The Shaming of the GOP

Tags

Bergdahl, GOP, hypocrisy, tea party

I mean ya gotta hand it to the GOP and their corp of clowns. I swear the term chutzpah must have been invented just for them.

Given all the back-walking going on within the GOP ranks on this issue of Sgt. Bergdahl, it still remains stunning the degree to which folks like Fox Noise continue to look down their noses at the drooling sycophants that pass as the usual Fox viewer.

Case in point, is one Ollie North, criminal/traitor extraordinaire who was recently on Newsmax to give us the benefit of his wisdom on the negotiated release of Sgt. Bergdahl from the hands of the Taliban.

You remember Ollie. He participated along with candidate Ronald Reagan, in a secret deal with Iran (terrorists) to sell them missiles and then turn that money over to the Contras in Nicaragua (more terrorists). In return Iran was supposed to turn over  hostages, but not until the election was over, so Carter couldn’t get the benefit of it. This was not only negotiating with terrorists, it was downright treason.

Yet, Fox figured Ollie was a good choice to weigh in on the matter of the Bergdahl release. I mean seriously!

From there we move to Johnny McCain who just cannot to this day live with the fact that he is not the President.

Back in February of this year, Johnny suggested that he could probably get behind a trade of Taliban Gitmo detainees in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl, though he would “have to see the details”. This seems in line with the information that this negotiation has been in the works since 2011, and that the appropriate members of Congress were informed of both the negotiations, AND the subjects of any exchange.

John was enraged when this was pointed out to him. He sputtered, accused journalists of “lying” and then abruptly changed his tune, and suggested that it was a done deal, and we should move on. Then the next day, he was back on the bandwagon, screaming for “his head”.

Joined at the hip, Kelly Ayotte just on Memorial Day was calling on citizens to “remember Sgt. Bergdahl in their thoughts and prayers” and declaring that she was pushing the military to do everything possible to return him to his family. Of course now she’s singing a different tune.

Ayotte, is of course, no different from Lindsey Butchmeup Graham, who get their marching orders from Johnny, came to lately McCain, and both can be forgiven their turnabouts, since it’s all just too confusing to them in the first place. Lindsey of course is facing a primary next week, and so he’s desperately trying to remind everyone in his state that he has a mighty big job in just zipping up his trousers over that massive load of junk he’s carrying.

Their story is not singular as it were. A host of those who were congratulating America on having brought back a prisoner, quickly scrubbed their congratulations from their Twitter feeds when advised that the GOP was tacking once again. At least six Republicans have done so, advised by party leaders apparently that things “had changed”.

This all falls into place when one realizes that the rabble of the Tea People are making their anger heard throughout the faux news blogs that cater to the trailer brigade. Facebook pages, and the usual stories rebound around the likes of WorldNetDaily, Breitbart and Fox Noise, all attesting to the fact that Bergdahl was “probably a traitor”, “probably a deserter”, whose father “looks like a Muslim” and on and on. Impeachment echoes through the halls of crazy land.

None of this has anything to do with the decision of course, but in the usual fear of upsetting the grossly ignorant, GOP politicians run scared. The mill around the Capital, asking each other what to do, after all, elections are at stake, and NOTHING is as important.

The degree to which the GOP jumps when the fringe furrows it’s collective Neanderthal brow, is stunning. Just last week, the NRA after having declared that the crazies in Texas wandering around cheap food establishments with assault-type rifles and camouflage, should just go home, was met with an uproar from these thugs, and beat a hasty retreat, claiming “we made a terrible mistake”.

Such is the state of the GOP that they are drug around by the nose by a band of motley ill-educated morons who have basements full of canned goods, and lockers full of assault weapons, all ready for the coming revolution. However shaming this is to them personally doesn’t excuse the selling out of their soul in exchange for a greasy fingered vote.

The bottom line is quite simple. There are few facts that are known, other than the following.

1. Prisoner exchanges have always been part of a President’s duties, going back to George Washington.
2. Prisoner exchanges are done by most countries, including Israel with Palestine. In fact one of their more famous exchanges involved 1 Israel for over a THOUSAND Palestinians. Both sides call the other side terrorists.
3. This negotiation has been going on since 2011. There seems to be evidence that some Congressional leaders of the appropriate committees were aware of the negotiations, and the general parameters of those discussions.
4. Sgt. Bergdahl has been charged with no crime. And even if he were, that is no reason whatsoever by any military standard not to secure his release.
5. The exchanged Gitmo detainees were Taliban, not Al Qaeda. There is a serious difference.

This smacks, as so much of GOP opposition usually ends up being, as nothing more than, whatever the Black guy does, we hate it. Note that as usual, the GOP prior to this event, demanded the release of Sgt. Bergdahl, but as usual offered NO concrete terms of how that should be done. (See Syria, and the Ukraine for similar demands without specifics). So they demand action, refuse to specify what that action should be, and then when ANY action is taken, it’s the wrong action, and still there is no statement of what right action would look like.

This is a pattern of opposition. This is not governance, it is pure mean-spirited obstinate opposition. It is in truth a pandering to the fringe crazies which now seem to run the GOP. These people are satisfied with nothing other than venomous denial to everything this President presents. Of course they have no alternatives. Do you expect to get alternatives from seven-year olds?

Perhaps someday, normal men and women will pick themselves up from the mud, wash themselves off, and decide to reclaim the GOP as a party worthy of listening to. Not today however, not today.

 

I Kinnah Unnerstan Thees Pepal

Tags

Extreme right-wing, History, revolution, tea party

God knows I try.

But it seems an impossibility. It’s like Jesus is said to have said, to gain your life you gotta lose it.

To understand the Tea Party People, ya gotta lose your mind.

It’s not that I’m such a great student of history, though I know my fair share. Not so much the dates and stuff, but the general threads of causation. I get the big picture.

The Tea Party is filled with deliberately false history. I mean that. It’s “history” designed to support the meme of the party, however that might be defined.

Let’s start with the “tea party” label. Who is a tea party person?  Well, the Koch’s envisioned a “populist” groundswell of people who hated government. Why would they do that? Oh because they are struggling economically and paying taxes has never been popular. So the Koch’s lassoed that common feeling, and then fed the flames that most of the taxes were going to the wrong places: i.e. poor “takers” who were not pulling their weight because the Democrats had found an endless supply of voters by giving them “stuff”–like food.

The Koch’s were willing to accept that a lot of these angry folks brought a lot of ideas of their own about how things should be run, and since the Koch’s vision doesn’t include them every running anything, they allowed for their anti-gay, anti-free choice, anti-immigrant, anti-not-white, pro-fundamentalism stuff to play in the mix. The Koch’s themselves? Who knows what they think beyond accumulating all the money in the world.

So basically the Tea Party contains a collection of economic super conservatives and/or social super conservatives. They can be all one or the other, or some mix of both. A bunch of grifters always rise to the occasion when they smell a mark. And the folks like David Barton step up and decide they will now call themselves “historians” and rewrite it to suit their new audience of gullible angry people.

We all know from a lot of studies that have been done, that to a degree, one is kinda born conservative or liberal. The latest entries in this growing body of work are Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, and Predisposed: Liberals and Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. No doubt these predilections are not written in stone, and environment probably has much to do with it as well. However, it does mean that we enter the world with a certain “world view”. If we get the “liberal” gene we are predisposed to be curious about the world, open to new things, willing to explore changing our minds and our way of doing things. If we get the conservative gene, we are more frightened of the world, see it as dangerous, think it’s best to stay with what has proven good in the past, and stick with our “own kind”.

When the extreme Right decided on adopting a logo and meme to describe who they were and are, it was no doubt comforting to align themselves with the history of the country. Yes, it made sense to see themselves as much like those brave souls who gambled everything to stand against the Mother country and strike for independence. They became Tea Party Patriots, self-described. They took to wearing three-corner hats dripping with tea bags as their costume.

Although studies do show that overall, those who identify as Republicans are a bit more educated than Democrats, this has little to do with intelligence if anything. It merely suggests that to a slightly greater degree, Republicans in general have more education. They also tend to be grossly more white, and older.

Clearly it seems to education has not served them well as regards the history of their own nation. One has but to remember Sarah Palin’s famous explanation of Paul Revere’s ride:

“He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

While Palin was sorta right about warning the British (Revere was actually stopped by the British, and had his horse taken from him, and he did tell the British that they would make a mistake if they marched on Lexington, he this was not the purpose of his “ride”.), she added in ringing bells and warning shots, which have nothing to do with the story.

Similarly, Michele Bachmann helped us understand our founding by explaining our “founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery” and that our “founding father John Quincy Adams would not rest until he had eradicated it.”

Of course this was not true. Slavery was written into the Constitution, several of the Founding Fathers owned slaves themselves, and John Quincy Adams was a mere child at the time of the revolution, was not a founding father, and died well before slavery was abolished.

No matter that this sort of thing is common with the Tea Party, they also as we have said, claim to be of the same genre as those patriots. And this is odd indeed.

For if one were to conclude anything from studying that period of our history, one would conclude that the men who pursued independence for this country were anything but conservatives. They were men who were well read in the new theories sweeping Europe based on the writings of John Locke, Montesquieu,  and Voltaire, and scientists such as Isaac Newton who brought us to a new way of understanding the world around us. These men were not conservatives, but just the opposite, they were men of the Enlightenment, that amazing time when there was a burst of new ideas and new thinking.

One of those new ways of thinking was a serious questioning of theocratic and monarchical forms of government. Britain represented both, and those soon-to-be Americans who supported the conservative position were holding with the Brits were called “loyalists” or “Tories”. They were the conservatives of the day, while Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin and those who declared for independence were liberals.

Our Tea Party adherents are not in any way aligned with the kinds of thinking that motivated the Founding Fathers. To claim such a joining is simply intellectually indefensible. Frankly I suspect the average Tea Bibber of today has no clue, has never thought seriously about any of this, and would be shocked if you tried to explain it. They seem to be satisfied that their willingness to argue against taxation automatically puts them in league with the Founders.

That might work if we didn’t have pages of subsequent history to prove otherwise. Those who decided to bring armed rebellion against the new country in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion soon found that the 2nd Amendment was used, not to insure their private right to bear arms against the government, but for the government to put them down as an illegal rebellion against a duly passed law.

I suspect this is all too confusing for the average Tea Bagger. It’s just feels better to wave “Don’t tread on me” flags and feel that you are in the tradition of such great men. Alas, that ship won’t float.

 

Weeping For Joy

Tags

1 st Amendment, judiciary, tea party

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

There are times in life when the universe slaps you in the face, not out of spite or meanness, but to be most sure that it has your attention.

This is a good thing.

Such a thing happened to me.

It often does, I have to admit.

This, I ponder, may not be the case with most of humanity, it’s hard to say. I can only speak for myself. But it is a regular occurrence for me, I assure you.

If one believes, as some do, that the universe is a vast sea of intelligence, and we are but threads in the great tapestry that is the universal brain, then one is required, or so it seems to me, to respond promptly to its nudge, or slap as the case may be. Perhaps to the more aware it is a nudge. As I said, to me it seems a good healthy slap, one that stings for a few seconds, leaves a pink echo upon my cheek, but no lasting imprint.

The prompting today seems directed at reminding me that there is much to this thing called humanity, this thing of being human. In fact, there is so much diversity along the spectrum of human to not so very, as to suggest that some of us many not be exactly of the same species at all. This of course could figure quite prominently in those circles where UFO’s and alien meddling are believed to be involved in so-called human evolution. A helping hand to Darwin so to speak.

What I mean to say is that, well some of us seem not to play by the normal rules of logic. You know the drill. Two plus two equals four. Rain falls down unless carried by wind in some not gravity direction. You know, basics.

It is undoubtedly what makes it nearly impossible for rational normal people to get facts across to people of the TeaSwillin’ party. Which is a whole failure of logic in and of itself, since of course said party is not really known for its tea swilling at all, rather for its Bud delight I would generalize. Yet it clings to an appellation, their collective minds conclude,  that suggests  a willingness to “give the last full measure” for an America they have dreamed up at back yard barbecue meets during lazy Saturday nights.

The following is but an example.

There was a time, long ago and in a universe perhaps far away, when the public at large looked up to those of great learning. Such were judges, who were given a reverence seldom accorded politicians at least. Wearing archaic uniforms of flowing robes, they dispensed justice from on high. They did this by reasoning from old and rather dusty tomes of ancient writings which consisted of “precedent” or the honor given to past pronouncements from similar men dressed similarly.

But I must say, that no longer can we accord such men, or women if they exist, with this presumed pedestal right.

Alas, they too have proven to be of mere clay.

Fine you say, the likes of Thomas, Alito, Scalia have made that case  for some time now.

Yes, you would be right, but, no I speak of one so low as to commune with pond scum.

That man would be Chief Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, a state always in the running for title as location of the world’s stupidest people.

Yes, THAT Roy Moore, the fool who refused to remove the 10 commandments from a courthouse under order from a Federal Judge. For that he was unanimously removed from the bench by other jurists of that state. But, yes, you remember don’t you? The good but stupid people of Alabama sent him right on back.

Roy was no doubt a stellar student at Alabama University but must have slept through most of his Constitutional law courses. This seems plausible, since Roy admits that his tenure as company commander of a MP unit in Vietnam was, shall we say, problematic. Known for his strict adherence to rules and interpretation, he became known as Captain America. This was not an endearing name, and poor Roy took to sleeping upon sandbags should his men decide to lob a grenade under his cot. So he might well have been in need of sleep during those years after in stuffy constitutional law classes.

In any case, Roy has developed a rather unusual interpretation of the First Amendment in its entirety. It seems, or so Roy says, that the darn thing only applies to Christians, since as he says, Buddha did not make us, and he is unaware of any copy of the Koran having come on the Mayflower.

If you don’t know this, then Roy invites you to “get back and learn your history”.

Roy expounds on life itself, saying that it’s clear that life begins “when the baby kicks, not when it’s head comes out!” Common sense found at the bottom of a cracker jack box folks.

Now if all this sounds somewhat different from what you learned, well, you don’t inhabit Roy’s jello brain.

See the universe is trying to tell ya something here folks. Not all humans are created, well quite human. Some of us are imposters. Roy proves that.

Aren’t you glad you don’t live in Alabama?

Get out there and look for the aliens among us…If you smell tea, you are on the right track.

Source: The Raw Story

Roy on vacation

Do You Ever Imagine What It Would Be Like?

Tags

life in the foothills, tea party, the human condition, the media game

This isn’t about sadness or depression or anything like that.

It’s about imagining how others live.

Have you ever sped down a highway in the evening, just past sundown? Noticed the shapes of houses sitting on hills and along dusty roads off in the distance?

Or have you driven through an unfamiliar small town passing house after house, each some replica of the next, although each distinct enough with its own pattern of fence, porch, color, tree ornamentation makes it semi-unique?

The lights are on in this houses.

It’s near dinner time.

And your mind begins to imagine what life is like inside that house. Who lives there? What do they do for a living? Are their children or grandparents? Are they troubled with finances or health issues? What must their life be like?

You’re not from there. You’re going from somewhere to somewhere else.

And sometimes, it looks depressing to be there. Sometimes it seems like the most gawd-awful life that must be lived there.

And you can’t imagine standing it.

And suddenly you breath deeply and you realize how darn lucky you are to “not be them”. Even though you know nothing about “them”. You just assume that their lives must be sad and awful because you find the surroundings not conducive to whatever you think of as a “good” life.

It’s too out-in-the-middle of nowhere. It’s too run down. It’s too cold, or not green enough, or to loud, or too quiet. It’s too something for YOU.

And you shudder at their mean little lives.

Except, as I say again, you don’t know.

It’s perhaps one of the saddest things I think about, when I think about humans.

I recently heard, I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson suggest that what made us special in all of evolution is that we compare stuff. That ability to “judge” or compare led us to  strive for improvements I guess. While the dinosaurs nestled into their perfect environment, grabbing each genetic mutation that made their “fit” more comfortable, we seem to be the ones who simply altered the environment to suit ourselves.

That makes us more adaptable no doubt. The dinosaurs were powerless to respond to the comet that hit their world and changed their environment drastically. The mammals, especially the burrowing sorts fared better.

But in our comparing nature, it seems that we like to compare ourselves to each other. And that may not be such a good thing.

Let’s face it, much of politics is driven by our comparisons, real or imagined. And plenty of highly priced magicians of public opinion are engaged in efforts to manipulate that comparison.

It seems that the average person can relax and feel satisfied as long as she can point to some “others” as far worse off. And of course the far worse off is arrived at by lack of whatever YOU have that makes you the relative success.

How else do we explain the relative popularity of shows like “Moonshiners”, “Swamp Hunters”, “Ax Men” with their whole slew of vaguely educated, rough men and women who live on the fringes and manage to “make do”. We love us some Honey Boo Boo, and her family of misbegots. We relish our pageant babies and their silly and sick mothers, (at least I’m a better mother than her!) We eat up this garbage because they make us feel like decent successful people by comparison.

The rich tell us that we are the salt of the earth, while they lie to us with half-truths and pieces of fact, trusting that we are so ill-informed and so incurious to tell the difference, that fact and fiction wrapped in self-satisfying ribbons of “it’s not your fault, but THEIRS” that you life feels so stinkin’ worthless. If you watch you kids not doing any better than you did, then it’s not your fault, it’s  THEIR fault. “Their’ is merely adapted to whatever group is currently available to be blamed.

A Latino man shoots some people at Ford Hood before killing himself, and I will assure that that from it the NRA will tell us we need more guns and the Tea People will inform us that our border security is to blame. Of course all that is untrue, but the quivering masses of “my life sucks” will eat it up and blame THEM.

We will feel better, because we have chosen to believe that others have it worse. Indeed others do have it worse. But it’s only by mere luck that we aren’t in their shoes and they in ours. We are not so much smarter or industrious as they. In fact they may well trump us on both those issues. We were lucky or not in having parents who could afford to support our four + glorious years in higher education finding our niche from which we could, as our personality led us, drive ourselves to financial nirvana, or be fairly lazy and still manage to make a decent living.

We got lucky in who we married perhaps, which led to unexpected riches (the family farm is worth a whole lot of dough on the market as prime farm land), or not. The family hardware store might turn out to be nothing in the face of the new Wal-Mart down the street. It’s pretty much a crap shoot ya see.

We did or did not have a kid with disabilities. We did or did not get sick; or maimed or not in theaters of war. The company upon which everybody’s job depended, did or did not belly up, or move to cheaper labor pastures.

Yet we still find it useful to compare our lives to others of which we know nothing.

It’s just easier.

It’s easier than digging through the pile of manure in our head and seeing if there is anything there worth keeping as human.

It’s easier when the bills need to be paid, and that second job may be lost, and the kid needs braces.

And the people who trade on stirring the pot of hate are happy that we are so distracted with trying to exist, that we will account ourselves good citizens if we listen vaguely for thirty-minutes every day while stirring the spaghetti, and pick up the phrases designed to resonate and be easy to remember.

BORDER SECURITY!

SHARIA LAW!

BENGHAZI!

OBAMA CARE!

2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!

OUR FREEDOMS!

FREE MARKETS!

TAKERS!

PLAYING THE RACE CARD!

SOCIALIST!

DICTATOR!

AMNESTY!

And I watch Nebraska, and I watched Medora, and I find myself thinking, “God how depressing to live THERE.” And I am doing the evolutionary thing I guess. But I am so wrong to do so. We are so wrong to do so.

 

 

A Lunch Tray and A Broom

Tags

GOP, government assistance, tea party, teabaggers, the poor, work

Well, they are at it again. At least weekly, often more, some addle-brained Tea Party lovin’ crazy GOPer opens his pie hole and spews forth something that other members of the GOP must hasten to “straighten out”.

Today’s numbskull is none other than Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), who explained to members of a local Chamber of Commerce, that those poor kids who are receiving free lunches ought to be made to sweep floors in the school, just to remind them that work is good, and nothing should be free.

“Moderate” Republicans were quick to explain that what Kingston was referring to was in fact laudable, being that the GOP has always touted the value of work, but that his delivery was a bit, shall we say, “insensitive.”

Really?

Didn’t Newt the Toot say something similar when he was trying to convince the GOP electorate to make his the candidate to go against Obama? As I recall, he talked about making little kids “junior” janitors. All in the hopes of teaching the lil chillin’ the importance of work.

And you see, that IS the point for these tone-deaf, living on another planet Republicans: they really do think that poor people don’t have a clue about the amazing joy of work. I mean, all of us who worked for 25-35 years do don’t we? Wasn’t that the most joyous time of your life? Didn’t you feel special and accomplished as you pushed widget A down the throat of widget B, or for the thousandth time, regurgitated the litany of “rights” one was giving up in coping the proverbial plea to a lessor offense? I know I went home every evening proclaiming that I only wished I could do that stuff for another hundred years, God willing.

But I do not mean to denigrate the world of work, for work is important, and we do feel like real normal people when we engage in it and not people so ignorant and incapable that we can’t do the simplest of “flipping” motions to turn a burger.

What I demean is the assumption that the poor do not understand this and don’t yearn for it as naturally as the smart-alecky rich kid whose idea of a job is really to “intern” at some fancy corporate headquarters arranged by daddy, wherein said “worker” will go out and get the lattes and mocha-lites with appropriate croissants, stopping to pick up the bosses phone-purchased little trinket for the wife’s birthday on the way. Said rich-shit will call this work, dutifully add it to his resume as “experience in the hedge-fund industry” and snicker over such nonsense with roommates over Sam Adams at the local pub in Boston near Harvard.

Meanwhile in the real world, the poor kid will flip the burgers and be too poor to move out of his mother’s flat until somebody entices him to do a “little something” for a lot bigger profit. And he will be a minority, since most of those poor kids will just do the best they can trying to making it on $7.54 a hour with a baby on the way.

But said Kingston’s of the world don’t get this, because see, really really really what they think? Is that these poor kids will never get work as long as the government gives them just enough to survive on.

Which begs the question raised by someone I read last week: Why do they argue that the rich need tax cuts so they will have more money, because as we all know, more money means more investment and more jobs, and the poor need more taxes and less government money because they just waste it on frivolities. The rich need more money to use it “right” and the poor need less, cause they use it “wrong”.

For that IS the assumption isn’t it? For the poor are just DIFFERENT.

That’s what the GOP really really really means, and it’s what they believe. Seriously.

How they got to believe that is anybody’s guess, but I’m pretty sure that the rich who seem to own the GOP had something to do with it. And that’s why we better remember this stuff when it comes to voting, because they REALLY do want to kill health insurance for the poor and average person. And they REALLY do want to kill off Medicare and Medicaid, and Social Security–because THEY REALLY BELIEVE IT BREEDS LAZINESS.

See Mitt the Twit meant it when he talked about the 47% who are expecting the government to take care of them. Paul Ryan paraded across the country during the campaign referring to all of us as “takers”, not “makers”. Ayn Rand is their Goddess.

And the Waltons who own as much as the bottom 42% of ALL THE ENTIRE AMERICAN POPULATION, control 1/4 of all the food moved and eaten in this country. And if left to their own devices they surely wish to control ALL of the food moving across America. And when they do, if it just happens to coincide with one of them deciding that they know better than you WHAT YOU SHOULD EAT, well then hold on to your boots kiddies, because change will be coming to America then won’t it?

When so-called Moderates within the party suggest that King or Bachmann or Stockman, or Gohmert and any of a hundred other nitwits “spoke poorly” well what they mean is that they spoke too DIRECTLY and STRAIGHTFORWARDLY is all. The masters of the obfuscation don’t like that.

For God’s sake Kingston don’t tell them what we really plan on doing!

But hey, Wal-Mart will sell you your broom at a good price, made by those fine little kids in Bangladesh. Now that’s what a labor force ought to be like, I tell ya.

Oh yeah…here’s how the poor actually spend their money.

Related articles

• Everything You Ever Needed to Know About the Minimum Wage (theatlantic.com)
• #NNTS: Rep. Kingston: Force poor kids to ‘sweep the floors’ to get school lunches (newslo.com)
• GOP Rep from Georgia wants poor kids to sweep the floors for their school lunches (deathandtaxesmag.com)
• Georgia lawmaker: Force poor kids to ‘sweep the floors’ to get school lunches (rawstory.com)
• Georgia Republican Jack Kingston Says Kids Should Sweep Cafeteria Floors for Food (politicususa.com)
• Suffer the children to come unto me and I will hand them a broom and a dustpan (rawstory.com)
• Georgia Congressman: Kids Who Get Subsidized School Lunches Should Be Forced To Work (outsidethebeltway.com)
• With enough urchins you can have a heckuva musical (firedoglake.com)

Well, Where Have You Been, Huh?

Tags

GOP, Humor, satire, tea party, teabaggers

Got your attention didn’t I?

Well where have you been? I been waiting here it seems like forever, and NOBODY showed up. So I thought I might jar you from your lethargy with Buttons here, my friendly pup.

Actually I have just been busy in a fairly good way. Holidays and all. Finally have days utterly to myself. Made enough food yesterday to last until at least Monday. By then, I think we will start to be tired of it all.

Frankly the political scene both disgusts me and bores me. I still keep INFORMED, but I’m just so tired of Republicans being, you know, so Republicanish, which is a nice way to say douchey. Do they ever stop being douche bags? My representative sure doesn’t. Steve Pearce is his unholy name, and he is a douche of the very first order.

A millionaire they tell me, and owned lock, stock and barrel by the TeaDrunkards. I find it amusing to read the GOP playbook (sent around to all the lil man and woman/childs pretencing at actually serving the public). Said playbook is regularly filched/gifted/snuck to various liberal organizations and published for all to see. It consists of phrases (typically called “talking points”) and suggestions of things to do to make the GOP look intelligent and the Democrats to look stupid.

The playbook lately has focused a lot on Obamacare, of which I am thoroughly tired by the by. So, to make a long story not quite as long, old Steve has been busy reading his, and he regales us regularly on Facebook with lists of all those tens of millions who have lost their coverage in New Mexico, followed by a plea to “please send us your stories of misery”. He then reports one or two of these, and dusts his filthy lucre hands off and thinks he’s done his “job.”

Of course he offers these people no help of any sort, and fails to bother suggesting that they go to the exchanges and see what they might be offering. We have no individual exchanges here since our other douche Guv Martinez, didn’t sign the legislation until it was too late to have the time to set them up for October. So we are very douchey here. (Guv Martinez may have some serious problems of her own since her main man on her staff is a Rovish like creature that a number of people have suggested might be leading her into some illegal behaviors )

Anyway, his latest addition to stupid dialogue is to suggest that Domino’s Pizza is paying $15-20 per hour to drivers, but only in “energy selling” states, meaning those states that are pumping oil and frackin’ their way to heaven with gas. Now any student in the first fifteen minutes of undergrad school (pick your subject) knows that one has zero to do with the other on so many grounds that we reach infinity. But what was funny was that a whole bunch of Domino’s drivers chimed in with “hey Steve, you idiot!” Turns out that the $15-20 is an estimate of what drivers CAN make with tips off their base crummy salary, and DOESN’T include the cost of maintenance of their vehicle and GAS. But poor old Steve fairly misses that, since he’s simply following the PLAYBOOK.

I figured after going a few rounds with Steve, that well, I was right in the ball park with this next story. It seems like dinosaurs liked to poop in groups.  In this they are similar to camels and elephants, which means the apple don’t fall far from the tree, I guess. Or not. Evolution is a strange thing.  I’m really pretty sure that Republicans poop in groups too.

Which leads to this: did ya know that some soft tissue from a T. Rex survived 68 million years? It was found in Montana, and I have no idea whether that mattered at all, but factoids are important in Jeopardy, so consider me a coach. I mean under the best conditions it’s only supposed to last a million years. Anyway, the collagen from the beastie resembles that of birds, which must make the people at the Creation Museum go scrambling for an explanation. It all has to do with a lot of biological mumbo jumbo and IRON-rich blood that for some reason known only to a BIOLOGIST, helps preserve the tissue.

Which reminds me of Coach, Craig T. Nelson, who is among the dumber of the Republicans I know of. He hates paying taxes, hates the “welfare” society we now live in, hates Obama for bringing all that to Merika, and so on and so forth. And he’s not going to take it any more, refusing to pay taxes for things he doesn’t believe in. After all, he says, “What happened to society? I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out?. . .” YES YOU IGNORANT FOOL, THE GOVERNMENT HELPED YOU OUT WITH THE FOOD STAMPS AND WELFARE!!!  I mean this is Louis Gohmert stupid.

Louis by the way has been ear-deep in Obama conspiracy theories, claiming that the President is busy via the AHCA in amassing a private army. He’s been at this for some time, and the stories of the government buying up ammunition only goes to support that idea according to the Galloping Gohmert. A portion of the law which allows the training of a group for public health and national emergency response, is to Louis a smoking gun. But he’s a bit unsure of what the weapons of choice will be for this group:

“I’ve continued to ask questions, what is this for?” It says it is for international health crises, but then it doesn’t include the word ‘health’ when it talks about national emergencies. And I’ve asked, what kind of training are they getting? It provides in Obamacare that this commission and non-commissioned officer corps will be trained. But I want to know, are they using weapons to train or are they being taught to use syringes and health care items? But we’ve got no clear answers on that.”

Seems like dear Louis should bring up this subject at the next group poop he has with Cruz and King, and well, all the bare butted GOP’ers at the gathering. Hey, whose poo don’t stink?

Happy leftovers!

Whew! Dodged a Bullet. Time to Start Filling the Bunker

Tags

tea party, teabaggers, Ted Cruz

The shutdown is over, the fiscal cliff averted, and we can all sigh with relief and go back to Packer football, raking leaves, and worrying about whether Uncle Henry’s flatulence will ruin the Thanksgiving dinner once again this year.

Ted Cruz and Tea Party soundly defeated. Dust off the hands. Job well done.

Not so fast my dears. Not so fast.

When nearly everyone with a brain that can think of a good answer to 2 + 2 (tea baggers excluded since whatever is in their skulls doesn’t qualify as a brain anyway), says that this was a no brainer from day one in that it had a SNOWBALLS CHANCE IN HELL OF WORKING, well, methinks I smell a rat. This had nothing to do with winning on the issue of dismantling Obamacare. NEVER. It was the ruse used to light the fire under the rank and file.

Ted Cruz is not an idiot. He may be crazy and narcissistic to a fault, but stupid he is not. He got out of this exactly what he wanted: a bigger national name, money pouring into his coffers, and a brand spanking new donor list to use. If I had to guess, I’d be really really sure that Cruz has read at least one book on how Adolph Hitler (a not stupid person) managed through sheer force of charisma to incite a small group of rabble (Brown Shirts) to catapult him into the Chancellery and ultimately to the dictatorship of the German people. Ted has a plan, I can assure you of that, ill-conceived and product of a meglamaniacal mind as it may be.

While Sarah, the grinning Barbie doll,  paraded around the WWII memorial with 200 elderly veterans,  and spouted how Obama was abusing them for political gain, as she abused them for political gain, veterans across America suffered from the loss of Meals on Wheels. Oh yeah, they couldn’t quite see the photo-op there did they?

Did the teabaggers learn a lesson? Sure they did.

They learned that a rather tiny group of very angry people can wreak big havoc with government, and cause millions of people real pain. And when you are a destructionist rather than a constructionist, well, that’s a valuable lesson.

Will they do it again?

Yes. We will go through all this again in January and February because disrupting things works. They have no care whatsoever that the fortunes of the GOP are falling faster than a meteor streaking across the sky. They only care that they can disrupt and bring government to a screeching halt.

If you have any question about that read Eric Erickson, founder of Red State, and his call for making all those “RINOS” pay in the 2014 elections. “A vote to end the crisis, is a vote for Obamacare!” If you don’t believe me still, compare the votes against ending the shutdown to those who are running for re-election in 2014.

This is not to say that the Tea Creatures are only about destruction. Like just about anybody, once in actual power, they will enjoy it all too well, and will merrily go about the business of enlarging government to suit their predilections. All that talk about “getting government out of our lives” is true. They mean that, but they missed a few words that always are in their head when they say it. It’s more like getting government out of OUR lives and into the lives of all those who don’t live the RIGHT way.”

Surely women will no longer get abortions except illegally, and once the nice white people have picked all the kids they want to adopt from the foundling homes set up to deal with the influx, the rest will be raised by the states. There will be no such thing as health care for the poor, no such thing as Medicaid surely. No such things as food stamps or any of that stuff. The poor will not be left to die, but rather, work houses will be set up in every county where they will live.

Work? Oh there will be plenty of that to go around for the foundling kids and poor-house inhabitants. Streets and bridges to repair and build, lettuce to pick, trash to collect. All the stuff that white people don’t like to do, well they will do for a bed and three squares a day.

While the monied interests will pay these workhouse overseers well, letting them have a few more dribbles of cash to live in the best part of town, not quite in the elite section reserved for monied business interests, but the next best thing. For you see the rich shall be very busy once again. With no restrictions upon them at all, they will be busy building businesses that no longer have to care about working conditions, product safety and all that.

Rockefeller you may recall had no interest in fairness. He wanted to destroy the competition. When you have so much money you can’t begin to spend it, you have to do something. So winning the game is all that matters. And once they have locked up control of America they will expand the game to the rest of the planet. And then, well, there is the moon, and Mars, and from there on read whatever version of science fiction “galaxy wars” excites you, but it surely won’t be a “federation of planets” ala Star Trek.

This all works so damn beautifully. As Theda Skocpol informs us, it’s a pincer effect. The grass-roots crazy ignorant frightened white people do the dirty work and the money pays the tab. The grassroots never knows it’s being used until it’s too late. Like I said, enough of them are paid off handsomely to forget that they are nothing more than enforcers for the “man” now. No freedom for you! TeaNazi.

You remember that some weeks ago we had a conversation about physical discipline of children. I lamented that a segment of my high school classmates thought today’s youth was “disrespectful” and not as they should be, and that mostly that was due to not being beaten as they had been. Course, they don’t call it being “beaten” they call nostalgically call it, “being whooped on”. Another classmate was always telling us how her relative was “scamming” the food stamp system, and she used that example as “proof” that the system was rife with people who were “just too lazy to work”.

Skocpol says this too is normal, for these grass-roots angry white people don’t like their own kids and grandkids, finding them all too willing to take government student loans for granted, and certainly not thinking as they do on social issues.

The monied interests, on the other hand adore their fundamentalist social straight-laced attitudes, for they fit right in with their agenda. While nobody suggests that the monied interests share tea party social values, it’s convenient to them when their work force is mired in simple-minded beliefs that are focused on them versus us in so many guises. So they give lip service to ending abortion and marriage amendments to keep the ignorant teabibbers lasered in on their own neighbors and co-workers rather than of course where they should be–the uber rich who pull the strings and continue to garner all the assets.

Can we stop this?

Well, as in most things, that depends.

When most people are rightly focused on how to make ends meet as a full-time occupation, it’s hard to find time to become involved in our civic responsibilities. When monied interests are all too happy to ply us with toys of every kind (how much bigger can that big screen get and how more pixilly perfect?), we are dutifully lost in our pleasure palaces that are controlled by the flick of thumbs on buttons. So we have to move ourselves off of that to be an effective counterpoint.

I have utter faith in the instinctive goodness of most people and in their can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-why-it’s-wrong-but-know-it-is ability to separate the goats from the sheep. I believe that the American public at large see through the smooth talk of Ted Cruz and knows him for what he is, a demagogic wannabe, much as the public saw through sista-Sarah and her grifting scheme to be a celebrity Vice President, and prance around in designer clothes and nifty heels.

But that means we have to go further than simply voting for a Democrat come 2014. It means a whole lot more since these old angry white people are infested in our state legislatures and school boards, and city councils.

Whether we are up to the task remains to be seen.

This guy is so cynical, he thinks that YOU are no more his match than the tea party minions who are following him as their new god.

I’m betting you are more than his match.

What do you think?

 

 

 

I would highly suggest you read this post from Salon, which I read after composing this post in my head, and suggested to me, that I’m not too far off the mark here. And you might want to pick up the book by Theda Skocpol as well.

 

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• Ted Cruz Admits Budget Standoff Was All About Building Fundraising Lists (thinkprogress.org)
• The left thinks business controls the Republican Party. They’re wrong. (washingtonpost.com)
• FOCUS | Democrats Must Stop Ted Cruz’s Hollywood Ending (readersupportednews.org)
• Ted Cruz Used Texas to Create ALEC’s Anti-Obamacare Legislation (sacurrent.com)