Tennessee Tea

Some people might give them credit for never giving up and of course, like congenital stupidity and genital herpes, the Republicans never really go away.

Yesterday's e-mail viral outbreak flared up with another version of a letter excoriating Barack Obama for such inexcusable acts of treason as not placing a flower at the World Trade Center crater with a sensitive enough wrist action and of course referencing that old groaner, the photo of him singing without his hand on his heart. Both these things and more, insisted the weeping and wailing writer are proof of his Christian hating Islamic faith and his mission to destroy all that is held dear by the pretend conservatives who hang upside down in belfries and eat bugs.

Not that such people actually write these things. Virtually all of the phony celebrity letters libeling and threatening Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and the Obama family are written by the same, easily recognizable hand, although the attributions change from day to day. The faux outrage and breast beating pretend patriotism are always the same.

The letter I got was attributed to Sherry Hackett, the wife of the famous and raunchy comedian although she didn't write it nor likely did the others it's been "from" in the last 6 months. The person who forwarded it to me was crying for our country or so she says. Actually I think she welcomes any scurrilous and seditious screed that oozes from the Republican cesspool. I think it just hasn't sunk in that far from shoving things down America's throat, democracy has shoved change down theirs.

The desperation seems to call for deliberate denialism and cultivated delusion. If Obama takes off his shoes, that means he's a Muslim and not a Christian was a sentiment presented by a small townTennessee Tea Party organizer along with a picture of a shoeless president. Frankly I wish he were, but even so, it's a statement that could only be applauded by people not likely to be found at a Mensa meeting unless they're simply dishonest exploiters of the traditionally stupid.

For a group whose meetings sometimes draw dozens of people, God willin' and the creek don't rise, it can't be hard to avoid the leaders knowing that it's a tiny minority cult representing a fringe Right element, yet their solution to the problems posed by an electorate that emphatically rejected the Right in the last election is to go further right. The Washington Post quoted David Nance, the founder of the Gibson County Patriots, in Jackson, Tenn as saying

"This effort is to try to get the Republican Party to try to give us more conservative candidates"

and he believes it's working, yet his choice of Stephen Fincher, gospel singer and cotton farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee for the State's 8th Congressional District seems to have little to do with stated Tea Party goals of reducing the cost of government and eliminating "entitlements" what with Fincher raking in a cool, conservative $200,000.00 per annum in farm subsidies and being financed by others riding the same gravy train. He's pulled down over $2.5 million since 1995. Of course that' just all tea in the harbor and doesn't seem to matter as much as the president with his shoes off or the stories about flag pins and tardy salutes, a too small flag on his campaign jet and the laying down of a flower at the WTC with insufficient wrist action as discussed in the letter Sherry Hackett didn't write.

The shame of it all really is that Barack Obama, with his continuing support of some unpopular Republican policies may be too conservative for Liberals and perhaps even for some centrists while this collection of Beverly Hillbillies wants to tell us he's a Muslim version of Pol Pot while selling a faux populist version of Corporatism.

It's more of a shame we don't seem to have any genuine conservative opinion worth reading these days, and of course if we'd had it earlier, we might not have needed it so badly now.

Cruel April

I'm sorry Mr. Eliot, but for me, April is no more cruel than any other month, particularly in the large part of the world wherein it represents no particular change of season. Yes, the jasmine blooms explosively here in April, but something always fills the wind with fragrant joy even if too many of us have had our cars repossessed, our homes foreclosed on and our assets ravaged by medical bills. Even the tired old Bunny had to walk home this year, or so I hear.

But hey -- In Western lands it's no longer open season for pogroms and persecutions and so far, Rupert Murdoch's dogs haven't got round to inventing the war on Easter they truly need to prop up their ridiculous fantasy about a war on Christmas. In April, people can still wish you a Happy Holiday weekend without stirring up one of O'Reilly's passion plays and even our Islamic Jihadist President had himself a sorta Seder, his ears sticking out from his yarmulked head like Mercury's winged helmet.

Still, this Easter, drunken bikini-boaters clogged the waterways with their springy-breaky recklessness and the Sunday morning roads teemed with ridiculously dressed people making their one annual excursion to the Church of their choice, but Captain Homebound in his bathrobe enjoyed his smoked salmon and Blue Mountain coffee at poolside in peace.

I hope yours was just as good.

Has anyone remembered that MLK was shot to death on April 4th? Yes that's cruel, but something did rise from that, didn't it? May something good arise from our troubled times and may everything bad pass your house by this year.

Om shanti om.

Let's pity the victim

There should be an emoticon for a dumbfounded guffaw or something less childishly vulgar than WTF? to express my reaction to Michael Steele's attempt to make himself a martyr instead of a hypocrite. It would save so many keystrokes.

It takes a desperate man and a little man to dismiss the scorn over his involvement with the kinky strip club incident GOP contributors unknowingly funded. There's something distinctly oily about his assertion that he has a "slimmer margin of error" as a black man, even though that might be true in general.

"It's a different role for me to play and others to play and that's just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it"

he explained on Good Morning America this morning.

Whether or not he actually is held to a higher standard than a non-African American in his position as RNC Chairman would be, that frisky business is certainly at a level where anyone would be condemned for it and above the level where a white Democratic president might be impeached for it.

Yes, it's true that an honest politician (we're speaking hypothetically here) has to walk on eggs, so to speak and it's true that one of a minority group has to have even more delicate toes, but that certainly doesn't apply to a gleeful romp in the slime bucket, does it Mr. Steele? Falsely posing as a victim doesn't help real victims either.

Twilight of the Godwins

I have to credit the rhetorical craftiness of self-anointed conservatives who often get away with dismissing inevitable and even necessary comparisons by invoking Godwin's Law. Yes, it's inevitable that when discussing sudden transitions from civilized societies, the implosion of modern, liberal democratic, constitutional governments into to absolutist and racist tyrannies and the techniques employed, Hitler will come up. It's just as likely that Albert Einstein will come up in discussions of relativity or Tomas de Torquemada in studying the Inquisition. Just try to study the Bush administration and not think of Orwell. Try it, I dare you. Invoking Godwin as though it were more than a humorous observation is simply a tactical diversion and it seems to work by embarrassing the one who brought it up.

Barack Obama is hardly the first President to be accused absurdly of tyranny, fascism or of being a socialist, for that matter. Lincoln's assassin called him a tyrant, both Roosevelts were accused of being socialists long before the current president was born and in my day, anyone who didn't think it worth millions of lives to keep Vietnam from holding free elections was simply a Commie. Remember when Ho Chi Min wanted Humphrey to win so Happy Hubert was a Communist?

Hell, anybody who Joe McCarty didn't like for quoting the Constitution or really any reason at all was carrying that invisible card and his name was on the invisible list. Too bad there wasn't an easily produced "law" telling us that the longer a right wing apologia goes on, the more likely that Stalin or Mao will come up. Too bad there still isn't one, since people likely to make such transcendentally hyperbolic comparisons between the pragmatic, cautious Mr. Obama and absolute tyrants who caused tens of millions of deaths aren't likely to listen to arguments that are factual or too long to fit on a hand lettered cardboard sign. It would be nice to shut them off with Fogg's Law, wouldn't it?

As of late, discussions of the president begin with or are preceded by the rather airborne assumption that he's Mao Zedong, Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot rolled into some bearded bin Laden burrito, but then his father was black. Bill Clinton's father was only a white drinker and perhaps a philanderer so one usually had to wait for a sentence or two before the comparisons were dredged up -- and dredged up they always were. Yes, Bill was not only a murderer, not only going to "force health care down our throats" but going to give control of our armed forces to the UN. Bill, who murdered Vince Foster and ran a Coke smuggling operation out of Little Rock was planting nuclear weapons underneath our cities while indulging in Communist free love and of course his socialist tax increase was going to bankrupt our economy within months and destroy capitalism forever!

But no, it was terribly wrong to bring up fascism when his successor made that office the most powerful it had ever been, with the power to override congress and the courts and the Constitution. Terribly wrong when his propaganda machine began to scapegoat real and invented enemies, terribly wrong when he demanded and got special emergency powers by invoking threats that were substantially imaginary if not fraudulent. Smile and say Godwin and we're done.

Obama? Of course he's Communist and Fascist and never mind the contradiction. Of course he's a tyrant for the same reason Lincoln was a tyrant, the same reason Teddy Roosevelt was and FDR and don't you dare bring up Godwin this time!

DO YOU KNOW WHAT TODAY IS?

A NEW DAWN IN ENERGY DEVELOPMENT

While many people will disagree with the President’s decision to open oil drilling off the VA coast, his administration does seem to have a cohesive plan to control damage while trying to relieve fuel woes and continuing the push for affordable, renewable energies.

I am really encouraged by some of the “out of the box” energy solutions currently being used on a small scale like Klamath Falls, OR where geothermal energy is being tapped to provide heat and hot water to the downtown area, including keeping the sidewalks warm and ice free.

They are in an area where tapping hot water from the depths of the earth is feasible at a reasonable cost but research is ongoing to develop a system to use the same technology in other areas of the country.

And the nanotech industry continues to impress with a small, cost effective device that desalinates ocean water on a smaller scale, opening the way to fresh clean water for drinking and crop irrigation to third world countries and island nations around the world.

And the new generation of transportation is being unveiled with the introduction of the Chevy Volt, a hybrid gas/electric car and the Nissan Leaf all electric vehicle. Already in use at some major airports are hybrid shuttle buses. Future development is being done by Chevy and Mercedes on hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Organic solar cells in development will be made of a thin film with the ability to be applied to all sorts of surfaces taking solar power to a new level.

Of course, the use of many of these technologies on a mass scale are years away. But at least they are here, moving us toward a future of affordable, renewable energy sources.

The rage is not about health care

President Obama could have proposed a tax rebate of $10,000 and the conservatives still would have gone stark raving mad. When the Health Care Bill passed Republicans and Tea Partiers turned into a raging sea of childishness, insanity, ugliness and stupidity.

Representative John Boehner went apoplectic chanting "Hell no, you can't." Frank Rich, in a New York Times Op-ed piece, The Rage Is Not About Health Care, suggests Boehner "had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons."
In a debate with David Ploffe on ABC's "This Week," Karl Rove frothed at the mouth and went on a non-stop tirade. Such antics have become less funny and less entertaining.

Republicans have shouted "you lie" and "baby killer" in House chambers, violating every rule of decency and decorum. To steal a phrase from Joe McCarthy, Republican Congressional representatives have become Tea Party "fellow travelers."

For over a year Tea Party protests have attracted increasingly large crowds. They have grown louder, uglier, more threatening and more violent as time has passed. They have shouted racial and homophobic slurs at respected members of Congress and have thrown bricks through their offices - similar to a mini-Kristallnacht in 1938 Germany.

According to Rich, there was heated reaction when Social Security was passed in 1935 and Medicare thirty years later. "When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association."

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill...you have to look to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.... it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer...

The election of a black president and a female House speaker, the appointment of a Latino to the Supreme Court, and a gay Congressional committee chairman "would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play."

In this writer's opinion, the Tea Partiers - just like the Birchers, the patriot groups, and other extremist groups have a serious case of paranoia. And racism - despite social scientists' claims to the contrary. Maybe they should have read the liberal blogs in the early days - especially those written by southerners.

The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935.By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist (Richard) Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

In my very humble opinion the Tea Partiers and Beck and Co. are one thin hair away from being seditious. If we were a police state, as that monumental wonder Beck proclaims, everyone of those thugs would be in jail.

Oh no we can't!

I know, the worst thing one can do is to feel shame for your community, your country, your fellow man. Patriotism, being the same as dishonest self-promotion and hyperbolic Chauvinism, I'm certainly being unpatriotic by saying that the relentlessly partisan viciousness, the partisan slander and libel and indeed the abuse of political and religious freedom by my own community is shameful. Certainly others who agree with me have been so labeled.

Recently some local students at the Martin County High School Junior Achievement Club put together a website and planned a "Recovery Rally" to bring attention to the unemployment and the high foreclosure and business failure rate which plagues our county. They put together a video with the object of sending it to the President as an invitation to attend. It ended with a proud "yes we can!" Some would call that sort of community spirit and enthusiasm inspiring, others:

COMMUNISM! MARXISM!

Imagine allowing citizens to petition for redress of grievances! Why that's just like Pol Pot or Ho Chi Min! What kind of good ol' cracker conservatives would permit that without a fight? I mean it would have been OK to invite Bush and indeed when he made a five minute appearance after Hurricane Frances flattened several counties; when he disrupted critical activities at the Red Cross and then promptly forgot about us, he was sold as a hero, but then, he wasn't a Marxist, Muslim, Communist, Kenyan Antichrist who pals around with Terrorists and murders old women, you betcha.

Yes I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed at the letters from idiots who write to the local paper. I'm ashamed of people who want to pull their kids out of a school that allows kids to participate in peaceful attempts to attract government interest -- because Government is, by the Gospel of St. Ronald, all evil. Diana Blackard went on Fox last week to howl at the moon about her daughter's future being ruined by having said "yes we can" in public.

“I’m concerned about this turning up 20 years from now when she’s running for political officer [sic] herself, trying to get a high-profile job,”

Certainly it constitutes paling around with terrorists to promote local businesses. It's almost treason to suggest that the people can do anything at all in a democracy without it being communism and Fascism. It's dangerous to respect the president, said another deranged citizen writing to the paper.

"since the dems think respect is given like all their other entitlements."

Hard to know what he means but then insanity is like that, Republican politics are like that.

"I resent dealing with people who believe they can spit on us and burn our flag "

says the dishonest but passionate Fox-Republican of the President of the United States -- without any apparent concern that he's done neither, or anything remotely like it.

"Filled with vile hatred, there is no common ground"

says a writer of all who support any effort to let the government be the government, all who are willing to use the government to serve the people, all those who reject the cancerous, self-hating, self-defeating Fox-Fundamentalist doctrines choking the life out of our country. Unaware like so many of the brown-shirt thugs of Martin County Florida of being a maggot, a vile worm eating away at the heart of America.

Christ in camouflage

No, we don't have to worry about private militias and of course they don't represent the "conservatives" who jabber and jape, mock and malign the concept that a dark skinned President could be legitimate, election results notwithstanding. They're nothing to worry about.

It appears to be our right to play soldier and prepare to overthrow the government and rave about American being for "Christians" only because Jesus wants it that way. Of course there's no law against believing or teaching that the President of the United States is the child of an imaginary horned god of evil and is here to destroy everything good, including the good Christian militias who train for a mythical battle of the gods cribbed from Zoroastrian splinter sects and Gnostic fantasies. It's a free country -- so far.

It sure is scary shit though. If you're a resident of rural Martin County Florida, you might be a redneck, but even if you're not, there's a chance you're buying all the .223 and 7.65X39 you can get hold of at inflated prices and squirreling it away for Armageddon and the next Presidential election or for whatever the Mayans allegedly forsaw in the stars. There's also a good chance you're just a nostalgic and frustrated old Confederate and that decal on your pick'emup and the flag waving over your cracker shack indicate a serious longing to try it all again.

At any rate, if you're any of the above, you're not alone and you're less alone than you were a few years ago when the right hand of Jesus presided over his crusade and his omnipotent presidential powers. Militias are prospering as they haven't since 1861.

"The only thing on earth to save the testimony and those who follow it, are the members of the testimony, til the return of Christ in the clouds. We, the Hutaree, are prepared to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren't. We will still spread the word, and fight to keep it, up to the time of the great coming."

It's the credo of the Hutaree, a Christian Militia, who are waiting and training in anti-Satan warfare for the end of time just in case God can't handle it himself; all the Jew killing and rapturing and devil chasing ain't easy, and needs reinforcements. The Anti-Christ Obama is damned near omnipotent after all, even if he has such a hard time getting the Republicans to behave like adults. No, if you want to stop Satan you need lots of camo and lots of ammo and it won't hurt to kill some cops and their families either. I know it sounds a bit questionable, but it's all there on their website. Hutaree, explains the camo clad site means Christian Warrior in some undisclosed language. Moronish, perhaps?

It was that plan that prompted the indictments today of 9 self-styled "patriots" after a series of raids in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The idea was to spark some kind of war against the police by killing at least one and them blowing up his funeral so as to help bring on whatever it is they think needs bringing on. Sounds a bit like Charles Manson's strategy, but I'm sure they thought of it independently.

Meanwhile, back in Michigan, the allegedly unrelated Michigan Militia still plans to hold their "Open Carry Family Picnic & Tea Party" to be held on April 10, 2010 so while the bomb making classes at the Hutaree house of hate will be on hold for a while you can still take the family to Michigan for a good old family time and play games like pin the mustache on Obama, kill the gun grabbers and Let's Pretend our taxes are going up.

And while we're playing games, does anyone want to bet that more commenters will bash me for "misunderstanding" the teabag patriots than will be concerned about armed madmen and trying to take over the government by killing the police?

The Party of Yes! Oh God, Yes! Harder, Please!! (or, le vice RNC)

A wickedly fun and perfectly frivolous post, no harm intended -- except between consenting adults. Since, after all, “All blogs are quite useless.” (Fake Oscar Wilde quotation.)

Now, I’m sure the Republican National Committee and Michael Steele will have an appropriate response to the topic addressed in Jason Linkins’ HuffPo Article today (namely, if I have understood aright, RNC-paid visits to a bondage-themed nightclub in WeHo), but at the moment they’re, well, you’ll understand -- all tied up.

Hosannah to Our Lord in the Highest for this good man’s tenure as RNC Chair. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I worked at it, uh, “24/7.”

I don’t mind stories like this playing rough with the daily headlines: dominate us, you sexy right-wing sadists, DOMINATE US! All through November 1st -- the day before the election. We just can’t get enough….

PS -- just so y'all don't accuse me of plagiarism, the "Party of Yes" ha-ha headline (without the naughty additions I made) first appeared in HuffPo.