The Evil of Banality

Is there no blessed end to this vapid cow?

"Of course, we all had to bite our tongues — more than once — as Tripp's father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spreading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric," Palin writes.

Jesus Christ, lady. Project much? Has she done anything over the past two years besides fatten her wallet by traipsing around the country talking shit, bearing false witness -- which, and I may be wrong, since I'm a godless heathen atheist (especially if someone like Palin is remotely a "Christian"), explicitly violates an actual commandment -- and jacking up the rhetoric to a height that even a sizable chunk of Republicans can't stomach in good conscience?

Of course, it's always a mistake to use the phrase "good conscience" in the same sentence as "Palin", since the latter truly has only a nodding acquaintance with the former, having sold whatever soul she may have had for the cheap and easy rewards of fake populism and reality teevee.

Bristol Palin has been featured on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," but Sarah Palin has a few words for Fox's "American Idol." She refers to "talent-deprived" contestants who suffer from "the cult of self-esteem."

"No one they have encountered in their lives — from their parents to their teachers to their president — wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth," she writes. "So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson."

Uh-huh, and apparently an entire nation has decided not to hurt her daughter's feelings, because it's not like she can, um, actually dance, nor is she actually a "star", even by the loosest definition of that term. She's famous for exactly two things -- getting knocked up by an oily bohunk, and being the offspring of an increasingly tedious political bobblehead. But it's nice that America's Sob Sister has the fucking balls to lecture the rest of us on how to set our kids straight, seeing the bang-up job she's done so far.

I think it would actually be edifying -- for Palin, for her supporters, for the people who are sick of her very name and presence at this point and wish she would just take her pelf and scuttle back into the underbrush -- if she ran for president. I still think it's doubtful, if only because she's just smart enough to realize that the real money is in the cock-tease.

But she is also an irrepressible narcissist, increasingly in love with the sound of her own grating voice and peanut-gallery aphorisms on Teh Twitter. The idea of her schlepping around the country for two years, weighed down with her rubber-glue shields and campaign-prop progeny, growing increasingly exasperated at the prospect of only being able to preach to the choir, exhausting herself for the pleasure of self-selecting jerkoffs, is interesting to contemplate.

Perhpas the most telling sign that she's topped out is that, while a bunch of her no-name House dimwits made the cut in the midterms, almost all of her high-profile picks lost. Alaska seems to have launched its own in-house write-in campaign to shit-can professional asshole Joe Miller, almost as a direct rebuke to her, to send lifer Lisa Murkowski (whom they had rejected in the primary) back instead.

After having this braying fool and her tedious jabber halfway up our collective asses for two endless years now, the main takeaway is really not that Palin is offensive, or even especially stupid, in a profession full of card-carrying morons. It's how predictable and tiresome she became quite some time ago, if you think about it. The last eighteen months, at least, have been the same Johnny One-Note schtick, unvarying -- and worse yet, uninteresting. One of my favorite bits is that she has yet to say anything that is either true or correct, but let's add one to the mix: when was the last time she even said anything interesting, as opposed to merely provocative or obnoxious?

Politics is at heart a clown college, and American politics is little different fromt he rest of the world in that regard. Dipshits and poltroons abound. But in America, where things are supposed to be bigger and better, one might expect a higher grade of buffoon. Palin has neither the pedigree of Fredo Arbusto, nor the avuncular charm of Fred Thompson. She is merely the personification of the garden-variety uppity dunce you can stumble across, double-parked in a Sam's Club aisle, any given day of the week.

Just another area in which we've fallen behind. The least we can do is demand a better class of jackass, not this prickly, grudge-nursing hausfrau who, despite attending five colleges to cobble together a fucking communications degree, cannot assemble a coherent sentence.

Bobocracy

It's been a while, but this one is moronic even by Bobo standards:

The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.

Hanh? Lemme get this straight -- one of the most steadfast, indeed tediously consistent, preachers of the technocratic gospel is now protesting the supposedly topsy-turvy nature of What's Going On? Surely a heaping helping of doubleplusbullshit can't be far behind.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Fair enough. Whence the morality, the righteous indignation, against the thieves and scammers who shitcanned the economy, forced the taxpayers to bankroll their "mistakes", are now sitting on hoards of cash that they won't lend out to rejuvenate the economy, and have dragooned a like-minded bunch of abettors to fuck people out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork? No, of course not; Bobo merely hangs his balding pate, shaking his head sadly at the Spock-like bloodlessness with which machine-messiah liberals insist on running our proud, tradition-rich society. This is truly a feat of some estimable proportions, to completely look past and implicitly absolve the destructive, sociopathic greed of a niche of derivatives pirates, and lob dickless wads of disapproval at the management style of -- wait for it -- a bunch of dickless drones who don't have the balls to take on their benefactors.

Lloyd Blankfein could demand a sacrifice of a thousand barbecued live infants for next Walpurgisnacht, and the Democrats would cringe timorously and murmur tepid disapproval, and people like Bobo would berate said Dems for their lack of support for our fine capitalist insect overlords. This is a rotten fucking little system all the way around -- the people who run and rape the finance system, the people who are supposed to legislate and regulate it, and the people who are supposed to analyze and report factually with at least a trace of intellectual honesty -- and it won't change until we set up a guillotine on Wall Street and make an example of some of these humps.

I do not understand why this has not been done yet. Perhaps at some point enough of the folks who are getting ass-raped out of their houses will band together and do or demand something. Or they may choose to wonder instead if Snooki takes it up the poop-chute. (Answer: mos def, but only if the hot tub's hot and the Four Loko is room temperature. A lady has to have her standards, even if said lady is really a transvestite Oompa-Loompa.)

Yes, if only we could just run things with a bit o' common sense, as if wage stagnation, income disparity, and banana-republic-level wealth stratification have not been ramping up and destroying the middle class for three decades now. I have absolutely no clues where Serious Thinker Bobo proposes that the "low debt" and "high savings" are supposed to come from, perhaps that bottomless pit of moxie and/or gumption that well-heeled bootstrappers like himself assume exists somewhere out in the vaunted flyover country that media dipshits constantly champion, but never seem to actually reside in.

With any luck, he'll someday find out firsthand. Really, if the market for corporate butt-boy suddenly fell out and Bobo had to make something resembling an honest living, it's difficult to tell what actual skill he has. Anybody can peddle tendentious "opinion" guff on unsuspecting passersby -- it's called blogging, and there's an infinite variety of better content produced for free across these here intartubez. At some point his toadying may no longer be cost-effective, and his periwinkle-collar commiserating may be put to the test.

The Memory Hole

The Great Revision continues apace, enabled not only by the usual complaisant chattering journos, but the éminence grise himself, a man literally without a pulse, but with a passion for gloss and invention that only a self-serving bastard can possess:

Addressing a crowd of 2,500 supporters and Bush administration veterans, Mr. Cheney said the response to Mr. Bush’s book showed that the country had begun to re-evaluate him.

“Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were,” Mr. Cheney said. “When times have been tough or the critics have been loud, you’ve always said you had faith in history’s judgment, and history is beginning to come around.”

....

His dry wit seemed intact as he took a poke at Mr. Obama’s recent admission that there were no such things as shovel-ready public works projects. Referring to the groundbreaking, he said, “This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

Yes, and we all know what they're shoveling. They never stopped, really, they just took a break for appearance's sake, and now the shoveling recommences.

Cheney may just very well be genetically predisposed, hardwired to the extreme, to act as hatchet man for whatever slimy boss he toadies for. He's been doing it since the Nixon administration, it's second nature, the way he steps in to let Fredo appear to be above the fray, above the mess that Obama may now officially own, but nonetheless did indisputably purchase on consignment from these two bozos, the continued existence and success of whom is proof enough that karma is a polite fiction.

Humble Narcissism

Remember last year when the Dubya "Miss Me Yet?" billboard popped up out in flyover country somewhere, and most people either laughed or shrugged? Yeah, good times. Fredo has graciously stayed away for two full years, but now he's back pimping some two-ply compendium of lies, excuses, and half-witticisms, naturally with the help of the librul lamestream media. What are the odds on Oprah and/or the Sheinhardt Wig Company having a vested interest in whatever hack factory is publishing this doorstop?

But it's actually been good in a way, Fredo's return, because it conclusively proves that there's nothing to miss about him. He really did, and really does, suck in a very fundamental way. He has never second-guessed a single major decision he made, no matter how tragic the consequences were. Apparently he would have changed the "Mission Accomplished" banner (to what? it was never about appreciating troops, it was about playing dress-up and legitimizing his incompetence), and he was really really butthurt over what Kanye West said about him.

Kanye, as I said at the time, had the wrong end of the stick on that one. It's not that Bush doesn't care about black people -- his diversity record was perfectly fine, and he genuinely seems to be as inclusive and non-racist as anyone could hope.

It's that he doesn't care about poor people, because it is an alien experience to him. Oh, he's talked about his failed congressional run back in the late '70s, when he and Laura were starting a family and had no money. But that is not being poor; coming from an East Coast establishment family means that you may find yourself cash-poor at times, but there is always a fallback position, usually many. Poor means if you don't figure something out, you are well and truly fucked, you're a paycheck or two from living on the sidewalk, whatever.

Ann RichardsJim Hightower had it so right when shehe said that Bush was born on third base but acted like he'd hit a triple. This is a penetrating insight to the man's personality -- it really is incomprehensible to him that actual poor people, who literally cannot bootstrap out of their mess with hard work and/or gumption, because they are overworked and underpaid, and will probably work until the day they drop, that such people exist. His mother's infamous comment at the Katrina shelter in Texas illuminated that whole mentality -- she seems to regard poor people as another species -- so it would make sense that Junior, who literally has never made a fucking dime in his life without the imprimatur of his old man and Nazi-symp grandfather, would just have no clue.

So. A piss-thin excursion into the, ahem, decision-making process of perhaps the most notoriously bad decision-maker in recent history, merely as an opportunity to rationalize them, as opposed to rethinking them, or even assessing their consequences. He amazingly still regards his failure to privatize Social Security -- even after the biggest financial catastrophe in eight decades -- as his biggest miss, rather than the missed bullet that it was. (Oh, and the miscarried fetus in the jar. Holy fucking shit. This explains a lot.)

Bush is one of those people who constantly, almost reflexively professes commitment to principle and humility. But clearly it's all about him, everything is viewed through a prism of brushes with greatness and perceived slights. The decisions that George W. Bush made between 2001 and 2008 cost a lot of people their lives; the number of people affected directly in tragic fashion would be mid-eight to low-nine figures, and the number indirectly affected obviously much greater. We're paying the price right now for his deregulation of the financial securitization system, and will do so for years to come, if indeed "we" (as in, a meaningful percentage of the total population, not the 1% of moral parasites at the top who are doing better than ever, fuck you very much) ever do recover.

Tens or hundreds of millions of lives forever altered, destroyed by unnecessary war, unleashed sectarian brutality, domestic financial chicanery. But it's Kanye West that's kept him up at night. The fucking moral degeneracy of this person, the sheer solipsism it must take to capture and hold a world-view like that, is -- well, I'm not sure the proper word exists for it in the English language.

Speaking of degenerate narcissists who refuse to just fucking go away already, the Wasilla Hillbillies have themselves a ree-alitee show, from the fine folks at the basic-cable sump that used to be known as The Learning Channel, but now trucks in garbage like I Didn't Know I was Pregnant and makes scumbags like Jon and Kate Gosselin into preening fametard assholes. The estimable Tim Goodman, now writing for the Hollywood Reporter, takes this bottomless sack of crap with his usual good cheer.

Perhaps most surprising is that — in the first episode, at least — it doesn’t cast the best light on Palin’s kids. Piper, 9, doesn’t seem to listen much to what Mom asks, and teenager Willow seems moody and defiant, at one point sneaking her boyfriend upstairs to her room after Mom slid the baby gate (for Trig) closed and told him not to go up. You’d think with the whole Bristol Babygate thing, they might have edited that part.

There’s also paranoia about Joe McGinniss, who is writing a book about Palin and rented the house next to her. She talks about him (without naming him) constantly as the camera shows him about 15 feet away on his deck, face blurred out. But though Todd says McGinniss is writing “a hit piece on my wife” and Palin keeps asking whether he’s watching, what he’s doing is reading a book on his porch, oblivious. Todd built a 14-foot fence to give the family more privacy. “By the way,” Palin intones politically, “I thought that was a good example; what we just did others could look at and say, ‘This is what we need to do to secure our nation’s border.’”

Ohohoho, see what she did there? Fucking brilliant. This is definitely the sort of person who needs to be in a position of political prominence, an intellectually sterile soccer mom who hasn't heard the phrase "market saturation", but knows she appeals to impotent old farts and vapid sob sister cows who buy into that moronic "mama grizzly" schtick. The takeaway from Goodman's review is that the producers got the title ass-backwards -- it really should have been called Alaska's Sarah Palin. It's all about her and she knows it.

No one's tuning in to see Alaska scenery. That's what they have Rick Steves and that Travel Channel shit for. They're tuning in to watch this braying jackass affirm their grievances and validate their insecurities. And she eats it up, she loves the attention. I suppose it's too much to ask Todd to throw his back into it once in a while, just so's she doesn't constantly have to seek validation from the rest of the fucking planet.

Anyway, a little cross-promotion from Li'l Miss Humility:

"You're lucky," she said at a Republican rally in Orlando, according to the New York Post. "You're going to get to learn a little bit more about my state here in the coming weeks."

Palin also took a dig at the current President, saying he'd likely get a show called "Barack Obama's Golf Courses"… "sometime [around] November 2012."

See, because Barack Obama is a rich patrician who plays a lot of golf, which is an elitist sport, doncha know....

Wait. No, that was George W. Bush. Not that it matters, facts are useless, ignorance is strength, cokehead alcoholics have inside wisdom on how Woodrow Wilson turned us all into communists, and multimillionaires like Bush (and now Palin) are jes plain folks.

America Drinks and Goes Home

Did we learn anything tonight? Of course not. There is nothing to learn, nothing to prognosticate. It did not, in fact, really matter who "won". The donor classes won, as they always do. They're not in this for their health, you know.

Some will say that because Rand Paul -- an ophthalmologist who created his own licensing board in order to certify himself -- beat Jack Conway, that the teabaggers are ascendant. Others will say that because Casper W. MilquetoastHarry Reid squeaked past the teabaggers' shithouse rat in Nevada, that said 'baggers are not what they (and the media who legitimized them with endless profiles) think they are.

The baggers seem to seriously not understand that politics is a business, first and foremost, that there is a reason that the same conglomerates and people of wealth hedge their bets by renting both parties. It is a money game, and all their Paul Revere bullshit will only take them so far once they're actually in. I'm sure Rand Paul and his toupée think this will be some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington schitck for the rubes back home, but what it will be is stasis, a two-year Mexican standoff between obstinate upstarts and puling lifers who literally couldn't pull shit together with a supermajority.

Comic relief abounds, as always, but pound for pound the biggest humor may be found in the CA goobernatorial race, where eMeg Whitman spent a sixth of a billion dollars of her own money to end up six points behind Jerry Brown, who didn't even start advertising until Labor Day. She would have gotten better results -- and saved a buttload of money -- just by going around and handing three million voters twenty bucks each.

Hilarious as it is to watch Mrs. Griff Harsh IV blow an impossible amount of money for a dismal job no one in their right mind would want, there is an actual takeaway. Every election cycle gets worse and worse in this regard, but the Citizens United decision really sealed the deal on effectively making the permanent campaign a full-time by god industry. This is why toxic yahooism and borderline-retard candidates get covered, validated, legitimized, turned into the latest and greatest.

And in the end, neither Rand Paul nor Barbara Boxer, nor a single one them, really, will do a single thing to address the two greatest issues driving this country into the dirt -- wage stagnation and wealth disparity. Even a nudge of those two factors in the right direction would address a host of connected issues, from jobs to education.

But as the man famously said, it is impossible to get someone to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

Purple (Drank) Reign

From the wacky world of the NFL: I hate the Redskins, and I despise Mike Shanahan, so the fact that they're actually working out Drankenstein as a backup for Donovan McNabb and Rex "Sex Cannon" Grossman is nothing short of hilarious.

Meanwhile, the Raiduhs actually seem to be shaking off a typically crummy start, with their XBox Madden thrashing of Denver Sunday before last, followed by a pimp-slapping of Pete Carroll's crew a couple days ago. It's only been two in a row, but that's more than these guys have put together in a while, and a home victory over the overachieveing Queefs this Sunday would give them momentum into the bye week, and put them just a half-game out of the division lead.

Oh, and Randy Moss getting run out of Minnesota after one month. Fucking haw-haw, Farvonauts. Let the T-Jack era begin! And thanks for looking after my fondest football wish, that Randy never gets his ring. [Update: More on what a great guy Moss is here. Fuck this guy right in the neck.] The only thing that could make it funnier is if Wade Phillips makes a desperation move and pulls Moss off the waiver wire, as Kitna-bait for the soon-to-be-3-13 Cowpies.

With normally reliable (but make no mistake, hardly any less dysfunctional) NFL standbys such as Washington, Minnesota, and Dallas completely imploding, it is refreshing -- no matter how brief it ends up being -- for the Raiders to look, by comparison, positively functional, competent even.