I just hope I haven't done too good a job of familiarizing the public with this stuff -- I'd hate to think I was normalizing it sufficiently that the citizens might no longer gave these guys the Springtime for Hitler look. You know, "seen too oft, familiar with her face" etc. Wouldn't that be a dramatic irony!
UPDATE. In comments, D. Johnson takes a trip down memory lane:
I remember the furor over Bush's executive orders. After reading dozens of blog posts on the topic, I became convinced that it was even worse than I thought. It was the start of a dictatorship, I reckoned; the administration would either declare martial law and suspend elections, or simply refuse to step down after the elections took place...
I was fifteen years old at the time. What's their excuse?Yeah, I only called Bush a fascist to be funny, but I was an old man even then. Christopher Hazell skunks the picnic by bringing up the droning: "Obama really gets a bum rap. I mean, you use your illegally massive secret surveillance network to track down and kill your own citizens without trial, and all of the sudden people start calling you a 'tyrant'!" Fair enough, I'm against that too, and will endorse actions against it even by transparently duplicitous conservatives. But I notice we hear fewer accusations of Obamatyranny over that these days than we do over fiddles with Obamacare and such like. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe it's close enough to 2016 that they're imagining their own asses in the CiC's seat.
UPDATE 2. Also in comments, Aimai, regarding Clinton: "Clinton the drug runner? The clinton hit list? Hillary accused of murdering her lover vince foster to cover up the fact she was a lesbian?" Ahhh yess, early innings in the right's attempt to capture the "have you ever really looked at a dollar bill, man?" market. There's a whole generation of wingnuts who think they learned "skepticism" from the Mena airport.
UPDATE 3. As usual, apposite posts turn up after my column is published. Today's Deroy Murdock propaganda job-o-work contains several ObamaHitlerisms such as "Obama now rules by decree," as well as a very Breitbartian complaint against Obama's executive orders: "Obama’s predecessors have signed executive orders and, more or less, left it at that. But Obama pounds his chest as he does so." If only Murdock had footage of this!
My favorite part, though, has nothing to do with ObamaHitler:
Also, Earth’s sole superpower is sagging where it should be No. 1. America has slouched to No. 12 on the 2014 Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom.That's like saying America has regrettably fallen on the NAMBLA index of Places with Cute, Friendly, Unattended Kids.
You know, it's possible that Obama is in fact the first Caesarian president.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping you would include your take on Jonathan Turley's interview with Megyn Kelly.
ReplyDeleteCurrent tally of Executive Orders stands at 167 for President Obama--and 291 for his predecessor (not counting the latter's signing statements).
ReplyDeleteI don't remember Clinton getting this kind of treatment, but maybe I
ReplyDeletewasn't paying close enough attention at that time; anyway wasn't
"criminal hillbilly" their schtick back then?
At the equivalent point in the Clinton presidency, it was all about the CLENIS. Now that Obama's in the White House, their obsession with the Presidential Penis is strictly on the down-low.
Not a single mention of Jonah in that column. Quelle mouche t'a piqué? I'll just give him a little shout out here so that he knows his fans still remember him, alone in the night, except for his mother, some Cheetos, and an intern who refuses to enter a restroom within 60 minutes of a Jonah drop.
ReplyDeleteFascist's just another word for nothing left to lose.
ReplyDeleteTurley's best line:
ReplyDeleteI am astonished by the degree of passivity in Congress, particularly by Democrats.
Huzzah!
Yet oddly enough, he then said that what the passive Democrats have done wrong is to have ducked their responsibility for locking Barry in the White House basement and that's just not like the Democrats Turley knew back when he was a page (1977-78, those epic years of nonpassivity in which Democrats chained Jimmy Carter to the furnace to thwart his Hitlerian Stalinist lust for freeing hostages without giving Iranians cakes and weapons and autographed pictures of Ollie North).
Oh yes, the good old days - Turley will never forget that time before the Dixiecrat migration was complete and James Eastland was president pro tempore in the Senate and could speak truth to power:
Segregation is not discrimination... Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire.
I think you meant "loose".
ReplyDeleteExcept for all the whining about "throat-shoving".
ReplyDeleteNow, small-time Republicans have long been prone to ObamaHitlerisms, especially in the Southernmost parts of the Republic.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, that's the population that would be most comfortable with the real Hitler.
I remember the furor over Bush's executive orders. After reading dozens of blog posts on the topic, I became convinced that it was even worse than I thought. It was the start of a dictatorship, I reckoned; the administration would either declare martial law and suspend elections, or simply refuse to step down after the elections took place. The next step, of course, would be their efforts to radically reshape society in their image - something aided by a populace scared into submission. They had to do this because they needed more soldiers in order to further their scheme to conquer the planet. I firmly believed that it was only a matter of time before I was dropped into some war zone at the behest of the American dictator.
ReplyDeleteI was fifteen years old at the time. What's their excuse?
ReplyDeletebecause the numbers aren't there, what's left of the Right will end up as
gravel embedded in the road to serfdom."
Early in the mornin' we'll be startin out.
To allow some extra travel time
They repaved the coastal highway with right wing gravel
And the woody gets hung up in the slime.
But was it really the naiveté of youth and not the charisma of Richard Bruce Cheney?
ReplyDeleteHey, I was 45. It wasn't totally crazy at the time. Was it?
ReplyDeleteYeah, it really was. As my dad pointed out when I was fool enough to say this aloud, "Well, we believed the same thing about Nixon."
ReplyDeleteSittin' in the kitcken, a house in Macon
ReplyDeleteLimbaugh's whinging on the radio
Smell the coffee, read the Free Bacon
Wingnuts on a gravel road
Pull the curtains back and look outside
Somebody somehere I don't know
Come on now child, we better go hide
Wingnuts on a gravel road
Wingnuts on a gravel road
Wingnuts on a gravel road
Describe Erik bin Erik's morning routine.
ReplyDeleteObama really gets a bum rap. I mean, you use your illegally massive secret surveillance network to track down and kill your own citizens without trial, and all of the sudden people start calling you a "tyrant"!
ReplyDeleteI mean, it's so irrational! Don't these people know that his health care law is somewhat of an improvement over the status quo? How could anybody who makes small but important improvements to our healthcare system be a tyrant?
When he laughed, Democrat senators burst with laughter,
ReplyDeleteAnd when he cried the little children died in the streets.
"On floor of house waitin on 'Kommandant-In-Chef"'... the Socialistic dictator who's been feeding US a line or is it 'A-Lying?'" tweeted Rep. Randy Weber (R.-Tex.).
ReplyDeletefirst they came for grandpa's car, and i said nothing. then they came for granpa's twitter account, and still i said nothing...
But he changed a deadline!
ReplyDelete"when you talk to him one on one, he sounds reasonable and like he's not
ReplyDeletetrying to transform America into some socialist nightmare."
Mr. Paul continued, "but when you play it backwards and listen real close just before the needle runs to the spindle, it says 'Paul is dead.'"
Yes, the signing statements in which Dubya in effect stated "I understand this law to have no enforcement power in matters I don't want it to have."
ReplyDeleteYou get an upvote mostly just because I'm sick of seeing people make excuses for things they were formerly against. Don't push it now, or I'll... I dunno... post another comment.
ReplyDeleteJesus Christ, I'm old.
ReplyDeleteWhat's outstanding is that Obama has given us no penisy scandal, no coverup-worse-than-the-crime-gate, and no crime. The guy is as close as a powerful human can come to smelling like a rose, morally, ethically, and legally. But that hasn't cooled his opposition at all. It's as hot as ever. Reading this week's column is like reading the gauge on a pressure cooker as it climbs up and up. But without any real meat in the pot, it's getting ready to blow over stuff like decisions to shift a signup date for a program.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to understand why the crazy right is waaaay crazier than the crazy left, and why their numbers are so big. Bush gave us wars and occupations, 100,000 people dead, any number of painful domestic snafus--Terry Schiavo, bans on stem cells, heckuva job Brownie, signing statements, legalized torture, economy driven straight off cliff--plus all that "no WMDs here" jokery, and while you could find him called Hitler here and there, at this point in his "reign" most Democrats just felt worn out. "Let's hunker down and get through it, this jackass won't be president forever." So why's one side heave out an angry sigh over repeated, large-scale catastrophe and the other side goes adenoidal over a reduction in the sulfur content of gasoline? Like what is the psychology there? It is so weird to me.
Repetition lends power to stupidity. Crazy right is far more beneficial to the wealthy than crazy left--or mild left--or watery liberal--so the wealthy are going to provide outlets (Fox News, wingnut welfare, the Sunday morning Press the Meat drivel) to provide that repetition. It's just that there's so much repetition that a feedback cycle has been set up, and the speakers are shrieking as a result.
ReplyDeleteI remember one particularly cracked bit of CLENIS obsession which posited that the Lewinski thing mean that Bill was gay because who even knows man.
ReplyDeleteWell, we've been destined to reach this point ever since about 1993. That's when Republicans first started batting around the notion of Democratic control of government as always illegitimate. First it was the talking point that somehow Clinton wasn't legit because he only won a plurality in a 3-man race. Then we had Gingrich's lexicon for the midterms in 94, all terms intended to paint the Democrats as illegitimate and unfit for office. Then the endless march of phony scandals, terminating in a purely political impeachment farce. In 2000 we get the stolen election, where the right really reaches for legitimacy for an illegitimate president; "Bush won more COUNTIES!" as if land mass casts votes, the downplay of the actual result of the full Florida recount (Gore won), the phony stories about "White House vandalism," the blaming of Clinton for the recession that started in 2001, the blaming of Clinton for 9/11, etc etc. By the time we got to the end of Bush's disastrous reign, the evidence of Republican malfeasance/incompetence was piled so high, and smelled so bad, that big majorities turned them out of office. In favor of ... a black guy.
ReplyDeleteNot that they didn't attempt the same with Obama, which of course led to the secret Kenyan birth insanity. At that point, so early in the game, they didn't have anything else to hang a claim of illegitimacy upon, so they manufactured a particularly ridiculous one, which many of our low-IQ fellow citizens continue to cling in spite of repeated debunkings.
They come up with this stuff because the determination of illegitimacy is pre-determined; not only is Obama a Democrat and therefore by definition illegitimate, but he's also a black guy - a member of the tribe the Republican base has been encouraged to fear and hate for the past 50 years. So you just know he's up to nefarious ends. The maddening lack of any real scandal isn't a problem when the lack of legitimacy is pre-determined. It becomes the prism through which all events are experienced and viewed. Once you know the guy himself is not legit, then by definition each of his actions is illegitimate, kind of like the guy driving without a license will always be the one at fault for the accident. If he wasn't out on the road where he wasn't supposed to be, that car never would have run into him. Same with Obama. He's not supposed to be where he is, so by definition, everything he does is illegal, his every action an insult to our constitution and founding fathers and etc.
"Constitutionality is what matters, not quantity," said Joel Pollak at Breitbart.com.
ReplyDeleteWhich would seem to indicate that every president who signed even one executive order was also a criminal. Alas, Pollak has realized this too late to affect most of them. Wonder how that happened.
No, it wasn't totally crazy. I was caught in the same fever despite being 30 years old at the time. Bush really was doing some unprecedented power grabs. And Obama has pretty much continued with most of them. The US system really has changed in the past decade and a half. A certain paranoia about the state of privacy, or the degree of corporate influence, is warranted.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to seem to argue in favor of conspiracy theories. And I do appreciate that much of what I (and many people like me) realized about US policies around the year 2003 had actually been true for some time. But I think we should appreciate actual changes, if in a rational manner.
Of course... Nixon actually was doing all manner of wickedness.
ReplyDeleteThat Clinton's Arkansas mafia managed to cover up the fact that Vince Foster was a chick is pretty damn impressive, you gotta admit.
ReplyDeleteI just had a Vince Foster discussion with my mother-in-law. Yes, she still believes the Hillary had Foster killed because, as her lover, he knew that she was actually gay. And something about the White House travel office being iinvolved in covering up Rose Law firm records.
ReplyDeleteIt's not physically possible for me to like this comment any more than I do.
ReplyDeleteIt's not physically possible for me to like this comment any more than I do.
Hell, I knew the fix was in when the 2000 election rolled around. The Bush campaign announcing in the primaries that they weren't going to abide by fundraising limits and were foregoing federal matching funds was the tell. I had been following campaign finance issues closely for a decade by then, and my thought at the time - which has not changed since - was "uh-oh, the big money guys are taking the gloves off; they no longer care about even trying to hide that they're buying the government, and he's their guy." And sure as shit, once their guy got into office, it was no-holds-barred strip-mining of the accumulated wealth of the populace, wage stagnation, out and out theft, and so on and so forth. Think about it; outside of being a horrible president with horrible policies, the Bush era began the impoverishment of the majority in this country. They talk about the first Bush recession as if it were a minor blip - but when you look at the real figures, it took 5 years for employment to reach pre-recession levels. By then it's 2006 and the housing crash is just around the corner.
ReplyDeleteDo you have to be crazy to wonder if wiping out that pesky middle class wasn't the goal all along? Or are you crazy if you don't at least wonder? It's no secret that broad affluence makes it harder for those at the top of the heap to achieve their every whim; maybe they just decided on a final solution for those bothersome plebes standing between them and total unquestioned dominance.
I feel your pain <\Clinton>
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing crazy about noting the economic disasters of our time and considering who benefits from them.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in the fifth grade America went through the event modern conservatives consider the Great Beginning, which was of course the election of Ronnie Raygun. To get us to that point Jimmy Carter had to be utterly destroyed. And of course he was: beset by foreign and domestic troubles, despised by the press, and largely abandoned by his own party.
ReplyDeleteSince this was the great formative event, righties have it in mind that this is the proper fate of all Democrats haughty enough to try and serve as president. They should at least have the decency to be one-termers. That's the commonality between the Clinton and Obama administrations: each betrayed America by being reelected. In Clinton's case there had been plans for impeachment nearly from the start of his presidency, and in 97-98 they were broken out of the glass case. In Obama's case they don't have anything they can sell as just cause for impeachment, nor do they have the numbers so far. So instead they amp up the crazy rhetoric.
This is what I say when my rightwing friends and family start going off about the deficit: "You must have been really upset during the Bush years, right? No? Then I guess deficits aren't really that important."
ReplyDeleteI was about six when Reagan won. Even then I remember wondering, "Why do they like that mean old man more than Carter?"
ReplyDeleteFirst they came for the niggling policy adjustments, and I said nothing....
ReplyDeleteThat was Ann Coulter- Clinton was a womanizer because he was a latent homosexual. Yeah, it really makes sense, honest!
ReplyDeleteIn Obama's case they don't have anything they can sell as just cause for impeachment
ReplyDeleteNot for lack of trying!
Rand Paul told a Newsmax talk show, because "when you talk to him one on one, he sounds reasonable and like he's not trying to transform America into some socialist nightmare."
ReplyDelete"I just can't figure it out. When I momentarily suspend my paranoid fantasies and confront reality, they are two totally different things! If only I didn't have a mentally ill base to pander to. Hmm, such an insoluble problem. Oh well, back to being a deranged fucking lunatic!".
The view from over the South Pacific was one of wonder - how could you Yanks be so stupid, so quickly after Nixon. That was, of course, before Reagan demonstrated that the plutocracy operated exactly how Ellroy described it.
ReplyDeleteOh you're definitely right about repetition -- but seems to me you have to want to be this angry for the repetition to work. When I took Philosophy 101, the one thing that made immediate sense to me was John Stuart Mill's Utility Principle: we do whatever will cause us the most pleasure, full stop. I have found this to be borne out in my own personal bad choices. But I can't for the love of whiskey figure out how people who declare themselves patriots derive pleasure from the idea that America is in collapse and there's nothing they can do about it. And then they vote for Romney, like he's the answer? It's bananas.
ReplyDeleteWhat, did she keep trying to perform cunnilingus on him? Or insist on shopping for a Subaru?
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is all of a piece with their larger overall philosophy: Government itself is illegitimate except as a means to funnel money to favored cronies.
ReplyDeleteRepublicans: True patriots who love America, but despise its government and the majority of the people who live here.
"Fascist's just another word for nothing left too loose."
ReplyDeletethat's actually pretty tidy. I think I'll use it.
In Obama's case they don't have anything they can sell as just cause for impeachment . . .
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter. Republican congressmen in the House have already declared that, should Republicans gain control of the Senate, they will start impeachment proceedings. Sure, they have no high crime (other than presidenting while black and while being a democrat) or misdemeanor. But they'll make up some charges and hope for the best.
I think it is now part of the general GOP operating scheme that any Democrat who wins two terms should automatically be impeached.
Caesarean is the new Alinskite.
ReplyDeleteThen call me crazy. I don't believe in conspiracies. I don't have
ReplyDeleteto. I just think a corporate bought state (with all its bonus
military, surveillance and police powers) can be every bit as fascist as
a dictator with his own army, even if their autocrats shout
"Constitution! Liberty! Freedom!" as they eviscerate worker and
environmental protections and call for the end of the minimum wage and
child labor laws. If the entire teabagging brand of nationalist,
authoritarian corporatist bullshit (soaked in rigid fundamentalism)
can't be called even a wee bit fascist in its anti-democratic,
anti-liberal manifestations of power (see, Kansas Brownbacks, North
Carolina Goopers, et al), then "Mission accomplished, Jonah Goldberg!"
You need to remember that the first president to issue an executive order was that gay transexual commie Nazi tree-hugging felon who also happens to have been the richest U.S. president ever, George Washington. I want my country back!
ReplyDeletederive pleasure from the idea that America is in collapse
ReplyDeleteSort of like declaring someone who doesn't want to date you a total loser forever or a bitch no one can love or something, isn't it?
And Mitt, hey, he had binders full of women. He must know how to get laid in America!
You'd think he'd have said it in Kenyan just to be all Muslim and anti-colonialism and shit.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the middle class was deliberately targeted. But if you look at the economic goals of the 1%, like favoring interest and capital gains over wage income, maximizing rent extraction, tort reform, and open market manipulation, it's pretty plain to see that they're engaged in zero-sum thinking. Rather than see their share of the economy grow as the whole economy grows, they're trying to grab a bigger slice of the pie as it stays the same size.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tedrall.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=keyalbum.KeywordAlbum&g2_keyword=CEO&g2_itemId=9943
After Reagan was elected for the second time, a Russian friend said to me, "You need a better actor."
ReplyDeleteSt. Ronnie, 381.
ReplyDeleteLast week Scott Lemieux over at LG&M was scratching his head over Senator Paul's political acumen in bringing up Monica Lewinsky some fifteen years after the scandal. I'm of the opinion that Paul knew exactly what he was doing, and that he's dealing with his base as a faith constituency rather than a political constituency. We like to use the phrase "dog-whistle politics" for the coded messages they use. The Lewinsky scandal was never all that important compared to the connotations that have become attached to it: Democrats cheat and lie and prey on young white women, the flowers of the race. That's the button that Rand Paul was pushing. There's no difference between that and some televangelist sneering about "Hollywood liberals"--the intended audience knows exactly what the reference means.
ReplyDeleteI firmly believed that it was only a matter of time before I was dropped into some war zone at the behest of the American dictator.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have been at the behest of an American dictator. Bush himself was a faceplate for energy companies trying to pull the shit they pulled in California- They were trying to militarily enable an Enron cash mopping operation with Persian gulf oil. They thought knocking out a weak Iraqi military was the centerpiece of this strategy. The insurgency never even entered the contingecy planning.
Pipes and that crew weren't just shit talking about going to Iran; it was part of a broader plan to de-nationalize as much oil as possible so it could be used to leverage political power. The Iraq insurgency delayed this part. Hurricane Katrina delayed it until there could be a subsequent Republican administration. They still have a hard on for Iran.
The military thinking among Republicans now is their Army of God (The largely fundamentalist Air Force) will succeed where the ground troops failed. Iran's already beaten our army with its forward skirmishers, and achieved all its military aims within Iraq.
We had nearly eight years of MBA flunkies directing a long range imperial military operation with an army that had been constructed to put out brush fires. It was sheer idiocy, and if you get another Republican in the white House they'll try it again.
I've got an analogy for Victor Davis Harmodius Aristogeiton Hanson- it was the Sicilian Expedition, as executed by the Army of Tennessee.
He liked women too much, and they liked him. Ann's ideal male was a rand style rapist. Not kidding. That was the underlying logic of her assertion. To seduce or charm a woman was so very gay. Real men treat them like dirt.
ReplyDeleteI think strip mining is a great term. Its more like the tragedy of the commons. The one percent engaged in a combo mafia bust out/strip mining of an asset (the middle classs) and then discovered that they would have to live with the despoiled wreckage and wretched refuse. Its like mountsin top removal in west virginia if the mine owners ghought the miuntsins would griw back. No dpelling edit on $&@ iphone.
ReplyDeleteRead "the authoritarians" and meditate on the role of anger for an emmiserated population. Its like cutting for teenage gifls . Its how they know they are alive.
ReplyDeleteAlso:hypocrites. They accuse us of secism and racism? They are even more guilty of sexism snd racism. Clinton made some innocent jew slut his whore and barack obama married a black woman likevthe racist he is.
ReplyDeleteI've seen one of Coulter's males in action at the bar I used to work. An off duty cop propositioned one of the waits with this line: "Why don't you come on back to the house with us. We'll watch some fuck films and climb in the hot tub." She declined. Another woman who declined him at the bar got rougher treatment. Some friends of mine witnessed him throwing her to the ground, and putting his foot on her neck. When they approached him, he pulled his badge.
ReplyDeleteThe arrest photos of Steve Stockman remind me of that fucking lizard boy. He's all the guys I went to high school with who thought they'd graduated from selling dime bags to being able to fuck with the Hell's Angels.
Most of them wound up in jail. They found one of them on the reservation of a power plant in his car, shot in the head and in such an advanced state of decomposition his skin was black and peeling off.
The other ones joined the police force.
"have you ever really looked at a dollar bill, man?"
ReplyDeleteThat is so perfect, thank you. I've definitely encountered that market.
So have I.
ReplyDeleteOne of my co-workers held up a penny and asked me, "Have you ever seen THIS? It says 'e pluribus unum.' Doesn't that sound Communist to you?"
I think he was trying to start an argument, and I try not to be pulled into political or religious arguments at work. I only said "It sounds American to me."
Fortunately, we had work to do, and did not argue.
From his mother's room untimely rip'd? Is that the new birther theory?
ReplyDeleteI don't want to get all stereotypical here but I also worked a bar a long, long time ago that was just a block or so down from a police precinct in NYC. Some of the very worst customers I ever had were off-duty cops -- not all cops by a long shot -- but enough to make it a category. Most of the truly obnoxious ones were relatively young, and the only thing that differentiated their behavior from psychos & criminals was the badge in their wallets. It was unfathomable that anyone would ever consider giving these guys guns and the power of the state, yet there they were. Whenever I read about some trigger-happy cop shooting a family dog in a drug raid, or blowing away a disturbed guy whose mother called them for help in the first place, it never comes as a surprise.
ReplyDeleteThat's not an exaggeration, sadly enough.
ReplyDeleteYou've probably seen these 14 characteristics of Fascism:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
Down here in the South, almost everyone I know or have ever known is a conservative. To a large degree, they would agree with policy decisions based on of these various points.
No kidding.
That is the saving grace of work, isn't it? Gives you a reason to set aside differences and personal bullshit. It's an underrated point in its favor, I must admit.
ReplyDeleteNobody remembers Janet Reno?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/govt/admin/reno.htm
I recall the wingnutzen complaining about her all the time.
~
Not to mention, 8 Espionage Act charges.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.policymic.com/articles/50459/8-whistleblowers-charged-with-violating-the-espionage-act-under-obama
~
Two things here: Reagan's people were actually in contact with members of the Iranian regime and dealing with them to hold on to the American hostages throughout the presidential campaign n order to make Carter look weak. Going back even further, Tom Hartman occasionally plays recordings of the phone conversations between Lyndon Johnson and Pug Senator Everett Dirksen discussing the back channel contacts between Nixon's people and the South Vietnamese government encouraging them to reject peace overtures from North Vietnam, and promising them that when Nixon is elected, they'll get a better deal. Johnson at one point asks Dirksen in so many words why Nixon is flirting with treason in continuing these contacts, and Dirksen basically says he'll look into it, and then never does. In both cases, the Dems made the decision to not go public with these incidents for "the good of the country". Does anyone think for a moment that if the Pugs were in possession of that kind of knowledge about Dems, they wouldn't have used it over and over again until the Dems were crushed? Our problem boils down to the fact that Dems are spineless, and the Pugs are ruthless... and well financed.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the cops in Durham, NC, where I worked were Hell's Angels or fellow travelers. Even after a federal investigation established unsavory links between the Angels and the vice squad, those links persisted. They're almost familial. Our bar had the F.O.P. room. Periodically the cops would have a bash there and rip everything off the walls, maybe beat each other up a little. A few of them wore guns strapped to their ankles at all times.
ReplyDeleteUmmm, Aimai, it works the other way around.
ReplyDeleteIf Bill Clinton wasn't a racist, he would have kept diddling white Protestant girls instead of discriminating against them when awarding White House internships.
And if Barack Obama wasn't a racist, he would have married a white woman just like his father did.
In contrast, Rand Paul married a white woman, proving he is not a racist.
I agree that Democrats need to stop acting like abused wives who stay quiet "for the good of the children". But what I really wish is that Democrats would come up with some ruthless ideas of their own.
ReplyDeleteBut in American, we say e-way uribus-play unum-way.
ReplyDeleteReagan proved it, said The Power Behind the Throne.
ReplyDeleteI really like that unlicensed driver analogy.
ReplyDeleteThey don't hate him for what he does; they hate him for who he is.
Rightwing thinking makes so much more sense when you remember to start with the conclusions and work backwards from them.
ReplyDeleteI've been pondering the movement to reinvigorate snake handling in fundamentalist churches. Why has Alex Jones been forced to remain silent about that conspiracy? Well, who cares about publicity? Let's just get on with it.
ReplyDeleteTrue.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the effects of simply taking Iraqi oil off the market. In 2004 Exxon-Mobile's reserves--oil in the ground that they owned the rights to--was worth a trillion dollars more than it was in 2001. They didn't have to lift a finger, sign a contract, or drill a single well.
ReplyDeleteI was doing alright until about 50, and then it wasn't just about trying to stave off fat, it's more about lurching into wakefulness in a kind of panic and wondering if you don't have MS or Hodgkins or leukemia or an incipient abdominal aortic aneurysm every time you have to walk to the mailbox or lift something heavy.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that makes it worthwhile is the eldersex.
"With apologies to T.H.White," wrote Yancy, "the reign of Barry Obama
ReplyDeleteis no fantasy. In fact, this has been a 6 year reign of terror against
Christianity, liberty, the Constitution, self responsibility,
employment, and economic opportunity. I have been thinking of a new
nickname for Barry to reflect his hacking away and massacre of America
as she once was. Barry the Butcher has a wonderful ring to it, don't you
think?"
" Like, for example, Rep. Mark Meadows(R.-N.C.), who said Obama "has declared war, and not just on Congress but the American people." "On floor of house waiting on 'Kommandant-In-Chef"'... the Socialistic dictator who's been feeding US a line or is it 'A-Lying?'" tweeted Rep. Randy Weber (R.-Tex.). "It's hard to imagine exactly what [Obama's] goal is," GOP Senator Rand Paul told a Newsmax talk show, because "when you talk to him one on one, he sounds reasonable and like he's not trying to transform America into some socialist nightmare."
Translation of all this seditious bullshit:
"Won't SOMEONE... well, someone who's not ME, dontcha know, PLEASE pick up a gun and do something... umm... patriotic?"
No, that was Jonah who got rip'd from his mother's room. Too many orange streaks on the bedding.
ReplyDeleteI heard about this on the Thom Hartmann show too.
ReplyDeleteFor those who are unfamiliar with these recordings, there's a good BBC article about it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668
If these mouth-breathers got their fondest wish, and saw this president end up like Lincoln or Kennedy, they would be horrified by the results. If they think for one minute that putting Joe Biden in the oval office would advance their agenda, they are sadly mistaken. It would empower Joe, and make the reactionaries in congress shut up and play along unless they wanted to be caught up in the Secret Service, FBI and CIA dragnet that would ensue. That dragnet would sweep up hundreds of survivalists, white supremacists, reactionary gun nuts and assorted anti-communist religious fringe types. It would delegitimize the right wing for years, it would fuel anti gun legislation and it would make it easier to pass legislation for social justice. Also within 30 years there would be a 100 foot tall monument looming over the mall in Washington DC with Obama's benevolent smile beaming down.
ReplyDeleteFor white males of a certain (old) age, rage is invigorating and is sold with a speedball of righteousness.
ReplyDeletePlease, continue with your story of the person who could have been elected instead, disassembled the security state built by his predecessor, and gotten us single payer. That never gets old!
ReplyDeleteYou are of course assuming they think that far in advance, or that they've figured out that the Left Behind scenario will always be a non-starter.
ReplyDeleteVery true. But I also wonder whether that is the real aim. Consider the way "Stand Your Ground" laws have become a catalyst for a rash of murders of young black men. This nascent white terrorist campaign shows no sign of stopping, and the law enforcement system seems to partially support it! So long as right wing violence contents itself with killing black children, I'm not even sure how it can be stopped.
ReplyDeleteSpelin iz so overrated
ReplyDeleteI became acutely aware of it in 1988, when Bush the 1st and his man James Baker were throwing around "card-carrying member of the ACLU," which morphed into "card-carrying liberal." Of course, the use of the word "liberal" as a smear had been going on for some time, but it really came out into the open that year, and sadly it got no push-back at all from Dukakis. It was the year of Lee Atwater -- with young George W. at his right hand. (This is also the first election after Rush Limbaugh had become a big radio star.)
ReplyDeleteAyuh. Dick Cheney foiled all of the Dubya-era assassination plots without doing anything other than being Dick-ish. If anything, Joe should be more Joey for his boss's sake.
ReplyDelete"Constitutional" = "I like"
ReplyDelete"Unconstitutional" = "I no like"
Wanking counts, right?
ReplyDeleteUh...asking for a friend.
"I'm of the opinion that Paul knew exactly what he was doing, and that he's dealing with his base as a faith constituency rather than a political constituency."
ReplyDeleteThis, on stilts. As someone said, these people don't vote their interests. They vote their identities. Which is to say, their beliefs. Which is then to say, a combination of wishful thinking ("faith") and self-contradictory axioms that support their bedrock sense of victimhood. "This is a Christian nation/We Christians are persecuted." "America is the greatest country in the world/We are under the boot-heel of tyranny." "This is the Land of the Free/Let's kill, or at least merrily oppress, the fags." Etc.
American politics has become the clash between a political party and a religious party. Welcome to the North American Middle East.
Roy, thank you for pointing out that America is not the #1 country on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. I cry myself to sleep every night wishing I could live in the land that has been the Heritage Foundation's bastion of true freedom for the 20th consecutive year....Hong Kong.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.heritage.org/index/country/hongkong
It is inconceivable to me that, even in the current dismal climate, one couldn't get a publishing deal for something called How to Get Laid in America.
ReplyDeleteIt gets me when wingnuts seek succor from the ACLU. The esteemed libertarian academic Walter Block comes to mind:
ReplyDeleteSeveral people have responded to this article of mine on LewRockwell.com, and have pledged several hundreds of dollars between them. But, I have just learned, much to my consternation, that to launch such a lawsuit would costs LOTS of money. ...
I’m willing to donate all the time it would take to do this, and maybe a little bit of my own money, but I don’t have too much for this purpose. I know that the ACLU helped out Hans Hoppe when he had his difficulties regarding “time preference.” So I might try them.
Professor Block was being forced to sue the New York Times for a scurrilous, libelous, venomous, scandalous smear campaign the New York Times launched against him by, according to Block, quoting him accurately. They just didn't quote him enough* to show the world that when you put enough racist claptrap in one place it's not racist.
Just because you've written extensively on slavery not being so bad and talk at a New York Times reporter for two hours about slavery not being so bad, it does not mean you should be made out as thinking slavery's not so bad, when of course, it wasn't so good either, though instituting "voluntary slavery" in today's economy would be an excellent way for parents to cover the cost of their children's education.
Why wouldn't the ALCU spend its money defending you from such an outrageous use of accurate reporting, especially when you yourself are willing to put a little bit of your own money into the suit, though not much?
____________________
*The portions were so small.
It's that dialog with the brain.
ReplyDelete"What you got for me imagewise?"
"Same shit I've had for the past ten or twelve years."
"What the fuck happened to your imagination?"
"What happened to your erectile tissue?"
"Ah go fuck yourself!"
Is it me or have the conservatives gone Commie? First it was Putin's nipples and now it's Xi Jinping's regulatory efficiency. Has somebody let them into the Left Wing of the Emma Goldman Memorial Library at night or something?
ReplyDelete"Ah go fuck yourself!"
ReplyDelete"Been trying all my life," as a Tom McGuane character once said.
Actual freedom is a bit of a mess, since it turns out that not every white woman wants to have four kids for the motherland, and some people want to be surfers or musicians or rock climbers instead of beavering away in an office for fifty-five hours a week. Conservative's fantasy America turns out to have more in common with the People's Republic of North Korea, where everyone is given a job (tough shit if you don't like it), criticizing the state is a crime, and the Dear Leader can have you fed to starving dogs if he's pissed enough.
ReplyDeleteThis is because the Putin suck-ups are the worst sort of authoritarians: the thought of a person being forced to lick somebody else's boots gives them a raging erection.
I think today's republicans are just genetically damaged men and women.
ReplyDeleteIt's getting there, at least. Bad people, badly made.
ReplyDeleteHere's Indiana state senator Mike Delph, struggling to describe the ethics of sucking corporate dick:
But the liberal view of rights to clean water, air, a decent job, a house, car, health benefits is a modern perversion.
The R's would have impeached Obama in his first term if they could have. If they had controlled the House and Senate on January 20,2009 he would have been impeached before that year was out.
ReplyDelete5/10 for content, 6/10 for form.
ReplyDeleteIf you read that WaPo bit, it mentions that Reno was criticized for her handling of the Ruby Ridge confrontation.
ReplyDeleteWhich took place in August, 1992,
Two and a half months before her boss was elected.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Washington Post.
Tie me up! Tie me down! (we're having a spanish movie festival over at casa aimai).
ReplyDeleteI think the right way to put that is Jefufs Chrift.
ReplyDeleteIts every man for himself...like wanking. (Lillejhammer).
ReplyDeleteI heard he blinked it use morse code.
ReplyDeleteWe've talked about it before but the Fred Clark "persecuted hegemon" construct allows each person to simlutaneously experience themselves as victim and victimizer, whiny loser and conquering hero, sadist and masochist. Its the intersex of our binary political system.
ReplyDeleteNPR is doing a show right now about the new scientific research on just how addictive and damaging junk food is to the individual and to society. Tom Ashbrook has on several scientists explaining the new science of food technology and how it makes certain foods basically lock in on the person's brain and make it impossible for them to stop eating. They discuss the possibility that states and medical providers could start trying to levy a classic "sin tax" on such foods, or penalties on the sellers, to recoup the costs to society for treating the illnesses caused by these addictions. They take a phone call from an excitable white guy from Wisconsin and before he can start I know exactly what he's going to say: its disgraceful to try to use law or government to help fat stupid people evade the "personal responsibility" inherent in people overreating themselves to death. Because Freedumb doesn't mean anything if some loser isn't punished for his stupidity while society waves as he falls off the cliff.
ReplyDeleteI also want to say that the "unliscened driver" (or, as we might also say, illegal alien) is just perfect, Jenn. Stop writing monster yeti porn and start writing political thrillers. You've found the key and you really, really, understand this revolting topic.
ReplyDeleteWoah! From the link:
ReplyDelete“Free association is a very important aspect of liberty. It is crucial. Indeed, its lack was the major problem with slavery. The slaves could not quit. They were forced to ‘associate’ with their masters when they would have vastly preferred not to do so. Otherwise, slavery wasn’t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory. It violated the law of free association, and that of the slaves’ private property rights in their own persons. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, then, to a much smaller degree of course, made partial slaves of the owners of establishments like Woolworths.”
The point is that free association, one of the bedrocks of the entire libertarian edifice, is a bulwark against slavery. On the other hand, the so-called Civil Rights Act of 1964 undermines free association. It forces Woolworths to associate with people against their will. Thus, very paradoxically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 supports slavery. It does so by undermining free association, the violation of which allows slavery. Our friends on the left, amongst whom we must include writers for the New York Times, are thus placed in a bit of a logical quandary. They, of course, as do all men of good will, oppose slavery. But, in their support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they attack the law of free association. Logically, they cannot have it both ways. When it comes to slavery, they defend the law of free association, which would allow the slave to quit or not be enslaved in the first place; all well and good. But, when racial discrimination is under discussion, they reject the right of the Woolworths of the world to invoke that self-same right of free association, which would allow discriminators of that ilk to refuse service (decline to associate with) people with whom they do not wish to interact. It would appear that New York Times editors and journalists do not appreciate or even comprehend sarcasm.
I was a child in Nixon's administration, and Ford's cleanup act, and became aware of the findings of the Church and Pike Commissions and the doings of the FBI's COINTELPRO, as well as Kissinger's enabling of slaughter in Chile and Indonesia.
ReplyDeleteI was an adolescent in the Reagan administration, and became aware of off-the-book wars in Central America run from the office his ex-CIA-chief vice president, as well as the October Surprise, the whipping up of the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan.
I was a college student in the first Bush administration, and became aware of the US arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war and the wholesale pardons of the Iran-contra criminals.
I was well into adulthood for the second Bush administration. Recounting details would be redundant.
I've live in the US long enough that merely discussing the documented history of the past half-century qualifies as "conspiracy theory mongering".
What kind of nonsense is that? Work is the perfect place to make clever verbal attacks on wingnuts, and gun nuts. (Like saying "My teen-age daughter has seemed so depressed, lately. I'm going to make sure there's a cleaned, loaded and cocked pistol around, in case she wants to treat herself!") And then exit the break-room. What're they gonna do, jump me?
ReplyDeleteAlso, Earth’s sole superpower is sagging where it should be No. 1.
ReplyDeleteAmerica has slouched to No. 12 on the 2014 Heritage Foundation/Wall
Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom.
Damn you, Somalia! DAMN YOU!
The science of addiction is similar to the mechanisms behind type 2 diabetes, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThey will never let go of the moral theory of disease. It's all plagues and pestilence at the hand of either the devil or god.
You can't make a reasoned argument against that shit, but you could tax the living fuck out of it.
Getting her to walk right had us pulling our hair out. "Dammit, Vincenne, get that book off your head!"
ReplyDeleteI think its highly significant that the people who have been killed have (largely) been young black men who were not armed. The logic of SYG from the hysterical white old guy perspective is tha thtey are surrounded by adult male black criminals who are armed--they are in an arms race with the new black panther party and the armed obama troops. Yet, interestingly enough, theese guys seem to only end up shooting helpless children, surprised white guys texting in the theater, and their own children. Could it be that dangerous actual adult black people are rather harder to find?
ReplyDeleteSagging...really? How about flaccid? All our indicators are trending down, IYKWIMAITYD
ReplyDeleteA modern perversion? More, more, I'm still not satisfied!
ReplyDelete"I just hope I haven't done too good a job of familiarizing the public
ReplyDeletewith this stuff -- I'd hate to think I was normalizing it sufficiently
that the citizens might no longer gave these guys the Springtime for Hitler look."
I'm much worse off than that. For a few years after all the blogs which started, as I remember, about the time of the Clinton 'scandals" I kept on saying: "Wowee, when the public gets a look at this writing, at this rhetoric (not mine! the stuff in the blogs) at this sarcasm, at these facts, that'll be the end of the neo-cons and wingers, they'll be hooted off the stage"
Yeah, I thought that for a while. Laugh all you want.
Funny how the same crowd isn't willing to let a female take "personal responsibility" for her uterus & ovaries, innit?
ReplyDeleteI think the Beach Boys said it best:
ReplyDelete"And we'll have fun, fun fun,
Until Daddy takes the T-Bird away"
I'm totally okay with political monster yeti porn thrillers, so keep writing, Jenn.
ReplyDeleteThat explains why the last volunteer I called during the NPR pledge drive kept murmuring "Harder. Harder." into the phone.
ReplyDelete"White Vision Glasses"
ReplyDelete"On the other hand, the so-called Civil Rights Act of 1964 undermines free association."
ReplyDeleteThank you, very much, there it is, what every goddam conservative since then has been trying to obfuscate. Everything that want to do requires getting rid of the Civil Rights laws. All the rest proceeds from that evil seed!
And of course, they are full of shit, as usual. Segregation was not when you got as the result of "free association". Segregated was mandated by law and controlled free association. But I'm sure I don't need to explain that. And I'm getting too pissed to type.
Yes, "segregation" as the result of "free association"!
I'm reaching for my vaporizer, right now.
Aimai, I think you mentioned this book once before and I downloaded a PDF of it. It is on my kindle somewhere -- I will move it up in my queue.
ReplyDeleteWe had nearly eight years of MBA flunkies directing a long range
ReplyDeleteimperial military operation with an army that had been constructed to
put out brush fires.
I have never seen a war so succinctly and completely described in a single sentence.
Every last Republican jerkwad of the lot wanted the next jerkwad to take up some of his slack. That stuff will fly as a small percentage of a population - you see it in corporate life all the time.
But if you build the entire fucking organization of lazy Dad'll-take-care-of-it shitferbrains, well, then, Doug Feith.
So basically, the right is going to try and convince the American public everybody will hate them, all the people who matter anyway, if they elect another Democrat.
ReplyDeleteIn Russia, script acts you!
ReplyDeleteThat is the dissolution of character which occurs for years before a disabling dementia kicks in, I'm becoming convinced, as I grow older. that we are surrounded by men going through that process. And since that stage is useful, and lauded, I see younger men trying to imitate its characteristics. Sad, very sad.
ReplyDeleteWell, they like to pretend that the free hand of the market will create a "just" and moral result--that free association would naturally reward everyone--those that refuse to serve black people and the black people who will find cafes and restaurants and hotels that like the color of their money. And they also like to pretend that there was no economic component to slavery and jim crow--that its just about "association" like, who you are friends with, rather than forced segregation being designed to create a subject work force and in the case of white owned businesses in the south a cramped and strangled black economy. Because its not just that restaurant owners were legally obligated to refuse to serve blacks its also that all kinds of businesses were legally and socially obligated to prevent black workers and business owners from prospering and demanding service in the form of bank loans and government consideration for their businesses.
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole lot of bullshit just buried in the concept of "free association" being the principal liberty at issue.
If America is in collapse (now that we can't "free associate") well, then, better get what you can and get out, or get what you can and build a suburban fortress!
ReplyDeleteIt was lesbian bed death with a gun.
ReplyDeleteI'd almost forgotten about Doug Feith. Is he doing the Home Shopping Network thing now?
ReplyDeleteIts a really fun and quick read.I highly recommend it.
ReplyDelete"There's a whole lot of bullshit just buried in the concept of "free association" being the principal liberty at issue."
ReplyDeleteVery much so. Americans are, by reputation, maybe adipose and somewhat sedentary. But when it comes to kicking themselves in the ass, and stabbing themselves in the back, they are regular Ross Sisters, indefatigable contortionists.
I always enjoyed the Hilary Clinton is a lesbian who murdered her male lover story. I always ask two questions, why does a lesbian have a male lover and are you sure she's not bi. The answer I get is to number one "because...blah blah" and "Nope, she's a straight up lesbian". At which point I laugh so hard I hurt myself and my wife starts giving me the stink eye for making fun of her family.
ReplyDeleteThe Morsi Code! When will the House Intelligence Committee get its hands on one of the Muslim Brotherhood's rotor cipher machines and learn the truth about Barry Sotero?
ReplyDeleteNo doubt there's some inbreeding going on.
ReplyDeleteShorter Prof. Block: Waz joke. Tee hee.
ReplyDeleteBut I can't for the love of whiskey figure out how people who declare
ReplyDeletethemselves patriots derive pleasure from the idea that America is in
collapse and there's nothing they can do about it.
Self-righteous asshattery.
"We told you it would turn out like this! You could have listened to us! But no, you were too smart, you were to too "emphathic". We told you if we rounded up all the muslins and gays and Commanists, we'd have been all right, but No! And now, now you see what the country as come to. Why it's so the poor bankers can't make an honest living stealing from the moochers! If you had only listened to USSSSSSSS"
Good ol' spite. Particularly Baptist spite, of which I am surrounded. Huckabee is a perfect example of Baptist Spite Complex. As Governor he noted "atheists already have a holiday - April 1st", and now these many years later he leads the GOP this week for a classic 'slut has get her barth control pee-uls from Uncle Sugar' spite moment.
(Understand, I am descended from Methodist (dad) and hardshell Baptist (mom) stock. The odds of anything out to third cousins being a preacher runs about 8% dad's side, 36% mom's. I've heard it all my life. I hear it every day.)
Conservatives have a much better understanding of what makes lesbians tick, merl. Liberals think lesbians aren't that interested in sex with men, but conservatives have viewed copious video evidence that lesbians like having a man in the room when they have sex with each other and are often converted to heterosexuality by having sex with a man, particularly rough het sex they didn't even know they wanted to have.
ReplyDeleteDamn you Tguerrant! I knew there was a better joke lurking there somewhere but I missed it. Hats off!
ReplyDelete"But, in their support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they attack the law of free association."
ReplyDeleteThis really is the "why are you hitting yourself?" mode of argumentation. Trust a libertarian, when faced with the options of either a narrow, literal, and fundamentally meaningless analysis, and one that actually comports with life as it is lived by real human beings (including him), to pick the former.
But then, that's Sophistry's Choice for ya.
So, wait, this bonehead thinks the ACLU is going to help him sue the Times for exercising their First Amendment rights...? Yeah, OK. Good luck with that, dude.
ReplyDeleteOnly the chiefs, and sons of chiefs, may read the E Plebnista.
ReplyDeleteHas tenure at Loyola NOLA, that fine Jesuit institution, the Butt College of Business in particular because truth-in-advertising.
ReplyDeleteI was raised on the overtly racist version of that construct, and one of the strangest things about growing old in a few southern towns is I'm beginning to notice physical and behavioral characteristics that are much more identifiable that cross "racial" lines. Whoever continues to separate people by color in these genetically isolated locales is basically drawing a line through an extended family and setting it on a path to destruction.
ReplyDeleteI can see this despite years of socialization in the dumbass camp. It has to be occurring to folks besides me.
Ah, I have learned much from you, Sensei, but still need private sessions.
ReplyDeleteAmerica's true favorite one man sport!
ReplyDelete-MST3K
Arrrgh! I all could come up in Morris Code, but past big brindle kitties, I had nothing.
ReplyDeleteI have a fluent Morris Code speaker in this house, though is preference is to touch my knee with his paw when he has need of staff attention.
The snakes won the last round 0 - 1. That's the thing: these snake/fundie preacher bouts are never high-scoring.
ReplyDeleteI naively thought that would be an easy find, but I can see now it will be googling for a particular fish in the sea. My recollection:
ReplyDeleteAt some outdoor goings-on when Mike Huckabee was Governor, on the Capitol grounds at a monument clean-up or such (we scrub that pesky petina off we do!), someone was joking about how many holidays there was getting to be (conservative joking, that is). Some other wag responded with "at least the atheists don't want one", to which the Governor of The Great State of Arkansas replied, "oh, they already have one. April 1st".
Help me out here, comrade Jenn. Wasn't that during your legislature wrasslin' tenure?
From the Baptist Press, Dec. 22, 2008:
ReplyDeleteIn an interview covering a wide range of questions before preaching at Westside Baptist Church in Gainesville, Huckabee suggested that atheists who criticize the celebration of Christmas work on Dec. 25 and then choose another day for their holiday -- perhaps April 1, he joked.
Probably was, but Huckabee was guilty of so much more that I forget some of it. I still can't get over his transparent attempt to profit from the Jonesboro school shootings, and his petulant response when it was pointed out to him that to some people, it might seem crass for the governor to personally profit from a tragedy in his state. Then there was the theft of state funds for the Velveeta and pizza his wide-load family went through at the mansion, the theft of state funds for Jethrene's campaign for Secretary of State, and etc.
ReplyDeleteDid taxpayers have to foot the bill for his son's dog clubs?
ReplyDeleteAs Governor he noted "atheists already have a holiday - April 1st"
ReplyDeleteMy first reaction was that this is an insanely entitled & obnoxious thing to say when your job is to be governor of all the people. But in context of the monument picnic -- eh, it plays more as a funny enough improv.
Although! TGuerrant's post about the interview brings me back to obnoxious. It's one thing to make this crack off the cuff -- it's quite another if you decide you love it so much, you're going to repeat it in interviews. What a jerk.
This reminds me of an election in 8th grade where I ran for something. I lost to a super-popular girl, but only by 2 votes, and 4 good friends came to me distraught afterward. They said, "I'm so sorry! I thought you would do a better job but I thought [REDACTED*] was going to win, so I voted for her!" Should I mention it was a secret ballot, or does that go without saying?
ReplyDelete*Not so much redacted as forgotten. I don't remember much about the election except these conversations afterward.
Not. Photoshopped.
ReplyDeletehttp://imageshack.com/a/img560/7910/l64e.jpg
But Obama pounds his chest as he does so.
ReplyDeleteNo dog whistle there.
As a governor's son, you could get so much pussy. What a shame to see that opportunity waisted.
ReplyDeleteWaisted -- get it?!
I'll show myself out.
And hes a 98 pound weakling.go figure.
ReplyDeleteThese chaps clearly know Morris code -
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure softshell Baptist stock makes for a better soup base....
ReplyDeleteTip the veal! Try your waitresses!
I guess it's about what one would expect. No big thing, I was just confused for a moment, like maybe it made sense on some level besides, "atheism - what a joke".
ReplyDeleteThe plot of "Black Goldfinger", basically.
ReplyDeleteI come from hardshell Baptists myself. Oddly, the ones I was around were by and large pretty kind, humble folks who didn't go around judging people too much. They talked a lot of shit about the missionary Baptists though, which I always enjoyed.
ReplyDeleteIn the Conservatory, or the Ballroom?
ReplyDeleteAccording to Seymour Hersh, your dad had good company, including Al Haig, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and Leon Jaworski.
ReplyDeleteSchlesinger went so far as to send a memo to military commanders to obey no White House commands to dispatch troops. He also looked at what forces he could command to offset DC-based Marines he believed Nixon would use in any "extra-Constitutional action." He settled on the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg.
Kissinger told the Washington Post that White House Chief of Staff Gen. Al Haig advised him that Nixon was considering surrounding the White House with troops.
And the deputy foreman of the Watergate grand jury said publicly that Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski warned the jurors that indicting Nixon could prompt him to call out troops.
But it's Pat Buchanan, the Nixon aide and speechwriter dubbed "Mr. Inside," who undoubtedly knows more about what was happening at that point than anybody. Y'see, Watergate was a coup to overthrow a sitting president launched by a media and political elite driven by hatred that dated from Nixon's courageous rallying of the nation against Soviet spy Alger Hiss. We commie-loving coastal types have been such a blot on this nation's history.
Well, if we are going to discriminate by "race", we need to determine exactly where the dividing line is.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it's a good fit. As an atheist, I regard religion as one of the world's longest-running practical jokes.
ReplyDeleteIt's classic MBA thinking, never own an asset, mortgage it. Sell it off and rent it back and book the windfall to a Cayman island bank account, and be ten miles down the road when the company goes bankrupt the next time the NASDAQ hiccups. Everything that was considered to be the mark of a well run company in the 1950's was considered a un-monetized liability by the MBAs of the '80s. So they sold off the company headquarters, raided the pension funds and when those were gone switched to 401ks, ended workplace training, doubled down on fighting the unions, froze wages at below inflation levels, moved production to Mexico or overseas, shut down R & D, slashed inventory and warranties to the bone and papered over the whole mess with management consultants pushing the latest business buzzword.
ReplyDeleteIn the 2000s, having thoroughly mined the corporate wealth into overseas bank accounts, the MBA crowd turned their sights to the middle class and employed those same tricks to the world of mortgage loans aided and abetted by the criminally short sighted property tax structure in California.
Here, Stormfront debates the dividing lines. Libruls just don't understand how hard supremacists have to work to be supreme.
ReplyDeleteAn Octoroon has a traceable relative with yellow eyes (full blooded nasty African Africans).
I do not accept quintaroons as White either.
I would not accept anyone with one drop of Negro blood.
The only people that are White are those whose ancestors survived the ice age in Europe.
It's the poltroons and maroons that bother me.
ReplyDeleteI've been accused of eating macaroons, but was able to conceal the evidence.
ReplyDeleteNah... Home Depot.
ReplyDelete"a publishing deal for something called How to Get Laid in America."
ReplyDeleteAs an "app" for I-phones, maybe?
Ah... you mean Mr. Fourth Branch of Government.
ReplyDeleteYes, and how the US profited, in every area, from his skeptical, probing, and analytical mind.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, their reserves were worth so much more they graciously refused Dick Cheney's offer of Iraq's oil as war booty. And we thought gaining control of the oil was one of the war aims, or wait, was it?
ReplyDelete"Ah go fuck yourself!"
ReplyDeleteYup, that's what my Dad said when I asked him to buy me a Jaguar XKE.. In a more roundabout way, of course.
Fascinating! Thank you for rerminding me of this. I was in my 20's in the 80's and this was going on but I didn't really understand it.
ReplyDeleteNot only that, but the U.S. ranks #1 in "labor freedom." Probably thanks to our ridiculous minimum wage and "right-to-work" states. Poor socialist hellhole Norway, ranked the most prosperous country in the world by the Legatum Institute, comes in 158th in labor freedom according to Heritage. Who the fuck needs prosperity? USA! USA! USA!
ReplyDeleteOn a personal note, in the early 70's when I was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC, I was asked by a black woman co-worker, jokingly (and I always felt good that she felt OK enough with me to kid around with), if I could ever make it with a black woman. My answer was "Are we talking about Pam Grier, or Moms Mabley?" THERE'S yer dividing line.
ReplyDeleteI now cry myself to sleep each night knowing that my country is #3, and we just elected the most morally challenged fuckwit since little Johnny Howard. I blame Rupert Murdoch.
ReplyDeletemoral turpitude is epigenetic.
ReplyDeleteHey, they left Somalia unranked. That wasn't fair.
ReplyDeleteThey'll go wherever the money is while offloading costs onto the taxpayer.
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
ReplyDeletehttp://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081215062349/memoryalpha/en/images/3/31/CloudWilliamPledge.jpg
Somalia lacks an effective central government and administration that can provide basic services and collect taxes. Although some duties and taxes are collected, there is little effective fiscal policy in place. Most of the federal government is financed through aid. ...
ReplyDeleteSounds like the ideal business environment to me!