Buyer's Remorse

Let the beatdown of the simpletons begin:

A woman who voted for Donald Trump is now regretting her choice after the President-elect chose Steve Mnuchin to be his Secretary of Treasury.

Teena Colebrook explained to the Associated Press that she had voted for Trump hoping he would keep his pledge to remove the elites from Washington. However, she became truly disenchanted when he chose Mnuchin, partly because it showed he’s “now backing his buddies.”

But also because Mnuchin was responsible for the loss of her home and source of income.

Mnuchin used to be an owner of OneWest, a bank formed in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08 that acquired the assets of subprime mortgage lender IndyMac. Shortly after acquiring the loans from IndyMac, OneWest began foreclosing on thousands of them.

I am honestly wondering what in Clownstick's extensively covered history made people like Colebrook think he could be trusted to look after their interests. There is literally no point in that history where he looked out for anyone but himself, and more often than not it came at the expense of the peons.

The coal miners are finding out the hard way too, and it is hilarious. These folks are getting exactly what they begged for, good and hard, and this is only the beginning for them. The fucker's not even in office yet and it's getting snapped off in their asses.

Fail to the Chimp

Even Fredo Arbusto, bless his simian muzzle, wasn't this fucking stupid:

[Drumpf] had an opportunity at the start of his presidency to begin with a more or less clean slate with China, and he has now very likely frittered that away for nothing. At best, [Drumpf] has pointlessly antagonized Beijing in a way that will have lingering effects on his dealings with them for months and possibly years to come. At the very worst, his careless freelancing could produce a real crisis between China and Taiwan that could end up dragging in the U.S.

It's hard to conceive of any "stupider like a fox" reason to do something like this. Why would a brilliant bidnessman needlessly jeopardize his yuuuge bidness interests in another country, a vital trading partner? There is no percentage whatsoever -- strategically, geopolitically, financially -- in doing something like this.

This is not to say that there aren't issues that need to be worked out with the Chinese. They are building a deep-water fleet to secure their place as regional hegemon, the ultimate goal of which would probably be to control the Strait of Malacca (through which most of the world's oil travels). Additionally, they are building artificial islands near the Senkaku (aka Diaoyu) Islands, under and around which lie large deposits of oil and natural gas, in conflict with Japan. The violent thug that has taken over the Philippines is sucking up to the Chinese, which runs counter to our purported strategic interests.

Hell, it may be time to back away and concentrate on tilling our own field anyway. This century is likely going to gravitate toward the Indian Ocean nations anyway, based on demographics and yet another book our non-reader-in-thief will never read and wouldn't understand anyway.

The last time a preznit fucked the dog unnecessarily with China, a few months later 9/11 happened. Those two events are not directly connected, but if this regime got too much attention for the sheer incompetence and belligerence of its dopey figurehead, you wouldn't put it past them to cook up some false-flag event as a distraction. And it would work.

The Outside Scoop

In order to continue with its premise of completely ignoring Senator Bernie Sanders and his Trump-sized crowds, as well as providing constant coverage of every little thing Trump does, the corporate media has to come up with other things to cover. This week's model revolves around putting Trump's current main rival for the coveted Iowa caucus vote, alien-in-a-human-suit Ted Cruz, under the spotlight. The idea here is to build up Cruz and then pit him against Trump. Spoiler alert:  they're both assholes.

Only in an ADD culture that no longer bothers to distinguish between has-beens and never-weres -- you know, the sort of interchangeable "hey, weren't you in...." saps that appeared on Trump's dopey fake-bidness show -- would it even be mentioned that a doddering cosplay hillbilly, whose stupid show jumped the shark a long time ago, is endorsing Cruz. So Phil Robertson thinks Ted Cruz would be a solid imperial custodian because Cruz believes in God and is willing to put on face paint and go duck hunting? Big fucking deal. Robertson also is on record as saying that liberals follow Satan and are worse than Stalin or the Nazis.

His idiot brother, whose schtick on the show is apparently to make people think he has a steel plate somewhere in his head, insists that atheists don't exist because they use the calendar and spend money. Yeah, if they HAD PRINCIPLES they'd live without money or knowing what day it is. Anyone taking advice from these goobers on picking good political leaders should be disenfranchised before they hurt someone. Fuck these morons in the neck with a rusty spoon.

A Bird In Hand

You know, if George P. Bush switched parties and changed his last name, I might almost consider voting for him, if he's really as moderate and reasonable as he presents himself. What young "P" presents -- aside from his own presumed destiny to the dynasty -- is an opportunity to call out the increasingly lunatic element of his party, one that is no longer the fringe but the mainstream of that party.

Instead, since P is running for Texas Land Commissioner, a quietly powerful but nationally inconsequential post, but a useful stepping stone nonetheless, he has resolved not to piss anyone off. In a state that is rapidly browning and bluing, despite its current proclivity for unrepentant mouthbreathers like Louie Gohmert, Dan Patrick, and Greg Abbott, Bush recognizes the need of his party to be at least somewhat inclusive, yet refuses to antagonize the troglodyte base.

It's even more of an opportunity in Texas, because aside from the issue of immigration, Republicans might be surprised to find that Mexican-Americans, not unlike Cuban-Americans, tend to be culturally (small "c") conservative. There is a common and unfortunate assumption on "both" "sides" that minorities will always vote Democratic. But like any other demographic, the more money they make, and the more comfortable and suburban they become, the more likely they are to vote to protect their measly stake in the game.

It's been often said that, given the current tenor of the Republicans, that Richard Nixon and even Saint Reagan, were they to seek office today, would have to run as Democrats. That party, becoming more distinct by rhetoric and sentiment at least, as the Republicans become more driven by id and inchoate anger (even with the establishment bankroll), has its own bench of younger talent to develop. Even in Texas in particular, with the Castro brothers, there is not a need for yet another young charismatic Latino politician.

And yet, should some enterprising Dem convince P to "defect", perhaps with the promise of unseating Greg Abbott in a few years (if, again, they haven't already promised that to Julian or Joaquin Castro), it would be a rather large get, one that the chattering classes, dependent as they are on some contrivance or other, would milk for months or years. In an industry based primarily on connivance and distraction, getting a Bush to switch parties would be huge, not that it would ever happen.

Preaching to the Choir in the Briar Patch

Elaborating a little further on "Benghazigategate", which is to Fux News what the missing Malaysian jet is to CNN, a steaming fnord in the punch bowl, meant explicitly to distract folks from anything of actual import. Again, Congressman Car Alarm and his merry band of idiots know full well that there is no there there, that compared to US Embassy deaths in the past, the most damning thing about Benghazi is that it was a PR fuck-up.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I do anyway -- that is not to minimize the tragic, violent death of foreign service personnel, but simply to point out that dozens of people were killed in multiple incidents around the world during Fredo's tenure, and no one said jack shit. In Beirut in the early '80s, between the US Embassy and Marine barracks attacks, over 300 people were lost, and there were glaring security issues in the latter attack that should have gotten someone's ass whipped.

And that's not even to mention the weird fact that some of the most strident criers of this particular "wolf!" are the same folks who voted to defund embassy security. So, you know, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, fellas.

Now, all that said, I think it's a splendid thing for these folks to continue with their obsession, and I think the Democrats should (and probably do, but won't say so) embrace it as well. For one, it is only going to get the base to vote in the midterms, it will not sway or convince a single person truly on the proverbial fence. It is of no strategic use.

Second, and maybe this is just my personal preference, the only possible long-term outcome of obsessing over this nothingburger is that it sticks to Hillary Clinton's "my turn" presidential campaign, and that would be just fine. It is a sad state of affairs when, in a fairly sophisticated nation of 320 million people, and a hyperactive electoral industry with dollars flowing through it like water through Niagara Falls, the best our "two" parties can come up with are Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Let me be even more clear:  if the "choice" in 2016 comes down to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, then we might as well just dispense with the endless campaign, the tedious analysis, the useless debates, and just have a fucking coin toss at the Super Bowl, and not bother to look at the result. It would be as explicit an indicator of the truth about the political system as one could imagine, the open acknowledgement that your vote is worthless, outcomes are inevitable, and the best you can hope for is for some rich tool to toss you a better piece of flotsam on which to weather an endless storm.

Don't get me wrong. If it comes down to Clinton versus whatever clown-shoes psychopath the Republicans roll out, you hold your nose and vote for her, and hope next time there'll be a better choice, just like you've done since day one. This is based on the presumption that at least the Democratic candidate has at least a slight chance of being marginally less catastrophic to the interests of what remains of the American working class.

It's just that it is always going to be this way, and it is not an accident but by design, and the only way to make it stop is to, well, make it stop.

ETA

Yes, if we don't find some way to curb the excesses of the several dozen people who own every goddamned thing of value in this country -- the media, the political system, the modes of production and distribution -- why, we might eventually become an oligarchy. That would be a bad thing, you see.

It doesn't take a history major to see that all countries have always been run in the interests of the majority owners of capital. But it's been a while since there has been such an obscene level of hyper-concentration, of wealth stratification, of the utter lack of upward mobility. What we're experiencing is, in the physics term, called stasis, and is defined in this case by lives of inertia and clutter.

This is an area where hope consistently triumphs over logic; poor and middle-class people are consistently rolled into voting for rich people because they hope to be part of that club, someday, someway. This is a fantasy straight out of a perverted version of Lake Wobegon, where everyone is good-looking and all the children are above-average, where no one ever gets laid off or poisoned by the chemical company up the road, where everyone has the same opportunities, and so forth. It's similar to the fantasy that voting for a fake Republican will produce much better results than voting for a real one.

But let's not shit ourselves, friends 'n' neighbors -- in the sense that all important decisions are made by the same class of people, in the sense that all modes of political discussion and accession are made by the same owners and donors, this is an oligarchy, more so than any time in the last hundred years. It may be slightly more benign than your garden-variety banana republic, or Russia, but only by matters of scale and degree, and where you live, and what socioeconomic or racial background you have. As long as the Albuquerque Police Department doesn't think you might be carrying a joint in your asshole, you should be fine.

Other than that, sure, it's a democracy.

Purity Bawl

Since it's an election year, it's time for the regularly scheduled plaint of the Thanksralphers, that migratory flock of folks whose bleats and peregrinations have somehow never quite clued them to a small but vital fact -- that Democrats don't lose because of third-party perfidy, but because too many of "their" voters end up voting Republican.

It's been repeated countless times in this here blog, but if the stupid "Mumia sweatshirt" schtick still merits play, then this does too:  in the 2000 electoral debacle, twelve times as many registered Democrats in Florida voted for George W. Bush as voted for Ralph Nader. Hokay? The Thanksralphers and DFH-punchers can ignore that all they want -- and they clearly want, since it's been twelve years and I'll be damned if I've ever seen any Dem animosity toward those party-jumpers -- but like gravity and evolution, this is a true fact whether or not people believe it or act on it.

I've come to believe that the folks who continue to indulge in meaningless Nader-baiting have simply made an easier strategic decision for themselves. It's easier to titty-twist the minuscule number of "purists" who supposedly insist on absolute ideological rigidity, than to take a serious look at the much greater number of people who, for whatever reasons, jump over to the other major party.

Or the even larger number of people who look at a corrupt system run by and for the wealthy and connected, understand intuitively that neither party gives a red-hot monkey-fuck about them, and stays home. It's all well and good to insist that even if one is getting by and not in need of assistance, they should at least vote with compassion for those less fortunate, who are in need of this or that government assistance. But uh, if one is looking at, say, literally spending the rest of their natural life paying interest on $200 textbooks because the higher education system is a fucking racket, that person may have different priorities in the voting booth besides ensuring that the alcoholic vagrant shitting on the downtown sidewalk has adequate health care.

There is certainly a difference between the two parties, operationally and policy-wise. These differences have become larger and more apparent due to the polarizing nature of the teabaggers, and their effect on the Republican party. As much of a disappointment as Obama has been to lefties and progressives, I don't think anyone would argue the point that his strategies and outcomes would have been vastly different with a better Congress and Supreme Court. Still probably would have been dickless incrementalism, because that is all our owners will permit, but the intransigence and idiotic obstructionism of the 'baggers has certainly worsened an already bad situation.

But the real problem here is the idea that anyone's vote is "owed" to a political party, as opposed to the party having to make its case for earning your vote. It's dangerous and undemocratic, it has led to the current situation, where the parties are owned and operated by corporate interests, and simply take your vote for granted, promising everything and delivering jack shit.

Hey, whatever floats people's boats, I guess. I could just live without the smug, sneering, condescending attitude that permeates these sorts things, expending far more energy and effort lecturing a tiny portion of voters on their sincere (if perhaps somewhat misguided or impractical) principles, than on the vastly greater numbers who jump over to the other side without a care in the world.

It's important for everyone to keep in mind that politicians, good or bad, are reflective of their constituencies. Somebody keeps voting -- on purpose, even -- for dipshits like Louie Gohmert and Jim Inhofe. Those people are the goddamned problem, not the handful of supposed purity trolls.

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

Golden Rule, Golden Shower

Shorter Wall Street:  If the eeeevil, sociamalist-run gubmint doesn't continue to subsidize our institutionalized usury / bookmaking operation, we'll just go ahead and fuck up the economy again with a round of corrective profit-taking.

Get bent, America.

Rule of Law

"We must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So let's see if we have this straight:  some two-thirds of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo -- most of whom have been cleared for release, yet not released all the same -- continue to rot in their subtropical dungeon, without charge nor trial, for over a decade now. The only way for them to get out of their Orwellian sentence is suicide, and some of them have managed to take that path.

Now those who remain get force-fed, nasally. Perhaps this is because it was deemed to be even more painful and humiliating than being force-fed anally. Who knows? Nothing makes sense about this situation anymore. Except that nobody seems to give a shit whether these people will spend the rest of their lives stuck in some legal limbo that no one is in much of a rush to rectify.

Either they are guilty, or they aren't. Either there is evidence against them, or there isn't. Put them on trial and have done with it if they actually did something, or admit a mistake and set them free, and close this place already.

Just as we executed enemies who waterboarded Americans during World War 2, but reserved the right to use the same form of torture when it suited us, so the application of basic jurisprudence appears at this point to be nothing more than a polite affectation. Again, either we -- and our endlessly dithering constitutional law scholar of a president -- believe that it is wrong to imprison a human being without charge, trial, or proof of crime, or we believe it's perfectly fine to do such a thing for no better reason than political convenience and cowardice.

This is yet another in a long (and getting longer all the time) line of issues where Obama continues to whiff. If he wants his legacy to be something other than "Congress wouldn't let me" then he needs to sack up and by god do something about anything.

Seriously, dude, no one's expecting loaves and fishes. Create a few decent jobs; take some steps to alleviate the impending clustersomething that health care deform will perpetuate, since it does nothing at all to address the usurious racket comprising the American health care system; enforce basic party discipline to keep retiring Democrats onboard with simple background-check measures for deadly weapons; maybe pressure Harry Reid to insist on actually having to get your ass up there and spend time filibustering, rather than this lame "threat" dodge the goopers get away with routinely. Take a bold stand that civilized nations don't lock people up without charge and lose them in an offshore gulag for a decade or so.

Put these people on trial; if they're guilty, shoot them as enemy combatants. Whatever. But do something, ferchrissake, something slightly bolder and more principled than strapping a person to a table and jamming tubes up their nose to force-feed them like a foie gras goose. The fact that said person may not only have been supposed to be released, but may very well be innocent in the first place, and spent a decade of their life in hell because of someone else's chickenshittery, is a disgrace.

You can make fun of Dubya's ridonkulous Liberry and its self-serving exhibits, but what's Obama's library going to look like at the rate he's going, a cartoon of Barry O getting pushed around by Mitch McConnell and Jamie Dimon for eight goddamned years?

I know his acolytes console themselves that his feckless 11th-dimensional chess mastery is somehow infinity better than whatever shit sandwich Romney and Ryan were cooking up. But only as a mild, eroding bulwark against the eternal predations of the oligarchy, not that Obama has done thing one about them or even slowed them down. In the meantime, every bloody thing you despised about the Bushies -- imprisonment without trial, drone war without end, the ongoing and deliberate ruination of the financial system, the rich getting richer and the poor no longer even getting by -- continue unabated.

There's not much more time for Obama to decide and act on whether he wants to end on eight years of excuses and ineffectual moderation, or to take a risk and do something, anything, pick a direction and grab a shovel. I have zero faith that he'll do the right thing, and it no longer matters whether he wants to but can't, or if he simply was never the transformative figure he was pretending to be. Just another politician, forever chasing the next election and too timid to do anything that might actually impact someone from the non-donor class.

The Inevitability Dance

I get that there are folks who want Hillary! for all the "right" reasons, but let's just say it now:  No more Clintons, no more Bushes, no more dynasties. That is all. There are 320 million people in this goddamned country, is there some compelling reason that one or two names are always shortlisted for this dog-and-pony show?

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, why is it the Dems can't develop their bench between now and this June, when the next interminable preznitential campaign will begin? Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Julian Castro, maybe a random guy in the stands at a San Jose Sabercats game? No, let's automatically anoint the more conservative half of the Triangulation Team, who will be 69 years old on Election Day 2016.

I know. The 'pugs will vomit a Brownback/Gohmert ticket or such like, so we'll feel grateful for being allowed to vote for Second Verse Same as the First, while we wait yet another four years for someone who might not take marching orders from Big Finance and Big Pharma and Big Insurance and Big Secondary Ed and all the other rackets that run this country straight into the ground.

Credit where credit is due -- Clinton did perfectly well in her role as the most peripatetic Secretary of State evar. And the complete and utter ricockulousness of the ratfuckers and calumniators who made an industry out of persecuting her husband's administration is well-established, and acknowledged by all but the most intellectually dishonest people.

But at some point, the Democratic Party has to decide whether it truly aspires to its rhetoric of preserving the structural integrity of what's left of the American middle class, or if it is merely content to be the tepid bulwark against the predations of Republican psychopaths. Because frankly, the Dems fucking suck in both those areas.

Let's not forget that it was during Saint Bill Clinton's administration that Glass-Steagall was repealed. And let's not forget that, were it not for his inability to keep his cock in his pants, Clinton was working on a deal with the great philosopher-king Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. I know the ripe claque of Clinton hagiographers wish to continue their ongoing characterization of the Nineties as the Golden Age of Pericles (if Pericles sprayed his seed in the White House sink because doing it down an intern's throat would have been cheating, y'all). But it was only a golden age for the moneyed classes who bankroll this wretched system at everyone else's expense.

It is not lack of ideological purity that keeps doing in this country and its "liberal" party. It's lack of imagination, and an overabundance of "eh, whaddaya gonna do?". Sigh. I hear Costa Rica is nice. I can't take this Plutocrat A vs. Plutocrat B shit anymore. I'm 45 now and I can see myself when I'm 70 falling for the same "maybe next time" shit, and it makes me sick to my stomach. I'm convinced it's the number-one reason -- even moreso than apathy or ignorance -- that people just don't even bother anymore.

To loosely paraphrase Burke, the only thing necessary for the same shit to keep triumphing over and over and fucking over again, is for good people to either keep voting for it, or to do nothing at all about the "choices" they're given. It's a funny thing how Congress rarely rates above 15% public approval, yet over 95% get re-elected every stinking time.

Law of the Jungle

Continuing in a long line of truly wretched attorneys general, and not content with his other hobbies of griefing potheads and selling guns to violent Mexican drug cartels, Eric Holder and his DoJ have apparently found their latest high-profile quest:

The complaint, which can be seen here, describes what an FBI agent involved in the case called an “extensive, sophisticated, organized scheme.” A ring of people, ranging from a 31-year-old credit counselor in Philadelphia to a 74-year-old jeweler in northern New Jersey, allegedly conspired to make up fake identities, pump up credit profiles with more false information, and then run up huge unpaid credit-card bills.

All 18 people named in the indictment were charged with the same count of conspiracy to commit fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Only 13 have been arrested. One is out of the country, and authorities are looking for the other four, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

The complaint describes something that resembles a multinational corporation—the enterprise “spanned at least 8 countries” (including Pakistan, India, China, Romania, and Japan), and at least 28 states. It involved the creation of 80 fake companies, more than 1,800 mailing addresses, 7,000 false identities, and 25,000 credit cards. It was as if the alleged fraudsters manufactured a small suburb, in which everyone had good credit at the beginning—only to walk away from big credit-card bills once they maxed out the plastic. The total cost is still being counted. But the U.S. says “final confirmed losses may grow substantially above the present confirmed losses of more than $200 million.”

Credit-card fraud is generally done with existing cards—crooks may hack the number, or get a new card sent to a different address, and then run up a bill until they get cut off. New account fraud is more difficult, time-consuming, but potentially more lucrative. The alleged fraudsters apparently read the personal finance literature on how to build and rebuild credit scores. They would apply for and receive low-spending-limit cards, make a few small purchases and pay down the balance. “This slowly increased the credit score of the false identities,” the complaint notes. Then, after the credit-card companies responded to the good behavior and improved scores by raising the spending limits, they would go on spending rampages and stop paying. This is also known as a bust-out scheme. “It’s not unique,” said Al Pascual, senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research. “It’s just that $200 million is huge. A bust out scheme of this scale is unprecedented.”

Ahahahaha. Right, unprecedented. Please, pull the other one. Counting all the unsecured derivatives out there, and the rest of the banksters' little perpetual grift machine, you're looking at probably over $200 trillion worth of potential economic devastation, completely out of control and totally unpenalized (except for the rare Bernie Madoff type who somehow forgot to rent themselves a handy pol or two). It's literally a million times worse than this credit-card fraud scheme, which is certainly sophisticated, but small potatoes in comparison. Yet all the feds do about that is appoint yet another inbred hack, an interchangeable fox to oversee the financial henhouse.

When the next financial collapse comes -- and rest assured, it will, and you and I and every other person not on Wall Street will pay dearly for it -- you can claim to have been distracted, perhaps, but you can't say you haven't been duly warned. The lack of priorities displayed by the authorities should provide enough clues in that regard.

Or, a Baby's Arm Holding an Apple

Since the only things this country produces reliably well anymore are perpetual war and perpetual campaigning, it is no surprise to find that Obama has officially tossed his hat in the ring for the election eighteen blessed months from now. It is of even less surprise that the most predictable by-product to emanate from these endless campaigns comes a-wafting from the cloaca of SF Comical columnist Mark Morford:

To the sneering disappointment of the puritanical left, Obama has turned out to be pretty much exactly what he said he'd be during his '08 campaign: flawed, exceedingly moderate, a resolute compromiser, overly pragmatic when he should've been a badass, temperate when he should've been white hot and furious, offering concessions when he should be bringing the hammer down.

In short, Obama has failed. He has not at all been the delicious chocolatey superjesus of radical sociopolitical transformation most on the hard left hoped, prayed and sacrificed precious Prius bumper ad space he would be.

Heh. Indeed. Yes, the peons, it seems, have been insufficiently grateful for all the wonderful things Obama has done for them. Shame on them. Bad peons!

Enough. Look, the man had plenty of opportunities early on to do at least some of the things he said he would do -- end a war of futility in Afghanistan, finish a troop drawdown from Iraq, rein in the rapacious bad-faith behavior of scumbag bankstas. See, I don't have a Prius, motherfucker. I have a house that's worth less than it was ten years ago, because Clinton and Rubin thought it'd be a super idea to gut the Glass-Stegall Act, and to monkeyfuck the securitization laws, leaving the door wide open for Lloyd and Jamie and their henchmen to totally ass-rape the economy, and make everyone else pay their eight-figure retention bonuses. Because they're soooo fucking skilled, you see.

We all get that politics is the art of the possible. The problem is that neither Obama, nor the Democrat supermajority, even tried to make their electoral mandate count. They shot their political capital on an industry-underwritten boondoggle for "health care reform", and came up for air only to find that not only did it not create any jobs, but that it didn't even really resolve the problem it purports to resolve. And then they had nothing else to work with, to get anything else accomplished.

So here we are. And yes, we all get that the Republicans seem to be content sifting through what charitably seems to be a carny freak show of unelectable poltroons -- and worse yet, Newt Gingrich. But really, isn't it part of the problem, that even up against a laughingstock ticket, Obama and the Democrats still always manage to find themselves instinctively punting on first down, or sucking up to the hand that inevitably slaps them?

How else does the fucking budget -- after Obama conceded more than the Republicans wanted in the first place -- get hung up on Planned Parenthood, how does noted sheepfucker Jon Kyl trot out a blatant lie about over 90% of PP's services being abortion-related, and the Dems don't have the stones even to denounce that? And we're supposed to vote for that shit, gratefully, unquestioningly, whatever 'n' ever, amen.

Get ready for another year and a half of this happy horseshit.

Sideshow

Taibbi is being rhetorical, of course, but I think we all know what Rick Santelli "means" by saying that you can't cheat an honest man. It's just that Rick Santelli is a loud and proud spokes-tool for profoundly dishonest people to begin with, a nasty symptom of a deeply compromised media system. Who the hell is Rick Santelli, and why does he have a teevee show, and what sort of person should take his spoutings at all seriously? Were those questions to be adequately answered, Santelli would probably be selling sacks of oranges at the corner of Woodruff and Rosecrans (I spent a few magical summers from ages 10-13, in the late '70s, nearby on the Faywood Street that runs off the Somerset/Woodruff intersection. Good fucking times, Bro Namath. I can show Little Ricky around the 'hood.)

Meanwhile, Frank Rich poses the heavier queries that pester the finer minds of the commentariat; namely, whither Obama the Fighter, sword inexplicably sheathed post-campaign?

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

No. The problem is not the absence of a message, it is the absence of a will to fight, more importantly to punch back. Fuck punching back, forget the Republican cheap shots and incoherent teabagger rants. He gets cock-blocked by Mary Landrieu, pushed around by Joe Lieberman, undermined by (ahem) something called Bart Stupak. The problem is a lack of party discipline, an understanding that sometimes it really is better, from a purely operational perspective, to be feared rather than merely respected.

Last week featured the bloodless pimping of Obama's sudden sense of urgency on this here health-care thingy, smash cuts of hortatory rhetoric, encouraging of the masses to alert their duly elected representatives to the crisis afoot.

Listen close, pally -- we did our fucking jobs already. We voted, and some of us even paid due attention after the election circus had left town. Now I'm supposed to harass my neighbors to pester their congresscritters over something they already know goddamned good and well they should do? Just to squeak through an industry-written abortion of a bill that won't change much for most people in the end? Are you fucking serious?

I resent the notion that, despite the unholy amounts of money these people make, we're supposed to continue to do their ground-work for them in our off-hours. Motherfucker, I have a job -- and so do they. What say we all do our damned jobs? You want me to help pass bullshit health-care legislation, pay me mid-six-figures and perks and lifetime free health care and I'll do your grunt work. Otherwise, kindly piss up a rope, Jack. We told you what we wanted a full eighteen months ago, fucking do it already with yer superdupermajority.

Back to Santelli and the media system, how it lets animals like that in. Yesterday and today -- and for all I know, the next week -- the Today show has had "exclusive" interviews with professional scumbag Karl Rove. Forgive my assumption that some vertical integration of ownership between NBC and Rove's publisher exists, but it's not exactly unheard of. But for some reason, I couldn't help but think of the recent death of the late great Howard Zinn, and how different our political culture might be if Zinn or Chomsky or practically any sentient being with opposable thumbs were allowed even 1% of the mass-media time accorded to a fucking piece of shit like Rove. Every time you flip on your teevee and get force-fed intellectual gruel, you can count on that being the very root of the problem.

The Honeymoon's Over

Articles such as this, while perhaps a bit early in the offing, are not entirely unexpected. I would agree with Watson in saying that unless Obama egregiously screws the pooch, he should be okay for '12. But that's primarily a function of how comically inept the Republicans have become. They can't get out of their own way; they're seriously debating whether Sarah Palin has a shot as their nominee in three years.

Certainly stranger things have happened, and the inherent stupidity of large swaths of 'murkins means that such a prospect can never completely be written off, but friends 'n' neighbors, let us stipulate for a moment that politics is a business, and businessmen expect a return on investment. Sarah Palin might be the Blessed Virgin Mary for her weirdo refuse-to-watch-anything-but-Faux-News fan base, but she's pure poison to the rest of the country. Why would anyone put their money on toxic sludge?

So she's taking an 18-month sabbatical to bone up on fundamentals in time for Iowa and New Hampshire, BFD. The only way this will fly is with the media's complicity in helping her rehabilitate her well-deserved image as a clueless, blustery dilettante who, after almost a full year of constant coverage, has yet to this observer's knowledge to say anything that is either true or substantive.

So Obama's worst enemy is not Sarah Palin, or any of the other trolls on their bench. It's Obama himself, not doing the things he said he was going to do, having more than sufficient numbers of fellow Democrats to get things done and yet failing to keep them disciplined, leaving people to wonder yet again why voting for Ralph Nader is such a terrible bad awful idea. Sixty Democrats in the Senate, a substantial House majority, a clear popular mandate, and still he's handed the economy back to the people who wrecked it so they can re-inflate and re-crash it -- and recharge us for the privilege. Health care reform is already doomed to be an industry-written abortion. We're finally getting out of Iraq, but nothing will ever be done about the people and lies who got us in there, while we're simultaneously getting more entrenched in Afghanistan.

So if Obama fails in 2012, it will be because enough Americans realized that he has his chance right now, and is failing to take it, despite all the high hopes and high-minded rhetoric. Yes we can, but for some reason, "we" have chosen not to, and if not now, with all the political stars and opportunities very favorably aligned, when? I mean, really, we can bitch about the apathy of the American electorate, but this is exactly why they don't bother to fuckin' vote. And it's getting harder and harder to blame them.

Under the Rug

Mostly I like what Fareed Zakaria says and how he goes about saying it, but in this case I think Taibbi has it right.

Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money.

Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”

Because the specifics matter. It’s one thing to say that Citi wasted some of the money taxpayers sent its way via the bailout; it’s another thing to say Citi wasted some of the taxpayers’ money by upholstering the pillows on the private jet Sandy Weill took to Mexico over Christmas vacation with Hermes scarves. It’s one thing to say Wall Street bankers felt pressure to chase profits; it’s another thing to say they achieved those profits by systematically robbing a whole generation of pensioners and working-class homeowners, under the noses of the politicians they bought with tens of millions in campaign contributions.

Zakaria works hard to tell the crisis story minus these outrageous details. Then he goes on to argue that, basically, nothing should be done.

This is exactly it, but I'll go out on a limb and specualte that it has less to do with partisan politics or intellectual laziness than most critics might assume. Recall that Zakaria was consistently scathing in his critiques of the Cheney administration, particularly in their inept foreign policy, which is Zakaria's specialty. Economically he's as in the tank for globalization as one could imagine, and rarely wavers from that path.

So the problem here is twofold: one, that as much as Zakaria loathed the machinations of the neocons, he acknowledges and appreciates the normalizing influence of the Obama team, even if most of the promised changes have been little more than rhetorical; two, if globalization is to continue, then the economy has to straighten itself out ASAP. In this he unsurprisingly echoes the stance of the Obama economic policy thus far.

One of the qualities I appreciated about Obama throughout the campaign was his ability to maintain a calm and collected demeanor, no matter what manner of smears and calumnies were thrown his way. It takes an inner strength to deal with self-styled clowns such as Tom Coburn or Jim DeMint, or constantly off-the-rez DINOs such as Ben Nelson or Mary Landrieu, and not just tell them all to go fuck themselves. Such a quality, people assumed, would be more well-suited to dealing with the tinpot assholes of the world than the ignorant bluster of Fredo, who famously could not be relied on to know the difference between Switzerland and Sweden half the time.

But in the economic arena, we are seeing the downside of that quality. It has been official government policy -- and thus, that of the corporate media -- to characterize the damage done to the economy as a series of "mistakes", presumably made in good faith by well-meaning people. Consistently these economic woes have been portrayed as some unforeseeable doom that befell us while everyone was just working hard and playing by the rules.

Folks, that is just a flat-out fucking lie, and we all know it. The financial spreadsheet wizards knew exactly what they were doing, knew what the risks were, and went ahead and pushed forward with the aid and complaisance of politicians and media monkeys, because they knew there was no disincentive to failure. They knew that no matter how badly they screwed that pooch, everyone else and their grandkids would pay for it. I couldn't care less that some of these fuckers lost their jobs; they weren't any good at them in the first place, and they're goddamned lucky they're not in jail.

This was theft, pure and simple, robbery, larceny on an impossibly grand scale. There was a brief spasm of manufactured catharsis, as people railed against executive bonuses which were unconscionable in good times, unforgivable in bad. Obama promised to reel those bonuses in then promptly reneged on that, larding his econ advisory team with ex-Goldman Sachs weasels and financial lobbyists, negating yet other campaign promises about transparency and lobbying.

It's not a mistake or a coincidence that Taibbi is about the only one who's bothered digging into this massive story, while everyone else is busy crying over people who stopped having any real cultural impact a quarter-century ago, or chasing sanctimonous bible-thumping politicians who get caught with their pants down. You and your children and your grandchildren have been stolen from, and nobody is doing a thing about it. That seems like a big story that everyone has a stake in. Why do you think your official media have chosen instead to follow each other's tweets and sniff their own asses?

One thing about a guy like Zakaria is that his rhetorical blandness actually excuses him somewhat from accusations of inappropriate partisanship or intellectual dishonesty. He's more of the pragmatist/realist type, understands that the alternative is infinitely worse, realizes that Obama will continue to forget about the change he promised and mandated, and push through more of the same, rebranded and retooled but fundamentally identical.

The bigger problem is that that sweeps away lingering, troubling questions about the economy, and the future of globalization. If we acknowledge that the economic slump is a correction, because its fundamentals had been hopelessly undermined, then we intuitively understand that priming the pump and going back to what we were doing before is just going to lead to another, probably greater, series of cascading disaster scenarios.

As for globalization, while it makes sense on paper, the fact of the matter is that the logical result of it means that billions of Chinese and Indians will utterly rape the planet in order to bring their standard of living up to ours, and/or deal with enormous, seething underclasses. Americans are but 5% of the world's population and look what we've done to get what we've got; globalization seems to avoid taking into account what the world would look like if the other 95% followed suit. That's not economic imperialism; that's just reality. Already China has been decimating the forests in the Russian Far East to keep up with our and their own demands, causing enormous dust storms and environmental consequences, oblivious to the future ramifications. It's only going to get worse.

The fact that we would rather let ourselves be robbed blind and laughed at to our faces, than simply dial it down a couple of notches and start working toward leaving future generations something better than an unholy mess, is simply mind-boggling.

Deer Hunting With Jesus

I've read some of Joe Bageant's pieces at The Beast and a few of his blog items, and I like his writing quite a lot -- angrily funny, bitterly acerbic, and usually dead-on in his observations. And I'd been looking forward to checking out his backwoods missive for quite some time. Yet it comes up short in a few respects.

I get where Bageant is coming from, at least, and he's right about his most fundamental insights into the Appalachians' relationship with and outlook on their government and their country. Lower-class working people of every ethnicity have always been and always will be the fodder for the machinations of the people who really run the country, and in a country run by its top 1%, that's substantial leverage. And the mostly Scots-Irish inhabitants of these areas tend to be bound by externally imposed constraints -- poor education and lack of real opportunities being the most prevalent.

These are people who are stuck with the scut work of society, slaving in slaughterhouses and nursing homes, joining the military to get a shot at something better, being burned through like human cord wood at shit jobs in shit towns across the dying inland valleys and plains of this country. To add insult to injury, they have to compete with illegal immigrants for these jobs. Drugs, debt, and desperation all conspire to kill them off, bodies broken and hopelessly in debt, before they're even old enough to collect Social Security, providing an even greater eventual rate of return on the cheap labor they endure throughout their working lives. The housing and health-care markets are rigged against them from the very outset. They are not given much of a chance to escape their conditions, and it's not accidental.

It's where Bageant tries to tie these economic and demographic maladies to other sociocultural phenomena, and thence to political outcomes and desires, that the premise begins to lose some ground. The relative cultural and geographic isolation experienced by these folks transmutes into, to be charitable about it, intensely ugly and blatantly self defeating political choices. So in Bageant's return to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, he presents family and friends and townsfolk as examples of where and why things went in that direction.

Occasional asides at the smugness of liberals and the fallowness of Democratic politicians share the stage with the cataloging of instances where Republicans catered to some of the more irrational conceits of the area to get votes, and screwed the inhabitants even harder, only to be rewarded by more votes. It goes awry mostly when Bageant frames the issues of religion and guns (which is redundant for this part of the country).

The gun culture of these areas is presented sympathetically, almost reverentially, mostly in the context of the hallowed family hunting trip. And in that light, it's entirely convincing; only the most die-hard gun-control advocate would have any issue with grandfathers, fathers, and sons bagging a couple deer to fill the family freezer for the winter, and doing some genuine bonding in the process.

But to the extent that the gun-control argument is even presented, it is largely decontextualized from more contemporary issues as random mass shooting sprees, politically-driven killings, and organized crime. It's as if evil, ancient, convicted felons weren't taking the guns they're not supposed to have and murdering people at random at the Holocaust Museum, or crazy assholes hadn't used Virginia's wink-and-a-nod gun laws to shoot up college campuses. The idea that Mexican drug cartels use U.S. gun shows to stock up on AR-15s and Tec-9s, to take back across the border and slaughter every cop and journalist in sight, is apparently superseded by Cletus' inviolable right to hoard assault rifles with which presumably to perforate beer cans out in the forest.

Ultimately the argument is presented that it is the responsibility -- and therefore the failure -- of Democratic and/or "liberal" politicians to reach out sufficiently, especially on the issues of guns and religion. But those are the areas in which the people are most intractable. Just as there is not much political headway to be made in easing gun restrictions that even the police can't abide, so too there's no political upside to be had in catering to people who think they are casting demons out of Camaro engine blocks (seriously). It's hard to compose a truly compelling argument as to how or where -- or even why -- ideological opponents should expend valuable political energy trying to counter this perpetually aggrieved, self-destructive intellectual boobism.

There is an effort to be made, and it should revolve strictly around issues of economic justice. This is where the visible policy failures are rendered most manifest. The usual trope is that Democrats have ceded sociocultural issues to Republicans because of some imputed sense of smugness and superiority. But that is not necessarily, empirically true, it's just a comfortable assumption. Republicans have learned to speak the lingo, to make it jibe with the closer issues of local politics, to infuse one with the other, from starting city council meetings with prayers and invocations to local developers working hand-in-hand with churches to make things happen at the local level.

But it's harder to square matters of policy and longer-range strategy to these sorts of weird cultural obsessions and expectations. Only a person not seriously concerned with operational issues, with the actual nuts and bolts of running a serious government, could find the time and energy to spend off in the weeds flirting with this god-bothering nonsense. That's about the only way to put it, because the corollary to that is that a serious, policy-engaged person would and should be uncomfortable with discussing issues that, frankly, should be personal and private in the first place.

We keep hearing that government should be run like a business, but every time it's actually attempted, the same people start crying because there aren't Ten Commandments monuments and fifty-foot crosses at every intersection. This nonsense is to the point that the more people whine about that sort of thing, the more you can reliably assume that they know fuck-all about the Ten Commandments or the Bible.

The challenge in engaging this lame cultural posturing is enhanced by the simple fact that, as we always say, countering irrational arguments with rational ones is a waste of time. People who are that deeply vested in positions that are unencumbered by facts or even coherence are never going to be swayed by the rhetorical opposite. They either hunker down in stubborn sophistry or move the goalposts. This has never not been the case throughout history. People do not suddenly leap from quackery and yahooism into sober empiricism, nor do they typically respond positively to overtures from people they have been conditioned to despise. Reaching out to them on their own terms just means you're a pussy, as far as they're concerned.

The simpler truth is that people do not change their behavior until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing. Making the effort to get people to understand exactly how that is taking place in their lives is the only way that will happen. And that's a politically impossible thing to do, tell people that their debt peonage and wasteful consumerism and excessive resource dependencies are about to bite them square in the ass, even harder than they've become accustomed to.

Even then, there's the instinctive mistrust of say-everything/do-nothing political operators to overcome, and if the track record so far of Mister Hope 'n' Change is any indication, it's gonna be awhile. Putting the foxes in charge of the economic henhouse is not exactly a great way to build trust among your ideological opponents, and I do think six months (since the election, and hence the initiation of policy direction) is about long enough to get a sense of what's to come.

The honeymoon's over, and if one thing Obama has said is likely to turn out to be the most true and accurate, it's that we have to be the change we want -- in other words, get your shit together and figure out how much you want to engage with the machine, because the machine is sure as hell not going to fine-tune that for you. Or, continue to guzzle gas and shitty beer and nacho cheese and reality teevee and hillbillies driving in circles all day and wonder why your life is so irreversibly fucked. Must be everyone else's fault. It's always someone else's fault.

In the end, it's hard not to come away with the impression that much of this damage is self-imposed and self-inflicted. Yes, it sucks that people drop out of ninth grade and work in a slaughterhouse until their backs give out at forty-five, and wonder why they're dying broke and exhausted at fifty-five. I dunno, maybe if the government mandated free public education through the twelfth grade, maybe that would help?

I don't understand exactly how reaching out across some self-imposed cultural divide is supposed to make kids stay in school, or even stay awake in school. Or, as Frank Zappa put it in the liner notes of Freak Out, over two generations ago, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Lashing out at everyone who thinks they're sooooo fuckin' smart hasn't worked too well. Perhaps it's time to try something different.

It's true in every dying shithole town: the smart kids found ways to learn something useful, saw what the town had to offer them for their trouble, and either got with the program or got the hell out. The rest just stayed and took what they could find. How is it everyone else's fault most of them chose to fester and stew in their own juices of self-selecting bitterness and imaginary resentments?

That's really the ironic part, how effectively they've been made to ignore the things they should be resenting, distracted with flag-waving and toys and cheap food and cheaper jingoism, while their pockets are being picked, their lives and opportunities are being carefully circumscribed, and their kids are sent off to die or be maimed in unnecessary wars. As a wise man once said, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

Still, all these discontents are mitigated by the genuine weight and passion of Bageant's writing, and the fact that, whether one agrees with the entire argument or not, it deserves to be heard and considered. It may be that Bageant himself has too high a personal stake in the outcome to balance the players and arguments sufficiently, and propose realistic, comprehensive solutions. The best place to start would be to hit the reset button on the health-care system and stop letting these bastards run people into bankruptcy and destitution for the simplest of things. Most of the cultural issues would take care of themselves. Sometimes the best way to meet people halfway is to simply quit fucking them over.

Gutless

Frank Rich is shrill in discussing Cheney's emergence from the bunker, as well as the entities who enable him to do so:

Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.

The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.

True enough. If you have a dumb dog who likes to shit on the floor, don't be surprised when he shits on the floor. The dog is only part of the problem.

Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.

Well, of course they did. This incompetent bunch of nellies couldn't get out of their own way if you gave them a map. These people are awful, and terrible at what they do, and now that Hope 'n' Change are in the air but not, they're more than happy to ratfuck Change Man every chance they get. And so far he has refused to whip them into shape, and exercise some discipline. If it doesn't bite them in the ass, it will only be because the knuckle-dragging oafs across the aisle, and the mouth-breathing dipshits who vote for them, are even worse. But it doesn't have to be this way, it really doesn't.

Of course, the Dummycrats are only part of the problem. Our rilly awesome corporate media shares a big chunk o' blame as well.

The déjà vu in the news media was more chilling. Rather than vet the substance of Cheney’s fulmination, talking heads instead hyped the split-screen “dueling speeches” gimmick of the back-to-back Obama-Cheney scheduling. Time magazine’s political Web site Photoshopped Cheney and Obama’s faces atop prize fighters’ bodies.

Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”

That's because this is all a big game to people like David Gregory, just as it's all a big game to people like Arlen Specter or Ben Nelson or Dianne Feinstein. This is nothing but a spectator sport to them, and they all think they're John Madden. Most of your teevee journamalists are self-absorbed princesses (even the male ones) who want a career with perks and accolades, big money and lots of attention (but only the good kind). They're not quite pretty enough to be in movies, but they're not quite homely enough to fall into politics. So broadcast journalism is an ideal niche for this sort of low-brow, starfucking aesthetic.

But again, the attention they desire is only of the good kind, the kind that keeps the invites to all the beltway 'dos coming. They're not going to go out on a limb for anything. Forget about openly challenging the demi-lich Cheney when he slithers on to the set to lie and calumniate; these people don't even have the nerve to ask themselves before they call Cheney, "Why should I have this person on my show? What informational purpose would it serve to have an agitprop performance artist here?"

Since their goal is only to mine another news cycle's worth of talking points, regardless of usefulness or even accuracy, those questions answer themselves. It's strictly a no-risk endeavor. None of these people would dare risk the harrumphing of their colleagues by asking a guest an untoward question. After all, they all go to the same parties. It would be bad form.

It's a toxic symbiosis, perpetuated by people who don't have the balls to even be perceived as rocking the boat, or actually changing anything. These are issues that can be fixed -- Cheney is a liar, and his arguments have been refuted time and again, by people with more sack but less face time than a preening mule like Gregory. It would be no risk for Gregory to step up and say so on Press the Meat; the biggest risk might be that John McCain might show his displeasure by waiting three months before coming on again, or the Today show might get some angry letters in crayon.

Another example: the economic collapse, really nothing more than straight-up theft, can and should be broken down so that the victims can understand the crime. But since, for example, NBC's financial network seems to be mostly a collection of Wall Street talking points, and Obama has lined his staff with Goldman Sachs flunkies, they're not gonna say shit about any of that. There was a hot week or two of pseudopopulist rhetoric about "retention bonuses" -- and then they walked off with the bonuses. Whoo-ee, that was close. Almost had a revolution there.

I dunno. This is exactly why I voted for Nader in '96 and '00, and it's why a hell of a lot of people don't even bother to vote at all. The Democrats talk big and do fuck-all, even when it's handed to them in a nice gift-wrapped box. The Republicans are liars and thieves, and cater to the basest, most obnoxious core of the American electorate. Two sides of the same debased currency. And the corporate media enables the entire proceedings because they think it's fuckin' Wimbledon or something.

I think we'd all be pleasantly surprised if people in positions of high responsibility simply performed their duties and did the things they said they would do. You could fix a lot with just basic professional integrity. Clearly this is expecting too much out of everyone.

Buyer's Remorse

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Farewell Redress

"Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying." -- Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

"They got the guns, but we got the numbers." -- The Doors

[Graphic via Vanity Fair.]

Perhaps you have heard about Oscar Grant, the New Year's partier who was shot -- while zip-tied and face-down on a Bart platform -- by a transit cop, touching off a series of riots in Oakland. As you might expect, these "riots" had initiated as peaceful protests, and even in the early overestimations of their severity, don't remotely approach real riots in the past.

As the Grant case has been covered in detail by the Bay Area media right from the start, I've paid pretty close attention to the whole story, and it sure as hell appears that, at the very least, both the transit cop and BART exacerbated the situation by acting in bad faith. BART confiscated one witness' video of the shooting at the scene, apparently thinking it had the only copy, until another video was leaked to a news station, thus foiling what would almost certainly have turned into an attempt at institutional opacity. Meanwhile, the cop resigned rather than talk to internal affairs. For the past seven or so years, we have immersed the country in the rank waters of how innocent people have nothing to hide -- well, there ya go.

Columnist Jon Carroll, who lives in Oakland, puts all this in perspective, while rightly contrasting the causes and severity of riots in other countries. It's simple for us sensible people to agree that trashing nail salons and such is a rash response to a sad situation, but it's also unfortunately true that sometimes that is what it takes for officials to take at least one appendage from the vicinity of their exposed asses and actually do their jobs.

All of which brings me to Captain Fuckup and his inevitable attempt to whitewash his miserable reign of error. I don't even want to think about how much time, how many words I've expended in various fora and blogs over the past ten(!) years, since this clown foisted himself on an unsuspecting nation. I assume most rational people have long tempered their assessments and opinions of him lest they attract the Secret Service. Such is the catastrophic damage Bush and his claque of merry bastards have wrought upon the nation and the world; such is his and their arrogant refusal even to acknowledge the fundamentals of it all, much less own what they've done.

Bare minimum, the man does not deserve another good day, or another good night's sleep for the rest of his life. Ancient curses were always more creative; may he and his be cursed with awareness and misfortune for the next ten generations, something along that line. Or, you know, a comical set of tragic mishaps involving daisy cutters and willy pete. Some people are incredibly lucky that karma does not exist, at least for them.

Bush didn't merely fiddle while the world burned; fiddling, after all, requires opposable thumbs, some measurable level of actual dexterity. This was simply an endless bumble, an incoherent, artless monkeyfuck of a tenure. And he's proud of it, every damned bit of it, a sociopathic level of indifference.

And why not? He and Cheney probably did just fine throughout all this. Did they lose a loved one in the wars they started, in the hurricane they ignored? Have their stock portfolios plunged the way everyone else's did; do you really think their pension funds took nearly as much of a haircut as yours has? Of course not. They, and the corrupt rentier faux-capitalists who purchase access to them, made out just fine, selling short on the margin, letting someone else carry the costs, in finance and in life.

And people just want to "move on", whatever the hell that means. We're not moving on from shit, bunky -- Iraq is stabilizing to the extent that Iran can co-opt it; Afghanistan is ugly and likely to get much uglier; the economy is a series of storms and rising waters, not lifting all boats so much as surrounding most houses. But at least the thieves got their no-questions-asked golden parachutes.

And no one riots about any of those things, they just trudge on, perhaps wishfully thinking that "things" will be "different" "now", without bothering to define those terms consistently. I can't imagine too many people, outside of hardcore political wonks, will actually watch Fredo's little goodbye speech; I certainly don't have any stomach for the emetic properties of such a thing. Nobody with half a brain has given a shit about anything he's had to say for years now. But one would think it'd be game for more open and impassioned repudiation somewhere along the line.

Not that they'd sit up and take notice, much less care. They don't unless they're compelled to, and no one's really compelling them.