Holy crap, what a self-righteous bunch of hypocrites. It's both okely and dokely for a bunch of unemployed yahoos, most of whom benefit from one gubmint program or another, to waddle around the park all afternoon with a bunch stupid signs and stupider slogans, festooned with misspelled words that don't mean what they think they mean. But heaven forfend a cartoon insurance mascot make fun of them for being a bunch of perpetually butt-hurt maroons.
I keep thinking that the best way to disperse these ridiculous public park putsches would be to give jobs to the participants, but for the life of me, I can't imagine anything these people are good at, besides pulling oddities out of their asses.
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Hume's Paradox
I'll see Monsieur IOZ' refutation of Clinton and raise him a McVeigh. On the one hand, the "Tea Partiers", whatever they may be or not be, are so far largely a media-driven phenomenon, albeit one that has found some traction for its aspirations of incoherent political mischief.
On the other hand, Tim McVeigh was a bad guy and an unrepentant asshole, but he could think and speak in complete sentences, and had an actual point (however indefensible) that he was able to argue. You look at the braying gaggles of unemployed morons, presumably collecting unemployment insurance at some point in their imposed vacation, many of them collecting Social Security and/or Medicare, taking a public road to a public park, in order to dress up like Paul Revere and rant about obamacommienaziblarghsoshalizm, and it is difficult to imagine Tim McVeigh hanging around these suckas.
So when Clinton talks about the "serious and delirious" in trying to conflate the suburban-asshole park-rats with McVeigh and his crew, he's missing the point. McVeigh was dead serious. The teabaggers have yet to coherently explain much of anything about what they stand for, what they would do if they had the opportunity, etc. It's just a bunch of sorry-ass "...and then Sarah told Obammy he could keep the change!" heh-indeedy lines repeated ad nauseam, and nothing more. McVeigh, on the other hand, articulated his sick rationales with clarity and purpose, lucid in his own way right up to the very end.
And, coming back to IOZ' theme, McVeigh was protesting the government's actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco -- which were, after all, overreach in efforts to preserve the monopoly of force. The siege at Waco was presented as the usual Protecting The Children guff, but let's face it -- if the government wanted to protect children from being molested by religious fanatics, they'd shut down every diocese from Seattle to Miami. No, David Koresh was also running guns, and possibly planning an armed insurrection, and it was (rightly) presumed that if Koresh was allowed to get away with it, pretty soon you'd have plenty of Koresh imitators out there in the boonies (and in fact, they're out there anyway).
Odds are there's bound to be at least one lone nut at one of these stupid rallies, which are needlessly kept afloat by a flailing corporate media, out of ideas and useful news but always able to sniff out a bullshit conflict to be ginned up. It's just the law of averages.
But that lone nut will probably not be one of the on-camera bozos, dressing up and shouting slogans while hoisting a sign he spent all weekend making because he has neither a life nor a job. The angry loner will be a guy like McVeigh, off-camera, quiet, possessing some relevant skill set, nursing his problems with women and gambling along with his perpetual grievances against Big Gubmint, eventually conflating them into a toxic spew, taking it out on whatever seems handy. In the end terrorists never quite know how to get what they want, they only know what they don't want, and have abandoned the conventional avenues toward achieving that anti-objective.
As for the teabaggers, if you really want to disband them, give the younger ones jobs, and call out the old farts collecting SS/Medicare checks, tell them to pay their own freight or kindly fuck off already. Or you could just stop giving them free publicity.
On the other hand, Tim McVeigh was a bad guy and an unrepentant asshole, but he could think and speak in complete sentences, and had an actual point (however indefensible) that he was able to argue. You look at the braying gaggles of unemployed morons, presumably collecting unemployment insurance at some point in their imposed vacation, many of them collecting Social Security and/or Medicare, taking a public road to a public park, in order to dress up like Paul Revere and rant about obamacommienaziblarghsoshalizm, and it is difficult to imagine Tim McVeigh hanging around these suckas.
So when Clinton talks about the "serious and delirious" in trying to conflate the suburban-asshole park-rats with McVeigh and his crew, he's missing the point. McVeigh was dead serious. The teabaggers have yet to coherently explain much of anything about what they stand for, what they would do if they had the opportunity, etc. It's just a bunch of sorry-ass "...and then Sarah told Obammy he could keep the change!" heh-indeedy lines repeated ad nauseam, and nothing more. McVeigh, on the other hand, articulated his sick rationales with clarity and purpose, lucid in his own way right up to the very end.
And, coming back to IOZ' theme, McVeigh was protesting the government's actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco -- which were, after all, overreach in efforts to preserve the monopoly of force. The siege at Waco was presented as the usual Protecting The Children guff, but let's face it -- if the government wanted to protect children from being molested by religious fanatics, they'd shut down every diocese from Seattle to Miami. No, David Koresh was also running guns, and possibly planning an armed insurrection, and it was (rightly) presumed that if Koresh was allowed to get away with it, pretty soon you'd have plenty of Koresh imitators out there in the boonies (and in fact, they're out there anyway).
Odds are there's bound to be at least one lone nut at one of these stupid rallies, which are needlessly kept afloat by a flailing corporate media, out of ideas and useful news but always able to sniff out a bullshit conflict to be ginned up. It's just the law of averages.
But that lone nut will probably not be one of the on-camera bozos, dressing up and shouting slogans while hoisting a sign he spent all weekend making because he has neither a life nor a job. The angry loner will be a guy like McVeigh, off-camera, quiet, possessing some relevant skill set, nursing his problems with women and gambling along with his perpetual grievances against Big Gubmint, eventually conflating them into a toxic spew, taking it out on whatever seems handy. In the end terrorists never quite know how to get what they want, they only know what they don't want, and have abandoned the conventional avenues toward achieving that anti-objective.
As for the teabaggers, if you really want to disband them, give the younger ones jobs, and call out the old farts collecting SS/Medicare checks, tell them to pay their own freight or kindly fuck off already. Or you could just stop giving them free publicity.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Steele Magnolias
The hilarious thing about Ben Stein's column is not that Stein is tired of being played for a sucka donor for Michael Steele's private jets and donut-bumping bondage-club excursions, but his wistful reminiscences of what his party "is" or "was":
Dude, fucking seriously? Did Stein move out of Hollywood at some point, or did I miss it? Nope, he mentions in the column that the Voyeur club is not far from where he lives. This is the sort of happy horseshit Bobo Brooks shovels with a brainless grin -- cushy, pampered suburbanites peddling long-lost dreams of bucolic villages where they themselves wouldn't live in a million years.
More hilarious than that is the idea that either party gives two shits about small towns or their "values", which are every bit as decadent as a Tarantino gutbuster, once you've lived in one long enough to know everyone's shit. Small-town America is unemployed, alcoholic, dealing and doing meth on the side, fucking each other's ex-wives. There's not much else to do, really.
But the Corporate Party, of which both Republicans and Democrats are members, has done its level best to eviscerate small-town America, the idealized one and the actual ones alike. They've fucked over small-towns every chance they've gotten, undermined their tax base and infrastructre with enormous tax deferments -- when they can be convinced to stay in the country, that is. Everything else has been outsourced, apparently with the goal the we'll all just sell each other five-dollar cups of coffee.
Steele's big crime is that he's just been a lot less circumspect about the type of organization he leads than his peers and donors would prefer. He may be counting on the GOP's seeming reluctance to shit-can one of their few non-white players, but that just shows how little he really knows his party, and the sort they cater to. The Republican party is much more concerned with dog-whistling neo-confederates and the like than with preserving a veneer of political correctness.
But we also give because we have a lingering belief (and a hope) that the GOP is the party of small town, all-American virtues and verities.
Dude, fucking seriously? Did Stein move out of Hollywood at some point, or did I miss it? Nope, he mentions in the column that the Voyeur club is not far from where he lives. This is the sort of happy horseshit Bobo Brooks shovels with a brainless grin -- cushy, pampered suburbanites peddling long-lost dreams of bucolic villages where they themselves wouldn't live in a million years.
More hilarious than that is the idea that either party gives two shits about small towns or their "values", which are every bit as decadent as a Tarantino gutbuster, once you've lived in one long enough to know everyone's shit. Small-town America is unemployed, alcoholic, dealing and doing meth on the side, fucking each other's ex-wives. There's not much else to do, really.
But the Corporate Party, of which both Republicans and Democrats are members, has done its level best to eviscerate small-town America, the idealized one and the actual ones alike. They've fucked over small-towns every chance they've gotten, undermined their tax base and infrastructre with enormous tax deferments -- when they can be convinced to stay in the country, that is. Everything else has been outsourced, apparently with the goal the we'll all just sell each other five-dollar cups of coffee.
Steele's big crime is that he's just been a lot less circumspect about the type of organization he leads than his peers and donors would prefer. He may be counting on the GOP's seeming reluctance to shit-can one of their few non-white players, but that just shows how little he really knows his party, and the sort they cater to. The Republican party is much more concerned with dog-whistling neo-confederates and the like than with preserving a veneer of political correctness.
Khmer Rogue
Like just about everything else this fucking dingbat does, I had to check around to make sure this wasn't some sort of late April Fool's Day goof:
Indeed, but no doubt the distinction is completely lost on her. (And hey, awesome new tagline. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.) This is that "shows up to the opening of an envelope" thing I mentioned before -- she's just there to grab a check, run through her usual schtick, make a few fat white middle-aged closet cases who can't get it up anymore anyway slobber over her, and move on to the next mark. Not a bad gig, so long as it stays on the usual rubber-chicken circuit.
The problem is when this bozo thinks she knows something about anything, and arrogates unto herself the right to tell the adults -- people who actually have skills and knowledge about the great big world, not beauty-pageant-scholarship-winners who took five years and six cow colleges to slap together a fucking communications degree, ferchrissakes, and have learned nothing since -- how to do their jobs.
Okay. What do you want to do, Sarah, li'l miss armchair tough-chick? Start wars with Iran and North Korea? No problem, so long as your kid is in the first attack wave. See how that starty-fighty thing works out for ya, since the two wars we're still in have gone so smoothly this past decade.
There is never going to be a point where any serious, truly non-partisan observer of world or domestic politics is going to take a tomato-lobber like Palin seriously, anymore than such a person could take George W. Bush seriously. It's hard to say whether she actually realizes that part of it or not. Probably a little of both; like any other person who manages by luck and circumstance to transcend their normal Peter Principle boundaries, the desire to believe the hype has to be at least internally tempered by the knowledge that they're in way over their heads. All that's left, since they know they are incapable of dazzling anyone with their brilliance, is to baffle 'em with bullshit.
The problem is the effect they can have on truly stupid people, which every country has in no small measure (especially in the realm of politics), but who are especially empowered in the media-stirred swamp of American politics. It devolves into the slop of dishonest, hypocritical rhetoric being received as some sort of gospel:
Like everything else she bleats, this is too clever by less than half. The goal here is twofold -- one, to evoke clearly revolutionary jargon with implicitly violent choices of words ("reload") and images (the crosshairs on "targeted" congressional districts). This is of a piece with the rest of her nonsense, dating back to the very of start of her being foisted on an adipose, reality-teevee-addled electorate, all but calling Obama a domestic terrorist outright. The other goal, of course, is more prosaic -- to jab libruls with their usual "fuck you" posturing, creating opportunities to do so if needed.
But the fact of the matter is, while the "left" (whatever that encompasses, other than people with triple-digit IQs) have mercilessly lampooned and roasted her, none of them (afaik) have even rhetorically or satirically advocated violent actions, or used implicitly violent catch-phrases. The tough talk, death threats, garment-rending over issues such as abortion funding, etc., are part and parcel of the right's reactions to pretty much everything.
It's a very frustrating phenomenon to watch, over and over again, primarily because it is impervious to factual argument -- indeed it thrives on its capacity to establish and populate a consistent alternative narrative, no matter how ludicrous. It achieves its most clear expression in its implications of violent overthrow, an endless Red Dawn fantasy of defending the divinely-anointed motherland against an unceasing series of Dolchstosslegende usurpers and traitors.
Never mind that there was indeed an election, and it was far too much of a blowout to be subject to the contested counts of the previous two. Never mind that, even had McCain and Palin won that election, they would have -- get this -- done the xact same thing with the banksters that Obama did, which was, let's recall, initiated by the Cheney regime in the first place. Remember, McCain's primary economic adviser was Phil Gramm, who personally engineered the regulatory unraveling that precipitated the destruction of the economy in the first place. Anyone who seriously thinks that McCain, Palin, or Gramm would have just told Goldman Sachs to piss up a rope knows fuck-all about the issue or its players.
The thing is, Palin may actually think that she would have struck some heroic, principled stand for the little guy in the face of Wall Street. She does seem to have a bit more invested in her own hype than most at that level. This is more a result of her not having even the foggiest idea about what she doesn't know, than of any noteworthy amount of intestinal fortitude.
Indeed, for someone who flashes their "maverick" credentials more than drunk coeds flash their tits at Mardi Gras, Palin's path is remarkably establishment -- Republican party, appearance on Oprah to pimp transparently ghost-written "memoir", shameless know-nothing and calumniator, mau-mauing the opposition with schtick and fabrications for the highest bidder. Doesn't get much more predictable than that.
Big hair, white jacket. And now a salute to the “beautiful people working so hard in Nevada.”
Heck yeah, I want to speak at this convention! Three bad wine puns in a row: “Going rosé”, “stand on a wine box (instead of a soap box)”, “in good spirits”.
Apparently Todd is in a snow race this weekend. Wow, this woman could have been president. Shudder.
[Editor: What is the crowd's reaction?]
TOTAL SILENCE
She just made up a Ronald Reagan quote. And now she’s talking about the deficit, using “heck” a lot. If her commercial fishing business is in trouble, she’d fix it, not borrow money.
She is avoiding any sort of industry specific comments, but seems to be all about deregulation. In Wasilla, she fought regulations that would dictate whether barber poles could rotate.
....
I think she would make a fantastic elementary school principal.
....
“Think of cultured yeast as a mentor.” That was an attempt to link winemaking with the habits of successful people.
She keeps focusing on small business. An interesting choice, given the crowd.
Indeed, but no doubt the distinction is completely lost on her. (And hey, awesome new tagline. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.) This is that "shows up to the opening of an envelope" thing I mentioned before -- she's just there to grab a check, run through her usual schtick, make a few fat white middle-aged closet cases who can't get it up anymore anyway slobber over her, and move on to the next mark. Not a bad gig, so long as it stays on the usual rubber-chicken circuit.
The problem is when this bozo thinks she knows something about anything, and arrogates unto herself the right to tell the adults -- people who actually have skills and knowledge about the great big world, not beauty-pageant-scholarship-winners who took five years and six cow colleges to slap together a fucking communications degree, ferchrissakes, and have learned nothing since -- how to do their jobs.
Palin, whom Obama dismissed recently as "not much of an expert on nuclear issues," fired back at the president, mockingly referring to "all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator and a candidate for president." She said Obama had accomplished "nothing to date with Iran or North Korea."
Okay. What do you want to do, Sarah, li'l miss armchair tough-chick? Start wars with Iran and North Korea? No problem, so long as your kid is in the first attack wave. See how that starty-fighty thing works out for ya, since the two wars we're still in have gone so smoothly this past decade.
There is never going to be a point where any serious, truly non-partisan observer of world or domestic politics is going to take a tomato-lobber like Palin seriously, anymore than such a person could take George W. Bush seriously. It's hard to say whether she actually realizes that part of it or not. Probably a little of both; like any other person who manages by luck and circumstance to transcend their normal Peter Principle boundaries, the desire to believe the hype has to be at least internally tempered by the knowledge that they're in way over their heads. All that's left, since they know they are incapable of dazzling anyone with their brilliance, is to baffle 'em with bullshit.
The problem is the effect they can have on truly stupid people, which every country has in no small measure (especially in the realm of politics), but who are especially empowered in the media-stirred swamp of American politics. It devolves into the slop of dishonest, hypocritical rhetoric being received as some sort of gospel:
"Don't retreat. Reload!" she said, invoking a slogan that has lately earned her some criticism. The crowd cheered deafeningly as she added, "And that is NOT a call for violence!"
Like everything else she bleats, this is too clever by less than half. The goal here is twofold -- one, to evoke clearly revolutionary jargon with implicitly violent choices of words ("reload") and images (the crosshairs on "targeted" congressional districts). This is of a piece with the rest of her nonsense, dating back to the very of start of her being foisted on an adipose, reality-teevee-addled electorate, all but calling Obama a domestic terrorist outright. The other goal, of course, is more prosaic -- to jab libruls with their usual "fuck you" posturing, creating opportunities to do so if needed.
But the fact of the matter is, while the "left" (whatever that encompasses, other than people with triple-digit IQs) have mercilessly lampooned and roasted her, none of them (afaik) have even rhetorically or satirically advocated violent actions, or used implicitly violent catch-phrases. The tough talk, death threats, garment-rending over issues such as abortion funding, etc., are part and parcel of the right's reactions to pretty much everything.
It's a very frustrating phenomenon to watch, over and over again, primarily because it is impervious to factual argument -- indeed it thrives on its capacity to establish and populate a consistent alternative narrative, no matter how ludicrous. It achieves its most clear expression in its implications of violent overthrow, an endless Red Dawn fantasy of defending the divinely-anointed motherland against an unceasing series of Dolchstosslegende usurpers and traitors.
Never mind that there was indeed an election, and it was far too much of a blowout to be subject to the contested counts of the previous two. Never mind that, even had McCain and Palin won that election, they would have -- get this -- done the xact same thing with the banksters that Obama did, which was, let's recall, initiated by the Cheney regime in the first place. Remember, McCain's primary economic adviser was Phil Gramm, who personally engineered the regulatory unraveling that precipitated the destruction of the economy in the first place. Anyone who seriously thinks that McCain, Palin, or Gramm would have just told Goldman Sachs to piss up a rope knows fuck-all about the issue or its players.
The thing is, Palin may actually think that she would have struck some heroic, principled stand for the little guy in the face of Wall Street. She does seem to have a bit more invested in her own hype than most at that level. This is more a result of her not having even the foggiest idea about what she doesn't know, than of any noteworthy amount of intestinal fortitude.
Indeed, for someone who flashes their "maverick" credentials more than drunk coeds flash their tits at Mardi Gras, Palin's path is remarkably establishment -- Republican party, appearance on Oprah to pimp transparently ghost-written "memoir", shameless know-nothing and calumniator, mau-mauing the opposition with schtick and fabrications for the highest bidder. Doesn't get much more predictable than that.