EXPOSING THE PUPPET MASTERS BEHIND THE PUPPETS

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!

A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!

The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

(W.B. Yeats)

This weekend, your intrepid Octopus stirred up controversy within our ranks. It started with this post by our friend and colleague, Captain Fogg, who invoked this post from our friend and colleague, Lindsay of Majikthise, about the latest Glenn Beckism. As Lindsay states:

“In the clip, Beck claims that Americorps has "just received half a trillion dollars in funding." What the hell is he talking about? […] It's even funnier that Beck's guests played along with the half-trillion claim. Surely they knew it was false. This wasn't just an incidental mistake, it was the hook for Beck's crazy conspiracy theory.”

No argument! Except that Glenn Dreck can spin lies and deceptions until the cows come home. Does this mean we should preoccupy ourselves with confutations every night after sunset? And what of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and the other dissemblers? Do we redouble our efforts and counter every lie from every dissembler in the Milky Way?

No doubt, Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh offend us on many levels. Deceptions offend us. Sneers and jeers offend us. Ridiculing a popular actor with Parkinson’s disease offends us. Accusing 9/11 widows of profiting from their husbands’ deaths offends us. They offend by invoking a deep emotional response within us: They remind us of schoolyard bullies who torment victims for sadistic pleasure. They push the boundaries of uncivil discourse deeper into unchartered cesspools. Outrageous people say outrageous things ... just to grab attention.

Here is my question: Do we allow fools to lead us by the nose when we pay too much attention? Do we aid and abet the viral spread of these messages? Lindsay offers a reasonable albeit expected response (August 29, 2009 at 06:50 PM):

“It's a very tough question. I think it's one of those strategic decisions that can only be evaluated retrospectively … John Kerry initially ignored the Swift Boat Liars. In retrospect, it seems like he should have hit back hard and early ….

In the face of uncertainty, my instinct is to counter the lies because I think that's an inherently worthwhile pursuit. I think it's worth knowing what these people are up to, even if the exposure gives them a little extra notoriety

Captain Fogg agrees:

”I don't think we can say Beck would go away if we ignored him. I think history proves over and over again that hate and bigotry have to be confronted.”

Yet, I can’t help but ask this nagging question: If we pay too much attention to the puppet, do we ignore the puppet masters behind the puppet? Does the court jester divert our attention from the secret usurpers who plot against the throne with stealth and guile?

Here is a little noticed footnote in American history. In 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified before Congress about a alleged plot to overthrow President Roosevelt. Although no prosecutions followed his testimony, one Gerald McGuire did attempt to recruit Butler to lead a 500,000 man march on Washington that would topple the President. Other alleged conspirators were members of the Liberty League, which slandered FDR as a Communist who surrounded himself with Jews. Members of the Liberty League included the plutocrats of American industry: U.S. Steel, General Motors, General Foods, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Names that figured prominently in the conspiracy: J. P. Morgan, Irénée DuPont, the Mellon and Remington families, and Prescott Bush.

Rightwing Republicanism was born in 1934 and their aim was to dismantle the New Deal and restore laissez-faire economics. Today, we are witnessing the same struggle against powerful interests, or as John Hoefle states in The Fascists Versus FDR, Then And Now: “This battle is not, as some would have us believe, a historical artifact, but an ongoing fight between a world which desires to be free, and a parasitic oligarchy [that] wishes to rule over us as if we were cattle.” The oligarchs of the 1930s may be long gone but their heirs and assigns live among us. Who are they?

Maybe we should start with William McGuire of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s leading health insurer. According to Forbes’ list of highest paid CEOs, his pay of $124.8 million would cover the average health insurance premiums of 34,000 people. Two years earlier, William McGuire received $1.7 Billion in pay and bonuses … roughly the health insurance premiums of 463,000 people. Why should one man be worth 463,000 Les Miserables!

How about the Walton family, perhaps the most influential family in America with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion. They have used their Wal-Mart PAC to avoid paying taxes, block environmental regulations, resist corporate transparency, hinder workers rights, stop port security, thwart tighter regulations on food safety, oppose estate taxes, and kill universal healthcare. They are the quintessential state capitalists whose self-aggrandizing exercise of power leaves us poorer.

In contrast, Glenn Beck is the quintessential shlameil who spins malapropisms and misspelled words from an alcohol-addled brain. When we focus on the village idiot of Pottersville, we ignore Mr. Potter at our peril. If Glenn Beck ever had booze on his breath, William McGuire and the Walton family have blood on their hands.

Thus, your tentacle-entangled Octopus would like to see the progressive blogosphere spend more time investigating the puppet masters and less time head-butting circus clowns.

Update: A nifty YouTube video from our good friend. Matt Osborne.

Argumentum ad lapidem

It's an argument by throwing stones and it's almost all they do these days. Anything can be dismissed by calling it "lefty" "Liberal" or "Socialist" and all the faithful will giggle and smile while swallowing the argument.

Take Andrew Sullivan, for instance: he's "a Lefty sockpuppet" according to Jules Crittenden because by talking about the hiring of wives, daughters and sons of political celebrities, like Jenna Bush and Liz Cheney as journalists or commentators in "snarky" fashion without calling attention to the media frenzy over the late Ted Kennedy is an obviously "lefty" thing.

What's "lefty" about America's obsession with celebrities? Not much, as the Michael Jackson / Princess Diana episodes would suggest and to imply that Ted Kennedy's long and influential career is of interest to the country simply and only because he was the Late President's brother is a bit more "sock-puppety" than Oscar the Grouch's opposition to everything.

Yes, Americans ( and many others) are obsessed with celebrity worship, but Ted Kennedy had a very long, very influential career while Jenna? Let's just say her future as a journalist of merit is still hypothetical and media investment in her has more to do with her father's notoriety than with a distinguished body of essays, commentaries and investigations. It's a very false equivalence Jules and it makes you look desperate. It makes you look like little more than a tube sock with some buttons sewn on and a persona that does nothing more than repeat "lefty, lefty."

It's an easy bit of Schauspiel and easy to produce. Perhaps you can get the letter H or the number 4 to sponsor it.

In the corner

". . . whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether they worked”

said George F. Will regarding the use of torture. How sad that anyone considers this man "conservative" or in fact listens to him at all. Although he supported a commission to study (obfuscate) the matter on ABC's This Week yesterday, Will seems to consider an extreme utilitarianism a valid moral measure. If it works to reduce crime, why not human sacrifice? Perhaps Will would like to be on the commission to "study" that.

Although the idea that a practical end justifies any means or makes crime legal or worse, is the basis of moral judgment, is frankly horrifying and although such thinking may long have been with us, it hasn't, to my knowledge been so clearly championed. The idea that such things still need to be re-examined is sickening, considering that we used opposition to this kind of Spencerian social Darwinism as a rallying cry in WW II and it's more sickening still that Will can call opposition to it "liberal" and Dick Cheney can call it "far left."

Have even the most articulate supporters of Republican policy run so far out of arguments that they have to resort to these mindless dichotomies? A cornered rat does not think of right and wrong and neither, apparently does a cornered Republican. It's just me against you and anything I do to you is justified.

Summer raving

Those lazy, hazy, crazy conspiracy theories of Summer are still with us and not just in the deep South. Majikthise gives us a clip of Glenn Beck, Fox News' designated madman, discussing the prospect of Americorps being a cover for President Obama's own private army - a kind of American SS if you will. Just the kind of zombie troops he will need to disarm the Armed Retards of Texas and deliver our country into the hands of Sauropods from Saturn. Just like FDR did with the WPA.

Obama has given the job training and public service agency "half a trillion dollars" to turn them into an elite fighting force to use against Americans, presumably after the Pentagon balks and Blackwater opts out. The Pentagon would be jealous of all that funding - if there was a particle of truth in this seditious crock of Glennbeckery.

Now don't get me wrong, I do not reject conspiracy theories out of hand. There certainly were some involved in bringing on Bush's Second War and a number of less violent ones involving raiding the public treasury, but I say that because there is credible evidence for it. There never is for Beck's ravings. In fact the idea seems to be that total absence of evidentiary support is not only proof of conjecture, but a large screen upon which to project the ideas he comes up with by sticking his head in a paper bag full of aromatic hydrocarbons. Never mind the proof of his dishonesty, the folks who have been backed into a corner don't care about evidence. The people who hired him care nothing at all whether their viewers are human or subhuman or anti-human as long as they tune in, turn on and freak out.

Heck of a job

"Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides? What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means? Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing? How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?"

These are the questions asked in the New York Times Magazine article about New Orleans' Memorial Hospital. You'll remember that, abandoned and without power with high winds and rising water making evacuation impossible, some patients, perhaps as many as 17 were given lethal doses of morphine and sedatives as an alternative to letting them suffer and die of heat, dehydration, starvation, drowning or from the failure of the machines keeping them alive. While the times appears to be asking questions about personal responsibility, the timing makes it vulnerable to being boarded and looted.

Rightly suspecting the imminent hijacking of this story by anti-health care propagandists, Hanna Rosin writes "pre-emptively" at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish that

"this story shows the opposite of what would happen under government mandated health care reform. The reason the hospital staff got stuck having to make all these terrible decisions is because they were abandoned, and on their own. There were no established procedures, no regulations, no guidelines. There was just them, exhausted and overwhelmed, and a few dozen very ill patients unhooked from their respirators."

Would an HMO or a privately owned, for-profit facility have been better prepared or better able to get National Guard helicopters to the scene ipso facto? We can expect to hear that this is a logical conclusion. It's not.

I'm sure Rosin is right and that this, like any other pieces of flotsam that can be dragged out of the flood and into the argument will be used to show that the Government is poison and corporations are the antidote. In fact, that the government was unable to help in this circumstance owes much to the lack of planning and disdain for taking responsibility that has followed upon decades of Reagan-inspired sabotage of our institutions. Since there never really has been real evidence for the Reagan theorem that Government is the problem because it is the government and Government has no solutions and Government should give way to private, for profit management, the Republican controlled administrations have been forced to manufacture a scenario by insuring impotence, corruption and incompetence in almost all areas, including most obviously FEMA.

The Dish quotes an unidentified staff member as saying:

"This was totally against every fiber in my body.” But “we were abandoned by the government, we were abandoned by Tenet, and clearly nobody was going to take care of these people in their dying moments.”

and I'm sure this will be picked up on as though the failure is intrinsic to government itself and not to a government that was Rightie-rigged and Brownie led against adequate response.

Regardless of whether the euthanized patients could have been evacuated or should have been left "in God's hands" none of this makes a valid argument against public health care, but we're not used to validity or even honesty in this fight and this struggle to make us believe that the government of the people, by the people should be sold off and all decisions about individual life, liberty and pursuit of happiness be determined by how much profit it makes for someone else.

Beck and the Burning Bag

Remember the Halloween trick with the flaming bag of dog crap? Eons of experience show that leaving it alone is the best policy because you can't stamp it out without getting shit all over your porch and on your shoes. It's an apt comparison, I think, to what's happening with Glenn Beck and the boycott of his incoherent hate-fests. Despite Fox having lost some 4 dozen sponsors, his ratings seem to be going up.

The LA Times tells us that according to his latest Nielsen data, he had 2.81 million viewers Monday, his third-largest audience ever on Fox. It didn't hurt that Sarah Palin, the de facto spokeswoman for the Stupid wing of the Hate Party, gave him a plug and it's good evidence that Homo Sapiens bashing has become the national sport.

OK, that's one person per hundred of population, but it's more shit than I want on my porch, thanks.

Hateful twits, hateful tweets

". . . and forgetting long passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not on their ashes."

-Thomas Browne-

Unless of course the vitriol of human meanness courses through your veins, in which case you don your rabid Pit Bull apparel and gnaw on what bones can be found. I've rarely seen such hate, even at a time like this where hate is the entire foundation of American Conservative politics. As fast as the greasy fingers can type, the Internet begins to fill with accusations of murder, treason and more formless forms of evil known as "liberalism." There is no restraint in Mudville now that Ted Kennedy has struck out.

Too many blogs, too many twits, too many accusations to dignify with a reply, but one thing is held in common: the tribe that represents the worst traits of our remote ancestors feels victimized and therefore free from any obligation to decency. They lost an election, their worship of Feudal Corporatism, equal rights and civic responsibility is being challenged - at last - and their true values finally revealed. It's as ugly as it's ever been.

I recently and reluctantly signed up for Twitter. I should have stayed at home. the necessity to keep it all idiotically short as brought out more unadorned ugliness than one finds on blogs.

"Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement,”

rages the ridiculous Breitbart

“IF a GOP possesses 1/100 of human failings of T. Kennedy he/she is TOAST,”

is another one of his staggering lies with endless examples to prove it false. Malkin laughs that he didn't go to France for his treatment as though it were funny or actually meant something, others follow suite and Chappaquiddick references spurt like pus from the septic boil of Republic sentiment; from those who would and do accept any act of Presidential treason, dishonesty and manslaughter -- and yes drunken driving. How many people died because George W. Bush was President? No, Kennedy was a “villain,” “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

Pissing on Kennedy's ashes is just a small part of the psychotic rage that fills the void once filled by Conservatives. A conservative by nature does not respond to disagreement by using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, that's what a madman does, that's what Mr. Breitbart is, that's what Ms. Malkin is and this is what the end of everything sounds like.

NIGHT OF THE UNRELENTING DEADHEADS

Somewhere in cyberspace last night, I was egregiously misquoted. My words were twisted, turned upside down, pulled inside out. You guessed it: It came from the fringes. How or why or who did this, I shall spare you the details. Perhaps I should say nothing from this day forward, leave behind nothing that can be misread or miscarried, nothing to haunt or incriminate me later. Today, I shall sit back and just let others do the talking:

Randall Terry: “Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good ... Our goal is a Christian Nation … we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules. I’ve got a hot flash. God rules.”

Randall Terry: “When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed.”

My lips are sealed. So far, so good. Now lets run the video (from a town hall meeting in Reston Virginia earlier this week):



If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a photomontage worth?



Did I say anything? Consider this an open thread.

Dead man walking -- tall

The man can't be much warmer than room temperature, but the demons are howling farleftliberalsocialist like some inbred glossolalian hysterics at a backwoods revival meeting where the devil is being denounced. Even those of us who dress more like civilized people and give University lectures are out there making false equivalences between how poor old milk-of-human-kindness Robert Novak was treated by farleftliberalsocialists like Crooks and Liars as compared to the way they're trashing the memory of the last of the Kennedy Brothers -- although the more adroit like William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection says he "wont go there" -- while he's coming back from just having been there.

Rush Was Right! Exclaims the Professor. People are using Ted Kennedy's death to their political advantage and the people who would like to put Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore and name airports and highways after him are very disdainful of that sort of thing, aren't they? Can you imagine that - those laughable liberals want to name a health care bill after a man who tried most of his life to reform health care and have the audacity to trash a man who only committed treason and lied about it.

" Democrats are desperate to do anything to overcome public opposition on the merits."

says the Associate professor. He doesn't tell us whether those merits include "death panels" or other outright lies so beloved of Republican saboteurs. He doesn't mention that the public opposition is the minority opinion and that's it's costing News Corp and the Insurance Industry and the Drug Companies billions to do anything and everything to overcome majority opinion; anything including lies and fabrications.

Face it, they're delighted that one more impediment to the will of the minority is down and so sure are they of public stupidity and gullibility they don't even bother to cover their tracks or hide their fallacies.

"Strange, when Rush Limbaugh used the phrase "Kennedy Memorial Health Bill," [in predicting how Democrats would use Kennedy's death] he was harshly criticized.. . . Now that passage of Democratic health care restructuring seems much less likely, I guess it is okay to invoke Kennedy's name."

That's just what I mean. No Perfessor, the objection to Rush calling a sickly old man a dead man was what the anger was about. Laughing about a brain tumor: it's not the same thing as calling a dead man a dead man: even a dead man who tried to do some good in this world instead of shilling for pirates.

Boycot Whole Foods

My liberal butt just got whacked, my liberal brain ransacked. John Mackey, president of Whole Foods, is pushing against public options in health care reform. He thinks that private programs, which currently leave 46 million people uninsured, are the way to go. He thinks that high health care deductibles for people, regardless of their income, will go a long way to solving the health care crisis.

Sorry Mr. Mackey. How many employees working for Whole Foods can afford a $2,500 deductible?

Thirty years ago, as a young mother, I had to leave a job because the inadequate health insurance at my job failed to pay for necessary services for my three year old disabled daughter. A public option would have enabled me to continue employment uninterrupted.

Now, I am fortunate to be more comfortable financially. I would be willing to pay more in taxes to support a public option health care plan. What truly bothers me is paying more to a private plan that has high deductibles, low coverages and uses MY MONEY to pay a few people at the top.

I can speak with my food store choices, and until you and your company can gain empathy for the 46 million uninsured Americans and the many more underinsured Americans whose insurance premiums pad the pockets of wealthy health insurance execs my food dollars will go elsewhere.