Devalued Currency

It's a floor wax, it's a dessert topping, it's got a thousand-and-one uses:

BURBANK, California (Reuters) - John McCain, who often invokes his ordeal as a Vietnam war prisoner to show his devotion to his country as he runs for U.S. president, drew on the experience again on Monday -- this time to deflect sniping over the number of houses he owns.

....

In an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, McCain, 71, said his priority was to keep Americans in their homes in tough economic times.

Then he recalled his Vietnam experience.

"I spent 5 1/2 years in a prison cell without -- I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair," he said.

Sigh. It's practically a drinking game at this point.

"Senator, what do you think the weather will be like tomorrow?" "My friend, when I spent a half-decade in Charlie's clutches, no weather at all could seep through that jungle canopy. Except rain....lots and lots of fucking rain."

"Senator, do you have change for a twenty?" "You know, I spent 5½ years without any money at all, wishing that I could break a twenty for my fellow Americans. We used cigarette butts and pictures of each others' girlfriends as currency. When the photos rotted away, we had memories of the USO girls that would come to the base and blow the officers. You can't make change of memories like that."

"Hello, Senator." "Listen, you smart-mouthed punk, for five years no one said 'hello' to me. It was all 'dinky dao' this and 'you no sit' that. Five fucking years and I still couldn't make head or tail of Charles' crazy moon-man language."

Look, here's the thing, and I'm loath to even bring it up and offer any insight as to what they're doing to themselves. (Yes, as if they're going to read this.) But this is the same thing that plagued Giuliani in the final stages of his campaign: the chronic overuse of "9/11" just dulled its edge after a while.

Even that wouldn't have killed Rudy's shot in and of itself, but once people started ignoring his rhythmic invocations of That Day, they realized that that was it, it was all he had. Giuliani has no intrinsic policy knowledge, either foreign or domestic. He knows how to sanitize a city by selling out to Disney and letting the cops run wild on even suspected ne'er-do-wells. He knows how to cash in on his circumstantial notoriety by charging people tons of money to watch him masturbate to his own leadership skills at a podium. He knows how to reward brainless, thuggish flunkies. He knows how to have the taxpayers bankroll his booty calls. Awesome.

Same thing with McCain. He just showed the world how tremendously overrated his foreign policy acumen really is, a couple weeks ago with the Georgia debacle. His campaign is run by the same asshole lobbyists he rails against, one of whom happened to work for the Georgian government, and may have encouraged Saakashvili to instigate this mess. And when the Russians strike back, as Russians are wont to do, McCain immediately goes into bluster mode, before almost as instantaneously dialing it back down to a peep. His economic policies are even more abusive and incomprehensible, encouraging working-class people to bootstrap their own whiny asses on lower real wages, while the top 1% get handed even more tax cuts.

I defy any potential McCain voter to explain what McCain's own proposals are, foreign and domestic. They can't because he has none, and like Giuliani, as he fritters away the good will his undeniably honorable sacrifices had bought him, uses it like some chit to trump the cheapest, most inconsequential gaffes, McCain exposes his paucity of actual ideas. There's nothing there that either translates coherently, or differentiates him substantially from the current regime.

The war hero thing only gets you so far. McCain's made more out of it because, since more Democrats actually served in the military, they're more reluctant to be disrespectful. You'll never see some goony cunt with a purple band-aid on her chin making fun of John McCain, not at the Democratic convention or any other sanctioned event. Never gonna happen.

But that's never stopped Republicans. Ask Max Cleland what kind of treatment his service got him. Ask John Kerry, or George McGovern. But it only plays so far, and only against an opponent that cuts you slack, and after what will probably be an entire convention week of soaking in it and ladling out the kool-aid to the draft-dodgers that run McCain's party, they're probably going to hit a wall. And since there's nothing else, they'll become even more desperate.

I'm almost surprised one of McCain's Rovian surrogates hasn't gone that extra mile and push-polled some 'tards in South Carolina about Barack Obama's black (or better yet, white) love child. Still a couple months to go.

Live Convention Blogging

I've never been able to sit through one of these things, and that hasn't changed. But there's not much else on (still waiting for The Daily Show's coverage starting tomorrow), so occasionally I'll take a break from reading and grind my loins into the screen when Norah O'Donnell appears. Takes the edge off of Olbermann's overwrought deep-throating of the whole thing. Dude's lips must be chapped by now. Take a tip from ol' Norah there, Chief, and breathe through your nose once in a while.

I did catch the very end of Michelle Obama's speech, and the big-screen family meeting with the kids and Dad and all. Very nice, especially the Stevie Wonder (Isn't She Lovely) walk-off music. Of course, I would have preferred Bring the Noise or Mama Said Knock You Out, but you can't have everything.

It'll have to do until the Republitard version, where a good chunk of the planet will likely gather before their teevees and pray aloud for the earth to sunder itself and swallow the arena whole during Cheney's selected readings from the Necronomicon. I assume he will enter and exit to the strains of O Fortuna.

I Against I

This just in: rubes continue to vote against their own interests by pretending that they're voting for someone "just like themselves", as if each one of them had married up so far that they could no longer recall how many domiciles they own.

“Illegal immigration needs to be controlled,” said 76-year-old Evelyn Perry of Fort Mill, who was among those surveyed. “I just haven’t really understood what (McCain’s position) is on that — but it needs to be controlled.”

Even without those specifics, Perry said she trusts McCain more. "Overall, I just think McCain understands better."

However, in a glimmer of hope for the Democratic nominee-to-be, more likely Southern voters polled said Obama "understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives" better than McCain does.

However, Deep South and working-class white voters disagreed, saying McCain understands them best.

They just know, yet they are completely unable to articulate -- or even comprehensively hint -- as to why. This is why Mencken loathed democracy, and damned if he didn't have a point. Wide swathes of goobers, inhabiting the states that dominate every low-end quality-of-life metric -- divorces, abortions, suicides, murders, violent crimes, lowest incomes, highest rates of child and family poverty, needing to be maintained by infusions of money from blue states -- apparently wishing to maintain all those proud statistics.

Do the rest of us a favor and secede already, please. Seems like everyone on both sides would be much happier.

House Bunny

You know, I also dig me some Anna Faris, who is hot and funny, and generally a plus to whatever project she's in. (I definitely agree on Just Friends, a movie that I would normally detest, but is actually a lot of fun. Plus, Amy Smart. And Ryan Reynolds, if Pajiba is any indication, seems to have initiated a scary number of mancrushes with that movie. I'm not going there, but he does look like he's having fun with a rom-com.)

But The House Bunny looks like one of those things where Faris is the only decent thing about it, otherwise a pastiche of Revenge of the Nerds scenes. At least the reviews have been fun to read, and in a couple weeks the in-laws will visit and we can go check out Tropic Thunder.

Biden His Time

So it's Biden after all, which, aside from his flacking for MBNA on the execrable bankruptcy bill, is more or less an acceptable choice. Even though Obama had a deeper bench to choose from than Straight Talk has, he is still obviously constrained by various in-house factionalizing, and realizes that he's not going to please everybody, but is at least smart enough not to piss off giant blocs of voters (as he would have with Bayh or even Clinton).

Some of the comments, as always, are priceless in their vitriolic lack of self-awareness, but the second of these two consecutive ones sum up the sentiments of most sensible people, I would hope:

No to Hillary means that I vote for mccain!

Posted by: joe | August 23, 2008 8:29 AM

If you consider yourself a Democrat and have rationalized voting for McCain because your candidate did not get picked, you do not deserve to be called a Democrat for you are actually an idiot. How one could rationalize voting for a man who has voted with George Bush 95% of the time is beyond my comprehension. The country's future is more important than your celebrity and/or feminist obsessions. I would have voted for Hillary but, she didn't win and that's it.

Posted by: Matt | August 23, 2008 8:32 AM

So now the prognosticators turn to Straight Talk's prospects, the announcement for which is scheduled for next Friday, McCain's own 72nd birthday. Heading into a holiday weekend. Should be good times.

Some of these clowns are "please, pretty please" type picks; can you imagine the fun in store if McCain were to make Giuliani his running mate? Christ, the comedic value of the rhetorical and visual contrasts would be worth its weight in gold, two angry one-note jackdaws warning the world off their damned lawns against two much more knowledgeable and polished speakers twice their size.

McCain's "safest" picks are the unknowns: Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Rob Portman. But they're only safe because they're unknown; Pawlenty is regarded as a drab but reliable pro-life tool from a potential swing state, Palin an entertaining and well-liked pro-life milf from one of the most corrupt, politically-inbred states in the country (which, to her credit, she has attempted to clean up where possible). Still, Alaska. Not bringing much to the electoral table there.

And either of those two will certainly be a shit-or-get-off-the-pot pick for people who are still(!) wondering about McCain's pro-life cred. Given all the other massively important problems facing this country, I don't have much sympathy for people (pro or con) who have chosen to make abortion their single issue, but I also don't see how he could be much clearer about where he stands on it and what he intends to do. So all these sixtyish dowagers I keep reading about who fought for Roe v. Wade back in the day and are now seriously considering McCain out of misplaced spite, good luck with that. Guess your struggle wasn't that important to you after all.

And Portman is a Bush hack, which gives the Obama team an opening to do what they should have been doing all summer -- hang the manifest idiocies of this administration around Straight Talk's neck. Jesus H. Christ, do these people need a diagram? One thing about Biden, like him or hate him -- he won't be shy about doing just that, and he won't be rope-a-doped by this tedious playing of the POW card at every opportunity. Biden can land a lot of body blows in this area that are simply off-limits to Obama and his perceived standing. But it's gotta be done; this dopey "John McCain means well, but he's wrong and he's mean to us" shit is not gonna fly.

Waste of Oxygen

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Cone of Stupid

Fools living up to their names, the usual experts have already proclaimed McCain as the "winner" in the Great Purpose-Driven Circle-Jerk this weekend, sponsored by the Saddleback franchise of JeebusCo, a division of God, Inc., blah blah blah. And in terms of preaching to the self-selecting choir, of course McCain won; these people, in their spasms of Pharisaic false piety, were simply looking for affirmation. No news there. Gee, the two-note thumbsuckers at Dobson's turd farm suddenly got religion on him. Didn't see that one coming. Shouldn't they still have the vapors from Ellen DeGeneres getting hitched that same day?

Perhaps counterintuitively, I would propose some sort of loose equation, to the effect that outside the megachurch, the larger the overall viewing audience, the better Obama does. Look, Warren's flock was McCain's in the first place, so going there to win them over was really a waste of McCain's time. To win, he either has to energize the base sufficiently, which is iffy, as he consistently peters out ~44%, or he has to poach the disaffected Clintonistas.

And most of those sob sisters are not going to appreciate McCain's pro-life stance, which he was quite clear about. They've stamped their wittle feet plenty now; once they cool down with a nice Sea Breeze and a Sex and the City/Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants/Beaches estrogen-fest, they'll think a bit more clearly about what their temper tantrum will ultimately bring them. Play a little ball, and maybe your gal would be up for the next SCOTUS seat (which actually would be a pretty good choice).

Until recently, POST had been very effective at milking that maverick label to the extent that most people couldn't really pin him down with clarity on the issue of abortion. Finally he's getting called on it, and his increasingly antagonistic relationship with a suddenly skeptical media is boxing him into a real corner. He's hugged an evangelical tar-baby here, and he can't extricate himself without alienating one or another major potential bloc.

His choice of running mate, whatever it is, may very well seal the deal; if the evangos are insufficiently enthused, they stay home, if he whips 'em up, he loses the independents and Clintonistas. The poor bastard already has to skulk around and avoid being seen with fundraising buddies like Ralph Reed and George W. Bush.

And again, he's already losing his media pals, and they're really the ones that got him to this point in the first place. Of course, they'll always be around for a booty call, but it won't be quite the same. They might be starting to get a little wise to his self-serving horseshit.

He's been running ads on NBC throughout the Olympics, but has the balls to say that its networks have it in for him. He now bookends his professed reluctance to talk about his time in the Hanoi Hilton with boilerplate aphorisms about his time in the Hanoi Hilton, which is starting to wear a lot like John Edwards' "daddy was a mill worker" card. (And for anyone who wants to insist that military service is sacrosanct in a political campaign, I have two words: Max Cleland.)

POST also whines that Andrea MitchellGreenspan is in the tank for Obama. I suggest someone take him up on that one, and openly speculate how he, John McCain, could lose the heretofore thoroughly establishment Greenspans. Maybe it's at least partly because, as he himself admitted and later denied saying, he doesn't know much about economics. Or, as it turns out, much of anything else. And if Biden ends up getting the veep nod, McCain's (fictional) foreign-policy advantage is done for.

Which would bring McCain full circle, turning him into what he once despised, a butt-boy for the very same thumpers who worked him over in South Carolina in 2000 at Fredo's behest.

Pump Chumps

These are incredibly silly people:

A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.

Usually when you hear about hardcore saps like these, they are resolutely engaged in equally useful activities, such as looking for the image of the Virgin Mary in a jelly doughnut. I suppose it's easier than, for example, understanding demand destruction, or realizing that this is a tremendously complicated process which will shortly resume course, economically and geopolitically.

They do deserve some credit for realizing that concrete measures such as carpooling and conserving gasoline are important. But the idea that beseeching your supreme being for months on end results in a whopping 20¢ drop -- to a price that's still twice what it was just a couple years ago -- and that constitutes some sort of success, well, talk about lowering the bar. Not to mention exactly how they are getting to all these gas stations all over the country; I suppose they're being miracled there by divine teleportation.

Battle Plan

Michael Moore is making sense. The only reason this thing is running so close is because the Dems have typically conceded the national security issue with their ham-fisted tactics. It does no good to complain about Republican failures, differentiating themselves from incompetence, and then turn around and embrace belligerent policies on Iran and Israel, as Obama as done in an attempt to tack "center". It merely, as Moore points out by way of Harry Truman, blurs the distinction between the fake Republican and the real one, and we know who usually wins that one.

The current Russian invasion of Georgia is a perfect example of this syndrome. (Chris Floyd has been exhaustive in his analysis on the subject, light-years ahead of practically every MSM take.) Here is a textbook example of the administration's manifest failures, wrapped up in a nice neat package. Bush's failure to recognize Putin as the crafty restorationist he has turned out to be is paramount in all of this. Conventional wisdom has had it that Iran is the chief regional beneficiary of the Iraq War, but what about Russia? Who has profited more in terms of a pure money-to-power ratio, in converting ramped-up oil profits to leverage and influence? Iran has a weak sister next door to it, but Russia has Europe under its thumb now.

Georgia was the ideal wedge for Putin to drive between us and the Euros, and Bush and McCain gave him the perfect provocations to do so, in making hollow promises to Saakashvili, in encouraging NATO expansion into the Caucasus(!), in thinking that encircling the Russians was a viable option at this point. This is the Great Game at its highest level, and the Bushies have failed spectacularly, as has McCain, whose lobbyist advisors have got him balls-deep in this pooch.

These people seriously have no clue what they're doing, and all Obama needs is a way to distill that to a bite-size phrase, since the average 'murkin has trouble finding the American state of Georgia on a map. Sending Joe Biden over as a counter-move to McCain's overt interference (talk about presumptuous) is a start, but only if Biden can return with ideas that draw a stark contrast to the Fiery Wreck that defines the decision-making processes of the administration and its potential extensions. They cannot keep me-tooing their way through things in misplaced efforts to look tough.

Handled wisely, the Georgia issue is one that can and should be made to blow up in Straight Talk's face, emblematic of all the wretched incompetence of his buddies. But as Moore points out, there has to be a willingness to engage McCain proactively on these issues, and draw tangible distinctions. This chickenshit "my opponent's a good man, we just disagree on specifics" boilerplate -- who needs it? It serves no purpose; it merely glosses over important differences in how serious events could be handled or even prevented. Georgia was highly preventable, but hell, what's to stop Ukraine's restive Transnistria province from giving a resurgent bear sufficient pretext to slap down another, larger former province from getting too many bright ideas about westernizing.

Saakashvili is on record as saying that Putin deliberately and repeatedly told Georgia to stick its resolutions and promises up its ass, and no doubt Putin's just itching to tell Yulia Tymoshenko that he's got an Orange Revolution in his pants. (I know I am.) Whatever else the guy is, there's no mistaking where he stands. It's just mind-boggling that an amateur like Bush seriously thought he had a handle on this guy. Putin's a fucking KGB colonel who's an expert in judo and chess, while Bush has yet to provide convincing evidence of a single skill or talent, marketable or otherwise. Playing dress-up doesn't count, unless you're five years old.

The armchair warriors of the cryptofascist right level their vicious threats and lies without hesitation, most of them idle, some of them not, more of them undoubtedly to come. There is no counterpart to them, political or otherwise, as the fellow travelers of "the left" were long ago co-opted, to the point where their putative political avatars still have trouble breaking out of their bad habits. Even if they are able to break those habits sufficiently to win the election, they must understand that they still have to deal with a halfwitted, easily bamboozled corporate media, and an increasingly ridiculous population that (as even the populist Moore points out) would rather slave away for peanuts, get drunk and watch Deal or No Deal, then vote out of spite and ignorance rather than simply pay attention to who's condemning them to such a life.

But then, as we all know, since both candidates are bankrolled by many of the same entities, maybe there's more of a motive to the Democrats' measured diffidence than anyone wants to acknowledge. After all, if Obama loses, he goes back to his lifetime peerage in the Senate, along with all the other contestants in this year's dog show. It's the widening bottom of the economic pyramid that bears the actual consequences.

Pick a Winner

Let's hear from all of you out there -- what are the names you'd like to see (or, failing that, realistically think you'll see) picked as running mates? Who do you want, who do you like, who can you live with? Either party, any reason, whether ideological or practical, who will these guys pick, who should they pick and why, anything and everything.

For that matter, who might have been better party nominees, in your opinion? Show me whatcha got.

Doing the Jeebus Dance

So the candidates for the office of Preznit of these here Yewnighted States have been (one assumes) at least electorally coerced into participating in yet another tedious evangelical dog-and-pony showthe, ahem, purpose-driven summit. The Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg has the pre-game warmup, letting the famously jovial Warren swing the fungo bat to his heart's content. After the usual round of boilerplate questions, and Warren's predictable digressions into the importance of civility -- or at least the veneer of it -- the interview caps thusly:

JG: Some people wonder why this event is happening in a church.

RW: I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he's making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It's entirely appropriate for me to ask what is their frame of reference.

Let's cut through the horseshit and deconstruct this a bit -- when people of Warren's ilk talk about "the separation of church and state", they mean the inequitable relationship where the state stays out of their business (and as always, business is good) while they proffer various electoral carrots and sticks based on the premise of a monolithic flockbloc. It is an unmistakably distinct bargain, whether it is being proposed by Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, or in this case Rick Warren.

To his credit, Warren seems to be much less dogmatic than his ideological ancestors, but still, there is no mistaking the deliberate conflation of politics and superstition. All that stuff about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's apparently does not apply, or else it doesn't mean what they think it means (or hell, what I thought it meant, and it seemed pretty clear).

This is not to say that one's political views can't be informed by the moral underpinnings of their faith. But conversely, Warren and the rest of them need to internalize the fact that agnostics and atheists can and do have very serious and rigorous moral precepts as well. Implicit in their meanderings is that since that code is not inscribed in an ancient, often abused collection of Levantine superstitions, it cannot exist, at least not to the more, um, tangible extent their divinely-ordained text says it does.

The position of imperial manager, while largely figurehead, does have some important components. This is a pivotal moment in this country's history; all our relationships and fortunes are at key points that can easily change for the worse if we continue to fuck around with encouraging people to drone out and vote their gut, or "pray for guidance" or whatever piffle they're being spoon-fed. Given that context of seriousness (even if, like me, you believe the system's rigged in the first place), why are we fooling around with belabored tautologies, waiting for some megachurch proprietor's imprimatur? Maybe Goldberg should have considered asking that question.

Crystal Balls

The difference between political prognostication and predicting the outcome of the upcoming football season is that the pigskin pickers generally know what they're talking about and don't dance around the facts. And they're usually more accurate.

Yet for all the breathless analysis and number-crunching that has convinced observers Obama is en route to an epic victory, there is one key historic fact that is often overlooked — most popular vote landslides were clearly visible by the end of summer. And by that indicator, 2008 doesn’t measure up.

In five of the six post-war landslides (defined as a victory of 10 percentage points or more) the eventual winner was ahead by at least 10 percentage points in the polls at the close of August, according to a Politico analysis of historical Gallup polls. Over the past week, however, Gallup’s daily tracking poll pegs Obama ahead of John McCain by a margin of 2-5 percentage points.

I think historical data may be practically useless for these attempts, seriously. For one, campaigns have become focus-marketing groups, poring through the offal of polling data looking for this or that sliver to poach. In the process each party is essentially writing off 40%, and just competing for that last twenty. They always claim different, and they always revert to form. Obama may be a mild exception in that, but even then more in the results than anything; he would be less likely to try to govern with a 51% "mandate".

Let's face it -- if McCain were able to pull this off after eight years of non-stop monumental Republitard fuckuppery, of basically instituting "suck it" as an operational policy guidelne for everything from foreign relations to hiring DoJ staffers, he would crow about a 50.0001% victory as carte blanche. And he'd be right to do so. Power belongs only to those who assert themselves and seize it. Ask Vladimir Putin, either you have balls or you don't; only a simp asks their opponent if they'd mind giving up the reins for a while. [Mocking Homer Simpson voice: "Oooh, let's hold the reins together! Tra-la-la, here we go gathering nuts in May!"] At some point the battered wife has to get wise and either leave the bastard or fight back; capitulation to assholes merely emboldens them. They are never going to stop being assholes, because there is no disincentive to being one.

Perhaps more importantly, historic campaigns were not saddled with such a technologically-enabled cohort of media morons and polling homunculi tracking their every fart. Politico is a perfect example of this modern phenomenon, and Charles Pierce touches on the root of the situation -- these people have no off-season, so they spend a great deal of their time in story-churn mode, turning up meaningless things and pretending they're stories, inventing crude subjective angles through which to perceive the people they cover.

This is an industry that has sprung up around an entire subset of Beltway cyberloafers who do very little but talk to each other, find out who's gossiping about what, and "report" that, permalinking each other along the way. It's turned it into a perpetual campaign; they probably already have their templates set up for the day after the inauguration, no matter who it is. If it's Obama, he has to contend with the Clintons while building a consensus for the '12 campaign (instead of, say, finding out how he's going to be able to clean up Fredo's messes); if it's McCain they'll wonder if he'll make it to 2012, or if he should start grooming a successor. It's political Mad Libs.

“This may sound kind of harsh, but if the Democratic nominee were a white male from a red or purple state, the theory would be dead on that this would be set up, there would be a very, very high probability for a Democratic landslide,” said Brad Coker, the managing partner of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

Which is why, as much as it pains most of us, I still think Bayh's got the inside track on the veep nom. He inoculates Obama from the xenophobes and assorted Appalachian morons, bitter codgers who don't know their assholes from their elbows but think they know something about that uppity nigra.

Obama also has to deal with the hypocrites of the media, who barely conceal their crushes on McCain and their weird disdain for Obama. Republicans understand something about these media assholes that Democrats seem not to -- they are (well, sorta) human, in that they would rather have their egos stroked than simply do their damned jobs. McCain plays grab-ass with them the way Junior did, while people like Obama and Edwards, smart as they are, think they'll win these tools over by talking about how much better their ideas are. Dudes, have you seen what people will sit through on the teevee lately? It's either idiots humiliating themselves for chump change, or cartoon blowhards like Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck on a channel that has the word "News" in its name.

I mean, I still can't believe that Cokie Fucking Roberts, an old-money to-the-manor-born hack if ever there were one, had the gall to complain about Obama visiting his grandmother in Hawaii. Fine, "Cokie", suppose you tell us all where you go on vacation, how many more houses you have than Obama or the reg'lar folk you claim to speak for. It's horrible to think that some impressionable halfwit might see that, and think that such a person knows something about anything. The only thing people like that know is where to schmooze and starfuck their way a little further in their imitation of life. It's galling to think that a person with such despicable observations and opinions could make any difference.

It is all an epic bamboozlement, a 24/7/365 sideshow to distract people from the upward wealth transfer, the grand theft being enabled by the aforementioned Roberts and her worthless colleagues, while they line their own pockets, all without any identifiable skills. It's a pretty neat trick, now that I think about it. Where do I get mine?

Some separation and momentum should take place after the conventions, with the running mates picked and the usual perpetually aggrieved groups placated. And the debates should be an amusing blowout, not that necessarily helps.

It is also no small thing that Obama has had to contend with the Clintonista crybaby faction, a sizable chunk of idiocy that refuses to accept their loss, and will not stop stamping their wittle feet until they are duly genuflected to, at the convention and beyond. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on; if they fuck this up with their pathetic whinging they can count on being finished for good. If they think that throwing the election sets their gal up to swoop in in '12, they've been hitting the kool-aid nearly as hard as the Bush dead-enders. I don't know about you but I'd be done with voting altogether; what would be the point?

Where the Elite Beat the Meat

Ten bucks says that when Cokie Roberts goes on vacation -- somewhere besides up her own ass, anyway -- it ain't to fuckin' Myrtle Beach. And if it is, it sure as hell isn't in some working-class area of the town, which as I've heard it from several people who have vacationed there, is primarily known for bikers and pussy during vacation season.

The ofay race-baiting from these half-assed chumps is one thing. But this constant preening "elitist" bullshit, like they can be found at your local Stuckey's working on a chicken-fried steak and home fries....beyond tedious. These people are every bit as phony as they keep trying to paint these high-falutin' pols (well, Dummycrats anyhow -- no way they're going to say anything about Saint Barbecue's seven houses and eight-figure net worth).

But then, as I always say, these assholes pretend to talk to us, but are really just talking to each other, while counting on enough of us to be dumb enough to tune and think their self-indulgent jabber means a goddamned thing.

Days of Whine and Poses

These people just never stop:

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

....

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

I can only speak for myself, but had I not voted for Edwards in the primary, it would have been Obama. This is exactly like the Gorons' insistence that all those Naderistas would have automatically given Al what had been comported to him by divine fiat. Which is a load of crap, to put it mildly.

Hell, if you must go there, maybe if Puffy hadn't mistaken the Oval Office for a happy-ending massage parlor, people wouldn't have gotten so sick of all things Clinton-Gore that they handed the keys over to the village idiot. Is that where Wolfson wants to take this? Because that's certainly one logical conclusion.

....And I Feel Fine

Shorter car guy:

Self-righteous preening environazis with their fruity bumper-stickered toastermobiles are not going to castrate me.

I actually feel for the guy to a certain extent, I really do. A great car, classic or modern, is a work of art, a feat of engineering, a vessel of innovation, a labor of love. Unfortunately we have conditioned ourselves into believing that they are also penis extensions, and that our illusions about our status need to be broadcast through our product choices. Okely-dokely then. See how much longer that lasts when oil starts heading north again -- as it will once the summer's incremental demand destruction has been reapportioned.

Enjoy sport/pleasure drives and auto racing while you can, because another few years of China and India ramping up auto ownership and gas demand, coupled with a burgeoning current account deficit going into China's already overflowing pockets -- well, supply and production are already maxed out, so who starts getting more out of the existing margin, the people with cash or the people without?

Car Guy doesn't have to take the word of Ed Begley or whatever arugula-humping twit he thinks is trying to hypocritically impose major lifestyle concessions on him. Hyman Rickover put it pretty well:

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.

The weekend warrior taking his Shelby out for a spin is not really the problem, so much as the millions of grocery schooners being used for the most mundane errands on a daily basis. That's where the most excessive waste is adding up, and that's where you start addressing the problem.

Or not; we'll see how far the rugged independence of defensive indignation gets us when Jeebus lets the wells run dry despite all our pious entreaties and increasingly reckless bargaining.

It's the End of the World As We Know It....

In which the cranky bear continues to awake from its hibernation and assert itself once again, with pipeline-routing interests at stake. Russia will certainly keep using its resurgent power to shift influence eastward, pending Euro complaisance, since they really have no choice in the matter. Georgia has no leverage here, and their good buddy Fredo is just going to leave them twist in the wind, so it should be over quickly enough. But Pooty-Poot will have made his point, one that the next president gets to deal with on top of everything else.

Sidekick to Failure

Thinking about Obama's veep options earlier highlights the serious contrast between what he has to choose from and what McCain's got to work with. Supposedly even Lieberputz has wormed his way onto the short list, which would be great news -- for Obama. Plus Holy Joe would then have the dubious distinction of helping to doom a ticket from each party.

But that Lieberman might even be seriously (or hell, even humorously) considered simply emphasizes this dearth of choices for McCain. The only other remotely viable choice -- aside from tapping an unknown -- would be Romney, and then only because as a corporate tool, he can bring in the cash. But the god-bothering nutbase McCain needs to coax to the polls would be put off by Mittens' queer pioneer-Scientology beliefs. Mormon politicians obviously do quite well in the Rocky Mountain states, and have since before Mo Udall. Outside that sparse electoral region, not so much.

Ironically, Mormonism is by far the least worrisome feature about Romney, a wholly political creature cobbled together from stage hair and an empty suit, an unsettlingly smooth career corporate raider waiting for further instructions. The more people find out about him, the less they'll like him.

This is why McCain has held off so long to pick a running mate -- there's just nothing to choose from, the usual gaggle of washed-up morons, each bringing their own bucketful of negatives to the table. Indeed, that's how McCain himself got the nod in the first place; his media butt-boys who have coddled and excused him for years kept up their fine work and bought him donuts, and once America's Mayor turned out to be the self-serving douchebag everyone already knew him for, and Ol' Fred decided he'd grifted enough monorail loot from the rubes and ambled off stage, that left Straight Talk.

Obama has several choices that will probably solidify and/or increase his numbers, while virtually all of McCain's options are practically guaranteed to hurt his. It's looking like Bob Dole all over again.

Jesus Cramp

I had thought that sensible people had long ago forgotten Hal Lindsey and his apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo, but an acquaintance (a very nice guy, but he and people like him are what's wrong with the voting process -- he admits that he doesn't know much about the people or policies he's voting on, and so prays for guidance on whom to vote for) swears by Lindsey's claptrap, so I had to mosey through WorldNutDaily and see for myself. The headline, just a hair north of "Obama and Bat Boy Have Love Child in John Edwards' Basement" country, does half the work for me.

There are no surprises in Lindsey's burbling horseshit, not a one, but supposedly the guy considers himself a Christian, and in their mythology one of the primary betrayals of Jesus was not just the crucifixion itself, but the denial and calumniation of him. Lindsey counters those very teachings he proclaims to uphold.

Barack has apologized to the French and Germans for Americans who are too ignorant to learn their language before embarking on their once-in-a-lifetime two-week visit abroad.

This is a profound contortion of what Obama has said, which is essentially that learning a foreign language in school (any language, not necessarily French or German) is practically guaranteed to upgrade any American's skill set in a globalized job market. This is such an obvious point it shouldn't have even needed to be said, but Lindsey is no doubt spoon-feeding the bozos who take that apocryphal Ma Ferguson quote seriously.

And yet, not true. No American politician in their right mind would hit a high-profile gig in Europe and invoke ugly American stereotypes, and then apologize for them. And Obama certainly did not do anything of the sort. But Lindsey counts on the notoriously thin skin of his audience to be reflexively offended by something that never happened.

He's apologized for the simple Midwestern rednecks who, forced to cling to religion and guns to justify their antipathy, just can't help themselves.

Another lie. There was no "apology" involved; this was merely another attempt to figure out why large groups of people keep enthusiastically voting directly against their own self-interests. Obama's explanation is as likely as anyone else's, I suppose, but there was no apology involved, simply a somewhat ham-fisted attempt to elucidate how these goobers might be won over by common sense, in a situation that Obama had assumed was off-the-record.

The reason Lindsey goes through these logical contortions is to bolster his own point, one that reeks of defensiveness. In Lindsey's brain-scrambled dimension, any attempt to right the ship of state, and identify, correct, and undo past and current wrongs where possible is an admission of error. And since these whackjobs consider the U.S. to be God's True Promised Kingdom, they conflate the country with their sky-buddy. Criticize America, and you're telling God that His wife is fat or something. Big no-no.

And Lindsey knows that he's lying here -- he's got links to newspaper articles satirizing Obama's messianic pretensions, but nothing for his assertions about Obama apologizing to the Eurotoffs for his retard hillbilly cousin.

America has never faced so many different crises at the same time in living memory. The war with al-Qaida and Islamic terror, the Iran crisis, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, the rising price of oil, the falling dollar, enemy acronyms like OPEC, NAM, OIC, U.N. ...

Indeed. Many of these crises have been created or exacerbated by the current regime. The idea that not just Obama in particular, but the 90% of the planet that stands against the Cheneyites in general is that knowing something about how the world works actually has some importance, and that responsibility and accountability are critical.

Even making the caveat that, at this stage of human geopolitical development, there is going to be a hegemon, and as such, the U.S. presents the least malicious option of hegemony, the fact is that we're slipping behind ascending hegemons. Obviously, this is in no small part because people keep allowing themselves to be bamboozled by superstition and outright hucksterism, smooth-talking assholes with a rarely-thumbed Bible in one hand and a script of lies in the other.

[Update: Time inexplicably lowers the bar by chronicling the ravings of some of these Left Behind goobers.

Everything from Obama's left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity.

John McCain is also left-handed. So is Bill Clinton, so is Poppy Bush. So, amazingly enough, are a lot of people, possibly even some Left Behind readers. I expect sites that explicitly cater to the worst sorts of dipshit tendencies of the American electorate, such as WhirledNutDaily, to spend time chronicling the straitjacketed utterances of a horrid little sliver of weirdos. Even though I don't expect much out establishment boilerplate such as Time, I would have thought them at least smarter than to bother with the sort of people who a generation ago would have been bothering unfortunate passersby with their ridiculous babble. Then again, for an industrialized nation, this country is infatuated with superstition, awash in it on a level that would make a Borneo witch-doctor uncomfortable.]

Cockroach Olympics

Overemployed sack of shit scuttles out from under a rock to offer his opinion, which oddly never seems to change:

Republican strategist Karl Rove said on Face The Nation Sunday that he expects presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama to choose a running mate based on political calculations, not the person's readiness for the job.

"I think he's going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice," Rove said. "He's going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he's going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He's not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president."

So let me get this straight -- a candidate for president might base his choice for VP at least in part on that person's electoral strengths in strategic regions? No shit? Not that it's guaranteed to work; John Edwards couldn't even carry his home state in '04, and the less said about Lieberman as veep candidate in 2000, the better (not to mention that Gore couldn't carry his own home state, which would have given him an unquestioned victory).

Kaine seems like a head-fake choice anyway; he'd bring Virginia but is virtually unknown outside that state, and is probably too close in age to Obama to provide sufficient contrast to downplay the usual "lack of experience" charges. If I were putting money down on an Intrade pick or some such thing, I'd bet that Evan Bayh gets the nod, which would be at least as strategic a pick as Kaine, and with better "serious" imperial management cred, which apparently does not apply to the angry coot who thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border.

This mindless kabuki where a mendacious chump such as Rove is still being welcomed on "serious" shows to discuss "serious" policy issues, as if his career of enabling death and destruction and failure shouldn't automatically eliminate him from such considerations -- and they say the bloggerses are incivil and offensive. Time to start a new dictionary.

Rock Me Dr. Zaius

In which David Gregory is a fucking moron:

Gregory opened the show by saying, "Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome?"

Yes, and McCain must answer for Larry Craig's wide stance, and Mark Foley's page-hunting, and Denny Hastert's live-in assistant, and Huckleberry Graham's prolonged spinsterhood. Everyone knows that a party's nominee is absolutely responsible for each and every moral indiscretion, real or imagined, committed by a member of his party.

I dream of a world where shameless idiots like Gregory are compelled to find legitimate work in order to justify their continued existence.

The Mangina Monologues

Not that I expect the usual roughneck "man's man" archetype out of every single fellow testosterone farmer, and Jeebus knows that when he's on his game, few can match wits with The Ocicat Whisperer. Still, I find it difficult to believe that an adult heterosexual male can spend so much time watching ballet, and is holding out for the sequel to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (a movie which one assumes had made its point the first time around) over the sequel to a creatively exhausted franchise which has undergone a genuine rejuvenation. Maybe he was kidding. It's hard to tell, which is not a good sign.

I admit to being pretty tired myself of the seemingly endless supply of profound opinions on What Batman Means, one way or t'other, and I haven't even seen the freaking thing yet. It's an action movie based on a comic book; belabored pronunciamentos on its ontological significance might be overthinking it a tad. And yet, reverting to giggly adolescent girlhood had not occurred to me. Surely a Steel Vaginas bonbon-and-comfort-food party can't be far off. Homeslice might want to rent a Harley for the weekend and hit a steakhouse en route to a B&B for a romantic romp with the wife, if only to prevent ending up on the same menstrual cycle as Vageena Hurtz.

Fear and Loathing

As frustrating as emotionally needy, gang-faxing evangelicals are with their obsessive bowdlerizing of the people's airwaves, they've got nothing on self-censoring publishers, deathly (literally) terrified of antagonizing violent religious psychopaths.

This is the wrong path to take, because it legitimizes the aggression typified by, for example, the lunatic who shot and sliced up Theo van Gogh. It tells these pussy-fearing, child-raping fanatics that their tactics of intimidation work, that if they riot, cartoonists will be afraid to draw "offensive" cartoons. People should not be afraid to write books or songs, or draw cartoons. I'm surprised this even needs to be said. Yet just the shadow of their retribution becomes enough to affect behavior, which of course is just what they want.

The only way the more virulent strains are going to be housebroken is when they get that sometimes there are things in life you find deeply offensive, and that you just have to deal with it and move forward, that lashing out in psychotic fury is unacceptable. People who are willing to kill and/or die for their Imaginary Friend, regardless of which name brand of Friend, need to get over themselves, not have the rest of the planet walk around on eggshells for fear of angering them.

Better yet, if they're in such a rush to meet Allah or Jesus or whoever, what the hell are they waiting for? Go already.

The Deerhunter

Another hard-hitting exposé from America's Most Trusted News Source (well, next to The Daily Show). This is too easy; I can see why people make a career out of this sort of thing. Beats workin'.

I have no particular opinion on this story, except that I dig Eliza Dushku like a fat kid love cake, to paraphrase Fiddy Cint. She eats what she kills, so I don't see what the problem is, although elk (does the "reporter" know the difference between elk and deer?) hunting in Oklahoma sounds peculiar, possibly somewhat canned, though certainly a challenge with a bow and arrow. But in and of itself, sounds tasty. The animal-rights folks might do more good if they concentrated on, say, the brutal factory-farming industry.

99 Problems (and a Bush Ain't One)

So it turns out that the Enquirer was right, everyone else was wrong, and Edwards is a lying douche. And kudos on his choice; apparently she's had so many cocks in her Edwards had to double-park his on her ass for an hour and wait his turn. And the kid's really his or she's telling the truth about it being the other guy in the campaign organization, homiez passin' a chickenhead between them, which either way spells class with a capital K. The whole thing is just so clichéd and Primary Colors, when you get right down to it.

Now begins the tedious process of grilling the librul MSM on why they "held off" on the story. Um, because the only allegations were being funneled anonymously through a tabloid rag, with no corroborating evidence, and Edwards is a politically powerful man who made his money as a courtroom pit bull. Not exactly a guy you need smacking you upside the head with a libel suit, if you don't have to. Hell, we should also ask why the librul MSM, in its vigorous hunting of poor ol' Fredo, never pursued the Enquirer's stories on him drinking again.

Or better yet, as I said before, why no one's wondering about the timing here. It's convenient, almost as convenient having an unresolved domestic terrorism case suddenly wrap up neatly over a summer weekend when no one's paying attention. Edwards insists that the affair was brief and in 2006, which is almost certainly a lie, since not one thing he's said in all this has proven to be true, and he apparently has been funneling hush money to her for some time. But if he's the father, that puts things at more like mid-2007, which would make him borderline retarded, seeing as how he was about to embark on a presidential campaign. Forget the moralizing -- what if this dumbass had won the nomination?

Yet this never came up on the radar until now, at least two years since the relationship commenced, and probably a year since it cooled or ended, and all the Enquirer will say is that they were "tipped". Just in time to force the (distant) third-place Dem candidate into self-defenestration a couple weeks before the convention. As always, cui bono? This is about as accidental as Diaper Dave Vitter's madam stringing herself up in a shed, instead of taking her extremely valuable secrets to the free marketplace.

Babydaddy

Recently there have been hints and allegations of John Edwards' supposed improprieties, initiated by the National Enquirer and propagated by Slate's resident unibrow homunculus (and porter of Ann Coulter's bag of oats) Mickey Kaus. No doubt much "did he or didn't he" and "is it our business" handwringing has gone on in other circles. Not here, mind you; while photographs of Edwards entering the woman's apartment have been alleged, none have been produced, which tends to damage one's credibility (unless again you're Mickey Kaus, in which case you should probably wax your back and make some new friends).

And this is the same font of journalism that alleges that Bush has been drinking (which would explain a great deal), so we have to decide what and whom we believe. Still, apparently no father is listed on the birth certificate, and no one seems to be in much of a rush to do a DNA test to simply confirm that Edwards aide Andrew Young is, as the woman claims, the father of the child, thus vindicating Edwards and getting this over with.

As for the moral implications and whether it's "our" business, it seems like a no-brainer -- I think 99 out of 100 random people would agree that a person who would cheat on a cancer-stricken spouse, much less have an accidental family with them, is an indecent person. And no, it's not our business except where such a person would be in the public eye, especially talking about policy issues and political endorsements, which would be Edwards. Like it or not, credibility is undermined, and Edwards is in an impossible spot. If he speaks out, he lends credence to the willingly gullible; if he refuses to engage it because it's beneath him, he looks like he's hiding something.

Which is no doubt the real point of this "story", which I do not believe but think that at some point, either Edwards or Young will end up having to take public steps to absolve Edwards. It's muddied the waters, it's put a person who, next to the Clintons, would have been the most powerful advocate for Obama in the fall, on the sideline for the duration. This is a politically motivated smear job, obviously. It prospectively takes Edwards out of the endorsement/veep/cabinet sweepstakes, and robs Obama of an important ally.

The most interesting question about this whole story is not whether or not it's true, but whose fingerprints are on it. Maybe it's Karl Rove's audition for a role in a McCain administration.

Persecuted

Via alicublog, a fascinating and depressing exercise in shameless tendentiousness rears its ugly ass.

With juicy cameos from every closeted Hollyweird conservatard, from Sideshow Bob to Angelina Jolie's crazy dad to Gary Coleman (the last of whom, to be fair, may or may not actually be conservative, but would show up to the opening of an envelope if his next few meals were comped). And they passed on Larry the Cable Guy to hand the starring role to Chris Farley's brother. I mean fuck, people, reckanize greatness when it's in your face!

I've been a fan of a lot of Zucker's stuff over the years -- even BASEketball -- but the more Hayes (who has the balls to call Joe Wilson a serial fabulist, when Hayes himself would have trouble getting an order of bacon and eggs straight) describes these painfully unimaginative, unfunny scenes as if they were polemic gems uncovering some hidden truth that the libruls won't let you hear, the worse it gets.

In all seriousness, they keep mentioning this word "satire", and I don't think that word means what they think it means. Satire is supposed to have a nugget of truth, duh. It hasn't been the ACLU that's been instrumental in getting 4th amendment and habeas corpus cases to the Supreme Court, it's been military lawyers risking their careers to speak out against something that nauseates them, something that they know intrinsically is un-American. The goal is not to give every terrorist a handjob and a suitcase full of money, it's to keep from treating every American like a terrorist. It's not nearly as complicated as they try to make it seem, but nor is it as simplistic as their idiotic attempts portray.

And in a war that has lasted longer than WW2, longer than the Civil War, where exactly do these terrible know-nothing protests they try to satirize take place, aside from universities? Like it's Vietnam all over again, when nothing could be further from the truth. "Overpopulation - Gay Marriage is the Answer!" reads one snappy satirical protest sign. Ow, ow, I'm splittin' a side! That is some grade-A satire all the players can and should be proud of. For too long upright heterosexuals and war supporters alike have been forced to hide in fear, in the attics of David Zucker and Jon Voight and other daring souls, from hordes of marauding fags and pacifists.

Some pretty choice hysteriquotes throughout, but some more stridently hilarious than others.

Eventually, the conversation turns from policy to punditry. Grammer, who is friends with Ann Coulter, says he quoted her once to some of the young people who work for him.

"'Ann Coulter,'" he says, recalling their horror and assuming their voice. "'She's the antichrist.' And I said: 'What the f-- do you know about the antichrist? You don't even believe in Christ.'"

Okely-dokely then, Sideshow Bob, howzabout this instead -- she's a liar, a calumniator, a prevaricating circus geek with the ethics of a swamp rat. No, she's not the antichrist, dear boy, merely an enthusiastic plagiarist and inventor of vicious fables to entertain people too stupid to know that she's lying to them. So, you smug, poncey smartass, what exactly has all that to do with one's religious belief, or lack thereof?

Or this one:

Robert Davi, who plays the lead terrorist in the Zucker film, joins us as the discussion turns from policy to the cable pundit shows. Davi is one of those actors with an instantly recognizable face--he was the villain in the Bond film Licence to Kill--but whose name is unknown to most of the country.

"I can't stand Keith Olbermann," says Davi. "Jesus Christ, I want to slap that guy."

....

Eventually, the conversation turns to the war and the opposition to it--the subject of their current project. "No one on the left wants to admit that radical Islamists want to kill Americans, the Jews--everyone in the West," Davi says. "I try to talk to my friends on the left and they just don't get it. Most of them have never even heard of Sayyid Qutb. How can you have an intellectual discussion about the war we're in without knowing who Sayyid Qutb is?" he asks, raising his voice so that actors from other tables glance over to see what's causing the commotion. JFK concentrates on his food.

Indeed, you don't want to make eye contact with ol' Pineapple Head when he's rolling, so you can't blame "JFK" for concentrating on his food. And Davi's right -- people should know who and what Qutb was, a vicious peddler of lies and smears explicitly meant to energize hatred and fear among revolutionary groups. Sound like anyone we know?

Now, Qutb has been dead and gone for over four decades, but people have long memories in that part of the world, and have little else to do but nurse their grievances and avoid the secret police in whatever "democratic" ally they happen to fester in. Perhaps if Nasser hadn't tortured and executed Qutb to make an example of him, he would not be considered such an example by the people who still remember him.

You know what else they remember, what else motivates a lot of these nutjobs, including most notably Osama bin Laden? The Balfour Declaration. Paraphrasing Davi, I don't see how anyone can have an intellectual discussion about the war we're in without knowing about the Balfour Declaration and its long-term effects. Do you know who Gertrude Bell was, pally, huh, huh, do ya, do ya? Jeez. Is it remotely possible that if you don't swoop in like the hand of God and redraw an entire region of ancient cultures, deliberately bordering them in with hated rivals so you can loot their only valuable resource, they won't hate you as much?

Zucker himself strikes a rather somber chord, after an all-over-the-map profile, culminating in him becoming a rented video thug for the sort of creeps who smeared Max Cleland just to get a waste of oxygen like Saxby Chambliss into the Senate.

"Obama is not qualified to be president, and it'll be a disaster," says Zucker, who then pauses as if he's said something he should have kept to himself. "Shouldn't I be allowed to say that?"

Oh my. The poor dear's risking so much, coming out of his conservatard tearoom with his closeted friends to bravely stand up and say, "Yes! We will ridicule Barack Obama not with empirical "facts" and "debate" and "accurate portrayal", but with fucking Gary Coleman tossing a car-wash sponge to an off-camera Obama." See? It's not only informative, it's entertaining. It's infotainment, as they say. The only way it could have been even more infotaining is if Coleman had pointedly asked his imaginary off-camera sidekick what, precisely, he was talkin' 'bout.

The possibilities are as endless as they are pointless, which is really the actual goal of these buffoons -- to obfuscate any true discussion of the issues they keep braying on about. They would rather invent stupidity on the "left" than have any sort of serious discussion about actual stupid people doing actual stupid things, and ruining the country and principles these oafs claim to revere.

One final (and poignant, to say the least) nugget:

Zucker and Sokoloff met Farley in April 2007. Zucker described his new film with words he had chosen carefully. "I figured he was like everyone else in Hollywood--a Democrat," Zucker recalls. "And we knew that this was not a Democrat movie." It would be a satirical look at the war on terror, he told Farley, and explained that he and Sokoloff were political "moderates."

Farley hadn't seen any of Zucker's ads and assumed he was like everyone else in Hollywood--a Democrat. So he answered with some strategic ambiguity of his own. "I consider myself a centrist," he said, worried that they might press him more about his political views.

Now, I can maybe see where a newcomer like Farley might be just wary enough of his new surroundings and lack of heavy connections to downplay his opinions and remain apolitical at a casting call. Pretty much everybody does that at a job interview, regardless of the job. I know, I know, it's a fucking shock to all, I'm sure. You thought you could just waltz in to your next interview with your Sharpton-Tancredo button pinned to your earlobe, and your Ché t-shirt, and The Man would just have to sit there and take your guff. Not so fast, Huey Newton!

But please -- the idea that Zucker, in casting an unknown for his circle-jerk, was worried about Farley possibly being a heathen Dummycrat? Come on. There are plenty of people out there who just want to work regardless of politics, and if they don't, fuck 'em. Maybe Zucker was just afraid that such a creature couldn't possibly grok the brilliant subtleties and rigorous intellectualism powering this momentous comedic achievement.

Feh. These paranoid assholes still do not get that the problem is not their politics, it's that they're just not funny. They have no sense of humor about themselves, and they have no reasonable way to lampoon their ideological foes, so they just make shit up. It's all very MAD magazine, which was fine when we were in sixth grade. But to see a group of adults so determined to live so far up their own asses may actually end up being the funniest part of the whole project. Semper fi, morons!

[Update: Sweet. A former Bush aide is suing Grammer for stealing his spec script for Swing Vote. Because if you're going to poach a script, you don't want it to be something that will make a shitload of money, like the next Batman movie. Good to see that Sideshow Bob's values end at the wallet, like any good Republican.]

[Update #2: Good lord, The Falafel Factor has blessed us with a trailer, since loofah artiste Orally himself is in this turkey. Usually you figure that the trailer is supposed to have some of the highlights of the movie; Zucker appears to be channeling whatever talent-sucking demon he conjured in producing the black rite that was Superhero Movie, while Farley will probably wither in his brother's voluminous shadow, in the niche that the more talented sibling carved in, say, Tommy Boy.

Pretzel Logic

More hijinks from Press the Meat:

SEN. KERRY: Well, John McCain was wrong about Iraq. He was wrong about why we ought to go there. He bought into a whole liberation theology about the Middle East with Paul Wolfowitz and others. It's wrong. He was wrong about oil paying for the war. He was wrong about our being greeted as, as, you know, as liberation leaders.

MR. BROKAW: Well, here...

SEN. KERRY: He's been wrong about Afghanistan not being a center of activity against us. He said no one threatens us in Afghanistan. He...

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, John McCain was right about the surge, and he had the guts...

SEN. KERRY: He's been wrong...

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...to go up against President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and, and public opinion in America because he didn't want America to lose in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Iran to win. Senator Obama took the opposite position...

SEN. KERRY: Let me comment.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...wasn't concerned about losing in Iraq. Today...

SEN. KERRY: No, he is always concerned about it.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...we're in much better position there because of the guts of John McCain, and that shows you what kind of president each will be. One has experience.

In other words, Barack Obama may have been the guy who suggested not driving into the ditch in the first place, but McCain found a credit card in the glove box with which to call a tow truck. Say, that is formidable judgment!

Oh and, al-Qaeda in Iran? Tenuous operational connections have been theorized, mostly revolving around associations between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah cells involved in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. Evidence of ongoing operational relationships appears, well, non-existent, and is generally put forth by the people looking for a pretext to attack Iran anyway.

Now, al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia seems to be another story, one that nobody from either party will ever bring up, for obvious reasons. The more Holy Joe preaches about principle, the more plain it is that that is patently untrue, or we would be at least more proactive in dealing with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

As for Kerry appearing with Lieberman, I don't get it. I don't understand why any high-ranking Democrat would appear in public with this guy. He's going to speak at the Republican National Convention, you spineless twats. The thing about the Republicans is that they would have sent this fucker into the desert a couple years ago; Kerry talks about caucusing with him next year. Fuck that noise. He'd better be in the congressional equivalent of shoveling frozen caribou shit in Nome, which I guess would be finding oxy for Rush Limbaugh.

Semantics

Trying my hand at this "Deep Thoughts" game:

There's no such thing as "alternative energy"; it's a disparaging euphemism implying lots of angst and flannel shirts. There are forms of energy that have been harnessed sufficiently so as to form entire political and economic systems dedicated to their utter preservation, no matter the costs. And there are forms of energy we are aware of, but have not bothered to innovate because it hasn't yet been made cost-effective for the aforementioned political/economic systems.

They won't do it unless we foot the bill, in which case why not bankroll new entities to do those things? Instead of paying Exxon to retrofit drilling rigs with wind turbines, so they can keep their eleven-figure quarterly revenues, why not invest less money in more diffuse, diverse startups that aren't already weighted down by obscene executive bonuses and cultural inertia?

Love, Actually

Nothing Holy Joe says these days has any import or meaning, except when it's funny, as everything on the Sunday mornin' wankfests always is:

MR. BROKAW: All right. We want to move on if we can. Among other things, Senator McCain has been very adamant about never raising taxes under any circumstances. That prompted this headline in the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal from the commentator Daniel Henninger. He said, "Is John McCain stupid? Is John McCain losing it? He said on national television that to solve Social Security `everything's on the table,' which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 ... he said: `Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't.'" Daniel Henninger concludes, "This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation."

SEN. LIEBERMAN: First, let me say that John remains all male. There's no question about that.

And we all had a good laugh at that, no doubt, although if anyone's in a position to know empirically, Lieberman is certainly on the short list. Lieberman goes on to cite his two main reasons for supporting McCain, one of which is the obvious "he's ready" malarkey, the other being that Johnny Mac is the more conciliatory, bipartisan contestant. Obviously, this is more of the usual "the sun don't shine except where our man points" hagiography that both parties indulge in, but ordinarily you would expect a diehard tool of the Mitch McConnell/Orrin Hatch type for this brand of pulp fiction.

Remember, Obama was Lieberman's protégé coming into the Senate. This is like Mr. Miyagi cozying up to Cobra Kai and mugging Daniel-san, just for the hell of it. Usually you don't expect an ongoing ratfuck to be so consistently bland and lifeless, but considering the source, it makes sense. Just out of a basic sense of justice and fair play, I do hope Obama has a deviously retributive plan for Droopy, something out of the "couldn't happen to a nicer guy" file.

Walmartyrs

As if you needed another reason not to shop there:

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if store workers unionize, the paper said.

....

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who have run the meetings didn't tell those attending how to vote in the November elections, but made it clear that voting for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, would be tantamount to inviting unions in, the Journal said.

Wal-Mart opposes proposed legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize by signing a card rather than holding a vote.

A Wal-Mart spokesman confirmed the meetings to the Journal.

"If anyone representing Wal-Mart gave the impression we were telling associates how to vote, they were wrong and acting without approval," David Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, told the Journal.

This is pretty standard stuff, actually, as anyone who has worked for a shop that considers unionizing already knows. The first thing management does is tell you that you'll all be out of jobs, which is frequently not that far from the truth. In other words, take the crumbs we give you, which in Wal-Mart's case has meant everything from shorting employees' hours just enough so that they have to go on the dole to get health care and other luxuries, to locking employees in the store overnight.

It's not unique to Wal-Mart, of course; this sort of thing is what precipitated labor innovations such as a 40-hour work week and child labor laws a century ago. It's just that Wal-Mart, because of its sheer size and scale, has simply been able to refine the process in the "modern" era, which coincidentally is looking increasingly regressive. It is most likely that enormous scale which has so far insulated it from the effects of fuel price increases.

Anyone familiar with their supply chain model (hub-and-spoke FDC systems running "just-in-time" logistics; essentially, as Jim Kunstler puts it, a "warehouse on wheels") can reasonably figure out what consequences $5 or $6 gasoline will wreak on their pricing structure, and hence their customer base. Already shipping costs are rising, whether land, sea, or (obviously) air, which is impacting supply time (especially raw materials) as well as cost, and will continue to cascade down the chain. It's just a matter of finding that price-point equilibrium where the corporation can't take it out of the hides of floor personnel anymore, and you can bet they have that regression analysis spreadsheet in the CFO's locked folder on the shared drive.

It's amazing to hear the psychologically-motivated vents of seeming relief that gas is "down" to four bucks in the last couple weeks, as if it were suddenly cheap again. Most likely it's a blip caused by short-term drops in American consumption (call it the "staycation" effect, if you enjoy trotting out that dismal coinage) which will shortly be offset by China and India. The oil companies, now that they are getting a better clue as to what the market will bear, are surely calibrating their options for the next wave of post-peak price restructuring. This is not exactly a secret.

We are addicts who about to have an intervention. Having one we can have at least some control over is probably preferable to one that's imposed on us. Part of reducing consumption is breaking from the globalized JIT supply-chain model and going for a more localized approach, which will end up being a long tail model. That doesn't mean entirely discarding the vertically-integrated doxology of globalization, but rather finding a balance. Driving smaller and smarter certainly helps, but so does remembering that nothing is free, no matter how cheap it looks sitting on that shelf with all the other crap. How and what we eat and how and what we buy will, sooner rather than later, become as important as how and what we drive.

Pot Meets Kettle

When Kathy Hilton is lamenting the "frivolous" nature of something, that's pretty goddamned bad, in several ways.

She should either explain coherently what she prefers about McCain (heh-indeedy) or throw him a fundraiser and seal the deal. Picking up a scorpion and acting all surprised and butt-hurt when he stings you just makes me wish you could have wasted more money on a candidate who was going to use your own daughter for fodder.

Cheap Talk

I think Obama is making a huge mistake by playing it safe and not taking McCain up on his um, challenge to debate at staged "townhall" meetings. Provided there are measures taken to keep either candidate from rigging the proceedings with ringers, it seems very much an opportunity to maximize Obama's strengths and McCain's weaknesses, which happen to essentially be the same. So why not? Get up there and pimp-slap the Depends off his ass.

Especially now that, as we see, a substantial chunk of Straight Talk's straight talk now consists of resentful, smug "celebrity" filler, meant to both emasculate Obama and de-emphasize his clearer command of pretty much every issue. It's probably quite effective with the mouth-breathers who are already on board or are looking for an excuse to jump, and Obama shouldn't take it too personally. If Hillary Clinton had become the nominee, right now we'd probably be seeing crude Photoshops of her muff-diving Ellen DeGeneres or something. That how these animals operate, and McCain, who was carelessly ratfucked by his good buddy George W. Bush, just to win the 2000 South Carolina primary, has learned those black arts better than most.

However, as we keep seeing, the low road wins as often as not, so if Obama thinks he's going to walk away hiding behind this high-minded horseshit, he really is out of his depth. He does not have to slap the old man around and calumniate him, but if he's not going there, he should instead prepare to engage him. Stupid attacks do not die out of their own volition, because they are inevitably enabled by a stupid media. You get no points for ignoring a loudmouthed idiot, expecting everyone to just naturally see that he's an idiot.

Like it or not, the #1 criterion that people use for voting for president is that the candidate not be a pussy. These tactics are McCain's only real chance, and he's going to run with it as far as he can.

Confederacy of Douchebags

Has Goldberg been passing stupid pills around to his dipshit colleagues or something? Once again, what's wrong with these people?

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

....

"He's too new ... and he needs to put some meat on his bones," says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

Uh, yeaahhh. It's looking like maybe Chozick got pranked by one-a them crafty triple-digit-IQ folks, on a thread that apparently Chozick herself started on that Yahoo message board, not that she mentions it.

This is what Rupert Murdoch does to newspapers, just ass-rapes what's left after the takeover and installs or promotes incompetent fools to write the dumbest fucking shit possible. This thing should have all the weight of a competitive-eating article, yet Chozick plays it as if she seriously thinks this "story" means anything other than some people are too stupid to breathe, and should seriously do us all a favor and stay home come election time. I know morons pay taxes too, but if you're going to be a fucking child about it, then stay home, get drunk, and contemplate your navel or something. Sample some of the chemicals under your bathroom sink while you're at it.

Even in the first quote, the "meat on his bones", that could very easily be construed as a metaphor, one that Chozick then shanghaied to cram into her grotesque thesis. I can definitely see one of these whinging, disgruntled Clinton cultists, with their tedious, hypocritical obsessions about "experience" (Do you think that they consider Laura Bush's eight years in the White House to be sufficient experience for a Senate run, not to mention future résumé padding? Me neither.), trotting such a lame pony around the ring and pretending it's a thoroughbred.

You want experience? You know who's got more fucking experience than Obama, Straight Talk, and Miz Hillary combined? Robert Byrd. Why don't you write in Robert Byrd or Ted Stevens, see what all that "experience" gets ya? Christ, these people are too stupid and self-indulgent to realize just how little genuine self-awareness they have. They think they want a candidate that's "just like them", for some fucking bizarre reason, but they don't even know who or what they are, if they're clinging to such moronic rationales for theoretically important decisions.

I don't know if these are all just anecdotal rubes dug up by a media that is only diligent about regurgitating stupid shit to keep the appearance of a horserace, or if they're indicative of a larger swath of chumps, a retard bloc if you will (and you might). None of these people are "like" you, you dipshits, not Obama, not McCain, not Hillary or Bush or Cheney. They are all millionaires who spend their days being gladhanded by corporate "donors", making policies that decide the fate of their constituents, the country, and the world. This is a high-stakes game that determines the direction of hundreds of millions of human lives in many different ways, and the idea that someone above the age of six years old could really be concerned that Obama doesn't eat ice cream and deep-fried shit on a stick makes me sick to my stomach. Such a person needs to go play in the freeway, mach schnell.

Note also that nowhere in her probing reportage does Chozick bother to mention the current occupant of the office, a notorious fitness freak who famously spends entire afternoons riding mountain bikes and elliptical trainers, rather than, say, engaging in proactive policy initiatives with his advisers, or whatever the fuck it is these ofay cock-smokers think it is Obama is supposed to be doing instead of a few sets of dumbbell curls. Bush has spent over 1½ years of his eight on vacation, and much of the remainder working out and rigorously watching his girlish figure. IOKIYAR, I suppose, but such a glaring similarity should be obvious even to a "reporter" who got clowned by a sock-puppet on a potemkin Yahoo thread.

More and more one gets the impression that she, Chozick, thought to herself one day that Obama looked a bit too fit or whatever, looked in Wikipedia to see how fat Taft was for the "research" angle, and decided to invent a controversy to get the cankle demographic all het up. Fortunately that group starts wheezing pretty quickly, at which point they give up and grab a 2-liter bottle of RC and a tub of fried chicken out of the fridge, and start working on some more extra chins. People, those elbows ain't gonna dimple themselves.

I mean really, this nation has been run by straight-up psychopaths who seriously contemplated shooting Navy SEALs in a false-flag incident in order to start yet another war, even though they haven't quite finished losing the other two. It is criminally negligent that even one (1) representative of the "legitimate" media waste any time at all with this mindless crap.

As always, either the story is a contrivance and therefore shouldn't have been written in the first place, or there really are a significant number of fat fucks for whom Obama's body type is a dealbreaker, in which case they deserve to languish the rest of their lives under a shitty health care system and a failing economy, with no way out. I don't mind the idea of a civil war between people who vote based on the issues, and asswipes who think they're voting for a fucking new neighbor. I wouldn't mind that one bit.

[Update: As "null" points out (in what appears to be its only marginally coherent comment) in the forum, it looks like The Onion beat this dingbat to her prize pig of an "article". With trenchant writing like this, I'm sure it won't be long before Murdoch's Folly will be availble on a roll of perforated two-ply.]

Sausage Party

Live from the Ninth Circle of Hell, it's conservatard gay porn. Bear horrific witness to the grasping, sweaty daisy chain of ideological inbreeding:

[JUNIOR]: [expletive deleted] George W. Bush calling to congratulate you on 20 years of important and excellent broadcasting.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. You've stunned me! (laughing) I'm shocked. But thank you so much.

[FREDO]: That's hard to do.

RUSH: (laughing) I know, it is.

[SHRUBBY]: I'm here with a room full of admirers. There are two others that would like to speak to you and congratulate you, people who consider you ...

... friends and really appreciate the contribution you've made.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. Put 'em on.

[CAP'N CODPIECE]: How you doing? This is my swan song? If this is all you got for me, I'm moving on.

RUSH: (laughing) No! The show's yours; take as much time as you want.

[NUMBNUTS]: Well, I'm just calling along with [Daddy Codpiece] and [the slightly less stupid and mendacious sibling]. We're fixing to have lunch here, and I said, "Listen, we ought to call our pal and let him know that we care," for you. So this is as much as anything, a nice verbal letter to a guy we really care for.

Yep, they was all jes' a-fixin' ta haves them some vittles, an' Paw sez, "Hey! Let's have us one-a them thar call-ins ta thuh El Rashbo show! Shee-it!" You gotta read the whole thing (make sure to have a bucket handy just in case) to appreciate the full-on mutual four-way ass-sucking glory of it. These people suck so bad, the light from suck takes several years to reach them.

Even more hammy and artless than Fredo's fake spontaneity at throwing a bone to their favorite propaganda arm, is his ludicrously obvious segue into Dummycrat/Obama bashing. Gee, didn't see that one comin' up the road, asshole. Real subtle, just like all the cringeworthy salad-tossing going on.

And of course Junior's in "high spirits". He always is, always will be. Things have worked out perfectly swell for him and his. Lucky sperm swims in its own pond. There was never any doubt about that outcome. Thanks to shameless cheerleaders like Limpballs, and more "conventional" enabler bozos, he never quite got the full measure of what he deserves from a truly adversarial media.

Whatever. Barring unexpectedly swift justice from The Hague, the next best punishment for these evil cretins is to permanently disengage their vile dynasty and its downstream proxies from any position of responsibility ever again. Let's start there.