Regarding Justice

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

More Shooz

OK, time to wade in hip deep. We all saw this:



and this is what The Editors had to say about it. I happen to agree whole-heartedly:

George W. Bush has spent most of his life fucking things up horribly, and then escaping any consequences for his incompetence and indifference. This is who he is. What you have seen is not a moment of quick thinking, it was the man’s essence.

So may this shoe-throwing moment come to represent his entire presidency, in fact it can and likely will become the very symbol of his whole miserable life.

Though I was rooting for the pretzel.

joy

Two things bring me joy today.

One - the GOP is so embarrassed by W that they want him to stay away from the convention. I hope this trend continues into his post-presidency across all his social arrangements. Perhaps universal shunning will have to replace the orange jumpsuit and shackles I normally wish to see set upon Fibby McLiesAlot and his entire putrid administration in their post-White House years. For a man who thinks history will vindicate him after he has met his maker in some kind of Harry Truman-esque rehabilitation of his legacy and reputation - and until his dying day protected from any sort of punishment by a power-worshipping political culture long since curdled by fallout from the Nixon years coupled to the insidious power of the Bush Crime Family - unreturned phonecalls and an empty datebook will have to suffice as punishment for the aging, dull-witted, frat-rat man-child who will soon shuffle off the stage of history. I rather like the idea of him white-haired and doddering around his Texas ranch, hollering at Laura, muttering to himself about how he beat his daddy by not only getting elected twice but by taking down Saddam Hussein to boot and wondering - sometimes aloud to Laura or to whichever sycophant Rethugli-doofus came by to lick his boots that day and sometimes to no one in particular as he clears brush in the blazing Texas sun - why no one comes calling to get his perspective on things.

Two - Johm McSame hates me.

As Oscar Wilde once wrote - the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And, as an ex-girlfriend once said to me - the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

(heh-heh)

I can't figure out which thing makes me happier.

Double h/t to C&L

Grand Old (Confederate) Party

Digby has an extended post that revisits a theme she's hammered for a very long time, that the Rethugli-bots really are exactly the bunch of racists they so hysterically deny being whenever confronted with examples of their dog-whistle language. If challenged, they usually call it a "joke" and then make it the fault of the uptight, overly-sensitive, listener for being offended.

They've been successfully running for office with cultural reinforcement via this technique from their dependable stable of right-wing shock-jocks and blathering bobblehead "pundits" for a very long time, but always couching it in issues that allow them to use coded language like "welfare reform" (stick it to the darkies) or "immigration reform" (stick it to the furr'ners) or "family values" (stick it to the queers - or uppity wimminfolk - you choose) or "strong defense" (stick it to the prissy girly-men over-educated egghead Lib'ruhls who all think they're better than Real Americans who know how to kick ass in war and always win - BOO-YA! - unless those pussies afraid of a stand-up fight make America lose just for spite).

Since the Ruling Class - and make no mistake we have a Ruling Class in America - is like all Ruling Classes across the world throughout history, they are deeply, fully, deathly afraid of the dirty, unwashed masses. Their fear is expressed in the platform of their pet-party, the GOP, to build election-winning coalitions (which they'd bypass if they could, since elections - and specifically democracies - are so messy and unpredictable and thus bad for business and, more importantly, accumulated wealth). The problem is, though, that those platform planks have all been, in some way, more or less reduceable to fear and loathing of "The Other" - to which the over-whelmingly white Rethugli-bot membership, from the violent & virulent racism of your average Dixie-goon to the latent racial mistrust of the nervous, TV-news-addicted suburban soccer mom, is all-too-eager to subscribe.

Well, digby takes a good extended look at the changing political landscape and has this to say:

The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to "our" country against their will (long before "we" did) comprise a majority. So even if they Republicans manage to make this election a referendum on the "Real Americans" vs "The Other," which is all they can do, they can't win that way anymore. The Real Americans are outnumbered by the rest of us. The takeover is complete.

I really hope she's right. Please go read the whole thing. And follow the links, too. It's well worth it.

Village Idiots Like Beer

So, just for grins, I followed the link at the bottom of the quote from my previous post.  

What an artifact from a strange and distant time it seems to my eyes now. What a strange world that was, when such minor, insignificant and distracting things could somehow be passed off as a legitimate addition to the public discourse.

Unlike now.

Mission Accomplished, Part Five

2 Points of Business:


ONE: Today is May Day. I will overcome my usual aversion to things red (strangely arising only in the last seven years or so) to celebrate in the traditional color of Labor and The Left. I am a union man and many people fought and died for me to have the living standard I enjoy, even if it has been and continues to be under attack. If the Rethugli-bots had their way, I'd be working for a couple hundred a week (paid in a steeply weakened currency, too, BTW), before taxes, and have no benefits whatsoever. In other words, I'd be working off-Broadway. Been there, done that. I like it here much, much better.


TWO: Today is also the five year anniversary of Mission Accomplished. This text is also in red to symbolize the blood on the hands of George W. Bush and Richard "The Big Dick" Cheney. It is to the Democrat's everlasting shame that they didn't hang that fucking banner around his neck and re-run that fucking picture of Kommander Kod-piece over and over and over again. A failure of nerve, I say. The man is a buffoon, an embarrassment and an utter, complete, epic failure. The saddest part of the whole bloody mess is that he is too fucking stupid to have sufficient inner life to undergo any personal examination that may result in some degree of personal anguish. He will return to Crawford to clear brush all goddamned day, secure in the knowledge that he did right and good, when he should be in an orange jumpsuit in The Hague on trial for war crimes (along with a raft of other people: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc...). Anything less than the whole lot of them imprisoned for life - perhaps in a place not unlike Gitmo - for crimes against humanity at the VERY least is a moral failure on the part of the American people. With two stolen elections and no public outcry to go on, I'm fully prepared to be disappointed.