Tea and Reason

Rick Santorum: the whole line-up of Tea Party candidates -- can't stand to listen to them, not allowed to drown them in a cesspit. What's a patriot to do?

We have all the 'important' Teabagger candidates now segueing smoothly from condemning the president for action to laughing at his inaction after he acted contrary to their threats and demands and tantrums. Santorum, in case you haven't heard, was quick on the draw in assuring us that President Obama was an "indecisive" man who can't take any credit for the fall of the Libyan despot, Moamar Gaddafi and his sons. Obviously, an Obama success; a mission actually accomplished, must not be allowed to interfere with the program of sabotaging our country, its economy, its prestige and anything good we ever pretended to stand for.

Of course, people who admire vermin like Santorum; Tea people who call their jive talking, hate stinking, subversive jihad a political party, aren't biologically capable of asking themselves why Obama was to be impeached just a short time ago for being too decisive by assisting NATO in helping Libyan rebels to overthrow the government -- but by having done so is "indecisive." Like other satanic saviors who come to mind, the lie's the thing. Keep saying it, shouting it repeating it, blogging it, blasting it from the Foxhole relentlessly around the clock and it becomes true. The steadfast become indecisive, the brave cowardly, and anyone who isn't an outright thief becomes a Communist.

One doesn't need to walk on water to be seen as a savior to these atavistic genetic accidents desperate for self esteem. One needs only to be a bigot, a fool a scoundrel and a bastard. (No offense intended to people whose parents never married.) Frankly any person who tolerates and supports such anti-American Tea Party idiocy is doing more than trying to make the president fail so they can put a moron and a crook in his place, they're assuring, promoting and cheering the failure of our country. Remember, the only difference between reason and treason is a T.

Obama goes to bat for the bad guys

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
Saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

-Phil Collins-

The truth can set you free, and it can get you hanged. It all depends on who you know and how much they owe you. Yes, we may live in a world of denialism, mythology and cover-ups but I hope truth still has a few teeth left. That's why I'm rarely the first to scream 'treason' when someone blows a whistle or leaks a secret. Sometimes it even gives me hope.

So people have been asking me, since my last post on the latest Wikileaks fatwah, just what we learned that was useful enough to warrant embarrassing our delicate diplomatic efforts. Well a number of things, in my opinion. For one, we now have cause to reflect upon the Obama administration's efforts to thwart international prosecution of Bush, Cheney et al, for using torture to extract confessions from suspects.

Spain has had a lot of experience with torture and gruesome treatment of prisoners from the Inquisition right up through the last of the Fascist dictators. I think they've grown a bit intolerant and perhaps touchy on the subject of right wing excesses. So perhaps when that country set out to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, our current administration had many reasons to worry about turning tables, embarrassing revelations and the repercussions of such an investigation on our future conduct. Without Assenge and Wikileaks, we might never have known that Obama and company had a rare bipartisan success in 'persuading' Spain to squelch the effort. It's nice to know and it sheds some light on the puzzling friendliness that Bush has recently shown the man his party has been presenting as something loathsome and dangerous.

We didn't need any breaches of state secrecy however to learn that Dick Cheney's vast ossuary of a closet still has occupants with inconvenient stories to tell. Nigeria is planning to charge him and his Halliburton cronies with bribery and to issue an Interpol warrant, says Bloomberg Businessweek. You may recall that the Right Wing US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing Congress to ditch The Foreign Corrupt Practices act which makes such practices illegal under US law. If you were puzzled as to why we needed so badly to do that so quickly, perhaps we now can answer the question.

Will Wikileaks make Obama think twice about protecting war profiteers and international criminals - maybe even think a third time about trying to portray leakers as dangerous traitors now that we have had a glimpse of what's been going on?

What's in your wallet?

The prospect of foreclosure is frightening enough to the many people who are having trouble making mortgage payments and who fear losing their homes. It's frightening enough without the prospect of strange men crashing through the back door in the middle of the night.

Even worse for some people here in The Sunshine State, folks who are simply a bit behind in payments but who are not in foreclosure have been treated to a surprise breaking and entering by representatives of one of those banks that love to advertise how they're on your side. Listen to the 911 call from one frightened woman and put yourself in her position and ask yourself what you would do if the man in black kicked in your door. I certainly know what I would do and what the law allows me to do to a possibly armed unannounced midnight caller. It would involve more than an angry letter to J.P. Morgan.

The hired thugs of our friendly banking industry have done worse than frightening people half to death in a way Pauly Walnuts could only envy. There are stories of home invasions at wrong addresses and one Jason Grodensky from nearby Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with the good fortune to have no mortgage at all had his house foreclosed on by Bank of America. What's in your wallet?

The publicity has been bad enough that major banks are curtailing foreclosure viking raids or freezing foreclosures entirely for the moment. Nancy Pelosi and some 30 Democrats in the house are calling for an investigation in their typically socialist way and Attorney General Eric Holder has announced he will be looking into it. Bloomberg News reports that some 7 states are investigating charges that false documents and signatures have been used to justify hundreds of thousands of possible fraudulent foreclosures and their attendant Viking raids against surprised and terrified homeowners.

So it's all going to be taken care of right? The Democrats are on the side of the people and against those huge, ugly hordes of corporate Visigoths and their paper battering rams, right? They control the Senate and the House and they'd never let the Republicans rubber stamp the right of Corporate Huns to lie, cheat and bypass every code of human decency since the Code of Hammurabi and the Proclamation of Telepinu -- right?

Don't be too sure, because a bill that may do just that now sits on President Obama's desk that somehow oozed through our lefty, anti-business, death-to-Capitalism Congress. Stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Robert Casey used some obscure procedure to take the bill away from the Senate Judiciary committee and the Senate then immediately passed it without debate and by unanimous consent. There was no one in the gallery to sing Whose side are you on.

It's not fraud when we do it

We've certainly seen and heard plenty of haughty harumphment aver the tax problems of Tim Geithner. We've had more of the "more of the same" from the same folks who gave us, or tried to give us Sarah Palin as a Joan of Arc reformer and an upholder of the kind of ethics Republicans like to talk about while trying to keep us from examining their own failings.

We're not seeing a hell of a lot about Sarah Palin's tax problems. It seems that it hadn't occurred to her that the additional "travel related" money she was being paid for staying at home in Wasilla ( since her home isn't in the capitol, Juneau) was taxable income. Of course we learned a long time ago that the State of Alaska has been paying for all kinds of family expenses like tickets to basketball games, and sled races, but these things are "private matters" according to her spokeswoman. That's because she's a Republican in a Red State. otherwise any personal detail would be a public matter and could and would be used against her by her party's scandal machine. I'm still waiting for the "Liberal Press" to make a fuss about it. I'm still waiting to hear why everything we do or say on the phone or in our mail: why everything we buy and everywhere we go is no longer a private matter as far as the Government is concerned.

Next time they tell me what a bad break Sarah got from the mean old media, I might just have to mention this, as well as to relate my litany of her other lies.

Of course Alaska is in for some hard times, since 90% of its revenue comes from soaking the oil companies, hard as that might be to explain to laissez faire lovers who supported her anti-Tax rhetoric. " living within our means and putting money aside for a rainier day" is something, like ethics, that Sarah likes to give lip service to while running up debt like a mainstream Republican.

But they're still talking about her as a Presidential Candidate, which is fine with me. Let her select Joe the Plumber as VP too and maybe the accountant she used to hide her expense account shenanigans for Secretary of the Treasury as well. The country's going to hell anyway and we might just as well get it over with. You betcha!

Morning quickie

So only days before the second Bush leaves town (not that he spends much of his time there) his father is already touting Jeb Bush as a presidential candidate.

Now let's see, we had Prescott Bush laundering money for Hitler and getting caught, We had Neil Bush involved in scandalous S&L shenanigans that cost us billions and getting off unscathed, we had George who made the dubious claim of being "out of the loop" during the Iran-Contra scandal, we had George the second who officially sealed the incriminating evidence and who is certainly a contestant for the worst American president (and I think we can include Central and South America in the contest) and perhaps we'll have another Bush, by and by.

Now how many gang members have to screw us before we can call it a gang bang?

It's my party and I'll lie if I want to

They're taking the girl from the streets of London to Ascot and passing her off as a debutante. A few weeks of diction lessons, some new clothes and they can pull it off, but for Chrissakes, don't let her say more than two words to anyone! No cameras, no audio, no reporters to observe what fork she uses, what diphthongs she distorts -- and be careful to introduce her to the Duke and the Dauphin so she won't mistake them for the Prime Minister.

Yes, you've seen the Broadway show, the movie, but no, this isn't a bet between two upper class gentlemen over brandy and cigars at the Reform Club. It's a bunch of thugs, goons, warmongers, Jesocrats, robber barons and Mafiosi trying to pass off the most unsuitable major candidate in American history as a statesman by pretending she's having substantive conversations with important people.

Palin's crew locked out AP and CNN from her introduction to Mohmmad Karzai today before they could catch her picking her nose on camera or asking the President of Afghanistan how things are in Australia. She will go through the same farce with other leaders tomorrow and her supporters and other damned fools will look shocked if we mention the absolutely unprecedented ( at least in America ) attempt to usher a candidate into office with no questions asked.

No, it's not a couple of tweedy old professors playing condescending games with the proles, it's the outfit; the wise guys taking over the country of the gleefully oppressed.