Friday, October 24, 2003

A note to the laity:

Tomorrow is my forty first birthday, so this blog is on vacation next week and will be infrequently updated if at all.
I'd like to schedule a nice mid-life crisis on my week off, but a quick review of Billy Crystal's filmography reviews that male menopause can be a costly thing.
No joke all his movies seem to revolve around Billy freaking out on his fortieth birthday and buying a sallon, a sportcar, or running off to drive cattle.
In all a disheartening prospect for those of us on a modest income.
Anyhow....if it all goes to smash and I don't come back, try to remember I was once an eagle.
John IAT
:)
See you in seven...
Power is a beverage


Despite the claims of the punditariat, the democratic party has little in the way of true bosses.
Lyndon Johnson gave it a shot in 1968 trying to get the Presidential nomination for Hubert Humphrey-but LBJ was an incumbent President with vast political resources at hand.
Humphrey repaid the favor be being the dems "missed it by that much" champ until the apotheosis of Al Gore.
Since 1968 a motley crew of bangtail yaps have tried to play Kingmaker-Fixer to the party, everyone from Lawrence O'Brien to Mario Cuomo.
All have failed mostly because the nomination process is decentralized and constituencies divided for anyone to whomp together a national "machine".
And then there is Former President Bill Clinton...who longs be the 21st century's first national political boss.
They never should've pulled Bill's law license....barred from adorning some boutique law firm's roster Bill now has time on his hands to collect ludicrous speaking fees and to plot and scheme.
It's all very complicated but I'm assuming that the wily razorback doesn't want to see his wife Senator Rodham-Clinton elected President...he may be enlightened but I don't think he's enlightened enough to be first husband having been Commander in Chief.
He could bide his time for Chelsea to come of age...she has many bona fides, an impeccable lineage and no skeletons in her closet.
However by all accounts Miss Clinton is a sensible girl and probably regards public life with entirely understandable horror.
Besides, Bill has a short lived window of opportunity here, his wife has pledged not to run for President in 2004, she is famously silent on the 2008 race.
So the former President has to get his candidate in now in order to sleep easy the next four years.
Now at first it looked like Senator John Edwards was Bill's familiar spirit in this race. The Senator is young, energetic, sincere and is still new to Washington so he hasn't done anything embarrassing yet.
For all that though, Edwards has been running like molasses in a cold snap....little money is coming in and his campaign appearances while well received aren't known for their passionate bombast.
The kid just isn't ready....more than few people have said Edwards is in this thing solely to raise his profile in anticipation of a gubernatorial candidacy.
Well this betrays a certain cunning on Edwards' part...four out of the last five US President's have been Governors - and he is young yet.
So who knows, Clinton playz Edwards, but Edwards plays his own game.
And who knows, the Vice Presidency could well be dangled before him next year.
None of this solves Bill Clinton's problem, he still needs a candidate.
Viola' enter General Wesley Clark, soldier, scholar, statesman, Rhodes Scholar...mayhap a bit of a hero too.
He is even a razorback-hog heaven for the former President.
Now the punditariat tells us, that Clark is off to a rocky start as a candidate, he got in late, lacks cash, and polish-yadda yadda yadda...
Don't pay that any mind, Bobby Kennedy got in late in 1968 and ran very poorly at first but he found his voice and barnstormed the nation and party.
The New Hampshire Primary is one hundred days away trust me on this no-one up there pays the political milieu the slightest attention until after new years day....and then the game is afoot.
Meanwhile Kerry keeps busing his volunteers in one after the other.
Frankly, I wish Bill well in his endeavors...it'd be ironic if actually managed to assist in the deposition of his successor.
It would be yet another object lesson to all the fanatical Clinton haters out th

Thursday, October 23, 2003

What does Jeb Bush get off on?
I mean clearly it's power.
He comes from a family famous for it's crude unsophisticated power worship.
And the neatest power of all, for any President or Governor, is the power of life and death.
Nothing so over-awes the peasants as executing a criminal with one hand and reconnecting a brain damage case's feeding tube with the other.
For the serious power-addict the rush of dispensing both life and death is nigh indescribable.
Ultimately the Schiavo case is not really a pro-life issue, no it's about making sure that questions of health, life, death, punishment and all the rest are solely controlled by fanatical conservatives.
Health decisions historically made by private individuals can now be over-ridden by puritan activists in your state legislature.
Make no mistake about it, this is a sort of GOP "bill of attainder" by which poor vegetative Terri Schiavo is being "sentenced" to life imprisonment with an inactive brain sans trial.
Oh Jeb will wax maudlin on this one....sanctity of life, blah blah blah...a strategic convert to Catholicism, Jeb is a master of the pro-life lexicon.
He may rule over a state that is a national embarrassment in every way as well as being the farthest north of the Banana Republics, but Jeb is prone to treacly sentimentality as much as any other brass hat dictator.
Especially when it's the sort of sentimentality that increases his own authority and expands the scope of government intrusiveness.
Well that is La Famiglia Arbusto for you, they'll pretty much countenance war, famine, humiliation and all manner of misery as long as in the end they still have the power to give some citizen somewhere a hard time.
Sick
Demented

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Wealth and Unwealth...

How stupid is Eric Kriss?
I mean really...
Can foolishness really be precisely measured?
Eric Kriss, the Commonwealth's Secretary of Administration told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week that the ratio of "givers to takers" was now about three to one.
A "statistic" that the Admin Secretary finds "unsettling".
This is a ludicrous assertion on so many levels-too many in fact to review in this teensy blogspace.
For one thing, he is calling one quarter of the Commonwealth's population a bunch of debtors and deadbeats....a real Republican Administration NEVER admits that poverty is trending upwards!
Think about it, Kriss is in effect claiming that after three GOP Governors one fourth of the population is living in a chronic state of want.
Never mind the fact that Eric never defines what constitutes a "taker"...you could easily lump schoolchildren and retirees into this "unsettling" parasitic class.
You have to wonder if this is the sort of moronic patois the Romney gang affects behind close doors....grown men complaining about how they are being "oppressed" by "the poor" or some such rubbish.
It's grimly hilarious to recall that Kriss is a grizzled hackneyed veteran of the Weld Cabinet, you'd think he would know better....
***
Of course Romney has nothing to say as yet about Eric's nonsensical effusion.
No doubt Eric "the snitch" Fehnstrom is frantically poling to determine if a hardline on "takers" has any political traction.
Sick
Demented
Typical

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

God, Osama, and the General.


Anyone else hear the news about the army's chief Osama-catcher-Lt. General William Boykin?
God put George Bush in the White House over the wishes of the American People...that was the gist of Boykin's favorite church group boilerplate.
Oh the General is a blubbery old christian evangelical all right....weeps and rants with the best of them.
Is it any wonder why Bin Laden is still at liberty with hapless little Jesus freaks like this on his tail?
With their strained war-of-civilizations rhetoric and routine use of Satan to excuse their own stupidity, truly the American xians finally have themselves their own private apocalypse.
On the other hand why would anyone be surprised that a turgid twice born christian fanatic is on the hunt for Bin Laden?
A turgid twice born christian fanatic is in the White House....stands to reason.
I swear, with rubes like Boykin on the job, it's a wonder Bin Laden hasn't occupied Washington D.C.
And if Osama managed to pull off such a feat, no doubt the White House would call it a "fly paper strategy" and a great success! General Boykin would then preside to a charming prayer vigil and boy's pie eating contest outside the provisonal White House now located in a Epsom Circle N.H. trailer park.

Monday, October 20, 2003

Due respect rendered...

So very nice people have seen fit to link to this tiny blog of mine.
Lis Riba:
The legendary Romney-is-a-Fraud blog
And blah3.com

All are fine blogs and or websites...they are deserving of your patronage.
Now if only I got that link thing right, all will be well.
:)
The Wit and Wisdom of Uncle Tom...

Not that Uncle Tom, no MY Uncle Tom....I actually had one-once.
Poor man went to glory twenty years ago come yesterday.
Tom was a Man in extremis...he smoked huge cigars and shamelessly stole schtick from the Apex Irishman, Jackie Gleason.
And what the hell the cigars are what killed him.
Now before the strokes and cancer shut his considerable wits down for good I can recall some potent advice he gave me back in campaign 1982.
Purists will recall a Phoenix called Mike Dukakis, who rose from the dead that year hell bent on reclaiming the governship from Ed King.
The game was afoot at all levels, the Lieutenant Governor's race was in contention too...I was of course was backing Sam Rotondi on the grounds that he was my state senator....all politics is local and like that.
A lawyer named John Forbes Kerry was in the contest as well.
All I knew about him was, Doonesbury had mocked Kerry back in his "Viet Nam Veterans Against the War" phase.
Uncle Tom however gave it to me straight, "Forget Rotondi, back Kerry! He is going places-he is a man of destiny".
I forget who I voted for, might've been Kerry might've been Rotondi.
But I was always struck by Uncle Tom's fervent endorsement of Kerry.
Now at the time, my Uncle was a de facto republican who was long driven out of the democratic party by the high-jinks of James Michael Curley!
So his was a disinterested endorsement to say the least.
Apparently he saw something in Kerry that I didn't at the time.
Well anyway, peace to Uncle Tom's ashes.

Friday, October 17, 2003

Tunnel Revision or throwing a Mitt fit

Governor Decaf is still beefin' with the Great and General Court over which name goes on Boston's Big Dig.
The Legislature, being sensible for once, wants to name the tunnel for the late Speaker of the U.S. House, Thomas P. O'Neill Junior. That seems only fair since O'Neill scrounged up all the initial funding for the whole mishaugas.
Romney is still fixated on naming it "The Liberty Tunnel" which he insists somehow confers new honors on Massachusetts' veterans.
This is the flag draped successor to his earlier scheme to hold an internet contest to determine the name of the tunnel.
What the current controversy does in an admirable way is hold a mirror up Mitt's lack of gravitas and thin political skin.
Faced with a simple "no" from the Transportation Committee on an admittedly minor matter, Romney has opted to bang the podium, throw a tantrum, and demonize his opponents as unpatriotic.
He "went to the funeral" of a soldier killed in Iraq this somehow sez to the slack jawed yokels in the State Senate, that Big Mitt means it.
No doubt the grieving family broke out into tearful smiles when Willard promised them their loss would be immortalized in "The Liberty Tunnel".
Are these the sort of childish fugues his colleagues had to endure at Bain Capital Group all these years?
Now I'm begining to wonder....
The Onanist in Chief and his staff have even gone on record as sneering at the "local mania" for naming public buildings after politicians.
Spoken like a true Viceroy.
Spiteful bastards when they don't get their way aren't they?
And not for nothing, but our Civic Spaces are being relentlessly assaulted by the arrogance of private commerce.
Naming rights to civic arenas are routinely sold off to sinister energy conglomerates and clothing manufacturers whose hiring practices in foreign countries perpetuate new form of serfdom.
Mitt of course has nothing to say about this malign trend which is a blight upon a free democratic polity.
Meanwhile here at home the democratic space shrinks as sports announcers are contractually threatened to call it the "Fleet Center" or whatever.
So there is something quaint and ridiculous about this famous commerce worshipper, Mitt Romney demanding the State Legislature bow to his will over the "Liberty Tunnel".
Why not auction the naming rights off, as we have done with virtually all other publicly paid for spaces in this country?
Call it the Halliburton Tunnel, the Hasbro Road, the Enron Hole, or the Bain Capital Gruppe Expressway...
What better way to honor our veterans than to forget our rights as citizens and sell off a fat chunk of our legacy?
This is the problem with having a wealthy pampered businessman with no training in the public sphere as Governor.
Nobody has ever said "no" to this jerk-off back in his palmy private sector days so of course he doesn't like it and gets riled like a stubborn five year old.
There is something equally childish about disparaging a departed statesman, if Romney can't achieve O'Neill's stature he'll dick on the late Speaker's memory.
In all
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Frankly,

I think some serious jail time would be the best thing in the world for Rush Limbaugh.
There are tons of freepers behind bars so he'll hardly be lonely.
And maybe he'll make some new friends while goin' cold turkey in the slams.
It's a cinch whatever deluxe rehab resort he has checked into WON'T get his problem under control.
Nope, no doubt Rush thinks the joint is a Club Med type deal and is ordering ribs covered in blood sauce from room service even as I write this.
By all accounts Limbaugh already leads a bleak prison like existence so it'll hardly be any great change for him.
From rattling around that 50 room mansion all day long sprawled like a beached whale on the couch watching football to rattling around the prison yard watching the penitentiary's baseball team.
Simple....
The guy lives in a freeper heaven, huge mansion, no emotional entanglements, and all the opportunities in the world to wallow in trite sadism on the public airwaves.
I mean no wonder he developed this phoney baloney "back problem" and needed 4500+ oxycontin pills to dull the pain.
Richard Nixon had psychosomatic back problems too....a legacy of his life long envy he projected onto J.F.K.
Hitler had phantom stomach problems and treated it with a strict vegetarian diet and plenty of goofyjuice injections from the loathsome Dr. Theodor Morell.
It is the same with Rush, he found a croaker who wrote him a script instead of sending him along to a psychiatrist.
Being public ass hole #1 apparently exacts a potent psychic toll.
That is if, he had a bona fide RX....there is some debate on that point.
Whatever the story jail will clean Rush up and make a man out of him...as Richard Nixon once observed after he resigned "a lot of good books have been written in jail".
"Mein Kampf" for instance.

Good luck Rush and remember, cigarettes are like money in the joint....and don't fall for that old "my credit is good, I gotta letter coming in from my sister" routine.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Is California really worth it?


I read in the current American Prospect an intriguing and disquieting article by David L. Kirp and Marshall S. Smith detailing the qualitative decline of California's public schools since Proposition 13's passage back in 1978.
A third of the schools are in physically "poor condition" per a report by Robert Corley and the state ranks 49th in the nation in the teacher to student ratio. California's score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate the their students are performing considerably below the national average in mathematics, science, and reading.
Spending per pupil is at an all time low as well...on a par with the Great State of Mississippi.
Faced with a potential educational catastrophe the voters and politicians have risen up with a revolutionary program; the installation a semi literate body-builder as governor, cutting taxes, importing more guest knowledge workers from India, and running the Mexican migrants out at the point of a bayonet.
So I ask you all...
It's gonna cost someone billions of dollars to fix California.
Now that Schwarzenegger is Governor it's for damn sure the Golden State's citizenry ISN'T gonna pay for any of this....
So why should Arnold be allowed to go to DC with a tin cup gripped in his meaty steroidal paw?
Why should anyone in equally cash strapped states be asked to shoulder the fiscal burdens of California's famously self pitying electorate?
Just because Arnie is pals with the President??
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to sell the joint back to Mexico or get the U.N. to hold an autonomy plebiscite?
Okay granted it's the sixth largest economy in the Universe, but it's still limping around the national neighborhood wailing and begging for alms...our sympathies are being taxed to the limit in other parts of the Federal Union.
I mean who needs to listen to this noise?
And sooner or later the pending catastrophes in education,quality of life and the budget will cause California to revert to the barbarous status of Bosnia.
We've all had a good run with California as the land of myth, movies and opportunity but the writing is on the wall, time for the other forty nine states to cut their losses with dignity.
It was great for awhile but now the whole shit house is looking gaunt and needy....with a scary thousand yard stare as well.
Is there a constitutional mechanism by which the U.S. can ditch a poorly performing state?
THAT would put Louisiana and the Northeast Kingdom on notice!!!!
If not we need to create one.
Let us say California struck for independence, they'd still have to maintain all sorts of ties with the U.S.A. for economic and national defense purposes.
We have to look at this as a paying proposition all around I think.
Hell, we could probably force Sacramento to pay for part of the upkeep on the San Diego Navy Base!
There are all sorts of advantages here...we could compel the California Free State to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty as a condition for full diplomatic recognition.
That'll shut the damn Arabs up about Israel's bomb!!
All the California liberals can quietly exit the state for Oregon and Washington, by 2010 those states will no doubt pick up vital electoral votes for the democratic party.
If we plan properly we can put in place a lucrative repatriation program for anyone who seriously wants out.
It'll be a boon for the New York Independent film scene I tells yuh.
The rump of the movie studios can set up shop in Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, granted the weather is lousy but the scenery!!!
With any luck we can force California to keep Jay Leno....that groveling bastard can cringe behind stacked sand bags for all I care.

Arnold can finally realize his dream of being President of someplace as long as it is far far away from me.
So it's a win-win situation in my books.

Monday, October 13, 2003

Extremism:

We've all known more than a few, I myself had a deeply paranoid co-worker once who literally believed every conspiracy theory in the book especially if there were Jews attached to it.
Now it's pretty much an article of faith that the GOP has steadily moved rightward since 1980.
The right has gotten "rightier" while still making a big play for swing voters...they this do in two ways:
1) Cloaking their real goals in bombastic pseudo populist rhetoric.
2) Spending a lot of money on crass party propaganda. Herein there are assisted by a vast install base of radio talk show hosts and professional conservative talking heads.
So it's a given that the extremists are in charge over there.
Yet among these activists and propagandists there are certain glaring contradictions...there is a vast gulf between that prissy puritan floorwalker John Ashcroft and a morbid debauchee' like Laura Ingraham.
Yet there is no diversity here....rarely do serious movement conservatives take their fellow worshippers to task for philosophical heresy.
So when we talk about the "gulf" between Ashbrook and Ingraham, it is a thing of style... or better lifestyle.
Maybe when we talk about conservative extremism, we are less talking about an idea or ideology and more about extremes of behavior.
These are extremes of behavior that the movement can reconcile and even control.
Both extremes of behavior-if properly channeled are sources of power to the modern conservative movement.
Thus there may be less of an ideology at work here...just a series of protocols for the management of boors, pseudo patriots and pious puritans.
Operationally, power is maintained by distributing boons and perks to key cadres. Laura Ingraham gets an easy gig on the radio, Anne Coulter is wrapped in the warm protective blanket of conservative book publishing...legislation is virtaully for sale giving fundraisers a stake in the movement's well being.
There are literally thousands of sinecures public and private in play here.
And extremists are given what the crave most of all, a chance to harangue the polity from safe vantage points on talk shows, radio programs and the internet.
Their views are not in any way challenged but treated with respect no matter how freakish they may be....the movement drifts ever rightward by making ever more outlandish views part of the mainstream.

I so many ways it is a lifestyle we are describing here.
Well it is worth thinking about anyway.

Friday, October 10, 2003

My problem is...

I can't yet figure out if we are in dire conflict with voluptuaries or revolutionaries?
Which is why I oscillate between the decadence of Laura Ingraham and the fanaticism of Bush the younger.
The program is puritanically revolutionary in content...but there are so many attached functionaries and whatnot who are clearly luxury loving moochers (Bill Bennett, La Ingraham)....
Hell I'm still mulling over the notion of Bush as a charismatic leader.
Well when I have it figured out, y'all will be the first to know.
:)
Dialectical Immaterialism.

The President's program can be analyzed as an exercise in crude dialectics:
Infinite expenditure, infinitesimal revenues, equals total catastrophe.
The infinite expenditures are yoked largely to the so called "war on terror" and the expansion of police power here at home.
Despite the alleged conservatism of this Administration they have a boundless faith in big government's war-making potential and police powers.
The Bush tax cuts are designed to starve out of existence almost every other congressionally mandated government function, social security, Medicare, the space program, veterans benefits, pretty much the whole tamale.
Those are the government mandates the Bush ideology doesn't approve of, rather than fight it out with congress, he has chosen to simply suppress taxation so radically that these functions will have to cease to exist at some point lest the Government default on it's war debts.
Because that is the secret weapon of the "Bushian" dialectics, debt.
Essentially the nation we will be forced to sell off the social security system or the few remaining social safeguards out there to pay for our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is why the President's cartoonish bellicosity has never been matched with an attempt to militarize the U.S. economy.
Even if the President was inclined to raise taxes, which he isn't, why would he give up a golden opportunity to destroy the federal social welfare infrastructure?
Bush is a revolutionary, plain and simple.
He is the first President raised and nurtured by the conservative counter-culture...his advisors and tutors, Rice, Rove, Rumsfeld are all themselves products of the organized conservative backlash of the 1970's.
Bush therefore has nothing but a brittle contempt for federal intervention in any social problems, which is a nice cover for his enduring hatred of poverty as an abstract condition. Despite his status as an old money avatar he is riddled with hateful projections onto fanciful elites whose activities he deems anti-American and unpatriotic.
Theirs is a de-evolutionary doctrine that literaly asserts that the economic infrastructure that characterized America in 1899 is a kind of earthly paradise.
Oh Bush doesn't rant and rave like Achille Starace or anything....but he does have an inflexible belief that men must fit the theory not matter what the cost in agony and woe.
The more worshipful sections of the press call him "focused"....which is a nice way of calling him a fanatic.
He won't be in office when the catastrophe comes if it does, but the consequences will be his and his alone.
Bush is fighting this war like his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, through debt and financial trickery.
Johnson however pulled back at the last minute, signed a tax increase and sought peace in Viet Nam...even still the bulk of the economic malaise of the 1970's was due profligate war spending sans due consideration for revenues.
What Bush wants, even worse than he wants to "win" against terrorism, is a economic disaster worse than the stagflation of the 1970's....something so bad that some other suitable GOP demagogue can come to power on a promise to "get the gummint" off the backs of the people.
Never mind the fact that the government will be reduced to penury by then....
This hypothetical demagogue doesn't bother Bush one bit, his friends controlled his nomination and no doubt their successors will keep the riff-raff out of the N.H. Primary come 2016.
So this is conservative civilization as Bush defines it circa 2003 AD, zero taxes, and a dangerously utopian vision of unlimited opportunity that can only be created by social chaos and government collapse at home.
More and more the war is nothing but an engine by which the Bush admin will turn back the economic clock to the contented days of William B. McKinley.
"Lucky me" he smirked once he was done fleeing.

Thursday, October 09, 2003

Drug Resistance...

The New England Governor's conference met in Boston with John Walters', the White House Drug Czar yesterday.
Intent on spreading the Administration's "cowboy up" attitude to all aspects of public policy Walter came out of random drug testing of school children as a means to combat the rise in heroin use.
With the theoretical exception of Maine Governor John Baldacci this is a listless collection of GOP Herods, Pilates, and Pierre Laval's acting as Chief Executives.
All were elected on undeliverable promises of a no-tax, no crime, utopia that requires no hard work or sacrifice on anyone's part at all.
And they all sat there like sheep...the only worry in their scanty minds was the effect that said proposal would have on their N.H. Primary Prospects come 2008, 2012 or 2016.
Assuming that is we still have elections in this faltering democracy of ours by then....but then these hammerheads can just as easily look forward to hereditary Dukedoms and other gaudy titles under King Bush I.
***
If Walters' wants to start screening for drug use, he may as well start with America's talk show hosts.
The revelation of Rush Limbaugh's oxycontin habit casts an ominous light on the nation's radio punditariat.
In fact if Hannity, O'Reilly, Severin, etc really love the U.S.A. they would patriotically volunteer to be randomly tested for drug use.
You just know otherwise they'll be shrieking to set up a gallows in every Junior High School in the land for "drug offenders"....and who wants to listen to that noise quite frankly.
If we can gets some urine off these yankers then maybe we can finally find out which class is truly "at risk".
Isn't flagrant drug use among our radio talk show hosts at least as big a problem as kids eating Nembutal's like tic-tacs?
Talk radio has a lot of influence over the public mindset, we can't afford to let drugs corrupt that cohort!
I say
TEST SEAN!
Then worry about all the kiddie junkies at Madison Elementary.
Hell as long as we are on the subject, long before we force our progeny to piss into little cups , we ought to test the NE Governor's conference for drugs....those results should prove interesting.
Love to see one of those fellas produce a bona fide RX for a mason jar of morphine.

Seriously though, if we are gonna judge our own children as potential dope fiends, don't we owe the same level of suspicion for our elected politicians and un-elected commentators???
TEST HOWARD
BEFORE WE TEST J.F.K. MIDDLE SCHOOL!
I can see it on a bumper sticker-hell lets get it on a ballot initiative next year!

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Will Laura Ingraham ever grow up?

This is a serious question as we approach the advent of post conservative civilization.
As the current crisis unfolds we may find that this is THE question to be debated.
Can she grow up at all-does she even need to?
And if she can't, then why is someone with a stunted preadolescent personality disorder allowed to opine on the radio?

She was on Imus this morning...still sounding fresh as daisy despite what must have been the bender of benders last night.
Not ten seconds into the appearance Laura launches into a vicious juvenile impersonation of Fox Cable News' pet liberal Susan Estrich.
Susan has been on a journey to the right lately as abler commentators than I have documented...a journey that has availed her nothing as Laura lampooned her speech patterns with childish gusto.
I suppose I need to make the point that there are no real ideological accommodations with today's degenerated brand of conservatism. Once you are identified in the enemy camp (Estrich's was campaign manager to the hated Mike Dukakis in 1988) you are branded for life.
Laura was giggling so hard at Estrich's expense you'd a thought Susan came to Junior High in lime green culottes or something...
It was a scary moment...not because I felt threatened or anything but because Ingraham sounded completely disassociated.
Y'know....nuts.
Never let it be said that the hard right in the country doesn't have it's own unspoken affirmative action policy.
They may not like queers, uppity women, persons of color, the poor and whatnot but they are very welcoming to the clinically deranged-how else to account for the rise and rise of Laura Ingraham?
Of course psychotics can't function for long without enabler, in this case Don Imus who egged her on with horrific glee.
Alas they had much to be gleeful about what with Schwarzenegger allegedly winning the recall in California last night.
True to form Ingraham hailed as a conservative revolutionary turning point and the death knell of liberalism in the U.S.A.
That by the way, if a favorite spin for the hard right in America, their every success big or small portends a vast permanent realignment in U.S. politics.
Neatly Ingraham leapt off the McClintock bandwagon and decided that Schwarzenegger, steroids, sex abuse, and all-was the man of destiny.
You'd think she had never heard of Monica Lewinsky or Kenneth Starr.
No she fell into the Schwarzenegger conga line with practiced grace.
Frankly I'm getting sick of calling people like Laura Ingraham hypocrites...it seems too trivial an observation given the way their brazen hypocrisy is used to conduct ideological warfare.
On the other hand, she has easily made her peace with Bush's brand of big government and concurrently Schwarzenegger's personal defects so it's getting harder and harder to call her a conservative.
As I've said before, conservatism is a dying phenomenon in America.
Like Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, modern movement conservatism has "promised" itself to death.
Most of those self same promises guaranteed victory in the cold war, prosperity at home, and harmony all over at no discernible cost to the voter or taxpayer.
Time after time the voters have paid in treasure, dignity and blood for these endless free-market utopian fantasies.
Having promised paradise and delivered naught but debt, war and division in return how does the conservative movement plan to perpetuate itself?
Simple by jettisoning it's last remaining principles in order to preserve the prerequisites of it's own power elite.
One of the ways the movement delays the inevitable is by glomming onto well financed amateurs like Schwarzenegger and then claiming a vast victory for the right when these inane weird personalities win at the polls.
Frankly they've raised this stunt to an art form in my opinion.
However the smooth Orwellian transferal of allegiance to Schwarzenegger....forecasts itself a dangerous drift in American ideological warfare.
We have liberals, moderates, conservatives and now reactionaries who have made so many compromises and botched governance so badly that they can only participate in electoral politics as pure power worshippers.
Laura Ingraham, girlish brutality and all, is one of these power worshippers.
It's a nice gig all in all, very warm, comforting, one can, Peter Pan, like retain a Junior High schooler's outlook on life sans reproof.
****
The struggle therefore in 2004 and beyond isn't between conservatism and liberalism...real conservatives are an endangered species in Laura Ingraham's America The coming confrontation is going to be between liberals, constitutionalists, and progressives against the emergent power-worshipping class of the former right.
They are decadent, that is to say contemptuous of elections and democracy, authoritarian, well financed, and ruthless to a fault. It is system of thought dedicated to retaining power at all costs
We are therefore not contending with Ronald Reagan's quaint brand of feel good conservatism.
That particular ideology has come and gone in America, what has replaced it is debauched, truculent and utterly remorseless in every way.
To prevail against it, we ourselves must become harder...less willing to let bygones be bygones.
***

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Mitt Chickens Out....

Trust Governor Romney to botch what should of been an easy-assed political trip to California.
No doubt visions of a well received national debut danced in the Kolobian Viceroy's head even as his aides excused campaigning for a steroid addicted sex maniac on grounds that "Arnold is like Teddy Kennedy".
So when the smoke cleared from what was really a minor contretemps...Mitt stands revealed as a bit of a squish quite frankly.
A true movement conservative with the guts of a Grover Norquist would've charged onto the plane howling his intention of "saving" California from socialism and Grey Davis.
Dopey remarks like this are pretty much a daily occurrence with President Bush, it doesn't stop him from misgoverning the nation and running the world into a ditch.
No Mitt pulled back for some reason....perhaps campaigning for a sexual degenerate proved too much for him in the end.
Maybe the Church Elders warned him off....maybe Arnold's base is locked up solid.
Who knows?
All I know Romney looks indecisive.
Arnold will just have to turn California into a big gymnasium-dictatorship without Romney's help.
It's a telling example of how little force is required to throw the Governor off balance.
Worth remembering IMHO.

Monday, October 06, 2003

And another thing....

And another thing...

Can someone pop off a quick note to Brian Williams at NBC News...they are using a particularly hilarious shade of orange in his stage make up.
I'm not joking here, the mantan looks like it's been with a trowel....
He looks vaguely radioactive.
It is easily to get distracted like this when Brian Williams is doing the news he is such a perfectly mediocrity in every way that the mind is forced to amuse itself with trivia lest one slip into a coma.
I think Tom Brokaw personally selected him as the NBC News Anchor in waiting simply because Williams is such a hopeless naif' that he makes the current incumbent newsreader look like Richard Harding Davis by comparison.
Maybe Brian is so clueless that he doesn't realize he looks incandescent on camera...meanwhile back in his office Brokaw is having a nice vacuous chuckle at the new guy's expense.
Monday Notes

So....if Rush Limbaugh is a junkie and perhaps even a dealer...
And
Bill Bennett is a compulsive gambler....
And
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a sex addict and a steroid freak...
And
George Bush Jr. a "reformed" drunk...
Then what do you suppose William Safire's shameful secret might be?
:)
I mean we are on a roll here folks...the virtucracy is falling to ruins before our eyes under a punishing hail of morphine styrettes, hookers, luv-chill'un, high stakes poker, and booze booze booze as far as the eye can see.
Safire's next I can just feel it....
I say it's something truly anathema to the shi'ite conservatives out there...like maybe Bill's hard drive at the New York Times is clogged with muscleboy cheesecake pics from Bob Mizer's old athletic modeling catalogues.
No doubt Schwarzenegger's steroidal berserker physique is just "too much" for the fastidious conservative contrarian.
Either that or he goes down to the alleyway on his lunch hour to huff paint thinner with the sans culottes or maybe Safire still thinks there is a decent psychoactive in testor's glue.
Either way we will find out shortly.
:)

Friday, October 03, 2003

Orrin Hatch on Imus today:

I give Orrin Hatch credit, as toadies go, he is uncommonly loyal.
The average lackey when faced with the imminent dissolution of the master, will take a final tumble, bow one last time, and quietly flee in search of some new magnificence to venerate.
Not Orrin though, Bush is still the smiling young Apollo that the Senator from Utah fell in love with on the New Hampshire campaign trail four years ago.
Orrin sounded scared today and shaky on more than few points but his embarrassingly canine devotion to Bush the Younger is undiminished.
Hatch's thesis is simple, ALL the President's problems can be traced back to "hand wringing" democrats in congress who wanna cut off our troops in Iraq.
Never mind the fact that those dems don't control either House of Congress...and forget about the casual criminality of President's staff or the irrational theses that goaded GWB to war...nope it's all the fault of the liberals.
This seemed to satisfy the smugly senescent Imus...I have to wonder though, are any of Hatch's democratic colleagues, (you know the ones who laud his bipartisanship) listening to Orrin's crude and increasingly delusional performances on the radio?
Otherwise it was a whiny passive aggressive appearance...you could practically hear Hatch's jowls quiver with indignation as he denounced as "imprudent" any congressional investigation of the Valerie Plame leak....this zealous persecutor of Bill Clinton couldn't see any point to a special counsel either.
Suddenly Utah's answer to Savanarola wants to be careful and judicious about the whole matter.
Ghod Bush's sycophants in the Senate are so hopelessly whipped that they can't even rise to the defense of a simple matter of national security i.e the sanctity of undercover operatives!
They won't protect our rights and they can't even protect the nation's secrets.
Appalling....this is the modern senate GOP, little more than field hands on La Famiglia Arbusto's plantation.
***
Hatch noted that Ambassador Wilson was "a partisan" who was for a certain presidential candidate but this proved a feeble line of attack and he soon abandoned it.
After all someone dimed out Wilson's wife from on high and that, party registration or not, is a crime in this country.
As usual everything is the fault of the liberals, the liberal media and liberals in congress in the Orrin-verse....that much never changes.
If this Wilson affair ever goes to trial it's be sheer gleeful heaven to hear Hatch parsing his sentences and twisting himself into a pretzel to keep in step with the White House spin.
Sick
Demented
Typical...

Thursday, October 02, 2003

RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A JUNKIE!!!

Nope never thought I'd write those words!!
According to the New York Daily News the bloated conservacrat has a serious oxycontin jones and has his maid score for him hither and yon.
It just doesn't get any better than this it doesn't!
I mean not for nothing but for how many years did he regularly refer to Bill Clinton as "our pot smoking President?"
And all those nasty cracks about Ted Kennedy's drinking...anyone remember those?
Or his dark insinuations about Hilary Clinton's medicine cabinet??
Lets not even mention his frantic hymns of praise on behalf of hard labor, the lash, the hangman's noose as the solution to ALL life's problems.
Good thing he has moved to Miami, thanks to the "Noelle Bush precedent" he can expect leniency as a well heeled GOP drug offender.
Oh I'm just kvelling about this I am I am I am.
Can we deport Rush....ship his fat ass off to Port Au Prince or something?
It'd be sweet poetic justice the way he's called for the deportation of HIV positive immigrants and the like...see how he likes trying to get high in the slums of La Gonave.
***
Well what can I say?
Stuff like this can't be made up!
Hey Hermann Goering (Rush's spiritual partner and look-a-like) had a shameful little pill problem, he was addicted to something called paracodeine...nasty little narcotics capsules.
Everyone who mattered knew about Hermann's habit...
The guards at Nuremberg got him off the stuff, shaped him up and made a man out of just in time for the Reich Marshal to commit hari-kiri with some cyanide he had hidden up his ass.
But then back in 1946 we knew how to handle rightical chic junkies.
***
Geez this really is the conservative crack-up happening right before our eyes isn't it?
One of this blog's most resolute notions is that modern conservatism is a dying creed in this country.
Rush has just made it's anti-drug pro-personal responsibility jeremiads a laughing stock.
Consider the whole matter from a ideological perspective:
Modern conservatism is a unnatural menage a trois between national security hard-liners, free market fanatics and religious hysterics. Each leg of the triad strengthens the other, the fundies sanctify the freemarketeer's money worship, the national security freaks make everyone look broad-minded and patriotic, all covered by a syrupy goo of old time religion.
it's a symbiotic relationship built around mutual advantage.
However:
IF
Your economic policy openly benefits naught but the rich and the few....
And
IF
National Security takes a backseat to juvenile snitchery and Karl Rove's need to terrorize CIA field agents into submission...
And
IF
Your loudest and most obnoxious spokesmen on behalf of harsh measure against social misfits re themselves, pimps, gamblers, and junkies...
Well then my friend you do have a problem and it's a very real philosophical problem that can't be dealt with via clever advertising copy or relentless press spin.

So yeah the affair d' Limbaugh does have serious implications for the GOP and it's conservative super ideology.
And then there is the image of Rush forcing his maid to go out to score for smack at the local Pharmacy...too delicious for words.
So much joy today...all of it nasty, but joy nonetheless.
California Screamin'

Mitt Romney, the Supreme Onancrat of Massachusetts and Kolobian Viceroy is flying out to California this weekend to campaign for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This seems more than a little odd to me, Arnie has huge name recognition, what can an obscure Governor of Massachusetts who hasn't even booked a year in office do for the terminator?
Romney is so hopelessly obscure, that his chief target constituency in the far off Golden State must be the Mormons.
Political connoisseurs will recall that Willard Mitt Romney is also a Bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.
A very powerful Bishop.
Now on the face of it, serious LDS-ers might be inclined to eschew a womanizing, pro-choice, steroid-addled amateur demagogue in favor of a known rightical chic quality like State Senator McClintock-a stern conservative monolith if ever I heard one.
So therefore it is fair to speculate that Schwarzenegger still needs to shore itself up on the right as we roar into the final weekend of the recall campaign.
Allegedly the aging Austrian mesomorph is ahead in the polls but with 150+ names on the ballot every vote counts in a situation where the tiniest plurality could mean victory.
Thus every Mormon counts in the present paradigm.
Hence Romney's precipitous flight west.
And of course Mitt is probably glad to get out of the Commonwealth, to date his two main accomplishments have been forcing Billy Bulger into an early carefree retirement and appointing Dollar Bill Monahan, the wastrel of Belmont Mass and a notorious Mafia jobber to the Civil Service Commission.
No doubt Romney will tour the local Mormon meeting houses on Saturday-Sunday...in fact I'll speculate that there will be little media coverage of his visit if it all goes well.