HOW TO INCITE INSURRECTION AND SPIN THE TALE ON THE DONKEY

“I hope Obama fails,” spoke Rush Limbaugh four days before the inauguration of President Obama. “We want to promote failure, we want to promote incompetence …”

These words spoken by a radio hack gave the Grand Obstructionist Party what it needed most: A strategy to hijack the election by sabotaging our new President. Within months, the GOP unleashed a barrage of daily attacks (source):

First, it started with the Birthers, those who sought to undermine the legitimacy of a newly elected President with fabricated conspiracy theories about the authenticity of his birth certificate and the legality of his presidency.

Next came the Tea Baggers, followed by the town hall hooligans, followed by gun-toting thugs at presidential rallies, followed by GOP Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst of “Liar!” before a special session of Congress, followed by GOP Congresswomen Michelle Bachmann calling for armed resistance against Obama’s legislative agenda, followed by GOP Congressman Trent Franks threatening a Birther lawsuit against Obama and calling him an “enemy of humanity,” followed by GOP Governor Rick Perry calling for Texas to secede from the union, followed by Newsmax columnist John Perry dreaming of a military coup against President Obama, followed by a FaceBook poll asking: “Should Obama be killed?”

For months, we have heard the repeating rhythms of Obama the Communist, Obama the Socialist, Obama the Islamofascist, Obama the Jihadist … and the steady and relentless drumbeats of a GOP run amuck driving us towards civil disorder and insurrection.

One year and four months later, the Grand Obstructionist Party has brought us to the brink. The party of ‘NO’ is blaming tea party rage on Democrats while ignoring the fact that former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey organized the tea party movement as an Astroturf event, which the GOP exploits at every opportunity ... and the party of ‘NO’ is refusing to be held accountable for what it unleashed.  Here is a snapshot of incidents within the past week alone:

Ohio Congressman Outraged By Newspaper Ad Showing Daughters

Talk Radio Attacks 11-Year Old Whose Mother Died

Tea Baggers Harass Man with Parkinson’s Disease

Sniper Threatens Congresswomen – Brick Thrown in Window

Severed Gas Line at Home of Congressman’s Brother

Protesters Spit on Congressman – Hurl Racial Epithets

Noose Images Faxed to Clyburn and Stupak

The climate of intimidation and fear exploited by the GOP is pervasive and pernicious. Earlier this evening, I read this comment at the Huffington Post:

Many of you have seen the video I did with my husband the Gulf War vet on the medical situation we found ourselves in. What I didn't say is that the two founding members of the Coffee Party are now living away from their home and going under assumed names since they have had their home address and phone numbers posted on right-wing sites ... in a addition to receiving death threats.

Out of curiosity, I visited the website of Fox News to read their version of these events. It wasn’t their spin on the story that caught my attention, but these readers’ comments:

pantherhunter - Will you stand, will you fight (...) the only way to deter Social___ism [sic] is by force (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 9:00 PM).

lightningtom00 - The only good politicians is [sic] one 6 feet under (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8:44 PM).

golf67 - bring on the civil war, ive [sic] got my guns and my church (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8:40 PM).

e5dra5 - The only way America can be what it's meant to be is to be rid of the Dems entirely (…) ONE VOTE, ONE PARTY (REPUBLICAN), ONE AMERICA (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 7:55 PM).

leftiswrong - These traitors to the constitution have committed a severe crime (…) Time for the populace to push back.  If somebody dies in the process, oh well...... (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 7:37 PM).

irocthisgt67 - I do beleive [sic] that violence may need to be used to get these scum bags out of our country (...) Death to them all (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 4:48 PM).

yellowduke - Perhaps if a dozen or so of the threats were carried out their hearing may improve. Dust a dozen of them (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 6:17 PM).

Outrageous and shocking! In the interest of fairness and balance, not all comments at the website of Fox News were as inflammatory as the above. There was also this:

bobloblaw - Good job Fox. You give right-wing nut jobs a platform to spread lies and hate. Then when things like this happen you get a story and say I told you so. The FBI should investigate not only these nuts. They should also start taking a good look at Beck and company (Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 5:04 PM).

Yes, by all means, investigate Glenn Beck; but don't forget Dick Armey, Minority Leader John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, and the other GOP skinheads who have exploited hatred and violence for political gain and brought us to the edge of anarchy.  And do it now before there is blood in the streets.

Dawn of the Palin

Oh God no - please don't let Sarah Palin have a TV show where she takes us around Alaska while entertaining us with her faux folksy youbetchaisms. Variety posted yesterday that the Discovery Channel will be paying a million dollars per episode for the rights to Sarah Palin's Alaska and if it airs, I'm going to have to boycott my favorite family of TV channels.

I wonder if we'll be treated to action shots of wolf strafing, holy rolling, turkey slaughtering, Russian Island watching and witch hunting with Pastor Muthee. All in rougue style, of course.

Ann Coulter -- Liberal

I've been told for decades that the culture of victimhood is a Liberal thing; that the lazy slackers of America simply pretend to be victims when they could simply get a job instead of mooching the "hard earned" dollars of hard working Americans.

I think I agree and that's why when Ann Coulter stunk up Ottawa today by claiming she's the victim of hate crimes by a University of Ottawa today. You see, the university’s vice-president of academic affairs and provost François Houle sent her an e-mail encouraging her to brush up on what’s considered acceptable in Canada whose laws about free speech may be unfamiliar to her. You have to admit that's just as egregious as lynchings, firebombings, painting swastikas on Synagogues and dragging some gay kid to death behind a truck. It's hate speech if I ever heard it and according to time honored righty dogma, claiming to be a victim makes Ann a liberal.

"You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression. For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”

said the e-mail and who could disagree that its message is in every way a conservative one: Learn the law and obey it. Ann is a Liberal, no doubt about it and even though the e-mail was obviously inspired by her previous performance in London, Ontario, it's a hate crime directed at consrvatives and what could be more liberal than that? At the University of Western Ontario, she attacked gay rights activists, the mainstream media, Barack Obama's administration and told a Muslim student to "take a camel" as an alternative to flying. Republicans have all been highly critical of any American criticizing the president or the government while abroad -- any Liberal American, that is -- so I'm expecting we'll hear them all chime in soon.

Yes, cautioning someone whose actions have bordered on the criminal to be careful while in Canada is a hate crime if ever there was one and it's just like a liberal to ask for special rights for a minority group: psychotic blond transvestites. I think it's fitting to quote one of her most often used phrases, because it says it all: "Liberals go wah -- they go wah, wah,wah."

And nobody gives a shit.

A Saurischean Special Comment, Quasi KO-Style: Analysis of the Current Moment

These days, the Republican Party isn’t abiding by the Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty and limited government; instead, it’s peddling a degenerate version of those principles, reduced to a simple-minded hatred of government and, indeed, of anything that hints at willingness to help anybody in any way. I’d say these types have the soul of a stone, but that would be insulting to stones.

Of course, their hatred of “big government” doesn’t translate to an equally fervent dislike for “big business.” That’s because they are economic fascists, men and women who believe in a close partnership between the State and huge corporate entities that have anything but the best interests of ordinary people in mind. What they want to do, to put the matter straightforwardly, is not reduce the role of government in our lives and thereby open up the field for greater liberty, creativity, and happiness; no, they want to deliver us crude to the powerful jaws of the aforementioned corporate entities, who will, I presume, gnaw on us until we become a fine paste useful for something or other, and therefore vendible.

The passage of the health-care-access bill, such as it is (with all its flaws and limitations), still amounts to a repudiation of the above-mentioned outlook on life and politics, so to that extent it is indeed dangerous to those who currently control the Republican Party. This legislation will force the major insurers towards acting like responsible citizens and honest merchants, both of which concepts are anathema to the proponents of “HELL No You Can’t.” They are to the true market practice and philosophy what ill-garmented, STD-ridden, alley-based rapists are to the Art of Love, and they have well deserved your and my disgust and contempt.

Failure to craft some kind of humane arrangement regarding health-care access was the last thing that separated us from the Euro-democracies (those SOCIALISTS!), and now, by all the big insurers’ most cherished pre-existing conditions and reasons to rescise, we have advanced some way towards closing the gap. The sinking-in of that realization is just now driving the less respectable among il partito conservatore the other half of cracked that they already were. There are even a few would-be pogrom-instigators, apparently, throwing bricks through congressional office windows, calling the honorable Jim Clyburn and other African Americans in the House the you-know-what word, and our dear demo-brother Barney Frank – well, never mind what they’re calling him. You’re not old enough to know what they’re calling him…. Pretty soon the rabble will be a-jumpin’ up and down, burning copies of Tom Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.

What’s a damn liberal or indeed any sane person (among whom there are, of course, still many who call themselves conservatori), to do in such shameful times? Well, by no means should we backpeddle: the rogues I’ve been outlining above invariably take kindness for weakness. They do it so insistently that, to some extent, it begins to ring true: to be overly kind and understanding with these people is to be weak, and as Milton’s “Divil” says, “to be weak is miserable / Doing or Suffering.” Enunciate and clarify your principles, and if you’re a liberal legislator, fight civilly but firmly for what you believe in. Don’t apologize for having won an election a little more than a year ago, and don’t apologize for supposing that the purpose of government is to help guide ourselves towards a better and more humane existence, and better relations with our fellows. The remaining true conservatives are quite right that we can and should do most of that work on our own, as individuals and freely associating communities; but where there’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be resolvable or ameliorable that way, government at some level, from the local to the federal, can legitimately become part of the response.

What’s needed here, at least on the intellectual plane, is a balance between the Founders’ “rational distrust” of government and the Aristotelian idea that the purpose of government is to assist us in our efforts to achieve the good life. Achieving the balance is never easy, and the penalty for continued failure will almost surely be the loss of our right to self-determination as citizens.

Finally, with regard to the prospects of the Republican party, a party inaugurated by a man as fine as Lincoln has its reserves; there are better angels within its nature, mystic chords to be struck within its memory. On those, at least, I’ll not give up, even if few members among the current batch in the House and Senate do their side of the aisle any credit.

THE HISTORICAL (HYSTERICAL) MOMENT

In the words of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: " The bill is passed."

Yes – 219

No – 212

Here is President Obama's email message (minus the DONATE button) that arrived in my email box moments after the vote:

For the first time in our nation's history, Congress has passed comprehensive health care reform. America waited a hundred years and fought for decades to reach this moment. Tonight, thanks to you, we are finally here.

Consider the staggering scope of what you have just accomplished:

Because of you, every American will finally be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage.

Every American will be covered under the toughest patient protections in history. Arbitrary premium hikes, insurance cancellations, and discrimination against pre-existing conditions will now be gone forever.

And we'll finally start reducing the cost of care -- creating millions of jobs, preventing families and businesses from plunging into bankruptcy, and removing over a trillion dollars of debt from the backs of our children.

But the victory that matters most tonight goes beyond the laws and far past the numbers.

It is the peace of mind enjoyed by every American, no longer one injury or illness away from catastrophe.

It is the workers and entrepreneurs who are now freed to pursue their slice of the American dream without fear of losing coverage or facing a crippling bill.

And it is the immeasurable joy of families in every part of this great nation, living happier, healthier lives together because they can finally receive the vital care they need.

This is what change looks like.

My gratitude tonight is profound. I am thankful for those in past generations whose heroic efforts brought this great goal within reach for our times. I am thankful for the members of Congress whose months of effort and brave votes made it possible to take this final step. But most of all, I am thankful for you.

This day is not the end of this journey. Much hard work remains, and we have a solemn responsibility to do it right. But we can face that work together with the confidence of those who have moved mountains.

Our journey began three years ago, driven by a shared belief that fundamental change is indeed still possible. We have worked hard together every day since to deliver on that belief.

We have shared moments of tremendous hope, and we've faced setbacks and doubt. We have all been forced to ask if our politics had simply become too polarized and too short-sighted to meet the pressing challenges of our time. This struggle became a test of whether the American people could still rally together when the cause was right -- and actually create the change we believe in.

The result is imperfect; we did not get everything we wanted; and the process has been contentious and ugly. Nevertheless, President Obama accomplished what no other president has done in a 100 years. Without doubt, tonight is a historic moment.

Absalom

But, oh! for Absalom,--

For his estranged, misguided Absalom,--

-Nathaniel Parker Willis-

What could be more fun that spending a sunny 73 degree Saturday at the County Fairgrounds with hundreds of fellow Hams, looking at equipment, attending seminars on ionospheric science and space weather and browsing the flea market? Perhaps a day free of Obama Derangement Syndrome; a day without having to hear that the roads are so bad in Chicago because "that's where Obama's from." I'd like to be able to discuss APRS without hearing that "Obama turned off Loran-C in order to make us all helpless so that the USSR will have an easier time taking over and making us all Communists. Obama, O-BAHma, OOOOH-Baaaaahma; the braying of asses in the Florida sun.

I'm tired of hearing that Shirtless Joe from Snakeshit Junction doesn't feel safe from Pelosi and the Gummint Gungrabbers with only 10,000 rounds of .223 in his house in the swamp or that "if taxes get any higher we're gonna have to have another revolution." Joe's actually getting a tax break this year, but I guess he's worried to distraction about how Warren Buffet is going to like the extra 2%. He never said a peep about the three trillion dollar war because he supported the troops. He'll never in his life make enough to approach that bracket.

I'm tired of the daily delivery of e-mail lies about health care reform and how everything from the Postal Service to the Pentagon is not only dysfunctional, but Maoist, Trotzkyite, Marxist COMMINISM! I'm fed up with hearing about Obaaaaaaaaaaaahma's plan to import and support illegal aliens at public expense, make Capitalism illegal, turn the schools into brainwashing centers and do away with private property.

Two years ago I watched my mother die, her brain eaten away by disease until she was unrecognizable and recognized no one, and I feel the same way watching my country turn into a pit of bloody, barking dogs tearing themselves apart. Unwilling to be governed and unwilling to participate in government, demanding the lawless freedom of the wild animal and total protection from all harm and all at no cost we howl at the moon. Suspicious and angry of everything and everyone; we're not the patriots who founded a secular, democratic republic and we don't even remember our real history as we brag endlessly about freedom.

No, Jesus was mocked, abused and scorned once again in the streets of Ohio as he's so often been and by the same kind of people -- whether it was in Salem or Selma or Jerusalem or Birmingham, and nobody cares. We brag endlessly and lie constantly about "Christian" values none the less; force Christian oaths on ourselves and demand the tyranny of Natural Biblical law instead of Democracy and we call the radical treason "conservative."

What does one do, powerless to stop the mortal decay of our closest kin, whether it's a mother, a father, a son or a country, yet unable to bear the sight of it?

. . . misguided Absalom,--

The proud bright being who had burst away

In all his princely beauty to defy

The heart that cherished him--for him he poured

In agony that would not be controlled.

Lost In Translation

Word from Hollywood via NPR:

There's a backup plan: If U.S. movie audiences don't buy tickets to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish, Hollywood is already gearing up for an English-language remake.

IOW, if Americans don't like the original then Hollywood will bowdlerize it. And since Dragon Tattoo is not going to open in my local cinema, this will very likely happen. There's nothing "liberal" about the destruction of culture by translation. I can already see where Hollywood can go wrong just by watching the trailer.

My favorite semester at college was spent in International Studies 120 and 220, Culture Through Cinema I and II. The professor was very, very good at teaching the signs and signals we needed to really appreciate a film like Nobody Loves Me. It was because of Dr. Adler that I was able to appreciate the best moments in Seven Samurai for the very first time and actually understood the cultural existentialism of Lost In Translation.

Which is the operative phrase, because all of this is destroyed when Hollywood translates. Their version of Dragon Tattoo will inevitably disappoint me after seeing the original with subtitles. As our good friend Dr. Joseph Suglia put it to me in an email today:

Films such as Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, Open Your Eyes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc. irritate the American entertainment industry. There is only one thing to do: neutralize the irritation by homogenizing everything in those films that is heterogeneous, familiarizing everything within them that is strange. That is the purpose of a "remake": to domesticate the foreign.

And how. City of Angels seems incredibly pretentious when you've seen Wings of Desire. There is a segment of America that is aware of books it has not read but chooses to read them after seeing the movie to avoid disappointment. Having worked in bookstores and spent far too much time in libraries, I cannot count the number of times I have heard this said.

Hollywood is quite aware of this. My local cinemaplex will not be showing the Swedish version of this movie. As usual, I must travel at least an hour, probably three, to witness it in an actual theatre. This is because Hollywood obeys Barnum's dictum of lowest common denominator: no one in Tinseltown ever went broke underestimating taste. Art is inevitably made artifice. Characters are recast as comic relief. A fart joke must be inserted.

And there must always be more violence.

I maintain that Inglourious Basterds is a meta-narrative about this very phenomenon. It isn't about the Holocaust of World War II, but the cinematic holocaust of Hollywood. Language is indivisible from culture; when Hollywood translates, it adopts spectacle to give the masses blood. What makes me say all this is the amazing passage I found at the beginning of Steig Larrssen's novel:

The policeman was a hardened veteran...He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases.

Nine. In a long career of urban policing.

This is one way America stays stupid about the world.

Adding: I have just remembered I wrote a short story called "Lost In Translation."

The High-Tech Lynching of ACORN

Warning: music is appropriately modern, angry, and loud. Video can still be educational with the sound off.

And who is my neighbor?

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch
The band is playing "Dixie", a man got his hand outstretched
Could be the Führer
Could be the local priest
You know sometimes Satan, you know he comes as a man of peace.

-Bob Dylan-

It hard not to think of the parable of the good Samaritan when you read about the anti-health care reform protesters in Columbus Ohio. Seems that Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) is still undecided and so competing groups showed up outside her office Tuesday last to express their opinions as loudly as possible.

A wrinkled, kneeling man holding a stick crawled up to a group opposing the effort with a sign saying he has "got Parkinson's" and needs help, say Raw Story's David Edwards and Sahil Kapur. Will any of us be surprised at the reaction?

"If you're looking for a handout you're in the wrong end of town," one man yelled at him.

"Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get."

Something smells bad in Columbus and I don't think that stench is called Christian values.

Of course the health care reform under consideration isn't about handouts, it's that some people's greatest fear is that not only will someone get something he himself isn't getting, but that it might cost him some money. Insurance, by nature is about dividing risk amongst participants and so those who suffer losses will be covered while others pay a smaller amount. This seems to be fine with Republicans as long as some third party is skimming off 40% while keeping those at greatest risk out of the pool. This seems to them perversely to be Communism when individual risk is minimized by maximizing the pool and cost minimized by self administration by public ownership.

Is it a coincidence that people who don't seem to get this are the same people so mean spirited that they will mock someone with a terminal and debilitating disease and tell him to "work?" Is it that such people fear someone who could challenge their own self-pity that they must hate those really deserving of it? God knows who the Christians in Columbus are, but no one else seems to.

Even so, health care reform isn't about being a good Samaritan, it's about the most economical and efficient method of minimizing the burden on any individual participant by making us all participants, so whether there is a God who punishes nasty, malicious, selfish greedy bastards or some other principle of Nature that punishes the intellectually unfit and self defeating Conservative, it may be time to get out of Columbus and not look back.

Victory at last?

Newsweek insists that the mission is accomplished and democracy has succeeded in Iraq -- just like Bush predicted. It good to know that Democracy consists of holding an election in an ethnically cleansed country where only a few dozen people are killed and while occupied by a foreign invader. How much more democratic must Venezuela be then, or Cuba or Iran? Bush predicted that? He also predicted mobile chemical weapons factories, Qaeda training camps, stores of WMD's and a nuclear weapons facility -- that it would all be on the cheap and take only a few weeks. I do hope there's a tongue deeply embedded in some editor's cheek.

And now Maliki is suggesting that election returns have been tampered with and there have been hundreds of accusations of fraud. But never mind, it's mission accomplished and Nixon wasn't a crook.