Insane Clown Pussies

Fuckin' facts, how do they work?

As the Gathering of the Beckalos draws nigh, the only question is what the over/under is on the per-dipshit IQ range of these knuckle-dragging, illiterate, barely-closeted racist troglodytes. I say low double digits, probably around the 25-30 range. Maybe Tila Tequila will show up and they'll pelt her with bottles and shit, who knows?

They're such rebels -- just ask them, they'll tell ya -- taking on The Man, these sainted common folk, not realizing that a couple of robber barons are bamboozling them, as ever, and that they will throw out one set of bums for a crazier, less articulate set of bums.

Crazy Uncle Joe has a cracker of a post whacking the usual moles, but he loses the thread in this passage:

You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds.

....

Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation's saviors -- morally and intellectually right in all things.

....

So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.

Immediately they conclude that it is the American people's fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard.

....

"Ah yes," they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!" liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.

Bah. No doubt there do exist the caricatures of self-righteous bien pensant libruls, just as surely as there really do exist toothless goobers who think their broken-down Camaros are possessed (read Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus for that one). Or idiots, many of whom collect Social Security or Medicare, who were educated in public schools and take public streets to the public park for their self-contradictory anti-gubmint protests, completely indifferent to the sheer cognitive dissonance.

So yes, there are most definitely people -- some liberal, some not, most having at least some level of education but not necessarily -- looking down at the Palinoids and Beckalos. It is not, as Bageant seems to posit, mere elitism. It would be easier if that's all it was.

Rather, it is a frustration with their preening ignorance, the pride they take in knowing absolutely nothing true or factual, the bad faith with which they infuse every contrived argument and crusade of theirs, the ease with which they generate yet another imaginary tempest in another phantom teapot, rolled up in their badly-cobbled astroturf philosophy. How is that supposed to be worthy of respect, or even civil disagreement?

It would be swell if they could be honestly engaged with facts and ideas and even solutions, but they don't want that, they want something to rally against, something to hate. There's no engaging with that, any more than you can engage or reason with a bratty kid in the cereal aisle. These people are morons, and they're fucking hypocrites. I cannot figure out how an honest broker (were there one in the political arena to begin with) would get a handle on this crew.

Really, I would say the Koch brothers are the elitists in this narrative -- multi-billionaire brothers who apparently spend every waking moment figuring out how to take it with them, and bamboozle the peons into believing they've been done a favor. And it's a neat trick, truly impressive. In the last decade this country has managed to return to the Gilded Age, robber-baron levels of disparity, and roll the rubes into thinking it's in their own best interest.

Ideally, a 1-2% redistributive tax on high-flyers like the Kochs would poke in the right direction toward more diversified ownership of assets, production, and distribution. But seeing how the Kochs operate, making ever more and more, but never quite enough, and dedicating their pelf to the lowest forms of propaganda and sleazy astroturf stunts, it almost deserves to be completely redistributed. It takes some fucking balls to throw tens of millions into this "Washington is run by thieves and crooks" schtick, while simultaneous pouring millions into an army of lobbyists to ensure your mega-conglomerate can keep poisoning the planet.

But in the end, as a utilitarian and an empiricist, I can't help but admit that the Kochs are rational actors in this, even if their political power seems to be derived from the cynical manipulation of irrational actors. It's unethical, but it makes sense.

However, the people who allow themselves to be fooled by this stuff have no one to blame but themselves. They've "refudiated" facts for emotion, common sense for truthiness. They've abdicated any entitlement to a civil response to their braying nonsense. They insist that Obama is a moooslim cokehead with a fake birth certificate who is socializing America, even though the man has continued almost every single policy from the last administration.

They all talk tough and front like rugged individualists, but with all the bluster, we've yet to hear of one giving up any gubmint assistance they might receive. Real self-sufficient there, sporto. When you burn your Medicare card, then we'll be impressed.

These people are not remotely intellectually honest, they're not even pretending to be interested in that. They are motivated by spite and lies, hate and fear, and at the heart of it, they're just pissed that they're not getting what's coming to them. They will not believe you if you prove to them beyond a shadow of doubt that the people bankrolling their little short-bus-to-Warshinton distraction are every bit the privatize-profits-socialize-debt motherfuckers that Obama's buddies on Wall Street are. Meet the new boss indeedy.

Bageant needs to understand that it is not everyone else's job to try to engage their impenetrable claptrap and "compromise" with utter stupidity. I seriously have no clue what I'm supposed to say to someone who seriously thinks Barack Obama is a "socialist", any more than I would know what to say to someone who insisted that Nolan Ryan was a power forward for the Lakers.

It's not that we're unwilling to help them comprehend precisely why Obama is not a socialist, it's that we know they don't give a fuck. Facts are of no use to them; things are what they say they are. There's a legitimate reason to be concerned that people who are proud of having no use for logic or facts, who invent reality as they go along, might accrue even a toehold of power. It benefits no one, including themselves. Well, that's not entirely true -- it benefits people like the Koch brothers, and Dick Armey.

But at this rate, if the Becktards get what they think they want, they'll get what they really deserve -- a swift kick in the ass from cruel fate. Try as I might, I cannot generate a drop of sympathy for any of them. Sometimes people are just their own worst enemies, and all you can do is get out of their way, or they'll take you down with them.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Speaking of retards, I'm sure Nuh-VAD-ans are thrilled with bankrolling this happy horseshit:

Earlier this month, Harry Mortenson, D-Las Vegas, submitted a bill draft request for the 2011 Legislative session for a resolution that asserts while the preferred pronunciation of the state's name is "Ne-VAD-a," pronouncing it "Ne-VAH-da" is also acceptable.

"The bottom line is, I do not want to change the pronunciation that Nevadans use for their state," Mortenson said. "I am trying only to ask them to be tolerant of those who use the Spanish pronunciation."

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, really? These assholes have nothing better to do than legislate how something is or isn't pronounced? I despise the notion of ceremonial legislation to begin with -- if it isn't something that will actually affect someone's life, don't waste time on it -- but this is on a par with proclaiming National Broccoli Week or some such nonsense.

Actual laws have consequences -- if you break it, there is a penalty, whether a fine or a jail term. Is Mortenson proposing to levy a fine for being a jerkoff and correcting someone's errant pronunciation? I just don't understand this type of crap. Bankrolled pedantry is all it is.

Besides, everyone knows the proper pronunciation of Nevada is "unemployed".

Going Full Retard

Kirk's advice for the Simple Jack sequel, Simple Jack Goes Teabaggin'.

There are a lot of practical reasons I don't post much these days -- work, school, and family leave very little leisure time, and what time is left is ill-spent in a medium best perhaps best characterized by its response time to hot-button issues. There's not much percentage in jumping in on a story after ten thousand other mooks have already wrapped their dick-skinners around it, especially when most "stories" and "issues" really have about a 36-hour shelf life -- or none at all, for those of us with functioning basal ganglia. That's the easy answer.

The harder answer is that it's more difficult to keep up with the accelerating pace of American stupidity. This refers to both the corporate media and its -- I don't want to bother with the usual trope and say "sheep-like", because it seems an insult to friendly, harmless ungulates -- aggressively retarded audience. Everything is a cause for which the barricades must be immediately and resolutely manned. You'd think all the exercise they get from mindless raging, seizing moral high-ground, and rabid ankle-biting would work off their sloshing beer-bellies, but no such luck.

So. Fat, stupid fucks looking for shit to get weird about. Really, who can keep up with it? And yet, I suppose in the end my ass-spelunking into the ridiculous activities of my fella 'merkins qualifies as some sort of amateur anthropology. Eventually their chimp-like antics get the best of my studied indifference, and I have to WTF the situation. So like us, but with some increasingly important distinctions, such as the ability to read and comprehend fairly simple points of fact, as opposed to constantly acting like someone deliberately ran over their dog.

So it is with the ongoing, endless hoo-ha over the "Ground Zero Mosque", an ongoing narrative into the continuing dumbassificationof this doomed land of ours. (Not that America isn't a great idea, but great ideas cannot continue when they're weighed down by an overabundance of morons.)

Two protests on Sunday morning, in the normally quiet blocks north of Ground Zero, claimed to be on the side of tolerance. One camp stood in favor of the mosque and Islamic center that has been proposed for the area; the other argued against.

Around 500 of those opposed gathered in a cordoned-off area, heavily monitored by police. They sang patriotic songs and spoke of a hijacked Constitution, a renegade presidency and tolerance toward the sensitivities of New Yorkers whose relatives died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks

....

Opponents of the mosque insisted they fully supported religious freedoms, but that the location of the planned Islamic center represented an incursion on the rights of Americans who deemed Ground Zero a hallowed space. “It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site; it’s a smack in the face,” said Kali Costas, a Long Island education worker who said she was a member of the Tea Party.

"[H]ijacked Constitution", "renegade presidency". Hanh? Ex-squeeze me? Look, faced with someone whose family died in the WTC, I would at least grant them the benefit of the doubt on the "sensitivity" thing, inapropos as it is. But I literally have zero clue as to what this manufactured issue has to do with the Constitution, which has a curious lack of mention as to people's fucking feewings, or Obama, who has sidestepped taking a stand on this issue with the Astaire-like deftness with which he approaches every issue of contention, real or imagined.

But 500 people in New York City, the city so nice they named it twice, decided that the best use of a glorious summer morning was to be corralled in a free-speech zone and lob their tired-ass Mad Lib epithets at a building which, as it stands, does not even have sufficient funding to pay for the lot, much less the building. Where's a suicide bomber when you could really use one? Seriously, the collective effect on the IQ of an area infested by these gaggles of idiots must be like a sudden pressure drop, a tropical storm of stupid gathering to assault the beaches of sanity.

As one would expect, Faux News has done its part to fan the flames of stupidity, as it jibes with their teabagger promotional campaign, and their million-dollar donation to the husk of the Republican party. And yet, how many of these jabbering dipshits know about this?

Amid the howls of outrage over the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero, some political pundits on Fox News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp. (NWS), have been particularly vocal in their opposition to the project.

Last Thursday, popular Fox News host Sean Hannity said the proposed center's leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a U.S. citizen who has spent 25 years working to improve relations between the Muslim world and the U.S., wants to "shred our Constitution" and install "Sharia law as the law of the land in America." Sharia is a body of law derived from the Koran and Islamic teachings.

In fact, in his book What's Right With Islam, Rauf writes that "many Muslims regard the form of government that the American founders established a little over two centuries ago as the form of governance that best expresses Islam's original values and principles." (Page 81.) He has never publicly advocated "shredding" the U.S. Constitution or replacing it with Sharia law.

A Major Backer From the Muslim World

The stridency with which Fox News personalities attack the downtown Islamic center -- red meat for the millions who tune in each night -- is an example of the often uneasy relationship and occasionally diverging interests between many of News Corp.'s properties, in this case Fox News and its parent corporation.

For example, News Corp.'s second-largest shareholder, after the Murdoch family, is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (pictured at left, and above right), the nephew of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, and one of the world's richest men.

Through his Kingdom Holding Co., Alwaleed owns about 7% of News Corp., or about $3 billion of the media giant. He also owns 6% of Citigroup -- to which he was introduced by the Carlyle Group -- or about $10 billion of the giant bank. He's a part-owner of the famed Plaza Hotel in New York and has invested in many other prominent companies. (At one point he invested in AOL (AOL), the parent company of DailyFinance.)

Earlier this year, News Corp. invested $70 million for a 9% stake in Alwaleed's Middle Eastern media and entertainment company, Rotana, which "owns the Arab world's largest record label and about 40% of the region's movies -- most of which are Egyptian -- and operates 11 free-to-air television channels, two of which are through a partnership with News Corp.," according to Reuters. (Rotana broadcasts Fox movies and TV shows throughout the Middle East.) News Corp. has an option to double its stake in Rotana for another $70 million within 18 months.

....

Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by Alwaleed's uncle King Abdullah, is, of course, an authoritarian petro-monarchy that actually is governed by Sharia law and is known as one of the top global sponsors of terrorism. A spokesperson for the Saudi embassy in Washington says that while Alwaleed is part of the royal family, he isn't a member of the government, but rather a private citizen.

Alwaleed, like Iman Rauf (pictured at right), professes a desire to build bridges of peace and understanding between the Islamic world and the West. One man is a multibillionaire, with far-flung investments around the world, and the other is a religious cleric, whose congregation happens to be in downtown Manhattan.

Now, this is not exactly a "gotcha", afaic. I happen to be a capitalist and a (cautious) globalist at heart, and I see at least the potential in engaging with assbackward buttholes like Saudi Arabia, in the hopes of bringing them along into the 21st century -- or hell, even the 10th century. This is how progress happens, when it does, slowly, incrementally. As long as positive direction can be tracked -- an important distinction for putatively idealistic Democrats -- incrementalism can be acceptable, even desirable.

(Not to mention that there is a very real distinction between the peaceful, introspective Sufism of Rauf and the aggressive, regressive, extremist Wahhabism/Deobandism cynically endorsed as a control mechanism by the Sauds. I get that the average knucklehead at these ricockulous protests just sees towelheads regardless, but that's supposed to be the function of a free press -- to point out the crucial differences.)

But by the avowed goals of the teabaggers and the assorted morons rolled up in this particular episode of bullshit, they should be refusing to even consider watching Faux News, seeing as it is in significant part -- and yes 7% is significant -- bankrolled by someone who, however much of a businessman/philanthropist he aspires to be, still works ably and willingly within the constraints of a profoundly regressive system, one which raises every red flag these weepy, posturing fake patriots have stashed up their collective arsenal.

Put more simply for the window-lickers in the teabag crowd: if you watch Faux News, if you swallow the lies Hannity and Beck are feeding you, you are, in some small but aggregately important part, supporting the sharia system you profess to detest.

That exploding sound you just heard may be their heads exploding from the cognitive dissonance, or maybe one of these impressionable goobers finally decided to strap himself with semtex and rebar chunks and become McVeigh 2.0.

Take This Job and Love It

Like most people, I suppose I got an initial kick out of the story of Steven Slater, the put-upon flight attendant who finally said "fuck it". Good for him, say the wage-slaves and assorted peons.

So our so-called media, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, grab precisely the wrong end of the stick in this here shaggy-dog story. There are at least two enormously useful approaches they could easily have taken:

1. How airline travel has become oppressive and borderline abusive, with countless tales of passengers being herded, pushed around, left to swelter for hours on the tarmac while the airline thumbs its dick, treated like something between third-strike felons and factory-farmed chickens.


2. How work itself has become, for a great many people, borderline abusive. From pissing in a cup just to get the job, to being electronically monitored and force-fed corporate happy-talk right up to the moment the job gets outsourced to Shenzhen or Bangalore, work is less frequently an honorable pursuit that can in many cases provide a sense of discipline and even purpose, and more frequently an escalating series of unpleasant circumstances that occasionally culminates in violent provocation.
   
   Even in this festering "jobless recovery", an oxymoron right up there with "jumbo shrimp" or "Governor Palin", even people who have been unemployed for some time have a core of secret dread that they will get a new job, and it will almost be guaranteed to be one that serves only as a buffer between themselves and a cardboard box on the sidewalk. Where labor used to actually have some dignity to it every so often, even mid-range jobs frequently necessitate new and improved modes of cringing, of reading the latest Who Moved My Cheese? knock-off and pretending to swallow it whole, of forgetting how to find joy in even the simple accomplishment of useful tasks.

Instead, what do we see on the Today show this fine morning (and it is fine, friends 'n' neighbors; the weather out here in the NorCal has been spectacular the last couple weeks) but a woman Slater was briefly married to right out of high school. That's right, ladies -- pray right now to whatever temperamental phantom you grovel to that your dipshit ex-husband doesn't do something stupid and/or trendworthy, or lazy-ass reporters will be beating down your door, breathlessly asking What was he like?, even if you divorced twenty ferchrissakes years ago.

There are legitimate reasons why Slater could be perceived as a bit of a "folk hero", yet those reasons are seldom discussed. It is a consistent pattern of disengagement between media entities, and the audience they sell cars and tampons to. It is not a joke, it is a deliberate effort to ignore the serious aspects of an entertaining story, and focus disproportionately on the most inane factors of that story.

This is why every ten days or so, we are treated yet again to some fool antic involving Sarah Palin and her inbred cracker clan, whether we like it or not. It may not be as tightly scheduled as the next Two and a Half Men, but it is reliable and predictable and distracting all the same.

Fuckin' A, folks, it cannot be repeated too often -- if our professional corporate media spent half as much time talking about issues that actually affect peoples' lives as they do with this ricockulous ass-sniffing soap-opera nonsense, more people might actually get a clue.

Which is why, of course, they persist in this crap. I refuse to believe in accidents and coincidences anymore, not when they proliferate with such regularity.

Police State

Not to pick on cops, but this is the most chickenshit thing I've seen in quite some time:

Anthony Graber, a Maryland Air National Guard staff sergeant, faces up to 16 years in prison. His crime? He videotaped his March encounter with a state trooper who pulled him over for speeding on a motorcycle. Then Graber put the video — which could put the officer in a bad light — up on YouTube.

It doesn't sound like much. But Graber is not the only person being slapped down by the long arm of the law for the simple act of videotaping the police in a public place. Prosecutors across the U.S. claim the videotaping violates wiretap laws — a stretch, to put it mildly.

Really, this is the hallmark of the fascist state -- not only are they attempting to extract murder-level penalties for non-crimes, but they deliberately invoke the most absurd conceivable interpretation of existing law to do so. It would almost be more respectable to just be honest and say, "We can't let you film us, because we might be held accountable for our actions." Even though they very rarely are.

It cannot be put any simpler, really -- no decent cop should care for even a second if someone's filming or not. But it says a lot that they and their courtroom minions are in the hunt, seeking ricockulous penalties while not even being able to find an actual law that's being violated. Citizens have to deal with cameras in all sorts of public places, sidewalks, sports stadiums, freeways, intersections. Your front door can be kicked down on a PC drug warrant, shoot first, ask questions later, ain't shit you can do about it.

But the average Joe or Jane taking modest steps just to protect themselves from asshole cops face serious time. Ask Oscar Grant's family just how important this is, keeping in mind that BART actually confiscated the two videos they knew about, that it was the one that made it to the media that stopped them from covering it up. Ask Rodney King, ask any number of people who've managed to catch cops harassing and abusing people.

So here's the deal, law enforcement folks -- if you get to film us, we get to film you. Or all the cameras come down. One or the other, and only a punk-ass bitch would try to have it both ways.

BTW, here is the Graber video. Graber is riding like an asshole, to be sure, but to be cutoff on the off-ramp by an unmarked car, and have a gun pulled on him by someone who doesn't even identify himself as a cop initially, for a fucking speeding ticket, is insane. Even more insane is that after Graber posted the video, the jackbooted thugs "upheld the law" by presenting an unsigned warrant, with which they confiscated all the computer equipment in Graber's house, and illegally detained Graber's mother and sister.

For a speeding ticket, once again. Someone needs to lose their fucking job for this shit.

Half-Baked

For someone who flashes the quals of a Serious Thinker, Amitai Etzioni has some poorly-thought ideas about Why We Should Listen To The Teabaggers.

For starters, look at the photo at the top of the article. Okay, chief, which one of these dipshits are we supposed to seriously engage with -- the one on the right in the powdered wig; the one on the left with the tri-corner hat, bursting the buttons on his waistcoat; or the fucking cat lady in the middle?

More importantly, the concern on the part of tea partiers that the government is not responsive to the interests and values of the majority is a valid one.

Ahahahaha. The government is not responsive to the interests and values of the majority, you say? Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock. This is not exactly a new phenomenon, no matter what the suddenly-aware closet-case pseudo-patriots would like us all to believe.

Etzioni goes on like this, reciting the laundry list of noble concerns and intellectually honest differences of opinion our costumed park-rats continue to air. What it really boils down to is that jobs are scarce, and these folks didn't get a piece of the action when the gubmint was bailing out its rentiers. If jobs suddenly get created, these losers will melt right back into the scenery, because they'll have something to do. All else is hair-pulling over the awful, corrupted mechanics of the legislative process, something pretty much everyone had figured out about, oh, 150 years ago.

The desire to gut the government ignores the fact that there are many important missions that the government is best-suited to accomplish. However, before those of us who do not belong to this movement can carry this message to the tea partiers, we first need to validate their feelings, rather than dismiss them.

This is what really grinds my gears. "Validate their feelings"?! Ex-fucking-squeeze-me?! This nation needs triage, not a goddamned counseling session for the slow kids in class. Fuck their feewings, m'kay? Validating the incoherent and the irrational just encourages them to continue their bullshit.

No constructive purpose is served by costume parties in the park, by a group of morons who have no platform, no goals, no leaders, and whose very name is inapt and intellectually dishonest in comparison to the historical event they attempt to glom onto.

I persist in calling these goofballs "teabaggers" not because of the raunchy flavor of the nickname, but because I will never refer to them by their preferred moniker. It is a lie, the name they choose to go by, a disingenuous interpretation of a long-standing historical principle. There is no taxation without representation here, therefore there cannot be a tea party, only a disgruntled group of ignorant codgers and perpetually aggrieved rabble-rousers, who cannot muster a coherent argument of their own, so they poach one that doesn't apply.

Well, as my first-grade teacher, kindly old Mrs. Lockhart used to say, fuck that noise. I ain't playing their game, I ain't (puke, retch) validating their fucking feewings, and I'm not going to pretend they're contributing something useful to the discussion when they've made a concerted effort to be mindlessly disruptive. I'm all for fighting the power and not taking shit from The Man, but ferchrissake, these people are idiots.

As I've said before, there are valid arguments to be made against Obama's governance thus far. It's a complete "refudiation" of what he had promised, and what was expected of him. But these assholes have not made that argument, nor have they proposed anything resembling a solution. They argue in bad faith, without facts, and they have done quite enough damage to an already battered political process. They need to go already, and the media need to stop validating every stupid thing that tumbles out of their pieholes.

Deep Thought

The lesson is not that The Saga of Shirley Sherrod is yet another tedious "teachable moment" about this country's race issues. There's really no lesson to be had at all, just a confirmation -- a quick round of creatively-edited, sub-performance-art tubthumping by a conservatard blogger and a few Faux News yard apes, and this administration reflexively punts on first down.

Were Breitbart or Fox, like the health-care and financial industries, to launch legions of barbed-tail lobbyist minions to extract humiliating concessions from Obama or famed tough guy Krav Maga Rahm, Breitbart would by now probably have his own Big Babywood basic-cable nutwork, and Rupert Murdoch would have the Lincoln Bedroom renamed after himself. And Obamanauts would proclaim it as a shrewd incremental advance.

I get what Al Sharpton said, that when you win the White House and both houses of Congress, you don't get into pissing matches with a bunch of poltroons dressed up like Paul Revere and carrying misspelled signs comparing Obama to Stalin. That's fine and/or dandy.

But you do, on occasion, have to remind the more obnoxious hecklers that you fucking won, and you have the stage and the mike. I got heckled once as a musician, and I made goddamned sure that motherfucker left the floor with his tail between his legs. These guys cringe before anyone even throws a real punch at them. Frankly, it's just ugly to watch.

You can get away with being wrong, you can get away with screwing up, you can get away with launching your copious monkey-butter across a zaftig Jewish princess' gob whilst discussing troop deployments in Bosnia. But you can almost never get away with being a total fucking pussy, especially when no jobs have been created.

There is a real pattern of this chickenshit behavior developing, and it is going to backfire if they don't deal with it. Carefully deliberated mediation impresses no one, all people see is someone with a knife at a gunfight.

Jack Tatum

Jack Tatum was the first football player I learned to recognize when I was a kid. He was the reason I became a football fan in general, and a Raiders fan in particular. I met him briefly at a Raider game in Oakland about ten years ago, and got to tell him that. He was quiet and polite, graciously accepting my compliment, talking briefly, moving on to the next fan in the stands as the game was about to start.

Tatum and George Atkinson were, during that sweet spot in the mid-'70s, the nastiest, hardest-hitting safety duo in the league. Fearless and ferocious, they literally terrorized opposing wide receivers forcing opposing offenses to alter their usual passing game plans.

Tatum never seemed quite the same after paralyzing Darryl Stingley, understandably so. That event tragically underscored just how dangerous the "game" really is, large men in peak physical condition deliberately hurtling at each other with force and impact comparable to an automobile accident, sixty times in three hours.

Certainly Tatum had hit other players harder, before and after Stingley, and to see many of the hits Tatum laid on people, it was actually surprising he hadn't hurt himself catastrophically. One step earlier or later, and Stingley just gets the wind knocked out of him. But the hit broke the way that it did, and Stingley and Tatum carried their respective burdens from that split-second for three decades after.

RIP, Assassin.

Pop Star

So Kathleen Parker, perhaps aspiring to be the WaPo MoDo, not realizing that the one is quite enough, vaingloriously and tediously attempts to cast performance artist Sarah Palin as some sort of postmodern feminist icon. Ahahahaha. Oh wait, she's (somewhat) serious.

This is, I believe, the selfsame Kathleen Parker who, not so long ago, ired thousands of knuckle-dragging cyber-troglodytes with her heretical analysis of Saint Sarah as being slightly out of her depth.

Apparently that was then, and this is now, and Parker's sage analysis has -- well, what's the opposite of deepened? Shallowed?

For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?

She and I apparently share a certain genetic predisposition to annoy all the right people. These would be the folks who take themselves and their ideologies a tad too seriously. Thus when I was promoting my book, "Save the Males," I wore an aggressively feminine suit -- pink with a bow in back -- just to irritate hard-line feminists, who, without bothering to read the book, would hate it on sight.

I happen to hate bows, but it was worth it.

Likewise, Sarah knows just what drives us all nuts and, instead of changing her tune, she turns up the volume -- and triples down. Don't like her little red shoes? She'll add a red leather jacket. Got gloss?

Oh, sisters really are doing it tofor themselves, aren't they? Here's the thing, and even Parker should be able to grok this simple observation -- there is a substantial difference between a columnist peddling a book under the guise of comfortably suburban pseudo-contrarian claptrap, and a former vice-presidential candidate hitting the rubber-chicken circuit and angering rubes with a St. Vitus' dance of choregraphed winks and glances at her scrawled palm, lying every step of the way. Parker and Palin are both trying to sell easily-replicated compendia of smartassery, true, but Palin is also catering -- no, deliberately antagonizing -- the addled assumptions of fairly large swaths of aggrieved morons, with the clear purpose of disrupting what's left of our political process.

This would be one thing if the country weren't on the verge of implosion, but this breathy sister-bonding with a noisome dingbat while serious people are trying to figure out serious solutions to serious problems, it's just bullshit. Palin appears to be not a whit more informed or astute about the world around her or the mechanics of US government than she was when Parker rightly called her out. Yet now Parker feels some lame kinship with Palin's increasingly tiresome narcissism.

This woman is not to be feared or loathed. She is to be taken with a grain of humor and a dash of admiration. A different version of Madonna, she's a public relations machine who manipulates public perception with well-timed and, recently, sophisticated messaging.

Again, Parker writes as if she should be talking about Lady Gaga or Lindsay Lohan, rather than someone who actively aspires to have an impact on the political process. Frankly, I'd rather have Madonna in high political office than Sarah Palin, and I can't fucking stand Madonna. The "grain of humor and a dash of admiration" was done with about 18 months ago; Palin is little more than a reality-teevee stunt-cast at this point.

So why the fuck are we hearing all goddamned week about her hypocrite daughter's impending crossbow wedding, like we should care that she put her legs behind her ears for a drunken hockey oaf and let him knock her up again? Happens every day around the world, the only difference here is that Levi is slightly smarter than we gave him credit for, insofar as he reads the papers enough to know that his future maw-in-law made $12 mil last year.

The genius of Sarah's message, whatever it is, is that it doesn't matter what it is. Of course Americans want their country back. We'd prefer that China not own us. Most don't like unfunded federal mandates, takeovers or bailouts. Except when it benefits us directly.

Reread that, because those five sentences are, inadvertenly one fears, the truest part of the entire column. The moment it doesn't matter what someone says, just so long as they say something, that person is just a parody of themselves with a brain-dead fan club -- in other words, Lady Gaga once again. So break the rest of it down -- "Americans want their country back" from whom? We had an election, you fucktards, it was in the papers and everything. And why does China own us, exactly, can our new pop goddess enlighten us? Does she know fuck-all about how the working class has been bled dry for 35 years, and now since the top 10% own 70% of the assets, they can pretty much trade with each other and write the rest of us off? Seriously, I've asked this many times, and I'll do it once again -- if anyone knows of any specific instance where Palin has proposed even one (1) actual serious policy, foreign or domestic, financial, job-creating, energy, whatever -- please do speak up. I think we'd all be very surprised.

In the meantime, Parker cuts to the heart of the teabaggers' deal, whether she knows it or not. Everyone gets bent over the idea of handouts, until some of the pelf lands in their hands. This is the core of the "get the gubmint out of my Medicare" morons' deal, which is why they need to die off all the sooner, since no one should expend energy trying to explain this shit to them.

Well, who's to argue with a lotta women comin' together? It's the sisterhood, baby. Wear pink and put a bow on it.

Sarah's long-term plans are anybody's guess. Anyone who thinks she won't run for president because she's making too much money on the celebrity circuit is missing a big point. You make money as a presidential candidate, too. If you win, you're president. If you lose, you're rich.

And don't tell her she can't. If you do, she's just gonna get feistier and cuter. Next thing you know she'll be a dadgum lioness givin' heck to those media hyenas, just the way they can't stand it.

Yes, she's showed us all, hasn't she? She really has, you know; where else can you lie through your fucking teeth, make millions, have thousands of morons adoring you at every stop, and even have formerly cogent media commentators fawning over your wardrobe and your bullshit attitude? But it's just good fun watching supposedly professional journamalists write these wretched screeds, like they're auditioning for a job at Entertainment Weekly.

It's not a coincidence that Bristol and Levi announced their immaculate engagement to some cheesy gossip rag, you know. Considering the "legitimate" media we've got, I'd guess we're about 10-20 years out from electing a Kardashian to national office, since neither the people nor the media can tell the difference any longer. Idiocracy will turn out to have been an eerily prescient documentary.

I'm so goddamned sick of all these people, the assholes yanking the world's chain with their prima-donna bullshit, and the highly-paid media monkeys writing brainless odes to them, instead of something useful. How do we get rid of them? They are ruining what's left of the country, but maybe we really want it that way.

Well, You Can't Have That....

Joe Bageant throws down only every so often these days, but that's understandable, and more importantly, every one has been a gem. I think he correctly susses the (probably) incurable malaise America is undergoing right now, and for at least the immediate future.

Along with the usual enviromental and classist issues, it's really a crisis of the spirit, to the extent that I can buy into that concept and remain a good atheist. Perhaps a secular version of "spirit" could be "passion", and when you see the things the majority of Americans appear to be passionate about, it makes sense.

One would like to believe it's just a media-created perception, but in even a notionally free-market milieu, there has to be some truth to it. Our pockets are being picked, our futures mortgaged, our lives and landscapes plundered by a precious few who already have too bloody much, yet never quite enough. Yet too many of us express our passions via modes that are undeserving of any passion at all.

We know things that were never worth knowing, about people not worth acknowledging, a comically dramatized echo chamber of interchangeable scripted "reality" shows. So many fat fucks pointlessly driving fat vehicles, carrying nothing to nowhere, back and forth, back and forth, spending money they don't really have on shit they don't really want.

Self-actualization, when it occurs at all, is done through the choice of vehicle, or hooting at hillbillies driving billboards in circles all afternoon, that sort of thing. There seems to be no sense of moderation in any of these pursuits; it's one thing to enjoy kitsch and trash and occasional indulgences, but it's important to find some balance to those things, especially since so many of them rely on dwindling shares of resources.

Bageant seems to have found that balance in simplicity, a genuine sense of community, the beauty of a moment. Speaking strictly for myself, I probably have an unhealthy attachment to my books, music, and guitars, but that's it. And even then, I recall being a teenager in Southern California, 25 years or so ago, spending the day surfing with friends and building a bonfire, meeting college girls and drinking beer and playing Beach Boys songs into the night. I remember thinking at the time, on one of those summer nights, that I could do that every day for the next hundred years.

It seems simplistic, counterintuitive, and may even be wrong, but sometimes you can observe the actions of others -- or even yourself -- and think that they can't possibly truly want to do what they're doing. But maybe we're all just too distracted anymore to think about what we really want to do, or it gets dismissed as too much trouble, or not enough time/money, even if some of the best things in life really are free (for now).

Deep World Cup Thought

Vuvuzelas are the African version of ThunderStix -- noisy, cheap, obnoxious toys that give supposedly grown adults an excuse to act like retards for a couple hours straight.

Unless, of course, a stadium that sounds like a ginormous nest of farting hornets somehow enhances your experience of viewing a sport that, while interesting at times, is viewed by most Americans on a par with, say, the metric system. The constant flopping and poor reffing is bad enough, but yeah, the fuckin' toy plastic horns don't help win converts.

Inside the Playbook

If you're a football fan who enjoys the mechanics of the game as much as the personalities, and you don't know about Matt Bowen's ongoing series of play and coverage breakdowns for the National Football Post, you're missing out. Really good, detailed analysis of what every player is doing on the field; great stuff for us fans in the off-season drought. I'm only slightly embarrassed to say that I've applied some of this to my very occasional Madden 2010 games, but if I can ride JaCarcass Russell to a 77-21 Super Bowl win, I must have learned something.

Return On Investment

Goldman Sachs executive/Obama economic policy advisor uses CDS payout to add to the indoor heated pool at his Hamptons spread.

I know The Krugster means well, and he is a Nobel laureate and all, but it's almost as if someone needs to break the news to him:

For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Uh-huh, and the bond vigilante and the confidence fairy usually convene at that off-ramp from the Suck It Expressway to Go Fuck Yourself Boulevard, near the tent city. (See what I did there?)

I don't think Krugman really needs to be told that this all falls under the general rubric of "it's not a flaw, it's a feature", but sometimes you wonder. Any investor, whether it's someone like Warren Buffett who generally invests in tangible assets, or some bookmaking hedge-fund scumbag, cares only about getting a return. If they thought more profit could be generated by encouraging and laundering more stimulus pelf, they'd gladly sign on to it, so the fact that they're not interested is more troubling than even Krugman characterizes it.

One aspect of this is that institutional investors really do seem to have allowed themselves to dumb down considerably. This may be attributed to a variety of reasons: the lack of accountability and proliferation of politically purchased moral hazard; the preponderance of automated spreadsheet algorithms doing most of the day-to-day trading, rather than people investing in ideas and things; the indifference to the inevitable consequences (see reason #1).

What you have here is a very small cadre of highly privileged -- yet not necessarily competent or qualified -- people controlling an increasing share of the nation's aggregate wealth. Worse yet, since they know that the peons will bailout their careless fuckups, they have almost zero incentive to maintain even modest standards of intellectual or moral rigor in their profession.

So you have what you have -- a fat, bloated carapace of a nation being hollowed out by financial parasitism. I don't think anyone envisions or desires perfect economic equality; it is impossible and unenforceable. However, when your level of income disparity is behind such workers' paradises as Vietnam and Yemen, and is actually closer to Zimbabwe than to those two, you have a real problem. Take a look down the whole list; the US is basically neck-and-neck with banana republics and sub-Saharan despotates.

It seems that, between their pension fund shell games, their shameless greed, and their credit-default-swap shenanigans, they may have reached that magical equilibrium where they don't need the masses to perpetuate their scam. Therefore any "stimulus" or "infrastructure" spending is a waste for them; they would make more money taking put options on Paraguay's World Cup chances. I think Krugman suffers from the same problem Obama does -- the belief that if you make rational appeals to people's better angels, truth and reason eventually will out.

This would be true if we had an economic elite that cared about creating things, instead of merely owning shit. But once you get past the public philanthropy of the likes of Buffett and Bill Gates, whaddaya got? A sub-class of people whose vocation is the acquisition -- and, more importantly, valuation -- of phantom wealth, paper profits. Keep in mind what the mechanics of the "financial reform" bill have been about -- the ability to peddle worthless securities to credulous institutional investors (a huge mode of control in leveraging pension funds, and thus the working-class chumps who depend on them to, you know, survive); the ability to leverage bad bets at asset ratios of over 30:1; the ability to basically force the next two generations of taxpayers to negotiate at gunpoint, to pay for someone else's deliberate mal-fee-ance.

These things are not "mistakes" nor "accidents". These are all very easily foreseen consequences of decisions made with indifference, if not outright malice, aforethought. And now that their bad bets have been paid off for them, and the ROI is in Asia rather than Oceania and Europe, they couldn't possibly give less of a shit what happens to displaced workers and the foreclosed homeless.

This is a very important, fundamental point that seems to escape many commentators, who dance around the issue and wonder that the Masters of the Universe don't get the ramifications of what they're doing or proposing. I assure you, they get it all too well, they know precisely what they are doing, and what the results will be. Every time I see the Dow average go up, I automatically assume that it happened on the backs of the peons, that unemployment or foreclosures or family murder/suicides are experiencing an uptick. More often than not, that appears to be the case. Wall Street seems to routinely profit, exult even, in the misery of the masses.

The sooner people start disabusing themselves of the weird, wild notion that the top 10%, which controls 70% of the nation's wealth, has any sort of moral or practical stake in the bottom half's 2.5% piece of the pie -- beyond how to use government leverage to forcibly extract that -- the more clear the picture will be for them. In the meantime, the middle class, the most consistent element of political stability, is decimated, paving the way for the corporate robber barons and their idiot demagogue apologists.

Unforced Errors

Per usual these days, I'm a tad late on the draw, but it bears even belated mention -- former heartbeat-away-from-the-preznitency-candidate Shitferbrains is not only tremendously, impassably dumb for a supposed Raygun acolyte, but irredeemably fucking lazy:

"This is Reagan country," the former Alaska governor told the cheering crowd, invoking the name of a fellow conservative icon, "and perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State."

Well, yes, if not for the fact Reagan, who Palin has frequently quoted and for whom she has repeatedly expressed admiration, actually attended Eureka College in Eureka, Ill., near Peoria, from 1928 to 1932. The 40th president didn't actually move to California, a state with which he'd become synonymous through both film and politics, until 1937.

Christ almighty, this would have taken what, fifteen seconds to check on Teh Googul? It's starting to make more sense, why Palin generally repeats the same tired schtick over and over again -- any of these pale attempts at an out-of-the-box homily inevitably plops on the podium, writhing, begging to be put out of its misery.

Not to mention the fact that Saint Reagan, no matter what these illiterate retards insist on yammering, would have to run as a Democrat these days. The teabaggers would have their three-cornered hats in full spin at Reagan's genial willingness to at least engage the opposition, even if he had no intention of actually listening to them.

I'm not sure what kind of asshole pays five hundred bucks to listen to Palin shrieking her bumptious schtick and made-up-as-she-goes-along factoids (portmenteau word of "facts" and "hemorrhoids"). As Johnny Carson once supposedly said, I've heard cats fuck with more harmony. The attendees would have been much better off just donating their damned money and taking in a bad movie.

Mediaocrities

What Dave Weigel really should apologize for is, well, apologizing. I don't think any rational person (which leaves out Drudge and his legion of butt-hurt readers) thinks that Weigel literally wishes for Drudge to set himself on fire. I don't think there's anything wrong with the shorthand term "Paultard" to refer to the internal inconsistencies of the acolytes of Paul pére and (even moreso) fils. This is especially true when the term was deployed to illustrate Faux News' hypocrisy in its newfound support of Paultardation across the nation.

There's actually a lesson to be learned from the likes of Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, not to mention the insane outer-world being of the R'lyeh of talk-radio -- don't apologize for saying what you actually think. At least Weigel has the advantage of being intellectually defensible in what he's saying; what he lacks is the courage of his convictions.

Every time somebody apologizes, they let themselves and everyone else who agrees with them get pushed around by people who couldn't give less of a shit whether or not they're remotely accurate or honest in what they say and do. Sack up or go home, ladies.

Intervention

I think there's a debate to be considered, and it's losers like this that make it a relevant discussion. The debate is not, contrary to the hooting commenters' lurid prison-rape fantasizing, how hard this idiot should be buttfucked by his cellmates.

A saner debate should focus on alternative, more productive modes of punishment, that lessen the burden on the taxpayers, endanger fewer children (and potential children), and don't irredeemably ruin this stupid sod's life, while still providing a punishment commensurate with the crime. It makes more sense to let these two morons out tomorrow with a couple years probation, taking them first to Planned Parenthood, for a vasectomy for him and at least a Norplant for her. In fact, it'd be cheaper in the long run to pay for tubal ligations, though that may be too invasive.

You could "on the one hand/on the other hand" this stuff for days, in addition to running the risk of bringing the would-be eugenicists out of the woodwork. But we're not talking about sterilizing retards or particular ethnic groups -- there's nothing irreversible suggested here, and frankly, with the public social safety network frayed almost irreparably at this point, it merits consideration.

The first rule of triage is to stop the patient's bleeding, even if it requires drastic measures. And when you have horrible people doing horrible things to their children, and having more and more children on the public dime because they neither know nor care enough to exercise a modicum of common sense or impulse control, maybe some "positive coercion" is called for. A mitigated sentence and maybe five hundred bucks to get high on seems a reasonable trade-off all the way around. It's worth it to halt their careless fecundity.

I realize I can be something of a hard-ass on this subject, and I don't apologize for it. I have no patience for these fucking people, and I sure as hell have only basic levels of compassion for them. I reserve that for the hapless kids they bring into the world and mistreat, passing on their bullshit to the next generation. I get the frustration that conservatives (and many liberals and moderates as well) feel about this sort of shit -- nobody likes feeling like they're doing all the right things, working hard, taking care of their families, only to also have to pay freight on these fuckers.

But I don't see the point in tossing them in prison, only to come out more incorrigible and less employable. Stop the bleeding, provide a limit to the cost they exact from society, without ever giving anything back. The system as it stands now fails everyone involved -- the people who work in it, seeing it become an exercise in futility; the taxpayers who pay into it, never getting results; the "parents" who know how to milk it; and most of all, the kids who have no control in their fate. This might be worth a try, if only because it would at least lessen the number of potential victims. Give me some feedback on this -- am I being an uncompassionate fascist asshole, or what?

Notes and Errata

A rarity, but I must quibble with Ed ever so slightly -- the right's martyr complex is hardly "latent". It's pretty much the only card they bother playing anymore, and it was a marked deck to begin with.

Check out the comments in this here article about Hugo Chàvez' latest brush with populist despotism. It's like reading a series of sidewalk sandwich boards, each one nuttier than the last. I'm half-surprised one of them didn't claim to have sucked Obama's Moooslim cock (under dire financial duress, of course, wrought by long years of communist oppression under Stalinbama's iron fist) in exchange for Victory Gin ration coupons and half a pack of generic smokes. Perhaps the encroaching moans from the hapless hitchhikers in these losers' basement sex dungeons prevented them from elaborating further. Maybe they took a break to molest the neighbor's collie, who knows?

Either way, we are apparently precious seconds from scavenging grass and bark in the nearest public park for our Dear Leader dinner soup, because Obammy is about to take a cue from Comrade Hugo and overtake Nabisco or Kraft or something, and cut off the all-you-can-eat buffets everywhere. Just ask 'em, they'll tell ya. Over and over again.

Night of the Living Debt

You can always tell the terrorist by his cologne and the watch on his wrist.

-- Clutch, Power Player

You know, as a responsible property owner -- that is, someone who followed the rate market, refinanced only as needed, and did not use the HELOC as a goddamned vacation/plasma-flatscreen fund, and kept things up on a single income at that -- I'm inclined to say screw the underwater crowd.

However, two things: one, moral superiority is no insurance against things like your own property value tanking because too many of your bozo neighbors lost their houses and flooded the market; two, bankers have no room to cry over the mess they helped create, perpetuate, and got bailed out at the top for.

The banking lobby says it could accept the bill as is, on one condition: that it apply only to new loans. In its current form, it applies to any existing loan.

“We really don’t want the legislature redoing contracts,” said Mr. Brown of the California Bankers Association. “That sends a bad signal to investors, to markets and to those whom we extended the credit.”

Whatever the fate of this particular bill, the issue of responsibility for debt is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. New government-mandated modification programs that for the first time will reduce borrowers’ debts will go into effect this fall, sparking another round of debate about who gets help and who does not.

“We’re a little in the Wild West here,” said Paul Leonard, California office director of the Center for Responsible Lending. “People are struggling with what it means to uphold the terms of your mortgage contract and what it means to walk away. There are no tried and true rules.”

This is no different than what goes on on Wall Street -- financial weasels generate a bunch of contract shenanigans to reel in the suckers, get the taxpayers to bail them out when the suckers live down to their names, and piss and moan about "responsible lending", aka legalized usury, permanent penury, etc. There's a moral hazard all the way around here; they fool no one.

The hell with it, bring back the mortgage sluts and start the fun machine all over again. Beats the hell out of this bullshit. We all might as well just open our wallets and dump them into a pile in the middle of the room.

On the Ball

I must be missing something here, because this seems impossibly dumb, even for the US government:

Four senators are seeking to force the Obama administration to blacklist the Pakistani Taliban, a day after the failed Times Square bomber pleaded guilty and admitted getting training from the group.

The senators, all from New York and New Jersey, said Tuesday they would introduce a bill requiring the State Department to designate the Pakistani Taliban a "foreign terrorist organization."

Wait, what? Wasn't the Taliban designated a terrorist organization, oh, I dunno, on 9/12/01? Or was it just the Afghan Taliban, while the Pakistan faction was left untouched, presumably because of deep-seated ideological and strategic differences over exactly how to bring "death to America"?

Or is this -- and I'll go out on a limb here -- a way for certain pols to posture and preen over some newfangled legalistic wrinkle, something that will inevitably (and inadvertently, of course) legitimize the eventual government overreach. Predictably, some dumb sod will find himself flown to a Syrian dungeon in the dead of night, because Chuck Schumer wanted to look tough for a few minutes. Stranger things have happened, yet always the choice in figuring out motivations seems to come down to "unforgivably stupid" vs. "stupidly malicious".

Sick Simper Tearanus

Christ, this Angle broad is worth her weight in comedy gold. Not that Harry Reid should get cocky, because people rarely go wrong in assuming that voters are reactionary mow-rons, but shit, she can't get out of her own way:

"Our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government," Angle told conservative talk show host Lars Larson in January. "In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

Sigh. "Lars Larson", is he from the same inbred Scandiwegian fjord-hole as Erick Erickson or what? Here is the original Jefferson quote, by the way:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Now, if you really think about what Jefferson is implying in the complete quote, it is at best opaque in some parts. The teabaggers certainly live up to Jefferson's phrase "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed"; rarely has there been such a spectacularly overheated yet befuddled "movement" in the spotlight, incoherent, self-contradictory, rudderless. Yet Jefferson acknowledges implicitly that because of their slack-jawed ignorance of the facts, they are the most likely to bray their long-simmered, cognitively dissonant grievances.

The quote is from 1787, from a Jefferson still flush with the success of a hard-won victory, and the establishment of a new and grand experiment in self-rule. It is not something Jefferson would have reiterated even a dozen years later, and indeed, none of his later writings (at least that I've ever read) burn with the same revolutionary fervor. I'm not saying that Jefferson got in on the top floor, liked the layout, and pulled the ladder up after him; I'm saying that he and the rest of the founders understood that ruling and keeping the ship of state on an even keel is a different game than revolution. Constant revolt -- especially when incited by the most ignorant, regressive, and temperamental elements of a society -- is as sure a recipe for disaster as sitting on your thumbs whilst a true tyrant is ahoof.

More importantly, no matter how hard they wish and squint, TJ's "blood of patriots and tyrants" money quote does not apply to them. This three-corner-hatted fever dream of theirs is a mirage, a sham, a cozy fantasy to tuck themselves into at night. Barack Obama is not a tyrant; Kim Jong-Il is a tyrant. Fat fucks who take their Medicare-subsidized Rascals on public roads to public parks are not patriots; they're lazy assholes who need a week in North Korea to set their stupid shit straight.

I think Mark Lilla has correctly sussed the heart of these preening goofballs' wafer-thin plaints:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

....

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

This is exactly right -- this is a group of people whose aim appears to be to cut off their collective nose to spite their face. They rant about self-sufficiency and the unwanted interference of government regulation, because their self-selected feedback loop tells them they are self-sufficient, even as they waddle to the Costco, instead of going Galt as they frequently threaten, and they have been too coddled all their lives to know what Third World shitholes without government regulations are like.

I've seen this phenomenon first-hand locally, and it perplexes and bothers me deeply -- people whom I know for an empirical fact are on the fucking dole, writing foaming screeds to the local news outlets about their wretched go of it under the iron fist of Barack Obama and his meddling government minions. Negro please.

It is of small comfort to recognize that if the best these dipshits can muster is the likes of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, then their bench is even thinner than one supposes. Yet the twin stupidities of a decade ago -- the selection of Fredo Arbusto and the usurpation in Gullyvornia of Enron-backed Rainier Wolfcastle -- have probably soured me for a lifetime on being even cautiously optimistic about my fellow votard.

One last indefensible quote from Sharron Angle, and woe betide the media flunky who brings it up and fails on the easy follow-through:

"The nation is arming," she told the newspaper. "What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"

[emphasis mine]

Um, the next step is that you field a better candidate for the next go-round, shit-for-brains. Someone needs to call this crazy bitch on this bullshit -- the logical, practical implication of what she is saying is that if a bunch of heavily-armed retards with delusions of being oppressed don't get their way, they will violently overthrow the majority.

They presume too much if they're assuming that they're the only ones with guns. Not that these goons would or could ever seriously organize to a meaningful extent in that regard, but inspiring angry loners is another matter, for which their thinly veiled threats of armed insurrection should be held accountable.

The Audacity of Dope

From the news you can lose file:

President Barack Obama's speech on the Gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin-Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Sooo....a professional language (read: advertising/marketing/trendmongering) consultant finds an opportunity to toot his own horn by nitpicking a preznitential speech. Count me in as shocked, but kudos to CNN for providing the free advertising, even if the implicit message is "Americans are morons who can't relate to oratory beyond that of a fifteen-year-old". Awesome.

Incidentally, the original piece has some more illuminating tidbits:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade-Level – 9.8 Grade Level. This is the highest of any major Obama speech. Obama’s closest match among recent presidents is Ronald Reagan, whose speeches generally ranged from the 9th to 10th grade levels. (President George W. Bush usually spoke at a seventh grade level.)

Wow, that high, eh? Guess the flash-card practice and repeated readings of The Pet Goat really paid off.

You know, Obama deserves a certain level of abuse for his diffident response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, most notably the sheer amount of time he gave BP to dick around with a bunch of Rube Goldberg "solutions" to a problem that was caused by corporate negligence. And his tepid throat-clearing about finding an ass to kick, six or seven weeks down the line, fooled no one.

But the idea that Obama's not dumbing it down enough for us, that we need to be talked to like we're slow third-graders (i.e., Glenn Beck viewers) just confirms the notion that we usually get the government -- and the media -- we truly deserve.

Closet Cases

The most ridonkulous court case of the year finally winds down, and one side is getting a bit desperate in their closing argument:

Winding up a historic trial over same-sex marriage in California, the lawyer for Proposition 8's sponsors told a federal judge Wednesday that allowing only men and women to wed promotes responsible sex and child-rearing, and ultimately ensures the future of humanity.

During more than two hours of intense and sometimes skeptical questioning by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, attorney Charles Cooper maintained that society is entitled to reserve its approval of marriage for those who can naturally conceive children.

....

But Walker, who presided over the nation's first federal trial on the issue, sounded dubious. He note that the state allows couples unable or unwilling to have children to marry, suggesting that the institution has a broader purpose that same-sex partners might equally fulfill.

"Marriage is a right which extends fundamentally to all persons, whether they're capable of producing children, incarcerated or behind in their child-support payments," Walker said, citing Supreme Court rulings that allow people in all those situations to marry.

I'm sure Walker -- who, as Prop. 8 wingnuts will no doubt scream from the rooftops the second this case is decided, is gay -- feels somewhat silly having to tell these goofballs what they already know. All together now, friends 'n' neighbors -- marriage is designed to protect property. Preservation of fambly valyews, while valuable, is purely ancillary.

But to insist that marriage's primary function is to encourage procreation is functionally retarded, seriously. Moreover, even if that were its function, it would be very difficult to argue that it's been even a qualified success, considering the divorce rate, considering the steady lessening of whatever stigma out-of-wedlock parentage once had.

The disingenuous arguments these morons have wielded are nothing short of legalistic quackery, a deliberate conflation of the obvious notion that children develop best when raised in a stable environment, and the ludicrous notion that heterosexual couples have some sort of sacrosanct monopoly on said stability. Go tell it to Larry King, chump.

The only witnesses for Prop. 8's sponsors were political scientist Kenneth Miller, who said gays and lesbians can protect their political interests without judicial protection, and David Blankenhorn, an author and advocate who said allowing same-sex marriages could lead to more divorces and fewer weddings for men and women.

At Wednesday's hearing, Walker asked Cooper whether Blankenhorn, who heads the Institute for American Values but lacks academic credentials, qualified as an expert witness. Cooper said Blankenhorn was a recognized expert in his field and Olson hastened to endorse him, saying Blankenhorn's testimony helped to discredit Prop. 8.

Olson makes a great point -- much like with "intelligent design", it is the proponents of Prop. 8 who tend to inadvertently make the opposition's argument for them. It's sheer forensic ineptitude, really. What sort of bozo thinks the "marriage should be reserved for procreating couples" argument will fly in an actual court of law, as opposed to some church basement bake sale for the, ahem, "Institute for American Values"?

Well, the sort of bozo who is unused to having to make an argument out of the scope of the usual choir-preaching hortatory rhetoric. The sort of bozo who wants to make "majority rules" the other cornerstone of his argument, apparently unaware that just in the last five years, opposition to gay marriage has declined, and will continue to do so.

As always, I am just mystified by people who are willing to spend precious time, money, effort trying to "protect" an irretrievably debauched appellation. At least half of the heterosexual couples who get hitched find a way to screw it up -- and that's just the ones who actually get divorced, not the ones who stay together "for the kids" or whatever they have to tell themselves.

And many gay marriage opponents, understanding the reality of long-term same-sex relationships, retreat to the bizarre notion of insisting that they don't mind if gay couples call their relationships "civil unions", even though functionally it is a marriage. People are bound to each other, legally, morally, familially, but these folks get all butthurt if any of the participants use the "m" word.

This is a very strange obsession, no doubt bordering on projection for many of them. Seriously, any straight person who feels "threatened" by a couple of dudes or a couple of chicks formalizing their monogamous relationship needs to get a grip -- and a hobby.

Cock Teas

Media alert: retard gathering in rainy state. MUST CREDIT DRUDGE REPORT. Ho hum. So it appears another knuckle-dragging ex-football player has been pulled out of the mothballs for the entertainment of the rubes. Say hello to former Washington ForeskinRedskin Clint Didier:

"It's time we the people had the courage and fortitude to take our country back," U.S. Senate candidate Clint Didier told the gathering Saturday. "When I get to D.C., there's going to be hell to pay."

....

Didier, who wants to take on Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told delegates his game plan: "Secure our borders, unshackle our industries and get rid of the regulations."

It's time, he added, "to fight our way back to the light, to the truth, to the Lord God Almighty."

Holy shit, it sounds like a translation from some woman-hating asshole from the Jamaat-e-Islami party in Pakistan. The transcript doesn't note specifically that Didier ended his oratory with a "Yee-haw!", but no one would be surprised if he had.

There were a couple other mouthbreathers jockeying for position, but Didier was by far the most entertaining, and not just because of his Stamp of Approval™ from Miss Thang. If elected, he'll probably offer to cornhole a Phil Simms effigy on the Capitol steps, or something equally charming. In the meantime, someone -- anyone -- should ask this idiot to clarify: "take our country back" from whom? Someone needs to step up and inform these cockmonglers that there was an election, and the clear majority of this "we the people" these assholes routinely invoke voted for the representatives currently in office. Every call to "take the country back" logically ends with "from the majority of the voters".

So, you know, fuck you, Clint Didier.

Incidentally, another fun fact about Clint and his teabagger aesthetic:

Didier has refuted criticism of his receipt of federal agricultural subsidy money, arguing that farmers need to participate in the subsidy program to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage. "If your neighbor has an advantage he is in the position to buy the next farm up for sale," Didier says.

One thing to keep in mind about the teabaggers, right down to the very last one of them -- they squeal endlessly about money being wasted, but only when it's not being wasted on them. Calling them a bunch of whiny hypocrites understates the case.

Mock the Vote

The curious case of Alvin Greene seems to be one of those "even weirder than you think" deals, doesn't it? After catching his mesmerizing performance on Olbermann the other night, it's impossible not to be intrigued by this mushmouthed, chuckleheaded cipher. Whatever the deal is with this guy and how he got here, you just know it's gotta be good.

But if you want to be pissed at somebody, be pissed at the Democratic party and its minions and mechanisms. What kind of half-assed organization lets an unemployed felon in as its representative in a senatorial campaign? Least they can do is find him a job. Greene looks like he could hold a door open on a windy day, if not much more than that.

No doubt this has more than a little to do with the state itself, and its, let's say, creative approach to political shenanigans. This is, after all, the state with a philandering governor who refused to resign gracefully, not to mention a slack-jawed livestock-molesting galoot of a state senator who called both Nikki Haley and Barack Obama "ragheads". Although the notion of Greene being a Republican plant seems a bit simplistic; even if they had any actual need for a plant in a campaign that should be a cakewalk for them, it wouldn't be this guy.

Perhaps Greene can take a hike up the Appalachian Trail, and find at least one (1) intelligible answer to any given question, such as, "How exactly does someone with no job and no campaign donations come up with $10,440 for a filing fee?"

A Modest Proposal

While most of the topics here are political, every once in a while we'll touch upon the nature of cruelty -- or more precisely, the deeds of cruel people, people who get their kicks preying on the weak and powerless. I make no bones about it, it's part of the reason why I am so pro-death-penalty (at least in principle, while acknowledging the huge flaws of the machinery). As far as I'm concerned, animal abusers are only a half-step above child molesters, a crime which I strongly feel should be a "two strikes and you're out" deal.

(Despite the title, I am not being even a little bit polemic here. Just fucking end these people already; they're no damned good (NSFW) to anybody, and no one will miss them. Even two strikes is too many.)

I don't care what the causes or backstories of these vicious assholes are. A person -- whether 15 or 50 -- who duct-tapes a puppy and bakes it in an oven is a waste of oxygen, and should be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Resources are tight, space is at a premium, the planet is overpopulated, and we're supposed to waste time, effort, and money figuring out what makes evil people do evil things?

No doubt there is some perpetuation of victimization at work here, but there is more cause to believe that the results will be worse as time goes on. The puppy-baker is not suddenly going to flip a switch and become a useful member of society; he's going to wake up and decide one day that his next-door neighbor's kid might be more fun and challenging game. These people enjoy inflicting pain on weaker sentient beings, pure and simple. Push comes to shove, it's "explained" by their inner misery or whatever, yet somehow, they never seem quite miserable enough to do the rest of the planet a favor and kill themselves.

It's good to see that at least law-enforcement agencies are taking this stuff more seriously. It may turn out to be a useful preventive tool in some cases, which, if they're not going to take my advice and just machine-gun these troglodytes into a hastily-dug ditch, would at least be a step in the right direction.

California Drinking

Deep thought: the exquisite irony of eMeg "Griff Harsh V's proud mom" Whitman spending $71 million of her own money to peddle herself as the voice of fiscal responsibility, has it registered itself in her Ben Franklin fivehead yet? Obviously not, since eMeg is really no doubt positioning herself as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney's next tilt at the electoral windmill. It takes some real doing to make Jerry Brown look like the best choice, but by gawd she's done it in spades.

As for iCarly Fiorina, the less said the better. The weekend chatter 'mongst the "news" dipshits centers around iCarly's snotty pot-meet-kettle live-mike sniping at Barbara Boxer's hair, because that is the media we have.

And while Boxer is as uninspiring as they come, at least she doesn't have the "I lawn-darted HP and all I got were these ludicrous campaign commercials" albatross. Poor iCarly probably does really think that Sarah Palin's imprimatur will help, but she would probably get more cred with the endorsement of the ghost of former gubernatorial candidate Gary Coleman. Tom Campbell would have been a much better opponent for the Republicans to run, and might have actually won with some financial support, but since the GOP org in this state could find a way to fuck up a baked potato, they declined to even pretend to help him out. So they get what they got, which is a big bowl of wrong.

Forty million people in this fucking state, and these are the choices we have. No wonder we're imploding. It's going to be a long campaign season; I may have to pull an Elvis and just shoot my teevee by the fourth of July.

Four Weddings and a Vicodin

Congratulations to processed aerosol cheese-like substance Rusty Limpballs and his fourth future former missus. No truth to the rumor that the groom is registered at Pfizer.

The couple met six years ago, while she was running a charity golf tournament and Limbaugh was in the process of divorcing for the third time.

Talk about meeting cute. For the eventual rom-com, I see Katie Heigl and, once he gains the requisite seventy-five pounds, James Woods. The hijinks write themselves.

Sunday morning, a source tells PEOPLE, the newlyweds hopped Limbaugh's private Gulfstream jet for a honeymoon in Mexico, Africa and a couple other spots.

Now, if we think about this for a hot second, the ginormous mound of pelf Limbaugh has accumulated through sheer gall, it should chap even the most dedicated libertarian capitalist's hide. True capitalism, as we all know through close reading of Adam Smith is not about creating mere profit, but wealth, things of value which can be utilized by others to innovate and prosper and create yet more value and wealth.

Big Pharma and his smarmy ilk have made their fortunes by generating product with no discernible, intrinsic value, merely recycled talking points that skew reality and play fast and loose with facts. Periodically they rent ghostwriters to compile their choicest schtick as empty-calorie jeremiads for the Walmart cutout-bin set to prop up their living-room milk crates with. It's a pretty good racket.

All that said, I have to admit that after reading Zev Chafets' infamous tongue-job of Limbaugh (now padded into book form, available at your finer True Value hardware stores), the real takeaway for me was how lonely Limbaugh really sounded. Chafets went on and on about the old-school opulence of Limbaugh's Florida estate, a cavernous compound riddled with top-shelf furnishings and a respectable car collection -- inhabited only by Limbaugh and his cat. Just seemed odd, somehow wrong.

Even liars and shills deserve to love and be loved (over and over again in Rusty's case), I suppose, so good luck with it, you crazy kids. No detours to the Dominican Republic this time.

Spell Baby Spell

High on the list for dumbest non-story of the week is the "protest" at the National Spelling Bee. Friends 'n' neighbors, try as you might, you just can't make this shit up:

The Associated Press reported that this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was picketed by four protesters, some dressed in bee costumes, who distributed buttons reading "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."

The demonstrators were from the the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society, organizations that aim to do to English orthography what the metric system did for weights and measures. The American Literacy Council endorses SoundSpel, which seeks to "rationalize" the English language by spelling each of the English language's 42 (or so) phonemes one way and one way only. In SoundSpel, "business" becomes "bizness," "equation" becomes "ecwaezhun," "learned" becomes "lernd," "negotiate" becomes "negoesheaet," and so on.

Oh yeah, that's much easier. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Who is keeping them in, erm, "bizness", so that they don't have to get out in the real world and actually earn a living doing something useful?

This sort of thing is not merely annoying, it's a pernicious lie. Illiterate people are not illiterate because they are bad spellers, or because English orthography is too irregular and opaque for them. People who don't spell well typically don't read very much, and those who do read but still can't spell well find ways to work around whatever relatively mild learning/memory issue messes up certain words for them. They sure as hell don't want or need the entire language to be reconfigured to accommodate their inability to spell (which is usually a pattern of certain word forms anyway, not an inability to spell all, most, or even very many words).

I suppose I am something of a snob on the subject, because I am a good speller and take pride in it, and won quite a few competitions in school, winning the Northern California regionals three times and getting into the state finals twice. The thing is -- and this pissed off my competition chaperones, believe me -- I never studied, refused to in fact. The state spelling competition (at least in the early eighties) gives each contestant a 200+ page manual of fifty-cent words, complied of lists from encyclopedias, word-of-the-day calendars, obscure word sources, etc. It's even more tedious than it sounds, and there was no fucking way I was ever going to sit down and memorize it for a stupid spelling bee. I learned to spell by -- get this -- reading. Yeah, real tricky, huh? Read books, and you will pick up most spelling conventions, not to mention irregularities, by osmosis, I guaran-fucking-tee it.

It probably also didn't hurt that I proofread court documents for five years, and can spot a misspelled word before I even read the sentence or paragraph it's in. But bottom line, there's no real trick to any of this. I honestly can't recall any point in my life where I just stamped my wittle feet and insisted that everyone else dumb the language down for me because it was too hard and I just couldn't get it. If I encountered a word I didn't know or quite get, I looked it up, I familiarized myself with it. It's really not that difficult. Takes anywhere from three to five minutes, if you're a complete vegetable. The horror.

So beyond my obstinance on the subject, I suppose my real suspicion is that the people who are whinging the most about it are putting in the least amount of work, and would prefer that everyone else -- you know, the majority of people who can read -- accommodate them. As my Sunday school teacher used to say, fuck that noise. Spelling is practice, just like reading is practice, just like math is practice, just like every skill requires practice, repetition, and attention to cultivate. It's not everyone else's fault parents of electronic-addled troglodytes would rather watch Dancing with People Who Useta Be Sorta Well-Known than force their kids to take an hour a day to turn the toys off and read a book.

Spelling itself is an overrated skill anyway. The National Spelling Bee is just a quaint artifact, fun for the kids, and profitable for the tutors of children from bizarrely obsessive Indian families. But the ability or inability to spell arcane, esoteric words will probably not make a difference in your employability. What it is, if it is anything, is a somewhat useful barometer for how well people pay attention to detail, how rigorous their thought processes are, but even there, it's only a piece of the puzzle. There are plenty of people who spell poorly, but are extremely intelligent and skilled, and there are plenty who cannot spell who are borderline retards. (There don't seem to be many stupid people who can spell, so there is probably some correlation.) All poodles are dogs, not all dogs are poodles, yada yada.

Functionally, this ankle-biting claque of senile lexitardrophers haven't thought through their half-baked scheme in the first place:

An overhaul of English spelling would be not without its pitfalls. Even if you could get every printer, publishing house, signmaker, and blogger to agree on a new system, there would still be the problem of those who have learned only the new system of spelling being unable to read literature printed in the old one.

What's more, in giving a fixed value to each letter, someone has to decide what counts as "correct" pronunciation. It's easy to imagine the holy wars that would erupt over whether "either" becomes "eether" or "iether," or whether "envelope" becomes "onveloep" or "enveloep"?

Ah yes, and what a valuable use of time that would be, as opposed to, say, just learning how shit works. I got a better one for the phoneticists, though -- in their endless, tedious oversimplifications of what is a magnificent hodgepodge of word histories and origins, what do the phoneticists propose to do about homophones?

Look, nobody knows how to spell every single word, and because misspelling typically revolves around pattern recognition habits, different people have different sets of words that they misspell. This is so obvious, it scarcely merits mentioning. The only group that will gain a clear and instant benefit from dumbing down orthographic conventions is idiot protest-sign makers.

Spill Baby Spill

Six weeks and counting into the Deepwater Horizon mess, it does seem to be well and truly on its way to being, as Dmitry Orlov has called it, America's Chernobyl. From BP's ongoing series of monkeyfuck "fixes", each more hare-brained than the last, to Obama's diffident responses to the catastrophe, it is clear that this will be years in the undoing.

Mostly the "debate" seems to center around the sufficiency and appropriateness of Obama's reactions, whether or not this is his "Katrina". But this is to misapprehend the situation on several levels. The issue with Bush's tepid response to Katrina had to do with government levels of preparedness to an entirely foreseeable disaster; Mike Brown's indifference, incompetence, and lack of prior experience as head of FEMA; and Bush's immediate response in the wake of the disaster (going to John McCain's birfday party and thence to San Diego, where he gave some self-serving batshit speech comparing his Iraq war to World War 2, finally heading back in the general direction of New Orleans three days after the storm had demolished the city).

Obama's response to the oil spill, on the other hand, has been of a piece with how he responded to Wall Street shenanigans -- stand back, let the people who caused the problem "work" on it, and offer to shovel money and resources in their direction if they want. Really dropping the hammer there, Chief.

Seriously -- no mention of a criminal investigation to figure out whose negligence caused the deaths of 11 people; no mention of a fat fine and sanctions for BP, after years of racking up industry high levels of safety violations; no mention of how maybe we oughta make sure that damage-control technology keeps pace with damage-causing technology; no mention of immediately demanding rigorous external inspections of every other offshore platform. Hell, how about imposing a deadline for BP to get this shit figured out, or the feds step in? How about even a token nod to the notion of conservation, of finding ways to consume less oil, even a little bit?

The problem is that Obama is politically intimidated by everyone. He's afraid to piss off Big Oil, afraid to be portrayed as "anti-business" (as if modest regulatory policies -- to prevent catastrophes like this one, and deal with them more effectively when they do occur -- are anti-business rather than pro-common-sense), afraid to be portrayed as a tree-hugger should he dare to endorse modest steps toward fossil-fuel conservation. He's even afraid to tell Sarah Palin to go fuck herself after she lies about which party takes more money from the oil industry. And not even a word about the foolishness of the stupid "drill baby drill" chant, Exhibit A destroying the Gulf of Mexico right this second.

Nobody's expecting Obama to don a wet suit and go plug the damned hole himself, and we all know he got dealt a ludicrously bad hand by the previous regime. But it's been eighteen months, and all he can hang his hat on is an industry-written ass-spelunking health-care boondoggle. Everything else has been foxes put in charge of henhouses, continued wars and secret wars, gutless incrementalism and unforced errors and ankle-biting diversions.

Bobcat Goldthwait once said something to the effect that blaming the president for every single thing that goes wrong is like getting pissed at Ronald McDonald when you get a bad Big Mac. There's some truth to that, that there are a lot of bureaucratic layers and unanticipated consequences between event and action and response. But the power of the bully pulpit is still considerable, and Obama seems to prefer to use it on pet projects and SCOTUS mediocrity rather than the grand, transformative visions he ascribed to himself.

The repeated lament from the enviro left -- or the usual centrists, for that matter -- was that the US needed a national commitment on the scale of the Manhattan or Apollo projects, to address necessary concerns about non-renewable energy, to mitigate the impending effects of waste, gluttony, and eventual resource depletion. No intellectually honest person can deny the necessity and the utility of such an effort, which would create millions of jobs and enhance national security as well as environmental quality. It would be simple to make it an effort of broad political popularity, if one has the guts to call liars what they are, and to not let it turn into a nationwide pork project.

The problem is not that Obama hasn't accomplished truly great things, it's that he hasn't even tried.