The Power of Positive Thinking

Bury your treasure, burn your crop
Black water risin' and it ain't gonna stop." -- Clutch, (In the Wake of) The Swollen Goat

Like most of y'all out there in Blogoland, I've spent the last few weeks more or less observing the increasingly choreographed Debt Ceiling Debate (which, like Health Care Reform and the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those things -- discuss!) out of the corner of my eye, a slo-mo train wreck in peripheral vision.

And of course, like everything The One touches, the end result was saturated in epic fail. Wait till Monday, when Moody and Fitch follow S&P's lead, to get the full flavor of how well and truly fucked we are now. Nice work, guys. Can't wait for the SuperCongress, or the League of StuporFriends, or whatever slipshod claque of corporate butt-boys and dogsbodies they throw together, to find newer and better ways to make it even worse. Except for their donors, of course.

Between the brazen, barely-concealed contempt both sides have for each other and for the peons, and Obama's carefully crafted, constantly refined MO of non-existent negotiation skills, punting on first down, and giving the other side concessions they didn't even ask for, somewhat heretofore unconsidered thoughts about What We Can Do kept twirling in the firmament.

Fortunately, Monsieur IOZ has returned, for however long, with a vengeance, and per usual crystallized what I'd been thinking better than I could:

Yea verily, I have returned unto you to put it straight to yinz: there is no tea party; there are no Democrats; there is no America. There is only global capital. There is no keeping American competitive for the future against the Chinese children of the math-science learning gap to win tomorrow today with the power of innovation. There is a single transnational elite whose allegiance is to itself. They would've fucked you on Saturday; they'll fuck you next Wednesday instead. There was no debt crisis. THERE IS NO DEBT CEILING. You are like prisoners in a concentration camp, tearing each other apart over crusts of bread. The guards check their rifles. The kommandant shtups his mistress. The carrion birds circle against the concrete sky.

You must destroy the rich.

Fuckin' A. On the one hand, no one's calling for violent insurrection as such, mind you, but on the other, that's all these motherfuckers understand, other than the threat of losing their money. The American motto is no longer "E Pluribus Unum", nor even "In God We Trust", but rather "The Fuck You Gonna Do About It?". It actually changed to that during the Cheney regime, but was mostly directed at the rest of the world. Now it more explicitly applies inward.

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.

Straight to Video

Doop de doop, let's check in on Rupert Murdoch's American agitprop tabloid arm, and see how Precious' Triumph of the Shrill hagiography is doing:

"The Undefeated," a glowing look at failed vice-presidential candidate and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has already sold out a show in Grapevine, Texas (population 46,000), according to the distributor Cinedigm.

Grapevine isn't exactly a teeming metropolis but the film is set to roll out across Tea Party country in 10 AMC theaters.

In addition to Grapevine, the documentary by conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon will expand to Indianapolis, Ind.; Independence, Mo.; Kennesaw, Ga.; Houston, Texas; Orlando, Fla.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Highlands Ranch, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Orange, Calif.

Packed house, folks -- though oddly, no actual number provided. Funny, that. Usually phat numbers is the first thing a PR flack sets on, like flies on shit.

Unless, of course, "theater 8 at AMC Barrett Commons 24" has roughly the capacity of an airport Sbarro's. Naw, that couldn't be the case. There were millions, kajillions even. It's Palin Nation, people, you just live in it. Suck on that, faggy librul!

Oh, the hilarity, she ensues, in this blurb from the Houston screening, further down the page.

"The Undefeated", the new documentary that showcases Sarah Palin's rise in Alaska politics, has arrived in Houston.

The movie is only open in a handful of theaters across the country, including the AMC Gulf Pointe 30 off the South Sam Houston Parkway East.

The lines were for Harry Potter, but the costumes on Friday night are for Sarah Palin and the movie about her.

Faithful fans arrived early. Donna Galloway drove all the way from Beaumont for the debut.

"Undefeated is about having losses but coming back for victories," said Galloway.

[squinting eyes, pinching nose in pained expression]

Kee-rist. Let's take these in reverse order:

• This word "undefeated" -- I don't think it means what you assholes think it means. She was defeated, along with her addled, dyspeptic running mate, not in small part because every time she opened her piehole, a team of political Superfund environmental hygiene experts had to hit the scene to quickly shovel shit. But regardless, they lost. Badly. Perhaps y'all heard, it was in the papers and everything. I'm pretty sure it was even on Faux News, to the benefit of their ratings since.
• Gawrsh, all the way from Beaumont to Houston, Aunt Bea? Quite the feckin' pilgrimage to Mecca there. I mean, considering they're only showing this train-wreck in ten theaters in the entire country, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that many of the faithful would have to travel at least 100 miles if they're going to see this thing. Maybe there's tailgate parties out in the parking lots of the theaters, where these old bastards competition-guzzle cans of Ensure and char some round steak until it's really well-done, then sneak some Metamucil into the theater, thus thwarting The Man once again.
• Finally: costumes? Seriously? It's bad enough when Star Wars/Harry Potter nerds pull this crap, but at least they have an excuse -- most of them are in seventh grade. Then again, at least intellectually, so are these bozos. You get to a point where you stop asking "what's wrong with these people", and decide it's simpler to just ask if anything at all is right with them. Driving two hours, or going in costume, to a two-hour informercial for a person who, despite being in her late forties, having a college degree and a family and some measure of political success, still cannot reliably complete a sentence that wasn't previously rehearsed to maximize borscht-belt timing for reckless calumniations.

And of course in the end it turns out to be somewhat selective bunkum, as most things Palin are in the end: in the conservatard enclave of Orange, CA the only person to attend the midnight premiere screening was the reviewer.

(A increasingly frequent defensive meme, which you'll see down in the comments in the Atlantic piece, is that at least Saint Sarah never said there were 57 states. Perhaps not, but the difference is, even people who hate him know that Obama simply misspoke. They know, whether they'll admit it or not, that Obama does not actually think there are 57 states. It is not generally that obvious with Palin, as she managed to irretrievably botch even the bowdlerized Paul Revere legend that most 'murkins learn by fourth grade, during her Magical History bus tour, which sought to highlight important places and events in American history by spending more time with Donald Trump than at Gettysburg.)

At this point, Palin-watching as a spectator sport is merely an extended exercise in schadenfreude, waiting for the next inevitable failure, both on her part and on the part of all the PMS (Palin Messiah Syndrome) followers. They are going to be disappointed, on many levels -- their hoped-for Passion of the Kee-rist turnout is never going to materialize, and their wampeter, content to earn pelf spinning ever more burbling foma, will not run, not in any genuine earnest anyway, perhaps only enough to give them another richly-deserved fleecing.

But what she serves as most of all is a barometer of this country's limbic urgency to follow failure with more failure, ridiculous stupidity with even more ridiculous and inarticulate stupidity. It is a doubling-down of id, the man who loses his car on a spin at the roulette wheel, then proposes to get it back by betting his house, then proposes to get it all back by stealing the deed to his neighbor's house and betting that.

I'm sure the next inevitable reality show to emanate from this cultural sphincter will be worth its weight in comedic gold.

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.

American Nightmare

I would think that everyone who would enjoy Breaking Bad has already been watching it, but just in case....Go. Now. Get on your Netflix queue and put the first three seasons on. This, not Mad Men (and that's not to take anything away from the latter's mannered, lugubrious deconstructions of post-Ike, Bernaysian Amurka) is AMC's true flagship series. The writing is spectacular, the ensemble cast flawless, the production of the show finding dark humor (not unlike The Sopranos) in whatever corners it may lurk.

Of all things, in terms of the narrative unfolding as a cascading series of disastrous, unforeseen consequences of pivotal decisions, BB actually makes me think of A Simple Plan, which, as dismal as its subject and execution is, holds up rather well and I think is very underrated.

And there's a very real subtext, that as what remains of the middle class becomes increasingly squeezed, as the dream goes sideways for all but a very lucky few, options become less constrained, more volatile for a lot of people, who have been given nowhere else to turn. When even the golden opportunity of a lifetime of wage slavery and debt peonage starts drying up, where do you go?

Also, too, just in time to push the BB premiere.

Social Distortion

With a mere sixteen months(!) before the next election, the tedious strategy circus on both "sides" will start picking up speed. The wingnuts on the right will start making goofier and looser assertions, secure in the knowledge that their crowd has no use for "facts" or "logic", much less intellectual honesty. Hell, Newt Gingrich is their idea of an intellectual, so clearly they have gone around a turn that even Hofstadter would have had trouble imagining. Their strategy will consist of continuing to obstruct any and all moves Obama might attempt toward righting an increasingly moribund economy -- one which is as likely as not to worsen than improve.

But that is the sort of guff we've been long accustomed to from that crowd. The real shenanigans will take place across the aisle, as "liberals" and "moderates" alike will outdo each other in informing why we should -- no, must -- grant Obama another term with which to play Lucy with their political football. Particularly galling about this strategy, such as it is, is that it invariably revolves around the prospect of losing on social issues which, sorry to say, are secondary at this point.

Polls consistently show a majority of the public being pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, etc. It is understandable that people would be distressed, concerned at the notion of losing (or being rendered unable to gain) fundamental rights because of the leverage of a small but politically motivated minority. It absolutely sucks rhino dong that terminally regressive, knuckle-dragging troglodytes can hamstring the political and social progress of a post-modern technocracy, just for the sheer glee of doing so (that, and the proprietary reading of a carefully selected, multiply translated Bronze Age transcripts of Levantine tribesmen).

But I submit that a darker corner lurks, deserves our additional attention. I submit that terminal fuckwits such as this guy, boundlessly greedy bastards and their awful dogsbodies, are the bigger threat. Day after day, year after year, these fuckers keep their boot across your neck, not because they create more actual value or wealth, or work hundreds of times harder than their minions, but because they can. Because it's a game, and they make the rules.

More importantly, they buy the refs ahead of time, and ensure their own success (not to mention the failure of everyone else not in the game). And the booga-booga currency to keep restive libs from realizing that the guy thye voted for is almost indistinguishable in economic terms from the last guy is the deathless specter of Roe v. Wade. Never mind that many states already have managed to circumvent or eviscerate RvW anyway, and where's yer fuckin' Supreme Court been for all of that?

This idea that we maintain or achieve success, fairness, justice, anything resembling economic parity or sanity, by remaining vigilant on one intellectually corrupt institution (a SCOTUS which has rendered its share of dismal decisions in the first place, from Kelo to Citizens United, and has done fuck-all in the arena of social justice anyway) and attempting to engage with righteous change an irredeemable instituion (a corporate-owned political party with center- and far-right wings, both of which have many, if not most, of the very same corporate sponsors) is perhaps the very definition of insanity. It's Stockholm Syndrome at its worst, the garbled cry of "go ahead and screw me out of every vestige of economic mobility, and trap me in the cage of debt and stratification, but fergodsake don't take my right to get an abortion away!".

By using this strategy against outliers on both "sides" (and make no mistake, Dubya was every bit as savvy about floating the phantom prospects of repealing Roe or amending the Constitution), they've managed to distract people with actual common ground -- the burgeoning underclass of economically disenfranchised.

I hate to sound like a revanchist Clintonista, but there is really only one issue worth voting on anymore. It really is the economy, stupid, specifically the widening gap of wealth and income disparity, a mathematical by-product of productivity gains accruing to owners only, rather than among the actual pool of producers. Nothing else matters, nothing else counts, if for no other reason than that an economically healthy society doesn't have those social issues to contend with in the first place.

Child Abuse

So PZ Myers writes a perfectly nice, reasonable, and eminently sensible "Yes Virginia" type post, publicly directed toward a young, brainwashed little girl who needs to revisit the smug all-purpose question that Jebus-Rode-A-Dinosaur Creation "Museum" huckster Ken Ham taught her to ask. Ham taught the little girl to ask "Were you there?" in response to any information presented to her that doesn't jibe with her programming (except, presumably, biblical narratives).

Naturally, no good deed goes uncalumniated:

I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken's Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy... sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn't see the message because I didn't want to...

And so another generation arises to drink the kool-aid, and perpetuate a stunted, shriveled intellect, and waste their most precious gift of all -- the capacity to learn.

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.

Get the Frack Out

Let's keep it simple: anybody who's fine with fracking needs to be fine with it in their own backyard. Funny how all these warnings about how we need to achieve "energy independence" simply revolve around fetishizing this or that tech, finding "new" and "clean" sources, or Drill Baby Drill (though again, not in the backyards of those squawking for it). But nobody ever talks about simply consuming less, about what the effects and opportunities might be if people drove smarter and less, if we enforced better fuel-efficiency standards, if people shut the fucking light off once in a while when they're not using it.

You can champion all the new tech you want, whether it's green and clean or kitchen faucets spewing fire. But at some point, at least a modest level of conservation has to enter the discussion. Or not.

Magical History Tour

Ahahahaha:

In Sarah’s version, Revere was

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

Jesus Christ, can anybody really add anything to that? It's beyond parody. If 'murka really wants to elevate a bubbleheaded snowbilly on her (if you're a middle-aged man who's not getting any) fuckability quotient, then as always, it deserves precisely what it will get in the bargain.

Palin has pushed this stupid bus tour as an opportunity to school ignint 'murkins on their Constooshunal ingnince. Maybe Roger Ailes can spring for a tutor to live on the bus with them for a few weeks, bring her up to speed on who's on Mount Rushmore and such like.

Cheesy Rider

Once again, if we accept the classic premise that markets act on demand, then our corporate media is a reflection of us as a nation, a bloated, rotted husk which, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, just doesn't know it's dead yet.

Also, too. Someone should maybe tell these halfwits the difference between a "scavenger hunt" and a "snipe hunt". Here are three major differences the mediatards can share with their window-licking friends:

1. Scavenger hunts have clues.
2. Scavenger hunts have a point.
3. Snipe hunts are, by definition, participated in by gullible morons.

Consider the most consistent line 'mongst media morons far 'n' wide, regardless of political bent -- they admit that they don't know what the subject of their "articles" is actually doing, ergo, they are literally following her around, unable to speak with her, for absolutely no reason at all.

If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the American media -- which again, like the country itself, is merely a series of obvious scams that people, in a tragic spate of collective Jungian subconsciousness, have agreed to dance to. Much like disco.

And we all know how that turned out.

A Beautiful Mind

One of Saint Sarah's less-than-gruntled former toadies has scrawled a "tell-all", adding to the publishing industry's largest segment, which is books no one in their right mind would read.

Naturally, the attention Frank Bailey has garnered so far, focuses around Sharia Plan's rather Leona Helmsley-like demeanor with people who can't directly help her political career, and her well-documented vindictive streak. But for me this little quote tells you everything you need to know about Palin's utter lack of even marginal intellect:

In his fervor, Bailey at first didn’t care that Palin lacked expertise — she had common sense. As she once e-mailed him, “Remember: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” But Bailey came to doubt his devotion, particularly after the presidential election defeat when Palin seemed to care little for governing Alaska and far more about cashing in on her celebrity.

[emphasis mine]
Set aside for moment that Frank Bailey is a fucking chucklehead who got taken for a ride, and now is trying to cash in on his time in the belly of the beast. Let's deconstruct Saint Sarah's attempt at profundity, not just for the complete lack of evidence and plausibility in the first part, not just because the Titanic sank not because it was poorly built, but because it hit a fucking iceberg.

Those nine words neatly encapsulate the mentality of Sarah Palin, and her addled flock. The smirking disdain -- delusional in its scope -- completely derides the notion of competence, of becoming better at what you do by learning as much as you can about it.

This was what I always despised about George W. Bush -- he exhibited the smugness of someone who seriously believes that he has long known everything he needs to know, that there is nothing more to learn. Palin is obviously cut from the same ragged cloth, no shock there. And no shock that she prefers the simple affirmations of fairy tales over empirical data.

But at some point, it needs to register with a critical mass of people -- voters and the skeevy corporate media monkeys they rely on for their daily dose of bullshit -- that beyond the breathless infotainment coverage of cock-teasing idiots like Palin or Trump, people who add to their fortunes by dangling months of guessing games to legions of dumbfounded dipshits, someone needs to be an adult.

A big reason America is in a period of epic fail right now, aside from its willingness to let Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon continue to skull-fuck the country with absolute impunity, is its inability to recognize unserious and marginal people for what they are. A serious, intellectually honest person does not let cartoon characters like Palin and Trump waste their time with this nonsense, and a nation serious about getting its shit together most certainly doesn't let these bozos jerk them off for months on end.

Their ability to stay in the conversation long past their sell-by dates feels to me like the sign of a nation that's given up on itself, has lost the capacity to identify entities that should never have been in the discussion in the first place, and are indeed simply using the process and its concomitant permanent campaign industry to enrich themselves. Maybe it's the natural by-product of a decade of hyper-cultural immersion in the mindless excesses of reality teevee, with it's deliberate vapidity and meanness. Maybe we were always mean and stupid, and are just not bothering to conceal it anymore. I don't know.

What I do know is that we are heading into a period that, for starters, will be characterized by more and more scarce energy supplies, and we are barely making token efforts to do anything about it, apparently assuming that some great Energy Fairy will providentially come along and fix it all. Shit, 'murkins cannot even be bothered to use environmentally friendly packaging for its snacking products, such is the affront to their dignity.

So it makes pathetic sense that a society that has lost its collective mind, preferring the comforts of magickal thinking, would put up with the notion of putting Sarah Palin or Donald Trump in charge of anything. Americans have had their heads lodged up their asses for so long, they have given up trying to extricate themselves.

Enjoy the view. It's only going to get worse.

News You Can Lose

Give us this day our daily cognitive dissonance: MSNBC host calls Laura Ingraham a "slut" and gets his fat ass suspended for a week, because MSNBC (unlike Fox) never stands behind their people when they say something "controversial".

To the extent that there's actually some controversy -- I mean, we are talking about the Laura Ingraham who has made a career out of using snark, insults, and calumny on her ideological opponents. All in the service of the 1% who already own pretty much everything worth owning, and won't be happy until they get the rest and take it all with them. Being their rented spokesperson -- basically the function of the entire damned punditocracy, a self-selecting crowd of poltroons, none of whom you would trust to clean your gutters, but are apparently supposed to trust in analyzing policies and events that affect your life -- seems to fit the basic definition for "slut", minus (praise Jeebus) the sex.

Say what you will about conservatards, but when one of theirs says or does something offensively stupid, they don't apologize, they bloody well double down on it. A lunatic goes on a spree at a supermarket, slaughtering old ladies and little girls and attempting to assassinate a US Representative who had already been on the receiving end of death threats, vandalism, and harassment, and Sarah Palin squeals "blood libel". Ofay teabaggers send each other photos portraying Obama as a monkey or a spearchucker, they don't apologize, they just shrug their shoulders and tell you to go fuck youself if you don't like it. Ted Nugent invites Obama and Hillary to suck on his AR-15 at his concerts, and not only will never apologize for it, but continues to be a Fox regular.

Ed Schulz trash-talking Laura Ingraham does not merit coverage or commentary, but what does is how quickly MSNBC pusses out with such predictability. Nobody at Fox looks over their shoulder at the lies and bluster that emanate from multiple pieholes on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

To the extent that "liberalism" can actually distinguish itself from "conservatism" in any meaningful, operational sense, as opposed to the usual ratchet-pawl two-sides-of-the-same-plug-nickel guff, it must at some point display a real willingness to take and throw punches. I mean, I'm just kind of embarrassed for them when they do shit like this. Fucking grow a pair already.

....And I Feel Fine

You know, I'm as glad as the next schmuck that the buffoonish radio dickhead predicting world apocamalypse was proven wrong yet again, as thus far they have always been. These jokers are a dime a score, always have been and always will be.

But what rings weird to me is how much press this particular joker got, both in the run-up to the magick date, and now the aftermath, everyone having a big grin that this old cheese-smelling cuss had a very public senior moment.

Don't get me wrong -- we've had our share of the billboards up this neck o' the woods, and the stupid doesn't just burn, it emanates. I guess I'm just glad that though my daughter is young enough to wonder about the provenance of this nonsense, she is at least astute enough to be skeptical about them. Not everyone, I'm wagering, is as lucky, and shame on Harold Camping for scaring the shit out of kids for no damned reason.

The adults, on the other hand, deserve precisely what they get. As we've always acknowledged, it really is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

But I'm curious as to what to ascribe this wave of coverage to, for a "story" that would in earlier times been relegated to the one-and-done bin of most marginal players. It seems that there is no such thing anymore as a marginal player -- a supreme assclown like Donald Trump can get slavish coverage for two full months to pimp his piece-of-shit teevee show in the guise of political aspiration, and pull out with the assurance that he could win this if he rilly wanted ta, and they just fucking stenograph it, like it ain't no thing. Sarah Palin has choked up the media cloaca for a full two years and counting now. Every network stentorously announced the withdrawal of Serious Player Mitch Daniels, without remembering to mention that he was Dubya's budget director for a few years, and thus had at least a thumb in how things ran for some time. And so forth.

So it goes with Harold Camping, and his happy if woefully misguided campers. The question is not "why is this a story" -- of course a nutjob radio preacher predicting global cataclysm is "a story" -- the question is "how did this story persist for a couple weeks". It's gone on and on like this for quite some time, seemingly more and more so as time goes on. Each news cycle seems more nonsensical, more relentlessly stupid than the last.

With this "story", one could play devil's advocate for a second, if one were so inclined. Consider not only the scope, scale, and frequency of natural disasters just his year so far, but the intractability of man-made catastrophes the world over. The destruction of the American economy and way of life continues apace, with no foreseeable respite. Your elected officials have been bought and paid for by the very people they need to prosecute, and who continue to drive the entire economy -- and thus, your way of life and that of your neighbors -- into the dirt. And the rest of the world, so much of it post-colonial, has suffered far worse for far longer, much of it at our hands.

Maybe the people who die in these natural disasters, or who take themselves and their families out as a response to creatively engineered desitution from afar, are actually being raptured. I hold it as no serious philosophical construct, nor do I want to disrespect the memories of those unfortunate souls. But if one believes in such outlandish ideas, one just never knows for sure.

Credentialism

So I finished my final MBA class this past Saturday. I still have to complete the directed internship, but the project is already mostly done, I just have to compile some survey results and make the pitch.

It's been an interesting two years, to say the least. I went in with two and only two goals for attaining the degree:

1. Open more professional doors. As I will turn 44 in a few days, it occurs to me that my career path needs to be more, shall we say, solidified, lest I meet the standard American working class dog's fate of working till the day I drop, leaving the cubicle farm feet first, a life by definition less than fulfilled. In other words, time to shit or get off the pot, professionally speaking. Until I start pulling down at least high-five/low-six figures, jury's still out on that one.
2. Gain more knowledge, of how and why things work, of specialized areas, of where to refer when in need. Really, to put it in somewhat Rumsfeldian terms, to learn more about the unknown unknowns, the things about which I didn't even know I didn't know. This goal was attained much more closely than the first one, because of the trade secret of the MBA -- you don't have to memorize everything from every class you take, every factoid that's pumped into your head, you just have to recall where to look it up for reference.

Of course, there were other valuable lessons, most of which I already knew but were reinforced with various degrees of vigor. The textbook industry is a goddamned racket, from author to printer; your instructors, while chock-full of the bien pensant sentiments one would expect sinecured academics to be flush with, are still susceptible to the same strains of peer pressure and business expectations as any of us in the real world are; you are handed rote ethical nostrums to dutifully recite, as if they were the bidnessman's Hippocratic Oath, without the rich context the ongoing shenanigans in the financial sector so abundantly provide; you need to memorize and regurgitate, and speak extemporaneously on the matter -- whatever it may be, balanced scorecards, Porter's five forces, why EVA is infinitely more important and useful than EBITDA -- as if your very life depends on it.

Most of all, what is reinforced is a rather unique arrangement, where you are both student and consumer, a role somehow both inherently subordinate yet festooned with Important Surveys on how well you enjoyed your extraordinarily high-priced product. It is a very strange business model, perhaps unique -- just as the insurance industry is the only major business model that is predicated on the company not providing the service for which it has already been paid, so the post-secondary edumacation system is the only model that caters to you even as it pushes you around.

It's been an enoyable experience, the way I assume a triathlon is for its participants -- it's an accomplishment just to complete it, really. But from the start, despite my goals and high-handed sentiments about the process and quest for knowledge and value -- something I still believe, for myself at least -- I have always thought about the subtext of the first goal enumerated above.

This is perhaps the biggest racket of all in the university system, this idea that a piece of paper is so incredibly valuable that it trumps all else, and thus is worth paying a couple years' wages (if it gets you the job it's supposed to, a tenuous proposition at best these days) for. And the truth is, it is and it isn't -- there is value attached to that piece of paper, so long as its holder realizes that there are people with nothing more than high school diplomas doing the same job just as well.

And really, now that I know where to look, and what to read, and with all the free resources on Teh Intartubez, I can tell you right now that the knowledge is available for free, or for less than $200 worth of books anyway, so you really are paying the big bucks for the credential.

I knew this from day one, to have it confirmed is alternately frustrating (because I still have to pay for the privilege) and comforting (because even with my worst assumptions about people and things, I love being proven right, which I always am).

All that said, it's been a fun ride. I love the library, I love the campus and the energy of it. I can see why some people never want to leave. But in the end, I do think that once the health-care battle has been more adequately addressed, it may occur to folks that granting more accessibility to higher education will lead to better macro outcomes in a rapidly crumbling society. You can't keep gouging kids at every turn, and expect them to just want to keep "getting ahead", especially when more and more that just means for them a decade or so of student loan repayments.

Your Awful Media, Part 15,864,573

Few things in this blessed life are more puling and obnoxious than the clubby back-patting of skeevy assholes:

This time, there was no "gotcha" moment, no kill-the-messenger pushback. Asked for comment about a child born out of wedlock, Arnold Schwarzenegger's camp simply gave up the goods.

It was quick, clean, surgical.

Schwarzenegger wasn't given a way out, the reporter who broke the story tells Howard Kurtz on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" on CNN. There was nothing to confirm or deny.

"It was true," says Los Angeles Times political reporter Mark Barabak. "They knew it was true, we knew it was true; they knew that we knew it was true. So it was pretty straightforward at that point."

Barabak does not say precisely how the paper got the story. He credits old-fashioned "shoe leather" for chasing the lead down.

Hmmm, yes, good ol' intrepid mediabots, with their shoe leather and Slap Maxwell hats and moxie and gumption and what-not. Praise be the shade of Edward Fucking Murrow, eh? I mean, the kid's only fourteen years old, ferchrissake. I guess they deserve some credit for getting to the bottom of this pressing mystery before the kid grew up, left home, started a family of his own. Nicely done, way to be on that proverbial ball.

I wonder what it would be like if more members of this particular "profession" devoted this degree of time and effort to, say, getting to the bottom of how Wall Street continues to rob this nation blind and stupid. Nah, it's much easier to sniff up Arnold Schwarzenegger's ass, harass the homely cow he porked and knocked up, as well as her hapless family. Let Matt Taibbi do all the Wall Street stuff himself. Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Usually I would just have the smug "we get the media we deserve" riposte to this sort of shit, but the easy jape fails me at this point. These are just bad, lazy human beings. It's bad enough that they peddle non-stories for a self-selecting audience of mouth-breathers; it's much worse that they're actually proud of it. Keep on livin' that dream.

Brand Newt Day

So Pravda's Dan Balz musta drew the short straw on reportage of the Republigoon clown car revving up for next fall. Instead of the tee-ball shots of crazymilfs Snowbilly Spice (Palin) or Mary Tyler Moron (Bachmann), Balz gets stuck with pimping eight-chinned pseudo-intemellectual Newt Gingrich. And pimp that shit he does, like it's a sixteen-going-on-thirty-year-old runaway:

Through intellect and ambition, Gingrich has kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on health care, education, energy and foreign affairs. “Newt’s been the Republican Party’s main idea man for close to a generation,” said Terry Holt, a Republican strategist who closely observed Gin­grich as speaker. “This is a guy who brings unlimited energy and creative thinking to a race that needs new ideas.”

Gosh, it's as if we could just take a Republican strategist's word (and the title of Balz' write-up) and just assume for the sake of argument that Newt Gingrich is a "man of ideas". So much is Balz convinced of this that aside from a quote of Gingrich's asserting a standard wish list and a token nod to the usual states' rights guff, nowhere in the several hundreds of words does Balz remember to include an actual, workable idea enumerated by Gingrich.

Fortunately he does link to the propitiously-named American Solutions site, which graciously includes links to several of Newt's stabs at profundity. Here's a magickal slice of the "ideas" and "intellect" being sold, like a case of spiked cough syrup out of the back of some greaseball's '92 Camaro in an alley:

Let me say that Louie Gohmert that he is a terrific national asset. He has a remarkable range of innovative ideas.

It goes on, lauding Gohmert's "brilliant insight" and "courage" in protesting something Obama wanted to do. Let me say that Louie Gohmert is the drawling hump who apologized to British Petroleum, after their fucked-up equipment had killed eleven workers and polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico, for having to endure Obama's shameless shakedown of their bullshit mud-drilling operation. Let me say that Louie Gohmert needs to be reincarnated at least a dozen times as one or another hapless creature encrusted by industrial pollution, and then reincarnated as a fisherman who has to make his suicide look like an accident so his insurance company will pay off his shrimp trawler and not leave his survivors completely destitute.

Seriously, if you had to make a "fuck 'em right in the neck" list of mouthbreathing assholes in Congress, Louie Gohmert is almost guaranteed to make your top three or five. Every public appearance of Gohmert convinces me more that he is a product of careful genetic engineering, of warped scientists valiantly attempting to find a sweet spot, that perfect cross of willfully ignorant and obnoxiously mean. Not in the childish "those guys are meeeeaan!" sense, but in the real "this guy barely gives a fuck about his family, and certainly not about anybody else" sense.

But in all seriousness, all intellectual honesty, can you read that entire speech and find a coherent workable idea, and even a sketch of how it can be implemented? There's plenty of rhetoric, sure, but it wears about as thin as the usual liberal "let's be the best America we can be/it takes a village" counterpart.

The big ideas seem to be, in no particular order: Gut the tax and regulatory systems, because our crumbling infrastructure can repair itself, and nobody gives a fuck about coal miners until 50 of them suffocate under a mountain of unsafe rock that the MSHA was too defunded or defanged to catch before it collapsed. Indoctrinate the populace with the heroic epic of American Exceptionalism, because you just don't see that at every fucking turn right now, seriously. Talk about God a lot, because if he hasn't struck Newt down by now, he must be pretty forgiving. And so forth.

(Even Gingrich's newfound god-bothering is off a touch; he claims that God has forgiven Gingrich's numerous transgressions, yet apparently does not hold out for the possibility that He might forgive the transgressions of Gingrich's political opponents as well. Of course, Gingrich is too busy effeminizing them and casting them as job-killers to notice this intellectual inconsistency. But then, that would presuppose that he has ever been intellectually honest in the first place. I'm not sure even Dan Balz really believes that.)

I get why Newt Gingrich thinks those things count as ideas; what I don't get is why Dan Balz thinks they count as ideas. See, an idea has to be more than "cut taxes" or "cut spending" -- you then have to explain the expected consequences and outcomes of these actions. If I say "cut spending", I should have to say what I want to cut, by how much, and how that will tangibly help the budget deficit. Every one of these goddamn "cut spending" clowns has the same schtick -- find some bullshit drop-in-the-bucket program that's politically unpopular but fiscally meaningless, and uphold it as the ne plus ultra of government irresponsibility and hedonism.

Crucial to this tactic is avoiding all mention of the Big Three spending programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and the military. Oh sure, once in a while one of the dumber and meaner ones will actually have the cojones to talk about privatizing Social Security, before catching themselves in a sudden rush of memory of how no one's really all that hot anymore to hand their paychecks over to the geniuses who monkeyfucked the world economy. And paid themselves nice fat bonuses for doing so, just because they could. Other than that, those things don't get brought up a whole lot.

It's like driving down a road that has three lane-wide, impossible-to-miss, car-swallowing potholes, and making a big show about the bug splattered on your windshield, acting like the potholes aren't there. Of course, this is constitutent-driven for the most part; the baby boomers are more than happy to ensure they get theirs and fuck over my generation completely and utterly, just like they always have.

And raging militarism is crucial to perpetuating important nationalist control myths, so the only cuts to the military will be in things that directly affect service personnel, such as post-trauma care, post-military job assistance, housing assistance for families while troops are deployed, etc. That's how that one works out. There'll always be enough money in the budget to bankroll another flying contraption the Air Force doesn't want, or to run formation exercises at the Raiders game. When your main concern is maintaining the budget for symbolism, the big cuts always come out of substantial stuff first. So guaranteed, any military cuts will come out of troops' backs.

Anyhoo, so again, Mr. Idea Man. I've reread the speech a couple times, just not seeing anything besides Mitch Albom-level stories and American Legion boilerplate. (And seriously, whoever transcribed this speech must have used cheap voice-recognition software. Fucking proofread once in a while, m'kay? Looks like a slow third-grader scooped this shit out. "Baton" Death March, seriously? Fugging chumps.)

Near as I can tell, Newt Gingrich has had exactly three big ideas in his entire political career -- mastering a precise vocabulary of loaded words guaranteed to antagonize and conceal rather than elucidate; cluttering up school boards and city councils with red-meat window-lickers who, while largely unelectable at higher levels, are useful for local rabble-rousing and policy shenanigans; and portraying himself as some sort of intellectual emeritus of the wingnut brigade. That last one is simple; when you're competing against marginal oafs like Palin and Bachmann, you pretty much win if you can get through a speech without drooling on yourself.

Ironically though, no matter how much he preaches his bullshit gospel about Christ's forgiveness, it's the issue of morality that will be Newt's undoing (assuming, in fact, that he's running because he genuinely wants to win and thinks he can win, as opposed to Fred Thompson's cute little take-the-money-and-run grift he pulled on the short-bus crowd a couple years back). The morality issue, in his case, is bad even for a politician.

Put it this way -- as a stereotypical godless, hedonistic sybarite, while I don't personally approve of fucking around on one's spouse or significant other, I don't make it a criterion for the people I elect to implement public policy. So, yeah, I found it distasteful and unsurprisingly tacky, even a minor source of irritation that Bill Clinton got his pole smoked by a chunky intern whilst discussing troop deployments in the Balkans. And I was weirded out by Clinton's bizarre compartmentalism, that he seriously felt that jerking off in a sink, instead of ejaculating in said intern's mouth, somehow absolved him of cheating on his wife, or having sex with a sub-sub-subordinate. And his smirking parsimony over the meanings of simple words was just obnoxious. But like most folks, I was far more irritated at the hypocrites who were all too happy to basically shut down the entire government to mess with him over it.

Chief among these scumbags was Gingrich. Maybe I am just a little bit square on the subject, because I simply cannot get my brain around a person who persecutes a colleague for doing the exact same thing he himself is doing at the same time. One expects at least some small measure of honor among thieves, but Gingrich time and again has shown himself to be a man utterly without honor, devoid of character. Expecting character and honor of one's openly purchased politicos is a fool's errand in the first place, but it's one Gingrich's party runs to every chance they get. Maybe for once we should take them up on that.

Update: Anonymous in comments reminds me that it was, in fact, Joe Barton who apologized to BP, not Louie Gohmert, proving conclusively that I cannot tell these inbred goobers apart. Amazingly, Gohmert is an even bigger shithead than Barton, so he'll probably serve at least another ten terms.

Tardocalypse Now

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this country desperately needs an enema. Take your pick at what's more morally repugnant -- the shameless racism, the mind-boggling illiteracy, or the complete inability to compose anything remotely resembling a coherent fucking thought. Truly, the best part of every single one of these halfwits ran down the cracks of their mommas' asses and ended up as a brown stain on a dirt road.

Some days you just figure that maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

[Via Gin and Tacos.]

Freedom of Screech

Looks like someone just got a lesson about speaking his mind during our week-long Two Minutes of Woofing.

"Nothing I said was meant to stir up controversy. It was my way to generate conversation. In looking at my timeline in its entirety, everything that I've said is with the intent of expressing a wide array of ideas and generating open and honest discussions, something I believe we as American citizens should be able to do. Most opinions will not be fully agreed upon and are not meant to be. However, I believe every opinion should be respected or at least given some thought. I apologize for the timing as such a sensitive matter, but it was not meant to do harm. I apologize to anyone I unintentionally harmed with anything that I said, or any hurtful interpretation that was made and put in my name."

Well, son, I'll see your reasoned attempt at civil discourse and intellectual honesty, and raise you a "USA! USA!" I mean, c'mon kid, whaddaya expe -- Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! Dee-fense! Unh! Unh! -- expect here? You work for a professional sports league, one of the most die-hard bastions of mundane jingoism in American daily life. Every game starts off with the national anthem; NFL games frequently feature flag or color guard ceremonies, flying in formation over the stadium, etc. Nobody ever bothers to ask what any of these rituals has to do with watching extremely large and fast men beat the hell out of each other for an afternoon, it's just accepted as given. As a form of mass conditioning, it's about as unsubtle as it gets.

I'm actually impressed with how well Mendenhall expresses himself, and how sincere he comes off. But he shows a very profound misunderstanding of his station and his audience if he really thinks -- or even just hopes -- any of his fans want to engage in a debate (or even mild thought) about this stuff. These are people who will literally beat each other into a fucking coma for rooting for the wrong team, wearing the wrong jersey. Questioning the ritual is not within easy reach of most of 'em's intellectual toolbox. Not exactly a secret.

The questioning part for them only goes one way -- towards anyone not buying into what the angry mob is doing. It's like sitting down while the rest of the stadium does The Wave (remember that?) -- nobody appreciates your gesture to reason, they just give you the stinkeye for being a dick. Tribal signifiers, yo. This is pure lizard-brain stuff, and there's just no winning a debate with it. When Art Rooney has to step in on the CYA tip, you know you screwed the proverbial pooch. That's life in the gladiator class. Good luck with it.

A Star Is Bored

Howie Kurtz helpfully transcribes what may turn out to be the very truest thing ever said about oh-so-brief-but-transcendentally-brilliant phenomenumbskull, La Palin:

“Her real constituency is the media,” says former John McCain adviser Mike Murphy, who views Palin as a “niche candidate” incapable of winning the nomination. “The media have always overestimated her appeal. They’re drunk with interest in covering her. It’s a partnership—they’re in business together.”

Indeed. The downside of all this wondrous technology at our fingertips is that it's enabled this slovenly, grotesque infoporn market to crop up amidst us, influence the order of things inside-out and upside-down by sheer muscle and gall. The 24-hour news cycle, which is really the same half-hour of sound bites on a repeat loop, 48 times per day times a bazillion channels, has metastasized into the perpetual campaign industry machine. From the very second an election ends, discussion of the next one commences, two years or four down the road.

Remember a mere half-decade ago, when a preponderance of the country -- indeed, the world at large -- were certain that American hubris, id, and willful stupidity had reached its blessed apotheosis with the Bush/Cheney junta? You want to go back in time and warn those naive, beaten souls of the depths to come, made possible in very large part by people whose sole purpose is to sell pharmaceuticals and big trucks, with dressed-up factoids and famous nobodies paraded in between, a constant barrage of mediocrity at best, dangerous buffoonery most of the time.

But golly gosh, I sure do hope it all works out for Saint Sarah. She's just given so darn much in the service of pure fabulism, calumny, and chronic butthurt over the meekest response to her constant smartassery. It takes an empty industry to reward an empty personage, white noise for white noise, for the esteemed pundits to parse.

The clown car is crowded for the Republitards these dark days, made darker still by the fact that enough 'murkins are just stupid enough to vote 'em back in anyway. What would we do without Sarah's free-verse burbling, her snowbilly glossolalia, runway-circling syntax displaying a truly accomplished lack of knowledge on an impressive array of subjects? Friends 'n' neighbors, it really is hard goddamned work to go nearly fifty years in life without being able to converse competently on at least something, even trickier to gull millions of gomers into admiring you for it.

If this politics thing doesn't work out for her, there's still time for her to get into journamalism.