Though I enthusiastically supported Obama's candidacy and am moved beyond words by what his ascension to the presidency says about who we have become and are becoming as a nation, I have said since he became the nominee and his victory began to look inevitable that he will likely piss me off more than make me proud for the majority of time he's in office. He's a centrist, I'm not and in a world where a post-Nixon-Reagan-Bush1&2 GOP has pulled the center WA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-AY to the right over the last forty some-odd years, being in the center is still sitting way too far to the right for me. I'm thinking of O's FISA vote, just to name one example.
The Quisling from Connecticut gets rejected by his own state party, actively curries favor with the opposition party, campaigned against the head of his own purported party and said some pretty nasty things along the way in so doing and he gets to keep his seniority and his committee assignments.
Way to go, O. I know you're all about reconcilliation and all of that kum-ba-ya shit, but this guy fucked you over loudly and in public and he is now going to suffer no reprimand whatsoever. What are you afraid he would do, say something mean about you on Tee-Vee? He's going to do that anyway and now, if the D's get really close to 60 votes in the Senate, we'll need him again (dammit) to put us over the top and all the bobblehead shows will naturally court him like a rockstar because he'll hold the balance of the Senate in his greasy little hands.
I would say he doesn't get it, but then he went to Harvard and is the President-Elect of the United States and I'm just a bitter partisan. I'll shut up about it.
For now.
(Found the picture above at this guy's facebook page)
I've started and abandoned about seven different posts since the election. Nothing I'm able to summon in words can describe the enormity of what has passed in this country with the ascension of the Junior Senator from Illinois.
We, America, land of Wounded Knee and Dred Scott, where non-white, non-male people have had to fight for their rights & freedoms using the very governmental structures that should have unambiguously guaranteed them in the first place, took 219 years to elect its first non-white chief executive and -- as an added bonus -- he has an African/Arabic name shared by the current president's vanquished foe at a time when that same political opposition has gained and maintained tremendous political advantage not just by pressing the electorate's xenophobia button (at the expense of an entire race & culture both here and abroad who share little more than a religion, language-group and skin tone with a small band of men who successfully and spectacularly struck at us here on our own soil) but also from the demonization of anything simply guilty of being vaguely "not American" or least somewhat French.
44th President of the United States of America: Barack Hussein Obama.
More fun with maps. With the pulldown menu on the right, you can look at past elections (all the way back to 1932!) or at the various polls for 2008 and what each would mean for the electoral college distribution.
Thank you to Broadway Carl for pointing me toward this article, which sums up why this election matters more than any other in my lifetime:
Daughter of slave votes for Obama
109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail. By Joshunda Sanders AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 27, 2008
Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.
The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.
For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.
Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year's presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. "I feel good about voting for him," Amanda Jones said.
Jones' father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.
Amanda Jones' father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.
Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn't recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.
One of Amanda Jones' 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election's significance to the matriarch.
"It's awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us," Baker said. "It's awesome to see what she's done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work" if Obama is elected, she said.
Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 — no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.
Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state — and the country.
Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation's oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that's hard to validate.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can't confirm whether Jones is the state's oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.
The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 — making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.
Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. "God has been good to me," she said.
We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.
Politics matters not just to corporations and to the military, and not just corporations and the military deserve to have its interests addressed by effective government, because that is fascism. It matters to people, to individuals, and who does it and the way it is practiced matters, too, in a democracy.
Politics matters.
Just watch this video. It's called "When Charles meets Barack":
Thanks to my video iPod & iTunes, I have been able to finally watch and become a fan of "The Wire". I was always a fan of "Homicide: Life on the Street", which is also set in Baltimore. The connection point is David Simon, who wrote the book Homicide was inspired by, and who became the producer of the The Wire. Because The Wire was on HBO, though, Simon was able to explore content and situations the network format of Homicide wouldn't allow.
When Mrs. Joe & I went to Baltimore last year on a weekend getaway, we took pics of each other on the steps of the station house used on Homicide -- which is an actual working Baltimore police station -- in the beautiful Fells Point area. We also stopped to eat at the bar and grill across the street that served as the Waterfront Bar on the show. In all, I found Baltimore to be a very charming city and not at all the waking civic nightmare depicted on not one but two first-class TV dramas. Has any city's PD (besides New York or LA, I guess) ever benefited so much from two different, top-notch TV shows?
At the time of our trip, though, I hadn't yet watched any of The Wire -- which had just been canceled -- so I didn't have any fan locations to check out because I didn't know of any. Now I'm halfway through Season Four and a huge fan, though I don't think a return trip to Baltimore is in the cards anytime soon.
So, to me this YouTube video featuring some of the cast from the show is pretty damned cool:
One day following a storm, a man was walking along a beach. The beach was scattered with clams – all victims of the storm. There must have been thousands, if not tens of thousands of clams just on this stretch of beach. The man felt bad – but what could he do?
Farther down the beach, the man saw a young boy – running, bending, and throwing. As the man got closer, he saw that the boy was picking up one clam at a time and throwing it back into the ocean.
As the man got close to the boy, he stopped him and asked -
“What are you doing?”
“I'm saving them” - the boy responded.
“There's far too many to make a difference”
The boy reached down and picked up another clam, hurling it as far out into the water as his young arm could throw. He smiled, looked back at the man and said:
“I just made a difference to that one”
I volunteered for the Obama campaign yesterday. I went to their offices in lower Manhattan and made phonecalls to the good people of Pittsburgh. Cold-calling people who might yell at me or call me an ugly name was WA-A-A-A-A-A-AY out of my comfort zone, but I did it because it needed doing.
Please consider doing the same.
If you live in a state that is fully "in the bag" for one or the other, then spend some time calling another state that may be at a tipping point. What possible difference could that make? Well, because I called yesterday, an 83-year old woman named Frances who just had surgery and "don't get around so good anymore" but really wants to vote for that guy named Obama is going to get a ride to the polls on election day.
How 'bout that?
Volunteer.
We can't let the thieves, thugs and sociopaths who've been running this country for the last eight years have four more to finish stripping the place bare.
This is no longer just the whimpering of a few disaffected ex-hippies and assorted leftist student groups. The country is disintegrating after 40 years of Rethuglican "leadership" and the foot-soldiers who enabled and reinforced the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II regime are reverting to type as the failure of all their most-cherished tropes and assorted other lies bespeaks their own personal failure and it makes them angry and prone to seek a scapegoat. Like Germany in the 1920's & 1930's. McSneer and Moose-a-lini are doing everything they can to solidify the racist, persecution-complexed middle of American society. Note that I didn't characterize it as "underbelly" or some such. It isn't. This putrescent hatred is interwoven in the very fabric our national character. It is the legacy of a nation built on genocide and human chattel slavery.
I'm not sure what they think will come of it, but the way I see it, McCain is a rich, grumpy, entitled old man who doesn't understand why the world won't just give him what he wants by dint of his gender, skin color, pedigree and resume and if he has to dip his widdle-footsie into the stinking, sulphurous, seething pool of evil that bubbles in the heart of the political right, then so be it, it can't possibly stain him because so doing furthers his ambitions and thus must be for the greater good; not the greater god of all Americans, mind you, but the greater good of the good Americans, the pro-Americans, his friends & family & business partners. His denials of the actual ugliness of his campaign's behavior stem, I think, from his pathological inability to see the wrongness of the underlying worldview that drives the behavior. In other words, the rabble who advocate violence are only doing so in the name of defending John McCain's America. As another senator from Arizona said at the beginning of the Right's nightmarish march to political hegemony (just before going down in defeat to the last Democrat to preside over a national consensus):
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
Which, in light of how utterly without principle or scruple they've conducted their political affairs since reads now like marching orders for a movement. Rethuglicans have seen every action through that lens and John McCain is no different, which is why the souring tone of his rallies doesn't phase him and the preposterousness of his distortions of fact and outright lies simply don't compute for him. His moral compass is broken, his internal ethical radar calibrated to different priorities.
Sarah Palin lies on the other side of McCain's cynical political calculations. She is a dimwit and a demagogue, but she is not a leader, good or bad. She is just another slack-jawed, Kool-Aid drinking rabble who got herself fast-tracked up the ranks through sheer pluck, luck and a total absence of core principle. If she were smarter, she'd be like Karl Rove - a collaborating member of the proletariat who knows his place on the food chain and instead assists the plantation masters in keeping the other slaves in line to earn favors, priviledges and access. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is too stupid to know that she isn't one of them, but rather is the type of manipulative social-climber who takes any apparent lack of social status as merely a failure of perception to be remedied by MILF-y charm, will to power or a well-timed shivving. She is the shiny new face of the same old blood-thirsty, Dixie-anchored rump of an electoral coalition McCain's approaching defeat will reveal.
By "Dixie-anchored" however, I don't mean geographically, although that will be true as well. The Solid South will remain so, even if the city-fied transplants from DC and other dins of iniquity further up the Eastern Seaboard make Virginia and North Carolina swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. No, I mean the mindset and values of The South, the mythical south of the redneck NASCAR "Lost Cause" Sunbelt sprawling cookie-cutter suburb & mega-church popular imagination. THAT South, the one that gets weepy when Lee Greenwood sings "Proud to be an American," is nationwide. And the policies of the ruling class over the last 40 years - enacted through the vigorous machinations of their pet political party, the GOP - have made their lives immeasureably worse through regressive taxation, crony capitalism, a self-justifying military-industrial war-making complex , industrial sell-off, rigging of the financial system and a relentless culture war. These are the ways that a greedy, pernicious ruling class maintains its power not just in America, kiddies, but everywhere in the world. They create a politics, through violence or bribery or both, that will eventually come to resemble the political Right in any country anywhere at any time in history for they are all the same in their fundmental desire to protect power & priviledge and supress the masses for fun & profit. Sometimes this is called monarchy, sometimes a dictatorship or a banana republic or a fascist state, sometimes it is "The People's Republic of..." and the plutocrats mouth communal doctrines of the "for thee not for me" variety, but the desire to constrict, restrict and suppress is an impulse of the political right.
Billmon, who vanished for a few years before re-surfacing recently back over at Daily Kos, wrote about the American variety of this eternal theme on his now-defunct blog (hence - no link):
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology), libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government. . . .
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman). The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times. . . .
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
A running topic on his blog was the Spanish Civil War, which he persuasively argued was a strong analog to the type of war we're going to have when our Civil War 2 breaks out. The Spanish Civil War was a brutal affair that pitted neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. It was not a matter of armies blue and gray (or is it blue and red?) ranging against each other across open fields. It was fought with meat cleavers and clubs in alleyways and in the streets. The Nazis helped out with planes and guns, which gave us "Guernica", but that conventional 20th Century-style warfare was the exception. The rest of the war was vicious and rife with atrocities.
I think this time in our history is comparable to the years leading up to our previous civil war in the hostile balkanization of the political camps. Back then, it was about slavery. BTW, never let anyone argue that our Civil War was ever about anything else but whether or not we would be a nation that allowed the ownership of human beings. Anyone who does argue thusly is a southern apologist merely muddying the waters to dilute their own reflected regional culpability.
So, I think we are barreling toward a civil war, something like the Spanish Civil War, a war lacking in front lines, where neighborhoods fielded partisan gang armies against the gang armies other neighborhoods, where neighbors hacked their next-door neighbors to death, where not even churches could offer safe harbor against murderous mobs. I fear for this country because predominant regional political differences as expressed by congressional representation belie deeper cultural differences that have more to do with religious affiliation, level of education and line of work and union affiliation and exist everywhere all at once apart from larger political culture. I am thinking, for instance, of true-blue Austin, an island of education and cultural sophistication in deep-red Texas, a sea of menacingly willful ignorance, hostility to cultural diversity and easy violence. I am also thinking of the fact that the police force in this bright blue city (to say nothing of the firefighters, or even blue-collar union members in general - the number of IATSE stagehands who LOVE George W. Bush is both sickening and shocking - and the entire Borough of Staten Island) are a bright shade of scarlet because red-ness & blue-ness is not an expression of regional difference, but rather of deep-seated cultural impulse. Police in general, NYPD in particular, are always on the side of authoritarianism. As metaphive once pointed out to me - for the police the whole civilian population is divided into two groups: perps and sheep. For police it is not about "protecting and serving" but rather maintaining order first and protecting property second, and serving people only insofar as it reinforces the first two items.
When the shit hits the fan, in Austin I would fear for the safety of the community that has grown up around the University at the hands of an armed and culturally resentful wider population with a collective chip on its shoulder - the animosity between Texas A&M and UT-Austin is only good-natured to a point. In New York, the police are also armed and deeply sympathetic to the racist, violent, and culturally resentful impulses normally attributed to the dark side of Jeff Foxworthy's America. Up to this point, NYPD and their blue-collar fellow-travellers have reached a kind of truce with the liberal forces that dominate this city, but unleashed by widespread social unrest, who knows what kinds of ugliness could ensue.
That is why I argue that the next Civil War, as murky as the lines of our previous war of brother against brother were, won't be even as well-defined as that one.
And, sadly, the fascists won in Spain. They were never defeated and Franco died in his bed of Parkinson's on November 20, 1975. If Obama wins this one, I fear an epic outbreak along all the traditional social and cultural and class lines in this country that could escalate, spurred on by rhetoric from the hate-spewers on talk radio, into a gradually-escalating civil conflict. Their side doesn't view any Democratic administration as a legitimate governing body. Add to that the racial component brought on by Obama's skin color, intensified by the cultural bigotry of his odd-sounding name, amid an economic crisis and a deeply unpopular war abroad, and you have the Ruling Class' Frankenstein's monster going off the rails in a likely violent national social upheaval.
I fear for the health of the candidate and that of our nation.
Get used to it and, for gawdssake, please leave the national stage now. Your sneering, angry old-man visage makes me cringe on sight. I can't imagine looking at that wrinkled, yellowed-teeth crypt-keeper face of yours for four years. By the look of the polls, I'm not the only one. I don't know how I'm going to make it until November 5th. OK, I know the election is on the 4th, but I'm going to have to see his picture (presumably in some kind of a red frame) on my Tee-Vee next to (delightfully!) low percentages for the entirety of that night, until some news anchor finally calls it for Barack Obama and McSnarl's campaign is finally euthanized. After that, or at least until after his concession speech, I won't have to look at Angry McMavericki-ness anymore.
And that will be a good day. Even if his scorched-earth campaign will leave in its wake a rage-filled and highly-motivated (to say nothing of ARMED) rump of a voting bloc with a persecution complex that could and likely will remain a threat not just to Obama's effective governance in the form of a rejection of his legitimacy (due to party affiliation or regional identity or educational level or race - specifics don't matter anyway, 'cuz he's just plain different - I mean LOOK at him!) but in fact to his physical person in the form of some crazed, racist loner out there - it only takes one and a gun - nursing a life-long grudge now ginned-up to red-line levels by Moose-a-lini's accusations of him being weird, strange, foreign, a traitor, in cahoots with our stated enemies in the most important and significant threat to civilization in the history of all human conflict called the War on Terra.
OK, so I have to say something about this. First, Broadway Carl has a wonderful post up right now that pretty neatly echoes my feelings about Obama's emergence as a viable candidate and what that has meant to me, so go read it and - may I say across the deafening roar of the inter-web "conversation" - hear, hear!
No, really, go read his post before continuing here. Go ahead. I'll wait.
OK, so now that you've read it, I have feelings about this:
What I see in his eyes is defeat. I see a man who has been not been sober in while, drunk on ambition and rage or doped up on Ambien (who knows?), finally seeing with his own eyes the horror he has wrought and knowing that he can do nothing about it.
Maybe he understands now and feels bad. Right now, I don't think so because I think he's got ambition and part of me even hangs this on his Barbie wife. Her money has paid for his political career and I have no doubt that they have had more than one conversation that went something like "What the fuck have I been paying for all these years!? I have underwritten all your crappy campaigns for all these years and godammit I want me a president!"
Or words to that effect.
I don't mean to deflect blame from Mavericky McMaximum-Maverick-ossity. He's a douche. Not as big a douche as The Quisling from Connecticut, but close. Barbie-doll McCain and how she got to be Ms. McMaverick is proof enough of that, but I think he does have shreds of decency in him, they've just been swamped by his Macbethian ambition to the point of irrelevance.
After the election, though...
When Congress is out of session and he is at one of his houses with a pissed-off Cindy and no one is calling him and he has hours and days to putter around the house and review his life, thinking back on flight school and Hanoi and the Keating Five and the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000 and all those ugly rallies he whipped up to solidify his base as some kind of revenge for what happened to him there... so many thoughts... so many regrets...
Especially if something should now happen to Obama. How could such an outcome not be blamed directly on the toxic sewer of the rhetoric of the last few weeks of his campaign, a stretch that has begun to resemble nothing so much as a political rally in Bavaria circa 1924 or 25?
How else to describe it? John McCain sold his soul. We know it. We've all known it for quite a while. His friends and loved ones know it, too, but I think they are too in love with his status and how it reflects on them to tell him, if any of them have even admitted it to themselves. He definitely hasn't admitted to himself yet.
But he will.
And that will be a dark, dark day in a lifetime of dark days for John Sidney McCain, who has so proudly held his honor as his greatest treasure to know that he sold even that. Maybe such a day will come, but then maybe he will simply slide into senility without ever having admitted to himself how very, terribly wrong he has been.
The man in that video will someday be able to admit it, perhaps even out loud and to other people if not just to himself, but such a man is having an ever harder time swimming out of the mental sewer of drugs, senility and bad advice in which he is now adrift.
It is a scary time in America and The Maverick is to blame if things get any scarier. If he were a true man of principle, wouldn't be here.
In recklessly stoking the fires of bigotry and hatred to near-maelstrom temperatures and then refusing to carry the torch himself, John McCain has surrendered legitimate political responsibility for their anger and yielded the floor to those whose rage now has no champion. In goading them on, planting seeds of doubt and sewing acres of hate while bravely promising to take the good fight to Obama’s door, McCain played to a Base -- and baseless -- fear for which he himself was the conquering Hero, a role he has no trouble imagining for himself. But this gutless little man, finding his own house burning after feckless arsonists in his employ set the Obama barn ablaze, has found he cannot stand the heat; with no lawful political means to control the burn, this is a fire that may spread without sense or sensibility, feeding on its own hot futility.
If those cowardly masses that saw a strong and righteous John McCain as the sole arbiter of their rage now find him a paper tiger frightened by his own swaggering shadow, they may appoint themselves Heroes in this contrived battle between Right and Wrong, Blue and Red, Black and White. A vigilante, after all, acts out of the perception that The System has failed, its leaders too cowardly or corrupt to take up the sword. They say politics abhors a vacuum. But this may be a fire that burns hottest when starved of McCain’s hot, fetid air.
John Sidney McCain is a racist. He is a rich, white, entitled, contemptuous racist who can't believe that he has to go through the motions of acting like Barack Obama is somehow his equal as a candidate, much less sharing a stage with a black man who is actually beating him in the polls.
As the Pig With Lipstick might put it: "Gollygeewillakers, what has the world come to?"
First, McSnarl said this last night at the debate:
Which gave us this less than 24 hours after he'd said it (goddamn I love me some inter-webs):
Which I think is awesome for incorporating in a mocking & humorous way the Freudian racist gaffe of a stupid, bumbling, short-tempered, muddle-headed old man who doesn't know or understand how the world around him has passed him by, only dimly comprehending (as a barnyard animal dimly comprehends a change in the weather) that for some reason the world is refusing to conform to his will and that as a result he isn't getting what he wants RIGHT NOW and GODDAMMIT HE WAS A P.O.W. (haven't you heard?) and that uppity n*gger is not showing proper respect for the white man!
Or, as the Rude Pundit put it after Grandpa McSimpson refused to make eye-contact with Obama during the last debate:
John McCain looked like nothing so much as a plantation owner just after the end of the Civil War forced to have a conversation with one of his freed slaves. There's no way he was gonna look that nigger in the eye and allow him to think they're equals. Used to be you could lynch a darkie for addressing a white man by his first name. Now, they think they can talk to you like they're humans.
Refusing eye-contact? How about refusing a handshake! (h/t Broadway Carl)
The bailout, which is SOOOO last week I know, is (as Mr. Sideshow wrote a couple of weeks ago), long before Hank "The Donald Rumsfeld of Economics" Paulson's "Give-Me-All-The-Money-And-Don't-Fucking-Ask-Me-Any-Questions-Or-The-Economy-Gets-It" three-page plan was scuttled in The House - the People's Chamber - by the "Tru-Believers" in the Rethugli-bot coalition (before being rescued by The Senate - The Plutocrat's Chamber) because - weaned on the poison milk of the Reagan Revolution as they are - they never understood that all that free-market rhetoric was just so much malarky spread by the Ruling Class to get their signature pet policies package-dealt with all those the Culture War rostrums that get the shrieking wingnut brigades nice and agitated for the end result of election victories that translate via Abramoff and Delay and the like into more money in the pockets of the Monied Class. The poor dears, those useful tools, willing pawns in a game they are too stupid or stubborn to understand (h/t to Lance Mannion):
One final, monstrous smash-and-grab raid on the treasury before they leave office
That about sums up the entire Bush Administration, don't it? W has been the very culmination of that vaunted "Reagan Revolution." He is the distilled essence of all that is ugly, greedy, simplistic, violent and mendacious in the entire intellectual (if that's even an appropriate word for this willfully ignorant bunch of hate-spewing know-nothings) underpinnings of the modern GOP.
We can all see that now as Grandpa McSimpson gets snarling and ugly at the uppity n*gger who dares challenge his white priviledge, as he sics Ms. Spunky McBeauty-Queen on him like some racist Alabama cop in a black & white newsreel from 1965 would sic a German Shephard on a black man who didn't know his place, but this time with lipstick. Sarah Palin is a racist. And the crowds who attend her speeches are, too.
In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
Because McCain was never radical enough for the fruitloops who run the GOP, he has been kept away from the heavy machinery. Only now, after the entire Rethugli-goon ascendancy of the last 30 years has been revealed to be the massive power and money grab that it was way back when Nixon Went A-Courtin' the racists in Old Dixieland, when the press let Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's senile brain just make shit up and they smiled and called it cute, when all our Defenders of the First Amendment marched lockstep into the panty-sniffing abyss to tsk-tsk about dalliances as the cackling wingnut gremlins of the rightwing impeached a lawfully elected and popular president of the opposing party just for spite and then pivoted 180ยบ to poo-poo the so-called howling moonbat liberals and other assorted Dirty Fucking Hippies who didn't think that maybe launcing headlong into a land war in the Heart of Arabia for the sake of cheap oil - while lead by a shifltless moron the shitkickers in fly-over country wanted to have a beer with - was necessarily the wisest and (as that shiftless moron's corrupt daddy would sputter) "prudent" action to take in the wake of an attack by men who had arisen from the educated middle class of a different country who was ostensibly one of our allies and whose iron-fisted ruling family is a well-known and well-documented friend to the entire clan of that aforementioned shiftless moron who would lead that kamikaze charge.
Only now, after Junior has wrecked the whole machine, run it aground, burned up the pistons and ripped out the radio (in case he can hock it on his way back to Crawford), have they let McSnarl have the keys.
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer at "Trinity," site of the first atom bomb test Alamogordo, New Mexico July 16, 1945
Sarah Palin scares the shit out of me. She is the distilled perfection of everything that is wicked, sanctimonious, self-righteous, venal, condescending, venomous, ugly and cruel in the American character, as refined by the post-Nixon crime syndicate known as the Grand Old Party. All wrapped in a curvy, buxom package with a winning smile that makes her inner-ugly all the more harrowing to recognize.
For the bulk of the Rethugli-bot Party, it will always be the 1960's and no matter how much they use "The Vietnam Experience" as an umbrella code-word for all the turmoil of that decade (so they don't have to openly bitch about the Civil Right Movement - which is actually what has kept them pissed-off all these years), the truth is that they are simply authoritarians at heart. The ultimate goal of that authoritarianism varies from the cornpone Christo-Nazis of the Dominionist Movement to the hyper-macho corporatist gangstahs of Wall Street to the draft-dodging Old Money cowards in the Ivy League ranks of the neo-cons to the woman-hating frat-dudes across Middle America to the Confederate battle-flag waving red-neck hillbilly race-warriors of Old Dixie, but they can stand united in their HATE of the Dirty Fucking Hippie. It has been the glue that has held the GOP together since the waning days of Nixon's criminal enterprise and because the Rethuglicans have over these forty years grown more and more powerful without ever fulfilling the deepest desires of any of the above-mentioned groups, not even at the pinnacle of their power with Newt and Delay and the Impeachment (and vindictive humiliation) of a President (for a blowjob), the Coalition of Hate has been unraveling ever since. McCain inherits the final tattered remnants of this once-mighty Orc Army and has found in Sarah Palin an Uruk-Hai to unite them in their hatred for one last time, for one last, desperate lunge at power before the whole lumpy group finally disintegrates into bickering factions with their own unique, Balkanized puddles of hatred to nurse.
They are Hate Junkies and Sarah Palin is just the Tony Montana to give them the main-line red-meat they so desperately crave.
She is not the political light-weight many took her to be only a week ago. She is a pit viper. She is a one-woman wrecking crew and she will destroy all she touches because the Rethugli-goons would rather blow up the world than see the dirty fucking hippies get anything except beaten back, beaten down and beaten to death.
You cannot negotiate with someone who wants you dead.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Though I enthusiastically supported Obama's candidacy and am moved beyond words by what his ascension to the presidency says about who we have become and are becoming as a nation, I have said since he became the nominee and his victory began to look inevitable that he will likely piss me off more than make me proud for the majority of time he's in office. He's a centrist, I'm not and in a world where a post-Nixon-Reagan-Bush1&2 GOP has pulled the center WA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-AY to the right over the last forty some-odd years, being in the center is still sitting way too far to the right for me. I'm thinking of O's FISA vote, just to name one example.
