Mr. Cruz goes to Washington

My nonagenarian father has been having problems keeping his blood pressure up.  I suggested watching Ted Cruz reading Dr. Suess.  Perhaps I should have titled this Green Eggs and Spam, but all in all, it really isn't funny. No attempt by a bought and paid for, zealot for hire to block the democratic process with endless impassioned idiocy is really funny.  Unfortunately it isn't rare or unique any more.

But if you're feeling calm or tranquil and even happy with life
If the day is fair and sky is blue
And that bothers you
I've just the thing you'll want to view:

Rubio Slippers

Hey, I'm not a scientist, man,  says Florida's Republican Senator and neither am I, but then I'm not an imbecile nor like Marco Rubio, willing to prostitute that pale and slimy vestigial appendage which he calls his integrity for a few votes.  Integrity, that nasty noisome thing he uses like a mop to soak up the sticky, slimy, scummy votes from the peep-show floor of  Southern politics.

He's not a scientist, so how can we expect him to know that the entire universe wasn't created by a sentient entity called Yahweh in seven "days?"  Can we even expect him to ask why we can see further than 6000 light years if it's only 6000 years old?  No, he'd have to be a scientist, he says and even so, there are different theories, just as there are different theories about whether or not  the Earth is flat and the universe, as it says in the bible, has water above and below it and there's a layer a few hundred feet 'above' us where magic creatures live.

You'd have to be a scientist, and even then you'd be baffled by all the 'theories' that abound which although solidly bolstered by irrefutable evidence and buttressed with repeatable observation are -- only theories. 

“I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.” 

I guess those would be parents of unsound mind or minds as lacking in scope and commitment to honesty as Marco's.  Honesty?  No, I'm not talking about the honesty that would require one to rank 'theories' according to their correspondence to the observation of nature, I'm talking about the dishonest assumption that parents are being prevented from telling their children that some god created us from a clot, a lump of clay or an ear of corn.  A polite person would call it hyperbole. I would call it a lie. I would see it as a continuation of the Republican libel and the war against modernity and science.

 The government has nothing to say about what you teach your kids, but it does have something to say about what I pay, what we pay to have them taught and face it, Rubio doesn't want them taught about 13 Mayan creator gods or Refafu, or Chuckwu or Osiris or Allah. He's simply trying to find support amongst the most ignorant, the deliberately stupid, the accidentally stupid and the demented. He's fishing for the Christian Creationists with fear as the bait. He's playing to the Christian Crusaders who want this to be a nation under God with an established religion.

There are signs that this brand of Christianism, this brand of Conservatism are weakening. Some see it in the entrails of this last election. There's evidence that blind belief is losing ground. That's what I want to believe, of course and that's why I'm not qualified to answer.

Ablow the man down

So, another Monday morning in this best of all possible countries; this greatest there ever was since the Big Bang and greatest there will ever be until Jesus comes back. And what do I read in the news this proud American morning?

Mark Sanford, as though he hadn't disgraced himself enough as Governor of South Carolina, calls President Obama a spear chucker.  Don't tempt me, Mark.

The American Family Association, that Far Right group of  Freaky Fundies masquerading as an American Family Association tells it's cult members to keep their kids out of school for an Oct 30
anti-bullying event, “Mix It Up For Lunch Day,” they insist, is 

"just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda."  

Imagine trying to tell kids it isn't the Christian thing to do to beat up gay kids or torment them to the point of suicide.  What would Jesus do, after all?

And on Fox & Friends some alleged psychiatrist aptly named Ablow declared that Vice President Biden was probably demented based on what he saw in the 'debate' with Lyin' Ryan.

“I did not evaluate Joe Biden, but if someone said to me, we want you to do what’s really required. You have to put dementia on the differential diagnosis. You have to say bizarre laughter, interrupting. If this were your dad or your grandfather, wouldn’t you say if you brought him to me, Keith, tell me, is he suffering with dementia? Because he can’t seem to listen, he’s laughing inappropriately.”

I did not evaluate, so I know the problem. How very Fox.  Is this what they call an Ablow job?    to tell the truth, Ryan makes me laugh at him  too and I just can't listen to the goddamn lies and sedition from the foreign owned Fascist propaganda organization any more, nor do I think laughter is what is really needed here as a national response to the Idiot's Crusade. Bring back the laughing stock!

I read this morning at Raw Story that

"A Florida judge has ruled that a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who believes he is the “Prince of God” and is convinced that he will be resurrected to sit for eternity at God’s right hand is sane and can put to death next week."

Good to know that such people are considered sane in Florida and perhaps that explains why according to my local paper 81% of this county's inmates plan to vote for Mitt the Shit and Lyin' Ryan. So the hell with the Supreme Court ruling against killing the insane, We don't need no damn government and we're gonna do the Christian thing anyway.  Jesus is going to need a man like Prince John Ferguson when it comes time to shove the Jews into the lake of fire after the Rapture.

My current issue of Newsweek has a lurid cover story proving that heaven is real because some guy who went into a coma from meningitis says he went to heaven and met beautiful women there.  Another straight to the recycling bin issue.

So perhaps we have to put dementia in the differential diagnosis of our national psyche and definitely we have to be grateful there isn't a YHWH to blow America to kingdom come or to wherever Sodom wound up, because if this is the best of all possible countries, no god worth his apocalypse would stand for our sad, demented, ugly and hate filled planet. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that and perhaps that's what the newly discovered comet 2012 S1 (ISON) due to fill the sky in about a year is all about. If it doesn't blow us all to hell, perhaps the fundies and righties and all the other dimwitted, demented friends of the Fox will dress in purple robes and tennis shoes and take the Cyanide Express to the Mother Ship.  Even in the worst of times, there's always hope.

If I had a son

"You know, if I had a son he would look like Treyvon,"

said the president and I guess that's true to some extent. He'd have dark skin, of course, but I took it to mean that his son would be an ordinary looking, ordinary acting 17 year old and not a shooting gallery target.

Newt Gingrich took it differently because he saw the comment, which was clearly an attempt to show compassion and to suggest that he couldn't avoid putting himself in the place of the grieving father of Treyvon Martin, as an opportunity to launch another Fox-faux outrage. Hasn't the entire Republican reaction to the election of Barack Obama been a collection of phony, trumped up, fabricated and exasperatingly stupid outrages?

" Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn't look like him?"

said Newt to Sean Hannity on Fox News. Certainly Fox is the Cape Canaveral; the launch pad of most such desperate grasping at rhetorical straws -- the place where the unscrupulously ambitious launch calumny after slander after blatant lie, not because this president is beyond criticism, but because they, the Republican insiders, are themselves accessories before, during and after the fact of the collapse of our economy, the corruption and outrageous economic policies and the unjustified war that precipitated it and only wild claims can distract the public from remembering. Only wild, unsubstantiated and preferably ridiculous statements can rally the bigotry against honesty and decency.

So is the president suggesting that it was only a tragedy because a black kid was killed? Only a Republican could twist words and facts to make it seem so and only a man of the "I will never apologise for America" persuasion could reflect on the Republican support for segregation, opposition to civil rights for minorities, females and non-Christians and not see the killing as part of a continuum; part of a mentality they've been promoting for at least a century.

The gambit is an old and tired and disreputable one, as much so as is Gingrich himself and the others Fox News gives the megaphone to. "Is George Washington suggesting that he should be king?" In fact he suggested the opposite, but the question suggests that there is indeed a question. Is Newt Gingrich a dishonest, morally unscrupulous, hypocritical liar blinded by an unholy ambition and hunger for power? Does a newt shit in the swamp?

Boo

"With regards to immigration policy, that those that come here illegally should not be given favoritism or a special route to becoming residents or citizens that's not given to those people that stayed in line legally,"

-Willard Mitt Romney-

One would think, if one had the fortitude to spend more than a moment watching what passes for television news, that for the last half decade or so there were nothing of more than momentary interest happening than the American political circus and perpetual campaign. Geological and meteorological calamities do get reported, but the vast bulk of air time is given over to "the candidates" and the unchallenged lies they perpetrate. There are no pauses between campaigns, no half time shows and no seventh inning stretches.

I say circus although circuses are intended to be family entertainment these days and freak shows have gone the way of Times Square peep shows, cock fights and lynchings -- and sadly, the traces of any sense of shame, decency and honesty that ever had the audacity to interrupt or question the ragemongering has disappeared.

At the South Carolina Fox News debate Monday last (and I call it debate with all awareness of the inherent dishonesty of the appellation) Mitt Romney was booed, not because of what discernible policies he may be espousing at the moment, but because his father was born in Mexico. I don't recall any booing in response to John McCain's having been born in Panama, but of course anything done or said more than ten minutes ago is irrelevant in today's Republican world and that hobgoblin called consistency is always foolish.

George Romney, Mitt's father, entered the US illegally from Mexico, which might have given a better, more decent, less ambnitious Mitt pause before making such harsh statements about not tolerating any mercy for illegal Mexican immigrants, but of course it's a racial and ethnic issue, not an immigration one despite assurances to the contrary. The name is Romney after all, not Ramirez -- and this was South Carolina, Glossolalia, Holy Ghost Power and Rebel Flags, just he way God likes it.

But the mood of the South Carolinian Republican Rabble was ugly and when moderator Juan Williams asked if it wasn't a bit insulting to minorities when Newt Gingrich spewed that nonsense about black people needing to demand jobs instead of food stamps, as though the unemployment problem were caused by laziness and a president that encourages it, the ugly mob conservative citizens booed the black moderator just as Republican snake pits at previous "debates" have booed Child Labor laws, booed a serving US soldier and cheered the killing of prisoners in large numbers.

Is it any worse that they insist on being called 'conservatives' and not snarling beasts and that our only sources of news collaborate in that farce? Is it surprising that the state of South Carolina, still unrepentant for having been the first to take up arms against the United States, would once again boo at Ron Paul's suggestion that the 'Golden Rule' so often quoted as a core Christian value be applied in US foreign policy?

" Quit warmongering, stop going to war, and treat other nations like we want to be treated. "

Hell, no! Boo the bastard! Ask not what Jesus would do, ask what Attila the Hun would do, what a tribe of savage head hunters and cannibals would do, what a pack of giggling, stinking hyenas would do while ripping and tearing at the corpse of America.

It's been suggested to me, that I should approach such people with a more polite demeanor -- that the people who have made most of human history a horror story need to be given a chance to discuss things, to debate things and that monsters and the people who promote monsters can be persuaded by kind words and reason to change.

Boooooooo!

Attention Republicans: Bugger Thyself

Short, sweet, and to the point!

Update: Our redoubtable raccoon, who is still recovering from a recent injury, has remembered us in our darkest hour.  Here is her comment which sums up the Swash Zone consensus:

As much as I abhor uncivil discourse, there has come a time now when our country and our lives are in the greatest of danger and we need to get loud and angry and if the "F" bomb gets us attention then I say drop it.

I'm tired of their glassy eyed, manical rantings and their disrespect for the political process and the judicial process and the president. I'm tired of hearing about some god that hates fags, wants Jews and blacks and liberals to die, and wants us to toss our constitution for good ole Kristian Law that will set us back 100 years. I would take the high road if it still existed but it does not - they have torn it down and ground it under their heels, now we fight fire with fire or we will lose everything we hold dear (Rockync, 10:02 AM - September 05, 2011).

Nonetheless, my original title was a bit over the top even for a stalwart dinosaur. In deference to the Saurischian, I have removed the F-Bomb and retitled this post ... with my humble cephalopod apologies.