, you're talking about forced unanimity and mandatory expressions of official faith. Christianity thrived actual persecution for enough time to make me doubt that it's future is in jeopardy, at least from other religions, and it has thrived through persecutions of it's own, but it's having a tougher time in some places that leave everyone alone to celebrate if and when and how they like and restrain them from forcing their practices and rituals on others.

Back before Christianity was coopted by those who play to the stupid and ignorant and hateful; back before Fox News and the Aryan Nation, it was an inclusive holiday. As a non-Christian and an atheist and someone who knows all too much about Christian history, about early Christian, Greco-Persian, Roman and Norse practices that form the basis of Christmas: as someone who knows how the holiday (and yes, it's a goddamn holiday) owes more to Coca-Cola, Hallmark and Charles Dickens than to some Jewish baby born to a teenage mother in April of an indeterminate year about 2000 years ago, I've always celebrated it anyway. After all Christmas as we know it is an American holiday and one that used to bring about a spirit of tolerance, brotherhood and generosity to a unique degree. It was a holiday that brought out the liberal in most of us.

Now that it's become a bloody piece of meat in the claws of harpies like Malkin and Carlson, now that we've become as stupid and superstitious and as ready to rend our neighbors as any of our subhuman cousins at the behest of Fox and its stable of demons, I'm no longer interested. Its just another hot poker in the dungeons of the Fox inquisition.

Of course if their were any real Christians in this country they might propose at least to ignore this attempt to make it a holiday of hate, but perhaps that, like liberty and the pursuit of happiness just another lost hope of the secular humanists who first dreamed of it.

Step by step

It wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't have the mindless, botox-faced zombies at Fox yelping about the insult to religion. Of course it wouldn't be a free country if we weren't allowed to express our objections to anything or were forced to make religious oaths and follow religious practices. Oh, wait a minute -- we are. It isn't; at least not yet.

Lyin' Bill says he expects "they" (Jews, Atheists, Muslims) will try next to remove the national holiday (what, he called it a holiday?) on the premise that we can't have a holiday based on religion. Of course we can have a holiday based on the fact that nobody would come to work anyway, but that's inconvenient to his scenario and it annoys him that in fact, nobody seems to object to a day off for any reason.

It's my constitutional right to insult your religion, I'm proud to say, and it's only fair since your religion in and of itself insults mine and several others. In fact I take offense at some aspect of every religion I've yet heard of. It's good to live in a free country.

Apparently the sense of relief at being newly out from under the bootheel of religious tyrants seems to be spreading. Newsweek has a very objective over story on the empty bigotry of the war against gay marriage; one that I think couldn't have got past the editors before the election. Keith Olbermann came out last night and condemed Lyin' Bill's comic opera about Christians under siege as the stepchild of xenophobia and anti-Sematism.

It's not as if freedom is breaking out all over, but I sense a weakening of the old guard; the passing of an old, worn out tyranny and again, I'm no longer ashamed to be proud of being an American: not because I think we're the best, but because we're not as ashamed to admit our faults and more likely to do something about it.

Merry Christmas.

Our Mutual Enemy.

I'm now convinced that this is the time. This is the time for all of us to come to the aid of our country, to stand up for civilization, for what is right and true; for our way of life, for our future, for our families, our homes and our fortune. This is my call to revolution.

The time to break the bonds imposed up us by an arrogant and assumed oppressor; a power that has made the truth its enemy, democracy its victim and the American people its hostage, is now. Indeed the time is now or the time will never be. Let us declare undying enmity toward Fox News.

Not to change the subject, but I have to ask "what do we know about Cindy McCain?" Not much really. Michelle Obama has been chopped up and re-assembled as a Terrorist, an opportunist, an elitist and many other silly things, but Cindy is an enigma. When the New York Times ran a long and somewhat sympathetic article about her and her unusual life with John, our mutual enemy, Fox News, decided without evidence that it was a "dirt Digging" article and opened the gates of hell in the direction of Barak Obama. Glenn Greenwald at Salon found it to be no more than

"just generally dissecting her private and emotional sphere for no apparent reason beyond idle voyeurism,"

but it's not partisan, he says. They did worse to the Clintons. That's true, but the idea that Presidents are entitled to secrecy when Republican is Fox policy, not the Liberal Press stereotype they peddle. She has become a public figure and thus has waived the right to privacy of a private citizen just as everyone does. "what do we know about Cindy" is as a legitimate question as is "what do we know about Sarah Palin, or Michelle Obama or the "first Dude" and his secessionist, anti-American "pals."

Because Mrs. McCain was said to have suffered from Migraines and took pills to ease the suffering, Fox News has decided that Barak Obama is a drug addicted criminal and has launched a crusade to find his "drug dealers" and search out anyone who may have bought "drugs" and hence can be associated with him. This is more than idle voyeurism, this is an attempt to twist the truth, to mold truth from the clay and animate it by blowing the breath of ignorance into its nostrils -- and for no reason other than to destroy anyone running against a Republican. Were this not obviously so, they would not have rolled their eyes and chanted Liberaliberal when George Bush's adult drug and alcohol problems, including a DUI conviction, was discussed.

"It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book"

said Fox and Friends. Oh really? The New York Times should inquire as to who passed Barry the joint at some party 25 years ago? Perhaps when Fox stops suggesting mob ties and terrorist ties of the Obamas; perhaps when they stop suggesting that his education was paid for by shadowy jihadists, that he was trained at terrorist training camps, that he supports the bombing of government property, that he's a disciple of Karl Marx and all the other foul things that issue from the anus of Fox - perhaps then.

Will we as patriotic Americans permit the quiet destruction of our country by the world's foremost propagator of terror, fear, hate and propaganda, or will we turn these bastards off? Will we sit idly by as associates, friends and others present Fox Facts as truth? Or will we do what we need to do to prevent our country from sinking into the cesspit from which nations never emerge whole?

Death to the Fox!



Cross posted from The Swash Zone

Free and fraudulent association

A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, 5. 5

Although the party has traditionally and dishonestly tried to associate itself with adulthood, restraint and responsibility, the members and supporters of the GOP often remind me of the kid who sat in the back of the room in 6th grade and flicked boogers at people or were quick to blame their enemies for that suspicious puddle under their desks.

You may remember the September 2005 confrontation between Dick Cheney and the heroic Doctor Ben Marble, reported in Human Voices, and how Cheney, upon being told to go fuck himself by that great American Patriot and musician immediately blamed the incident upon the fans and followers of John Kerry rather than on the tragic and grotesque mishandling of the Katrina disaster.

Is the tactical conflation of unrelated things as essentially Republican as monetary inflation?

Take the tale told by an idiot Fox News correspondent Martha McClullen about a Texas State Employee who flung egg salad at a Secret Service Agent in Austin Texas. Barak Obama was speaking at the State Capital and the woman was angered upon being told she would have to wait to return to her office. To a Fox fabricator, that's sufficient magic to transform her into a "big fan of Obama" and abracadabra, presto-changeo, this whole thing is a reprise of the attacks on civil rights protesters in the '60's and supported in fine and fallacious tradition by video clips. Unfortunately no video of the Lincoln assassination, Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot or the Defenestration at Prague were available.

Are we witnessing Historical fiction being written before the events are even historical?

Fox and the other News-as-Entertainment outlet stores have turned an important national decision into the kind of steroidal shouting match that wrestling promoters use to build excitement . The more civilized the campaign, the harder they work at it and the more creative they get. I think that what we need is for everyone to be his own Ben Marble; to stand up and say Go fuck yourself Fox - and that goes for you too, CNN and CBS and ABC and anyone else creating phony controversy for private profit and public detriment. You're all as much of a hindrance to Democracy and good government as any other kind of election fraud.

Enough!

"Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor"

Matthew 19:21

"poverty is not an issue"

Father Jonathan Morris on Fox and Friends

________________

Hasn't anybody had enough of rapists, pederasts, embezzlers, adulterers, public toilet Lotharios, swindlers, the cognitively impaired, the psychotic and the high living patrons of prostitutes of both genders waving bibles and telling us how to vote? Not enough of us I guess. Apparently such tin horn casuists; such moral midgets who use Bibles as a sort of elevator shoe, still find a welcome at Fox News and Republicans stupid enough to think God likes Democracy almost as much as he likes Mike Huckabee still tune them in.

Father Jonathan Morris, a "conservative" Catholic priest told us on Fox and Friends yesterday that the reason there was "less response" from Democrats when it comes to talking about God, is that the Democratic platform is at odds with Biblical teachings. So it is, or at least at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church which for well over a millennium has excommunicated anyone who dared deny that God appoints kings and prelates to rule them and told us that because questioning the government was questioning God, Democracy is of the Devil.

Perhaps Father Morris was too busy with the altar boys to study his "Ecclestical History for liars" course or to notice that the Bible doesn't mention abortion and tells us that life begins with breath, not conception. Of course the Bible, even the bowdlerized, mistranslated and tendentious Vulgate Bible the smug Father reads, commands all sorts of things that no one including the Pope would consider obeying, but Morris isn't a theologian or Biblical scholar or an historian or is he even honest or intelligent for that matter; he's a Republican Christian supremacist and Fox News pet. Like Shakespeare's Iago, he's all about convincing us that our best interests are served by killing the thing we love best and in this case that thing is freedom.

It shouldn't take a genius to realize that the aims of a united church and state are not democratic, but authoritarian. One does not arrive at commandments by voting and law based on commandments as interpreted by divinely inspired priests can be no part of a free society.

"Now, this is not judging any Democrat's individual faith, but when their platform goes against Biblical teaching they know they have to be careful when they start getting into details"

says Morris, carefully avoiding the details that show his ignorance and contempt for compassion and decency and liberty and all the human values the values voters can't handle. Indeed, the problem of poverty and how to treat the poor, the subject that seems to appear so often in the words of Jesus is secondary to stamping out abortion says the man in black. After all, the poor go to heaven but those single cell "babies" go elsewhere unless we sprinkle water on them and mumble in Latin, right? Screw the poor, the elderly and the sick. Screw the children and all hail the wealthy and powerful. Jesus is about persecuting gays and abortion, right?

"There's always a hierarchy of value"

says Morris with the kind of self contradictory gall that only a moral absolutist can muster, and by that he means the essential teaching of Christianity is about abortion and gays and not the poor. We can talk about the poor and sick and helpless later when we solve these greater problems. Do you need any better proof that there is no God who punishes us than that Morris is rewarded while innocent children starve and die for lack of medical care?

But as long as America avoids addressing it's imbecile problem; it's ridiculous fear of truth and its swooning submission to superstition and charlatans like Father Morris, we will continue to elect the Huckabees and the Romneys and the other Elmer Gantrys we always fall for. Unless we are willing to admit that the wisdom of the stupid only makes sense to the stupid; unless America is ready to have a reformation and a new birth of secularism we don't deserve any better.

Ignore the man behind the curtain

How anyone can think that anyone in the latest TV blabberfest is presidential material is beyond me. The latest nausea inducing exhibition featured Bible waving and professions of faith and idiotic declarations like Fabulous Fred Thompson's "A nation that cannot and will not defend its own borders will not forever remain a sovereign nation." Isn't anyone tired of xenophobia as a crucial issue at a time when we face economic disaster and another war without end? Funny that we were a sovereign nation for most of our history of unguarded borders and that New York was a sanctuary city for the forbears of just about everybody listening to the actors on stage in St Petersburg.

Funny too, that the media isn't making much of the polls showing a preference for Ron Paul's arguments other to mention that McCain told us Paul's policies are the type that facilitated Hitler's rise to power. And here I thought it was the Germans who elected him. Not only is it getting harder to ignore Paul, it's requiring that once again, Fox News ignore it's own numbers. The nervous laugh and the near hysteria of Hannity's declarations of disbelief are music to my ears.

A penny for the old Guy

"Guy Fawkes is a guy that tried to assassinate some king -- King Henry or King George or King -- James! ... So I guess that's a libertarian thing to do. Try to assassinate kings. And so they had a celebration of this dastardly act."

So said Joe Scarborough this morning on MSNBCs Morning Jo[k]e. Had this been a nation where more than 10% of the TV audience had the knowledge of history appropriate for an 8 year old or the ability to reason sufficient to be called dull, you would have heard the giggles even with your windows closed, but of course it isn't that sort of nation. It's the United States.

Of course Scarborough is trying to confect the successful Ron Paul fund raiser yesterday with the Gunpowder Plot that was foiled on November 5th, 1605. That event was of course, a plot to blow up the House of Lords, King James I and all, but the celebration of Guy Fawkes day in England is about how the government was saved, not about making a hero of the government hating conservative British kids burn in effigy every year. Joe doesn't know, really, and I guess the people who watch that made-up carved wooden ventriloquist's head the network uses the way Macy's uses window dummies are only looking for a way to banish the specter of Ron Paul and aren't too scrupulous about fact or reason, which is my way of politely calling them stupid.

Stupid people watch such stupid shows because it gives them a collegial feeling without having actually having attended college, or grade school for that matter. It gives them a feeling of knowing something the smart people don't know and they will follow anyone who gives it to them like rats after the Piper. it worked for Reagan, it works for Limbaugh and it almost works for Scarborough.

Fawkes was a "terrorist" and he was caught on November 5th and Ron Paul raised a lot of money on November 5th and that means libertarians are terrorists and Ron raised money in the name of terrorists. Seems stupid and pathetic beyond belief when you set it out stripped of the typical Fox banter. It easily rivals the Limbaugh rant from the 1990's when he blasted the idea of electric cooperatives because cooperatives are like communes and communes are run by hippies.

It's tempting to speculate or actually to hope that 400 years from now kids will be gathering pennies to make straw effigies of these legendary morons and throw them on the bonfire of the idiots.

Al Qaeda in Qalifornia

So it was a little kid playing with matches. Does anyone think Fox News is going to apologize for trying to pin it on "terrorists" or Qaeda operatives in California? I'm not going to hold my breath and I wouldn't be surprised if they continued the idiocy and told us "some people say" there's a Kiddy Qaeda training camp over the border in Tijuana or that the Teletubbies were behind it all.

And speaking of dangerous idiots, Ralph Nader, the most egotistical man in America who got 0.38% of the votes in the last election and helped make sure George W. Bush stayed in office is suing the DNC for conspiring to keep him off the ballot. Hey, he might have got 0.39 or 0.4% if they hadn't interfered and we probably wouldn't be in Iraq and millions of lives wouldn't have been ruined.

Hell if he'd never been born, General Motors might have had a car that could compete with the Europeans. It's time to hang it up Ralph. You know less about government than you know about engineering or driving a car. You have nothing to offer but to keep telling us how corrupt everything is. We already know and we know you have no plan and no ability to do a damn thing about it.

I need a Jew

It seems like an out-take from some cheap cartoon blending of the Simpson's and Borat, and it's making money for Fox. We know what people at Fox will do for money.

Initially, Fox withheld a 2003 episode of The Family Guy for reasons that will soon become obvious, but the lure of money eventually prompted them to issue more than a million copies on video that twisted the venerable ballad When you Wish Upon a Star and used it in an episode titled: When You Wish Upon a Weinstein. Weinstein, of course is a name selected to sound Jewish and as everybody at Fox knows, Black people are good at frying chicken, the Irish are drunks, Italians are all hoodlums and Jews are good at making and keeping money. It's only fair and balanced. "I need a Jew" sings the main Family Guy, Peter Griffin, unable to manage his finances by himself.

Perhaps now he will get one or at least Fox will. The Bourne Company, owner of the rights to the academy award winning song that premiered in the 1940 Disney Classic Pinocchio, has filed suit in a Manhattan court, claiming that:

"By associating Bourne's song with such offensive lyrics and other content in the episode, defendants are harming the value of the song."

I wonder if Fox executives are humming If I Only Had a Brain to themselves this morning.

You can feel it on the air

The last day of Summer now seems to mark the beginning of the Crusade season, October is become a cruel month, breeding anger out of the dead truth, mixing memory with hate, stirring dull brains with new lies. In other words, It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Of course there's no chill in the air where I live and the local merchants are hawking Halloween candy and plastic pumpkins made in China but Fox is gearing up it's war stories again. Captions like "War on Christians" and "Anti-Christian Crusade," are appearing on the official propaganda channel of the religious-military-industrial complex.

In case you forgot, them Liberals; those lefties are warring against Christians and against Christmas.

"This is a small part of a big, huge attack by the left on Christianity, which has always disliked the concept of Christianity, "

said Fox News blowhard Andrew Napolitano on Friday, of advertising for a San Francisco block party that used leather bar imagery to depict the Christian myth of the Last Supper.

Using their customary travesty of Socratic method Fox News hosts tossed about every conceivable fallacy in the attempt to build a bigger straw man than last year, using popular Radio Brown-shirt "Mancow" to make the case that mythology and belief should be protected by law, particularly if it's Christian. Mancow, who was criticized for playing a song called "Burning Mosques" 6 years ago apparently feels that appearing on a Fox program gives him the authority to say "I don't make fun of Religion" and asks us what would happen if there were a parody of Gay people.

Well of course there are parodies of Gay people spewed like green vomit from pulpits and political platforms and in televangelistic tirades every Sunday and that's only a small part of the crap about heretics and Jews and infidels and sinners burned at metaphorical stakes. Those people don't need to have their opinions legally protected from humor, criticism, analysis, parody or the inquisitiveness of historians, but Christians do.

"It's a godless group there, and they hate it,"

says moronic Mancow who apparently can't see the comedy in his assertions - as if anything said that invokes the magic word Christ were protected to the detriment of the beliefs of all others. But in a sense Fox has a point. The left leaning people who founded our laws in the secular enlightenment of the time did not distrust religious institutions, religious writings, priests and nations under God and tried to created a nation free of their intrusion into government and into civil liberty. Their ideas have been steadily eroded and never so swiftly as today, with an uneducated and indoctrinated public and modern methods of mass mendacity.