Fait Accompli

I agree it's a national tragedy in the making that the Supreme Court has removed the "constraints" of corporate political sponsorship.



We can only imagine the nightmare of corporate conformity and control that now awaits our innocent political system, not to mention our heretofore unmolested way of life.



I, for one, applaud our new insect overlords. At least they, unlike us, actually get what they pay for.

Super Bowl Shuffle

I think it's swell that Rod and Maud Flanders are exercising their free-speech rights and James Dobson's wallet. Good for them. Can't help but wonder, though, what the reaction would be from the Flanderses, and the folks they're dog-whistling to, if Planned Parenthood were to run a pro-choice ad. You might suddenly hear about how people just want to watch a damned football game. It's precious and obnoxious and completely uncalled for; other than that, I'd have a hell of a time figuring out how to care any less.

A small but niggling question: what exactly is the deal with a loudly-proclaimed evangelical (and proud virgin) spending his college career at the nation's top party school? Seriously. The kid lives by his principles, and I can respect that, even if the notion of a chaste college football player surrounded by horny coeds is incomprehensible to me.

But it points to the fact that all the top college programs are party schools, in which case it's either a moral compromise or a spiritual test for Tebow. But modern Christianity in all its stripes is mostly about getting your way while pretending that the mean ol' snakepit of a world is keeping you down. Yeah. Someday a person of faith will be allowed to rise to higher office, and talk about their sky-buddy on the public's dime, yada yada. Till then, they walk the iron path.

Whatever. The most interesting thing about Tebow will the rude awakening he's going to get when the Rams draft him and he finds out the hard way that you can't run the shotgun formation every single play.

Monotheism and Its Discontents

So let's see if we have this straight. Last week's upset victory by the new Senatorfold from Massachusetts marks the end of the brief era of wonderment that Hopenchange had brought unto our heretofore benighted land. A vitally needed health-care reform bill would now be brought to its bony, spavined knees because, according to the new-new math, 41 > 59, especially when you have no balls. Worse yet, the fearsome claque of jabbering teabaggers has now been empowered to reclaim what Obammy stole from them. And so forth.

I mean, hell, do these people ever listen to themselves? Not everything is a sea change, folks, nor do things necessarily possess the semiotic heft you ascribe to them in your political fever dreams. Maybe Martha Coakley was simply a phenomenally dreadful candidate, running on fumes and entitlement, a hack who couldn't even make sure the name of the state she was running for was spelled correctly on her own campaign ads, who thought a two-week vacation in the Caribbean during a close race was a good idea.

Regardless, now we are apparently on the verge of national catastrophe because this supposedly-better-than-nothing industry-written monkeyfuck might get filibustered to death, because the Democrats simply don't have the stones to actually force the minority party to make good on their threats. A party with some imagination and courage would make sure to heavily promote such proceedings; the spectacle of borderline retards like Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn expounding at length of the post-apocalyptic moonscape of Obamacare would be worth its weight in comedy gold. Only a party shit-scared of its own shadow, preoccupied with its incessant cat-herding, would fail to see this.

Not to mention that even had Coakley somehow figured out a way to retain a seat that a slow ten-year-old could have held for the Democrats, her role in the "reform" bill would simply have been that of caretaker -- that is, ensuring along with the rest of the people's delegates that nothing untoward would affect the health and pharma industries' revenue-gathering capabilities.

The hand-wringing is really pretty embarrassing, and I'm sure Scott Brown will turn out to be every bit the mediocrity he appears to be, but that was never going to redound to Coakley's advantage. If there is any lesson to be drawn from this, it is that sometimes people lose because they deserve to, because they fail to make a case for why they are even in the room, and are inept and tone-deaf to boot. The fear that it is also a party failure is justified, and on an even simpler basis -- it's not that they failed to do what they said they were going to do, it's that they didn't even try.

Decadence

It's a bit late to worry about it now, but as 2009 came to a close, I considered the idea of doing some sort of de rigueur end-of-year (or, and I really have no interest in the pedantic "when does it really begin?" dispute, end-of-decade) list. Since The Beast seems to have gone out of commission, I mostly thought about poaching their always-excellent "50 Most Loathsome People" idea, perhaps shortening it to 20 or 25.

But in the end it seemed like it would have been as much a tedious reiteration as a recapitulation. Does anyone need to be reminded that Richard Bruce Cheney is a loathsome tool who needs to be frog-marched off every cable-news podium onto which he skulks; that Nadya Suleman is a parasitic head case who needs to be forcibly sterilized; that Joe Lieberman is an unprincipled ratfucker who should be thrown from a bridge into a vat full of pig parts and droppings; that Barack Obama turned out be just another dime-store politician after all, even with all the populist political winds at his back? They're all loathsome in their own special way, but it's nothing new to readers of this or any other blog. It's just a matter of breaking out the thesaurus and finding innovative ways of saying "You really suck" to people we already disparage on a routine basis. Who needs it?

That said, it is somewhat useful for everyone to take stock of what the last year or ten years or whatever held for them, their families, communities, etc. I think most of us, unless we happen to be oil futures speculators or hedge-fund thieves, would like a do-over on many things. And yet, what would "we" do with it, Kemosabe?

Probably the most salient point to really be driven home over the past decade is how brute stupid so many people really are, and how technology has tended to empower them in that, rather than to allow or encourage them to unscrew their heads from their sphincters. It has enabled them, counterintuitively I think, to wallow in it and become even dumber and meaner, just when that seemed impossible.

Blogs and chat fora at least had a fairly equitable chance of raising or lowering discourse; for every virtual room of tubthumping dipshits, you had decent odds of finding people who could argue substantively, and even with some measure of intellectual honesty and good faith. Even a blog maintained by a halfwit troglodyte at least requires some small bit of discipline and persistence. All you need with a Twitter account is a lack of self-awareness, the assumption that someone, somewhere, actually gives half a shit what you had for breakfast. (Me, I had the usual Sunday Special of tequila and Pop-Tarts. Don't knock it till you try it, preferably with your taste buds pre-coated from last night's bender of hydrocodone washed down with RBVs and purple drank.)

Knowing that yahooism reigns and having it confirmed in ever more ways with ever more frequency are two different things. You can grok the dilemma of understanding just how dumb the average American is, and that by definition it means that half the people aren't even that smart, and still have be almost a surprise just how high it turns out you had that "average" bar set. The rise of Twitter and the prevalence of cable news networks attempting to keep pace with that nonsense only drives home the sad fact that all this technology democratized the people's ability to speak their mind, only to demonstrate that most of them had nothing useful to say, nor the means to even comprehend it.

What kind of moron watches CNN to listen to the news reader recite viewers' tweetstwits? Is it more or less the same kind of doofus that still contributes money to a moral cretin such as Marion Robertson, or the farm animal that watched Sarah Palin on Glenn Beck's Playground o' Decompensation, or do new times call for new taxonomies of dangerous retards?

In the end, maybe that's what the Naughts were all about -- confirmation, not revelation. They confirmed that there are vast swaths of people that really will fall for or put up with anything, and some of them are college-edumacated Democrats. There's a difference between them and the unrepentant yahoos of the Palin/Beck set, but only in degree. No one seems able to quite explain this compelling reason why the Democrats must retain Ted Kennedy's Senate seat or regain California's goobernatorship, seeing what they've done this past year.

So the Democrats are spineless and flaccid, even with a supermajority, and the Republicans are openly gleeful at any prospect to profiteer and make war on the backs of the poor. (Not that the Democrats aren't fine with those prospects as well, they just have the good grace to not be as open about it.)

The latest class I'm taking has begun with a rather protracted discussion of ethics in general, and the corporation's need to be socially responsible in particular. Snapshots of overworked South Asians and Caribbeans slaving for six cents an hour amongst piles of $120 logo shirts proliferate next to scenes from the ritual death of the factory farm. Woven throughout is the plaint that the eeeevil corporation squeezes its profits out of the hides -- sometimes literally -- of the weak and powerless, abusing them mercilessly to find that extra one-tenth of a cent per unit in profit.

What's ignored is how deeply symbiotic this ugly scenario is. Every successful business has gotten that way by giving people what they want. Anyone who is still in the dark about where their clothes or their meat or their kitchen cleansers come from is either too stupid to breathe, or knows exactly what the deal is, and is just fine with it.

It's not exactly a secret that people tell themselves little lies to get through the day all the time. So will they bravely put up with abused chickens and exploited Pakistanis and unbelievably polluted rivers in China, in order to save a buck on the next Costco run? Hell yes, even at the expense of the jobs and communities they used to have. It has always been thus, but the past ten years seem to have compacted and accelerated that nasty dynamic.

Oppression and malfeeance, lies and chicanery, in whatever nefarious forms, simply cannot continue without the complicity of some portion of the victims of those tactics. For example, violent pro-life activism would not exist without the involvement or tacit approval of at least some women. Fox News and its ordured heap of screeching daemons could not thrive without the viewership of the bamboozled, the very people who are being tricked into voting against their own rational self-interest over and over again. The Democratic Party would be thumped without the support of dead-ender bien pensant libruls who will back them at any and all costs -- as they are about to find out the hard way later this year.

Schmidt Happens

It's always great when a disgruntled operative airs dirty laundry.

Sarah Palin believed that Sen. John McCain chose her to be his running mate in 2008 because of "God's plan," according to a top political strategist in the Arizona Republican's campaign.

In an interview with the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes," Steve Schmidt described Palin as "very calm -- nonplussed" after McCain met with her at his Arizona ranch just before putting her on the Republican ticket. McCain had planned to name Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., as his vice presidential choice until word leaked, sparking what Schmidt called political blowback over picking the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Schmidt said he asked Palin about her serenity in the face of becoming "one of the most famous people in the world." He quoted her as saying, "It's God's plan."

It's too easy to point out that Palin is either a barking loon, a raving moron, or a cynical opportunist (or some combination thereof). The sick part is that some of the target audience for this article will read it unironically and nod their heads at Saint Sarah's affirmation. It doesn't occur to them that if that's "God's plan", then He's running this thing even worse than Al Davis runs the Raiders. The Big Guy needs a GM, and pronto.

Schmidt credited Palin with being a quick study and for giving a great speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., but he said it soon became clear that she often was not accurate in her remarks.

By "being a quick study", obviously Schmidt means "able to memorize and regurgitate standard talking points, albeit with great effort and syntactic awkwardness". By "not accurate", he means....aw, who are we kidding? She's an idiot, pure and simple. Schmidt knows better, and has to have a shit-eating grin just to utter such a preposterous phrase.

Even after a full year in the spotlight, with nothing but time to prepare, Sarah Palin is still catastrophically unqualified for any national office. That's not mean, it just is. Most people are, it's just that most people aren't telegenic enough to bamboozle millions of slack-jawed yokels into buying into this fucking nonsense.

Schmidt conceded that had Palin not been on the ticket, "our margin of defeat would've been greater than it would've been otherwise."

Well, yeah, they did better than they would have with Lieberputz, whom Republiclowns and conservatards put up with for his apostasy, but despise nearly as much as the other side does. But so what? They might have done even better with Carrie Prejean as a running mate, at least until the masturbation videos came out.

As bad as the Dummycrats are -- and christ, they are fucking awful -- the Republitards are an endless mine for comedy gold. I'm surprised Lincoln's shade hasn't risen to renounce any association or mention with these shameless reprobates.

Coocoocachoo

Apropos of nothing, this odd story manages to highlight something interesting:

Earlier on Sunday, a close friend of ex-DUP leader Ian Paisley repeated his view that Mr Robinson's position as Northern Ireland first minister was "untenable".

Free Presbyterian minister David McIlveen stressed that his opinion was not that of Mr Paisley.

His church has also said he was not speaking on their behalf.

"He has a problem with solving his family difficulties and I cannot take the view a person's private life does not affect their public life," he said.

Now, as politically incorrect as it may be, I actually agree with this philosophy. It's pretty simple -- it's hard to respect somebody enough to allow them to make big-boy decisions, when you know they've been cuckolded by a fucking barista and been unable to do anything about it. But then we're talking about a bunch of poncey fops who are still reminiscing about the thrashings they received in boarding school. It's just sad that a long-standing serious, violent political situation is affected by this nonsense.

Fuck the Patriots

In the neck. With a rusty fork. Nice win (their first over New England) by the Ravens; the only complaint is that they couldn't keep that 24-0 first quarter momentum going full throttle. Aside from the field position for their first touchdown, not even the refs could help the Patsies out of this one. If there's a team more sorely deserving of a 96-0 thrashing than the Tuck Rule Sillynannies, I'd be surprised. May they go 0-16 for the next decade.

On the other hand, the Packers. Epic shootout, tremendous game. The Cards actually have a decent chance against a fading Saints team, but assuming the Vikes beat the Cowpies, would probably not win in Minnesota. Fun stuff. The main thing is the Pats are out, maybe for some time.

The Golden Rule

Perhaps the most galling characteristic of the banksters -- aside from their utter lack of common sense or basic empathy -- is their sheer cluelessness. It was already obvious that they couldn't care less that their shenanigans have wrecked millions of lives so far, cost families their only homes and incomes, and all that. But they don't even seem to comprehend why those people might resent having to pay them for the privilege of having their lives wrecked. It's truly puzzling. You know, insult to injury.

(I've called them thieves all year, and I stand by that. The smoking gun in the linked article is in the beginning -- A.I.G. execs didn't even want their own stock as compensation, "worthless" in their own words even though it was trading at $40/share at the time. Does anyone still need a fucking diagram on this?)

Maybe let's illustrate the comprehension gap in Spoiled Douchebag Connecticut-ese to these bastards: Let's say the pool boy at your vacation home in the Hamptons is porking your trophy wife. You don't mind as a man so much, since you are a spineless, dickless dweeb who can't satisfy her anyway, and it keeps her off your back, so she can just go shopping and leave you to swapping made-up war stories with your trader buddies.

The thing is, the pool boy has been throwing his back into it as of late, and your trophy wife is clearly starting to think about how she can take your dumb trader ass to the cleaners, and collect six-figure alimony while she and Taylor fuck all day and drive your Cayenne around. Not cool, bro-ham!

So Taylor the cuckolding pool boy orchestrates a slip-and-fall on your pool deck, and your coke-whore trophy wife -- for whom you screwed over your first wife to cover up your insecurities at being a paunchy, balding closet case -- simultaneously hits your monkey ass with papers, requesting divorce and that mid-six-figure alimony you were dreading.

Both cases get to court. The kid that's tapping your wife gets everything he's asking for, grinning like a rube that poured cooking oil on the floor of a supermarket and pulled a sack of dog food on himself, and got fucking paid for it. And your cunt trophy wife gets twice the alimony she was asking for. And custody of the kids. And the vacay house.

Okay, Mister Banker Asshole -- how you feel about those judges, is how 99% of America feels about you. Hope that clears things up.

The Power of Prayer

Oh, hey, no doubt, Rush Limbaugh has certainly been in my prayers as well. Yet still he continues to draw breath. Same with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Horst Wessel gang. Might as well pray for a suitcase full of Franklins to land in your backyard.

Love the crybaby conservatard comments there, by the way, excoriating japing libruls. Hey, motherfuckers, where were the tears and outrage at the barrage of Chappaquiddick jokes at Ted Kennedy's demise, or Tom Coburn imploring his pagan goatwhore daemon to smite a colleague for him? I gots your incivility right here, son.

(And what sort of twee mezzofanuc wears "blue jeans, an argyle sweater and a tweed jacket with elbow patches", as Coburn apparently does? Sheesh. Nearly as retarded as Coburn, Brownback, and DeMint -- nary a hundred IQ points among the lot of them -- gathering to pray for the defeat of the neutered health-care bill. If prayer worked, those three certainly wouldn't be standing.)

Writes of Passage

What Ed said. This has been a huge pet peeve of mine for some time. I love the way technology has democratized and facilitated our ability to communicate freely and easily. But it's sad to realize that so many people who have absolutely nothing to say, nor the skills to competently say it, have been empowered and enabled by these toys.

It's not about the linguistic lepidopterist's cri de coeur to faithfully preserve any and all conventions of spelling and punctuation, it's about what a moron's failure to observe those simple conventions communicates. At risk of stating the obvious -- but I seriously doubt it would be obvious to a preening halfwit like Sarah Palin -- the way a person writes is not only a function of the way they speak, but of the way they think. And what Palin communicates in her climate change twittering -- aside from the fact that she apparently does not know the difference between "ions" and "eons" -- is that she does not actually read, much less think about, the things she writes.

What you end up with is a shitload of people who don't bother to inform themselves about much of anything in any real depth, pontificating on subjects they know very little about. And since they don't read in general, they don't understand the fundamentals of composing an argument with coherence and structure and narrative heft. You get these stupid little word-salad blips that mean whatever the hell Miss Thang wishes they meant. But that's not writing; hell, it's not even typewriting.

In terms of intellectual honesty and probity, Palin is the equivalent of an illiterate, drug-addled dipshit on a sidewalk with a crayon and some cardboard, scrawling half-formed trifles of thought for the bemusement of unfortunate passersby. CNN, true to form, stenographs her nonsense uncritically, in fact casting her yet again as a scrapper unafraid to take on The Man. I mean, for fuck's sake.

Let's cut to the chase about what the climate change dispute is really about: exactly how many people around this benighted planet can achieve the American way of life, of consumption and indulgence, before it exacts a permanent, catastrophic price on a substantial part of the earth's ecosystem. We have it, they want it, and now that they have all the manufacturing jobs we used to have, as well as the technology to attain that goal, it becomes a number-crunching exercise.

Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope calcs to illustrate. Figure that the most advanced industrialized economies -- North America, Europe, Japan -- total around 900 million people, out of roughly 7 billion total population. Figure also that the two most rapidly rising economies, China and India, have about 2.5 billion people just between the two of them. Each country has enormous seething underclasses and infrastructural gaps which will require attention in order to maintain their domestic stability.

The scale of just those two countries in comparison to Europe and the U.S. is amazing. Nothing Sarah Palin has ever tweeted or babbled about any subject indicates that she remotely comprehends any of this, that China and India each have lower classes far larger than the entire population of the United States. To bring them up to the same level that even the American underclass has would require efforts of a scope and scale that guarantees serious environmental consequences.

And yet we cannot continue to sit smugly at the top of the heap and deny to everyone else the creature comforts we take for granted. There is some sort of equilibrium that must be sought, or what we've seen just over the past decade -- the poles melting, mass mammalian extinctions continuing apace, clear-cutting everything in sight -- will be just a prelude. It can't be solved at some bien pensant circle jerk in Copenhagen, certainly, not with a bunch of douchebag private-jet limo libs smugly dictating terms for the peons, and overbreeding Third World shitholes refusing to take responsibility for their own demographics. But the dribbling buffoonery emanating from the denialists, who mindlessly chant "drill baby drill" without considering all the externalities of such endeavors, is far more destructive.

Perhaps this would be more readily apparent to a society that hasn't already done every conceivable thing it can to undermine its own capacity for reason and critical thinking. Dean Wormer was an optimist.

Vulgar Display of Pouter

For Peggy Noonan, this little jeremiad almost qualifies as a head-fake or a rope-a-dope. After some mild pseudo-populist clucking about how the economy's travails have deflated 'murkin's natural optimism and begun turning them against Obama (for, you know, essentially continuing Bush's economic and financial policies without missing a beat), she abruptly scoops up a couple armloads of hay from the barn floor and valiantly attempts to construct a nice strawman.

But something tells me this isn't all about money. It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.

Forget the hip waders, bring a hazmat suit. It's gonna get thick. So thick that Nooners has even given her hunch a name, the "Adam Lambert Problem", which is apparently like the Alan Parsons Project, but more flamboyant and destructive to Our Culture, which is what?

Seriously, if any of these harrumphing "culture" bozos can pin down exactly what that is, in the monolithic sense they imply, and without lamenting the demise of I Love Lucy, I've yet to see it. Indeed, Nooners never quite gets around to identifying any cultural benchmarks of which she approves. She just knows that people in flyover country are easily startled, yet apparently not quite enough to just change the fucking channel.

It goes on like this, and of course Nooners, per usual, misses the damned point.

America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it.

Uh-huh. All these things we are protecting our children from that pollute the airwaves, the sexual references, the language, the obnoxious behavior, the ill-treatment of others. Raise your hands out there if you learned about all those things at school, rather than teevee.

The core problem with culture vultures is that their social concerns are somewhat at odds with their economic sensibilities. Is America more coarse and vulgar than fifty years ago? Of course. Could being marketed to relentlessly, endlessly, everywhere we go and everything we see, constantly being pushed to spend money we don't have on shit we don't need, encouraged to borrow at usury rates for impulse purchases, self-actualizing through fuckyoumobiles and electronic gadgets, commodifying all and filtering through only the prism of desire and pure id, could any of that have to do with that coarseness and vulgarity? How about being rendered powerless and cynical by ever-growing economic disparity, a culture that unironically insists that greed is good, maybe that plays a part in this?

I mean, all those things require a concerted effort to turn sentient beings into dullards, and thence easy marks for whatever bridge is sold to them by telemarketers, self-help hustlers, SUV manufacturers and such like. It makes sense that their entertainment and activity choices would reflect that; you can't actively encourage masses of people to be spoon-fed morons and then expect them to seek quality in their choices for visual and auditory stimulation.

There's actually a few points in Nooners' essay with which reasonable people can agree, but it's particularly offensive that she chooses to prioritize it above ordinary citizens' genuine concerns about their economic viability. You want vulgar and coarse, how about banksters turning the finance system into street-corner numbers racket, then expecting the peons to pay for it and insisting on fat bonuses for their trouble.

I suppose there might actually be a few addled 'tards out there who really are more het up about Adam Lambert than they are about getting their jobs shipped overseas, or their house foreclosed on, or being a medical problem from utter destitution. But as always, those folks get precisely what they deserve.

I don't like Adam Lambert either. That's why I don't watch brain-and-soul-sucking crap like American Idol or The American Music Awards, whatever the fuck that is. It really is a free country, Peggy, and as such, people are free to turn the goddamned teevee off and, hell, read a book or take a walk or play a board game with their family, instead of this constant "the food is terrible and the portions are too small" whinging, especially in contrast with the truly vulgar bastards that have wrecked this country's economy, its optimism, and very likely its future.

Deep Thought

Remember when Rahm Emanuel was like this hyper-bad-ass back-room enforcer who was, like, gonna make the most of that huge electoral majority and keep party discipline and make those Republitard biznitches cry uncle with that Krav Maga shit he learned in the Mossad? Yeah. Good times.

Stop, Democrats. Please, just stop. It takes real patience and practice to cultivate the level of mind-numbing ineptitude required to actually make the American health-care system worse than it already is.

Consider the Asshole

[apologies to David Foster Wallace]

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal, presumably between weekly Karl Rove 'rhoid-poppers, to delicately understate the unearned role of prominence Senator Lieberputz (I-Massengill) has taken in the putative health-care-reform process.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman's use of his swing vote to help quash a proposed expansion of Medicare marked the latest act in his deteriorating relationship with the Democratic Party.

Even a source, such as the WSJ, that would seem to have some inherent antagonism to Democrats and/or Holy Joe, fails to properly limn the obvious issue -- why Lieberman would continue to retain any sort of relationship at all with the Democratic Party. When he lost the '06 primary, he petulantly quit the party and ran against -- and beat -- the Democratic candidate, thanks in at least some part to campaigning by the current preznit. Since that time, he has shown his gratitude to both the party and Obama by ratfucking them at every possible opportunity, just for the sheer fum of it at times.

The fact that there is still a relationship to deteriorate is testament to the utter lack of sack in the Democratic Party. They're a bunch of cowards, hypocrites, and pussies, and they will continue to be so until they stop letting this hump push them around.

The liberal group MoveOn.org held rallies outside the White House and Mr. Lieberman's Hartford office Tuesday to protest his role. "It is absolutely absurd that after months of work, President Obama and the Democrats are letting one senator, Joe Lieberman, gut the health-care bill," said executive director Justin Ruben.

Yeah but, whaddaya gonna do about it, Ponyboy? You think these clowns haven't calculated a squawk factor into all this? Politically, it costs them less to play ball with Lieberdouche because they know the MoveOn crowd ain't goin' fuckin' anywhere. And until that factor gets changed, by action rather than merely the threat or mention of action, it'll stay exactly that way. There's just too much money on the table. You can't say that, senatorially, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies don't get what they pay for.

Many Democrats wanted to retaliate by stripping Mr. Lieberman of his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, but the senator made an emotional appeal to his colleagues, and Messrs. Obama and Reid argued that punishing him would only hurt the Democrats.

Bullshit, the relationship gets more and more symbiotic with each passing feint at a vote -- and all this drama for a meaningless, industry-written bill that does not address actual costs, but merely front-loads them. It will not improve the health-care system in this country one iota, it will merely grease the payment skids, because even though science, education, infrastructure, and all that are slipping away, one thing this country stands firm on is executive compensation and eight-figure bonuses taken out of the backs of the peons.

It should be clear by now that the Democrats need Lieberman just as much as he needs them. He provides them a convenient foil, always somehow managing to single-handedly prevent them from Doing The Right Thing. Funny how a dweeb with the voice and countenance of a cartoon character, who can't even ride in a car on Fridays, is thwarting this illustrious bulletproof majority we've been hearing so much about. Seriously, fuck you, Democrats. You lose because you deserve to.

I dunno, maybe it really is time to heighten those contradictions. The dime's worth of difference has gotten old, and life's too short to keep trudging to the booth to vote for Lucy with the football one more time.

Patriot Games

As bad as the Raiders have been this year (aside from last week's upset in Pittsburgh, which was easily the best game this team has played in at least five years), it is always gratifying to see another article on what a punk and a quitter Randy Moss is.

Randy Moss finished today with a single, 16-yard catch, which led to a fumble. Brady's interception was intended for Moss.

And if you asked the Panthers what their gameplan was, it's simple. They helped whoever was covering Moss early on in the game with a safety. Then, once he was frustrated, they no longer needed to. Because by then, it was Game Over for No. 81.

"We knew he was going to shut it down," Panthers corner Chris Gamble told me after the game. "That's what we wanted to do him. That's what we did. ... He'd just give up a lot ... Slow down, he's not going deep, not trying to run a route. You can tell, his body language."

Gamble continued ... "I know everyone who plays against him, they can sense that. Once you get into him in the beginning of the game, he shuts it down a little bit."

Yes. Yes. That's the Moss I remember, the guy who picked Al Davis' pocket for $15 mil and dogged it like a practice-squad scrub for two fucking miserable years. The guy who didn't give two shits about the team or the fans, but never gave back a paycheck. You deserve him, massholes. Choke on it. It's why he'll never get that ring, nor does he deserve it.

Requiem for a Wet Dream

Paul Samuelson sounds like he was a pretty decent egg. It's a damn shame that apparently he was unable to communicate to the motherless Wall Street fucks -- including his nephew Larry "You Gonna Finish That?" Summers -- that sense of Depression-era mores he informed his own work with. Then again, Samuelson seemed at least to understand the difference between "economist" and "bookie", a distinction that is far lost on the current gang of underwritten thieves. Keep up the awesome work, Preznit Hopenchange!

I consider it a privilege to pay for their manses and bonuses, and I will gladly take turns heaving the blade when it's their turn at the block, should a sufficient amount of 'murkins turn off their dancin' shows and decide to do something about their pockets being picked. I dunno, maybe if Tim Geithner was fucking Kate Gosselin or something, some attention might be paid.

News of the World

Soooo....anything new happen with Tiger Woods' cock that I need to be apprised of? Because it is apparently of the utmost necessity that I know where he's been sticking that thing. Jesus, and we thought the coverage of Michael Jackson's death was ridonkulously over the top.

Incidentally, should the need ever arise for the planet to know everywhere mine was during my twenties, I'm working on a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, the banksters' pillaging of the shell of the nation continues apace. We should all have been related to Bob Rubin, I guess, if we were expecting a fair shake.

The Song Remains the Same

Big thanks to The Vile Scribbler for steering me to this little gem. Basically an updated iteration of Steve Albini's classic screed on record-industry accounting. These people are vipers, always have been. No one will miss them.

Music industry weasels always liked to congratulate themselves that Zeppelin, for example, got treated well because Ahmet Ertegun loved them. Bullshit -- Zeppelin got paid because they had Peter Grant for a manager. Ertegun loved them because they made him lots of money. People can chicken-egg that shit however they like, it always comes down to money. But, you know, people will buy pretty much anything if you push it on them hard and often enough, as if the continued existence of Lady Gaga isn't proof enough of that.

So it's particularly telling that in the case of Too Much Joy, the major labels really haven't learned a damned thing from what's happened to them over the last decade. They took their shoddy promotional and accounting practices into the digital realm, that's all. They give crap bands like REM $80 mil, bully it out of the hides of all the other bands on the label, and wonder why no one thinks twice about fucking them over on LimeWire.

In another 5-10 years, the majors will either be gone or transformed. There's really not much use for them anymore, at least for production, distribution, marketing, or swag. Maybe fronting money and scheduling shit for some short-bus band that can't figure it out for themselves. But the payola stranglehold these assholes shared with radio is done, and good riddance. There's more bands than ever, and more good bands than ever, and the music's cheaper and more plentiful than ever.

A truly free market -- the predatory capitalist's worst nightmare.

Journography

Sully quite rightly gets it that the glee club at Politico specializes in verbal rub-and-tugs, yet there's something slightly off about the verb tense:

Increasingly, these journos see themselves as conduits for politicians, not as independent actors determined to get at the truth and hold the powerful accountable. There are no follow-ups any more; and when you see how Palin was insulated from real questioning in the campaign and book tour, you realize how corrupted the MSM has become....These people are not checks on power; they are increasingly its willing accomplices.

"Increasingly". "Has become". How about "are" and "have been for quite some fucking time"? Hell, I was referring to Allen as "Open Mike" several years ago, back when Politico was just a goopy stain in Pool Boy Vandehei's board shorts. This is the same breed of dipshit that was transcribing any and every paranoid Clinton invention throughout the '90s with halfhearted rebuttals at best (not that they would have had the presence of mind to avoid printing rumor and conjecture in the first place).

Seriously, what journalist in their right goddamned mind has to bother with slobbering Dick Cheney's knob? Yet Pool Boy and Open Mike do exactly that, not because of any dark conspiracy, but because they're housebroken by now. It doesn't even occur to them to call bullshit anymore. The best you can hope for is some pseudo-Gawker "as if" tone attesting to their postured skepticism.

Besides, one never knows when the next opportunity will come along for the yearbook society to fawn over the cheerleaders:

Palin spoke for 11 ½ minutes, poking gentle fun at the media.

“Sometimes you just gotta trust your instincts,” she said, “and when you don’t, you end up in places like this.”

But it had some value: “At least now I can put a face to the newspapers I do read.”

Kidding aside, sort of, “It's good to be here though, really, in front of this audience of leading journalists and intellectuals,” Palin said, “or as I like to call it, a death panel."

Hi-yooooo! Look, I get it -- the Gridiron dinner and the press corpse dinner in the spring, that's supposedly where these mutual antagonists get to set aside grievances and roast each other. Haw haw. Oh, it is to laugh.

And that's precisely my point -- these two sets of people are supposed to be mutually antagonistic. They're not supposed to get together for palsy-walsy no-camera strokefests. But these jerkoffs go the same parties all fucking year.

The media assholes pretend not to realize that for the politicians, they are the coveted "get".

Without constant, barely skeptical coverage and dutiful transcription, Sarah Palin would disappear from everyone's radar. Ya know? She's pimping a crap book for the sort of morons whose last book finished was The Secret, getting a fat little retirement fund off it, while the lies she told and the shenanigans she engaged in back in her politically inbred little state get forgotten.

Ditto Cheney; the guy left office as one of the most universally despised people in American government, and unless he's being brought to trial, there's not much reason to talk to him. As the saying goes, every word out of his piehole is a lie, including "and" and "the".

The press likes to strut around, pretending they're shining klieg lights on the dark recesses of governance, when in fact it's just a camera light with a gauzy soft-focus lens. It's not mutual antagonism, it's symbiosis.

That Swirling Sound

Kunstler susses the current media/culture dynamic with his usual cheery optimism. Obviously it's a quick and easy rant button to push, why presumably sentient beings would waste one second of their lives watching reality teevee or Erik Estrada dancing or what have you. Fish in a barrel and all.

And the last two months of the year are always the silly season anyway, when it comes to what qualifies as newsworthy. This is not coincidental; the corporate media, after all, are in business to sell ad space, just as if they were airing Jon and Kate or Leave it to Llamas. If you no longer have to try, content-wise, because enough idiots show up to the train wreck regardless, it instantly becomes much easier to control your marginal and operational costs.

But the silly season has expanded to all year long, not just summer and the holidays, the media 'tards just frog-jump from one contrivance to another, hoping to whip another crowd of morons into a frenzy. This throws the usual bread-to-circuses ratio ever more out of balance. The distractions become bigger, emptier, and somehow more baroque and protracted; the characters more interchangeable and uninteresting; the peanut gallery playing to ever-dumber audiences.

So when random mouth-breathers take up their electronic crayons to draft their hysterical plaints about how the scope of poor Sarah Palin's public abuse has been uniquely unfair and vicious, I have to wonder where the fuck they were when Hitlery Clinton was being called a lesbian and a murderer. Whatever fancifully-based mortal wounds the herd animals of the MSM have apparently inflicted on this beleaguered Christian woman, so far they have not Gone There.

Probably the worst rumor-mongering Palin has had to endure revolved around the birth of her most recent rugrat. But between her failure to tell anyone about the impending birth, her efforts to wear clothing to obscure the pregnancy, and her peculiar (and dangerous) insistence on flying home from Texas while in labor, and the subsequent knocked-upness of her presumably abstinence-educated daughter, some confusion was bound to occur. The most important thing to remember about Sarah is that, whatever the issue or event in question may be, it's never ever her fault. These really are the biggest bunch of fucking crybabies since the Michael Jackson funeral (no doubt available on DVD any day now).

The fact of the matter is, the media has stepped over itself in order to allow Palin to peddle her unnecessary memoir, regularly trotting out talking heads who have not actually read the damned thing, but can still be counted to let us all know what a compelling read it is. None of them ever quite seem to get around to asking the more fundamental question, "Does this book serve any purpose whatsoever, and if so, what in hell could it possibly be?".

Well, the purpose is to make her some money, and keep her name out there, keep her options open. But her idiot fanclub have higher aspirations for her, of course -- merely reifying their incoherent tropes is just the cover charge. And that's just not going to happen if the money people don't believe she's a good investment.

Comparisons are inevitably made to George W. Bush, who counterintuitively comes out looking rather intelligent and well-spoken next to Palin. But Fredo had a serious pedigree in both the familial and political senses of the word, which Palin has yet to cultivate in even a professional sense. And until she can convince some of the actual money and power players in her party to sponsor her tomfoolery, she'll always just be a populist totem, to be trotted out at appropriate times and make these drunken goobers forget that their jobs have been outsourced and their homes have been foreclosed, and that both parties are balls-deep in those problems.

But people who have that kind of money and influence clearly are not going to invest in Palin populism unless they can control the aim of its vituperation. Truly influential people will always be mortified at the very notion of the country being run or even affected in any truly meaningful way by the dipshits waiting in line at the signing of a book they'll never quite finish. [Hilarious video here.]

And really, who can blame them? There's a reason Mencken loathed and distrusted the democratic process, and these fucking yahoos are it. Damned if I can find a difference between these fools and a gaggle of moony-eyed teeny-boppers waiting in line to see the Twilight sequel for the eighth time. Jesus H. Christ, they must have interviewed a couple dozen people in that segment, and not one of them made any fucking sense at all. It's obviously not some isolated agitprop edit, either -- videos like this proliferate, at the teabagger rallies, at the summer town-hall putsches, and not one of these goddamned people has the presence of mind to explain themselves or how they can buy into this happy horseshit.

Surely one (1) of these bozos is able to show up at what they reasonably anticipate (or assume, or hope) is going to be a media event, and have taken two minutes to prepare some meaningful sound-byte manifesto beyond the usual boilerplate they picked up through Glenn Beck osmosis. Or not, since it has yet to happen. Any sensible person should be viewing these troglodytes with a hearty mixture of scorn and contempt, of figuring that they pretty much deserve whatever they get. Pity is always wasted on the willfully, obnoxiously ignorant -- you don't have to buy what Hopenchange is selling, but you do have to have a better answer for why not, or at least one that makes some sense.

Now supposedly, there is a wide disconnect between the amount of coverage Palin gets, and the amount most people think she should get. And yet it continues unabated, much like her reality teevee counterparts. It's the old Yogi Berra conundrum -- nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

What it is is a vile combination of the newsertainment symbiosis which has metastasized and seems well on its way to turning every journamalistic institution into tabloid coverage, celebrity ass-sniffing, and reading viewers' tweets; and the impulse of the flailing media establishment to mainstream all these niche marketing gambits. All the things they do are covered on the internets, and faster and better, so there's no need for the people who actually crave that sort of Twinkie news coverage to bother with watching Andrea Mitchell cover some fucking book signing.

And in the meantime, the "recovery" is still jobless, the bubble is still being re-inflated, Goldman Sachs is still fucking you and your grandchildren over, Blackwater is still conducting ops and will probably be covertly bombing Laos next week. And Sarah Palin is well on her way to becoming the conservatards' Lucy Van Pelt, forever dangling incoherent hopes and fever dreams in front of their bloodshot eyes, and always yanking the ball away when the time is right. And why shouldn't she? Why should the Democrats have all the fun with true believers?

It's Not a Flaw, It's a Feature

Per usual, The Beast's Allan Uthman nails the Democrats' perfidy right on the head:

The Democrats seem to be throwing this thing on purpose. The public option is DOA and was probably always meant to be. And it’s not because they’re wussy or incompetent. It’s because they’re corrupt. It’s because all they are is the sock puppet on the left hand of corporate hegemony. Bribery is legal in this country—we call it campaign finance. That’s why we can’t have a single-payer system, and that’s why this bill devolving into yet another massive theft of taxpayer money was a foregone conclusion. In the end, maybe some poor people will be able to get treatment when they couldn’t before, but only in the weakest, most costly and corrupt way conceivable. And if that’s the only way we can do it, then I guess I’m for it.

Of course they're throwing it on purpose. Nothing else explains the scummy opportunism of the Stupidak Amendment, a useless and easily-negated piece of crap tacked on to a deliberately unpassable bill. The whole thing is nothing more than yet another massive upward wealth transfer, because evidently our grandchildren's pockets have not been picked quite enough.

But consider -- even with a 40-seat House majority, it took Stupak to get the necessary votes to pass it by just 5. Forget the whole "Democrats from conservative districts" handjob, those are the constituents who are most in need of a real health-care effort. If they really think abortion trumps their own actual health-care crisis, then I suppose they deserve exactly what they're signing up for. But that's likely not the case, just more politically expedient.

This is a sideshow, and everyone knows it. If it persists -- and it will, because the insurance industry owns treacherous frauds like Max Baucus outright -- the Democrats deserve whatever they get. Including Obama. The only way he avoids being a one-term punchline is if he sufficiently convinces enough people in '12 that, bad as he and his party have screwed this pooch, the other side is even dumber and meaner. But these are all truly awful, awful people, who need to be tossed at the earliest possible opportunity. That'll happen the day Sarah Palin goes away and pigs fly out of Joe Lieberman's ass.