Oprah, Mencken, Mencken, Oprah

So, who wants to break it to Miss Thang that a nation of slack-jawed rubes, that has basically spent the last decade watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers on the teevee while their pockets were picked and their jobs sent to Shenzhen, is exactly dumb enough to put Sarah Palin in the White House?

Never put anything past the 'murkin public, dearie. Not only is there an abundance of assholes ready and willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, they also seem to think that noses grow back after you cut them off. Still not sure whether that is better or worse than people waiting for Oprah to tell them what to do or read, or for Barbara Walters to tell them who the "most fascinating" people are (an annual exercise in tedium that somehow manages to exclude even marginally interesting people as a general rule).

It never ceases to be a source of amazement/amusement to me, the people who we choose (or have chosen for us) to dictate the tastes and tempo of what passes for cultural discourse. Oprah's preening dismay at La Palin would have more credibility if, you know, she hadn't had Palin on to pimp Going RougeRugRogue last year, and again with her bohunk pincushion daughter just a few months later. If you aspire to be a tastemaker, start by learning to tell the difference between soup and wastewater.

Update: This guy, who bravely took a bullet for the rest of us and read Sarah's latest two-ply scrawl, hits the nail right on the head: "There is no historical analogue in the political history of the United States because Palin is not a politician. She is Oprah for another segment of the country."

He's right. And fortunately, Palin is just smart enough to realize this, and to realize that she can make Oprah money doing that, rather than Obama money dicking around in politics. Which is a good thing, because America is just dumb enough to vote for her, given half a chance. Let the wisdom of fools trump the spiteful foolishness of mobs. Or something.

Season's Beatings!

You've probably already read this Ricky Gervais piece by now, but if not, you should.

Something to consider in the wake of the Don't Ask Don't Tell law finally being repealed, as people congratulate one another over the US finally joining every other industrialized nation in something, if not health care and education -- an openly gay politician has a much better chance of getting elected than an openly atheist politician (if there are any). Like Gervais, like most atheists, I choose not to pester people, religious or not, about my personal belief system. But I think most atheists could put their senses of morality and justice up against those of any devout person, and come up as good or better in comparison.

Generally we're just quiet about it, because we all have shit to do, and life is too short, and it's tough to talk people out of that particular tree; evidence obviously won't sway them on the subject, so rational discussion is usually not an option. But one could point out that there is only one openly atheist federal legislator (Pete Stark), and that's pretty much it at the federal level. Every time there's a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, the endless "diversity" trolls start counting gender and race as finely as they can, but when you get right down to it, it's six Catholics and three Jews.

It's easy to point the finger at American Christians -- sweet merciful Jebus, is it easy -- since most of them seriously seem to think that their religion was created in toto sometime between the landing of the Mayflower and the founding of the Republic. The idea that it could actually be a hodgepodge of cultures, histories, and traditions that co- or even pre-existed their usual touchstones does not seem to have even occurred to them. This does not, however, let the Euros off the hook, with their carefully sculpted hypocrisies -- state religions, symbols festooning public buildings, yet very little actual keeping of the practices. But very nice seasonal festivals, especially in the Germanic countries. So it goes.

Contrary to popular belief, atheists do have hope -- hope in the rational and empirical, hope that humans stop fine-tuning their traditional belief books to amplify their personal preferences, hope that they can eventually get over themselves and just leave other people the hell alone, instead of telling them what to believe or not believe.

Peace on Earth. Merry Christmas!

Useful Idiot

This has to be one of the most willfully obtuse screeds to litter the NYT in quite some time, and considering the roster of chuckleheads who poop out filler for them on a reg'lar basis, that really is saying something. Certainly the Arab world, as a whole, needs to do a better job in weeding out the regressive nutballs in their backyards, but for one, Persians are not Arabs.

Cohen seems blessedly ignorant of any possibility why some inhabitants of that part of the world, after a couple straight centuries of varying levels of colonialism, might tend to assume the worst of the US and Israel. The question is not that it might sound preposterous that the Mossad would have remote-controlled sharks attacking people at Sharm el-Shaikh; it does sound preposterous. But only because sharks, insofar as we know, cannot be lowjacked and utilized as remote-kill devices, not because there's no way Israel -- who, let's recall, just a few months ago sent two dozen agents into a Gulf State hotel to whack someone, pissing off several countries' diplomatic corps with their counterfeiting of passports -- would ever do such a thing.

It's as if this guy, not even sixty years later, has never heard of, say, Kermit Roosevelt.

Make a Joyful Noise

OK, it's basically an update of Dick in a Box, but that's not a bad thing. One of the more fun things to hit the teevee in recent memory.

Exception to the Drool

Been meaning to touch on this gem for a while, but busy week, blah blah blah, you know the drill. Besides, if this is an article, you know it's a slow news week in Bullshit City.

Anyhoo, let us cut the proverbial crap -- for each and every one of the turd-bruglars mentioned trumpeting about "American exceptionalism", it is a vastly different concept than what most sentient beings assume. The phrase actually used to connote, get this, a certain level of exceptionalism, that even beyond the blood-soaked history of slavery and genocide, there was a common desire to achieve and excel. This, along with serendipitous geography and the sort of gregarious aggression that stupefies Europeans, translated into progress over the last century.

But the exceptionalists have something more sinister, less achievement-oriented in mind. What they really mean is the divinely-ordained right to push inconvenient others around, to dictate the tempo of regional and global activity, to drive the world's bus even as the country itself devolves into an obese corporate despotism with banana-republic levels of income disparity. To such people it makes infinitely more sense to spend $3 trillion to depose and kill Saddam Hussein, displace or kill 10% of the Iraqi population, and leave the country a violent Iranian satrapy, than to spend even one-tenth of that trying to make sure that the public education system actually produces thinking, reasoning people.

They'll throw out some pseudo-populist red meat about those darned bankers, but rest assured not a one of 'em would turn down a fat donation from Lloyd Blankfein or whichever Armani-coated homunculus. But they do get an inordinate amount of mileage from the one-o'-yew pose.

This cheap anti-intellectual posturing always gets traction when one of them (you know which one) misspeaks, then is apoplectic at the prospect of it getting reported. This is the downside of having the cowed corporate media report every blessed thing to fall out yer piehole, dearie -- they regurgitate the fuck-ups as well.

The takeaway from that particular non-story is not whether Palin knows the difference between North Korea and South Korea, anymore than anyone seriously believes that Obama thinks there are 57 states. People misspeak. It happens. (Of course, the responses of each when people make fun of them for it is telling; Obama never says shit, while Palin instantly gets defensive and has a holy hissy-fit that someone is not completely deferential to her.)

Palin probably understands which Korea is which in the context of American interests; that is, she knows which one is designated as "our friend". That's not necessarily an insult; for all his rhetorical furbelows and oratorical vamping, Obama has so far demonstrated precious little real acumen for foreign policy detail. Aside from his stance thus far on Iran, one would be hard-pressed to delineate substantial differences from what he's doing, and what his predecessors or opponents would have done.

If we accept for the sake of argument that Obama does not have over Palin -- aside from proprietary information granted the office -- any substantial advantage in profound knowledge regarding the Korean peninsula, we then have to keep in mind their respective approaches. That is, a leader who does not possess deep insight on a particular subject surrounds himself with people who do. And that is the big difference -- where Obama will at least in good faith try to find someone temperamentally inclined to defuse volatile situations with unstable despots, Palin would pick John Bolton.

This is of a piece with her "commentary" as such, on pretty much any given subject, the predisposition to escalate virtually any conversation with obnoxious guff and mendacious flapdoodle. People who are looking for a problem can invariably create one if need be, the better to rally her legion of angry, ignorant, gibbering morons to the most tendentious arguments.

In the past, I might have been self-righteously offended at yet another god-bothering dickhole overtly insinuating that the religious, despite at least two thousand years of bloody proof to the contrary, are inherently more moral than non-believers, whether or not they practice what they preach, whether or not they know what they're yapping about, simply by virtue of belief. But really, it would be like leaving my dog in the house, and getting angry when she shits on the rug. The dog is doing the only thing it knows how to do; the fault is mine for not kicking the stupid fucker out before I left.

So it is here. The only question is whether we (whoever "we" may be in this case, perhaps folks with IQs above 90) still have the energy to rub their noses in it when they soil the rug.

The Evil of Banality

Is there no blessed end to this vapid cow?

"Of course, we all had to bite our tongues — more than once — as Tripp's father went on a media tour through Hollywood and New York, spreading untruths and exaggerated rhetoric," Palin writes.

Jesus Christ, lady. Project much? Has she done anything over the past two years besides fatten her wallet by traipsing around the country talking shit, bearing false witness -- which, and I may be wrong, since I'm a godless heathen atheist (especially if someone like Palin is remotely a "Christian"), explicitly violates an actual commandment -- and jacking up the rhetoric to a height that even a sizable chunk of Republicans can't stomach in good conscience?

Of course, it's always a mistake to use the phrase "good conscience" in the same sentence as "Palin", since the latter truly has only a nodding acquaintance with the former, having sold whatever soul she may have had for the cheap and easy rewards of fake populism and reality teevee.

Bristol Palin has been featured on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars," but Sarah Palin has a few words for Fox's "American Idol." She refers to "talent-deprived" contestants who suffer from "the cult of self-esteem."

"No one they have encountered in their lives — from their parents to their teachers to their president — wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth," she writes. "So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson."

Uh-huh, and apparently an entire nation has decided not to hurt her daughter's feelings, because it's not like she can, um, actually dance, nor is she actually a "star", even by the loosest definition of that term. She's famous for exactly two things -- getting knocked up by an oily bohunk, and being the offspring of an increasingly tedious political bobblehead. But it's nice that America's Sob Sister has the fucking balls to lecture the rest of us on how to set our kids straight, seeing the bang-up job she's done so far.

I think it would actually be edifying -- for Palin, for her supporters, for the people who are sick of her very name and presence at this point and wish she would just take her pelf and scuttle back into the underbrush -- if she ran for president. I still think it's doubtful, if only because she's just smart enough to realize that the real money is in the cock-tease.

But she is also an irrepressible narcissist, increasingly in love with the sound of her own grating voice and peanut-gallery aphorisms on Teh Twitter. The idea of her schlepping around the country for two years, weighed down with her rubber-glue shields and campaign-prop progeny, growing increasingly exasperated at the prospect of only being able to preach to the choir, exhausting herself for the pleasure of self-selecting jerkoffs, is interesting to contemplate.

Perhpas the most telling sign that she's topped out is that, while a bunch of her no-name House dimwits made the cut in the midterms, almost all of her high-profile picks lost. Alaska seems to have launched its own in-house write-in campaign to shit-can professional asshole Joe Miller, almost as a direct rebuke to her, to send lifer Lisa Murkowski (whom they had rejected in the primary) back instead.

After having this braying fool and her tedious jabber halfway up our collective asses for two endless years now, the main takeaway is really not that Palin is offensive, or even especially stupid, in a profession full of card-carrying morons. It's how predictable and tiresome she became quite some time ago, if you think about it. The last eighteen months, at least, have been the same Johnny One-Note schtick, unvarying -- and worse yet, uninteresting. One of my favorite bits is that she has yet to say anything that is either true or correct, but let's add one to the mix: when was the last time she even said anything interesting, as opposed to merely provocative or obnoxious?

Politics is at heart a clown college, and American politics is little different fromt he rest of the world in that regard. Dipshits and poltroons abound. But in America, where things are supposed to be bigger and better, one might expect a higher grade of buffoon. Palin has neither the pedigree of Fredo Arbusto, nor the avuncular charm of Fred Thompson. She is merely the personification of the garden-variety uppity dunce you can stumble across, double-parked in a Sam's Club aisle, any given day of the week.

Just another area in which we've fallen behind. The least we can do is demand a better class of jackass, not this prickly, grudge-nursing hausfrau who, despite attending five colleges to cobble together a fucking communications degree, cannot assemble a coherent sentence.

Bobocracy

It's been a while, but this one is moronic even by Bobo standards:

The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.

Hanh? Lemme get this straight -- one of the most steadfast, indeed tediously consistent, preachers of the technocratic gospel is now protesting the supposedly topsy-turvy nature of What's Going On? Surely a heaping helping of doubleplusbullshit can't be far behind.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Fair enough. Whence the morality, the righteous indignation, against the thieves and scammers who shitcanned the economy, forced the taxpayers to bankroll their "mistakes", are now sitting on hoards of cash that they won't lend out to rejuvenate the economy, and have dragooned a like-minded bunch of abettors to fuck people out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork? No, of course not; Bobo merely hangs his balding pate, shaking his head sadly at the Spock-like bloodlessness with which machine-messiah liberals insist on running our proud, tradition-rich society. This is truly a feat of some estimable proportions, to completely look past and implicitly absolve the destructive, sociopathic greed of a niche of derivatives pirates, and lob dickless wads of disapproval at the management style of -- wait for it -- a bunch of dickless drones who don't have the balls to take on their benefactors.

Lloyd Blankfein could demand a sacrifice of a thousand barbecued live infants for next Walpurgisnacht, and the Democrats would cringe timorously and murmur tepid disapproval, and people like Bobo would berate said Dems for their lack of support for our fine capitalist insect overlords. This is a rotten fucking little system all the way around -- the people who run and rape the finance system, the people who are supposed to legislate and regulate it, and the people who are supposed to analyze and report factually with at least a trace of intellectual honesty -- and it won't change until we set up a guillotine on Wall Street and make an example of some of these humps.

I do not understand why this has not been done yet. Perhaps at some point enough of the folks who are getting ass-raped out of their houses will band together and do or demand something. Or they may choose to wonder instead if Snooki takes it up the poop-chute. (Answer: mos def, but only if the hot tub's hot and the Four Loko is room temperature. A lady has to have her standards, even if said lady is really a transvestite Oompa-Loompa.)

Yes, if only we could just run things with a bit o' common sense, as if wage stagnation, income disparity, and banana-republic-level wealth stratification have not been ramping up and destroying the middle class for three decades now. I have absolutely no clues where Serious Thinker Bobo proposes that the "low debt" and "high savings" are supposed to come from, perhaps that bottomless pit of moxie and/or gumption that well-heeled bootstrappers like himself assume exists somewhere out in the vaunted flyover country that media dipshits constantly champion, but never seem to actually reside in.

With any luck, he'll someday find out firsthand. Really, if the market for corporate butt-boy suddenly fell out and Bobo had to make something resembling an honest living, it's difficult to tell what actual skill he has. Anybody can peddle tendentious "opinion" guff on unsuspecting passersby -- it's called blogging, and there's an infinite variety of better content produced for free across these here intartubez. At some point his toadying may no longer be cost-effective, and his periwinkle-collar commiserating may be put to the test.

The Memory Hole

The Great Revision continues apace, enabled not only by the usual complaisant chattering journos, but the éminence grise himself, a man literally without a pulse, but with a passion for gloss and invention that only a self-serving bastard can possess:

Addressing a crowd of 2,500 supporters and Bush administration veterans, Mr. Cheney said the response to Mr. Bush’s book showed that the country had begun to re-evaluate him.

“Two years after you left office, judgments are a little more measured than they were,” Mr. Cheney said. “When times have been tough or the critics have been loud, you’ve always said you had faith in history’s judgment, and history is beginning to come around.”

....

His dry wit seemed intact as he took a poke at Mr. Obama’s recent admission that there were no such things as shovel-ready public works projects. Referring to the groundbreaking, he said, “This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

Yes, and we all know what they're shoveling. They never stopped, really, they just took a break for appearance's sake, and now the shoveling recommences.

Cheney may just very well be genetically predisposed, hardwired to the extreme, to act as hatchet man for whatever slimy boss he toadies for. He's been doing it since the Nixon administration, it's second nature, the way he steps in to let Fredo appear to be above the fray, above the mess that Obama may now officially own, but nonetheless did indisputably purchase on consignment from these two bozos, the continued existence and success of whom is proof enough that karma is a polite fiction.

Humble Narcissism

Remember last year when the Dubya "Miss Me Yet?" billboard popped up out in flyover country somewhere, and most people either laughed or shrugged? Yeah, good times. Fredo has graciously stayed away for two full years, but now he's back pimping some two-ply compendium of lies, excuses, and half-witticisms, naturally with the help of the librul lamestream media. What are the odds on Oprah and/or the Sheinhardt Wig Company having a vested interest in whatever hack factory is publishing this doorstop?

But it's actually been good in a way, Fredo's return, because it conclusively proves that there's nothing to miss about him. He really did, and really does, suck in a very fundamental way. He has never second-guessed a single major decision he made, no matter how tragic the consequences were. Apparently he would have changed the "Mission Accomplished" banner (to what? it was never about appreciating troops, it was about playing dress-up and legitimizing his incompetence), and he was really really butthurt over what Kanye West said about him.

Kanye, as I said at the time, had the wrong end of the stick on that one. It's not that Bush doesn't care about black people -- his diversity record was perfectly fine, and he genuinely seems to be as inclusive and non-racist as anyone could hope.

It's that he doesn't care about poor people, because it is an alien experience to him. Oh, he's talked about his failed congressional run back in the late '70s, when he and Laura were starting a family and had no money. But that is not being poor; coming from an East Coast establishment family means that you may find yourself cash-poor at times, but there is always a fallback position, usually many. Poor means if you don't figure something out, you are well and truly fucked, you're a paycheck or two from living on the sidewalk, whatever.

Ann RichardsJim Hightower had it so right when shehe said that Bush was born on third base but acted like he'd hit a triple. This is a penetrating insight to the man's personality -- it really is incomprehensible to him that actual poor people, who literally cannot bootstrap out of their mess with hard work and/or gumption, because they are overworked and underpaid, and will probably work until the day they drop, that such people exist. His mother's infamous comment at the Katrina shelter in Texas illuminated that whole mentality -- she seems to regard poor people as another species -- so it would make sense that Junior, who literally has never made a fucking dime in his life without the imprimatur of his old man and Nazi-symp grandfather, would just have no clue.

So. A piss-thin excursion into the, ahem, decision-making process of perhaps the most notoriously bad decision-maker in recent history, merely as an opportunity to rationalize them, as opposed to rethinking them, or even assessing their consequences. He amazingly still regards his failure to privatize Social Security -- even after the biggest financial catastrophe in eight decades -- as his biggest miss, rather than the missed bullet that it was. (Oh, and the miscarried fetus in the jar. Holy fucking shit. This explains a lot.)

Bush is one of those people who constantly, almost reflexively professes commitment to principle and humility. But clearly it's all about him, everything is viewed through a prism of brushes with greatness and perceived slights. The decisions that George W. Bush made between 2001 and 2008 cost a lot of people their lives; the number of people affected directly in tragic fashion would be mid-eight to low-nine figures, and the number indirectly affected obviously much greater. We're paying the price right now for his deregulation of the financial securitization system, and will do so for years to come, if indeed "we" (as in, a meaningful percentage of the total population, not the 1% of moral parasites at the top who are doing better than ever, fuck you very much) ever do recover.

Tens or hundreds of millions of lives forever altered, destroyed by unnecessary war, unleashed sectarian brutality, domestic financial chicanery. But it's Kanye West that's kept him up at night. The fucking moral degeneracy of this person, the sheer solipsism it must take to capture and hold a world-view like that, is -- well, I'm not sure the proper word exists for it in the English language.

Speaking of degenerate narcissists who refuse to just fucking go away already, the Wasilla Hillbillies have themselves a ree-alitee show, from the fine folks at the basic-cable sump that used to be known as The Learning Channel, but now trucks in garbage like I Didn't Know I was Pregnant and makes scumbags like Jon and Kate Gosselin into preening fametard assholes. The estimable Tim Goodman, now writing for the Hollywood Reporter, takes this bottomless sack of crap with his usual good cheer.

Perhaps most surprising is that — in the first episode, at least — it doesn’t cast the best light on Palin’s kids. Piper, 9, doesn’t seem to listen much to what Mom asks, and teenager Willow seems moody and defiant, at one point sneaking her boyfriend upstairs to her room after Mom slid the baby gate (for Trig) closed and told him not to go up. You’d think with the whole Bristol Babygate thing, they might have edited that part.

There’s also paranoia about Joe McGinniss, who is writing a book about Palin and rented the house next to her. She talks about him (without naming him) constantly as the camera shows him about 15 feet away on his deck, face blurred out. But though Todd says McGinniss is writing “a hit piece on my wife” and Palin keeps asking whether he’s watching, what he’s doing is reading a book on his porch, oblivious. Todd built a 14-foot fence to give the family more privacy. “By the way,” Palin intones politically, “I thought that was a good example; what we just did others could look at and say, ‘This is what we need to do to secure our nation’s border.’”

Ohohoho, see what she did there? Fucking brilliant. This is definitely the sort of person who needs to be in a position of political prominence, an intellectually sterile soccer mom who hasn't heard the phrase "market saturation", but knows she appeals to impotent old farts and vapid sob sister cows who buy into that moronic "mama grizzly" schtick. The takeaway from Goodman's review is that the producers got the title ass-backwards -- it really should have been called Alaska's Sarah Palin. It's all about her and she knows it.

No one's tuning in to see Alaska scenery. That's what they have Rick Steves and that Travel Channel shit for. They're tuning in to watch this braying jackass affirm their grievances and validate their insecurities. And she eats it up, she loves the attention. I suppose it's too much to ask Todd to throw his back into it once in a while, just so's she doesn't constantly have to seek validation from the rest of the fucking planet.

Anyway, a little cross-promotion from Li'l Miss Humility:

"You're lucky," she said at a Republican rally in Orlando, according to the New York Post. "You're going to get to learn a little bit more about my state here in the coming weeks."

Palin also took a dig at the current President, saying he'd likely get a show called "Barack Obama's Golf Courses"… "sometime [around] November 2012."

See, because Barack Obama is a rich patrician who plays a lot of golf, which is an elitist sport, doncha know....

Wait. No, that was George W. Bush. Not that it matters, facts are useless, ignorance is strength, cokehead alcoholics have inside wisdom on how Woodrow Wilson turned us all into communists, and multimillionaires like Bush (and now Palin) are jes plain folks.

America Drinks and Goes Home

Did we learn anything tonight? Of course not. There is nothing to learn, nothing to prognosticate. It did not, in fact, really matter who "won". The donor classes won, as they always do. They're not in this for their health, you know.

Some will say that because Rand Paul -- an ophthalmologist who created his own licensing board in order to certify himself -- beat Jack Conway, that the teabaggers are ascendant. Others will say that because Casper W. MilquetoastHarry Reid squeaked past the teabaggers' shithouse rat in Nevada, that said 'baggers are not what they (and the media who legitimized them with endless profiles) think they are.

The baggers seem to seriously not understand that politics is a business, first and foremost, that there is a reason that the same conglomerates and people of wealth hedge their bets by renting both parties. It is a money game, and all their Paul Revere bullshit will only take them so far once they're actually in. I'm sure Rand Paul and his toupée think this will be some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington schitck for the rubes back home, but what it will be is stasis, a two-year Mexican standoff between obstinate upstarts and puling lifers who literally couldn't pull shit together with a supermajority.

Comic relief abounds, as always, but pound for pound the biggest humor may be found in the CA goobernatorial race, where eMeg Whitman spent a sixth of a billion dollars of her own money to end up six points behind Jerry Brown, who didn't even start advertising until Labor Day. She would have gotten better results -- and saved a buttload of money -- just by going around and handing three million voters twenty bucks each.

Hilarious as it is to watch Mrs. Griff Harsh IV blow an impossible amount of money for a dismal job no one in their right mind would want, there is an actual takeaway. Every election cycle gets worse and worse in this regard, but the Citizens United decision really sealed the deal on effectively making the permanent campaign a full-time by god industry. This is why toxic yahooism and borderline-retard candidates get covered, validated, legitimized, turned into the latest and greatest.

And in the end, neither Rand Paul nor Barbara Boxer, nor a single one them, really, will do a single thing to address the two greatest issues driving this country into the dirt -- wage stagnation and wealth disparity. Even a nudge of those two factors in the right direction would address a host of connected issues, from jobs to education.

But as the man famously said, it is impossible to get someone to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

Purple (Drank) Reign

From the wacky world of the NFL: I hate the Redskins, and I despise Mike Shanahan, so the fact that they're actually working out Drankenstein as a backup for Donovan McNabb and Rex "Sex Cannon" Grossman is nothing short of hilarious.

Meanwhile, the Raiduhs actually seem to be shaking off a typically crummy start, with their XBox Madden thrashing of Denver Sunday before last, followed by a pimp-slapping of Pete Carroll's crew a couple days ago. It's only been two in a row, but that's more than these guys have put together in a while, and a home victory over the overachieveing Queefs this Sunday would give them momentum into the bye week, and put them just a half-game out of the division lead.

Oh, and Randy Moss getting run out of Minnesota after one month. Fucking haw-haw, Farvonauts. Let the T-Jack era begin! And thanks for looking after my fondest football wish, that Randy never gets his ring. [Update: More on what a great guy Moss is here. Fuck this guy right in the neck.] The only thing that could make it funnier is if Wade Phillips makes a desperation move and pulls Moss off the waiver wire, as Kitna-bait for the soon-to-be-3-13 Cowpies.

With normally reliable (but make no mistake, hardly any less dysfunctional) NFL standbys such as Washington, Minnesota, and Dallas completely imploding, it is refreshing -- no matter how brief it ends up being -- for the Raiders to look, by comparison, positively functional, competent even.

Balls to the Wall, Part 2: Man Up

Out here in hick country, it was several years ago when I first found myself stuck behind some jacked-up four-by with a weird sticker plastered across the rear window -- a silhouette of a cowboy, from behind, encircled with two iterations of a cryptic redneck magick spell: Cowboy Up.

That first encounter, I instinctively wondered aloud, given my prejudice against such folk, cowboy up what? Up your ass? That would jibe pretty closely with what I've always presumed is the deeply closeted nature of many hicks, the corroboration of which is the inevitable overcompensation such vehicles connote -- virtually everyone driving these wank-jobs is some 5'6" banty rooster who has to wear a giant hat to get close to the 6' range, which as we all know is where the real eagles fly.

It took a few sightings of this adhesive secret handshake to realize that my linguistically wonkish nature had neglected to allow for the possibility that "cowboy" was being used as a verb. Of course! And why not? It fits with the intrinsic notion that rednecks just know that they're working (and playing) harder than everyone else. Just ask them, they'll tell you. So naturally cowboying up imputes a higher sense of being, sorta like Tool's Forty Six & 2 minus the Jungian/Melchizedekian imagery (and drum solo). Push on, strive to be all the cowboy one can be. Larger tyres await thee in Valhalla, mighty keg-hauler!

Okay, enough picking on the rednecks. This campaign year has been the Year of the Ballbusting Shrew. Lowing cows from hither and yon, who in past years would have had to debase themselves to get a school board position, have found themselves Palinized, thrust front-and-center to compete for national positions that they are manifestly unqualified for.

Knowing this, and competing against tenured, diffident men who can't have sex anymore without a ball gag and a safe word, the default phrase for these gibbering dingbats is to emasculate the already emasculated DC lifer with the clichéd-before-it-was-first-uttered "Man up!". This is done knowing full well that these men, even if they possessed a pair, are culturally discouraged from responding in kind, as if pimp-slapping a nasty troll like Sharron Angle had fuck-all to do with picking on a girl.

Needless to say, it's always frustrating to see essentially meaningless catch-phrases become oft-repeated standbys of talentless hacks seeking higher office. It's this year's "Where's the beef?".

Balls to the Wall

You almost have to admire the stones on this asshole:

Tim Profitt, the former Rand Paul volunteer who stepped on the head of a MoveOn.org-affiliated activist outside of a debate on Monday, said he thinks the woman, Lauren Valle, owes him an apology.

"I don't think it's that big of a deal," Profitt said of the incident in an interview with CBS affiliate WKYT. "I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you."

Profitt, a Rand Paul supporter who used to serve as a campaign coordinator for the Kentucky Senate hopeful's campaign, was caught on video on Monday stepping on Valle's head after she had been wrestled to the ground. Valle had been trying to offer a satiric award to the candidate.

Profitt goes on to describe how Valle instigated the entire thing, as if holding up a sign gives Profitt and his fellow brownshirts the right to stomp her into the sidewalk. It's as if he doesn't realize the whole thing was caught on video.

In lieu of an apology, Profitt may have to settle for a lawsuit and criminal charges. And maybe Valle should consider carrying pepper spray, or traveling with a group of friends or something, before one of these freaks actually does some damage.

In general, this seems unfortunately somewhat representative of the high-flown vitriol these losers engage in, the logical conclusion of constantly steeping in abusive levels of sheer ignorance.

I don't typically watch Olbermann or Maddow, but last night did happen to catch the latter as she traveled to Alaska to interview the three Senate candidates. She had no trouble catching Scott McAdams and Lisa Murkowski, seeing as how they both trail Security Goon Joe Miller in the polls and could use the publicity. However, Maddow's quest to interview Miller took on a strangely Roger & Me-like vibe, playing phone tag with aides, trying to schedule five minutes of facetime, culminating in a brief but revealing waste of time with Miller.

Anyhoo, perhaps the most telling part of this sojourn was Maddow attempting to engage with a street-corner gathering of Miller supporters. She asks the first guy a perfectly reasonable question, to wit, why does he support Miller? Welp, the yob replies, Miller will protect my gun rights, because "Eric Holder is the most anti-gun AG America has ever had". Sensing an opportunity to drill down into the goober's intellectual sludge, Maddow begins asking him what, precisely, Holder has done or said that makes him so anti-gun.

After several iterations of "I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about, but I believe in it enough to waste my time on a fucking street-corner instead of doing something productive with my waste of a life" answers from this halfwit, Maddow gives up and goes to the next one, a middle-aged woman who repeated the yob's gibbering catechism about Herr Holder's impending threat to forcibly confiscate y'alls gun safes, right down to the complete inability to cite even one (1) actual example of this perfidy.

Anecdotal as this is, surely we have seen enough anecdotes in enough states, nationwide clusters of seething fucktards who have seen just enough Glenn Beck to get their panties in a wad, without knowing or being able to artiiculate exactly why. Surely "the most anti-gun AG this country has ever had" would provide an abundance of ready evidence for the enterprising protester, much less just one even half-assed example.

Yet these people were clearly using their whole asses. Miller will no doubt win, as most likely will Sharron "Black football jerseys make the baby Jesus cry!" Angle, and several other goofballs from this seemingly endless clown car. Hell, if Delaware was bigger than my left nut, even former wannabe-Wiccan (and full-time dingbat) Christine O'Donnell would probably be giving charisma-free Chris Coons a run for his money.

Back during the comparatively bucolic Cheney regime, I mused often about what sore winners they and their supporters were. It goes double for this year's model of shitbird; these brainless fuckers will simply be emboldened by any victory, no matter how puling, granting themselves the right to violence when someone confronts them with disagreeable ideas -- or, infinitely worse -- facts.

Of course, a primary culprit is Duh Media, with its clearly vested interest (especially in the wake of the awesome Citizens United SCROTUS ruling) in ginning up a pro wrestling match every electoral season. They've given these morons so much fucking airtime, they've legitimized them to substantial swaths of other morons, who are right to be angry, but scattershot in their focus and intellectual honesty. It was ever thus, obviously, but usually not with so much moron empowerment.

It is some small consolation that, in the long run, these are the people who will be spending their retirement living on cat food (if not actual cats), but again, they won't be happy until they drag the rest of the country down to their level, pin them to the sidewalk, and stand on their shoulder. Like we always say, maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

These people are despicable, not because I disagree with them, not even because they don't know what they're talking about most of the time, but because they are intellectually dishonest -- willfully, deliberately so -- and worse yet, they have no reservations about resorting to violence when they don't get their way or someone openly disagrees with them. If Duh Peepul want government by temper tantrum, then these are your folk. Good luck with that.

The Roof Is On Fire

Enough is enough -- I think it's high time I gave a shout out to my homiez in Cell Block Tea, the grass-roots populist movement that just happens to be supporting only Republican candidates. Their slate of lying dingbats, racist morons, and fascist scumbags is exactly what they want, need, and most importantly, deserve. Vote 'em in, early and often, see what you get.

As for the rest of the country, being forced to deal with their fallout? Fuck 'em. Yes, some people will valiantly schlep to the polls, and do their duty to at least try to hold back the impending tide of teabag stupid. But the fact is, the majority of people will not bother even to show up and vote, because, well, I don't fuckin' know why. On the one hand, I agree with Pete Townshend that not voting is just as political of an act as voting; on the other hand, knowing the average douchebag, the disaffected apathy reeks of laziness and intellectual poverty, not deliberate intent and intellectual integrity (a concept which has never occurred to the fucktard teabaggers).

It seems that the people who have the most to lose are the most enamored of these screeching assholes. I say let 'em have their way, and when they're denied medical coverage, their local support programs are eviscerated, and they're living on fucking cat food, they can look in the mirror and congratulate themselves for their fine work.

Putting in More 'n' Better Democrats has achieved perhaps a different flavor of gutless incrementalism, but naught else. They seem content to finish what Fredo started, and snivel and cringe at the emasculating japes lobbed by the ballbusting, dried-up teabag shrews. Both parties are the butt-slaves to corrupt bankers and thieving rentier capitalists who, if we had any guts, would have been gibbeted and guillotined in the town square by now. It is a corrupt edifice, and perhaps burning it down, if people are hellbent in voting directly against their own rational self-interest, is in order.

We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Autopilot

Ahahahaha. Even for bullshit debates, the true believers just can't help themselves. Cupcake O'Donnell wastes no time in going for the meat-and-taters talkin' points, since most everything else is past her grasp:

"My opponent wants to go to Washington and rubber-stamp failed spending bills," she said. "This is wrong. Uncle Sam needs to be cut off."

She also wondered about Coons' patriotism. "If you've ever questioned whether America is a beacon of freedom and justice, then he's your guy."

OK, the first part, while hackneyed (as if Republitards don't spend other people's money like water), still has a debatable point in it -- either spending is rampant and wasteful, and needs to be cut across the board, or people just don't want their spending ox getting gored, and before you know it, nothing gets cut. That is a point that can be debated.

But there is no sensible, logical jump that takes you from that to impugning Coons' belief in American virtue, presumably over his sarcastically-titled "Bearded Marxist" thesis. It's just weak, even for someone who's spent most of their adult life campaigning against the perils of masturbation and homosexuality.

Asked about evolution, which O'Donnell has said she believes is a myth, she said the question was "irrelevant." When pushed by Wolf Blitzer, a CNN anchor who was one of the moderators, she said: "Local schools should make that decision."

Friends 'n' neighbors, if you need to ask why China and India are drinking our collective milkshake, there's your answer.

Bullies

Bullies, of course, are much in the "news" these days, as if they suddenly cropped up of a nonce, and had not always been there. Perhaps they are there in school to prepare you for the more institutional bullies you face through life, in the various guises of bureaucratic administrations -- teachers, friends, enemies, bosses, co-workers, politicians promising "change" every so often whilst they yank your dick and coddle the rentiers. We've all observed and/or dealt with them at one point or another, with varying levels of success. One thing is for sure -- asshole kids come from asshole parents. You can bank on it every time.

Every once in a while, though, an especially vicious subset crops up, so gleefully cruel, so overwhelmingly more powerful than their target, that you find yourself wishing for a murderous home invasion, or a one-home radius natural gas explosion, or a nice shoulder-launched Katyusha to dispense with the problem.

'I’m not proud of myself because this went from a neighbourhood dispute to a huge thing.'

Heh-indeedy. No, this motherless fuck isn't mortified because she suddenly realized that she was taunting and harassing a seven-year-old who is in the midst of a very nasty, grueling fate. She's bummed because the rest of the planet found out what a truly horrible person she is. I honestly cannot even imagine what sort of person does this shit. It's a scant step above child molestation or animal torture; it is the strong preying on the very weakest and most vulnerable, not for food, but for the sport of it.

Over a fucking bouncy-house. Seriously.

‘My husband is a good person and I hope he doesn’t lose his job. I hope our family doesn’t lose his job. I’m the bad person,’ said Mrs Petkov.

‘I feel horrible for what I’ve said and done. That little girl shouldn’t have had to lose her mum like that and she shouldn’t have to lose her life either. I just hope she didn’t see those pictures.’

Fuck that. Scott Petkov (or Petrov, the article really can't seem to decide which) refers to his wife's "brutal honesty" that the neighbors can't handle. Like she's Richard Pryor or something, man, and your phony bourgeois bullshit can't handle how real she is, with her Photoshopping and spray-camo-painting the Deathmobile. In your face, plastic exurbia!

I hope he gets his ass fired, just for having such a cunt wife and putting up with her bullshit. Grow a fucking pair, and put your psycho cow into her proper place, sporto. I hope she gets fired as well, if in fact she has a goddamned job. I can't imagine anyone hiring her for anything now. I hope they lose their house, their car, their dog, their Facebook page. I hope their kids realize what cocksuckers their parents really are.

Honestly, I am just flummoxed at how human beings can turn into whatever the fuck Jennifer and Scott Petkov are. It's just incomprehensible, how someone can get so butthurt over a perceived birthday-party snub that they devote themselves to tormenting the family of a dying child. What the hell is wrong with these people?

There is a point where you have to wonder how people can be so irredeemably vile and still live with themselves (or each other). This is well beyond that point.

Deep Musical Thought #2

Like many of the kidz seeking lulz on thar intartubez (or however they say it in the 'hood), I enjoy the "I see what you did there" meme. It occurs to me that the true original I See What You Did There band, pound for pound, before Radiohead, Tool, whoever, is REM. Serves me right for throwing it over to the "classic rock" station in a recent moment of weakness (i.e., the CD had ended and I couldn't change it in traffic). I'd forgotten how fucking dreadful they really were, but Stand brought it all back. At least Fred Durst never got mistaken by retard critics as some kind of iconic poet.

Deep Musical Thought

I should send the ZRock station a thank-you note, for continuing to remind me just how little I miss Limp Bizkit and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Over and over again.

It's a public service, really, though playing better music would also be considered one.

99 Problems: Dunce Dunce Revolution

Oy. What hath Palin wrought, you know? It was bad enough we had this belligerent nitwit dumped on us, but now her ideological gender-mates are cropping up hither and sometimes yon. And they are bad enough in the sense that you don't even need to go into their politics or positions (since none of them are willing to discuss their actual ideas anyway). They're just ridiculous people to begin with.

I don't care that Christine O'Donnell may or may not have "dabbled" in "witchcraft" (which was probably a bullshit embellishment of her being a hanger-on to either Dungeons and Dragons nerds or headbanger poseurs in the first place). The concern is that she has yet to articulate a position on anything; she apparently seriously believes she'll just waltz into Capitol Hill with a Ginsu pen and cut spending as far as the eye can see.

Of course, she's never held a real job either, not one that requires reporting to a boss and justifying your continued existence. So much for this simplistic "I'm you" crap. An even bigger concern is that she has spent her entire adult life campaigning against fairly routine things like masturbation. I don't know what to make of a person who fails to recognize biology for what it is.

Then there's Sharron Angle, Nevada's crazy cat lady, minus the cats. As with O'Donnell, it's not the actual politics (because again, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid that they actually talk about what they do and how they plan to do it), so much as the basic notion that a person who campaigns against black football jerseys on religious grounds is simply mentally unstable, and probably shouldn't be trusted with more than a three-figure budget.

So beyond politics, there's just sheer intellectual quackery, not to mention dishonesty. And then there's eMeg Whitman, supposedly more reputable and legitimate, by virtue of her awesome bidness experience. But this is someone who has built a personal fortune on insider trading and opportunities, situations that, legal or not, are denied to 99.9% of all other human beings on the planet, period.

And really, how great of a businessperson are you when you blow an eighth of a billion dollars of your own money to be governor of California, a job sure to be as thankless and winless as head coach of the Oakland Raiders? Especially since, for all the high-dollar media blitzes she bought, Whitman is running maybe neck-and-neck with Jerry Brown, who has spent dick on his campaign, and waited until after Labor Day to even bother advertising (as it should be).

But the first rule of politics is, don't spend your own money. Yes, yes, throwing your own cash in presents the veneer of incorruptibility, but as Jesse Unruh famously said, if you can't take thier money, drink their whiskey, fuck their women, and still vote against them the next day, you don't belong there.

This is the level of incompetence I'm supposed to elect as governor? Why not just re-elect Schwarzenegger as goobernator for life and have done with it? At least Ahnult is occasionally entertaining; the best we'll get from eMeg -- before she inevitably jumps to be running mate to Mitt Romney's '12 Magic Underwear campaign -- is an occasional update on her evil snowboarder son. Frankly, just naming a kid "Griff Harsh V" -- yes, the fucking fifth, goddammit -- is a sign of epically poor judgment.

People, I'm tellin' ya, we gotta start judging people on intangibles, if they refuse to give us tangibles. As tempted as I am to let them choke on their own fumes o' stupid, this teabagger shit, it does no one any good -- except, of course, their corporate benefactors.

Not to implicitly support the hoary notion of smoke-filled backroom deals, but the idea that politics is best served by installing complete neophytes is dangerously stupid. Sure, we've railed against stupid, gutless compromises in the past, because such creatures deserve to be called what they are. But politics is, in the end, the art of reasonable compromise, and adding bozos like these to the mix just makes a toxic pot more so.

Part of me hopes the retards get what they think they want, just to watch them twist in the wind. After all, their moron bullshit won't affect me, not for a long time, by which point I'm sure (wishful thinking) I'll be just another flatulent gazillionaire. Let these Scrooge McDuck wannabes hoist themselves on their dull fantasies of striking it rich with whatever nose gold they can dig out, and devil take the hindmost. It'd be worth it just to watch their state-subsidized Rascals re-appropriated. Fuck 'em.

The problem is, no matter how iconoclastic I am temperamentally, I still trust and believe in the Scottish Enlightenment ideals of what this nation was supposed to be, what it still should and could be if even fifteen percent got their fucking shit together and brought the wood to the dipshits currently poisoning the discourse.

Teabaggers are certainly not a "populist" movement, not in the conventional sense, and its backers do not represent the best interests of its participants, pure and simple. Only in America could a cokehead morning zoo deejay -- who was so spiritually empty that he and his wife converted to Mormonism after shopping around (if only they had found magic applesauce before the magic underwear) -- print money selling easily disproved lies to addled dipshits.

Not all of these assholes will win, but the fact that any of them are even in the running, as if "throw the bums out" suddenly translated into "find the dumbest motherfucker you can", should be warning enough.

Dirty Sanchez

Oh my. Well, that's just great -- who's going to read viewer tweets throughout the lunch hour for the Cable, um, News Network? I mean, Nancy Grace and her twelve chins can't be everywhere all at once, can they?

Mr. Stewart has made jokes about Mr. Sanchez more than 20 times in the last five years, according to a search of the show’s Web site. Or as Mr. Sanchez put it, “You watch yourself on his show every day and all they ever do is call you stupid.”

And yet Sanchez still persists in being stupid. It does not -- can not -- occur to someone like Sanchez that maybe he is foolish, does and says things deserving of ridicule with enough regularity to merit some attention every so often. Ah, the price paid for greatness, no?

To the extent that Sanchez is "offensive", it's not the lame attempt at Jew-baiting, so much as the histrionic crap he trucks in, sensationalism, intellectual dishonesty, bad-faith arguments, etc. That and the complete lack of self-awareness he oozes from every pore -- like every corporate media whore, Sanchez does not realize that he doesn't really do anything special, that there are literally thousands of bubble-heads with a fresh communications degree who can do exactly what he did, and will smoke every pole that swings in their faces just for the opportunity. Reading the news does not require talent; it merely requires the determined belief that your shit don't stink.

The over/under for Sanchez to re-appear at Faux Noise, nursing the usual librul-media grievances for a different claque of mouth-breathers, is three weeks.