2013: The Year in Review (Part 2)

Hey, we're on a roll here. Not really, but cut me a giant slackburger with cheese, okay?  It's Christmas.  Here are some more highly desirable and coveted awards for the Year That Almost Was - 2013!

The ONE-TRACK MIND/NO-TRACK BRAIN Award goes to the Republican Scandal Industry:  "Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  OH LOOK! A SQUIRREL!  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi."

The WINTER OLYMPICS AWARD FOR SPECTACULAR WASTE TIME AND MONEY goes to the government shutdown last October.  This was when the Republican party completely lost their minds and got hijacked by a bunch of noisy, obnoxious douchebags in their own caucus and brought the entire US government to a complete halt.  The Tea Baggers, ostensibly led by pasty-faced bed-wetter with questionable citizenship Ted Cruz (aided by his completely demented, Alzheimers-ridden father), threw a hissy fit and turned what should have been a routine budgetary procedure - raising the federal debt ceiling, something that Republican false idol Ronald Reagan did 18 times during his reign of error in the 80s - and tried to use it to cripple the Affordable Care Act which also debuted in October.  Because that's the way one of the oldest representative democracies in the world changes legitimately-passed laws that run afoul of a bunch of dimwitted loose cannons in the House of Representatives - by shutting down the government.  Millions of federal employees furloughed, national parks closed, airport security compromised, for what reason?  Less than three weeks later the Tea Baggers capitulated in a hugely embarrassing loss, gaining ABSOLUTELY NOTHING other than a monstrous amount of bad publicity, the Republican party rightfully buried under the condemnation and derision of the public, and the Office of Budget and Management estimating that over $64 BILLION dollars of taxpayers money were completely squandered by this useless exercise in constipated government.  And the target of their misplaced ire, the Affordable Care Act, was completely and utterly unscathed by all this (although it definitely had problems of its own making, more about that later).  Hope you enjoyed your little 64-billion-dollar tantrum, Tea Baggers, because the result was that most people in this country had their pre-existing opinion reaffirmed - that you are a bunch of selfish, useless, idiotic dicks.

The WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE? Award goes to Miley Cyrus and her delightful twerking episode on her appearance at the MTV Video Awards (or something, I can't tell any of those award shows apart anymore).  Stretching the definition of "entertainer" to nearly the breaking point, Ms. Cyrus and her grotesquely large tongue made their entrance from the inside of a gigantic teddy bear complete with Battlestar-Galactica-Cylon scanning red eye.  And things went downhill from there.  Floundering and gyrating around on stage like a zombie scarecrow with a severe neurological disorder, she made her way through a bunch of confused dancers dressed up like plush animals.  Then singer Robin Thicke sashayed out of nowhere, decked out in the latest football referee formal wear and warbled out his current song "Blurred Lines" (which, I'm embarrassed to say, I find irresistibly catchy and have on my MP3 player).

But, cultural critical mass and nuclear detonation was achieved when Cyrus bent over, backed into Thicke's crotch and did some half-hearted spasmodic twitching which the kids nowadays call "twerking."  500 years ago folks would have called it "St. Vitus' Dance" and burned her at the stake.  Well, the next day the American public went completely batshit crazy, just like they did when Janet Jackson had her infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake, and kiddies all over the world were treated to the unexpected sight of her boobie and nipple shield (and I'll bet THAT made for some interesting post-Superbowl parent-child conversations).  Every single pundit went into overdrive and were unanimous in their conclusion that this is America, not some godless wicked society which would allow such a wanton display of abysmal taste and moral dissolution.  Ironically, this really IS America, and the only bad publicity is no publicity.  Instead of being banished to the outer reaches of cultural Siberia, Cyrus received an unprecedented avalanche of publicity which she funneled right into the release of her latest music album, resulting in spectacular sales and well over 35 MILLION likes on Facebook.  Jesus Christ's Facebook page, by comparison, has fewer than 6 million likes.

So what are we to make of this, when a very marginally-talented, utterly forgettable celebrity behaves in an overwhelmingly crass and tasteless fashion, and immediately reaps an enormous, priceless bonanza of attention and publicity?  In our culture, sensationalism trumps quality any day of the week, and people delight in watching others degrade themselves, the more publicly, the better.  What we can expect in the future is more of the same, because nothing succeeds like success, and Ms. Cyrus has very clearly shown us that the reward for bad behavior is infinitely more lucrative than the reward for good behavior.

The "PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE'S SOME OTHER WAY WE CAN SCREW UP" Award.  The name of this award comes from a scene in the classic movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."  After a particularly awkward and uncomfortable dinner with a delegation of Klingons, Capt. Kirk says, "I'm going to bed now.  Please let me know if there's some other way we can screw up tonight!"  This award is given to the most monumental screw-up of the year, something that was so horrifically misconceived and so dismallly executed that the inevitable carnage was spread far and wide, from sea to shining sea.

Everyone knows that the staff here at the Careless Whispers blog (me and 17 rabbits) is nothing but even-handed and impartial (I would have said "fair and balanced" but those dirtbags at Fox News have ruined that phrase for the rest of eternity), and we assign blame wherever appropriate, regardless of political affiliation.  Thus, this award goes to the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA had been in the works for a long time, and is the signature legislative achievement of the Obama administration.  Central to the idea of health care reform is a national website which would allow people to shop for health insurance and sign up online.  The website is widely reported to have cost over $400 million dollars when it went live on October 1st.  For nearly HALF A BILLION dollars you'd think you'd get the Lamborghini of websites, a platinum-standard of efficiency and user-friendliness.  What we got instead was a clunky, poorly-designed mess which was well nigh impossible to navigate.  I got on the site about two weeks after launch and it was incredibly slow and tediously frustrating.  There were many things wrong with it, too many to list here, but suffice to say it was a big pain in the ass to use.  I stopped using it whenever it took 20 minutes to get some information back after you hit ENTER, and the questionnaire part that gathered personal information was a complete mess, asking ridiculous questions and taking an unacceptably long time to do anything.  I went and did something else for a month and came back to the site, and it had improved considerably.  I found a health care plan which I liked and the rest of the process was really pretty easy.

But the damage was done and the entire country went crazy.  The Republicans jumped on it like a pack of ravenous hyenas on a geriatric antelope and took every single opportunity to inflame and misinform the public regarding the entire concept of health care reform.  At this writing, the Obama administration has just barely begun to drag itself out of the mammoth crater it dug for itself and hopefully by this time next year, the extreme screw-up that greeted the launch of the ACA will be a distant, unpleasant memory.  But not before the Republicans squeeze every single drop of political advantage out of it.

Next up:  Part 3, in which we tie up the loose ends and send 2013 to the Promised Land.

News From Hell

The past six days have been an amazing news cycle, one of the busiest we've seen in ages.  A lot of very important stuff happened, and there was something for everybody to love and hate.

First off, last Friday the jury in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse trial came back with 45 guilty counts out of 48 charges.  The whole situation is pretty dreadful and awful, and is an object lesson in how things can get completely out of control when authority figures feel they can do whatever they damned well please and the "good ol' boy" network will shield and protect them.  Sandusky's predation on young boys is stomach-turning in the extreme, and the administration of Penn State University choosing to do nothing in the face of undeniable evidence is something they will have to answer to and pay for dearly.

One has to wonder how such horrendous abuse seemed so easy.  There has been a lot of investigation into the mindset of child molesters, and a lot of them pick occupations or endeavors that place them in direct contact with their quarry.  Sports coaches in the past have been automatically assumed to be benign and the vast majority of them are, but for the small percentage who are child predators, it provides an ideal shield and opportunity for their nefarious activities.

When I was a child, I was taught that adults were to be obeyed unconditionally and they were always right.  For me it was a fact of life that if the teacher gave you a beating in school for doing something wrong, when you got home you got another beating, because the teacher was always right, and you were always wrong.  That kind of blind, abject deference to "authority" creates the perfect climate for abuse.  It's like if a burglar comes to your home to rob it, and you welcome him with open arms and make him a nice dinner as he ransacks your house.

Sandusky will die in prison, as he deserves, but what of the lives he has destroyed with his sick activities?  There are no winners in this whole sorry situation, just pain and wreckage.

The following Monday had the Supreme Court striking down most of Arizona's hateful, racist SB1070, the draconian anti-immigration law passed in 2010, much to the delight of the bigots and hate-mongers in this wretched, godforsaken state.  Governor Jan "The Walking Dead" Brewer signed it with much fanfare, and used the resulting court challenges as a tool to raise nearly $4 million to defend it.  Even as recently as last week, when conventional wisdom indicated (incorrectly, it turns out) the Court would uphold the legality of SB1070, that dried-up old corpse was gleefully sending training materials out to police officials.  So it was particularly gratifying when the Court struck down most of the provisions of the law, and left the door wide open for future legal challenges to the part of it that was left standing.  Brewer immediately went on the news media and we were treated to the pathetic sight of that delusional, hatchet-faced old hag trying in vain to spin the ruling in her favor.  It's been obvious for a very long time that Brewer is incredibly stupid and most likely mentally disturbed, and she can add pathetic embarrassment to the very long list of reasons why she needs to go.

There was also a ruling in a Montana case which very tragically affirmed the vile, loathsome Citizens United ruling of 2010, which opened the floodgates to a deluge of corporate money into the election process.  This is plainly astonishing, as nearly everyone except the Republicans agree that the original ruling was a horrendous, horrific abomination and probably one of the very worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of this country.  As Mannequin Romney says, "Corporations are people!" and much to the detriment of this country, the Court agrees.  Another terrible, awful ruling from a Court that seems to take the side of corporations over the welfare of the American people.

Of course in the midst of all this history there just has to be some batshit-craziness, and that was provided by the witch hunt tight-assed douchebag Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca) is waging against Attorney General Eric Holder.  There was this little sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called "Fast and Furious." started during the George W. Bush administration, which sought to trace firearms used by Mexican drug cartels back to sellers in the US.  They ran into a little snag due to the incredibly lax and ridiculous gun laws in (where else?) Arizona.  It seems that a couple of people plopped down $350,000 for 650 guns, got them, and just waltzed across the border to the south where drug cartels got an early Navidad, because according to AZ gun laws, there wasn't anything illegal or suspicious about a purchase that size. Now that this fiasco has blown up all over the place, AG Holder is getting blamed for everything, and the 2nd Amendment gun nuts are all bent out of shape, saying the failed sting operation is all a big scheme by the Obama administration to ram stricter gun laws down everyone's throats.  Because it's so important to be able to spend $350K on guns without some law enforcement agency asking you a lot of inconvenient questions.  Yeah, they really ARE that stupid.  They're gun nuts.

The big-deal ruling dropped this morning, when the Supreme Court basically reaffirmed the constitutionality of Obama's centerpiece Affordable Health Care Act, individual mandate and all.  There is still much to discuss and learn about this ruling, but the important take-away is that Republicans and right-wingers are crapping broken glass now, and will do so for the foreseeable future.  It is extremely gratifying to see all the right-wingers losing their shit in a very public fashion.  Anything that makes conservative right-wingers unhappy makes me EXTREMELY happy, and I have a great deal to be happy about this morning.

Apocalypse Deferred

Personal note: Exactly one year ago this day I wrote the first entry in my new blog. In it I took Meghan McCain to task for being, well, Meghan McCain. Writing "Careless Whispers" has been a supremely interesting experience for me and I've enjoyed it very much. When I wrote my first entry I thought I would run out of things to say after like 5 posts but now, after 73 posts, I feel I'm just hitting my stride. Sometime this summer I will be posting my 100th entry and will take a look back then. But until that time, I thank everyone for reading my blog and the great feedback you have provided. You would do me a great honor if you continue to read my ramblings.

After more than a year of bickering and fighting, including a summer full of testy town hall meetings, innumerable marches and protests, the highly entertaining spectacle of insanely misspelled signs and endless commentary and disinformation campaigns, health care reform became law of the land when an obviously pleased Barack Obama signed the bill in a jubilant ceremony at the White House. As we are constantly reminded, the fight is not yet over and the Republicans are girding their wrinkled, pasty loins for an Armageddon scenario of plans to "repeal" the law and poke holes in the federal requirements under the guise of "states rights."

I suppose we can't expect the Republicans to do anything else, but graceful losers they are not. In fact on Sunday night when the House of Representatives was taking their final ratification votes the Repubs had to hide behind unborn babies and try to get the whole bill referred back to committee (e.g., killed) for not "protecting the unborn." This was preceded earlier in the afternoon by opponents screaming racist and homophobic slurs to members of Congress and even spitting at one of them. Such a lovely example to show the world. The attempt to use the abortion issue for their own nefarious purposes stunk to high heaven of back-against-the-wall desperation and scorched-earth policy - they were prepared to do anything, no matter how ridiculous or cowardly, to try to scuttle all the effort to reach this point. Luckily, it did not work, but it did result in the hilariously surrealistic scene of Rep. Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortionist and until then the darling of the Republican opposition for nearly torpedoing the whole bill over abortion funding, being called a "baby killer" by some misinformed moron from Texas.

So the legal challenges are only just starting, and we are going to hear about attempts to derail health care reform far into the foreseeable future. The task of carrying out reform has just begun and it's not going to be pretty or pleasant, despite all the other extremely pressing matters we must address as a nation. But probably the most important task that remains to be done is to get Rush Limbaugh out of the country, because he promised on his radio program in a very public fashion to leave the country if health care reform passes. I strongly believe we should hold him to that promise and get his big fat obnoxious ass out of the country and over to some other country we really hate, like North Korea. After all, if they threw his flabby bulk into a big stew pot and cooked him up, he could feed all of Pyongyang for over a year.

The Republicans are spitting mad and all look like they took a huge crap in their Depends and can't find anyone to change them. They are vowing revenge in the midterm elections and while that is not a threat to take lightly, so much can happen in six months and once the American people get to see that health care really will make many lives better, their attitudes will soften and maybe they'll see that it was a good idea after all. But history was truly made last Sunday, March 21, 2010, and we will be looking back on that date for many, many years to come.

Countdown To History

It's been pretty tough these past couple of days not to hear the phrase "make or break" if you watched, read or listened to any sort of news coverage about the health care reform bill. It all comes down to the next couple of Congressional votes, the MSM (mainstream media) would have you believe. Although the news media have a very long tradition of exaggeration and making mountains out of molehills, in this case it seems to be warranted.

The stakes in this long, acrimonious battle could not be higher. President Obama has made health care reform the centerpiece of his young administration, and has basically bet everything on getting the bill passed. The rest of his presidency and its legacy hang in the balance. The Republicans have fought him every step of the way, goose-stepping as a unified block in perfect lockstep behind their leadership. They say they are so concerned about the country and health care reform is so horrible, but it's painfully transparent to anyone that they could not give a crap about what's best for this country; they only care about embarrassing Obama and turning his administration into a failure because he is African-American.

It's clear that health care in this country is horribly dysfunctional and keeping the status quo would be disastrous. Every year over 45,000 people die in this country from lack of adequate health care. If that number of people died in terrorist attacks each year Congress would be apoplectic with outrage and you could be sure the legislation would be pouring out of Washington. The present system works best in keeping the health care insurance providers in business, and has allowed them the latitude to do unbelievable things, such as increasing insurance premiums for their members as much as 40% while racking up multi-billion dollar profits. Do the Republicans not see anything wrong with the insurance companies making enormous profits while costs to working people go through the roof? What if these profits went to actually caring for sick people instead of lining the pockets of insurance executives?

At any rate, the Democrats are scrambling for votes in the House of Representatives to pass the revised health care legislation and refer it to the Senate, where only a 51-vote majority will be required to send it to Obama's desk for signature. The Dems are cautiously optimistic they will have the votes later this week. The Republicans are engaging in a full-court press, pulling out all the stops trying to keep the 37 Democrats who originally voted "no" on their side. Some Republicans have threatened "civil disobedience" in the halls of Congress to get their point across, which is reminiscent of the "Tea Party tantrums" we were witnessing last summer, where petulant, confused old people stood up with their hilariously misspelled signs to "keep the government out of my Medicare."

Conservative talk radio has switched over to 24-hour Armageddon mode. Yesterday I had to take an extended drive into the southeast hinterlands, and to amuse myself I tuned in to Glenn Beck on the radio. Yes, I do listen to conservative talk radio on occasion just to get some idea of how crazy these people actually are, and Beck always comes through in spectacular fashion. He was making all sorts of dire predictions in very somber, sonorous tones that we will "not recognize this country" in five years if health care reform passes. Well, I'm pretty sure the country will be recognizable; what I'm hoping is that the health care system will be completely different. It's always an experience listening to these kind of shows - the hosts do every ridiculous thing possible to make their points to a gullible audience. They make loopy, elliptical connections between unrelated events in the past and in the future, they engage in hyperbole, fear-mongering and wild exaggeration at every turn. They appeal to the prejudices and ignorance of the public, as they always do, to panic people into a stampede and make them think Al-Qaeda is ready to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and set up a nuclear-weapons farmers' market on the White House lawn.

Beck did make a hysterical statement which almost caused me to drive off the road. Someone on his show brought up the argument that providing health care for all citizens is a moral obligation of the government. Not so, Beck replied; that's not the job of the government, that's the job of the churches, to take care of moral issues like that, because we have something called separation of church and state in this country!! EXCUSE ME??? Conservatives invoking separation of church and state like they actually believe it?? That sounds like something right out of the current Alice in Wonderland movie. Conservatives don't have the slightest problem with government interference in moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, but they do have an issue with government getting involved in universal health care. Just another example of how conservatives pick and choose their moral arguments and talk out of both sides of their mouths at once, as it suits them. For them, morality is completely subjective and situational, and changes about as frequently as the wind direction. They use it and abuse it any way they see fit, to bolster their ridiculous, idiotic and ironically, their morally bankrupt arguments.

The health care reform battle will run right down to the wire, and every vote will be in play until the very end. The Republicans are increasingly desperate and the Democrats increasingly confident in the final outcome, but it is not yet a done deal. Democrats have a long and rich history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so I'm certainly not taking anything for granted. It will be interesting to see where we'll be a week from now. So much is on the line right now, and what happens in the next couple of days will resonate far into the future.

It's an exciting, scary and exhilarating time. The old Yiddish curse of "may you live in interesting times" seems ever so applicable.

Theatre of the Damned

Washington certainly is a bottomless pit when it comes nutty behavior. Politicians dip deep into the well of insanity and never fail to bring home the crazy in gigantic trainloads. It would probably be a little more amusing if they weren't dicking around with billions and trillions of our dollars and basically screwing with the future of the entire planet and every living creature on it. Things have been getting a little tedious lately with all the sex scandals, such as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and disgraced Presidential candidate John Edwards, among many others. Let's face it - hearing about old white guys getting their swerve on and acting like hormone-crazed frat boys rates pretty high on the "ick" scale. I'm an old white guy and I think it's pretty unsavory. But occasionally the denizens of Capitol Hill outdo themselves when it comes to massive silliness and a true spectacle emerges for our entertainment and edification.

That's what happened at the Health Care Summit held yesterday in DC. President Obama got together with a roomful of Democrats and Republicans, ostensibly for a come-to-Jesus meeting where they would thrash out the different philosophies that have been colliding recently and preventing any real progress in fixing our ailing health care system. The Republicans have been complaining that they've been shut out of the whole process and Obama said, you want to come to the table to talk? - fine, we'll do just that. But instead of hammering out some kind of compromise that both sides would be able to support, however unenthusiastically, what we got were both sides digging in their heels and preening and posturing for the camera, and saying precious little of any use.

The live television coverage let us sit in on this confab, which truly did look like the staff meeting from hell. On one end we had the unnaturally orange Representative John Boehner, or John Boner as I like to call him, pontificating and blustering in true Congressional fashion while saying absolutely nothing. On the other side we had Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who looks like he should be managing an H&R Block office in Akron, getting ready to work on someone's taxes. In the middle was Obama, uncomfortable with his role as ringmaster in this hellish Cirque du Batshit. Next to him was Vice President Joe Biden, looking and sounding surprisingly cogent and on the ball. Joe Biden looks like your uncle who always seemed to have had a little too much to drink even at 8 in the morning, and who would laugh at his own jokes and screw up everything no matter how simple. When Biden appears to be the voice of reason and sensibility in any gathering, you know things are on the verge of heading south in a big way.

But there were a couple of fun things to watch in this whole seven-hour grindfest. One was Obama sniping with his former Presidential rival John McCain. Obama had to tell McCain that the "campaign was over" and he should drop his tired blathering. McCain cackled in his usual cringe-inducing, pseudo-pedophile way and said that was something he was "reminded of every day." I bet he is. Why anyone gives this silly old man any airtime at all is beyond me. He looks like a character from The Muppet Show that was created to be an understudy for Statler and Waldorf, the two old hecklers in the balcony, but was discarded because it was too creepy.

But the most amazing thing was a brilliant segment on yesterday's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" show. They put together little snippets of the speeches the Republicans gave at the summit, and it clearly and hilariously showed them repeatedly using the exact same words and language. With robotic consistency that would make the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica jealous, they shamelessly used the same phrases over and over again, which consisted of "start over," "clean sheet of paper," and "step back." It was pretty eye-opening to see how thoroughly rehearsed and coached the Republicans were. It's like they had been drilled to within an inch of their lives like third-graders learning math tables and were told, probably by Darth Cheney, that if they strayed one iota from the party line they would dissolve into a messy puddle of goo like the Nazi Ark-snatchers at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It was plainly obvious that they weren't saying what they truly felt and thought, but were slavishly parroting what their puppet masters told them to say. In a time and place where we really needed the participants to be actively engaged in finding a solution to possibly the biggest crisis we have to face today, what we got was the same-old-same-old, much to no one's surprise.

And President Obama still does not get it. For some reason he still clings, Don Quixote-like, to his dream of bipartisanship even though it's been made painfully clear over and over again that the Republicans have no intention at all of cooperating. They only want Obama and the Democrats to fail, no matter how much it would cost the country. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a bipartisan agreement is both irresistible and unattainable for Obama. The Republicans have always said that it's their way or the highway, but Obama still tries to hold out hope that they'll come on board. Now the Republicans are spitting mad that the Democrats will push the health care overhaul through using the process of reconciliation, which is a way of combining the Senate and House health care bills and only requires a simple 51-vote majority, instead of the inconvenient 60-vote supermajority. When Republican Lamar Alexander tried to do a pre-emptive strike and chastised the Democrats for threatening to use reconciliation, Harry Reid in an amazingly righteous show of cojones told the Repubs to STFU because since the 1980s, reconciliation has been used more than 20 times mostly by Republicans, and if it was good enough for Republicans in the past it's good enough for Democrats now.

Well, the show is over and the Health Care Summit of 2010 is history. Comedic history, but history nonetheless. What Obama said was absolutely true, and that is the American people do not need another year of pointless, mind-numbing debate, which is what it would take to come up with another health care bill from scratch, as the Republicans want. We simply can't afford to keep the status-quo; health care has to be fixed and even the stripped-down, neutered bill we have now is better than nothing. We can only hope the Democrats can find a way to get this done, since the Republicans will not lift a finger to help and will in fact obstruct at every opportunity. They are truly the "Party of No," as in No Brains, No Help, and No Morals.

Stupidworld

This has really been the political Summer of Stupidity in this country. It's so depressing to see so many people being as stupid as they can possibly be, and not having one whit of shame or regret about it.

Last month we had the ridiculous spectacle of the town hall meetings held by members of Congress in their home districts during the August recess. Programmed by right-wing talk radio dirtbags such as Rush "Mount Flabmore" Limbaugh and the obviously mentally ill Glenn Beck, the legions of their illiterate followers fanned out across this nation and turned what had usually been a relatively civilized forum for the exchange of ideas into a hysterical shouting match, with fat, sweaty Midwesterners screaming at the top of their lungs to get their own obnoxious ideas across and suppress anyone else with an opposing view. Their conservative puppet-masters conveniently omitted the basic concept that those tactics are barely appropriate for belligerent three-year-olds who have been denied their basic right to Hostess Twinkies, but for adults to indulge in this behavior instead of confronting the deadly-serious issue of out-of-control health care costs, it is not only obnoxious and shameful but also extremely self-centered and disrespectful. How incredibly sad and pathetic those people are, who can find no other way to make themselves heard other than to shout down any opinion other than theirs. They claim to be "patriotic" but in fact what they are doing is a very un-American thing: keeping others from expressing their viewpoint through bullying and intimidation. They are ignorant right-wing dupes with tiny brains and big mouths. Throw in the selfish, piggish attitude a lot of them have about "I have health insurance and I'm sort of happy with it, so screw everyone else" and you become acutely aware of how many idiotic, mean-spirited and utterly classless people infest every town and city in this country.

A by-product of all these loud-mouthed morons is how "socialism" has become such a conservative buzz-word. All of a sudden health-care overhaul has become a thinly-disguised attempt to turn the world's most powerful democracy into a socialist state. Crazed old people are seen carrying signs around screaming "No Government Health Plan!" HELLO? Do any of these senile old geezers even have a clue as to what Medicare is?? Medicare IS government-run health care! You want government out of your health care? Fine - then RIP UP YOUR MEDICARE CARDS! I usually have a fair amount of sympathy for the elderly because I will be one of them very soon. It's okay to be old, but it's NOT okay to be old and stupid, and that's what a lot of them are. They believe whatever nonsensical hysteria they hear on the news media and start stampeding like a panicked herd of lemmings.

Even worse than that was the reaction to President Obama's speech to school students yesterday. The right-wing in this country is so completely obsessed with sabotaging everything that Obama does that they somehow spread the story around that the President was going to talk to school children and indoctrinate them into his "socialistic policies." For God's sake, it was the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES encouraging school children to stay in school and do well! What the hell is "socialistic" about that?? Instead of focusing in on this message, which normal people consider to be kind of important, conservatives made a big to-do about children being "forced" to listen to the speech and how the President was going to use it to make political points. In many places parents were given the choice of sending their children to school or keeping them home, as if the parents were smart enough to make that decision. I heartily applaud a Chicago school official who got on TV and said there will be no "parental choice" when it comes to the speech, children will come to school and they will LISTEN to the speech, and if parents objected they can just get over it. Instead of letting the children see and hear an inspirational message from the very articulate Leader of the Free World, the only thing a lot of them saw was the ignorance and bigotry of their own parents. How freaking lovely.

Then you have the abysmally stupid and detestable Sarah Palin who automatically starts blathering enormous amounts of crap if she gets within ten feet of a media outlet, just like a toilet that keeps backing up sewage into America's bathrooms. On the eve of the President's address on health care to a joint session of Congress, she inexplicably brought up her reviled and widely-discredited notion of "death panels" which in her pathetic little mind will be set up to decide if terminally ill or elderly people will live or die. I'm not going to go into what a despicable, loathsome waste of human flesh Sarah Palin is, because I've made that perfectly clear in at least six other postings on this blog, but if there is any person who deserves to burn in hell solely on the merits of the magnitude and depth of her all-consuming stupidity, she is that one. How someone so incredibly MORONIC can keep spouting her idiocy on a national stage is completely baffling to me, and as far as I'm concerned shows how broken and damaged the national media is, and how very badly it serves to advance informed debate and intelligent reasoning in this country. I rank anything Palin says on a par with those two other pointless media whores, Jon and Kate Gosselin.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, we can throw in the birther controversy earlier this summer, where so many unapologetically misinformed, brainless people got convinced that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Add to that the usual detritus that regularly washes up on our pop-culture shoreline, where people who should know better insist on doing really ridiculous, embarrassing things without any indication that they've given the slightest amount of thought or consideration for how it's going to look on the world stage. Aided and abetted by a soundbite-driven media who are much more interested in publicizing dumbness and bad behavior instead of reasoned, thoughtful action, it does seem that so often the really stupid, ignorant people are taking over. And that will spell the end to this country quicker than any Al-Qaeda terrorist could ever hope for.

Down The Tubes

The level of political discourse in this country is really headed down the toilet as we enter the home stretch of summer. The right-wing opponents of President Obama have stooped to new lows, even for them, and the fact that they are surpassing their own benchmarks of idiocy and deadheaded stupidity is a truly alarming development.

First off, the birthers still refuse to give up and go away despite the mountains of overwhelming evidence against their god-forsaken yammering. Their latest stink bomb is a supposed copy of Obama's Kenyan birth certificate. Salon.com does a much better job of refuting this nonsense than I could, so if you're interested please check out their website here. But over and over again the right-wingers will grasp onto whatever paper-thin shred of evidence they can dream up (even something which is a ridiculous outright forgery as this) and give it the aura of unassailable truth. When you have to start manufacturing evidence to back up your moronic claims, you're pretty much out of gas. But the conservative pundits have never let inconvenient things like the truth get in the way of shooting off their big mouths.

Next up in the idiot parade are all the rude, immature dickheads who are standing up at "town hall" meetings with their Congressional representatives and screaming and shouting them down when it comes to reforming health care. It's obvious that these "spontaneous" outbursts are anything but, because the blowhards on conservative radio are clearing advocating and coordinating these efforts, and the dimwitted, mindless sheep that make up their audience are more than happy to be recruited because I'm sure it makes them feel like they're doing something. But standing up and shouting at someone is something that petulant third-graders do when they don't get their way, and it only emphasizes the utter desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of their positions.

I'm willing to bet that the majority of those people who stand up and shriek about "socialism" have no idea what the word means. If there is anything in this country that is completely and fundamentally broken and just screams out to be repaired, it is the health care system. Keeping this system in place without reform is probably one of the surest ways to financial disaster this country has ever faced. But these people continue to try to block and frustrate every attempt at defusing this ticking time bomb because their hatred of the President is so all-consuming and blinding. And the only method left to them (because obviously reasoned argument and thoughtful debate are completely incomprehensible, alien options) is juvenile, disrespectful bullying.

Ever since the election last November, the right-wingers have continued to embarrass themselves at every turn. They never will accept of the fact that THEIR CANDIDATE LOST. He is the LOSER. It just irks them to no end that McCain/Palin was such a profoundly loathsome, unattractive combination that the electorate overwhelmingly chose a black president, and they in their thinly-disguised racism hate that so much. It is something that sticks in their collective craws like a big piece of broken glass and will not go away. But expecting conservatives to feel even a little bit of remorse or shame for their disgraceful, childish and hateful actions is like expecting the sun to rise in the west tomorrow - it just isn't going to happen. It is something that in better times would be merely an amusing sideshow, a political Theatre of the Damned or a monstrously bad American Idol audition. But it just so happens that the future of the country is at stake, and we just don't have time for this kind of extreme stupidity.