Blog Day Afternoon

So Governor Goodhair (as the late great Molly Ivins generally referred to him), who now as ever looks and swaggers like an unholy cross between GeeDubya Bush and Josh Brolin, got his little stadium prayer circle jerk going today:

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness," said Perry, praying with hands clasped.

"Father, we pray for our president, that you would impart your wisdom upon him, that you would guard his family," the governor said. "You call us to repent, Lord, and this day is our response."

It should not take a map to get these chuckleheaded mutants to see that their problems are man-made, and thus need to be undone by the men who caused them in the first place. Assuming that their sky-buddy not only exists, but exists in their specific iteration (as opposed to the thousands of other iterations now and across history), why has he not helped them out before, what with their weekly benedictions and invocations? Why does he persist in refusing to pluck the beam of greed from the eyes of people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon? Why has he ignored Gov. Goodhair's earlier beseeching to smite the drought that's been killing Texas for the past several months, yea verily and forsooth?

'Course, Li'l Ricky's got his work cut out for him when it comes to ankle-biting god-bothering schtick, namely from the one and only Mary Tyler Moron, who has been peddling her snake oil across Iowa, patiently, diligently, Sunday after Sunday:

While Bachmann's stump speech and paid ads focus almost exclusively on her economic views, the social conservatism that launched her career is a strong undercurrent.

Isn't it, though? It takes some doing to take gubmint handouts and subsidies for your fambly farm, and for your closet-case gay-curing hubby to take gubmint dough to pay for his "treatments", and still get up there and decry the vicissitudes and intrusions of the nanny state, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

Obama really needs to step up his game if he wants another four years to coddle Wall Street and kill off what's left of the middle class, because as spineless and incompetent as he is, he at least knows when he's full of it, where these guys don't even pretend to care, and they care even less when they're called on it.

From time to time I do make small attempts to be more tolerant of the obsessively religious, to understand the important role that ritualized comfort mechanisms play in the lives of many people. But dammit, these things are right in front of them, and if they were to devote half the energy and time focusing on the actual people causing the strife in their lives as they do on their futile exercises in public piety, they might actually get somewhere.

And the reflexively pseudo-objective (in the sense that only politicojournohacks can muster with any real skill) notion that Perry's and Bachmann's respective ministrations are apolitical is ridonkulous. They are inherently, overtly political. This is early-stage dog-whistle scamboogery at its most obvious. Wait six, nine, twelve months, however long it takes for the presumptive front-runner or second-stringer by that point in time to schlep out to Saddleback and genuflect before Rick "Hey, You Gonna Finish That?" Warren, corral larger swathes of mainstream rubes.

Of the seemingly infinite ways that American politics and participants find ways to be buffoonish and annoying, this may be one of the more irritating offenses, this incessant god-bothering schtick, redolent with its tribalist assumptions that everyone is just supposed to pretend that this "approach" to problem-solving has every bit the validity of, say, a more empirically, logically based approach.

Not that empiricism and logic have all that much impact on politics in any phase anyway, of course, but at least you can more accurately keep track of who's responsible for lawn-darting the country.

The Unexamined Life

Marcus Bachmann takes on clients of all ages.

Apparently there are rumors ahoof that Marcus Bachmann might be gay. Folks have taken to parsing audio and video of him, at it tends to ping the gaydar of most sentient beings who possess full (or even partial) visual and aural faculties. This is understandable, and more importantly, hilarious.

Set aside for the moment that, with Michele and her family benefiting from federal farm subsidies, and Marcus taking gubmint dollars to practice his "pray away the gay" quackery, they're hypocrites. The next time she yaps about making gubmint smaller and less intrusive, I heartily suggest that the feds take them up on that entreaty. That's the real crime with these people -- they can't even live consistently under their own fundamental precepts. But again, set that aside for now. This here is about Teh Ghey.

Friends 'n' neighbors, I have a much simpler method for ascertaining whether an individual might or might not be gay. (Again, not that I could possibly care less, of course, except insofar as the individual in question has aligned themselves with virulent -- and psychologically harmful to people who are still trying to sort themselves out -- activist nonsense.)

Anyone who spends their entire adult life on a literal divine mission to intrude and obsess over people's sex lives, and "cure" them of their "disease"? Yeah, that's someone who's projecting like your local Cineplex. Regular, well-adjusted people -- gay or straight -- simply do not have that kind of time to waste, nor that sort of niggling inclination to spend decades on that sort of thing. You can do anything you want to do in life, what is your motivation for choosing that?

No matter. Bachmann is simply the MSM's obsession du jour, now that Evita Palin's cargo cult is on its last legs (more on that in a few). Bachmann is photogenic and quick, and unlike Palin, not completely afraid to go on non-Fox media outlets. However, like Palin, she cannot stand up to even mild scrutiny, and will be considered by all but the most intractable of mossbacks to be a dithering husk by October.

I'm sticking with Huntsman to get the eventual Gooper nod, providing he can keep his powder dry and raise enough cashola when the time is right. The only other non-crazy contestant on that side of the ledger is Romney, who is a heretic to conservatives, and a job-killing bastard to everyone else.

In the meantime, I do hope Marcus Bachmann gets the help he so clearly needs, because even if he's 100% Chuck-Norris-banging-Miss-America straight, his vocation is as meddlesome, troublesome, and empirically problematic as, say, astrology or phrenology. I don't think that unhappy gay people are unhappy because they're gay, I would assume they're unhappy because ankle-biting god-botherers like Bachmann keep fucking with them because they're gay.

For people who proclaim their commitment to a philosophy of leaving everyone the hell alone to live their lives as they choose, they sure seem to not get it on this particular issue.

Clown Car Contestants

Taibbi has some pretty good smackdown on the rising political star of Mary Tyler Moron. Aside from having a gerrymandered district consisting of rich white assholes, Bachmann's success up to this point is essentially summed up here:

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

Bachmann is the champion of those tens of millions of Americans who have read and enjoyed the Left Behind books, the apocalyptic works of Christian fiction that posit an elaborate fantasy in which all the true believers are whisked off to heaven with a puff of smoke at the outset of Armageddon. Here on Earth, meanwhile, the guilty are bent to the will of a marauding Satan who appears at first in the guise of a smooth-talking, handsome, educated, pro-government, superficially pacifist, internationalist politician named Nicolae Carpathia — basically, Barack Obama. Bachmann has ties to the Left Behind crowd and has even said that Beverly LaHaye, wife of LB co-author and fundamentalist godfather Tim LaHaye, was her inspiration for entering politics.

Ah, yes, the "those people hate you because you're smug and they know you're laughing at them" gambit. Well you know what? Fuck them. Fuck 'em all right in the goddamned neck. I'm not even going to bother with (justifiably) ridiculing the sort of oaf that feels compelled to profess divine intervention for every mundane activity and decision; there is nothing particularly wrong with belief per se, but those sorts of chuckleheads are either delusional or cynical in their faith.

But it is the implicit and explicit assumption that everyone else needs to get on their page, that they have the right to indoctrinate everyone's children with their special faith, that they are intrinsically more moral than us heathens Because They Believe. How is that not smug, how is that any better than the people who laugh at them because they are tethered to superstition and magical thinking (as opposed to religious belief being one mode of introspection and genuine reflection)?

Bachmann gets lumped in with Palin generally, but that is not an entirely honest comparison. Palin is clearly just out to soak the suckers with this ongoing cock-tease; she has yet to display an iota of aptitude or even basic desire for the job, much less for the rigors of campaigning for said job. I seriously would not be surprised if Palin's ultimate goal were to host an afternoon Oprah-type talk show (or perhaps an inverted View setup, with a bunch of like-minded troglodytes and one token librul to bash on in between circle-jerking whatever hapless celebrity is on to pimp their latest box-office load).

Not that Bachmann is the real deal, mind you; again, her incessant god-bothering jabber is either delusional (if real) or just pathetically empty (if put-on), and either way, her actual track record in the House appears to be one of grandstanding more than actually doing anything. Her chances for winning the nomination are slimmer some people seem to be thinking for now, because she is at least as intensely polarizing as Palin.

Personally, I would put money on Huntsman eventually getting the GOP nod. That he worked for Obama is a cardinal sin easily inverted -- once he figures out how to turn that into a "Hey, I tried to work with these guys" sound bite, he will start to pull disaffected independents, which is what any contender is going to need. If he can get half a rhythm going, there is simply no viable competition in that party.

The one clip of the recent "debate" I did catch spoke volumes -- Pawlenty trying to assert himself with his "Obamneycare" care guff on the Sunday circuit, but when confronted with it at the debate, with Romney just skull-fucking him the whole time, Pawlenty punts, taking care not to look aat Romney the entire time. That sort of gutlessness does not work well in a party of, to be generous, fanatical adherents. These guys have just spent the last three years doing everything they can to be an impediment to Obama, they are expecting "balls to the wall or not at all" at this point.

But for someone like Bachmann to be viable, as with Palin, there have to be enough moneyed donors to get her in the game. And that really is difficult to conceive -- they don't give that kind of money to people unless they know they can control them, and a culty midwesterner does not seem like a smart investment.

Either way, hell -- remember when we used to sit in amazement that a mouth-breather like George W. Bush could get in? Good times.

Bachmann Goofball Overdrive

I admit to being perplexed back in November that estimable Minnesotans chose to send Teh Hottness that is Michele Bachmann, aka Mary Tyler Moron, back to Warshington. But more and more, it's beginning to make sense. They got her out of their local meetings and she's pure comedy gold. It's a win-win (though it still doesn't explain Norm Coleman).

Don't ever stop speed-skimming those history books and acting like you learned something, sweet cheeks. I'm waiting for the Germans to ruffle her feathers so's she can go off on them for Pearl Harbor. Fortunately I likes 'em good and stupid; I'm pretty sure a prowling cougar like Bachmann could be lured into the old darkened-porthole-window blogger van with a shiny nickel and a pixellated photo of Rush Limbaugh's stretch marks.

I'm going to make a mid-year resolution to work "Hoot-Smalley" into everyday conversations at least as much as I use "cup my balls, say my name".