It's been nearly two weeks since the 2012 elections and they are still reverberating through the nation. Conservative nut-jobs are getting back into their normal mode of slowly-simmering hateful insanity after an extended period of unbridled paranoid schizophrenia when Obama won a second term (I have to admit I did not help the situation much when I went into full troll mode on a number of news sites, rubbing their noses in their ignominious defeat, and I don't mind telling you I had a really good time doing it).
One thing that has become quite apparent recently is that defeated, disgraced Mitt Romney is definitely on some sort of kick-ass anti-depressant/anti-psychotic drugs. On a recent conference call to his duped and defrauded donors, Romney placed the blame for his decisive, unequivocal loss everywhere except where it really needed to be placed, on himself. It was weirdly pathetic but not really surprising, given his innate cowardice and total lack of integrity, to hear him blame minorities and women for voting overwhelmingly Democratic, and only because they received "gifts" from the Obama campaign. Hispanics received the Dream Act, which Romney called an "amnesty program," college-aged women received free contraception and blacks got more food stamps and welfare. I voted for Obama and I didn't get a single damned present, other than the joy of seeing him re-elected. Where is my gift, god damn it?
It's hard to believe that someone would be so oblivious to the offensive racism and sexism of such remarks, but apparently Romney is that someone. The fact that he thinks the vote of college-aged women can be bought with some free contraception is breathtaking in its arrogant stupidity. Because we know, the only thing young college women care about is contraception. Same thing with the Hispanics only caring about the Dream Act, and as for food stamps I guess it doesn't make a difference to him that the majority of people who get food stamps are white, and a great many of them vote Republican.
The Republicans are STILL doubling-down on their ridiculous trickle-down theory (and it's a testament to the blinding stupidity of their supporters that anyone is even talking about that anymore) and have transmuted that disgraced, discredited ideology into the "makers and takers" line, in which they divide the country into those who supposedly make wealth and those who take it. This is just another toxic permutation of the "us and them" dichotomy that the Republicans have been flogging for decades, to demonize a significant segment of their fellow American citizens by turning them into "the enemy," someone to blame for everything that has ever gone wrong.
Romney also made some other completely incredulous remarks about Bill Clinton calling him up after the election and commiserating with him, and doing everything but come out and say that Romney should have won. It was the weirdest thing ever, and beyond any rational belief. Clinton worked extremely hard for Obama and campaigned tirelessly for him. To think that he would call Romney and tell him that he was the better candidate, is completely insane and batshit-crazy. I've always considered Romney to be incredibly awkward, weird and creepy but his post-election blatherings show with little doubt that he has some serious mental health issues and delusional fantasies which desperately need to be addressed by qualified mental health professionals. What a horrible, infinitely dangerous President he would have been.
So now we're moving away from elections and into the fun-house world of the "fiscal cliff." That is the Congress-made line in the sand that was a product of the debt ceiling fiasco in 2010. Congress and the president couldn't come together to act on the national debt so they created this "poison pill" situation which presumably would force the government into some sort of corrective action on the debt or face horrible, dire consequences as the Bush-era tax cuts go away on December 31, 2012, and everyone wakes up on New Years day with a hangover and a huge extra tax burden.
For some reason the fiscal cliff is being cast as a sort of natural, organic and unavoidable catastrophe, like a 10.0 earthquake or an asteroid collision, and not something completely man-made and artificial. Congress created the fiscal cliff, and is now cowering in fear in front of it as if it was a Frankenstein monster gone wild. Oh what a surprise - imagine creating a financial Armageddon scenario and then actually having to deal with it at some point! Who in Congress ever thought that they would be held responsible for things that they do?
So, both sides are hunkering down in their usual positions: the Obama administration pushing for increased revenue (i.e. taxes) on the ultra-wealthy, and the Republicans screaming that taxing rich people is worse than child molestation and will kill the millions of jobs that those wealthy "job-creators" somehow forgot to create over the last two years. The Republican mantra is that rich people create jobs - something that is definitively and repeatedly refuted by financial experts of every kind, like here, here and here. The middle class creates those jobs, by creating "demand" for products and services and having the money to pay for them. More demand means more jobs - plain and simple. Seriously, how hard is that to understand?
The Obama people have an election triumph and the accompanying political capital on their side, and have shrewdly boxed the Republicans in by saying that they will keep the tax breaks in place for 98% of wage-earners in this country, but allow them to rise back to Clinton-era levels for the upper 2%. If the Republicans push back on that, they will be seen as sacrificing tax breaks for middle class to finance more tax relief for the very wealthy, who already have so much. It will be very interesting to see who blinks first, and my bet is that it will be the Republicans. Obama learned his lesson about caving in to Republicans two years ago, and I will bet any amount of money that now, at the start of his second term, he has nothing to lose by staring the Republicans down and holding their butts to the fire.
So, it promises to be an eventful end to the year, which has been one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory. Between the primaries and the election, and now the fiscal cliff and the upcoming end of the Mayan calendar in December, we can be sure the bullet trains to Crazy Town will be running 24/7 through the end of 2012.
Showing posts with label democrats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label democrats. Show all posts
Monday, November 19, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Four Weeks
It's now four weeks until the 2012 elections, and things are going just about as expected; that is, chaotic, mind-blowing and depressing all at the same time.
The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on. Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death. The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s. For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times. There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring. While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive. More on that later.
There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task. Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high. All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches. Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives. He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.
It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them. And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so. For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story. His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.
The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate. This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.
As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.
On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry. One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one. What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created. But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.
Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified. But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity. These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda. The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities. This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election. Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.
Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent. Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state. And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.
A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level. I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not. For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.
Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face. But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best. Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.
The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on. Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death. The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s. For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times. There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring. While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive. More on that later.
There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task. Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high. All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches. Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives. He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.
It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them. And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so. For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story. His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.
The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate. This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.
As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.
On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry. One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one. What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created. But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.
Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified. But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity. These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda. The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities. This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election. Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.
Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent. Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state. And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.
A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level. I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not. For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.
Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face. But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best. Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
A Republican Primary Dictionary
If nothing else, this blog is all about public service. You may think a major reason why I write Careless Whispers is to satisfy some deep-seated need in me for attention and an obsession-level quest for fame and media notoriety, and you would be pretty much correct. But mixed in with all that psychological stuff is my desire to bring clarity and enlightenment into a world so often choked and obfuscated with dullness and stupidity.
In my mind, nothing more clearly illustrates the innate tawdriness and runaway putrefaction of the American political system than the Republican presidential primaries. Rising like a rancid zombie out of a pile of garbage in a junior-high-school drama class reenactment of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, the primaries or caucuses or "preference polls" or whatever the hell they call themselves reared up on their cloven hooves for about two seconds and then immediately started a headlong and inexorable plunge to the lower depths of Stupid Hell, trying to drag us all down with it.
But fret not, help is on the way. I have created this guide to the political language of the primaries, which I hope will allow the Gentle Reader to understand the hidden meaning behind all the lies, deliberate misstatements, and dog-whistle rhetoric which so often these days tries to pass as legitimate discourse. Consider this your political life preserver, and please, don't thank me. My reward is spreading around the awareness of what utter pieces of shit the Republican candidates are.
"Class Warfare" - This is one of the most patently hilarious things the Republicans have come up with yet, other than Sarah Palin running for anything other than Queen of the Inbred. Oh, those poor, sad, downtrodden billionaires - the Republicans would have you believe they are the most misunderstood and unfairly persecuted minority in this country . Imagine, they bleat out as they squeeze the crocodile tear or two from their rheumy old eyes, all the unwashed multitudes attacking the uppermost 0.5% of wage earners in this country solely because of their wealth and success! Yeah, you need to watch out for the middle class, they'll turn on you in a second. They start making 25, maybe 30 thousand bucks a year and all of a sudden they get uppity and bite the hand that feeds them. Why can't they just be satisfied sitting in their worthless, over-mortgaged homes watching Donald Trump's comb-over terrorize the mentally handicapped on "The Apprentice," or be happy with the crumbs that trickle down from the more fortunate? Never you mind the decades of tax cuts, offshore tax havens and specialized financial instruments you can access when you have a lot of money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - just heap disdain upon the Democrats for daring to criticize the people who underwrite and benefit from every wasteful, deficit-expanding thing the Republicans do.
"Phony Theology" - This is a rather late entry to the Sweepstakes of Stupidity the Republicans are running, but it's pretty good. It seems that, according to the priggish, sanctimonious Rick Santorum, President Obama has some kind of "phony theology" going on with his energy policy. Yeah, it sounds stupid because it IS stupid; I don't know what he means, either, and who really cares? However let us savor for a little while the delicious irony of Rick Santorum opining that someone else has a "phony theology." Santorum should know all about phony theologies because fundamentalists like him are world-class experts in "pretending" to be Christians while "doing" the exact opposite. To wit: Fundamentalists believe that you should use any means necessary to keep a fetus from being aborted but the instant they're born you turn your back on them and they are on their own. Fundamentalists don't believe you should feed the hungry or provide medical care for those who can't afford it. Let's see, where have we heard that before? If I'm not mistaken someone named Jesus Christ thought that was a good idea. Fundamentalists, not so much. Santorum also believes gay marriage is an abomination and wants a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. It will destroy traditional marriage, he bellows. He misses the irony that the 50% divorce rate among traditional marriages is what's destroying it. I guess serial adulterer Newt Gingrich is also irony-resistant because because his cheating on two of his wives is doing so much to keep traditional marriage alive and well. Now I realize that for fundamentalists, irony is so much of their daily lives and belief systems that after a while they just become inured to it and don't even notice when it jumps up and slaps them in the face, but someone like Santorum preaching about "phony theology" is absolutely astounding. The fact that he doesn't get how stupid and hypocritical it makes him sound is really amusing.
"Secure the Border" - Here in Arizona we hear a lot about "securing the border," but what that really means is keep brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people out of our country unless they're picking our crops, tending to our lawns or cleaning our houses.
"Anti-religious Social Agenda" - Another one of those catch-all phrases that can be stretched and shaped to cover any number of perceived problems, from marriage equality to access to contraceptives. Any time you push back on the fundamentalists when they try to shove their religious biases on the general population, all of a sudden you're "anti-religious," and you "hate Christianity." While I gladly and proudly admit to both, a lot of people aren't, and they resist the fundamentalist urge to conflate "standing up for your rights" with "taking away their right to practice their religion". No one is taking away anyone's right to believe in the delusion of their choice, but I have a HUGE problem when they try to make everyone else defer to their beliefs, as if their beliefs are preeminent and trump everyone else's. I don't suppose it matters to most of them that the majority of people on this planet are either Hindu or Muslim, and that their beliefs are in the minority. As for contraceptives, conservatives are blanching at the fact that a church-affiliated employer might have to provide contraceptives to their employees, against their religious beliefs. Tell that to the 98% of Catholics who already use some form of contraceptive.
"Food Stamp President" - Newt Gingrich came up with that one, and it's only fitting because he looks like he really knows his way around a dinner table. Nothing like making a less-than-subtle racial comment because 1) Obama is black and 2) everyone knows the majority of people using food stamps are black. Except that they aren't. Only 22% of food stamp recipients are black; the rest are white, Hispanic, Asian, Native Americans, and others. But why let facts get in the way of a good racial slur?
These are only some of the interesting linguistic stunts the Republicans are pulling in this very bizarre primary season. One might have thought with the exit of the truly moronic wing of the candidate roster - Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain - we could maybe get into a little more substantive discussion of the great challenges this country faces, and you know, actually talk about ideas and stuff, but that was wishful thinking. The Republicans are looking for someone who can get their ultra-conservative base all riled up and ready to hit those voting booths come November, so they know they have to appeal to the very lowest, basest nature of the obese, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who vote for them. It is truly a shame that, in their haste to get to the slimy muck at the bottom of the voter pool to find their support, they have to pull the rest of the country down with them.
In my mind, nothing more clearly illustrates the innate tawdriness and runaway putrefaction of the American political system than the Republican presidential primaries. Rising like a rancid zombie out of a pile of garbage in a junior-high-school drama class reenactment of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, the primaries or caucuses or "preference polls" or whatever the hell they call themselves reared up on their cloven hooves for about two seconds and then immediately started a headlong and inexorable plunge to the lower depths of Stupid Hell, trying to drag us all down with it.
But fret not, help is on the way. I have created this guide to the political language of the primaries, which I hope will allow the Gentle Reader to understand the hidden meaning behind all the lies, deliberate misstatements, and dog-whistle rhetoric which so often these days tries to pass as legitimate discourse. Consider this your political life preserver, and please, don't thank me. My reward is spreading around the awareness of what utter pieces of shit the Republican candidates are.
"Class Warfare" - This is one of the most patently hilarious things the Republicans have come up with yet, other than Sarah Palin running for anything other than Queen of the Inbred. Oh, those poor, sad, downtrodden billionaires - the Republicans would have you believe they are the most misunderstood and unfairly persecuted minority in this country . Imagine, they bleat out as they squeeze the crocodile tear or two from their rheumy old eyes, all the unwashed multitudes attacking the uppermost 0.5% of wage earners in this country solely because of their wealth and success! Yeah, you need to watch out for the middle class, they'll turn on you in a second. They start making 25, maybe 30 thousand bucks a year and all of a sudden they get uppity and bite the hand that feeds them. Why can't they just be satisfied sitting in their worthless, over-mortgaged homes watching Donald Trump's comb-over terrorize the mentally handicapped on "The Apprentice," or be happy with the crumbs that trickle down from the more fortunate? Never you mind the decades of tax cuts, offshore tax havens and specialized financial instruments you can access when you have a lot of money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - just heap disdain upon the Democrats for daring to criticize the people who underwrite and benefit from every wasteful, deficit-expanding thing the Republicans do.
"Phony Theology" - This is a rather late entry to the Sweepstakes of Stupidity the Republicans are running, but it's pretty good. It seems that, according to the priggish, sanctimonious Rick Santorum, President Obama has some kind of "phony theology" going on with his energy policy. Yeah, it sounds stupid because it IS stupid; I don't know what he means, either, and who really cares? However let us savor for a little while the delicious irony of Rick Santorum opining that someone else has a "phony theology." Santorum should know all about phony theologies because fundamentalists like him are world-class experts in "pretending" to be Christians while "doing" the exact opposite. To wit: Fundamentalists believe that you should use any means necessary to keep a fetus from being aborted but the instant they're born you turn your back on them and they are on their own. Fundamentalists don't believe you should feed the hungry or provide medical care for those who can't afford it. Let's see, where have we heard that before? If I'm not mistaken someone named Jesus Christ thought that was a good idea. Fundamentalists, not so much. Santorum also believes gay marriage is an abomination and wants a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. It will destroy traditional marriage, he bellows. He misses the irony that the 50% divorce rate among traditional marriages is what's destroying it. I guess serial adulterer Newt Gingrich is also irony-resistant because because his cheating on two of his wives is doing so much to keep traditional marriage alive and well. Now I realize that for fundamentalists, irony is so much of their daily lives and belief systems that after a while they just become inured to it and don't even notice when it jumps up and slaps them in the face, but someone like Santorum preaching about "phony theology" is absolutely astounding. The fact that he doesn't get how stupid and hypocritical it makes him sound is really amusing.
"Secure the Border" - Here in Arizona we hear a lot about "securing the border," but what that really means is keep brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people out of our country unless they're picking our crops, tending to our lawns or cleaning our houses.
"Anti-religious Social Agenda" - Another one of those catch-all phrases that can be stretched and shaped to cover any number of perceived problems, from marriage equality to access to contraceptives. Any time you push back on the fundamentalists when they try to shove their religious biases on the general population, all of a sudden you're "anti-religious," and you "hate Christianity." While I gladly and proudly admit to both, a lot of people aren't, and they resist the fundamentalist urge to conflate "standing up for your rights" with "taking away their right to practice their religion". No one is taking away anyone's right to believe in the delusion of their choice, but I have a HUGE problem when they try to make everyone else defer to their beliefs, as if their beliefs are preeminent and trump everyone else's. I don't suppose it matters to most of them that the majority of people on this planet are either Hindu or Muslim, and that their beliefs are in the minority. As for contraceptives, conservatives are blanching at the fact that a church-affiliated employer might have to provide contraceptives to their employees, against their religious beliefs. Tell that to the 98% of Catholics who already use some form of contraceptive.
"Food Stamp President" - Newt Gingrich came up with that one, and it's only fitting because he looks like he really knows his way around a dinner table. Nothing like making a less-than-subtle racial comment because 1) Obama is black and 2) everyone knows the majority of people using food stamps are black. Except that they aren't. Only 22% of food stamp recipients are black; the rest are white, Hispanic, Asian, Native Americans, and others. But why let facts get in the way of a good racial slur?
These are only some of the interesting linguistic stunts the Republicans are pulling in this very bizarre primary season. One might have thought with the exit of the truly moronic wing of the candidate roster - Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain - we could maybe get into a little more substantive discussion of the great challenges this country faces, and you know, actually talk about ideas and stuff, but that was wishful thinking. The Republicans are looking for someone who can get their ultra-conservative base all riled up and ready to hit those voting booths come November, so they know they have to appeal to the very lowest, basest nature of the obese, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who vote for them. It is truly a shame that, in their haste to get to the slimy muck at the bottom of the voter pool to find their support, they have to pull the rest of the country down with them.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Dump the Trump
The Republican presidential nomination process is like a toilet overflowing with backed-up sewage. Things just seem to lurch from ridiculous to horribly awful. Part circus freak show, part media shitstorm from hell, this political Theatre of the Damned is like a really unfunny caricature of what a nominating process would be if all the participants were dangerously mentally ill, addicted to meth, and completely and utterly without morals or any redeeming value whatsoever.
In retrospect it seems that Tim Pawlenty made the best move ever when he bailed out of this revolving crapfest early, only because he was as boring as white bread with mayonnaise and nobody liked him at all. He has since become a full-time pimp for Romney, but even that is a huge step up from associating with the likes of Batshit Bachmann and Rick Santoilet, even though Pawlenty is blatantly campaigning for the vice-president spot on the ticket, should Romney be nominated.
These past couple of months have seen the spectacular flame-out of Rick Perry, governor of Texas and once regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination. An astonishingly unqualified and incompetent candidate, his callousness and limitless stupidity rapidly became too apparent to ignore because of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, flubs and misstatements. How anyone could even consider this simple-minded dolt as Oval Office material shows how degraded and corrupted the American political system has become. I said it before, but Perry has succeeded in what was universally regarded as an impossible task - making George W. Bush look good.
We also witnessed the equally-spectacular downfall of Herman Cain, a black conservative who seemed to revel gleefully in a level of arrogant stupidity usually reserved for politicians in the Deep South or the Arizona state legislature. I don't know if he really thought his faux-populist shtick of acting like jus'-plain-folks was going to catapult him into the White House, but he openly mocked and ridiculed things that any President would have to take seriously, as with his "Uz-Becky-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan" comment. For a while, his poll numbers were inexplicably rising, but the media firestorm about his penchant for cheating on his wife and breaking his marriage vows (such is the Republican "family values" rule - do as I say, not as I do) will kind of serve as a pre-echo for what will happen to fellow candidate Newt Gingrich should he survive this process and make it to the general election.
There is nothing to be said about bottom-feeding, second-tier candidates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santoilet that hasn't been said before, so I will skip over them and give them the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I will mention that Bachmann's latest mental health call-for-help is her statement about the Iraq war, saying that we should not pull our troops out after 8.5 bloody, hideously expensive years but instead stay there longer. I think the $800 billion that that ill-advised conflagration cost this country will haunt us for a much longer time than Bachmann will spend in a mental institution after she is inevitably committed.
The grandest media grandstand of all for this blathering smorgasbord of idiots, dopes, bigots and racists has been the debates, which amounts to a well-lit, televised, cautionary tale of what might happen if human evolution suddenly reversed itself several million years. The comparatively-sane John Huntsman and Ron Paul were also thrown into this toxic stew of ignorance, presumably for a sassy little splash of color.
The cast of ancillary supporting characters that came along with this pathetic parade of drones and morons is equally appalling. Sarah Palin had the national news media inexplicably enthralled for a while, waiting for her to say she's in the running for President. Luckily even a slatternly egomaniac like her realized that it would be pointless. Land whale and future Subway sandwich spokesblimp Chris Christie threatened to jump into the running, and the thought of him jumping anywhere is enough to send you running for the nearest earthquake shelter, but decided otherwise when he noted that every comedian in the country was dredging up every fat joke known to man and aiming them at him. Suprisingly, dimwitted amateur witch Christine O'Donnell appeared out of nowhere and endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy, saying that she likes him "because he's been consistent since he changed his mind." I did NOT make that up.
But there is one person in this repellent, unsavory witches-brew of recessive genetics who has consistently proven over and over again that tacky, classless and boorish behavior knows no socioeconomic boundaries, and that is oafish, stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. Whether he is beating the bushes with that tired, discredited birther nonsense or staging a publicity-stunt campaign for presidency himself, this roadkill-crested gargoyle has shown there is no depth too low for him to sink to in order to keep his name in the public eye. Feeding on self-promotion like a vampire feeds on Type O negative, Trump has shown a preternaturally creepy talent for turning one of his many ridiculous screw-ups into a publicity bonanza for himself and his obnoxious, flatulent image. The latest fiasco was to stage a Republican debate with Trump as moderator. When only two of the candidates agreed to show up and all the others refused, the "debate" was exposed for the absurd fraud that is was, and was canceled. Just how f**ked up do you have to be to make Michelle Bachmann think you're too crazy to deal with? I don't think there's a way to measure that.
This has got to be the weirdest, most bizarre and depressing nomination season in decades, and it shows no sign of dying down. Now, the flabby, pudgy-faced Newt Gingrich, him of the three wives, is having his turn at the top of the polls, but even Republican pundits expect him to start falling pretty darned soon. And for some unknown, damnable reason we have to be concerned with what a bunch of overweight, pasty-faced, religious-nutjob farmers in Iowa are thinking about as their January 3rd caucuses draw near. I mean, who gives two shits about what those idiots think? They are not even slightly representative of the American populace and their opinions should not even matter. All this points out how irretrievably wrecked and poisonous the American political system is. It's probably the worst possible way to pick the person to fill the most critically important job in the world.
In retrospect it seems that Tim Pawlenty made the best move ever when he bailed out of this revolving crapfest early, only because he was as boring as white bread with mayonnaise and nobody liked him at all. He has since become a full-time pimp for Romney, but even that is a huge step up from associating with the likes of Batshit Bachmann and Rick Santoilet, even though Pawlenty is blatantly campaigning for the vice-president spot on the ticket, should Romney be nominated.
These past couple of months have seen the spectacular flame-out of Rick Perry, governor of Texas and once regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination. An astonishingly unqualified and incompetent candidate, his callousness and limitless stupidity rapidly became too apparent to ignore because of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, flubs and misstatements. How anyone could even consider this simple-minded dolt as Oval Office material shows how degraded and corrupted the American political system has become. I said it before, but Perry has succeeded in what was universally regarded as an impossible task - making George W. Bush look good.
We also witnessed the equally-spectacular downfall of Herman Cain, a black conservative who seemed to revel gleefully in a level of arrogant stupidity usually reserved for politicians in the Deep South or the Arizona state legislature. I don't know if he really thought his faux-populist shtick of acting like jus'-plain-folks was going to catapult him into the White House, but he openly mocked and ridiculed things that any President would have to take seriously, as with his "Uz-Becky-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan" comment. For a while, his poll numbers were inexplicably rising, but the media firestorm about his penchant for cheating on his wife and breaking his marriage vows (such is the Republican "family values" rule - do as I say, not as I do) will kind of serve as a pre-echo for what will happen to fellow candidate Newt Gingrich should he survive this process and make it to the general election.
There is nothing to be said about bottom-feeding, second-tier candidates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santoilet that hasn't been said before, so I will skip over them and give them the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I will mention that Bachmann's latest mental health call-for-help is her statement about the Iraq war, saying that we should not pull our troops out after 8.5 bloody, hideously expensive years but instead stay there longer. I think the $800 billion that that ill-advised conflagration cost this country will haunt us for a much longer time than Bachmann will spend in a mental institution after she is inevitably committed.
The grandest media grandstand of all for this blathering smorgasbord of idiots, dopes, bigots and racists has been the debates, which amounts to a well-lit, televised, cautionary tale of what might happen if human evolution suddenly reversed itself several million years. The comparatively-sane John Huntsman and Ron Paul were also thrown into this toxic stew of ignorance, presumably for a sassy little splash of color.
The cast of ancillary supporting characters that came along with this pathetic parade of drones and morons is equally appalling. Sarah Palin had the national news media inexplicably enthralled for a while, waiting for her to say she's in the running for President. Luckily even a slatternly egomaniac like her realized that it would be pointless. Land whale and future Subway sandwich spokesblimp Chris Christie threatened to jump into the running, and the thought of him jumping anywhere is enough to send you running for the nearest earthquake shelter, but decided otherwise when he noted that every comedian in the country was dredging up every fat joke known to man and aiming them at him. Suprisingly, dimwitted amateur witch Christine O'Donnell appeared out of nowhere and endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy, saying that she likes him "because he's been consistent since he changed his mind." I did NOT make that up.
But there is one person in this repellent, unsavory witches-brew of recessive genetics who has consistently proven over and over again that tacky, classless and boorish behavior knows no socioeconomic boundaries, and that is oafish, stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. Whether he is beating the bushes with that tired, discredited birther nonsense or staging a publicity-stunt campaign for presidency himself, this roadkill-crested gargoyle has shown there is no depth too low for him to sink to in order to keep his name in the public eye. Feeding on self-promotion like a vampire feeds on Type O negative, Trump has shown a preternaturally creepy talent for turning one of his many ridiculous screw-ups into a publicity bonanza for himself and his obnoxious, flatulent image. The latest fiasco was to stage a Republican debate with Trump as moderator. When only two of the candidates agreed to show up and all the others refused, the "debate" was exposed for the absurd fraud that is was, and was canceled. Just how f**ked up do you have to be to make Michelle Bachmann think you're too crazy to deal with? I don't think there's a way to measure that.
This has got to be the weirdest, most bizarre and depressing nomination season in decades, and it shows no sign of dying down. Now, the flabby, pudgy-faced Newt Gingrich, him of the three wives, is having his turn at the top of the polls, but even Republican pundits expect him to start falling pretty darned soon. And for some unknown, damnable reason we have to be concerned with what a bunch of overweight, pasty-faced, religious-nutjob farmers in Iowa are thinking about as their January 3rd caucuses draw near. I mean, who gives two shits about what those idiots think? They are not even slightly representative of the American populace and their opinions should not even matter. All this points out how irretrievably wrecked and poisonous the American political system is. It's probably the worst possible way to pick the person to fill the most critically important job in the world.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
I'm Baaaaaack!
Whew, what happened to this blog? I didn't just fall off a cliff somewhere, I just took a 4-month sabbatical from Careless Whispers. And by "sabbatical" I mean being too damned lazy to write my own blog. How messed up is that? I've been meaning to get back on track and resume my random rants, and this time I'm going to do it. I missed writing my blog and promise to do better in the future.
Part of the reason I stopped blogging is that things really have gone to hell in the world of politics, until very recently. The elections in November 2010 marked the Ascendency of the Terminally Stupid, and voters have unequivocally proven AGAIN that it's impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the average American. Despite the fact that Republicans have repeatedly shown over and over how hostile and destructive they are to middle-class Americans, what do the voters do? Elect a bunch of the most regressive, neanderthal-like Tea Partiers to Congress, as if they are going to save the world or something.
The Republicans entered into an unholy alliance with the TPers, just like they enter into unholy alliances with every other right-wing crackpot group they can dredge up, and they rode the (unexplicable) voter appeal of the Tea Party to a majority in the House of Representatives. But what is different, and very encouraging, is that the Repubs are experiencing "buyer's remorse," and that keeping the TPers happy and goose-stepping in formation behind them is going to be a lot harder than they thought. Their blubbering, dithering "leader" Rep. John Boehner is nowhere near as charismatic and qualified as he needs to be to keep that unruly mob of cretins and mental cases in line. He is just one major screw-up away from watching his weird Coalition of the Inbred implode and split into two factions - the Crazy and the Crazier - thus allowing Barack Obama to coast into a second term. We can only hope that will happen.
The Republicans also have seemingly shot themselves in the cloven hoof with their batshit-crazy plans to solve the budget deficit by a whole witches' brew of draconian measures, like privatizing Social Security, replacing Medicare with a completely insane voucher system and getting rid of a whole spectrum of programs and services which directly help the elderly and the poor. And, at the same time, awarding the super-wealthy with lots of tax breaks and dumping more money into the Pentagon to fight costly, protracted and ultimately unwinnable wars. In a barely-believable demonstration of the old adage that says, if you repeat something often enough it will become true no matter how preposterous, the tired, boring Republicans are still flogging the dead horse of trickle-down economics, the decades-old, blatantly ridiculous and widely discredited piece of economic hucksterism that says if you make rich people richer, it will filter down to all levels of the economy and make everyone happy. The only problem with that is that is HASN'T WORKED IN 25 YEARS and it never will! Every single economic indicator available says the same thing - Americans are economically worse-off than they were 20 years ago. But, sad to say, so many ignorant, disconnected and disinterested voters in this country seem to think it's true, and will repeatedly vote for Republicans who are working so very hard AGAINST the voters' best interests. Why, I absolutely don't know.
Wait, yes I do know. It all comes down to the three G's: God, Guns and Gays. The Republicans are all about social conservatism, and their mantra for the past four decades is to frighten old white people into believing that a bunch of atheists are going to take away their guns and recruit their children into homosexuality and close all the churches. They keep hammering away at those social issues and convince voters the American way of life is in imminent danger because of the "others." Republicans are undisputed masters of the "us-and-them" game, pitting stalwart, conservative Americans against vast hordes of liberals, gays and gun-control freaks who are at this very second pounding on their front doors, demanding surrender of all they hold dear. And for so many voters, these are the only issues they can even remotely understand, so they figure that voting Republican is going to save them. But what they don't understand is when you vote for a Republican because you agree with their stance on gay marriage, for instance, you get a whole lot of baggage along with the candidate that you didn't know or didn't count on.
But more amazingly still, the conservative front line when it comes to completely destroying this country has moved into a new frontier, the state governorships. In a number of states, most notably Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, new Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures have embarked on an astonishing, mind-blowing campaign of fiercely conservative legislative actions which have, among other things, stripped the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions and allowed for the take-over of towns and cities that the governor has unilaterally deemed to be in "economic crisis". That includes nullifying the will of the voters of their cities and throwing duly-elected officials out of their offices. That by itself is a breathtaking usurpation of the democratic process rarely seen outside of third-world dictatorships like Myanmar or North Korea or at least a dozen places in Africa, or anachronistic, repressive monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And yet, it's happening right in the American heartland. How the hell can something like that take place here?
The usual freak-show cast of political characters is still around, unfortunately. The eternally vapid and loathsome Sarah Palin is still polluting the scene but fortunately her star has fallen considerably and she is now viewed unfavorably by a majority of people in her own party. Just how disgusting and messed-up are you if even other Republicans can't stand you? And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bitch. Unfortunately, the even crazier and more repellent Michelle Bachmann has seen her political stock go up, and this batshit-crazy scarecrow now has her eye on a Presidential run. God save this country if she gets anywhere near the White House, things would truly be lost and I will pack up all the rabbits and head to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
We are also being treated to a supersized-version of the Theater of the Damned, as the execrable, annoying and low-class Donald Trump makes noise like he wants to be President. The late, great Spy magazine had him pegged 30 years ago when they consistently referred to Trump as a "stubby-fingered vulgarian." I'm not going to say anything more about him because he and the dead animal on top of his head need no embellishment, but again it shows how irretrievably broken and dysfunctional the American version of democracy can be, when any cheap, tacky blowhard thinks they can be President. Throw in the usual array of right-wing creeps like Romney, Huckster-bee and Gingrich, along with other third-string players like Pawlenty and the infinitely cringe-inducing Rick Santorum, and you have the makings of the most inept, repulsive and potentially destructive slew of jerks and assholes that the world has seen in a very, very long time.
But, as much fun as political rants can be, after a while it seems as if you are just beating your head against a brick wall. And the result of that is the wall pretty much stays the same while you have a massive headache to deal with. So I stopped doing political rants because there was just so much bad stuff going on that it seemed pointless to rail against it. But things have taken a turn for the better last week with the death (I prefer the word "extermination") of Osama bin Laden in his lovely little compound in a nice suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, where he lived for years right under the nose of Pakistani intelligence services and within walking distance of the leading military institute of that country, and not in some cold grubby cave somewhere. I may write more about this in another post but suffice to say that in spite of the fact that Obama has been almost universally hailed as a courageous, skilled and resourceful leader, there is a large faction of conservative cockroaches who refuse to give him his due as the President who finally brought bin Laden to justice. And that is solely due to their racism and their refusal to admit that a black man can be a fantastic leader, a great President and a loyal American. And that, more than anything else, will cause this country to fail.
So, I won't be doing as many political rants as before, but I will be doing more posts on non-political topics. I hope to write more short stories and talk about rabbits and write more humorous stuff. I hope everyone who grants me the great favor of reading my blog will enjoy it. It is very good to be back.
Part of the reason I stopped blogging is that things really have gone to hell in the world of politics, until very recently. The elections in November 2010 marked the Ascendency of the Terminally Stupid, and voters have unequivocally proven AGAIN that it's impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the average American. Despite the fact that Republicans have repeatedly shown over and over how hostile and destructive they are to middle-class Americans, what do the voters do? Elect a bunch of the most regressive, neanderthal-like Tea Partiers to Congress, as if they are going to save the world or something.
The Republicans entered into an unholy alliance with the TPers, just like they enter into unholy alliances with every other right-wing crackpot group they can dredge up, and they rode the (unexplicable) voter appeal of the Tea Party to a majority in the House of Representatives. But what is different, and very encouraging, is that the Repubs are experiencing "buyer's remorse," and that keeping the TPers happy and goose-stepping in formation behind them is going to be a lot harder than they thought. Their blubbering, dithering "leader" Rep. John Boehner is nowhere near as charismatic and qualified as he needs to be to keep that unruly mob of cretins and mental cases in line. He is just one major screw-up away from watching his weird Coalition of the Inbred implode and split into two factions - the Crazy and the Crazier - thus allowing Barack Obama to coast into a second term. We can only hope that will happen.
The Republicans also have seemingly shot themselves in the cloven hoof with their batshit-crazy plans to solve the budget deficit by a whole witches' brew of draconian measures, like privatizing Social Security, replacing Medicare with a completely insane voucher system and getting rid of a whole spectrum of programs and services which directly help the elderly and the poor. And, at the same time, awarding the super-wealthy with lots of tax breaks and dumping more money into the Pentagon to fight costly, protracted and ultimately unwinnable wars. In a barely-believable demonstration of the old adage that says, if you repeat something often enough it will become true no matter how preposterous, the tired, boring Republicans are still flogging the dead horse of trickle-down economics, the decades-old, blatantly ridiculous and widely discredited piece of economic hucksterism that says if you make rich people richer, it will filter down to all levels of the economy and make everyone happy. The only problem with that is that is HASN'T WORKED IN 25 YEARS and it never will! Every single economic indicator available says the same thing - Americans are economically worse-off than they were 20 years ago. But, sad to say, so many ignorant, disconnected and disinterested voters in this country seem to think it's true, and will repeatedly vote for Republicans who are working so very hard AGAINST the voters' best interests. Why, I absolutely don't know.
Wait, yes I do know. It all comes down to the three G's: God, Guns and Gays. The Republicans are all about social conservatism, and their mantra for the past four decades is to frighten old white people into believing that a bunch of atheists are going to take away their guns and recruit their children into homosexuality and close all the churches. They keep hammering away at those social issues and convince voters the American way of life is in imminent danger because of the "others." Republicans are undisputed masters of the "us-and-them" game, pitting stalwart, conservative Americans against vast hordes of liberals, gays and gun-control freaks who are at this very second pounding on their front doors, demanding surrender of all they hold dear. And for so many voters, these are the only issues they can even remotely understand, so they figure that voting Republican is going to save them. But what they don't understand is when you vote for a Republican because you agree with their stance on gay marriage, for instance, you get a whole lot of baggage along with the candidate that you didn't know or didn't count on.
But more amazingly still, the conservative front line when it comes to completely destroying this country has moved into a new frontier, the state governorships. In a number of states, most notably Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, new Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures have embarked on an astonishing, mind-blowing campaign of fiercely conservative legislative actions which have, among other things, stripped the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions and allowed for the take-over of towns and cities that the governor has unilaterally deemed to be in "economic crisis". That includes nullifying the will of the voters of their cities and throwing duly-elected officials out of their offices. That by itself is a breathtaking usurpation of the democratic process rarely seen outside of third-world dictatorships like Myanmar or North Korea or at least a dozen places in Africa, or anachronistic, repressive monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And yet, it's happening right in the American heartland. How the hell can something like that take place here?
The usual freak-show cast of political characters is still around, unfortunately. The eternally vapid and loathsome Sarah Palin is still polluting the scene but fortunately her star has fallen considerably and she is now viewed unfavorably by a majority of people in her own party. Just how disgusting and messed-up are you if even other Republicans can't stand you? And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bitch. Unfortunately, the even crazier and more repellent Michelle Bachmann has seen her political stock go up, and this batshit-crazy scarecrow now has her eye on a Presidential run. God save this country if she gets anywhere near the White House, things would truly be lost and I will pack up all the rabbits and head to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
We are also being treated to a supersized-version of the Theater of the Damned, as the execrable, annoying and low-class Donald Trump makes noise like he wants to be President. The late, great Spy magazine had him pegged 30 years ago when they consistently referred to Trump as a "stubby-fingered vulgarian." I'm not going to say anything more about him because he and the dead animal on top of his head need no embellishment, but again it shows how irretrievably broken and dysfunctional the American version of democracy can be, when any cheap, tacky blowhard thinks they can be President. Throw in the usual array of right-wing creeps like Romney, Huckster-bee and Gingrich, along with other third-string players like Pawlenty and the infinitely cringe-inducing Rick Santorum, and you have the makings of the most inept, repulsive and potentially destructive slew of jerks and assholes that the world has seen in a very, very long time.
But, as much fun as political rants can be, after a while it seems as if you are just beating your head against a brick wall. And the result of that is the wall pretty much stays the same while you have a massive headache to deal with. So I stopped doing political rants because there was just so much bad stuff going on that it seemed pointless to rail against it. But things have taken a turn for the better last week with the death (I prefer the word "extermination") of Osama bin Laden in his lovely little compound in a nice suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, where he lived for years right under the nose of Pakistani intelligence services and within walking distance of the leading military institute of that country, and not in some cold grubby cave somewhere. I may write more about this in another post but suffice to say that in spite of the fact that Obama has been almost universally hailed as a courageous, skilled and resourceful leader, there is a large faction of conservative cockroaches who refuse to give him his due as the President who finally brought bin Laden to justice. And that is solely due to their racism and their refusal to admit that a black man can be a fantastic leader, a great President and a loyal American. And that, more than anything else, will cause this country to fail.
So, I won't be doing as many political rants as before, but I will be doing more posts on non-political topics. I hope to write more short stories and talk about rabbits and write more humorous stuff. I hope everyone who grants me the great favor of reading my blog will enjoy it. It is very good to be back.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Idiocracy in the Desert
There was a sci fi/fantasy movie a couple of years ago called "Idiocracy," in which a really stupid person went into some kind of hibernation and woke up 500 years later, to find that society had been so thoroughly dumbed-down that he was now the smartest person on the planet. In a really depressing example of life imitating art, one can have a similar experience in Arizona and you don't even have to hibernate for five centuries. Usually five minutes will do it.
The midterm elections are history, and not a moment too soon. While such elections are typically hostile toward the party in power, these were particularly ugly. The American electorate can always be counted on to make a stunning variety of horrible choices at every turn, picking the most batshit-crazy, bigoted and ignorant candidates imaginable. It's almost like the Republicans or the Tea Partiers or whatever the hell they are calling themselves nowadays said, "Hey America! Check out this completely insane, repellent, moronic candidate we dredged up from under a giant pile of manure. Nobody in their right mind would vote for this mess, right?" And America says, "Are you kidding? Of course we'll vote for them! We can't wait to get to the polls to make sure all levels of government are overstuffed with the most incompetent, racist, prejudiced and paranoid-schizophrenic people available!" After all, we are Americans and that's what we do.
The US House of Representatives now has a Republican majority although the Senate still stays under Democratic control, albeit with less of a majority than before. There were a few bright spots on the national level, with the tragically mentally ill Sharron Angle losing to incumbent Senator Harry Reid in Nevada. Thank you so much, Nevada, you have restored my faith in you more than you can know. Thank you, Delaware, for soundly defeating and humiliating witch fetishist and secret masturbation addict (you know she is) Christine O'Donnell. Thank you, California, for electing Jerry Brown and retaining Barbara Boxer. I'm really not that excited about legalizing marijuana although I do support the idea. Thank you, West Virginia, for sending your Democratic governor to the Senate. And thank you, New York, for sending that pasty-faced tub of bacon grease Carl Paladino back to whatever mutant alien breeding farm he came from. I take tremendous satisfaction in all their failures, especially since it is a big slap in the face to the braying, grating Sarah Palin, who strongly backed a lot of the losers. It was a bad night for some other of her so-called "mama grizzlies" as Carly Fiorini, Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman very deservingly went down to defeat despite Palin's endorsements. The words "Sarah Palin" and "loser" go together so very well.
We were also subjected to the monumentally surreal, stomach-churning spectacle of the presumptive next Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, blubbering and slobbering on national television at how he worked so hard overcoming so many obstacles in his life to get to where he is. If he worked one-tenth as hard on his legislative efforts as he does trying to look like a fluorescent carrot with his cheap skin bronzer, he might have something to talk about. His display last night was cringe-worthy to the extreme, and the ick factor was way off the scale. It's going to be really tough having to listen to his maudlin sentimentality and overwrought stupidity for the next two years.
But the really disgusting stuff was reserved for the state of Arizona (big surprise), the worst being that we will have to put up with the decaying, disgusting remains of Jan Brewer in the governor's office for the next four years. How this puckered, haggard, old sarcophagus even walks around by herself is a mystery, since corpses are usually not that ambulatory and she looks like she died a good 20 years ago. There are 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in the British museum that look much better than she does.
All this has to do with SB 1070, Arizona's anti-immigrant law. That is the sole basis for Brewer's success, since her blinding stupidity, overwhelming incompetence and all-around repulsiveness would normally scare away most people. SB 1070 was also the centerpiece of all the other Republican campaigns, as they loudly crowed their undying support for that misguided measure, and undoubtedly was a big factor in returning the bill's chief architect, the corpulent, sweaty Russell Pearce of Mesa, to office. Voters have figured out that if previous governor Janet Napolitano (i.e. any Democrat) had still been in office that bill would never have been signed. Brewer, as all Republicans do, found a way to appeal to the basest, most prejudiced and degenerate aspects of human nature and harness them for their benefit. You have to hand it to the Repugnantans, they sure know how to take an enormous pile of shit and build it into an empire.
The only good thing that happened here is that shockingly, Arizona voters were smart enough to reject an NRA-backed initiative, Proposition 109, which would have amended the state constitution to make hunting and fishing a right. I think what frightened most people is the prospect of the state legislature making wildlife management decisions, because it is well known that they can and will screw up absolutely everything they touch. Dear NRA: Eat shit and die. Love, Steve. But in fact Republicans have increased their stranglehold on the government of this wretched, benighted state by sweeping their candidates into most state-level offices.
It's baffling to me why so many middle-class people vote Republican, even though it is directly contrary to their own economic interests. Republicans have and always will be the puppet-party of the ultra-wealthy, seeking huge tax breaks for their rich donors at the expense of the lower classes at every possible turn. They've even taken to hiding behind the facade of "small businesses," seeking to keep Bush-era tax breaks for the upper-class in place because they say a lot of these so-called "upper-class taxpayers" are really small business owners. When in reality, small businesses make up a tiny minority of the over-$250,000 a year taxpayers. Just as they maintain the estate tax is a bad idea because it makes hard-working farm families pay taxes on the family farm when the owner dies, when in fact it just shields the wealthy from paying taxes on their vast accumulated money. They also say rich people should get tax breaks because they will invest that money in other businesses, which is probably true if you own a yacht showroom, ski resort or a Lexus dealership, but mostly this "trickle-down" theory of economics is a cruel, self-serving hoax.
Looking forward, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, and they will be shouldering at least part of the responsibility for whatever happens next. They will no longer be able to blame the Democrats for everything that has happened since the dawn of history, because they now have some power. Power comes with accountability - a very painful lesson the Democrats have learned - and the Republicans may not like having to actually answer to voters for the bad stuff that will inevitably come down the pike. Also they may find out that getting in bed with the Tea Party might not be as wonderful an experience as they imagined, since a lot of the T.P.-ers have been just as hostile to Republicans as they are to Democrats. But I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Representative Boner, I mean Boehner, sniveling and blubbering on television about his wonderful life, while the rest of the country suffers. It's painfully obvious that "embarrassment" and "shame" are two concepts completely alien to Republicans.
The midterm elections are history, and not a moment too soon. While such elections are typically hostile toward the party in power, these were particularly ugly. The American electorate can always be counted on to make a stunning variety of horrible choices at every turn, picking the most batshit-crazy, bigoted and ignorant candidates imaginable. It's almost like the Republicans or the Tea Partiers or whatever the hell they are calling themselves nowadays said, "Hey America! Check out this completely insane, repellent, moronic candidate we dredged up from under a giant pile of manure. Nobody in their right mind would vote for this mess, right?" And America says, "Are you kidding? Of course we'll vote for them! We can't wait to get to the polls to make sure all levels of government are overstuffed with the most incompetent, racist, prejudiced and paranoid-schizophrenic people available!" After all, we are Americans and that's what we do.
The US House of Representatives now has a Republican majority although the Senate still stays under Democratic control, albeit with less of a majority than before. There were a few bright spots on the national level, with the tragically mentally ill Sharron Angle losing to incumbent Senator Harry Reid in Nevada. Thank you so much, Nevada, you have restored my faith in you more than you can know. Thank you, Delaware, for soundly defeating and humiliating witch fetishist and secret masturbation addict (you know she is) Christine O'Donnell. Thank you, California, for electing Jerry Brown and retaining Barbara Boxer. I'm really not that excited about legalizing marijuana although I do support the idea. Thank you, West Virginia, for sending your Democratic governor to the Senate. And thank you, New York, for sending that pasty-faced tub of bacon grease Carl Paladino back to whatever mutant alien breeding farm he came from. I take tremendous satisfaction in all their failures, especially since it is a big slap in the face to the braying, grating Sarah Palin, who strongly backed a lot of the losers. It was a bad night for some other of her so-called "mama grizzlies" as Carly Fiorini, Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman very deservingly went down to defeat despite Palin's endorsements. The words "Sarah Palin" and "loser" go together so very well.
We were also subjected to the monumentally surreal, stomach-churning spectacle of the presumptive next Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, blubbering and slobbering on national television at how he worked so hard overcoming so many obstacles in his life to get to where he is. If he worked one-tenth as hard on his legislative efforts as he does trying to look like a fluorescent carrot with his cheap skin bronzer, he might have something to talk about. His display last night was cringe-worthy to the extreme, and the ick factor was way off the scale. It's going to be really tough having to listen to his maudlin sentimentality and overwrought stupidity for the next two years.
But the really disgusting stuff was reserved for the state of Arizona (big surprise), the worst being that we will have to put up with the decaying, disgusting remains of Jan Brewer in the governor's office for the next four years. How this puckered, haggard, old sarcophagus even walks around by herself is a mystery, since corpses are usually not that ambulatory and she looks like she died a good 20 years ago. There are 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in the British museum that look much better than she does.
All this has to do with SB 1070, Arizona's anti-immigrant law. That is the sole basis for Brewer's success, since her blinding stupidity, overwhelming incompetence and all-around repulsiveness would normally scare away most people. SB 1070 was also the centerpiece of all the other Republican campaigns, as they loudly crowed their undying support for that misguided measure, and undoubtedly was a big factor in returning the bill's chief architect, the corpulent, sweaty Russell Pearce of Mesa, to office. Voters have figured out that if previous governor Janet Napolitano (i.e. any Democrat) had still been in office that bill would never have been signed. Brewer, as all Republicans do, found a way to appeal to the basest, most prejudiced and degenerate aspects of human nature and harness them for their benefit. You have to hand it to the Repugnantans, they sure know how to take an enormous pile of shit and build it into an empire.
The only good thing that happened here is that shockingly, Arizona voters were smart enough to reject an NRA-backed initiative, Proposition 109, which would have amended the state constitution to make hunting and fishing a right. I think what frightened most people is the prospect of the state legislature making wildlife management decisions, because it is well known that they can and will screw up absolutely everything they touch. Dear NRA: Eat shit and die. Love, Steve. But in fact Republicans have increased their stranglehold on the government of this wretched, benighted state by sweeping their candidates into most state-level offices.
It's baffling to me why so many middle-class people vote Republican, even though it is directly contrary to their own economic interests. Republicans have and always will be the puppet-party of the ultra-wealthy, seeking huge tax breaks for their rich donors at the expense of the lower classes at every possible turn. They've even taken to hiding behind the facade of "small businesses," seeking to keep Bush-era tax breaks for the upper-class in place because they say a lot of these so-called "upper-class taxpayers" are really small business owners. When in reality, small businesses make up a tiny minority of the over-$250,000 a year taxpayers. Just as they maintain the estate tax is a bad idea because it makes hard-working farm families pay taxes on the family farm when the owner dies, when in fact it just shields the wealthy from paying taxes on their vast accumulated money. They also say rich people should get tax breaks because they will invest that money in other businesses, which is probably true if you own a yacht showroom, ski resort or a Lexus dealership, but mostly this "trickle-down" theory of economics is a cruel, self-serving hoax.
Looking forward, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, and they will be shouldering at least part of the responsibility for whatever happens next. They will no longer be able to blame the Democrats for everything that has happened since the dawn of history, because they now have some power. Power comes with accountability - a very painful lesson the Democrats have learned - and the Republicans may not like having to actually answer to voters for the bad stuff that will inevitably come down the pike. Also they may find out that getting in bed with the Tea Party might not be as wonderful an experience as they imagined, since a lot of the T.P.-ers have been just as hostile to Republicans as they are to Democrats. But I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Representative Boner, I mean Boehner, sniveling and blubbering on television about his wonderful life, while the rest of the country suffers. It's painfully obvious that "embarrassment" and "shame" are two concepts completely alien to Republicans.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Down To The Wire
Midterm elections are four days away and I'm going to be doing my election-worker thing on Tuesday, so I won't have to hear about voter projections and exit polls and states turning blue and red until late in the evening. From every indication, it's going to be an election like none other, as a tsunami-sized wave of stupidity and ignorance threatens to wash over this nation coast to coast as a plague of locusts, I mean Tea Partiers, comes home to roost.
Like an enormous flock of really stupid buzzards, the Tea Party candidates are circling in the sky right now, just waiting to swoop down on the decomposing remains of the dignity of this country. This has been an amazing election for a number of reasons, one of the worst being the enormous amount of money that has been poured into it over the last couple of weeks. They said on TV that more money has been spent on political advertising in the past two weeks as has been spent in the previous nine months. All thanks to those monolithic dipshits on the Supreme Court, who last January opened the floodgates by ruling that corporate interests can express their political opinions just like a regular flesh-and-blood person. And they "express" themselves with their deep pockets and funnel their money through a myriad of political action organizations with innocuous-sounding names.
Stretching the First Amendment until it's nearly unrecognizable, the "Justices" (term used loosely) did exactly the very worst thing it could. The election process in this country was already corrupted and debased by enormous amounts of money, and the Court ruling only allowed more money to be injected into a very sick, very broken system. It's like trying to put out a raging fire by pouring a bucket of gasoline on it. Now, right-wing crackpot groups in New York or Florida can buy airtime and drop their noxious opinions on Congressional races in Arizona and California. How is it even possible that single-issue social-conservative groups on the other side of the country know what is best for people in Arizona? In fact, they don't know what is best for us, nor do they care. The only thing they care about is to get the candidate they favor into office, who will presumably do their bidding and advance their twisted agenda. You might think it's the responsibility of the voter to weed through this weird blizzard of attack ads and ferret out the truth, but very few people care enough to do that.
The current crop of candidates include some of the most backward, reactionary and just plain deadheaded dimwits that I can ever recall. It seems the more idiotic, ridiculous and simple-minded the candidate, the more popular they are. Sharron Angle, running for Senate from Nevada, is a bottomless pit of stupidity, saying some of the most outrageous and jaw-dropping nonsense ever heard, and still she is in the race. In any other election, someone who had said such completely ridiculous things would have been laughed off the ticket, but not this time. There is another trend among these candidates to only talk to who they want to talk to, which is usually the cesspools over at Fox News, because they know they will be handled with kid gloves, portrayed in an extremely favorable light, and not asked any hard, embarrassing questions. Just the other day some journalists tried to corner Sharron Angle to have her answer some questions and she took off running on her stubby little tree-trunk legs like she was being chased by a murderer with a chain saw.
We see that here in the state of Arizona as the poorly-embalmed, grossly incompetent Jan Brewer refused to have any more debates with other gubernatorial candidates because the first debate made her look like a complete, total idiot. Which she surely is. But her habit of just not talking to anyone asking legitimate questions and trying to get some information out of her for the benefit of the voters is bad enough, but the fact that the voters let her get away with it is the most disturbing aspect of all. How very sad for the future of this country that the voters are so ignorant and disengaged that they just don't care anymore when candidates basically spit in their faces and say, "eat crap, I'm not telling you anything because I don't have to."
We haven't heard much from the Delaware Dimwit, Christine O'Donnell, because she's thankfully sinking fast in the polls and will hopefully just be a weird footnote when this is all over. Even the eternally annoying Sarah Palin hasn't opened up her big mouth in support of the Anti-Masturbation Princess in weeks. But there is a big surplus of creeps, like Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado and Nazi cross-dresser Rick Iott in Ohio and the F-5 tornado of weirdness Rand Paul and going-to-pop-an-artery-any-second Carl Paladino, candidate of governor of New York, to name a very few, who are more than ready and willing to drag down this country in a maelstrom of idiocy and backward, regressive thinking.
Who is to blame for this very sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves? There is plenty of blame to go around, first to the Democrats who have an astounding talent to pull defeat from the jaws of victory and absolutely screw up everything they touch. They have shown a startling lack of backbone in everything they do, and are so afraid offending anyone they end up offending everyone. President Obama gets some blame, too, for being too decent and intelligent a person, and making the great tactical error of thinking he could get the Republicans to cooperate and come together with the Democrats to try to solve some of the enormous problems that face this country. A huge segment of the Republican Party has never ever accepted a black President and barely bother to conceal their racism and bigotry anymore. A lot of them think the President is a Muslim. How can we possibly combat ignorance and stupidity of this magnitude?
But in my opinion most of the blame has to go to the American public, who somehow think the way to solve the problems of this nation are to elect the most ignorant, unqualified and stupid people that can be found. Somehow they have come to the conclusion that dumber is better, and the best thing to do is to take everyone back to the 1950s, when everyone knew their role and their place and everything was better. Back then, there was no Al Qaeda, no bin Laden, no September 11th, no AIDS, no nuclear proliferation, no global warming (although a lot of people think that is a farce), no economic collapse, no multi-billion dollar bailouts. It shows ever so clearly the intellectual cowardice of the American population, and how they prefer to do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to fixing everything. I dread next Tuesday, but at the same time I wish it was already over. If it looks really ugly now, that's probably nothing compared to what it will look like on Wednesday morning.
Like an enormous flock of really stupid buzzards, the Tea Party candidates are circling in the sky right now, just waiting to swoop down on the decomposing remains of the dignity of this country. This has been an amazing election for a number of reasons, one of the worst being the enormous amount of money that has been poured into it over the last couple of weeks. They said on TV that more money has been spent on political advertising in the past two weeks as has been spent in the previous nine months. All thanks to those monolithic dipshits on the Supreme Court, who last January opened the floodgates by ruling that corporate interests can express their political opinions just like a regular flesh-and-blood person. And they "express" themselves with their deep pockets and funnel their money through a myriad of political action organizations with innocuous-sounding names.
Stretching the First Amendment until it's nearly unrecognizable, the "Justices" (term used loosely) did exactly the very worst thing it could. The election process in this country was already corrupted and debased by enormous amounts of money, and the Court ruling only allowed more money to be injected into a very sick, very broken system. It's like trying to put out a raging fire by pouring a bucket of gasoline on it. Now, right-wing crackpot groups in New York or Florida can buy airtime and drop their noxious opinions on Congressional races in Arizona and California. How is it even possible that single-issue social-conservative groups on the other side of the country know what is best for people in Arizona? In fact, they don't know what is best for us, nor do they care. The only thing they care about is to get the candidate they favor into office, who will presumably do their bidding and advance their twisted agenda. You might think it's the responsibility of the voter to weed through this weird blizzard of attack ads and ferret out the truth, but very few people care enough to do that.
The current crop of candidates include some of the most backward, reactionary and just plain deadheaded dimwits that I can ever recall. It seems the more idiotic, ridiculous and simple-minded the candidate, the more popular they are. Sharron Angle, running for Senate from Nevada, is a bottomless pit of stupidity, saying some of the most outrageous and jaw-dropping nonsense ever heard, and still she is in the race. In any other election, someone who had said such completely ridiculous things would have been laughed off the ticket, but not this time. There is another trend among these candidates to only talk to who they want to talk to, which is usually the cesspools over at Fox News, because they know they will be handled with kid gloves, portrayed in an extremely favorable light, and not asked any hard, embarrassing questions. Just the other day some journalists tried to corner Sharron Angle to have her answer some questions and she took off running on her stubby little tree-trunk legs like she was being chased by a murderer with a chain saw.
We see that here in the state of Arizona as the poorly-embalmed, grossly incompetent Jan Brewer refused to have any more debates with other gubernatorial candidates because the first debate made her look like a complete, total idiot. Which she surely is. But her habit of just not talking to anyone asking legitimate questions and trying to get some information out of her for the benefit of the voters is bad enough, but the fact that the voters let her get away with it is the most disturbing aspect of all. How very sad for the future of this country that the voters are so ignorant and disengaged that they just don't care anymore when candidates basically spit in their faces and say, "eat crap, I'm not telling you anything because I don't have to."
We haven't heard much from the Delaware Dimwit, Christine O'Donnell, because she's thankfully sinking fast in the polls and will hopefully just be a weird footnote when this is all over. Even the eternally annoying Sarah Palin hasn't opened up her big mouth in support of the Anti-Masturbation Princess in weeks. But there is a big surplus of creeps, like Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado and Nazi cross-dresser Rick Iott in Ohio and the F-5 tornado of weirdness Rand Paul and going-to-pop-an-artery-any-second Carl Paladino, candidate of governor of New York, to name a very few, who are more than ready and willing to drag down this country in a maelstrom of idiocy and backward, regressive thinking.
Who is to blame for this very sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves? There is plenty of blame to go around, first to the Democrats who have an astounding talent to pull defeat from the jaws of victory and absolutely screw up everything they touch. They have shown a startling lack of backbone in everything they do, and are so afraid offending anyone they end up offending everyone. President Obama gets some blame, too, for being too decent and intelligent a person, and making the great tactical error of thinking he could get the Republicans to cooperate and come together with the Democrats to try to solve some of the enormous problems that face this country. A huge segment of the Republican Party has never ever accepted a black President and barely bother to conceal their racism and bigotry anymore. A lot of them think the President is a Muslim. How can we possibly combat ignorance and stupidity of this magnitude?
But in my opinion most of the blame has to go to the American public, who somehow think the way to solve the problems of this nation are to elect the most ignorant, unqualified and stupid people that can be found. Somehow they have come to the conclusion that dumber is better, and the best thing to do is to take everyone back to the 1950s, when everyone knew their role and their place and everything was better. Back then, there was no Al Qaeda, no bin Laden, no September 11th, no AIDS, no nuclear proliferation, no global warming (although a lot of people think that is a farce), no economic collapse, no multi-billion dollar bailouts. It shows ever so clearly the intellectual cowardice of the American population, and how they prefer to do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to fixing everything. I dread next Tuesday, but at the same time I wish it was already over. If it looks really ugly now, that's probably nothing compared to what it will look like on Wednesday morning.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
What's That Smell?
Anywhere across this great, fair land of ours, over the past eight months or so, you may have occasionally become aware of a strikingly offensive odor that seems to come out of nowhere with no warning whatsoever, assaulting your nostrils with its foul presence. No, it is not coming from this blog - my blog has only been around for a couple of months but thank you for your concern. You may have spent a bit of time wondering about the origin of the pungent fumes - after all, something that smells that bad kind of needs to be looked into, right? Well, worry no more: I am here to tell you that you need not be fretting over some approaching pestilence; rather, the smell indicates an existing pestilence is receding in your rear view mirror right now. That odor belongs to the Republican Party, sliding ever more rapidly into irrelevance and decay. And that is definitely a reason to rejoice.
It must be tough to be a die-hard Republican these days. A recent ABC News poll indicated that only 21% of Americans identify themselves as Republican, a 40-year low. Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania jumped ship to the Democrats at a critical juncture in time - now a filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority is tantalizingly within reach. The Republican National Committee has been floundering around like a beached whale trying to come up with a reason for its own survival. Its token-black chairman, Michael Steele, has made a bigger impression as a national laughing-stock than anything else. The new Obama administration has been diligently dismantling a number of legislative cornerstones of the Bush regime and many, many people agree that the last administration was one of the most damaging and disastrous in many decades. What, exactly, do they have to be proud of? Nothing much, by my reckoning.
But the most delightful thing about the Republican downfall is that it was entirely self-inflicted!! By aligning themselves with the most narrow-minded, reactionary, extreme right-wing fringes of our political landscape, they have increasingly marginalized and distanced themselves from the center, where most Americans are. People have come around to the understanding that Bush and his cohorts are largely responsible for the economic catastrophe that has nearly brought ruination to this country, and they rightfully blame the Republicans for it. The last election cycle proved that with crystal clarity. The Republicans are being taken to task for everything that is going wrong, and deservedly so.
Republicans have always been undisputed experts at appealing to the basest, lowest instincts of people. Their unholy alliance with Christian fundamentalists has had its biggest success in thoroughly corrupting and co-opting the message of religion. They loudly demand that parents have the choice of sending their children to religious schools, with the taxpayers picking up the bills in the form of vouchers, but stridently seek to deny over half the population of the United States the choice to determine their own reproductive destinies. By fanning the flames of bigotry and intolerance they frighten voters into passing highly regressive laws which institutionalize discrimination and prevent consenting adults of the same gender from having their relationships recognized. Similarly, by instilling and invoking fear and hatred, they seek to demonize large segments of the population whose only desire is to come to this country and make a better life. They convince poor farmers in the Midwest to vote against their own economic best interests by claiming to be the last defense against the vast hordes of pagans, atheists, child molesters and pederasts who are all living for the day when they can take over the schools and corrupt the lives of children everywhere. They do that while rejecting the theory of evolution despite overwhelming scientific evidence, and push the flimsy, ridiculous concept of "intelligent design."
For a long time that strategy worked, but no more. At its very core the Republican party is the party of negativism and deconstruction. Fear is its lifeblood, and it lives not to build up but to tear down. Instead of building bridges and finding ways to unite people for the common good, it strives to pull people apart, separating the entire population into "us" and "them" in the pursuit of their own self-serving agendas.
The basic, elemental mendacity of the Republican party is something they can never fully cover up or suppress, no matter how hard they try. Like a virulent variation of the influenza virus, their profound spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy always finds a way to break out. They claim to be the "party of Lincoln," but I can think of no more extreme slur against the memory of our 16th president - the present-day Republican has almost nothing in common with Lincoln. And the higher the stakes, the lower you can count on the Republican Party to go in order to get or retain power. The last election saw the execrable Sarah Palin regurgitated onto the national scene, a low-rent, soulless, shrill Barbie doll with absolutely no discernible talent or intellect. That any national party would seriously nominate an empty, brain-dead cipher like her to the second-highest office in the land speaks volumes of the debasement and dissolution that permeates the Republican soul. Years ago, the freak show that was the Nixon administration had one of the most psychopathic, disturbed individuals to ever occupy the Oval Office, and the Reagan presidency had an evil, Alzheimer's-addled curmudgeon at its head who half the time had no idea where or who he was. When you are as rotten to the core as the Republican party is, the virulence will always find a way to surface.
One of the most satisfying amusements in life is schadenfreude, which is the great old German word for "taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others." There are plenty of entities in the modern world which, when bad things happen to them, cause me great, unbridled, gleeful joy. Big tobacco, big oil, and anyone or anything involved in animal exploitation, to name a few, are very ripe, deserving targets of derision. I try to avoid enjoying the problems of individual persons but there are exceptions, such as the dimwitted, petulant Bimbolina at the recent Miss USA contest who expressed her support for "opposite marriage," whatever that is, and then bleated like a stuck pig when she came in second. But her deep, debilitating ignorance makes her an unsatisfying critical target; it's like making fun of the mentally-challenged. Not cool and not fun. But right now I can think of no institution more worthy of a heaping-helping of schadenfreude than the Republican party. The fact that they have a repellent, drug-addicted blowhard like Rush Limbaugh as their spokesperson and de facto spiritual leader shows just how corrupt, out-of-step and irrelevant they are. Just as the Republican National Convention last summer showed hundreds of ancient, crotchety old men and their puckered, desiccated wives wearing "Drill Baby Drill" buttons, the present-day party has proven itself to be the bastion of backward-looking, discredited and disastrous policies. They claim to support the American family, but their domestic economic policies are without a doubt extremely anti-child and anti-family. But like a moldering old vampire in the movies, you can never count them as being completely dead. Maybe the Republicans will realize the utter, total failure of their policies and reinvent themselves into something relevant and worth listening to, but as of right now, they richly deserve every bad thing that happens to them. And I will be enjoying every last second of it.
It must be tough to be a die-hard Republican these days. A recent ABC News poll indicated that only 21% of Americans identify themselves as Republican, a 40-year low. Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania jumped ship to the Democrats at a critical juncture in time - now a filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority is tantalizingly within reach. The Republican National Committee has been floundering around like a beached whale trying to come up with a reason for its own survival. Its token-black chairman, Michael Steele, has made a bigger impression as a national laughing-stock than anything else. The new Obama administration has been diligently dismantling a number of legislative cornerstones of the Bush regime and many, many people agree that the last administration was one of the most damaging and disastrous in many decades. What, exactly, do they have to be proud of? Nothing much, by my reckoning.
But the most delightful thing about the Republican downfall is that it was entirely self-inflicted!! By aligning themselves with the most narrow-minded, reactionary, extreme right-wing fringes of our political landscape, they have increasingly marginalized and distanced themselves from the center, where most Americans are. People have come around to the understanding that Bush and his cohorts are largely responsible for the economic catastrophe that has nearly brought ruination to this country, and they rightfully blame the Republicans for it. The last election cycle proved that with crystal clarity. The Republicans are being taken to task for everything that is going wrong, and deservedly so.
Republicans have always been undisputed experts at appealing to the basest, lowest instincts of people. Their unholy alliance with Christian fundamentalists has had its biggest success in thoroughly corrupting and co-opting the message of religion. They loudly demand that parents have the choice of sending their children to religious schools, with the taxpayers picking up the bills in the form of vouchers, but stridently seek to deny over half the population of the United States the choice to determine their own reproductive destinies. By fanning the flames of bigotry and intolerance they frighten voters into passing highly regressive laws which institutionalize discrimination and prevent consenting adults of the same gender from having their relationships recognized. Similarly, by instilling and invoking fear and hatred, they seek to demonize large segments of the population whose only desire is to come to this country and make a better life. They convince poor farmers in the Midwest to vote against their own economic best interests by claiming to be the last defense against the vast hordes of pagans, atheists, child molesters and pederasts who are all living for the day when they can take over the schools and corrupt the lives of children everywhere. They do that while rejecting the theory of evolution despite overwhelming scientific evidence, and push the flimsy, ridiculous concept of "intelligent design."
For a long time that strategy worked, but no more. At its very core the Republican party is the party of negativism and deconstruction. Fear is its lifeblood, and it lives not to build up but to tear down. Instead of building bridges and finding ways to unite people for the common good, it strives to pull people apart, separating the entire population into "us" and "them" in the pursuit of their own self-serving agendas.
The basic, elemental mendacity of the Republican party is something they can never fully cover up or suppress, no matter how hard they try. Like a virulent variation of the influenza virus, their profound spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy always finds a way to break out. They claim to be the "party of Lincoln," but I can think of no more extreme slur against the memory of our 16th president - the present-day Republican has almost nothing in common with Lincoln. And the higher the stakes, the lower you can count on the Republican Party to go in order to get or retain power. The last election saw the execrable Sarah Palin regurgitated onto the national scene, a low-rent, soulless, shrill Barbie doll with absolutely no discernible talent or intellect. That any national party would seriously nominate an empty, brain-dead cipher like her to the second-highest office in the land speaks volumes of the debasement and dissolution that permeates the Republican soul. Years ago, the freak show that was the Nixon administration had one of the most psychopathic, disturbed individuals to ever occupy the Oval Office, and the Reagan presidency had an evil, Alzheimer's-addled curmudgeon at its head who half the time had no idea where or who he was. When you are as rotten to the core as the Republican party is, the virulence will always find a way to surface.
One of the most satisfying amusements in life is schadenfreude, which is the great old German word for "taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others." There are plenty of entities in the modern world which, when bad things happen to them, cause me great, unbridled, gleeful joy. Big tobacco, big oil, and anyone or anything involved in animal exploitation, to name a few, are very ripe, deserving targets of derision. I try to avoid enjoying the problems of individual persons but there are exceptions, such as the dimwitted, petulant Bimbolina at the recent Miss USA contest who expressed her support for "opposite marriage," whatever that is, and then bleated like a stuck pig when she came in second. But her deep, debilitating ignorance makes her an unsatisfying critical target; it's like making fun of the mentally-challenged. Not cool and not fun. But right now I can think of no institution more worthy of a heaping-helping of schadenfreude than the Republican party. The fact that they have a repellent, drug-addicted blowhard like Rush Limbaugh as their spokesperson and de facto spiritual leader shows just how corrupt, out-of-step and irrelevant they are. Just as the Republican National Convention last summer showed hundreds of ancient, crotchety old men and their puckered, desiccated wives wearing "Drill Baby Drill" buttons, the present-day party has proven itself to be the bastion of backward-looking, discredited and disastrous policies. They claim to support the American family, but their domestic economic policies are without a doubt extremely anti-child and anti-family. But like a moldering old vampire in the movies, you can never count them as being completely dead. Maybe the Republicans will realize the utter, total failure of their policies and reinvent themselves into something relevant and worth listening to, but as of right now, they richly deserve every bad thing that happens to them. And I will be enjoying every last second of it.
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