George Who?

Here's a history quiz for you.  Which President of the United States do we see on the left, telling the incompetent Mr. Brown he's doing a "heckuva" job responding to hurricane Katrina?  

29% of Louisiana Republicans said in response to a TPM poll that it was Barack Obama - still only an obscure freshman senator from Illinois who bears most of the blame.  44% weren't sure just who was responsible for the poor response to the devastating hurricane. George who?

These people vote.  These people say Liberals are retarded. These people are happy to lecture you about history and science and laugh at your education. George who?

I credit Libby at The Impolitic for bringing this to my attention, but I wish she hadn't.  Of course, being a Floridian, I'm glad for evidence for the argument that Florida isn't the Stupidest State as long as we have Louisiana, but none the less; how can I not feel despair at reading a poll showing, as she says, that "73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA."

The Daily Race-Baiter

So, there's this internet "news" site out there going by the name the Daily Caller. It was started by Tucker Carlson, a bow-tied right-wing twat-weasel who was once famously savaged by Jon Stewart.

Now, despite the fact that he staffed his little paper with GOP advisors and got most of his funding from Foster Friess, who famously bankrolls presidential candidates like Rick Santorum, Carlson likes to claim that "we're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone."

Which might even be true, except... well, they ran with this story on Monday. A fluff piece, about Obama buying a new dog. Another Portuguese Water Dog named Sunny, to give First Dog Bo a playmate. Cute, right?

Well, kind of. It's a story that means absolutely nothing to anybody. Man buys dog. Until, not even 50 words in, you come across the following sentence.

Apparently it’s a girl and it was born in 2012 in Michigan, where the unemployment rate was 8.8 percent last month.

OK, motherTucker, define "non sequiter" for me, will ya?

What exactly is that little factoid doing in the second paragraph of a human-interest fluff piece? Is it, maybe, to show that "Obama reigns over a failed presidency"? "Obama doesn't care about poor people"? How does that even belong there?

But that's not the gold. Oh, no. Here's the gold - the last two sentences in the piece.

With the addition of Sunny, the Obamas now have two black Portuguese water dogs.

The Obamas do not have any white dogs.

Yes, that's right. They aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

We now officially have a new definition for "dog-whistle politics."

Of Mice and Old White Guys

As Republicans struggle to re-brand the Grand Old Party, perhaps we should trade in our old clichés:

Old Wine in New Bottles

… and have some fun with mixed metaphors:

Old Pigs, New Lipstick

New labels and new faces will not mask the fact that rotgut will always rot your gut; and a pig is a pig no matter how much rouge you put on a rogue.  Swill’s the word that binds our mixed metaphors together.

In an attempt to rebrand their flagging flag-bearers, the Republican National Committee has announced a new initiative to showcase diversity within their ranks.  Not just old white guys anymore, meet the Rising Stars of the New GOP:  Marilinda Garcia, T. W. Shannon, Scott Erickson, and Karin Agness.

Marilinda Who? Scott What? How will these rising stars outshine the stellar performances of Governor Gaffe, Senator McFluff, Congressman Corn Dog, former Speaker Nitwit, and tea nominee More Schlock?  Let’s play Trivial Pursuit.  Match these blunders to the blunderbusses who spoke them:

[Immigrant children have] “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert.” 

"You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." 

“Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that” 

"Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen." 

I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps. Because there's no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.”

Will the Rising Stars walk a new walk and talk a new talk?  Hardly!  Not according to Karin Agness, who argues that the GOP would benefit by tackling the problem of liberal bias in universities.  Oh nos!  Not that old shibboleth again!  See my point:  “Old wine in new bottles” doesn’t mean the GOP has changed when the faces are new but the message remains the same.

Speaking of mixed metaphors, lipstick on a pig will not resurrect a dead horse.

Breaking up is hard to do

Ted Cruz, AKA Rafael Edward Cruz, the Tea Partootie who would be president in 2016, has finally contradicted his official position that he is not a Canadian citizen and declared his intention to renounce it so as to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.  Knowing how difficult it is to renounce US citizenship, I have to wonder if a simple renunciation will suffice for Canada.  The IRS, you see, assumes that the only reason to do so is to avoid paying US taxes and it's my understanding that they will consider you liable for same for ten years after you flee to some tax haven, vehement renunciation notwithstanding. You're a US citizen until they allow you not to be and in the eyes of European financial institutions you're an American for life.

But there's the Communist elephant in the room -- Cuban communist that is. At first face it seems that having been born to a Cuban father resident in Canada, "Ted" would be eligible for Cuban citizenship  under Cuban law as well and indeed under the Cuban Adjustment Act he could be considered to be  a Cuban national. It's certainly a more valid hypothesis  than the idiocy about Obama's divided loyalties we've listened to from Republican idiots, crooks and liars (if you'll pardon the tautology) for years.

So if the requirement to be a "natural born" American is to avoid such conflicts of office that would ensue if a US president could also be the Prime Minister of Canada and hold simultaneous office in Cuba wouldn't that argue against the interpretation that being foreign born to one American parent is sufficiently "natural" to fulfill the requirement?  I think the interpretation needs to be that a candidate be like Bruce Springsteen,  Born in the USA.

Not of course that Rafael Edward Cruz meets many other minimum standards. But if turnabout be fair play, can't we -- just for fun -- start our own Birther madness and require him to prove that he's not a Communist agent as well as the Canadian Candidate?  Seems fair to me.

A creature of their own

Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers (#68) that:

“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in [American] councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

 I would think such sentiment  informed the Constitutional requirement for a US president to be "natural born."  Of late however, the definition of natural born has been kneaded into whatever shape is needed to make our current president, born on American Soil to a natural born and Caucasian mother, seem illegitimate while his first opponent, Panamanian born John McCain , never had his suitability challenged, nor indeed did Mitt Romney who although born in the US may have descended from illegal aliens. Odd indeed as so many Republicans would like to change the constitution to deny citizenship to those born here, but to parents who are not citizens.  Situational ethics and silly arguments all and perhaps colored by racism as the only one challenged was the only one with an African father.  Romney's Mexican immigrants were white and thus all right as the saying goes.

If in fact the Constitutional requirement was to serve to keep foreign "creatures" out of office and if in fact, such a circumstance motivated the "birther" madness, there is a disturbing dissonance when one considers the eagerness of Republicans to allow unlimited campaign funding from offshore corporations to finance a creature of their own.  A cynic might be tempted to propose that when such domestic creatures claim that the objection is about the law, that it's really about Obama. It's really about racism.

The cynicism might be affirmed when one considers the proposed 2016 ascendant, Canadian born Senator  Ted Cruz (R-T.)    Now Cruz may have had a US born mother, just as Mr. Obama had, but Obama does not hold a foreign passport as Cruz does.  Does dual citizenship mean divided loyalty?  Is that more or less of a concern when one has a foreign loyalty to a country where most people are Caucasian and Christian?  Res ipsa loquitur, I should think, or freakin' obvious for those with undivided loyalty to English.

Cruz's father, Cuban born Rafael Cruz was a Cuban citizen and a legal resident in Canada when Ted was born and thus Ted is automatically a Canadian citizen at birth under Canadian law as well as a legal US citizen at birth -- because his mother was a US citizen.  He has never renounced Canadian citizenship and yet his spokeswoman claims with a kind of logic suspiciously alien that he has no Canadian citizenship to renounce.  He does. 

Perhaps that's a simple misunderstanding or perhaps it's the kind of duplicity and denialism that has come to define the faux-conservative, morally impoverished and greedy for power creatures of  the Republican ascendency. No matter where Mr. Cruz was born and no matter where his loyalties may lie, Cuba, Canada, the United States of America, he's a creature of their own.

Organic vegetables and free range terrorism

Last month I described one example of police insanity and constitutional travesty that still seems to have stayed in Vegas for all the the uproar it failed to produce.  Perhaps it's a valid example about how America no longer cares about the core issues of our war of Independence. Perhaps it's an indication of how we always emulate our enemies, but there are so many examples that get little notice while we assiduously obsess about  what we're directed to obsess about.

I'm talking about quasi-military invasions of private homes with battering rams, obscenity shrieking SWAT team members abusing citizens at gun point and often for no cause and with no warrant.  It's a rare week that I don't hear of such a thing and I'm convinced that most go unremarked upon at the national level. Sometimes people die. One never hears of consequences or even apologies.

I'm talking about the recent commando raid on a small organic farm near Arlington Texas, ostensibly for the purpose of our disastrous War on Drugs, but which turned out to be a war on organic tomatoes.  Is the threat of a couple of hippies growing vegetables on a seedy little farm sufficient to warrant holding them at gunpoint  and not showing a warrant until hours after the 10 hour ransacking by police WITH THEIR BADGE NUMBERS CONCEALED of their property began?  Apparently all they had was a complaint from a neighbor who thought the upkeep on the farm was lax.  Of course nothing illegal was found and the victims, for such they are, didn't suffer any more than humiliation and half a day of terror in which police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers,"

The use of SWAT teams using machine guns, armored vehicles, battering rams and dogs to serve warrants is growing and one might argue that the largest perpetrators of domestic terrorism are in uniform. Can anyone explain to me why regulating oil drilling, explosive fertilizer storage and food sanitation are an unwarranted abridgement of liberty, in the minds of Conservatives, but armed assaults on peaceful unarmed citizens by unidentified men in black with real assault weapons is permissible in the name of safety?

Troll Eruptions

Last night, something strange happened at Progressive Eruptions. Suddenly, Shaw Kenawe had morphed into Shaw Kenawe, The Wicked Witch of the Blogosphere! Either someone hacked into Shaw’s profile, or Shaw is participating in a hoax. Whether trolling or masquerading as a troll, pranks – no matter how seemingly harmless - are neither amusing nor funny. How often have we read accounts of online harassment, character assassination, threats of violence, or stories of teenage suicides due to bullying in Cyberspace!

Adrenaline is an addictive drug that promotes socially communicable aggression, and trolls are notorious adrenaline junkies. Let’s be perfectly blunt: Partisan blogging does not promote dialogue and debate and rarely, if ever, dissuades anyone of their opinion. Partisan blogging is motivated by self-amusement – a kind of ultimate video game - as bloggers from the left and the right taunt and engage each other in pointless and interminable arguments. How do you score this game? Trolls measure their success by the number of comments under every post – inspired, no doubt, by mischief.  Personally, none of this appeals to me.

Some very Special Photos

I really encourage you to go here to see some photos of Klan members going about their daily lives.  Here's a sample- a guy using a shotgun to get a cockroach in his own house:

It really displays what a bunch of degenerate subhumans they are.  Good for a laugh or two.

My Dinner with Raskolnikov

   "Russky Pu-leeze!" I said to Rodya, already wishing he hadn't poured that 4th Vodka. It wasn't going to help me in putting together a cogent denunciation much less assist me in remembering what the hell he'd been saying that was so naive long enough to refute it. "You're starting to sound like Ayn Rand"

     "You mean she's going to sound like me.  Remember she hasn't been born yet."

     "And you haven't been born at all, you're just a figment of  Dostoevsky' dyspepsia or the 'Russian soul' which means too damned much vodka -- and speaking of too much Vodka, can't we get something to eat - other than borscht?"

      "Da, sure Captain,  but you're not going to argue that there are not two kinds of people in the world - those who like rules and like to be ruled, and the great men, or even men a little out of the common, that is to say, capable of giving some new word -- and those men, must from their very nature be criminals -- more or less, of course.  And from my mind they ought not, indeed, submit to remaining in the common rut."

     "which means, what:  be prevented from ruining or at least unfairly exploiting the misery of others or even creating it in order to have a flock to fleece?  Russky please!"  You just don't want to pay taxes and think you can handle a society without them.  Trust me you wouldn't rise to the top if the top were the bottom and who the hell would buy you dinner if it weren't for me?

     " Well, I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known without sacrificing the lives of one, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound. . . to eliminate the dozen or the hundred. . ."

     " Yes, yes, so I claim I have have a solution for Fermat's enigma or cold fusion  so I get to lie, cheat, steal and murder and everyone who does evil can complain that he's Newton or Feynman or even Ayn freakin' Rand and pretend to be  some sort of  supergalt who must not be restrained by the peasants even while he's eating their children.  It's like some mirror image of Communism."

     I was getting hot under my high collar and that 4th glass of  cheap vodka was starting to look more attractive.

     "What you're saying is that you feel guilty about murdering an old woman and you're inventing an ethical system that absolves you by putting her into a 'class.'  Next thing you know, you'll write some crappy fiction about a super savior,  job creator who gets crucified by taxes and OSHA regulations by the mob of greedy "takers." 

     "Look Foggy, as I said in my article, if you've bothered to read it, is that all legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycergus, Solon, Mohammad, Napoleon, and so on were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one -- and they did not stop at bloodshed."

     "Neither did Chairman Mao and you know, his new word might have been a bit more credible if 20 million didn't starve to death, even if they're now Galty capitalist ass kickers pretending their self-interest is enlightened, but perhaps with a little less of the potato juice you might ask yourself  how you know in advance between Moses and Mussolini so that you can decide whether to follow him or hang him?   Or Mickey Mouse for that matter, in which case we just smile while we're getting fleeced.  Should there be some sort of test, some academic degree -- or should it be hereditary, the way it was back before the Revolution that will someday take  away Alisa Zinovyevna's wealth and make her bitter and self righteous and a bit horny?  At least we had only one Tzar at a time.  You'd give us a mob of every jerk who wants to blame others for his failures.  Like 'I'd be a rich man instead of working in this shoe store if it weren't for the Liberals.'"

     "Look, Fogg, I acknowledge that it's somewhat arbitrary -- I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior, ordinary, that is to say material that serves only to reproduce its kind -- and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word.  the first category are men conservative in temperament -- it's their vocation.  the second transgress the law; they are destroyers.  The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied. They seek the destruction of the present for the sake of the better.  However the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them. The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future.  Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact all have equal rights with me and vive la guerre eternelle -- til the New Jerusalem of course.  More Vodka?"

     "The old Jerusalem is enough of a headache, thanks and no, but damn it, you're missing the point.  If those classes are only discernible after the deaths of millions and the destruction of nations and peoples, all you're doing is saying  'do what thou wilt shall be the law' and let God or the Devil or Dostoevsky sort it out later.

     Two classes my ass Rodya, that's the assumption behind every horror mankind has done and call it what you like that eternal war of all against all is the road to the new deluge - at best. If you could 'remember'   150 years into the future like I do, you'd be surprised to hear that 'creator class' calling itself conservative and the others Liberals, but you don't remember, now do you? At least acknowledge the title of your silly life -- it's crime and Punishment, dude.  Punishment, not apotheosis.  But again, how do we tell the builder of railroads who has to bend the rules a bit even if people are killed or ruined in the effort to build an empire, tell him from the embezzler, the cheat, the negligent, the greedy and unscrupulous?  What's the difference between a Galt and a Goering?

 As Razumihin asked you -- "couldn't they adopt a special  uniform, for instance, couldn't they be branded in some way?  For you know if confusion arises and a member of one category imagines that he belongs to another, begins to 'eliminate obstacles' as you so happily expressed it, then. . ."

     "Look, Captain,  take not that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people.  In spite of their disposition to obedience many of them like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement' and meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries.  You really need not be uneasy for they never go very far."

    "WTF?  Что за черт? Are you serious"?  If you can't tell man from superman, how can you say you're not saying anything goes and winning is the only justification; success or profit  the only judge of morals and only after the carnage is finished?   Are you sure you're not here from the future selling Ayn Rand books to a yet untapped reservoir of wanabees -- or 'followers' as you call them?  Hitler created jobs and since that Godwin git hasn't been born yet any more than Galt has, I can ask how this конское дерьмо, this horseshit is useful in any way.  There is another judge of worthiness, another way to tell what's just and what's just criminal and that's what you're afraid of - that voice quietly saying 'murderer'  Just wait, I've read the book after all."

     Why don't we reserve our reverence, Rodion Romanovich -- our excuses for the excesses of  others, our discrimination between avarice and altruism for historians looking back and having seen the results and being able to ask if  millions of dead and a world of misery were a just price for jet planes and video games and on-line porn.  Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, Rodya and if you're quoting that randy Ayn verbatim and before you've even read her --  why then, it's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards.  This 'philosophy of yours can justify things as disparate as Fascism and Communism and organized crime as well as the Spanish Inquisition, I expect -- and if  no price is too great for progress, and progress only defined by the people who committed crimes to make it happen, you've sold us a world no different from the world of jackals and hyenas and for that matter, you'll please forgive me for sticking you with the check, me being above that sort of obligation, being an 'advanced' person who needs the  money to destroy the old and bring in the new and create jobs and all. Right?"

Dasvidanya, dude.
   

     ____________

The reader will please excuse me for having excerpted big chunks from  Crime and Punishment. It's a cheap way of filling a page and of course it's all in the public domain too, but I can't help seeing in that tale the author's contempt both for Socialism in it's infancy and naivete and what would have been equal contempt I imagine, for the labored arguments for that equally jejune and opposite in name only to Communism:  Objectivism, with it's fictional and contrived classes of people and the warfare between them.

Liberals in the shower?

Are ya uncomfortable showering at the gym?  Asked Rick Santorum of students at a "Students for Life" rally last month.  Apparently he thought they should be, because there might be 'Liberals' in the shower and you know they can't stop talking about abortion rights and saying uncomfortable things. Of course Students for Life aren't lifetime students nor are they particularly interested in preserving life in general - only that of unbaptized embryos.  But hey, Students for Imaginary Biblical Commandments is too long for people whose lips move when they read.

And those are Rick's people. People who somehow see a point in his idiotic jabberwocky. But even those people can't be expected to focus very long, and so the pretense that liberals will follow you into the shower down at the YMCA to discuss reproductive rights until you're uncomfortable is more likely  than that Rick's little village people will likely follow you anywhere and everywhere to blather about not showering with Liberals.

It's all about youth and beauty says Rick, incomprehensibly, but it's also all about a culture of death that needs sparks and someone to rebel.  If that makes any kind of sense to you, I don't want you or Rick in my shower.  Particularly if you love people the way Rick and his chosen claim to.  Rick thinks his flock is very much like the liberals who broke away from England, even though he's a Conservative and he thinks conservatives did away with slavery and that's why we had to rebel.  Sorry If I'm making your stomach rebel.

Oh hell, it's impossible to make sense of any of that passionately meaningless garbage about -- about whatever it is he's blathering about, about what 'the left' has done to America in recent times.  Those are basically meaningless things he says, even when he says they aren't, but don't look for anything more than the barking of dogs at a Santorum giggle gallery, because people who think it's OK to kill children and people who are so retarded and mentally ill they don't know right from wrong, are people who don't get to gurgle and gobble and gargle about anyone's right to remain alive even when that "someone" isn't a someone.  I doubt his audience needs a coherent or factual argument anyway. They're mostly looking for a comfortable venue to express their righteous contempt and those things only get in the way of the self-esteem they think they acquire from being a "conservative" at best.

 You need to hear it, because it's none too early, with the Republicans beginning their campaign of  meaningless babble and emotional idiocy and self-righteous lies.  This idiot intends to run for president again and  he will have followers again and  this expression of the worst, most retrograde manifestation of human meanness and stupidity will always be with us.