It's a perfect example of how government always interferes with the sacred market forces that keep us free, happy and doctrinally pure. That OBAHma has gone after the free and holy food producers, using that Communist agency the FDA to keep infected cantaloupes off the market -- a market that would, sayeth the Rand, regulate itself after enough people die, by scaring the survivors into staying away from fruit and eating the sanctioned BurgerfriesCoke meal like real Americans. Can you imagine? (Would you like to supersize your fries?)
I mean what greater freedom can we have than freedom from the knowledge of good and bad food and if OBAHma can tell us what to eat, he can tell us anything, that tyrant. And where does the money wasted on things like the FDA and FEMA and the FAA come from? TAXES, that's right, those fruits of our own unassisted labor of which we owe no portion to anyone much less those Commie bastards in Washington who want to give MY MONEY away to those undeserving leeches who won't work for less than minimum wage and have the effrontery to vote for Democrats.
No sir, I don't want those government schools brainwashing my kids with math and science and economics and twisted history. People are poor because they are lazy and because God put them here as an example to us, the elect and we don't need those America-hating Godless, OBAHma loving liberals telling us otherwise. No sir, my house isn't going to blow down or get washed away or burned by a brushfire and if yours does, it's not my fault or responsibility. If the roads and bridges wash out, you can fix them yourself, you lazy, tax loving bums. I mean I worked hard for everything I got and I don't owe you shit.
God Bless America.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The hollow man
Herman Cain won the Florida Republican Straw poll yesterday, not that any of my Floridian friends or neighbors seem to have taken notice. The straw poll probably means as much as any other straw-stuffed bundle such as one might find on a pole in a corn field amusing the crows. I'm not sure how many Florida Republicans would actually have chosen him out of a line-up to be the Republican champion, even a line-up as motley and miserable as we're given to choose from at the moment, but he's preferable to Perry in a state still jealous for only being able to brag about Jeb Bush instead of his idiot brother from Texas.
But really, he might just be ideal. The perfect man to deflect the charges of racism Republicans face when making racist statements about Obama would be the man who accused Jon Stewart of attacking Cain for racist reasons. Rovian tactics have rarely deviated from accusing the opponent of one's own glaring misdeeds, so who better to allow them to say: "you're against Cain because he's black" and "Liberals are racists."
He's just the sort of spontaneously and unwittingly hilarious clown Republicans love to vote for because what they say isn't what they said they said and so they've been for and against anything as suits the argument of the moment. "Reporters who quote me are stupid" and "compromise is killing this country" are the kinds of statements stupid and uncompromising people praise when sitting around the table, taking tea.
And of course he's made money in business, which leaves him immune to the jabs of Republican picadors such as Romney's assertion that Obama has never run a business and has spent his career in public service so he's not fit to serve the public which was asserted despite any clear indication that having been a businessman makes for a good president ( and much that says it isn't.)
And of course, the whole tea-brained idea of prosperity through parsimony is served well by recycling all that old McCain campaign material simply by painting over the
Mc and re-enlisting the delightful Mrs. Palin to distract from his unsuitability by flaunting hers. Think of the savings.
But really, he might just be ideal. The perfect man to deflect the charges of racism Republicans face when making racist statements about Obama would be the man who accused Jon Stewart of attacking Cain for racist reasons. Rovian tactics have rarely deviated from accusing the opponent of one's own glaring misdeeds, so who better to allow them to say: "you're against Cain because he's black" and "Liberals are racists."
He's just the sort of spontaneously and unwittingly hilarious clown Republicans love to vote for because what they say isn't what they said they said and so they've been for and against anything as suits the argument of the moment. "Reporters who quote me are stupid" and "compromise is killing this country" are the kinds of statements stupid and uncompromising people praise when sitting around the table, taking tea.
And of course he's made money in business, which leaves him immune to the jabs of Republican picadors such as Romney's assertion that Obama has never run a business and has spent his career in public service so he's not fit to serve the public which was asserted despite any clear indication that having been a businessman makes for a good president ( and much that says it isn't.)
And of course, the whole tea-brained idea of prosperity through parsimony is served well by recycling all that old McCain campaign material simply by painting over the
Mc and re-enlisting the delightful Mrs. Palin to distract from his unsuitability by flaunting hers. Think of the savings.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Indian River
the trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks
by the docks on Indian River.
it is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
banks of the palmettoes,
it is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-
trees out of the cedars.
yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu,
nor on the nunnery beaches.
-Wallace Stevens-
Autumn is the Spring here, down at the bottom end of the Indian River, where the long lagoon becomes the Jupiter Narrows right behind my house. It used to be impassible to anything bigger than a skiff until the Government dredged it so that the steamboats could travel further south than Peck's lake where I often anchor my boat to enjoy the solitude.
The Autumn is the season of rebirth, not from the stark, cold death of bleak, white Winter, but the crawling death, the Silurian wet death and ferment of endless insect and reptile life; the rot and crawling mildew that turns my paving stones black and stains the sides of my house green and you can smell the rank mud at low tide - just there behind those white mangroves in the corner of the lot. On steaming, foetid summer nights, that still eternal boskage rings with frog voices and palm leaf clack and insect rattle and snakes and owls hunt in the night heat and the quiet bobcat's padded feet pass by unnoticed until you hear some rabbit scream.
Autumn and Spring; the only difference is the anticipation of the next phase, dreaming about cool nights and opened windows and dry ground, the two or three winter nights when you can wear that old leather jacket or the sweet, sad smell of April jasmine prophesying June's thick and breathless heat.
Autumn is for planting vegetables if you don't want them to burn and wither or rot at the roots from the rain soak and the ravage of Summer insect hunger; for watching the oranges and bananas turn color as the brief Winter approaches with it's red-burned tourists on beaches picking up shells: the seasonal retirees in white socks and sandals eating at Appleby's and driving slowly home at dusk in black sedans with license plates on front bumpers, braking for green lights. It's a renewal for those without many more cycles of renewal left in them.
Autumn, when Africa grows tired of launching storms into the Atlantic, when evening dinners on the patio need candle light in the early dark and swimming pools glow turquoise and cool. We feel born again into the outside world and the mild November air is sweet in the lungs and the night sounds change and the stars grow clearer as the great, dark numinous night embraces you to her wild bosom with her fragrant arms.
by the docks on Indian River.
it is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
banks of the palmettoes,
it is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-
trees out of the cedars.
yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu,
nor on the nunnery beaches.
-Wallace Stevens-
______________
Autumn is the Spring here, down at the bottom end of the Indian River, where the long lagoon becomes the Jupiter Narrows right behind my house. It used to be impassible to anything bigger than a skiff until the Government dredged it so that the steamboats could travel further south than Peck's lake where I often anchor my boat to enjoy the solitude.
The Autumn is the season of rebirth, not from the stark, cold death of bleak, white Winter, but the crawling death, the Silurian wet death and ferment of endless insect and reptile life; the rot and crawling mildew that turns my paving stones black and stains the sides of my house green and you can smell the rank mud at low tide - just there behind those white mangroves in the corner of the lot. On steaming, foetid summer nights, that still eternal boskage rings with frog voices and palm leaf clack and insect rattle and snakes and owls hunt in the night heat and the quiet bobcat's padded feet pass by unnoticed until you hear some rabbit scream.
Autumn and Spring; the only difference is the anticipation of the next phase, dreaming about cool nights and opened windows and dry ground, the two or three winter nights when you can wear that old leather jacket or the sweet, sad smell of April jasmine prophesying June's thick and breathless heat.
Autumn is for planting vegetables if you don't want them to burn and wither or rot at the roots from the rain soak and the ravage of Summer insect hunger; for watching the oranges and bananas turn color as the brief Winter approaches with it's red-burned tourists on beaches picking up shells: the seasonal retirees in white socks and sandals eating at Appleby's and driving slowly home at dusk in black sedans with license plates on front bumpers, braking for green lights. It's a renewal for those without many more cycles of renewal left in them.
Autumn, when Africa grows tired of launching storms into the Atlantic, when evening dinners on the patio need candle light in the early dark and swimming pools glow turquoise and cool. We feel born again into the outside world and the mild November air is sweet in the lungs and the night sounds change and the stars grow clearer as the great, dark numinous night embraces you to her wild bosom with her fragrant arms.
Monday, September 19, 2011
A tale told by an idiot
Has Andrew Breitbart blown a fuse? He seems to be saying just that: raving strangely about shooting people and being under attack from "liberals." Perhaps that's true since like most of that rabble without a cause calling themselves conservative these days, a liberal is anyone you disagree with and if these dull witted bastards agree with anyone, it's with other ignorant, deluded and dull witted bastards.
So what line are you talking about Andy? what line won't I cross to defend my country, the truth, democracy and common decency? I'm afraid I know exactly what I'm dealing with and I'm not impressed.
But still, a threat of violence is a threat of violence and I think it's worth noting that when the frustration involved in transporting the United States back to it's darkest years of poverty and exploitation gets to these people, when they find themselves confident in talking to people of like mind, the true colors come out -- and so do the guns.
Andrew Breitbart isn't a conservative. Conservatives don't dream about, talk about and apparently advocate starting violent revolutions, by definition, nor do most sane people under circumstances as we have today. Andrew Breitbart doesn't believe in Democracy, because although revolution may speak from the muzzle of a gun, Democracy does not, nor does it suppress votes, buy votes and base political power on firepower, threats or buying power.
I mean what the hell is he so desperate about? He's got money, our federal taxes are the lowest in his lifetime and it certainly wasn't witches or demons or Liberals who started a war and refused to pay for it or, as Republicans nearly always do, escalated the debt beyond all reason. What content can anyone find in his barking and hissing"? What can he explain other than to drone on and on about how Liberals are that and ConSERVatives are this like a deranged dog chasing his tail. Argument by diktat, argument by amplitude, argument by lying, shifting his terms around like some street hustler with walnut shells.
Like most of these brats and hooligans and barroom bullies, all he wants is power: the kind of power that stems from divine right, hatred and the wealth of Hades. The kind he has no qualification to hold and no following to elect him to. So sure Andy, your friends have guns and that's the only way sad, depressing losers like you and them can get noticed: hate shouting, gun waving, witch hunting and all the rest of the bellicose bullshit you try to pass of as a cause. So sure, bring it on, show everyone what kind of spoiled, petulant and democracy-hating bolshevik brat you are. I'm waiting.
Come out shooting and see how far the "liberals" let you get before you and the whole camo-clad, rebel yell shouting vermin get what you deserve.
" There are times when I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot. Bring it on.’ Because I know who’s on our side"he said to a group of people on his side of the border of sanity, or at least those capable of listening to this without calling 911.
"We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. "Perhaps he's not kidding, but sorry, the"we" he's talking about really don't have the numbers and although I hesitate to tell him, they aren't the only ones with guns. The rest of us just don't wave them around and threaten other people with them so that we can get our way.
So what line are you talking about Andy? what line won't I cross to defend my country, the truth, democracy and common decency? I'm afraid I know exactly what I'm dealing with and I'm not impressed.
But still, a threat of violence is a threat of violence and I think it's worth noting that when the frustration involved in transporting the United States back to it's darkest years of poverty and exploitation gets to these people, when they find themselves confident in talking to people of like mind, the true colors come out -- and so do the guns.
Andrew Breitbart isn't a conservative. Conservatives don't dream about, talk about and apparently advocate starting violent revolutions, by definition, nor do most sane people under circumstances as we have today. Andrew Breitbart doesn't believe in Democracy, because although revolution may speak from the muzzle of a gun, Democracy does not, nor does it suppress votes, buy votes and base political power on firepower, threats or buying power.
I mean what the hell is he so desperate about? He's got money, our federal taxes are the lowest in his lifetime and it certainly wasn't witches or demons or Liberals who started a war and refused to pay for it or, as Republicans nearly always do, escalated the debt beyond all reason. What content can anyone find in his barking and hissing"? What can he explain other than to drone on and on about how Liberals are that and ConSERVatives are this like a deranged dog chasing his tail. Argument by diktat, argument by amplitude, argument by lying, shifting his terms around like some street hustler with walnut shells.
Like most of these brats and hooligans and barroom bullies, all he wants is power: the kind of power that stems from divine right, hatred and the wealth of Hades. The kind he has no qualification to hold and no following to elect him to. So sure Andy, your friends have guns and that's the only way sad, depressing losers like you and them can get noticed: hate shouting, gun waving, witch hunting and all the rest of the bellicose bullshit you try to pass of as a cause. So sure, bring it on, show everyone what kind of spoiled, petulant and democracy-hating bolshevik brat you are. I'm waiting.
Come out shooting and see how far the "liberals" let you get before you and the whole camo-clad, rebel yell shouting vermin get what you deserve.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Bush Pilot
"What the President meant to say. . ." How many times have we heard the foot extraction specialists begin to move the shells around the able with that phrase? Really, when George Dubya, the ex cheerleader with the parachute harness arranged to show off his gonads aboard the Abraham Lincoln to give his "mission accomplished" speech, he really didn't mean to say the whole mission was accomplished said Scott Sforza, former deputy assistant to President Bush for communications. Yeah right. Sure, perhaps the crew of the Abe Lincoln thought it pertained to the end of their mission, but you know it wasn't a private thank you to the crew, it was broadcast around the world via satellite and he sure as hell didn't say your mission is accomplished, even though Sforza would like to whitewash Bush's shameful and fraudulent exhibition and his own part in it.
It was, as the attack on Iraq was, an infantile attempt to portray significance; to be as he titled himself, a Warpresident, the Commander Guy, like a little boy wearing his father's old uniform and playing army.
Does anyone who has ever flown a fighter plane think Bush, who hadn't flown in years and years and had no specialized carrier training actually landed that plane as the newshorns blared and continue to blare? Ridiculous. Just ask any Navy pilot and yes, I have asked. Had Bush really meant what his apologists claim, would he have attempted to stop combat pay nearly a decade before combat ended - if indeed you can now say it has?
No, just as the assault on Clinton precisely mirrored the proceedings and charges against Nixon, the assault on Obama has it's roots in our 8 year national embarrassment and every valid criticism leveled against Bush: ignoring the constitution, creating massive debt and the largest administration in history amongst other things is being reflected onto the current administration and I think these little attempts to reconstruct a more forgivable past need to be countered and not just passed by and dismissed as the excuses of failed politicians.
Really, is there a better example of a pathetic attempt to pull something from the cesspool and pass it off as a hero -- at least since the attempted rehabilitation of Tricky Dick?
It was, as the attack on Iraq was, an infantile attempt to portray significance; to be as he titled himself, a Warpresident, the Commander Guy, like a little boy wearing his father's old uniform and playing army.
Does anyone who has ever flown a fighter plane think Bush, who hadn't flown in years and years and had no specialized carrier training actually landed that plane as the newshorns blared and continue to blare? Ridiculous. Just ask any Navy pilot and yes, I have asked. Had Bush really meant what his apologists claim, would he have attempted to stop combat pay nearly a decade before combat ended - if indeed you can now say it has?
No, just as the assault on Clinton precisely mirrored the proceedings and charges against Nixon, the assault on Obama has it's roots in our 8 year national embarrassment and every valid criticism leveled against Bush: ignoring the constitution, creating massive debt and the largest administration in history amongst other things is being reflected onto the current administration and I think these little attempts to reconstruct a more forgivable past need to be countered and not just passed by and dismissed as the excuses of failed politicians.
Really, is there a better example of a pathetic attempt to pull something from the cesspool and pass it off as a hero -- at least since the attempted rehabilitation of Tricky Dick?
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Privatizing disaster
I suspected there must be something afoot when talk at the Tea table began about killing FEMA. I'm more than suspicious now. It seems our former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who according to The Maritime Executive, is announcing a 'strategic partnership' with O’Brien’s Response Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of SEACOR Holdings Inc. Bush's company, Old Rhodes Holdings now looks forward to
I played a small part in delivering food to those who had no means of getting to a FEMA distribution center -- and there are many such people here -- and also used my amateur radio license to good effect, facilitating communications between Red Cross shelters and government agencies until commercial communications and electric power were restored. The interface between need and help was public and public spirited. It was not corporate, it was neighbor to neighbor working through non profit organizations. It was restaurants sending food to police and firefighters, carpenters and roofers and others helping those who needed it.
The only time we heard from Governor Jeb and his brother, the Commander Guy was when they showed up at Red Cross headquarters for a photo op, disrupting operations for half a day, and when they posed for the cameras handing out a bag of ice for a few minutes before escaping into an air conditioned limo and the Presidential helicopter to fly off to a party in Miami Beach while we sweltered in the dark for weeks and weeks.
Jeb is a Bush, however and the "strategic partnership" may be about a further strategy than to provide "emergency planning, disaster response, preparedness consulting, crisis communications and regulatory compliance services to corporations and governments" which is what O’Brien’s Response Management, the SEACOR subsidiary in question does. O'Brien's has been picking up people like former Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was the Incident Commander during hurricane Katrina and the recent BP oil spill. It's funny how oil and the Bush family float to the top. O'Brien Oil Pollution Service being part of the O'Brien family.
So do we have the same people who were so heavily criticized for mishandling that Gulf oil spill soon to be handling more disasters for profit while FEMA goes the way of Social Security and Medicare and the FAA and all those agencies being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of tea?
I don't mean to say that FEMA has always been what it should be or done as well as it should have done, but FEMA sits at the end of a chain of responsibility that leads to the
American public while SEACOR is ultimately responsible to its owners -- and like the former Blackwater owners, they're quite able to ignore questions as to what they did and how much they made by doing it by saying "sorry, we're a private corporation."
I do mean to be suspicious however and I'm aware that evidence of collusion and corruption and various acts of grift, graft and flim-flam are too easily dismissed as "conspiracy theories." Our history is basically a series of conspiracies conveniently mislabeled and when I hear the words, oil, Bush, and disaster used in close conjunction, and when I hear about efforts to privatize yet another not-for-profit health and safety organization, I'm more than suspicious.
People like me, who belong to well organized volunteer groups like ARES, American Red Cross, SATERN and many, many others are used to working with government agencies, not that there isn't some friction on occasion, but the prospect of mercenaries who take orders from corporate CEO's who profit from disaster aid and are motivated to control and monopolize the process, rationing help to maximize private gain, isn't a welcome one. In fact it's infuriating to think about being told what to say and do, where we can go and where we can't go by black uniformed privateers protecting turf and profit and it would tempt me to ignore them and work around them if possible the next time a storm rages ashore and Florida goes dark.
"helping a broader array of organizations and communities become more resilient through preparation, response, communication and recovery”says Bush, whom Floridians will remember was the governor through the disastrous hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. How they will remember him is hard to tell and probably depends on whose house and car and boat and livelihood was demolished and how long it was before he got any significant help. As I recall, my neighbors and I felt pretty much on our own, despite Bush's alleged leadership, although FEMA certainly was here with food, water and some generators.
I played a small part in delivering food to those who had no means of getting to a FEMA distribution center -- and there are many such people here -- and also used my amateur radio license to good effect, facilitating communications between Red Cross shelters and government agencies until commercial communications and electric power were restored. The interface between need and help was public and public spirited. It was not corporate, it was neighbor to neighbor working through non profit organizations. It was restaurants sending food to police and firefighters, carpenters and roofers and others helping those who needed it.
The only time we heard from Governor Jeb and his brother, the Commander Guy was when they showed up at Red Cross headquarters for a photo op, disrupting operations for half a day, and when they posed for the cameras handing out a bag of ice for a few minutes before escaping into an air conditioned limo and the Presidential helicopter to fly off to a party in Miami Beach while we sweltered in the dark for weeks and weeks.
"Governor Bush has unparalleled experience in crisis management, as he helped guide Florida through some of the most significant natural disasters in its history"said Charles Fabrikant, executive chairman of SEACOR Holdings. Unparalleled, of course isn't quite the same as unequaled.
Jeb is a Bush, however and the "strategic partnership" may be about a further strategy than to provide "emergency planning, disaster response, preparedness consulting, crisis communications and regulatory compliance services to corporations and governments" which is what O’Brien’s Response Management, the SEACOR subsidiary in question does. O'Brien's has been picking up people like former Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was the Incident Commander during hurricane Katrina and the recent BP oil spill. It's funny how oil and the Bush family float to the top. O'Brien Oil Pollution Service being part of the O'Brien family.
So do we have the same people who were so heavily criticized for mishandling that Gulf oil spill soon to be handling more disasters for profit while FEMA goes the way of Social Security and Medicare and the FAA and all those agencies being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of tea?
I don't mean to say that FEMA has always been what it should be or done as well as it should have done, but FEMA sits at the end of a chain of responsibility that leads to the
American public while SEACOR is ultimately responsible to its owners -- and like the former Blackwater owners, they're quite able to ignore questions as to what they did and how much they made by doing it by saying "sorry, we're a private corporation."
I do mean to be suspicious however and I'm aware that evidence of collusion and corruption and various acts of grift, graft and flim-flam are too easily dismissed as "conspiracy theories." Our history is basically a series of conspiracies conveniently mislabeled and when I hear the words, oil, Bush, and disaster used in close conjunction, and when I hear about efforts to privatize yet another not-for-profit health and safety organization, I'm more than suspicious.
People like me, who belong to well organized volunteer groups like ARES, American Red Cross, SATERN and many, many others are used to working with government agencies, not that there isn't some friction on occasion, but the prospect of mercenaries who take orders from corporate CEO's who profit from disaster aid and are motivated to control and monopolize the process, rationing help to maximize private gain, isn't a welcome one. In fact it's infuriating to think about being told what to say and do, where we can go and where we can't go by black uniformed privateers protecting turf and profit and it would tempt me to ignore them and work around them if possible the next time a storm rages ashore and Florida goes dark.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Government injections
There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
___________________
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
___________________
So Michelle Bachmann claims some young girl suddenly got all retarded like, after her "Government injection" of Guardasil. That's not too surprising. I know someone who got loaded on Private Reserve Brandy and voted for Bush, but one thing always follows another and that's enough proof of causation for a desperate liar speaking to the profoundly ignorant and superstitious primitives who listen to people such as she; people who see the rage of gods in every storm, lightning bolt and tectonic movement, who are terrified of mysterious rays and forces and 'toxins' and couldn't pass a 5th grade science exam.
"Government Injections" eliminated smallpox, you know, and would have done the same for Polio and other diseases if we didn't have that other pandemic in America -- ignorance. Perhaps the absence of Government fluorides in our local Republican drinking water would explain all the brown and missing teeth I see at Tea Party rallies and I don't think it has anything to do with too much Lipton's.
But hey, we're a country (and I use the term loosely) not only infested with idiots and idiocy, but one where there's a good chance someone stupider and with even less integrity than Mark Bachmann's smokescreen wife may slither into high office like one of those young snakes that wriggle under my patio doors.
Speaking of things that creep and crawl, take my Congressworm, Tom 'Looneytunes' Rooney -- please. Tom who keeps showing up on my Facebook page to remind me that Government is not only impotent but incompetent and also tyrannical -- and all without explaining how those things aren't sort of mutually exclusive and more importantly, since he's part of it, why the hell he isn't as much to blame as anyone else who's part of it. Really, I'd be pleased if he'd just follow that other anti-government, moose-eating grifter and simply fly over the cuckoo's nest and drive around the country in a bus and get rich, like some inverted and less lysergic Ken Kesey.
But no, polluted air isn't bad for you, polluted water can't hurt you, unless it has government fluoride in it and besides Florida Governor Rick Scott says we can't afford it because disease and degradation are good for business and bad for 'jobs.' But condoms don't prevent disease or pregnancy, says the gospel of Tea and vaccinations are a genocidal hoax and freedom from disease and unwanted pregnancy will promote teen promiscuity and the gay agenda and we don't need no government health insurance because when we get leukemia or Alzheimers we can go to the emergency room and the taxpayers will pick up the bill and if you can't understand that you're just a libtard elitist and part of the problem.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Ron Paul: Liberal
Some people like to dismiss Ron Paul as a simple minded extremist loony. I don't think that's fair and not just because I'm often dismissed with the same simple mindedness by the same simple minds. Yes, I think Dr. Paul does take many things to an extreme point, but you know -- sometimes he's right and sometimes so far to the right that he comes back around the spherical universe and appears on the left.
When he was booed at last night's Tea Party "debate," he was booed as a Liberal, not as the dogmatic, theory obsessed, quasi-anarchist and not-too-bright demagogue he's been portrayed as. He was booed for not bleating and re-bleating the recorded message about why "they" hate us, which, if truth ever be told, isn't for our freedom: a thing which in fact has a larger following amongst Muslims that can be allowed by the Jingoistic braying of the party for which the jackass is not the symbol -- but for the reality.
The reality is and the reality has been that not only al Qaeda but others have hated the US government for interfering in Middle East, for rightly or wrongly supporting Israel, for building military bases in places they see as sacred and for supporting oppressive governments because they were "anti-Communist" and willing to exploit their resources for our benefit.
Who else in the Republican Party is willing to step outside the passion play and challenge the formula: they hate us because we're all good and always good and so we have to hate them -- all of them, all of the time?
The Tea Party picture of human and natural events needs to be presented in such high contrast that any smudge of darkness on our pure white character must be erased; there are no grays or colors and one is either the favorite angel of God or Satan's most foul smelling demon. To admit that any of our sacred military endeavors was not waged in defense of our alleged "freedom" puts one on the odiferous side and so yes, the Battleship Maine was blown up by the evil, freedom hating Spanish between bouts of raping American women and God really did want us to have the continent and our conquest thereof was just like the rape of Jericho only slower. It's anathema to suggest that we were not protecting our freedom by killing millions of Vietnamese or destroying Iraq and those who think and those who know must then be devils for suggesting that anything we ever have done might ever have made anything worse for us or anyone else of God's elect.
We have to believe, as we've been told, that "liberals" would have preferred to "psychoanalyze" al Qaeda than to retaliate, that Democrats unanimously voted against the odious Patriot Act when in fact their support was (sadly) unanimous. Facts don't matter and for the Tea Party only feelings matter -- and the only feelings they have are greed, anger and hate. If you're not unquestionably in support of everything we do; if you don't hate enough and hate whom we tell you to; if you don't think everything we do in anger isn't ipso facto God's will, you're our natural enemy even if you're Ron Paul and even if most people think you're so far right, you're wrong.
This time Ron Paul is right and it's time to question the people who say government is always wrong when they simultaneously say it's always right.
When he was booed at last night's Tea Party "debate," he was booed as a Liberal, not as the dogmatic, theory obsessed, quasi-anarchist and not-too-bright demagogue he's been portrayed as. He was booed for not bleating and re-bleating the recorded message about why "they" hate us, which, if truth ever be told, isn't for our freedom: a thing which in fact has a larger following amongst Muslims that can be allowed by the Jingoistic braying of the party for which the jackass is not the symbol -- but for the reality.
The reality is and the reality has been that not only al Qaeda but others have hated the US government for interfering in Middle East, for rightly or wrongly supporting Israel, for building military bases in places they see as sacred and for supporting oppressive governments because they were "anti-Communist" and willing to exploit their resources for our benefit.
Who else in the Republican Party is willing to step outside the passion play and challenge the formula: they hate us because we're all good and always good and so we have to hate them -- all of them, all of the time?
“This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and their attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true,”he said last night. But what set the snarling beasts off their feed was
“Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit, and they wrote and said that we attacked because you had bases on our holy lands in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians a fair treatment,”which quite plainly is true.
The Tea Party picture of human and natural events needs to be presented in such high contrast that any smudge of darkness on our pure white character must be erased; there are no grays or colors and one is either the favorite angel of God or Satan's most foul smelling demon. To admit that any of our sacred military endeavors was not waged in defense of our alleged "freedom" puts one on the odiferous side and so yes, the Battleship Maine was blown up by the evil, freedom hating Spanish between bouts of raping American women and God really did want us to have the continent and our conquest thereof was just like the rape of Jericho only slower. It's anathema to suggest that we were not protecting our freedom by killing millions of Vietnamese or destroying Iraq and those who think and those who know must then be devils for suggesting that anything we ever have done might ever have made anything worse for us or anyone else of God's elect.
We have to believe, as we've been told, that "liberals" would have preferred to "psychoanalyze" al Qaeda than to retaliate, that Democrats unanimously voted against the odious Patriot Act when in fact their support was (sadly) unanimous. Facts don't matter and for the Tea Party only feelings matter -- and the only feelings they have are greed, anger and hate. If you're not unquestionably in support of everything we do; if you don't hate enough and hate whom we tell you to; if you don't think everything we do in anger isn't ipso facto God's will, you're our natural enemy even if you're Ron Paul and even if most people think you're so far right, you're wrong.
This time Ron Paul is right and it's time to question the people who say government is always wrong when they simultaneously say it's always right.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Thanks Rick
I didn't listen to the President's speech Thursday night, partly because I had a meeting to attend and partly because I've ceased caring. Of course not listening to the president's ideas about reviving the economy by putting people to work seems to a matter of pride in this part of the swamp and one squints when asked "didja listen to to President?" with that certain tone. The proper answer is of course, "hell no!" Why should I care about a country wherein this sort of idiocy is called "patriotism?"
Of course I didn't listen to Rick Scott, our Governor/Medicare Fraudmeister either -- hell no. I save such things for later and I prefer to read that kind of news rather than to be waterboarded with it. That way I can take a deep breath when I read that before the speech, he snarked that there wouldn't be anything for Florida in it and my TV was safe from having my foot through the screen when I read that it's likely he'll turn down 7.5 Billion allocated to improve and upgrade our infrastructure. That's money that would employ a lot of people who would spend their income in Florida and make Florida more attractive and accessible to the tourists upon whom our economy depends.
It wouldn't be the first time Ricky has turned away an opportunity. He refused to accept 2 billion to build a high speed rail line - you know the kind of thing other countries we feel superior to have. The kind of thing that, once again, would boost tourism and tax dollars. Oops - I used the magic word tax and Rick doesn't like taxes. Of course he doesn't like employment and he doesn't like the President and isn't about to let him do anything about employment because the only way to get out of a recession is to make sure the state doesn't take in a dime and to fire so many employees and cancel so many necessary projects that hardly anyone has enough income to require them to pay any taxes.
And then you cut costs more which puts more people out of work which means they spend less and so less gets made and companies go out of business and fire more people so there are still fewer with any money to buy anything -- and by and by everything gets better. Don't get it? you must be a liberal, or so the Teabrains tell me and I'd rather argue with a toadstool than with the kind of fungi and pond scum that make up that seething ferment. I mean, who can afford to care any more?
Of course I didn't listen to Rick Scott, our Governor/Medicare Fraudmeister either -- hell no. I save such things for later and I prefer to read that kind of news rather than to be waterboarded with it. That way I can take a deep breath when I read that before the speech, he snarked that there wouldn't be anything for Florida in it and my TV was safe from having my foot through the screen when I read that it's likely he'll turn down 7.5 Billion allocated to improve and upgrade our infrastructure. That's money that would employ a lot of people who would spend their income in Florida and make Florida more attractive and accessible to the tourists upon whom our economy depends.
It wouldn't be the first time Ricky has turned away an opportunity. He refused to accept 2 billion to build a high speed rail line - you know the kind of thing other countries we feel superior to have. The kind of thing that, once again, would boost tourism and tax dollars. Oops - I used the magic word tax and Rick doesn't like taxes. Of course he doesn't like employment and he doesn't like the President and isn't about to let him do anything about employment because the only way to get out of a recession is to make sure the state doesn't take in a dime and to fire so many employees and cancel so many necessary projects that hardly anyone has enough income to require them to pay any taxes.
And then you cut costs more which puts more people out of work which means they spend less and so less gets made and companies go out of business and fire more people so there are still fewer with any money to buy anything -- and by and by everything gets better. Don't get it? you must be a liberal, or so the Teabrains tell me and I'd rather argue with a toadstool than with the kind of fungi and pond scum that make up that seething ferment. I mean, who can afford to care any more?
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Never Forget
This coming Sunday will be the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack on Washington and New York and there's no way that anyone is going to forget it. After 10 years we're not only still mired in lachrymose and maudlin self-pity, but the incident has taken on a religious tone, complete with holy martyrs and holy relics. We still have cars with those plastic flag holders attached to the windows and we're reminded constantly that not only will we never forget, we'll never allow our grandchildren or their grandchildren to forget this dark day: the worst day in American history.
Of course I'll be condemned by some for hard heartedness, if not outright treason. I'm only arguing for a sense of proportion, but any balanced and reasonable viewpoint is so condemned in today's America. We're a radicalized, polarized nation choking and strangling on our own anger, yet cherishing it, nourishing it and hoping to preserve it in ritual, in perpetuity: a new anger for the ages. At least some powerful people hope that to be the case. Grieving people being so easy to manipulate and exploit, as some funeral directors know.
Some bits and pieces of the World Trade Center steel framework are being distributed to towns in my area. The Navy SEAL museum in Ft. Pierce now has a chunk and another arrived in my town a few days ago. The local paper printed photos of people kissing the rusty steel, touching their rosaries to it to make them extra holy and others simply hugging the metal, weeping.
The flag wrapped bits of steel arrived escorted by a motorcade over a quarter mile long. Military, law enforcement and veteran's motorcycle clubs accompanied it all the way south from the Georgia border like a funeral procession.
Of course it wasn't all maudlin lamentation, there was plenty of anger still, even though bin Laden, most of his henchmen and all of those who perpetrated the attack are dead. Former detective Dennis McKenna promised that his son was soon going off to Afghanistan, where the perpetrators no longer dwell, to "whack one of them." Bagpipes were played, America the Beautiful was sung, Holy Water was poured on Holy Steel and then the bandwagon moved on.
Never forget that we're victims. Never remember how we victimized millions abroad in an uninvolved country. Always remember that "they" hate us and always complain when we attempt to make peace.
But how long will we actually remember and how long will we see this sad period in the same dim light? Surely half of our country no longer remembers 12/7/41 as the date that will live in infamy, nor the Battleship Maine on 2/15/98 or the burning and sacking of Washington DC on 8/24/14. People will forget. It won't be the worst thing that ever happened any more.
Some of those pre-teens who are too young to remember will absorb the tailored and fitted viewpoint they have thrust upon them at the moment, but their children will live in a vastly different world and one in which this country will not have the same status and those 3000 saints and martyrs won't really compare with the millions and millions dead in other places we wouldn't get involved in because "they hate us."
Of course I'll be condemned by some for hard heartedness, if not outright treason. I'm only arguing for a sense of proportion, but any balanced and reasonable viewpoint is so condemned in today's America. We're a radicalized, polarized nation choking and strangling on our own anger, yet cherishing it, nourishing it and hoping to preserve it in ritual, in perpetuity: a new anger for the ages. At least some powerful people hope that to be the case. Grieving people being so easy to manipulate and exploit, as some funeral directors know.
Some bits and pieces of the World Trade Center steel framework are being distributed to towns in my area. The Navy SEAL museum in Ft. Pierce now has a chunk and another arrived in my town a few days ago. The local paper printed photos of people kissing the rusty steel, touching their rosaries to it to make them extra holy and others simply hugging the metal, weeping.
The flag wrapped bits of steel arrived escorted by a motorcade over a quarter mile long. Military, law enforcement and veteran's motorcycle clubs accompanied it all the way south from the Georgia border like a funeral procession.
"Our objective is to eventually put this steel on every corner so that people never forget,"said a retired New York homicide detective. That even includes my tiny, unincorporated crossroads town which has no other monuments of any kind. He expressed hope that one day there would be a holiday in every state honoring the policemen of New York. He promised never to forget.
Of course it wasn't all maudlin lamentation, there was plenty of anger still, even though bin Laden, most of his henchmen and all of those who perpetrated the attack are dead. Former detective Dennis McKenna promised that his son was soon going off to Afghanistan, where the perpetrators no longer dwell, to "whack one of them." Bagpipes were played, America the Beautiful was sung, Holy Water was poured on Holy Steel and then the bandwagon moved on.
said one Vietnam veteran. I wish it had done so, I wish all the other war memorials had made us more reluctant to make wars, but we're hardly stronger. We're far more divided, our economy has suffered from trillions of borrowed dollars turned to smoke. There is a bigger economic divide and the tear-shedders in their sackcloth and ashes want to sacrifice every bit of social progress since the 1860's, impoverishing the already debt-ridden majority while enriching the aristocracy.
"Let these pieces of steel remind us of the 2,973 men and woman who sacrificed their lives and, unknowingly, made our country and people become even stronger,"
Never forget that we're victims. Never remember how we victimized millions abroad in an uninvolved country. Always remember that "they" hate us and always complain when we attempt to make peace.
But how long will we actually remember and how long will we see this sad period in the same dim light? Surely half of our country no longer remembers 12/7/41 as the date that will live in infamy, nor the Battleship Maine on 2/15/98 or the burning and sacking of Washington DC on 8/24/14. People will forget. It won't be the worst thing that ever happened any more.
Some of those pre-teens who are too young to remember will absorb the tailored and fitted viewpoint they have thrust upon them at the moment, but their children will live in a vastly different world and one in which this country will not have the same status and those 3000 saints and martyrs won't really compare with the millions and millions dead in other places we wouldn't get involved in because "they hate us."
"I know that Osama bin Laden did the whole thing,"said an 8 year old. Perhaps he'll remember that, perhaps not. Perhaps he will learn some more comprehensive history, perhaps not and it's more than likely there are events to come that will make the death of a few thousand seem insignificant in comparison. No, I'll never forget I won't forget going to the Red Cross office to donate blood and not being able to get there for the crowd. I won't forget the feeling of national unity that was so soon hijacked and exploited and used as a tool, and excuse to wage war at home and abroad. I won't forget the overwhelming, commercially distributed fear and xenophobia and lust for battle either, but I'm old and the world belongs to the young - or soon will and the myth of 9/11 will go where it goes, not where I predict it will go.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Manha de Carnival
Baseball? Football? Hell no, the American national pastime is snark, that kind of idiotic cynicism that makes the worthless hunk of big city, small minded protoplasm feel wise and worthwhile.
No, I didn't wake up this way this morning, but I did go looking for live streaming of the remnants of TS Irene on her way through New York. I do, after all have friends and relatives in the area and as of 10 AM today it looks like it won't be all that bad for those not foolish enough to go surfing or walking out on piers to see the waves as idiots are wont to do to the delight of the sharks.
No, what got to me were the endless comments from people using their good fortune to scream the usual brainless things about the inaccuracy of storm strength predictions. Ha, ha, ha -- the worst case scenario seems not to have occurred and as the first licks of wind began to affect the wormy apple, the giggling about the "experts," the government and their liberal inadequacy began.
So perhaps there were ten good heterosexual Christian people in the greater New York area and so God, who as you know is in control of all natural disasters affecting America, decided to spare the city. If so, that small group isn't evident in on line news commentaries. But God or no God, hurricane strengths are subject to too many variables to be accurately forecast so the smart person, the person who has been there, done that and had the T-shirt ripped off his back by the wind, ignores the giggling and prepares for the worst.
There aren't a hell of a lot of New Yawkahs who remember the storm of 1938. Even in Florida in 2004 the locals, many of them from New Yawk were smirking and snarking about the silliness of taking Francis seriously. It was fun to see them lined up at FEMA in their big Republican cars waiting sheepishly for food and water. Many of them no longer have houses in my part of Florida after a cat 2 and a cat 3 hitting the same town in the same month. Even so, in the following year some were still talking about Chicken Little when Wilma was predicted to be a weak Cat 1 yet by the time it came down my street, there were big oak trees rolling like tumbleweed in a Western movie and tall palms flapping like overcooked pasta or being torn to pieces and I still can't sleep through a storm for remembering the deafening noise of that storm.
So keep laughing you smug, know-it-all New York nitwits. Keep telling us we don't need FEMA or the National Weather Service or any silly thing that sounds like government -- just don't go looking for help when the looters come to your door, if you still have a door or are floating out to sea on the remnants of your house after a phone pole came through the wall at 160 MPH. Go have a Tea Party meeting in the soggy rubble stinking of drowned rats and dead crabs and tell yourselves about the every-man-for-himself paradise that comes from having no "government programs." I'm 800 miles away and it ain't my concern.
No, I didn't wake up this way this morning, but I did go looking for live streaming of the remnants of TS Irene on her way through New York. I do, after all have friends and relatives in the area and as of 10 AM today it looks like it won't be all that bad for those not foolish enough to go surfing or walking out on piers to see the waves as idiots are wont to do to the delight of the sharks.
No, what got to me were the endless comments from people using their good fortune to scream the usual brainless things about the inaccuracy of storm strength predictions. Ha, ha, ha -- the worst case scenario seems not to have occurred and as the first licks of wind began to affect the wormy apple, the giggling about the "experts," the government and their liberal inadequacy began.
So perhaps there were ten good heterosexual Christian people in the greater New York area and so God, who as you know is in control of all natural disasters affecting America, decided to spare the city. If so, that small group isn't evident in on line news commentaries. But God or no God, hurricane strengths are subject to too many variables to be accurately forecast so the smart person, the person who has been there, done that and had the T-shirt ripped off his back by the wind, ignores the giggling and prepares for the worst.
There aren't a hell of a lot of New Yawkahs who remember the storm of 1938. Even in Florida in 2004 the locals, many of them from New Yawk were smirking and snarking about the silliness of taking Francis seriously. It was fun to see them lined up at FEMA in their big Republican cars waiting sheepishly for food and water. Many of them no longer have houses in my part of Florida after a cat 2 and a cat 3 hitting the same town in the same month. Even so, in the following year some were still talking about Chicken Little when Wilma was predicted to be a weak Cat 1 yet by the time it came down my street, there were big oak trees rolling like tumbleweed in a Western movie and tall palms flapping like overcooked pasta or being torn to pieces and I still can't sleep through a storm for remembering the deafening noise of that storm.
So keep laughing you smug, know-it-all New York nitwits. Keep telling us we don't need FEMA or the National Weather Service or any silly thing that sounds like government -- just don't go looking for help when the looters come to your door, if you still have a door or are floating out to sea on the remnants of your house after a phone pole came through the wall at 160 MPH. Go have a Tea Party meeting in the soggy rubble stinking of drowned rats and dead crabs and tell yourselves about the every-man-for-himself paradise that comes from having no "government programs." I'm 800 miles away and it ain't my concern.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
The Cracked Obelisk
" Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge."
-Pat Robertson-
Beside the fact that this contemptible idiot is low enough to compare Washington DC to Jerusalem and medieval enough to insinuate that every shake rattle and roll this planet has experienced in the four billion years it's been around indicates the anger of God, besides the fact that this worm thinks his hate is God's hate, he presumes to speak for me and for America in general and that's unforgivable.
No sir, and I use that title in a contemptuous way, I don't think of a nation under God when I look at that monument and I'm certainly old enough to remember when the Knights of Columbus inter alia twisted Eisenhower's arm into bastardizing the children's pledge in 1954. I think of a victorious general and of the first president of the first secular democracy in Western history -- a man who asserted that this is not a nation under Pat Robertson's God or anyone else's.
Like some prehistoric shaman, squinting at goat entrails and attributing every meteor and comet and eclipse to angry but invisible entities for his own detestable profit, Pat Robertson always has a list of grievances to air when any natural process is noticed. Those grievances seem to have little to do with denouncing evil even on a gigantic scale, as God never shook his finger at Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Tomas de Torquemada for that matter, but only at the failure of our secular government to assume the aspect of God's enforcers in private matters - like love - that this black-hearted abomination can make a career out of raging about.
It's not of course that this tin-horn prophet is alone, nor is it restricted to pseudo-Christian pretenders like Robertson who have decided that tolerance for love's many forms is God's main obsession rather than injustice and oppression and exploitation or even murder. Yahweh, the Hammer of Homosexuals.
It's an insult to God, an insult to America; to freedom, to Democracy, to secularism and religious tolerance and all the other things our country actually is "under." This of course is the Worm who told us that God had no power over plate tectonics when the tsunami hit the eastern Pacific not long ago, but yes, I'll judge and I'll judge you viciously. I can't shake the ground or crack monuments and I'm too furious to crack jokes but because God is always silent and never says the same thing to different people: because divine retribution is indistinguishable from random natural events, I will judge you myself, weigh your words and find you wanting.
-Pat Robertson-
______________________
Beside the fact that this contemptible idiot is low enough to compare Washington DC to Jerusalem and medieval enough to insinuate that every shake rattle and roll this planet has experienced in the four billion years it's been around indicates the anger of God, besides the fact that this worm thinks his hate is God's hate, he presumes to speak for me and for America in general and that's unforgivable.
No sir, and I use that title in a contemptuous way, I don't think of a nation under God when I look at that monument and I'm certainly old enough to remember when the Knights of Columbus inter alia twisted Eisenhower's arm into bastardizing the children's pledge in 1954. I think of a victorious general and of the first president of the first secular democracy in Western history -- a man who asserted that this is not a nation under Pat Robertson's God or anyone else's.
Like some prehistoric shaman, squinting at goat entrails and attributing every meteor and comet and eclipse to angry but invisible entities for his own detestable profit, Pat Robertson always has a list of grievances to air when any natural process is noticed. Those grievances seem to have little to do with denouncing evil even on a gigantic scale, as God never shook his finger at Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Tomas de Torquemada for that matter, but only at the failure of our secular government to assume the aspect of God's enforcers in private matters - like love - that this black-hearted abomination can make a career out of raging about.
It's not of course that this tin-horn prophet is alone, nor is it restricted to pseudo-Christian pretenders like Robertson who have decided that tolerance for love's many forms is God's main obsession rather than injustice and oppression and exploitation or even murder. Yahweh, the Hammer of Homosexuals.
It's an insult to God, an insult to America; to freedom, to Democracy, to secularism and religious tolerance and all the other things our country actually is "under." This of course is the Worm who told us that God had no power over plate tectonics when the tsunami hit the eastern Pacific not long ago, but yes, I'll judge and I'll judge you viciously. I can't shake the ground or crack monuments and I'm too furious to crack jokes but because God is always silent and never says the same thing to different people: because divine retribution is indistinguishable from random natural events, I will judge you myself, weigh your words and find you wanting.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Tea and Reason
Rick Santorum: the whole line-up of Tea Party candidates -- can't stand to listen to them, not allowed to drown them in a cesspit. What's a patriot to do?
We have all the 'important' Teabagger candidates now segueing smoothly from condemning the president for action to laughing at his inaction after he acted contrary to their threats and demands and tantrums. Santorum, in case you haven't heard, was quick on the draw in assuring us that President Obama was an "indecisive" man who can't take any credit for the fall of the Libyan despot, Moamar Gaddafi and his sons. Obviously, an Obama success; a mission actually accomplished, must not be allowed to interfere with the program of sabotaging our country, its economy, its prestige and anything good we ever pretended to stand for.
Of course, people who admire vermin like Santorum; Tea people who call their jive talking, hate stinking, subversive jihad a political party, aren't biologically capable of asking themselves why Obama was to be impeached just a short time ago for being too decisive by assisting NATO in helping Libyan rebels to overthrow the government -- but by having done so is "indecisive." Like other satanic saviors who come to mind, the lie's the thing. Keep saying it, shouting it repeating it, blogging it, blasting it from the Foxhole relentlessly around the clock and it becomes true. The steadfast become indecisive, the brave cowardly, and anyone who isn't an outright thief becomes a Communist.
One doesn't need to walk on water to be seen as a savior to these atavistic genetic accidents desperate for self esteem. One needs only to be a bigot, a fool a scoundrel and a bastard. (No offense intended to people whose parents never married.) Frankly any person who tolerates and supports such anti-American Tea Party idiocy is doing more than trying to make the president fail so they can put a moron and a crook in his place, they're assuring, promoting and cheering the failure of our country. Remember, the only difference between reason and treason is a T.
We have all the 'important' Teabagger candidates now segueing smoothly from condemning the president for action to laughing at his inaction after he acted contrary to their threats and demands and tantrums. Santorum, in case you haven't heard, was quick on the draw in assuring us that President Obama was an "indecisive" man who can't take any credit for the fall of the Libyan despot, Moamar Gaddafi and his sons. Obviously, an Obama success; a mission actually accomplished, must not be allowed to interfere with the program of sabotaging our country, its economy, its prestige and anything good we ever pretended to stand for.
Of course, people who admire vermin like Santorum; Tea people who call their jive talking, hate stinking, subversive jihad a political party, aren't biologically capable of asking themselves why Obama was to be impeached just a short time ago for being too decisive by assisting NATO in helping Libyan rebels to overthrow the government -- but by having done so is "indecisive." Like other satanic saviors who come to mind, the lie's the thing. Keep saying it, shouting it repeating it, blogging it, blasting it from the Foxhole relentlessly around the clock and it becomes true. The steadfast become indecisive, the brave cowardly, and anyone who isn't an outright thief becomes a Communist.
One doesn't need to walk on water to be seen as a savior to these atavistic genetic accidents desperate for self esteem. One needs only to be a bigot, a fool a scoundrel and a bastard. (No offense intended to people whose parents never married.) Frankly any person who tolerates and supports such anti-American Tea Party idiocy is doing more than trying to make the president fail so they can put a moron and a crook in his place, they're assuring, promoting and cheering the failure of our country. Remember, the only difference between reason and treason is a T.
Friday, August 19, 2011
The Gap
Does it matter that a real, bona fide conservative Republican like historian Bruce Bartlett thinks the Texas Governor Rick Perry is an idiot? Not really, and face it, Perry is the kind of idiot that appeals to the kind of Americans who somehow have taken control of what passes for dialog today -- or at least have drowned it out with their idiocy and superstition. Like making a copy of a copy of a copy, Perry would be the blurriest and least readable page in the Bush dynasty: George III
I confess, when I heard that pathetic American primitive condescending to a schoolboy, telling him that Evolution is a theory that has gaps in it, my first comment didn't contain words nearly as polite as 'idiot.' But upon further reflection, I can see a lot of gaps in Rick Perry and I'm willing to bet that there are gaps between his synapses big enough to hide all the creation myths of the world, not just the one it's profitable for him to accept as truth and enforce as a standard on the rest of us. Sadly his misunderstanding of science is as great as his ignorance of economics and history and. . . well it's a very long list, because Rick Perry is an idiot.
But the Fed is "treasonous" says Perry and not because it actually is in any way, by any definition of the term, but because it provides yet another enemy for the Teadogs to bark at and makes him a leader, a dragonslayer, the Great Stupid Hope. It's treasonous because it delights the swamp critters and desert rats and mountain men; the losers and lamebrains, the anger addicts and the addlepates. The people who eat fried butter on a stick and watch Fox News love to see anyone so brave as to tell them suits and them college boys all about how there weren't no universe 7000 years ago -- because it makes the ignorant feel they're important, that they have a cause, that the world belongs to them.
Rick Perry's audience doesn't really know what the Fed is or what it does or how capitalism works or what Socialism is. Understanding genetics and evolution is as far beyond them as the level of wealth disparity their gullibility supports, nor do they question the Tealords when they're told the stimulus package didn't work or that entitlement programs and NPR and Planned Parenthood have bankrupted the country or that an extra few grand in my pockets will create US jobs. They believe this idiot when he tells them that Evolution, like gravity, is "only a theory." They believe because it justifies their abject ignorance and lets them pretend. In a part of the country where half the population couldn't manage to graduate 4th rate high schools it's a matter of pride to identify with one's idiotic, back of the schoolroom, tobaccy chewin' peers and so we have Rick Perry being taken seriously as presidential material, hell bent to destroy the country just to prove that "idiots rule."
Why is the Fed treasonous rather than timid and inept? Because as Bartlett points out, the Fed may be the only entity not yet tied down by the Lilliputian Teatwits. The only entity with any possibility of getting America to spend again, to bypass the political fatwa imposed by the Republicans occupying Congress like squatters -- to get those countless billions sitting in corporate coffers flowing through the capitalist system to create demand which creates jobs, which create growth. But discussing elementary economics with anyone like Rick Perry is like discussing calculus with a hamster -- and that's a gap that will never close.
I confess, when I heard that pathetic American primitive condescending to a schoolboy, telling him that Evolution is a theory that has gaps in it, my first comment didn't contain words nearly as polite as 'idiot.' But upon further reflection, I can see a lot of gaps in Rick Perry and I'm willing to bet that there are gaps between his synapses big enough to hide all the creation myths of the world, not just the one it's profitable for him to accept as truth and enforce as a standard on the rest of us. Sadly his misunderstanding of science is as great as his ignorance of economics and history and. . . well it's a very long list, because Rick Perry is an idiot.
But the Fed is "treasonous" says Perry and not because it actually is in any way, by any definition of the term, but because it provides yet another enemy for the Teadogs to bark at and makes him a leader, a dragonslayer, the Great Stupid Hope. It's treasonous because it delights the swamp critters and desert rats and mountain men; the losers and lamebrains, the anger addicts and the addlepates. The people who eat fried butter on a stick and watch Fox News love to see anyone so brave as to tell them suits and them college boys all about how there weren't no universe 7000 years ago -- because it makes the ignorant feel they're important, that they have a cause, that the world belongs to them.
Rick Perry's audience doesn't really know what the Fed is or what it does or how capitalism works or what Socialism is. Understanding genetics and evolution is as far beyond them as the level of wealth disparity their gullibility supports, nor do they question the Tealords when they're told the stimulus package didn't work or that entitlement programs and NPR and Planned Parenthood have bankrupted the country or that an extra few grand in my pockets will create US jobs. They believe this idiot when he tells them that Evolution, like gravity, is "only a theory." They believe because it justifies their abject ignorance and lets them pretend. In a part of the country where half the population couldn't manage to graduate 4th rate high schools it's a matter of pride to identify with one's idiotic, back of the schoolroom, tobaccy chewin' peers and so we have Rick Perry being taken seriously as presidential material, hell bent to destroy the country just to prove that "idiots rule."
Why is the Fed treasonous rather than timid and inept? Because as Bartlett points out, the Fed may be the only entity not yet tied down by the Lilliputian Teatwits. The only entity with any possibility of getting America to spend again, to bypass the political fatwa imposed by the Republicans occupying Congress like squatters -- to get those countless billions sitting in corporate coffers flowing through the capitalist system to create demand which creates jobs, which create growth. But discussing elementary economics with anyone like Rick Perry is like discussing calculus with a hamster -- and that's a gap that will never close.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Fantasy Islands
There have been a number of great social experiments since the founding of the United States of America as a secular republic whose legitimacy arose from the consent of the governed rather than the approval of some leader presuming to speak for God. It's too soon to know if it's been entirely successful.
If the Ayn Rand style social experiment envisioned by young venture capitalist Peter Thiel ever gets off the ground, or more accurately if it floats, since it's to be conducted on an artificial island, we may get a more definitive answer in a much shorter period of time, or so I suspect. Thiel, the fellow who helped found Paypal and Facebook, would like to construct a series of floating city-states in the Pacific where the 'principles' of Ms. Rand would be tested. They would somehow be established along "strict libertarian lines with a minimalist government free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country" says Details Magazine.
How a technology-intensive creation such as a floating city could be built without rules puzzles me since the builders and owners would in essence be the government and a government responsible only to its investors like Thiel and Patri Friedman, ultra-Libertarian grandson of economist Milton Friedman and the brains behind the idea. What sounds Libertarian on the drawing board may be corporatocracy at sea -- or perhaps just a bunch of little boys whose adulthood has been stunted by their massive wealth, playing Peter Pan. I have to wonder which one is Wendy.
And of course, the islanders wouldn't be randomly selected from the teeming masses real America is composed of, if I'm guessing correctly, so perhaps the Island of Randtopian Objectivist Dreams wouldn't have to deal with the real world's most intractable problems nor would any lessons learned about the value of living without the burden of altruistic responsibility be worth the effort. Think of a Petrie dish with a Plague bacteria culture. One might never know the dangers it presents since the vectors that spread it aren't present as it sits there peacefully digesting its agar.
Our country has long been home to many social experiments, some of which have withered away either by banning reproduction or lack of further interest by the participants. Some have gradually turned from the founding principles and melted into the larger American pot. Some are alive and growing, even if slowly changing. But a few thousand rich and aggressive millionaires on an oil rig without "government intrusion" forcing them to treat others in the way they'd like to be treated might be an interesting experiment, but what would the results actually mean in terms of conducting that kind of experiment outside the Petrie dish: in a nation of 300,000,000 rich, poor, healthy, sick, young, old smart, stupid, people with varying degrees of neurosis? Would the experiment mean anything at all if everyone there were so wealthy that the normal concerns and normal needs of normal people never manifest themselves?
Beats me, but this is an experiment proposed by young billionaires full of enthusiasm and self-esteem or should I say, overweening egotism. The real problems of real lif
e are far away from their experience and all too easy to associate with other people and dismiss as the "bad choices" lesser people make. Far too easy to move away from to a fantasy island where disease, suffering, old age and bad luck fear to tread and the good times always roll like those long Pacific swells.
Monday, August 15, 2011
The thrill is gone
You probably missed it, what with all the screaming and yelling that passes for news these days, but they've given us new, higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for 2016. Here we go again.
Paybacks may be a bitch as people are wont to say, but unintended consequences of half thought out measures are worse. It was the first round of government standards that gave us those big, dangerous hunks of steel we call Sport Utility Vehicles; an appellation I still can't endure without a smirk. Yes, sure, the 1948 Willys Jeepster was an SUV, but when the gummint told the auto manufacturers they had to sell more low profit, low performance and soulless austerity vehicles like Chevettes and Pintos, they cynically took unwieldy trucks and gave them womb-like upholstery. Just the thing to prowl pot holed city streets booming like thunder and sucking up the gas. Enter the Hummer, exit sanity.
No telling what will emerge after 2016, but don't look for some significant breakthrough in engine efficiency. Yes, today's engines make a lot more power per unit of displacement and use less fuel to do it, but making them smaller, much more complex and winding them harder has about run it's course and it's a course that didn't always include driveability. Further improvements have to come from something new, like hybrids where the familiar reciprocating engine shuts down and restarts all the time ( and don't ask what that does to engines.) Electrics have limitations you can't dream away and that means the bottom line is smaller and lighter and slower and maybe a much shorter useful life. That might mean more trucks as an alternative - just like it has from the beginning.
Don't concern yourself with improvements in that thrill of driving 'cause there ain't gonna be none. When I think of the car of the future, more miles per gallon seems like less car. Think Europe. Think Fiat Panda, think pain, think sack cloth and ashes. Don't think aerodynamics, stability, transient response, acceleration, speed or braking performance; think skinny tires, high center of gravity, tiny wheels and lots of electronic gadgetry to make up for your lousy driving ability.
Of course, being a government agency, the EPA isn't staffed by car lovers and it it's saddled by obsolete rules that weren't set by engineers and never got around to being changed. I think of how in the 1930's we began to mandate "sealed beam" headlights because they were better than the prevailing bulb/reflector type. I remember how the technology soon made them obsolete too, but we were saddled with them for decades afterwards to our detriment.
The same applies to the EPA mileage ratings. In short we no longer drive the way the politicians assumed when the rules were set down -- if we ever did in the first place. EPA mileage tests assume a rate of acceleration so painfully slow that it would result in horns honked and shots fired. That gives tiny engines a test score advantage that doesn't apply to real driving. They assume a top speed of 60MPH, when the average on my local highways is over 80 and suburban traffic rolls along at 60 but stops every 200 yards. Don't forget that air resistance increases with the square of the speed, so rolling boxes: SUV's 'Crossovers' and the like seem not to be as awful as they really are and low, sleek, slippery sports cars seem worse.
Although brief stops are included, the results do not include time spent waiting at lights. That can, in urban and suburban driving account for half the time you spend behind the wheel. Some cars use much less at idle - or none at all, while some gulp down the gallons, but the EPA rating doesn't notice. Air conditioning use is at least a 10 month thing here, but again, the EPA doesn't bother to factor in AC efficiency either. So what we're likely to get out of this knee-jerk environmentalism is more of what we have - or much less if you see it my way.
Perhaps it's like the SAT tests: accurate at measuring things that may or may not matter. Perhaps that's why my boxy, 1.5 liter PT cruiser gets nowhere near the highway mileage my 6 liter Corvette does even though the EPA figures are similar, neither does it run 12 second quarter mile times or do 190MPH. It can't cruise around town at 800 RPM and still give you whiplash when your mood changes. The cars this new CAFE standard will produce? It's not too likely to be something my grandchildren will prize 30 years from now when most things are throw-away consumables like beer cans and Bic lighters.
But most of all it doesn't howl like the bloody wrath of God when you need to get that pushy little Beemer off your ass, or that cowboy idiot in his pick up truck is sniffing up your tailpipe like a dog in heat or that hiphop box of brain dead teens with plastic wings and a cartoon face. It can't come off a 1G apex at 6500 Mother of God RPM, tires on fire and screaming Glory Hallelujah either.
But it'll be "green" like astroturf, as exiting as a Lawrence Welk polka and it will get you there, sealed tightly in a steel safety capsule breathing canned air as you transport your dead soul across what used to be America but is now the land of "you can't have that any more - or that, or that."
Paybacks may be a bitch as people are wont to say, but unintended consequences of half thought out measures are worse. It was the first round of government standards that gave us those big, dangerous hunks of steel we call Sport Utility Vehicles; an appellation I still can't endure without a smirk. Yes, sure, the 1948 Willys Jeepster was an SUV, but when the gummint told the auto manufacturers they had to sell more low profit, low performance and soulless austerity vehicles like Chevettes and Pintos, they cynically took unwieldy trucks and gave them womb-like upholstery. Just the thing to prowl pot holed city streets booming like thunder and sucking up the gas. Enter the Hummer, exit sanity.
No telling what will emerge after 2016, but don't look for some significant breakthrough in engine efficiency. Yes, today's engines make a lot more power per unit of displacement and use less fuel to do it, but making them smaller, much more complex and winding them harder has about run it's course and it's a course that didn't always include driveability. Further improvements have to come from something new, like hybrids where the familiar reciprocating engine shuts down and restarts all the time ( and don't ask what that does to engines.) Electrics have limitations you can't dream away and that means the bottom line is smaller and lighter and slower and maybe a much shorter useful life. That might mean more trucks as an alternative - just like it has from the beginning.
Don't concern yourself with improvements in that thrill of driving 'cause there ain't gonna be none. When I think of the car of the future, more miles per gallon seems like less car. Think Europe. Think Fiat Panda, think pain, think sack cloth and ashes. Don't think aerodynamics, stability, transient response, acceleration, speed or braking performance; think skinny tires, high center of gravity, tiny wheels and lots of electronic gadgetry to make up for your lousy driving ability.
Of course, being a government agency, the EPA isn't staffed by car lovers and it it's saddled by obsolete rules that weren't set by engineers and never got around to being changed. I think of how in the 1930's we began to mandate "sealed beam" headlights because they were better than the prevailing bulb/reflector type. I remember how the technology soon made them obsolete too, but we were saddled with them for decades afterwards to our detriment.
The same applies to the EPA mileage ratings. In short we no longer drive the way the politicians assumed when the rules were set down -- if we ever did in the first place. EPA mileage tests assume a rate of acceleration so painfully slow that it would result in horns honked and shots fired. That gives tiny engines a test score advantage that doesn't apply to real driving. They assume a top speed of 60MPH, when the average on my local highways is over 80 and suburban traffic rolls along at 60 but stops every 200 yards. Don't forget that air resistance increases with the square of the speed, so rolling boxes: SUV's 'Crossovers' and the like seem not to be as awful as they really are and low, sleek, slippery sports cars seem worse.
Although brief stops are included, the results do not include time spent waiting at lights. That can, in urban and suburban driving account for half the time you spend behind the wheel. Some cars use much less at idle - or none at all, while some gulp down the gallons, but the EPA rating doesn't notice. Air conditioning use is at least a 10 month thing here, but again, the EPA doesn't bother to factor in AC efficiency either. So what we're likely to get out of this knee-jerk environmentalism is more of what we have - or much less if you see it my way.
Perhaps it's like the SAT tests: accurate at measuring things that may or may not matter. Perhaps that's why my boxy, 1.5 liter PT cruiser gets nowhere near the highway mileage my 6 liter Corvette does even though the EPA figures are similar, neither does it run 12 second quarter mile times or do 190MPH. It can't cruise around town at 800 RPM and still give you whiplash when your mood changes. The cars this new CAFE standard will produce? It's not too likely to be something my grandchildren will prize 30 years from now when most things are throw-away consumables like beer cans and Bic lighters.
But most of all it doesn't howl like the bloody wrath of God when you need to get that pushy little Beemer off your ass, or that cowboy idiot in his pick up truck is sniffing up your tailpipe like a dog in heat or that hiphop box of brain dead teens with plastic wings and a cartoon face. It can't come off a 1G apex at 6500 Mother of God RPM, tires on fire and screaming Glory Hallelujah either.
But it'll be "green" like astroturf, as exiting as a Lawrence Welk polka and it will get you there, sealed tightly in a steel safety capsule breathing canned air as you transport your dead soul across what used to be America but is now the land of "you can't have that any more - or that, or that."
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Turkey in the Straw
What does the Iowa Straw Poll really mean as an indicator of who might actually be the chosen Candidate to bring about the "end of an error?" I really don't know, but it proves that the extremist barn dance is still the thing in Iowa. I'm referring of course to the the fact that, although the lineup (or the menagerie if you prefer) included all sorts of wild things, the Minnesota Gobbler herself came in first. Here's the list as published in the Huffington Post:
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.): 4,823 votes
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): 4,671 votes
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty: 2,293 votes
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.): 1,657 votes
Former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain: 1,456 votes
Texas Governor Rick Perry: 718 votes
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney: 567 votes
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: 385 votes
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman: 69 votes
U.S. Rep Thad McCotter (R-Mich.): 35 votes
Neither Romney, Gingrich or Huntsman campaigned actively and Rick Perry had announced his candidacy only shortly after the barnyard gates were closed. All of them were thus at a disadvantage, but you'll notice that Ron Paul was only a half step and a do-si-do behind Bachmann. Perhaps Iowan Tea Tipplers think her 'holy roller two-step' dance gives her that ol' show-time religion shamanship the straight-talking Dr. Paul lacks.
Who knows? But it seems Rick Pawlenty is adding 'former candidate' to ' former governor' on his resume. He announced on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour this morning that he was scraping the muck off his boots and going home.
Once again, I have no idea what all this means and who will be the great Republican Hope come next year. I do suspect that if he or she wins, the much wished for end of an error will be the beginning of a disaster.
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.): 4,823 votes
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): 4,671 votes
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty: 2,293 votes
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.): 1,657 votes
Former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain: 1,456 votes
Texas Governor Rick Perry: 718 votes
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney: 567 votes
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: 385 votes
Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman: 69 votes
U.S. Rep Thad McCotter (R-Mich.): 35 votes
Neither Romney, Gingrich or Huntsman campaigned actively and Rick Perry had announced his candidacy only shortly after the barnyard gates were closed. All of them were thus at a disadvantage, but you'll notice that Ron Paul was only a half step and a do-si-do behind Bachmann. Perhaps Iowan Tea Tipplers think her 'holy roller two-step' dance gives her that ol' show-time religion shamanship the straight-talking Dr. Paul lacks.
Who knows? But it seems Rick Pawlenty is adding 'former candidate' to ' former governor' on his resume. He announced on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour this morning that he was scraping the muck off his boots and going home.
Once again, I have no idea what all this means and who will be the great Republican Hope come next year. I do suspect that if he or she wins, the much wished for end of an error will be the beginning of a disaster.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Gimme that old slime and religion
The Republican circus' Big Top is beginning to fill with snarling dogs, rooting hogs and booming frogs fighting to get into the center ring -- the kind of things once relegated to side shows so as not to frighten young children and more 'sensitive' viewers.
Rick Perry is, as I write this, now announcing his candidacy from the State of South Carolina, where the First Civil War started with the booming of cannons 150 years ago. The Cold Civil War is heating up and so is the rhetoric. Rhetoric just as emotional and just as full of vain invocations of the common divinity. "It's time to get America working again" he says as though his party hadn't presided in ZERO job growth in the eight Republican years and as though we haven't had significant job growth since. Has Perry suggested anything positive or anything other than blind faith in what got us into this mess? Remember he's the guy who thinks the climate responds better to prayer than to carbon dioxide levels. So far it's still not raining in Texas.
Not all the candidates, however, are quite so willing to engage in such a pitched battle on an even field. All the likely female contestants for instance -- like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich seem to prefer to come out slapping and eye gouging but should anyone be so unfair as to ask such inappropriate, unfair "Gotcha" questions as "which newspapers do you read" or just what Mrs. Bachman meant when she said:
Perhaps since she wears her religion, not only on her sleeve and on her shield like a crusader, but constantly suggests the superiority it gives her along with the right to make peremptory statements about how the rest of us live our lives, it's an appropriate question. It's the same Question President Carter asked of the Southern Baptist Church and not liking the answer, quit the church in which he was raised and spent his life. She'd have us believe she only meant "respect" contrary to the literal word she's so eager to worship. But she didn't say respect, now did she? Nor did the word of God she thinks she's quoting.
Suggesting both that it's offensively inappropriate for anyone to ask clarification of Bachmann and that her explanation would be far too nuanced for us heathen to understand, we have Roland Martin writing on CNN.com today.
Martin tells us she was asked by Byron York:
I don't know how old Roland Martin is; whether he remembers the Republicans' question as to whether John Kennedy would obey the Pope instead of the Constitution or whether like the other hand-waving, special pleading, smoke and mirrors artists he can only take refuge in fog shrouded ineffability when someone asks a damned good question he wouldn't hesitate to ask of others.
It's a question asked only because she's a woman, asserts Martin rather tautologically. After all, men aren't ordered to obey their wives in the old books some people confuse with the US Constitution. Apparently he thinks men aren't even asked similar questions about the conflict between their beliefs about the the legitimacy of government, their credos and their ability to administer secular laws in a secular country they may disapprove of.
He's quite wrong of course. These questions are asked and not just by me -- and they are important questions to ask of a party that is insisting in ever louder voices that secularism is a problem and that the country rightly belongs only to those with suitable church affiliations.
Rick Perry is, as I write this, now announcing his candidacy from the State of South Carolina, where the First Civil War started with the booming of cannons 150 years ago. The Cold Civil War is heating up and so is the rhetoric. Rhetoric just as emotional and just as full of vain invocations of the common divinity. "It's time to get America working again" he says as though his party hadn't presided in ZERO job growth in the eight Republican years and as though we haven't had significant job growth since. Has Perry suggested anything positive or anything other than blind faith in what got us into this mess? Remember he's the guy who thinks the climate responds better to prayer than to carbon dioxide levels. So far it's still not raining in Texas.
Not all the candidates, however, are quite so willing to engage in such a pitched battle on an even field. All the likely female contestants for instance -- like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich seem to prefer to come out slapping and eye gouging but should anyone be so unfair as to ask such inappropriate, unfair "Gotcha" questions as "which newspapers do you read" or just what Mrs. Bachman meant when she said:
"But the Lord said, 'Be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.' "
Perhaps since she wears her religion, not only on her sleeve and on her shield like a crusader, but constantly suggests the superiority it gives her along with the right to make peremptory statements about how the rest of us live our lives, it's an appropriate question. It's the same Question President Carter asked of the Southern Baptist Church and not liking the answer, quit the church in which he was raised and spent his life. She'd have us believe she only meant "respect" contrary to the literal word she's so eager to worship. But she didn't say respect, now did she? Nor did the word of God she thinks she's quoting.
Suggesting both that it's offensively inappropriate for anyone to ask clarification of Bachmann and that her explanation would be far too nuanced for us heathen to understand, we have Roland Martin writing on CNN.com today.
Martin tells us she was asked by Byron York:
"As president, would you be submissive to your husband?"Forgetting the "Billary" gambit directed against Bill Clinton, Childe Roland hesitates not a bit to be offended on behalf of Biblical literalists and for the shy, sensitive and ever-so-subtly nuanced Bachmann who brought the subject up in the first place.
I don't know how old Roland Martin is; whether he remembers the Republicans' question as to whether John Kennedy would obey the Pope instead of the Constitution or whether like the other hand-waving, special pleading, smoke and mirrors artists he can only take refuge in fog shrouded ineffability when someone asks a damned good question he wouldn't hesitate to ask of others.
It's a question asked only because she's a woman, asserts Martin rather tautologically. After all, men aren't ordered to obey their wives in the old books some people confuse with the US Constitution. Apparently he thinks men aren't even asked similar questions about the conflict between their beliefs about the the legitimacy of government, their credos and their ability to administer secular laws in a secular country they may disapprove of.
He's quite wrong of course. These questions are asked and not just by me -- and they are important questions to ask of a party that is insisting in ever louder voices that secularism is a problem and that the country rightly belongs only to those with suitable church affiliations.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Queen of the Damned
And, in few words, I dare say; that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain'd, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. But I spend words in vain; for the evil is now so inveterate, that it is hard to know whom to blame, or where to begin to reform.
(Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, 1667)
_____________
When I got my copy of Newsweek yesterday; the cover showing Michelle Bachmann looking upward as though reading a celestial teleprompter, I fired off a letter similar to the one I wrote when Sarah Palin became the cover girl not long ago. "Indecency or obscenity can be di
fficult to define" I said, "but I recognize it when I see it."
Somehow, her supporters saw it differently, condemning the wide-eyed lunatic pose as having been selected by the "liberals" to make her look crazy, but scanning the web for other photos, I found it hard to find one where she doesn't look like a two year old who has just, to her great surprise, soiled her diaper -- but that of course, is only my opinion. No offense to incontinent toddlers is intended.
Her stance on "the evils of Government" as the headline blares, is harder to see as being other than obscene unless it's the indecent dishonesty behind her rhetoric that pushes your particular buttons.
I have to wonder: if Democracy is so inherently bad, what kind of government would she then prefer? If G
overnment itself is the enemy of freedom, who or what could be the ally? I have to wonder if the government is really broken or is she trying to break it to prove her point?
Making big noises in Kansas about an oppressive government that makes tyrannical rules about what kind of light bulbs to use and destroys our freedom by inspecting meat, she certainly begs the question of why she nonetheless promotes a "faith based" government that tells us what kind of sex we can have and with whom; promotes poisoning the well if someone can get rich doing it, which encourages us to pray rather than to fix our problems and to be a nation of individuals who owe nothing to anyone.
Then there's also the question of the deceit involved in taking government subsidies under false pretenses and using one of them illegally to fund prayer sessions in the guise of psychotherapy. Really, if we can't call her crazy, what other excuse can we make for her? Ignorant? Malicious? Greedy?
It's a two tier government she dreams about, with one set of rules for 98% of us that exist to preserve and increase the capital and the power of Corporations, Plutocrats and Theocrats. Of course no one with any understanding of Capitalism and what makes it expand would recommend policies that shrink the numbers of people whose spending makes Capitalism work while the one-percenters send capital and jobs abroad, but what made you think the Teabaggers are Capitalists in the first place? The kind of Randian, take the money and run Utopia these people claim to envision is Feudal as well as futile and self-destructive. The rabble-rousing and specious rhetoric smells more of the Brown Shirts and Bolsheviks than Tom Paine or Tom Jefferson.
Of course those who follow the Tea Party Queen like the mice of Hamlin, should be intelligent enough to realize that not only do we not have an oppressive, confiscatory tax situation, but that very low marginal rates inevitably produce bubbles and busts as they did in the 1920's and at the end of the last decade. They should recall that the years of low debt and high prosperity were the years of high marginal tax rates. They should be smart enough to see that all that extra cash in already deep pockets does not create US jobs, but inflates the market and makes hedge funds flourish - but only for a while. They should be, but they're either too ignorant or too stupefied by the pied pipers of the radical right. But like the Shadow, Bachmann knows what rage lies in the hearts of men. Unlike the Shadow, she's hell bent on making a buck for her backers out of it.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Damned if you don't
Even in the mean, scummy world of American presidential campaigns, there are few examples of behavior more scurrilous than the personal attacks on Barack Obama and his wife and children. Central to the defamation were the attacks on his religion, descriptions of which which ranged from radical Christian anti-white crusader to militant, anti-Christian Islam. Of course these attacks are ongoing and virulent even while such a potential candidate as Mitt Romney is feigning shock and dismay at what seems to be a largely non-existent attack against him and his Mormon affiliations.
In a lurid article at Politico, titled Obama Plan: destroy Romney, Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin try to convince us that the Obama campaign staff is planning unconscionable and personal attacks on Romney's religion and character.
Shocking, I know. That sort of thing never happens in America and Republican campaigns never, ever fabricate stories about the war records or terrorist affiliations or high crimes or foreign influences or membership in weird religious cults or even the citizenship of their opponents.
None the less, there was an anonymous source or two we must trust as well as we trust the journalistic integrity of Politico. It's just political reality, says the article. He can't campaign on accomplishments so he has to get dirty and therefore he's already dirty. Seems logical even if it isn't actually the truth, much less fair or balanced reporting.
No, he has little choice so he's already guilty of what we predict he will do: he'll be as bad as we Republicans. Those dirty Democrats want to go after Romney's poor record of getting rich while eliminating jobs as CEO of Bain Capital, for instance. They'd like to portray him as "weird" and personally awkward, and even stiff, perhaps like John Kerry was said to be by his GOP opponents. That's slashing for ya! And what about 'Romneycare' in Massachusetts?
Weird. It's a word used often by Obama campaign headquarters we're told. " there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Pete Giangreco who worked on Obama's 2008 campaign;
In a lurid article at Politico, titled Obama Plan: destroy Romney, Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin try to convince us that the Obama campaign staff is planning unconscionable and personal attacks on Romney's religion and character.
Shocking, I know. That sort of thing never happens in America and Republican campaigns never, ever fabricate stories about the war records or terrorist affiliations or high crimes or foreign influences or membership in weird religious cults or even the citizenship of their opponents.
None the less, there was an anonymous source or two we must trust as well as we trust the journalistic integrity of Politico. It's just political reality, says the article. He can't campaign on accomplishments so he has to get dirty and therefore he's already dirty. Seems logical even if it isn't actually the truth, much less fair or balanced reporting.
"And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent."
No, he has little choice so he's already guilty of what we predict he will do: he'll be as bad as we Republicans. Those dirty Democrats want to go after Romney's poor record of getting rich while eliminating jobs as CEO of Bain Capital, for instance. They'd like to portray him as "weird" and personally awkward, and even stiff, perhaps like John Kerry was said to be by his GOP opponents. That's slashing for ya! And what about 'Romneycare' in Massachusetts?
Weird. It's a word used often by Obama campaign headquarters we're told. " there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Pete Giangreco who worked on Obama's 2008 campaign;
“There’s no way to hide this guy and hide his innate phoniness.”Calling a candidate a phony just for being against what he used to be for? I mean how far below the belt will they punch? An "unidentified" source even suggested that Romney's personal awkwardness might turn off some voters -- outrageous!
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