Pete Hoekstra - hero of the revolution

Believe it or not, very few Americans voted for Barak Obama. The 9 million or so difference between the count for McPalin and Obama was the result of election tampering by ACORN. This notion seems to be part of the ever-changing catechism of the Republican faithful because I've been hearing it over and over again and so it's not all that surprising that congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) would feel encouraged to tell us that the internet activity and the massive street protests since the Iranian election was

" similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."

He said, referring to last August when the Speaker adjourned the House before an energy vote. Jon Stewart joked last night about the parallels being eerie: "Not parallels, the perpendiculars” but to a party that has tried to compare the governments we've cobbled together in Iraq and Afghanistan to the formation of our own government, the humor will be written off as liberal meanness or deflected by some tale of an unfair joke about the Palins or Joe the Plumber. No, once again they're posing as victims of a corrupt system and a stolen election.

I can imagine the groans of his staff, who quickly told us what Hoekstra would have said if Hoekstra had been as smart as they are:

"The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That’s the only point that he was trying to make."

No it wasn't and of course his party had been doing just that for 8 years. The reaction was swift, according to CNN, and one counter-twitter responded with:

"Except the Democrats didn't come after you with clubs and guns, did they?"

No, they did it with the ballot box and will all allowances made for poetic license, the perpendiculars are striking.

Who's the victim here?

Yes Sir, it's terrible how tasteless old far-left liberal David Letterman got away with some comment about the Palin family because the media is like you know all Liberal and hardly mentioned the grievous offense. Why if some God-fearing Christian conservative were to make some comment about Obama or his family? All hell would break loose, right?

You say you need evidence? Why how liberal of you, but look at how they're handling that really, really funny and tasteful picture of the 45th president of the United States that Sherri Goforth, an aide to state Sen. Diane Black (R-TN) sent out by e-mail? Why it's made international headlines, hasn't it? Well OK, at least it made some blog called Raw Story, but that's more exposure than the Palin story got from being headline material on all the media for days, isn't it?

Besides, you know, showing Obama as a pair of googly eyes on a black background is the funniest thing since the minstrel shows went away because of Liberal Fascist censorship and it just proves that far left Liberals have no sense of humor anyway. I mean none of us America loving patriots ever went beyond the bounds of truth or good taste by trashing Obama the Magic Negro and that only proves that it's them behind all the hatred and racism they throw at us Republicans who are the real victims here.

He must be wrong -- he's Obama.

It seems to me that if one is dedicated to thwarting president Obama's health care reform before one knows what it is, then one has to admit that either he's out to thwart anything Obama does, or any kind of health care reform.

Multimillionaire Rick Scott is one of those people who can't wait to hear what the plan actually entails before putting on the Drum Major costume and strutting about the streets twirling his baton in ostentatious outrage and ornate opposition. He has put together a group he predictably calls Conservatives for Patient's Rights rather than a more honest "The I've Got Mine and F*ck You Club."

"Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care,"

says Scott as quoted in today's Washington Post. Of course since we don't know that Obama is actually talking about Government run health care, at least not in the same sense that Scott would like us to fear he is, the mendacity begins with the first words. Then too, he doesn't want you to ask Americans who have government run health care either. By all accounts our politicians have it pretty good and the VA system was a model of efficiency, at least until the privatization pirates attempted to board that ship. He doesn't want you to listen to countries with successful and popular health care plans, he wants you to listen to a carefully selected and edited group of Canadians and Brits and their anecdotal horror stories and so enter CRC Public Relations and another round of captious TV ads.

Did I mention that Scott made his money as CEO of a private hospital business?

Scott is contributing $5 million from his own piggy bank and has, according to WaPo, got $15 million more from other people who support the status quo most Americans feel is in need of reform. The funds will be put to good use by CRC Public Relations, the same firm that gave us the "swift Boat Veterans" campaign that convinced the weak minded and no-minded that John Kerry was not where he was, didn't do what he did and proved it with testimony from people who didn't know him and were never near him.

Did I mention that CEO Scott was ousted from Columbia/HCA, the largest private U.S. health-care company at the time, that pleaded guilty to fraud? He defends this by telling us that other private hospitals were committing fraud too. Think about that when the argument comes around to the part where private is always better than public.

If you took logic 101 in college, you probably remember it being called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but Scott's target audience didn't go and doesn't remember and so Scott can employ the argument that any step toward reform will accelerate down hill without evidence. He can tell us he isn't necessarily opposed to Obama's plan, even before he knows what it is, but that

"The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path"

but what he means by "debate" is to obfuscate -- and that's obvious. We have had decades of debate; decades of millions spent on sleazy ads and slimy lies and distractions and Scott thinks we need to continue the gravy train he's on as long as he can keep it going.

Waiting for Ann

Oh goody! The Republicans on the Supreme court have handed down another victory to the Republicans here on Earth who think we need to punish people who say "indecent" things like "shit" and yet want to "move on" when it comes to punishing people for lesser indecencies like torturing suspects to death.

Now any minute now, Ann Coulter will be calling for these "activist judges" to be poisoned, won't she? After all, if it's Communism (or Fascism on alternate Tuesdays) to let a 3% tax cut expire and Fascist censorship to restore the Fairness Doctrine, how bad must it be to allow Federal censorship over broadcast TV? Any minute now, I'm sure. Ann and Godot -- any time now.

Tough guy Ed Rollins

Well what can we expect Ed Rollins to say when he tries to make a case for Barak Obama's weakness? After all Rollins can't make much of a case for anything but "toughness" in the Reagan administration he worked for or indeed the party he's long been part of. Not that he will get specific about Reagans testicularity, because if a Democrat had "cut and run" in Lebanon, Ed would still be howling about his effeminate weakness. But one can't take Ed for anything but a low key polemicist, an Ann Coulter without the filed teeth, a Lower fat Limbaugh with less gas content. It's all theater; all a continuing part of the fear mongering the humiliated GOP has been using to make us feel good about giving up freedom and prosperity and distract us from the abject failure of all its promises.

So Barak Obama wants to be loved, says Mr. Rollins. Horrors!

"He wants to be loved passionately and daily"

he writes for CNN.com as though he could know. As though he learned of the presidents innermost dreams through pillow talk: as though he weren't building yet another straw man, stuffed with pot-pourri and dressed in lace panties.

"He wants to be loved by the Democrats on the Hill and even the Republicans who have still not given him any love." (despite many having voted for him)

"He wants to be loved by the Europeans who have made a career out of badmouthing U.S. presidents and their policies."

which is Ed's way of placing the blame for calling them all Terrorist supporters of the Axis of Evil because they didn't agree about our false assurances about Iraq on them rather than on George Bush's glaring weakness of character.

"The real example of searching for love in all the wrong places was last week's lovefest south of the border when, in effect, he appeared to be hugging Castro, Ortega and Chavez who have spent their lives fighting everything the United States stands for."

continues the puffed up patriot, twirling his baton, wacing his flag, wishing you could believe that George Bush's Chavez handshake was fundamentally different than Obama's Chavez handshake which, to a prejudiced eye appeared to be a "love fest" and that these banana republic leaders were, by dint of socialistic ambitions "fighting against everything the United States Stands for." The very nerve of showing basic respect instead of making threats! The very weakness of decency and dignity!

Perhaps they do fight against some of the things we stand for, in their own countries, Like Ronald Reagan's death Squads and the fuedalism of foreign corporations, but as a threat to the security and way of life of our republic, they can't do the kind of damage that's been done by Rollins' party, nor are all the things we've been standing for, like torture, military aggression, supression of dissent and bombing the bejusus out of innocent civilians, all that worth defending. I hate to mention it, but Jesus lost his life fighting against many things we've wasted time standing for, nor did he think love was such a terrible and weak thing.

Still Obama should court respect, says Ed, meaning fear. He should just spit on these spic bastards and tell them in no uncertain terms just how many bombs we could drop on their miserable citizens just for voting against our wishes, like we did in Veet-nam. Fear is what we want, not love: grovelling, abject submission to the will of the American President, through fear.

Now of course appealing to the basest sentiments of the public with slander and libel and a smorgasbord of false accusations as the Republicans have done, is really all about wanting to be loved; only it's more pure by virtue of its dishonesty and hostility.

Consider the torture memos. Obama was weak fo releasing them: weak for allowing the Justice Department to decide who to go after and sorst of all, he looks weak, says Ed, to both the people who wanted to hide the information and the people who are our for Republican blood.
Weak if he does, weak if he doesn't. In fact the courage to ignore the passion of either mob must be weakness, right?

"Weakness is the death knell for a president. With 1,366 days to go before this term is up, Obama's got to get tougher or he will be viewed as a personality who reads well from a teleprompter."

So Ed is already partying like it's 2012 and he's trotting out that shibboleth about telepromters to prove his comfort with the most childish and idiotic of his party's giggling points. Pretty weak Ed, I'm sorry to have to say it.

But that's what America liked about Kommander Guy Bush and Reagan - toughness - reading tough words written for him by arm chair belligerants like Ed. I just wish someone would define the concept well enough to differentiate it from pandering, from intransigence, stupidity, dishonesty, unwillingness to learn -- even to make peace.

I just wish politicians like Ed Rollins could explain to me why it's wrong to expose atrocities rather than be grateful to the perpetrators who have allowed us 1200 some odd days of not being attacked by a dozen or so saboteurs -- and why being so pants-wetting fearful justifies taking our freedom, respect, dignity and prosperity away while he whimpers about Obama being weak.

Same old, same old Party

What's more disgusting than CNN giving copious air time to Florida Representative Connie Mack this morning so that he can continue to demand the firing or resignation of Tim Geithner for reasons of complicity in a no strings attached, unsupervised AIG bailout under Hank Paulson and the Bush administration? Why, it was natty, nasty and nefarious young Connie Mack himself. Representative Mack, in trying to pin the tail on the donkey, seems to have overlooked the fact that it's an elephant's tail and wants us to buy the notion that the AIG bonuses were not only Geithner's fault, but proof of the incompetance of President Obama in fixing the Republican train wreck. The spectacular smugfest of Republicans acting as though oversight of Wall Street was their idea is just that -- spectacular.

Asked pointedly and repeatedly on CNN this morning however, Mack refused to comment on whether Geithner or the Obama administration should attempt to recover the funds, repeating again and again that they never should have been given and asking what Geithner knew and when he knew it.

"Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster."

said Mack last Wednesday. Once again, CNN missed the opportunity to ask whether the huge disaster of the last 8 years was anyone outside the current administration's responsibility and whether the 8 years of mismanagement could reasonably be expected to have been rectified in a matter of weeks without the waste of a hundredth of a percent. Are we to have forgotten that the kind of oversight that would have prevented the mess was the devil himself to every Republican of the last several decades?

I have to recall however that the Republicans waited two months longer to declare the Obama Administration a failure and disaster than they did when Bill Clinton was elected. Some couldn't wait for him to actually take office to begin the disinformation, investigation and sabotage and what can we call this but sabotage as they offer no practical alternative other than to attack, attack and attack?

One can never hope for contrition from any Republican it seems, nor can anyone expect their cooperation in any attempt to deal with their failures and misdeeds. It's just the Same Old Party and the Same Old Excuses.

Bigger, more intrusive government

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone."

-Justice Louis Brandeis-

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

"offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,"

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

"A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

"That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too."

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

The healer

"A man can smile and smile and be a villain" or at least he can heap praise on one. That Mussolini made the trains run on time has become a metaphor for the practice of singling out certain isolated actions of an otherwise un-praiseworthy person in order to dismiss any clear view of the whole man.

That particular kind of smile is visible on the face of Bill Frist as he tries to portray our outgoing president as a savior of millions. George Bush is a healer, he says. I know, but be careful that nothing flies into your mouth while it gapes in amazement. No, he's not talking about the hundreds of millions of lives, perhaps billions of lives affected by his economic policies nor the uncounted lives of Iraqi civilians who he has killed or maimed, the millions exiled, the millions forced into fear and abject squalor, he's talking about the lives he's saved in Africa.

While millions have been hacked to pieces, raped, dismembered and starved in Africa without any interference by the United States of America, Bush has none the less committed 15 billion dollars to fight AIDS, according to smiling Bill Frist. Some, of course question the accounting and questionable accounting is the most visible Bush family trait as has been demonstrated. No mention makes Frist of any number of lives that might have been saved by advocating condoms to prevent infections because that, of course, would offend the Christian Right. God, after all, provides sinners so that we can be saintly in our condescension and preventing the infections just gets in the way of God's plan.

Frist has the nerve to continue on and on about how Bush has done wonders for education and health care and I'm sure it's not that he's a damn liar or that he lives on another planet that he doesn't realize that Bush failures in these departments contributed heavily to the fact that Frist is no longer the Majority Leader. That Bush and Frist and their party of God are saintly men, misjudged by sinners and Liberals, is an article of faith for Republicans but they're no different than other men. It's just that faith makes liars of us all.

Light at heart

“Paul Shanklin is a long-time friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for the Rush Limbaugh show are light-hearted political parodies,”

said "Chip" Saltsman. I'm sure that many of them would see "Barak the Magic Negro" as hilarious, that many of them would see Rush Limbaugh as a funny man.

“Please enjoy the enclosed CD by my friend Paul Shanklin of the Rush Limbaugh Show”

read the note RNC candidate "Chip" attached to the CD containing 41 tracks of "light-hearted political parodies" and distributed as a message of Christmas cheer to Republican National Committee members. Republicans love Christmas and all it's religious meanings, you know. It's titled "We hate the USA." These light hearted bozos of course can't be accused of hating the USA, they just think most of the people in it are comical Poles, Jews, Liberals, homos, Mexican illegals, murderous Muslims, and of course Negros, any of whom can be stereotyped, ridiculed and condescended to over Scotch and sodas at the good old boy's club where loving America's most obnoxious traditions is as de regeur as a good old black-face minstrel show or lunch at the Coon Chicken Inn.

Rush Limbaugh, you know, the guy who avoided the draft because of an anal infection and who let his housekeeper take the fall for his drug addiction and who thinks it's "light-hearted" to compare a homely self conscious adolescent girl with a dog on national TV, predicted a while back that featuring the song on his radio program would foster accusations of racism. That wasn't hard to predict seeing that it is racism of the most arrogant sort. But no, Chip and Rush and the rest of the country club comedians haven't broken any laws. It's possible that they truly don't see anything wrong in being the douche bags they are and will go to their graves thinking they've been put-upon by moral censors and do-gooders and humorless liberals and there's little we can do about it other than to hope the event comes soon.

REVISIONISM REDUX: PART DEUX

December has become National Revisionist Month for the bloodsuckers.   It started on the Second of December when Charlie Gibson interviewed the War-Criminal-In-Chief, whereupon your enraged Ninja 8pus posted this:

After the WMD argument proved bogus, the Bush administration advanced yet another false premise to justify themselves:  The “pied piper” argument.  The one that states:  “We are fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”  When intelligence fails, “staying the course” is the cowardly way to avoid owning the mistake.

Within a week, The New York Times published this editorial, calling Bush The Deluder in Chief:

The truth is that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been chafing to attack Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001.  They justified that unnecessary war using intelligence reports that they knew or should have known to be faulty ...

Despite it all, Mr. Bush said he will “leave the presidency with my head held high.”   And, presumably, with his eyes closed to all the disasters he is dumping on the American people and his successor.

Hours later, the arrogant Stephen Hadley, responding on behalf of the petulant POTUS, released this statement condemning the NYT editorial:

The New York Times continues to have difficulty acknowledging the undeniable success of the President's decision to surge an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq.  Because of the surge, Iraq is a more stable and secure country.  It is the success of the surge that is allowing American troops to withdraw from Iraq and return home with a record of heroic service and still unheralded success.

Even former administration officials are feeling the basses of their being throb with sacraments of praise for their simpering Byzantine:

We are better off for having woken up to the fact that we were in a war, and, mark my words, no president in the foreseeable future is going to step back from the tenets of the Bush philosophy, which are: better to fight them over there than to fight them here, and we will not wait until dangers fully materialize before we strike," Rove said.

Presidents come and go with a rhythm of lapping waves.  They arrive in tumult and, after their days are done, should leave gracefully, spent of their devotions.  Not this president.   Bush intends to finish as he began ... with attacks against any critic, smears against any opponent, denials of any fact, and falsifications of any record.  He intends to spin his own legacy to the bitter end.

Why should we care?  Because old lies and new infamy condemn us to repeating our mistakes, and our only recourse left, our only justice, is the truthful reckoning of history.  Consider this perspective, The GOP's McCarthy Gene:

In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin … You demonize the opposition and polarize the electorate to win.

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating … The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs - Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin.

Not this time.  To prevent a repeat of the Nixon and Bush disasters, we should say “never again” and force the “undead” of McCarthyism to look in the mirror and despair of their works.

NOT FUNNY

I was just getting ready for bed to nurse a bug when this caught my attention (a H/T to Echidne for posting this earlier):



The interviewer, Barbara West, must be a Freeper for the McCain campaign, and her questions are so obviously hostile they border on parody.  Here are some background statistics before I continue this rant:

Federal deficit (Carter years):   $54.5 billion annual average
Federal deficit (Reagan years):   $210.6 billion annual average

Federal budget (Carter administration):  $590.9 billion (1980)
Federal budget (Reagan administration):  $1.14 trillion (1988-89)

National debt as a percentage of GNP (Carter years):  31.5%
National debt as a percentage of GNP (Reagan years):   70%

Furthermore, it should be noted that the federal bureaucracy grew by 5% during the Reagan administration despite campaign promises and years of rhetoric about shrinking the size of government. But wait, there’s more:

Personal savings rate (Post WW-II to 1979):  8 to 10% of disposable income

Personal savings rate (1985):  Zero.

(Since Bush #43, household debt now exceeds household income.)

My point:  The current economic meltdown has roots going back to the Reagan administration, and the Republican mantra for almost 30 years has been “smaller government” and “fiscal responsibility” that, hypocritically, was never put into practice until ... you guessed it … Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who was the first president to actually balance the federal books. 

Now the Republicans are trying to demonize Obama as a socialist.  It is an outrageous lie when one considers that 20 years of Republican mismanagement set the stage for the current meltdown.  Wish the kids a Happy Halloween for me.