Obamapologists

"Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time."

Oh, rly? Ya, rly. (In passing, I wonder if text-speak will be a key part of the evolution of language, so in 500 years, many words will omit vowels all together, srsly.)

A few weeks ago I agreed with Glenn Greenwald that Obama feels free to dismiss the left in this country because pissing them off is virtually cost-free. Nate Silver and some other members of the White Liberal Males Who Love Obama SOOOO Much said that this wasn't true, the health care bill was really demonstrative of Obama's fantastic masterful strategy, and all those little tiny problems leftists had with the bill are going to go away POOF later on. Obamagic!

And now I present to you, the American Left: offshore drilling! The rigs are going to be in the shape of one big middle finger. This is no doubt a core part of Obama's cunning strategy to get some Republicans to vote for the cap-and-trade bill (this is actually being suggested, which is re-fucking-diculous, fr rl.)

Today in Religion: I've Had About Enough of This Shit

Comic Relief:


Muslim extremists blew themselves, and several dozen other people, to the Afterlife-if-there-was-one-but-sadly-actually-NO. Apparently the suicide bombers were all women. Progress!

Also, if these absolutely insane people were brown religious lunatics named Muhammed, Obama would have been impeached by now. But they're white religious lunatics named David and Josh and John, so therefore by definition cannot be terrorists. Oh, hey, don't read this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, or look at this Map O' Crazy they made.

Government is Not the Problem. Unchecked Corporate Oligarchies Are the Problem.

...As I believe Reagan once said.

I read the recent Times article on Tea Partiers (though they don't seem to be having that much fun, so "partiers" really seems like a misnomer). Apparently many of the people in this Giant Blob of Monstrous Ignorance were galvanized by losing their jobs in the recent economic Troubles. And who is to blame for the disappearing middle class, and stagnant wages, and health costs that quadruple every few days? Who has been the beneficiary of the "deregulation" of markets based on Friedman's Magical Freedom Market Theory? [Hey, remember how deregulation of energy markets in California was supposed to reduce costs because there were hundreds of mom-and-pop nuclear reactors out there just dying to get in there and compete? And instead, energy bills went up by 300% in one month? And certain people at Enron got obscenely wealthy because they played fun little games, like creating artificial scarcity and then demanding huge amounts of money to turn the lights back on? Good times, good times.] Who is to blame for shipping jobs overseas and dismantling our education system...&c., &c.

Well. THE GOVERNMENT, obvs! Yes, if the government would just get out of the way of freedom fighting corporations, everything would be swell. And if government could also provide all of the services everyone now takes for granted, but not collect any taxes in order to pay for said services, then we would once again truly be aligned with the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

During the Depression, when people also rose up in anger, they realized that they were at the mercy of impersonal economic forces that were totally beyond their control. The only way to mitigate the impact of the inherent instability of markets was a) to regulate them--N.B. this is not the same as "giving the banks 1.4 trillion dollars" b) to create a minimal social safety net (very minimal, why, it's the minimal-ist there is in the industrialized world!) and c) to guarantee certain basic rights for laborers. What a bunch of crazy Marxists! When this happened, everyone in America became instantly un-free.

But these--what's a polite word here?--I guess I'll just fall back on "motherfuckers"--no, ignorant motherfuckers have elaborated their own sophisticated political theory, to wit: “If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said [editor's note: this man is on Social Security. Of course]. Dude, totally, I know, I was, like, going to build my own F-22, but then the government, like, just gave me one? So I just stayed in and burned flags instead, and they were supposed to be made out of hemp? but it totally didn't get us high, so it was lame.

What Fresh Hell is This?

I have previously insulted the Catholic Church in this blog. I will now resume.

What is the deal with these guys? What is up with the fornicatin' and prostitutin' and gay fornicatin' and, oh yeah, molestin'? Is the Catholic Church just one particularly well-organized, well-funded, and fabulously dressed secret sex society? To be honest, most religion seems to me kind of suspect from the get-go. But okay, some churches provide the kind of communities that most people no longer have, and many of them do indeed go forth and do good works.

However. The Church as headed by Der Popenfuhrer (thanks, Jesus' General, for that one) has arguably done more harm than good. First they went after American nuns, which is a good idea, since so many women want to be the unpaid, unappreciated workhorses of a byzantine patriarchal organization. They went ahead and said they didn't think condoms were much help after all, because Every Sperm is Sacred, Even Sperms with HIV. Then they went back and clarified their stance on women as priests, from [quietly] "No, we don't think we'll be doing that anytime soon" to "Women are all sinful whores vaginas are scary never mention this again."

So I guess what I'm saying is that the Catholic Church is the originator, the Ur-Dudes, if you will, of the "Bros Before Hos" ethos.

And now all this bullshit. Some dude in a dress molests 200 deaf children, but while suggesting
that birth control is not actually counter to "God's will" is grounds for instant excommunication, molesting disabled boys is just fucking fine. Then there's this other guy in a gown in Germany, who had his little peccadillos reported to Ratzenwhatsit when he was head of what used to be the office of "The Inquisition" but is now called something much more bureaucratic, like "the Office of Making Reports Of Child Abuse Go Away." The Church got some guy to throw himself on the sceptre for that one, but oho, look what the Times is reporting today:

But the memo cited by the Times says that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest's reassignment, the newspaper reported.

The Vatican's response to this bit of news is:

The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.

I know, right? Seems like every goddamn day I hear about the Unitarians covering up for criminal pedophiles in their organization.

In the case of this shitheel who abused children who literally could not speak of what was happening to them, there was apparently an "internal" investigation, which showed that the abuse was not as widespread as had been claimed. They determined this without interviewing any of the victims. I guess they wouldn't have to, since God would just transmit the truth to them through their fillings or however he communicates these days. This is a good one:

Fasani said the diocese maintained that it did not interview the alleged victims because they never made a formal complaint to the bishop. The diocese also said it didn't know how to contact them, even though they are all members of a Verona deaf association with ties to the church-run school.

Somewhere, someone from the Bush Administration is saying, "Hey, they copied our notes!"

Today in Republican Jackassery: All of It

Having lost the vote on health care reform, the Republicans continue to throw all their toys out of the crib (and then cry, hold their breath, and wet their pants when they don't get them back*). After the bill was passed, Americans got on board: a 9% increase in approval. It's the "I've been a fan of the Saints forever!" syndrome: everyone loves a winner.

It's one thing to do all you can to defeat a bill, but even I'm surprised at the continued all-out freak out: really? You're going to sue the government to stop this bill? You're going to insist on enforcing minor parliamentary rules and send it back to the House? After a year of debate? I never expect the Republicans to do what's right, but I do expect them to do what will get them elected. What's the campaign slogan here: "We went to the mat to make sure your pre-existing condition excluded you from health insurance!" "We stood up for the right of every American to go bankrupt because of health care costs!" You all, every single one of you jackasses, voted against it--when they start euthanizing Grandma, can't you just stand on that?

I still think this is just one of the weirdest social phenomenon I've ever seen: people literally up in arms about the government trying to help them. A suggestion: if we want to continue to go with this idea of American Exceptionalism, perhaps we should aim for something other than exceptionally ignorant and exceptionally reactionary.

*Just read Wonkette, who has also noted the similarities between actual toddlers and Republicans. Something about David Vitter and diapers should be thrown in here, but we are above such cheap jests, of course.

Right Thinks Left is Huge Stoned Carousing Sexytime Socialist Feminist Monstrosity; Left is Actually Sitting in Corner, Sucking Thumb

So, when I was little my brother and I had an inflatable punching bag. It was weighted with a sandbag at the bottom, so whenever you hit it, it would pop back up. As a bonus, it had a clown on it.

This is pretty much how the wingers seem to view the 60's: something that they keep punching, which keeps popping back up to spite them, and leer at them with a scary clown face, and they're not even on LSD.* For instance, today Glenn Beck (I really must stop talking about this guy; I feel like the more we talk about him the more substance he has, like how Voldemort came back to life when Ginny Weasley wrote in the journal that turned out to be a Horcrux...or something) wrote** on his Twitteringy: "Attn: 60s sanfran radicals--we will rise and crush in Nov. Together like NEVER b4. You WILL fail bcausr WE R COMING."

Yeah. Sanfran radicals! Who still run everything and get everything they want, like abortion parties and gay marriages and arugula, and gay aborted arugula, which Real Americans would never eat, because it can't be fried, and also there's no pork product involved. I guess the only way B-who-must-not-be-named and his ilk can keep up the fiction of victimization they have going is to keep inflating that old 60's clown. Meanwhile, the American left, such as it is, is fighting the good fight known as "finding reasons to get out of bed."

*Not to be confused with LDS, though Glenn Beck is under the influence of that.
**It is with great self-restraint that I don't "ironic quotes" half of the things on this blog, mainly the half that deals with wingers "writing" or "reading" or "thinking."

Shiny Happy HCR

Part of the reason Republicans fought this bill so hard (besides being obstructionist jackasses) is that they know it's nearly impossible to take away entitlements once they're in place. Even Republicans can't touch Social Security or Medicare--remember Bush's push for privatization of Social Security in 2004? The market was up, people were making money (or stealing it, whatever!) and it seemed like Grandma could get rich, if it wasn't for that mean old gubmint. And they still couldn't do it: Republicans can do a simple cost-benefit analysis as quickly as the next corporate lackey, and they knew a vote to end Social Security would be like voting themselves out of office.

Here, refreshingly, is a clip wherein a conservative seems like a reasonable human being. Frum manages to avoid using the words "communist" "socialist" "government takeover" and "shoved down our throats," for which I thank him.

Group Think: Just as Irritating on the Left as on the Right

I'm sorry, but did I miss some kind of everyone-gets-a-kitten deal that would explain why all of a sudden everyone on the Left (Daily Kos et al.) picked up their pom-poms and started cheering for this health care reform bill?

Let's review. The bill contains no cost controls, no public option, and very little oversight or regulation of insurance companies by the government. This was true before, and it's true now, so what has changed to convince liberals to support this bill? Specifically, I really really want to know what Obama said to Kucinich on the plane that not only made Kucinich agree to switch his vote, but also has him running around evangelizing like some kind of born-again Centrist.

As is depressingly usual, the left in this country is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this means that the Corporatist Dems can safely ignore anyone to their left, because the left will always fold when confronted with the "It's the lesser of two evils" card (it trumps the 'principled objections' card every time!). People: the lesser of two evils is still evil. I mean, JESUS CHRIST ON A CRUTCH. Everyone on the left is having a good time pointing out that the Republicans never met an earmark they didn't like while Bush II (Bush I, Reagan) was in office, and our Little Middle Eastern Escapades were paid for by off-books accounting that would have made Arthur Anderson proud. So true. Yet if the Bush White House had made a backroom deal with insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit hospitals that resulted in mandating that millions of Americans buy their shitty shitty products, vastly increasing their profits while not requiring them to, you know, actually provide health care, what would Markos Moulitsas have said then? Would it have been, "Well, you know, this contract with Halliburton isn't great--I mean, we asked them to provide the troops with food and water for $85 billion dollars a day, and they agreed to give them each a can of soda and a pack of gum for $165 billion dollars a day--but now is not the time to question these trifling details, because something is better than nothing..."

Amusingly, the Democrats and the Leftists Who Love Them Too Much have bought the line that they have to pass this bill because if they don't, then they'll be seen as weak. But this bill is entirely predicated upon the weakness of the left in this country, and the certain knowledge that no matter how bad the Democrats look, the Republicans always look worse. This means that the Democratic establishment counts on the fact that the left will always turn out to vote for them because the Right looks like (well, okay, has actually become) a bunch of Christ-crazy rednecks who'll ship women back to the kitchen and shove gays back in the closet.

For example, in the very post that details the back room deal and K Street strategy of the White House, Miles Mogulescu (hitherto, and probably henceforth, unknown to me) writes,

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: Whenever I write blogs which are critical of Obama and Congressional Democrats for making corporatist deals, I get numerous comments from people who believe they are progressive but say they will never vote for Obama or Democrats again, that they will stay home at the next election, or that they will vote for small third parties who have no chance of winning. It's not my intent to encourage those views. Do people making these comments really think bringing Republicans back to power would make things better?

Well, Miles, the real problem here is that these are our only two options. This means the American voter is constantly trying to object to the status quo, and it doesn't actually matter which party is in power. They're just going to go the other way, because it's the only way they have to punish the corporate toadies, lackies, and shoeshine boys who have shipped good jobs overseas, allowed American cities to crumble, perpetuated vast inequalities of wealth and status, and permitted the shameful iniquity that is reality television.

43 Stone? Today in Crazy British Measurements

Do you ever click through on a link and then think, "Why the fuck did I do that to myself?"

No. Probably just me, then.

So I clicked through on a link that said, "Super-sized mother determined to become world's fattest woman" in part--though this is no justification--because it was from the British Daily Mail, and I though, "Aha, maybe the Brits are going to make a run at the Grossly Obese Nation Award." But no. The woman is of course American, though she does hail from New Jersey and not the Traditionally Obese States of the South.

This article is so full of wrongness. For example:

Ms Simpson already holds the Guinness World Record as the world's fattest mother, when she gave birth in 2007 weighing 38stone.

She needed a team of 30 medics to deliver her daughter Jacqueline during a high-risk Caesarean birth.

Just sit there and let the implications of all that filter through. Or don't. Save yourselves! Go on without me! As I, without regard for my mental well-being, continued to scroll down, I thought, "This implies a man" and so it does. Not one man but many men!

You might expect her long-term partner Philippe, 49, to advise her to slim down, but instead he encourages her to eat more.

He met Donna on a dating site for plus-size people and is a self-confessed fat admirer, although he himself only weighs 150lbs.

...To fund the massive $750 weekly food shop, she runs a website where men pay her to watch her eat fast food.

Hahaha, this woman spends more per week on food than I do per month on rent! Maybe the whole family just lives in her vagina.

Yeah. That was totally gratuitous. I just added my own Ingredient of Wrong to the Stone Soup of Wrong that is this article. I'm going to step away now.

fn. A "stone" = 14 pounds, apparently. Here's a conversion site, if you want to know your weight in medieval units.

Who You Really Are

The New York Times tends to cycle through iterations of certain topics. Foodie things, usually linked to sustainable, local, etc., themes, but also variations on the Really Expensive New Ingredient Which is Suddenly Necessary (for example: kaffir lime leaves. Himalayan or Hawaiian salt. Expensive liquor--you will buy a bottle for $45 for one tablespoon for one recipe, and then it will stickily gather dust in that cupboard above the fridge, where Creme de Menthe and Kahlua go to die). Then there are the Hateable People Columns, which involve some of the following: Park Slope, kids with trendy names--Ava, Lotus, Madeleine, what have you--which leads to trends in child rearing and the Cult of Parenthood, "affordable" apartments for $500,000, young architects/designers (who paid too much for an "affordable" apartment and now have to borrow $10,000 from their friends to make the mortgage), people who made beaucoup de dinero in the city and then left for The Simple Life in the country, making artisanal tofu and goat-cheese-body-wash in their perfectly restored 19th century farmhouse. I really could go on, but I'm too lazy to keep looking for links.

Then there are the What The Kids Are Doing These Days columns, all agog about Twitter and How to Friend Your Child on Facebook. A subtheme of these--and this, I promise, is the point of this post--is ZOMG there is no privacy on the Interwebs!!! The tone of these articles is always shock, dismay, surprise, be afraid. And it always shocks, dismays, and surprises me that they are continually being reminded of, and terrified by, something that has been apparent for quite some time now: should a malicious person wish to find out all kinds of things about you, with the purpose of running up bills at Outback Steak House and Best Buy, or because they want to be on the cover of Stalker Weekly, well, they can. There is a certain opacity to our lives now. It's like living in a house with frosted windows: passers by can get a fuzzy idea of what's going on inside, and really determined passers by could probably find the clear space at the edge of the pane and look in. I don't really know if this is a good thing, but it is now an understood thing. Most of us have come to accept this state of affairs: we trade some level of risk for some level of convenience. Banking online probably increases the risk that someone will be able to hack into my account information (and, actually, my ATM card was replaced by the bank a couple of years ago because the account number, and that of many others, "had been compromised") but it also meant that I could pay my bills from abroad, thus preserving the sanctity of the all-important credit rating.

An essay that Jonathan Lethem wrote (in How to Be Alone) made me think a bit differently about this issue. Lethem pointed out that in many ways we all lead much more private lives now than ever before; that, in fact, no one is watching us. We aren't surrounded by people who know our parents or siblings, let alone our grandparents. Most of us aren't even around people who knew us as a child. My brother and I have now lived apart for almost as long as we lived together growing up; I went away to college when he was 14 and moved to the other side of the country 8 years ago. What I'm trying to say, very poorly, is that we may have a lot more information about people, but we don't have any context for it. Which makes it sort of like getting individual sentences from War and Peace and thinking that you know the whole story.

No one is watching us. There is a freedom in that. We can violate convention without fearing ostracization. We aren't ascribed character and history because of who our family is and was, the way they fit or didn't fit into a community and place. But there is something lost, too. We live our lives without witnesses. When we say we "bear witness" to someone, it means we have agreed to carry something of theirs within ourselves, and to tell the truth--to testify--about it when called upon. I'm not the first, and I won't be the last, to observe that without these witnesses we must all carry our selves. Since no one knows us, we must tell who we are through how we act, all the time, and when those actions are not what we think they should be, we must be the arbiter of mores and the enforcers of our own solitary conventions. So we are constantly, restlessly, piecing ourselves together.

This ceaseless activity of putting and pulling ourselves together is often quite tiresome. One has to make decisions all the time: how should I act in this situation? Or more precisely, how does the person I think I am, or wish to be, act in this situation? How do I get other people to see me as [insert positive character trait here]? There is a lot of anxiety in this situation, because we're trying to control a lot of moving parts. We're trying to get ourselves to act a certain way, to do what we think we should do in widely varying situations, trying to get it right. We have to keep the film moving through the projector, so we keep cranking away. In addition to the mountainous task of controlling ourselves, we're trying to get other people to think we got it right, to applaud at the show we're putting on, so we're also trying to control how other people think of us--we're trying to control other people's minds.*

It's not really surprising, then, that people (in this country in particular, I think) are self-centered in so many senses of the word. The self, this flimsy construction, becomes the only referent people have, their only sense of continuity in time. And it is something for which we feel solely responsible, because we can't depend on other people to be present for any length of time to help maintain it.

*"This exercise in futility is brought to you by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals."

Today In Republican Jackassery: The Texas School Board Edition

The Texas School Board, on a party line vote (Idiots 10/Relatively Sane 5) revised the social studies curriculum to correct for the well-known liberal bias of history. Fun! What shall schoolchildren in the Lone Star state learn?

• Separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers, except for that nasty leftist Thomas Jefferson, were all totally devout Christians who wanted a Christian nation (which is definitely in the Constitution, amiright? I'm sure the Founding Fathers spelled out the necessity of theocracy in great detail, because that worked out so well for Europe).

• In addition to learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., they shall learn about the "violent philosophy" of the Black Panthers, lest they wrongly think that black people are non-threatening.

• They will be instructed as to the "unintended consequences" of the Great Society programs. These consequences were not specified in the article, but since affirmative action and Title IX were singled out, we can assume it's about The Terrible Things That Happen When The Women and Coloreds Get Uppity.

• Capitalism will be re-named "the free enterprise system," because capitalists are tired of being called pigs. (And, to be fair, pigs are probably tired of being associated with capitalists.)

• Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment-biased writings did not inspire anyone to revolution; the peasants of Europe were all about St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, those freedom loving philosophers.
  

Blow Me Down Flat

I open the Times today and..will it be believed? I saw a headline that made me happy. And that headline involved the Democratic party. The Democrats in the House had all taken their Ritalin, and then (after alphabetizing their CD collections, then deciding it was better to organize them by color) decided to end earmarks that award no-bid contracts to for-profit companies. Then, this evening, I see that Democrats are fighting to attach President Obama's reforms of the student loan industry to the health care bill. Of course, the Senate is having none of it. They probably spent all day on the phone trying to reassure their corporate sponsors, so that they could preserve their sinecures until they keel over dead. Because I was up late recoding data--having accidentally deleted Great Britain; no one seemed to notice--I'm lacking my usual savoir faire. So my sophisticated argument here is: fuck the fucking Senate. It was supposed to be a body that tempered the whims of the masses, not a lifetime appointment for obstructionist blowhards. Thomas Jefferson, confronted by Ben Nelson, would go back to Monticello and make a Death Apparatus out of tobacco leaves and hemp.

That being said, let us pause for a moment and realize that never, since the dawn of the Blog Era, has there been a day in which I could fully support any piece of legislation introduced by my elected representatives, much less two in one day.

But not to worry. I'm sure the green shoots on my Tree of Hope will shortly wither in the Frost of Reality.

Thought Roulette

• I am sorry to say (rather belatedly) that Al Weisel, better known to many as Jon Swift, has died. It's hard to pull off satire when reality itself is so absurdist, yet he frequently did it.

• I saw Jon Stewart's piece on Chat Roulette, another one of those Intert00b "trends" that I cunningly avoid by never, never watching news programs. (Speaking of satire, when Wolf Blitzer and the CNN bobbleheads unveiled their Twitter "analysis" of the State of the Union...well, even Voltaire folded his cards. Lest you think I actually watched the CNN vomitorium,* I saw that, too, on The Daily Show.) As surprises exactly no one who would give it a moment's thought, what was supposed to be a way to use the internet to get all interconnected and whatnot turned instead into another Penis Forum. It's a new and exciting way for men to broadcast high-def video images of their genitalia, thus fulfilling some kind of primal urge which I frankly do not understand. My first thought, upon hearing about Chat Roulette, was: "That sounds lame" because most people are, let's face it, pretty boring, and you have to meet a lot of them from day to day anyway. So why go out of your way? My first thought was not, "Hey, now strangers can be unwittingly duped into seeing my vagina! Won't that be TOTALLY AWESOME for them?"

• And so we see, class, that men and women are different from one another. Perhaps an effective deterrent for this would be a lot of women going online prepared to point and laugh, but we're busy, you know? Hm. In fact, maybe if we get enough men doing this simultaneously, we can have a world-wide coup d'etat by The Ladies, and get some shit done around here.

• Which brings me to the next chamber in my Thought Roulette, which is the weird way that Douthat and sundry other conservative men consistently invoke The Femininist Menace, a global force of shrieking harpies armed with castration tools and restraining orders and sexual harassment suits. Yet when I look around I see that even among my liberal and educated female friends there is not a feeling of similarity, much less solidarity. And where Friedan and Friends, bless them, had some hours when the kids were at school and the husband was at work, during which they could contemplate their suburban anomie and then get together for coffee, well, the times, they have a'changed. Hard though it may be for these conservative men to understand, most women don't call themselves feminists anymore, and also don't really give a shit about them or their transparent toddler-like attempts to get attention through provocation ("Didn't you hear me? I said Hillary was shrill! Nyah nyah nyah.").

• This lack of attention or regard from The Givers of Life/Witholders of Sex/Substitute Mommy Figures is, of course, what drives these guys nuts (and, possibly, drives them to put their penises on Chat Roulette). When I read Brooks or Douthat, I am reminded of the invariably unattractive conservative boys in the political science courses I taught, most of whom got a C-. And I wonder about retroactive grade changes.
  

*The Intert00bs inform me that "vomitorium" means a passageway in a theatre "situated below or behind tiers of seats through which people can spew out at the end of a performance" and not, as I meant to imply here, a place where people go to force feed themselves and then regurgitate in the presence of others. Ah, well. Details.

Exercises in Futility

Against my better judgment, I clicked through to David Brooks' latest, entitled "Wal-Mart Hippies." You know Brooks is just dying to come up with something that will measure up to the pithy standards set by his "Bourgeois Bohemians." Reading the article, which was a piece of sheer wankery, as usual, I contemplated the erotic jolt of self-satisfaction that Brooks must have felt when he came up with the idea of Wal-Mart Hippies. How clever, how counterintuitive, why, it's practically even countercultural [chortle chortle].

But arguing against someone who honestly thinks that hippies, even at their most self-indulgent, are just like Tea Baggers holding up signs that say "The Zoo has an African Lion, and America has a Lyin' African" is just...it's hard to come up with a metaphor here...like clearing the brush on G.W.'s ranch. Darned if it doesn't keep growing back.

So I was pleased when I blog I've been enjoying recently--Bats Left/Throws Right--did a nice little takedown. To Brooks' trenchant observation that "One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart" DogHouse Riley appends, "One wore Tea Shades; the other carries Tea Bags. One failed Drug Tests; the other passes Purity Tests. One "grooved" on "Free Love"; the other is a collection of knuckle-walking Troglodytes with handguns in place of penises." And he has the wit and perception to have the same response to Brooks' use of a Rousseau quote* as I did, namely, "I didn't know Bartlett's had a book of Easy Political Quotations for Out-of-Context Uses."

Anyway, Brooks' "point" seemed to be that Tea Baggers and Hippies are all anti-establishment, man, you know, they just want everyone to be free from The Man and Authority and The System but bullshit because the Tea Baggers would have no problems if The Man was Dick Cheney and The System was segregation and they all got something for nothing and to piss on a Mexican on holidays, to boot.

As I said, an exercise in futility. But read D.H.Riley's whole post. It's funnier than mine.

*Guess which one? Go on, you know it. Is has to be this one, right?: "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
Sadly, no. It is: "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains." Ten bucks says Brooks had to double check that that wasn't a quote from Marx. And Brooks is always throwing in these little "intellectual" references, like the ones in this article, which I assume he thinks will get him into the Cool Kids Clubhouse of New York Times readers, but which actually will just annoy anyone who has actually read Rousseau beyond the first fucking sentence of the Social Contract.

Republican Jackassery: The Jim Bunning Story

A heartwarming tale of a former professional baseball player who became Senator from Kentucky; a man of such principle and courage that he alone stood against the tides of opinion (and 99 other senators) to stop the immoral and wasteful extension of unemployment benefits to people who are just clearly too lazy to fight them Mexicans for jobs picking lettuce. He did this despite significant personal cost: he missed the South Carolina--Kentucky game.

Republicans (as noted by Krugman in his editorial today) have decided to revive the argument that welfare benefits (including unemployment benefits) provide a disincentive to work. The idea (or, well, "idea") is that people will only work if they are forced to do so--if the consequences of not working are homelessness, starvation, and a brutal death at the hands of a meth junkie in the cruel cruel streets, amidst the cold falling rain. This little story fails to explain why anyone in Western Europe works at all, when they could just loaf about the place, smugly drinking a nice little Bourdeaux.

Yet I think it also hints at a grim glimmer of truth about the kinds of jobs that are available in the United States today. Many jobs are so miserable, so meaningless, and so underpaid that people must essentially be coerced into taking them. Even jobs which pay well (corporate, white collar jobs) are totally soul-sucking. I hope the person who invented the cubicle is now in a cubicle for all eternity, where the only thing he will have to read are tattered Dilbert cartoons pinned to the cubicle walls. If we accept that the Republicans are the pro-business (and emphatically not pro-free market) party, then it is essential that Americans continue to accept this wretched state of affairs, earnestly working for Wal-Mart for $7.75 an hour with no benefits, paying a higher tax rate than the Waltons do, and thinking unions are the enemy.

Glenn Beck is a Teenage Girl

“When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.” --George Carlin

Even though he has only been on Fox News a short while, Glenn Beck has already pole-vaulted himself into the Crazy Wingnut Hall of Fame. Which is why I haven't written anything about him: too easy. Like kicking a baby clown. But when friend H. said "Glenn Beck is a teenage girl" (in re: the crying, and the weird thing he did with Sarah Palin, where he read his journal to her on air) well, I had to find some way to pass such a witty observation on to you, the masses (all four of you).

I looked for the clip in which Beck cries about loving his country, but it wasn't in the first three clips I found. And I love you people, but not enough to sit through more than three clips of Glenn Fucking Beck, I'll tell you what. The first one was a sit down with O'Reilly in which they had a little gabfest about progressivism. Beck was big enough to say that Obama is not "technically" a Marxist. Because in Marxism, Beck says, there is a revolution, and progressives just come to get you bit by bit. Marxism is like a big shark, and progressivism is like a bunch of piranhas, I guess. Then O'Reilly chimed in about how he got Obama to admit that he was in favor of the redistribution of wealth, which gave one furiously to think: hey, wait, isn't capitalism a system for the redistribution of wealth? Once you move beyond bartering a chicken for some butter, any system of trade is inevitably going to redistribute wealth from some people to other people. But, you know, whatever. They then chortled about the "fact" that progressives want to "take all your stuff."

I only made it through 45 seconds of the next clip I found, which was about some guy whose daughter had been kidnapped, and Beck swore she wouldn't be forgotten, &c. &c. Who knows what that was about. The above clip is one in which Beck decides that the White House is peopled with "radical Marxists" (so Obama pals around with radical Marxists, even though he isn't technically one himself).

Watching these things is painful because it's just baffling that anyone, anywhere, believes what this man is saying. Do they not ever ask themselves, "Hey, what exactly is a Marxist?" or "Since this guy is anti-big business, I assume that Fox News is a Mom & Pop media group?" The Rude Pundit has a great post up (which is part of the impetus for this post) about Beck's version of history, in which Calvin Coolidge* (!^@%@&!!) was a great President, and Progressivism died because of Wilson's failed League of Nations (uh, no). Strangely, he forgets to mention the active Socialist movement in the United States during this same time period, or even the numerous experiments with communes throughout American history.

I suppose the point of this post (beyond "Hey, what a jackass that guy is") is that it's hard to see how reasoned debate can work with people who believe what this man is saying. It's like negotiating with the inmates of the insane asylum about how the asylum should function.**

*In my AP U.S. History Class (crowd: elitist! [throws tomatoes]) we were told that the only thing worth noting about Coolidge was his campaign slogan, which was "Keep Cool With Coolidge." This had to have been a lame slogan, even by the low standards of campaign slogans. Was he promising everyone ice cream? Otherwise, Coolidge was just filler between Wilson and FDR.

**That metaphor may be revised later, when I have more time to think about it. Other suggestions for appropriate metaphors are welcome.