And Ye Shall Know Him By His Enemies

Let's see...

On one side you've got Barack Obama. You know, the Kenyan, anti-colonial, Marxist, socialist, Muslim? Yeah, that guy.

Set aside for a second that he isn't a Kenyan, he isn't a Marxist or a socialist, and he isn't a Muslim.

As for being anti-colonial, well, hell, our country was founded by a bunch of anti-colonialists. Do the names Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison ring a bell? Being a pro-colonialist is very 17th Century.

Anyway, this Obama guy is a nice enough fellow. Charming. Lovely family. Very smart. Way too accommodating to his opponents. Still can't seem to get it through his head that he's dealing with a bunch of nihilist assholes who have only one goal: destroy him. Fortunately, as the election draws nearer, this appears to be changing.

And on the other side, his enemies, if you will:

Mitt Romney: serial liar. Cat can't go a day without lying about something. At this point it seems to be habitual. He even lies about the one semi-good thing he ever did as governor of Massachusetts. I tell you, he really can't help himself. Tax evader. Oh, he loves his country, sure. Didn't you see the little flag pin on his lapel? He just loves his money more. Tremendous sense of privilege that comes from being a wealthy male member of a patriarchal religion. He and his "let them eat cake" wife deserve each other.

Paul Ryan: also a serial liar; and from the National Socialist haircut he sports, (seriously, take a close look at some newsreel footage from the 1930's. All the brownshirts have the same 'do), to the Ayn Rand nonsense he spouts, he is a complete fraud. Ryan's family made their fortune on government contracts. And his wife was a lobbyist. So, once again we have a Republican who thinks the government should only work for them. "I got mine--fuck you!" He is considered an "intellectual force" in Republican circles. That should tell you all you need to know about the brain power at work in the GOP these days.

Rush Limbaugh: let's play a word association game. When I say "fat racist radio scum" who comes to mind?

Rupert Murdoch: his Fox News is ground zero for the Get Obama Gang. It is made up of halfwits, cranks and liars. And appeals to the same. You would need a Kray super computer to tally all of the misinformation that spews out Fox News in a single day. In a truly "fair and balanced" world old Rupe and his boy would spend the rest of their lives in an English gaol. And they just might.

Donald Trump: what a piece of work. Most loudmouthed developers of a certain age are content to just flash their money, marry their fourth or fifth wives, stamp their names in gold foil on everything they can, and skip off to Switzerland for their quarterly monkey gland treatments. Not Trump. No, the Man With The Improbable Hair thinks people a) like him, b) value his opinions, and c) would vote for him for president. (Well, maybe president of a restricted country club--if nobody else was running.) After hinting that he might run for the highest office in the land, Trump (as in Hump, Dump and Rump) has taken over the reins of the Crazy Birther Wagon and he's gonna ride that empty thing until he can't ride it no more! He would never, never really run for President because a)  he isn't up to it intellectually, which would become apparent in the first few minutes of any debate he would enter, and b) he would be afraid to let anyone look too closely at his finances, because he isn't worth anything close to what he claims to be worth.

Of course there are many, many others: Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Glenn Beck, Darrell Issa...the list of swine is long... but time is short...and I'm sure by now you get the idea.

No News Is Good News?

According to a recent study by Farleigh Dickinson University, people who watch Fox News know less than people who watch no news at all.

So the Fox crew, and by extension their soul mates Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and all the rest of the right-wing noise machine, are anti-intelligence devices. They are the opposite of learning, the negation of knowledge. Un-learning anyone?

If you watch Fox News, and believe what they tell you, you are in a deep hole and you are digging constantly to make it deeper.

You are demonstrably better off not knowing anything than knowing something from Fox News.

This explains so much about the state of our world! It is the Rosetta Stone for understanding contemporary America.

Rant

I just never tire of watching cops assault defenseless people. It must be the red-blooded American male in me.

And what is it about police work that attracts the kind of person who, when he sees someone who is completely defenseless and offers no threat to anyone, his first inclination is to hit them with the old baton or drench them with pepper spray?

I mean, is that on the "Hey Sociopath, Wanna Be A Cop" test? And if you answer, "uh, just ignore them" do you fail and end up a minimum wage security guard at K-Mart?

What's next? Do they unleash the dogs? How soon before someone gets shot? Are we back in Alabama circa 1960? Where is Bull Connor now that we really need him?

Do not fear--he may be gone but his spirit lives on in Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly and every Republican Tea Party candidate.

And in the dark hearts of a bunch of cops, too.

Democracy In Action, or: Andrew Kowalczyk is an Idiot

For those of you wondering, "who the hell is Andrew Kowalczyk?", he is the author of one of the stupidest letters to the editor I've ever read. And considering that most of the letters to the editor that I read are from The Arizona Republic, that's really quite an achievement. Tip o' the hat to you, Andy!

Why is Andrew Kowalczyk an idiot? Let me count the ways...To quote from young Andrew's scribblings, "While adults were away in 2009 and 2010, the Democrats in Congress and President Obama decided to have a wild toga party for all their friends and cronies." This is so absurdly wrong that I'm not really sure where to begin. But I'll try. For starters, what "adults" could Andy possibly be referring to? The Republican Party? Really?

What happened in 2008-2009 is that the bill came do for eight years of The Dark Lord Cheney and Simple W's malfeasance. They squandered the Clinton surplus, they cut taxes on the wealthiest whenever they could, they let oil companies set energy policy, they attempted (but failed) to privatize Social Security, they started two unfunded wars, they crippled the regulatory oversight of Wall Street, they used the Constitution like toilet paper, and on and on. Oh, and let's not forget that 9/11 happened on their watch, too. Oops. So those can't be the "adults" Special K is talking about. Only an idiot would believe that the financial crisis, to pick just one Republican catastrophe, was Obama's doing.

Andy K. continues, "They went wild on the Internet, ordering all sorts of stuff that they've been dreaming of for years and years. They used America's credit card." This is the K meister trying to be clever. You know, like Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh? Of course it is unsubstantiated by the facts--unless you use Fox News as your source for "facts". "All sorts of stuff"? I guess he means healthcare reform. For some reason, "Obamacare" really pisses a lot of idiots off. I'm not sure why. I guess they like being at the mercy of insurance companies, or they've bought all of the Right's tired old lies about the "evils" of socialized medicine, or they plan on never getting sick or getting old. Or maybe it's just because they're idiots.

More Kowalczyk wisdom: "It's now 2011, and the Democrats are saying that America has to pay for their wild binge and they want a bigger allowance." The "wild binge" he is referring to was the money spent preventing the world's economy from melting down. Incidentally, this "binge" began on W's watch. By the way, here's a fact for Andy to chew on, if he can stop frothing at the mouth long enough to chew on anything: The national debt increased more under both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush than it has under Obama. The national debt also includes several trillion dollars that we owe ourselves. Kowalczyk's "bigger allowance" means the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is an artificial construct that many economists consider ridiculous. However, up until now, it has always been automatically raised, regardless of who the president was. Apparently Andy would rather see the US default on its obligations than give Obama what every other President has gotten. That'll show 'em! Take that world economy!

Now we come to the heart of little Andy Kowalczyk's ravings: "Republicans are not going to raise their allowance and are simply asking for the Dems to send back some of the stuff so we might have a chance to pay for the stuff we can't send back." Since Andy doesn't specify what "stuff" we should send back, I will. Let's send back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Let's send back all of our outsourced manufacturing jobs. Those are the two root causes of most of our debt to China. Let's send back the bill for the Iraq War. It's over a trillion dollars and rising. Let's send back Federal subsidies for oil companies. Let's send back all of the corporate tax loopholes. While we're at it, let's raise the wage cap on Social Security and stop once and for all this nonsense about privatization. Now honestly, do any of those "send backs" sound like Republican ideas?

No. Republican "ideas" include cutting taxes for billionaires and corporations while gutting the safety net for the rest of us; doing away with the Departments of Education and Energy, Head Start, the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, the SEC, Medicare, Planned Parenthood, and any other agency, governmental or otherwise, that might stand in the way of their plans for turning the USA into a Christian Corporate Fascist state. Amen.

I decided to add Democracy In Action to the title of this post because Andrew Kowalczyk's vote counts the same as mine or yours. Even though he's demonstrably an idiot.

Of course, we're all born ignorant of certain things. But some of us choose to remain ignorant. Many of those who choose to remain ignorant end up in Arizona. In fact they make up a majority of the state's voters. The current state that Arizona, and indeed the nation, finds itself in is a direct result of the rise of Idiot Power. And The Arizona Republic is their paper of record.

The Last Laugh

Apparently the rest of the world is laughing at us. I know this, because Donald Trump, Patriot, has been giving interviews to any and all news outlets that will listen. Loudly, repetitively, the Donald has banged the "foreigners are mocking us" drum until he's red (redder) in the face.

Setting aside that one of our country's strongest national traits has always been a complete indifference to what any other country thinks about us (feel free to chant "USA, USA, USA" at any point during the remainder of this post), is it possible that Trump is right?

Well, even a blind squirrel with a bad rug stumbles on an acorn occasionally.

We are being laughed at--but not for the reason Trump believes. See La Donna (as the peasants of Umbria call him), thinks we're being mocked because our president is weak, and if only we had a strong leader, someone like IL Trumpo, then the mocking would stop immediately.

The truth is that as long as a bunch of easily misled simpletons like the Tea Party can scare allegedly serious politicians into doing the bidding not of the American people, but of a few amoral billionaires, the laughter from abroad will only continue. As long as Fox News broadcasts lies and distortions nightly with relative impunity; as long as a majority of the Supreme Court believes corporations should have all of the privileges of citizens--but none of the responsibilities of citizenship; as long as Glen Beck is treated as a serious journalist--and not as the circus geek he is; as long as people like Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, Paul Ryan and the rest of that gang of fools, thieves, and grifters masquerading as a political party is given any credence at all, the laughter will only increase.

The rest of the world wonders why our financial institutions, which caused the world wide recession, continue to avoid regulation, let alone prosecution. Why we worry so much about what should be personal issues, like abortion, drugs, religion, and sexuality. Why we can't even agree to guarantee basic health care for all of our citizens. Why anyone in his right mind would consider Donald Trump a viable candidate for president of anything other than a restricted country club.

Yeah Don, they are laughing. But not at Obama.

The Stockholm Syndrome

So the Republicans would like to cut $6 Trillion dollars from the deficit over the next 10 years, and they propose doing it without touching defense spending and continuing to lower taxes on the rich and corporations? This can only mean a full scale attack on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, Head Start, Unemployment Insurance, Student Loans and Grants, and anything else that might conceivably protect working people from a downward spiral into poverty.

When captives begin to sympathize with their captors they call it the Stockholm Syndrome. Working class people in the US have been held hostage by corporations and their center-rightist stooges in politics and the media for so many years that many of them truly believe that up is down, and black is white.

That lower taxes on the rich are the only way to create jobs, that guaranteed health care for all is somehow un-American, that government programs only help "other" people, and that benevolent corporations will look out for them.

These are the people who listened to Reagan and cheered when he said that government was the problem. Of course, the clear implication was that the Federal government was helping "them" and not you. And we all know who "they" are, don't we? (The undercurrent of racism that runs from Nixon's Southern Strategy, through Reagan's attacks on "Welfare queens", right up to today's Tea Party is undeniable.)

They swallow whatever Fox News says without a second thought.

They rely on Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter to educate them on the issues.

And all along they keep getting poorer, and angrier, and further away from "the American Dream."

These are the people who still think Barack Obama is the most serious threat to "our" way of life.

What can you do with people like that?

A couple of late night thoughts

It's late and I just feel like getting a couple of things out there into the ether. On Thursday I'm planning to write more about Wisconsin, Scott Walker, John Kasich and Ronald Reagan, but tonight I just want to make a couple of points.

First, bravo to the Obama administration and the Department of Justice for the announcement that they will no longer defend the DOMA in appellate court. I can't help but think this is the beginning of the end for DOMA, an act that along with Don't Ask Don't Tell has always seemed to me to be both unconstitutional and repellent in its discrimination against roughly 10% of the American public. The right has already begun its assault on this decision, with that harridan Monica Crowley leading the way on Fox calling Obama "Mubarak Obama" and stating that this is a dictatorial decision by the administration. This only leads me to believe that Crowley needs to get a dictionary and try to find out what the word "dictatorial" actually means, because it's pretty apparent that she doesn't understand it right now.

Next, the Presidential election of 2012. Which Republican is actually going to try to run? One would think by their rhetoric that the Republicans would be lining up to face a socialist dictator who by their account is the most unpopular President in history, but the early frontrunners already seem to be dropping out. John Thune, that handsome dude from South Dakota? Nope. Mike Pence, that erstwhile defender of liberty from Indiana? Says he ain't gonna try. Let's see -- who else is out there. Oh yeah. Chris Christie, Anne Coulter's dream of a boy toy. Will he run? According to him he will commit suicide before running, just to convince people that he's not running. Who does that leave now? Mitt Romney, the plastic master of change (he can change his opinion in an instant depending on which way the political wind is blowing) who got slaughtered just two years ago? Mike Huckabee, the evolution denier who tries to come across as somewhat moderate -- a stance that disappears upon any close appraisal of his policies and words? Newt Gingrich? Give me a break.

Nope, none of those could possibly beat Obama and I believe they all know it. Who does that leave? Please, please, by all that's holy, let the last two candidates I can think of please run. That's right, ex-Governor half-term, Sarah Palin, and crazy lady who seems to have frostbite of the brain, Michele Bachmann. If she were to actually run and be forced to face actual reporters at some point and not just the droids at Fox, Palin's approval rating by November 2012 would probably hover at somewhere around 15%. And is there really even anything to say about someone who believes that Glenn Beck can solve the nation's financial crisis? Enough said....although if anyone in the country would be happier than me for Presidential runs by these two idiots, it could only be Jon Stewart and the writing staff at Saturday Night Live.

I'll be back later with my thoughts on Walker and labor, particularly regarding the influence Ronald Reagan has had on them. For now, good night.