Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Every liberal writer/talker/grouser I know of has his or her own toolkit of facts and quotes into which they can usually dip to produce just the right sledgehammer-and-nipple-clamp combination needed to blow almost any Modern Conservative argument to atoms.

And that’s the problem.

Take, for example, this little slice of neocon crazy from which Tommy Friedman has again built an entire column in which the primary theme (around which he will be Maypole dancing for at least a month) is in Capital Letters, just in case you missed how Very, Very Serious a thinker the Moustache of Understanding really is:

...
Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every Abu Ghraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.

The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.
...

Whether or not any particular paragraph in Friedman's wildly veering bibbledy happens to accidentally bang into any slow-moving reality as its plunges over the guardrail of credibility as it hurtles into the abyss of hack writing is overwhelmed by the sheer brain-freezing hilarity of Thomas "Suck. On. This." Friedman

trying for the umpteenth time to re-write recent American history by drawing on his usual arsenal: three crayons, hyperventilation and the fact that he has a permanent column in the New York Times.

After which, the next thing happens: people like the estimable Glenn Greenwald take Friedman apart, such as he does here by, in part, dipping into his toolkit and breaking out five-year-old articles like this:

UPDATE III: As Jonathan Schwarz documented back in 2004,

Because it is not merely that Friedman is wrong; it’s that he’s old-wrong. Tired-wrong. Washed-up-drudge wrong. And so Glenn has no need to do any original spadework on Friedman; he needs only re-re-re-re-link posts from 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006. And, one presumes, he will go right on re-linking then in 2010…2012…2015.

Second, consider this extended exercise in magical thinking by Fred Barnes of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

...
Why has the president's publicly expressed vision of a kinder, gentler Washington failed to materialize? I think Mr. Obama — while hardly the only person at fault — is chiefly responsible.

He might have spawned a different Washington, a less divided town with Democrats firmly in charge but Republicans actively involved. The bonus for Mr. Obama and Democrats would be higher popularity and better prospects in 2010 midterm elections. Instead, the president made three strategic mistakes—or, really, misreadings of the political landscape—and they've come back to haunt him and his party.

First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn't a mandate for a liberal revolution.
...

Only in the sumptuously appointed opium den of Murdoch-land could anyone refer to a center-right moderate like Barack Obama as the leader of a “liberal revolution” without falling down laughing.

Only in a madhouse could anyone dare to advance the argument that Obama “is chiefly responsible” for the mean-drunk, hog-slaughter behavior in D.C. even as the Party of God openly and proudly deploys every weapon it has from drooling mobs in public square, to slithering hypocrites in the pulpit, to roaring bigots on Hate Radio, to legislative button men on the floor of the United States Senate --

End the GOP's filibuster folly

A year ago, Barack Obama was elected to bring change to America. But his efforts to transform Washington are being stymied by one of the capital’s oldest of political traditions: the Senate filibuster. Ten months into Obama’s presidency, Democrats have passed just one major piece of legislation, February’s stimulus package.

But from judicial and executive branch nominations to health care, labor and financial reform, the very threat of the filibuster and other obstructionist techniques by Senate Republicans has stopped President Obama’s ambitious political agenda in its tracks.

Reforming the way Washington operates is hardly the sexiest of topics, but from a policy and even a political perspective, there are few more important issues on which Democrats should be focusing their energy. Quite simply, the filibuster has become the single tool that is undercutting everything Obama and the Democrats were elected to achieve.

Both parties have historically used the filibuster, but its overuse by modern Republicans stands at outrageous proportions. Not only has the number of filibusters increased dramatically — from never more than seven a year in the 1960s to a record 137 in the last Congress — so, too, has their banality.
…

-- in an explicit attempt to strangle the Obama Administration in its cradle by any means necessary.

Neither Tom Friedman nor Fred Barnes nor 100 others like them of various gauges and calibers have any business whatsoever participating in a national dialogue. About anything.

And yet they do, because this is no longer a "debate" in any sense of the word. It has become a ritual.

A ritual in which, no matter how many different ways Friedman and Barnes and all the rest find to slip and fall face-first into their own shit in print every week…they will rise again the week after, poop a few lines on nonsense on a sheet of white paper, see their words reprinted everywhere, collect a paycheck, and go home.

After which 1,000 writers -- myself included -- will once again go to their B-roll to prove, yet again, that they are wrong.

A sad, nightmare-tinged ritual which changes nothing.

But it is all we have.

Watching this exchange on “Face the Nation” --

HARRY SMITH: This new report from your committee that basically confirms Osama bin Laden was within the grasp of U.S. military at Tora Bora in December of the year of 9/11. Had he been killed or captured at that time, do you think we would still have U.S. forces in Afghanistan?

SENATOR CARL LEVIN: Maybe not. I would say there'd be a good chance we would not have forces or need to have forces there. But this has been kind of well known for some time that we took our eye off the ball. Instead of moving in on him at Tora Bora the previous administration decided to move its forces to Iraq. It was a mistake then and I think this report of the Foreign Relations Committee just sort of reinforces that.

-- I could only marvel that it took eight years for a formal, gummint body to come out and begin to tell the god damned truth about how spectacularly the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld oil cartel lied about and fucked up Afghanistan -- that Republican “token gesture” of a war at which Conservatives casually threw American blood and treasure like Mardi Gras beads on the way to the war they wanted, two countries away in oil-rich Iraq.

And with this comment from Levin:

--with the Afghan forces is not a shortage of American troops, it's a shortage of Afghan troops. The ratio in Helmand province, where we were, were five Americans for each Afghan soldier. It should be reversed.

I felt rage. Absolute rage.

Six years ago, Conservatives told us all in definitive, defiant, declarative sentences that the reason we could leave a placeholder force in Afghanistan and skip on over to big, juicy Iraq was because the war was over.


We'd Won! Period.

Even as Liberals like me were waving around dirty Commie foreign press coverage of incredibly ominous development like major Taliban Spring offensives, we were called disloyal.

Told that we hated America for even thinking such things or reading such trash

Told to sit down and shut the fuck up,

because George W. Bush's codpiece was an Invincible Christian Peace Shield that would keep us all safe from the scary brown foreigners forever.

We were right. About everything.

They were wrong -- tragically, catastrophically, completely wrong. About everything.

And yet they still are on the Inside. Sleek and prosperous.

While we still fight for scraps on the Outside.


On “Meet the Press”

A rich guy and his wife talked about giving.

And Reverend Rick Warren said “I’ve spoken at Davos many times…”

And then I turned the channel.

On “This Week” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) used his one appearance on national teevee to cock-punch Senator Lindsey Graham (R-John McCain’s underwear drawer) during his 355th such appearance.

Sanders: We’ve dumped the trillions these botched Republican wars have already cost on our kids and grand-kids. How about we start paying for them?

Graham: Cool. Let’s cut the budget somewhere to pay for bouncing the rubble around in Afghanistan for another ten years.

Sanders: So what do you wanna cut? Hospitals? Schools? Food for poor people? What?

Graham:


Word of advice, Bernie; you’ll never get on the Mouse Circus speed-dial if you keep slapping around

their favorite pool boys.

The Roundtable consisted of one liberal -- Paul Krugman -- and four members-in-good-standing of the Conservative/Beltway Insider Axis; Matthew Dowd, George Will, Cokie Roberts and Dan Senor, who, if you didn’t know (because they didn’t mention it) was, among other things, Deputy to Bush White House Spokesliar Scott McClellan

More about Senor:

While in Kuwait and Iraq, Senor was an adviser to both the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and later the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), for which he was Chief Spokesman and Senior Advisor.
...

In September 2004, the White House controversially employed Senor to coach and ghostwrite the speeches of Iraq's interim prime minister Iyad Allawi during his visit to the US, in an effort to enhance the Bush reelection campaign. At the same time, Senor appeared on cable news programs claiming that Allawi's positive remarks (vetted by Senor) supported the Bush Administration's rosy view of the Iraq occupation.

He currently draws a paycheck playing pundit for...wait for it...Fox News, and completed the Beltway Insider circle of life by marrying CNN on-air personality Campbell Brown in 2006.

Yesterday he was brought on camera to share his infinite wisdom on the subject of foreign policy, because who on Earth could possibly be more credible and qualified? Except maybe Dick Cheney's daughter?

On the proposal for a surtax to pay for the final acts of Dubya’s Mideast Follies:

Senor: Imagine if every time we had a foreign policy priority, we said we had to raise taxes?

Krugman: There’s a big difference between a war and a “foreign policy priority”. Wars are expensive. Iraq was supposed to be cheap, remember?

Ouch.

On climate change:

Will: The financial incentives for lying about climate change is so high that… (Leaves the dangling implication that the only people who believe in climate change do so because their mortgages depend on it.)

Krugman: For every 20 people in the scientific community who are credible climate change expert, there is one flake “skeptic” for hire by the oils companies, and yet they are given the same amount of time on teevee. It is much more comfortable to be an oil company whore than it is to tell the truth.

Will: No. The US Energy Department is bribing people to lie about carbon and stuff. Also jobs and, uh, the economy. Also my Victrola snapped a belt and the sassy kid from the Geek Squad says he can’t fix it. Damn you global warming liars!

Krugman: Shut up old man, or you’ll never make it out of this studio alive.

On the White House Party Crashers:

Dowd: This whole thing about becoming famous without doing anything. About gaining celebrity without inventing a vaccine. Or running the mile in under four minutes.

What about becoming famous for giving Republicans soothing political reacharounds?

Or for pimping racist, xenophobic trash to the desperately ignorant?


“Fox News Sunday” was what it always is: a platform for smirking, sociopath freaks like Bill Kristol to get away with saying things like

“Democrats cannot bring themselves to win a war.”

without anyone around to challenge him.

But Fox surpassed even its own standards for surrealism at the very end during this exchange in which all the Clowns at the Fox Circus share a giant hanky about the White House Party Crashers and awful awfulness of our celebrity-sick culture.

Chris Wallace: How could anyone do this? How could they?


Dana Perino: Why anyone would want to do this!?!

Nina Easton: Because it pays. She spent seven hours getting ready for this party. And they need the money.

Wallace: Do you think someone will actually PAY them for this?!?

Kristol (Perma-smirking): There are a lot of scam artists and con men out there.


Yes, that’s right: the degenerate sons of Mike Wallace and Irvin Kristol…
…sitting on the set of their fake news show…
…lavishly adorned with blonde Fox news bimbos…
…and collecting the paychecks for telling lies to stupid people...

Are pretending to be stunned that American culture has grown so sick that some fortune-seeking, second-generation, spoiled rich twat of a con artist…
…would use his contacts and blond arm-candy…
…to break the last, sacred seal -- the rules of Beltway party-going…
…to get his own teevee show.

The horror.

The horror.

Because Pitchforks and Torches

Have a Conservative Bias.



If you believe that a one-time, stunt-breach of White House security during a Democratic Administration, by attractive,


wealthy-looking celebrity dumpster-diving white people

looking to gin up interest a teevee deal using their own names (from the Chicago Tribune) --

State dinner crashers spur White House security probe
Couple had been trying to land spot on 'Real Housewives' TV show

By Jim Tankersley Tribune Newspapers

WASHINGTON - -- The Secret Service has launched a "comprehensive investigation" of its security measures after two aspiring reality-TV stars crashed President Barack Obama's state dinner at the White House this week.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who have been auditioning to appear on the Bravo reality show "Real Housewives of D.C.," managed to stroll into the dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and mingle with the power people of Washington even though they weren't on the invitation list.

An administration official said the gate-crashing incident was apparently a breakdown in Secret Service screening and not the work of the White House social office.

White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, asked by The Associated Press on Thursday whether personnel from her office were at the checkpoint, said, "We were not."

The White House had requested an investigation, but the Secret Service had already begun one after discovering the incident.
...

-- deserves to be treated as national security threat of the highest order (I, for one, certainly do) requiring 24/7 wall-to-wall media coverage for days on end...



...and you are not one of those unfortunate wretches whose long-term memory has been pulped to wingnut oatmeal from daily doses of Fox News rat poison, then you just have to ask yourself why it is that when it was a gay male hooker using an assumed name

who breached security day after day for two years -- who sat 50 feet from the President on any number of occasions

and to whom the Republican White House routinely leaked important stories -- that there was such an immediate and total media embargo on ANY mention of the story that virtually the only place it received any coverage whatsoever


was on an HB0 comedy show.

Walter Crunkite

My humble contribution to Blue Gal's call for an appropriately demure photoshoppic response to

Dame Katie Couric's

Witchy moves.

Darkblack and Tengrain help raise the level of discourse also too.

Because Even Presidents Need Help

Too bad there's not a "Getting out of someone else's fucked up war" hot-line.

Or one that gives detailed instructions on how to get rid of Wall Street parasites, chronic Lawrence Summersitis and 175 lbs. of unsightly Geithner.

Because sometimes even Presidents need to be able to get at some straight, unbiased verdad.

After all, who knows how much more successful President Bartlet's administration would have been had someone been around to warn them against embracing their disastrous

"soft on turkey" policies.

As God As My Witness

I thought turkeys could fly.

Well, this one has.

For five-and-a-half years and counting, through all kinds of weirdness thanks to you the readers (lurking and nekkid) who have stuck around through rain, sleet, snow, hail, Frist, DeLay, Pumas, Spartacus and the dark of night.

And for whom I am very thankful.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Prior to Paddy Chayefsky, most of us were considered to be two-headed hacks who worked around the clock... Paddy gave us stature.”

-- Rod Serling talking about writing for early teevee.

Early teevee started off remarkably similar to early blogging in lots of ways. Teevee was seen as the disreputable bastard child of other, older forms of mass media. Teevee couldn’t compete with the lavishness of cinema, the popularity of radio or the prestige of The Stage. Early on, it crawled around as a technology in search of a purpose, and a soapbox in search of a street corner and a crowd.

But it did find its voice. It did crack open doors through which a Chayefsky, Serling, Reginald Rose, Tad Mosel, and a handful of others could roar.

This is the crucial ingredient that social/political/media blogging either lacked from the beginning, or lost along the way: a collective sense of its own identity as an artistic enterprise that was strong enough to persist and sustain its best and brightest.

But before it had a chance achieve a critical artistic mass, grow three heads, wings and purple horns and become something altogether different, blogging streaked from Bohemian to rebellion to “show me your ROI” in the wink of an eye. There is plenty of policy-wonkery in bloggerdom. Plenty of number crunching and poll taking. Scads of political activism and fundraising. More than enough blast emails every damned day exhorting us to “Tell Joe Lieberman To Stop Being A Prick/Sign My Thingie Now!” Enough pick-up-and-push aggregators flinging headlines at us to last several lifetimes.

But for all of that, political/media blogging grows “stale, flat and unprofitable”, because while it groans under the weight of oceans of angry data, it still does not know how to Tell. A. Story.

Because it is too much “Survivor” and “Meet the Press”, and not enough "Twilight Zone".

Because while it has all the smarts in the world and a good, strong back, it lacks a soul.

A poet’s soul.

And lacking the poet’s soul, it does not understand that the greatest of all the unforgivable failures of the Mouse Circus is that it is bad fucking theater. Every week, the same troupe of aging, lackluster players mouthing the same, hackneyed, meaningless lines. Every week a Pro Wrestling puppet show where no side ever actually wins, no actors are considered to have been too fucking disgraced to lose their place at the trough, and any possibility of genuine emotion or real, passionate debate has been scripted out of existence.

The Mouse Circus is not about keeping you informed or engaged; the Mouse Circus is a meticulously crafted weekly mortality play designed to hammer home the futility of fighting the Beltway’s collective wisdom. Again and again and again it turns its cameras over to a clammy little clubhouse of serial liars, war criminals, the ghoulish offspring of and apologists for war criminals, and various other political and cultural misfits and miscreants to rub our face in the fact that normal rules don’t apply to the denizens of that world.

And it is their sophisticated comprehension of this reality at the level of theater – their artistic sensibility -- that marks the rare genius of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”.

And so when human Ipecac like Joe Lieberman show up for the 387th time on “Meet the Press” to wax pious about health care, David Gregory conspicuously avoids asking Holy Joe about he and his wife’s financially incestuous relationship with the insurance industry.

Because it would be rude to embarrass one’s fellow performer in that way.

And it would break the fourth wall.

Or something.

So instead we get…


Lieberman: We should cut the debt at any cost. Even of it destroys the country, let it be written in the Book of Judgment that we went broke spending money propping up banks and disastrous wars, and giving tax cuts to rich people, and not wasting on the smelly working classes to aren’t smart enough to figure out how to take legal bribes from insurance companies.

Gregory: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, should Timmy Geithner lose his job?

Hutchison: I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your question, so I’ll assume you just asked me about tax cuts. Yes, we should be cutting taxes!

Gregory: OK…but should Timmy Geithner lose his job?

Hutchison: This stimulus package is making Jebus mad! And just before his Birthday!

Gregory: Look, it’s a simple question. Timmy Geithner? Loses his job?

Hutchison: This stimulus package is wrong. This health care bill is wrong. Also we need to cut some more motherfucking taxes, bitches!

Lieberman: May I just add that we need to replicate everything we did in Iraq over in Afghanistan.

driftglass: You mean bribing people to stop killing us? Well, it worked on Wall Street…

Hutchison: Yadda yadda yadda…bringing enemy combatants to Murrica…giving terrorists the rights of Americans…every freedom loving country… yadda yadda export terrorism…making us less safe…. yadda yadda..something about the giant flag pole up my ass.

Over on “Fox News Sunday” Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) was saddened by the arrogance of trying to fix the whole system instead of doing little, tiny, itsy-bitsy edge-nibbling which is all the suckweeds in the GOP are capable of doing. So long as the edge-nibbling is confined bashing trial lawyers. And cutting taxes. And screwing working people. So show Lamar a bill that figures out a way to use working people to kill trial lawyers and convert their remains into tax cuts…and he’s all for it.

Shorter Alexander: If your boat has five gaping holes in it, you should only plug one of them. Preferably with a trial lawyer.

Kit “Foghorn Leghorn” Bond (R-CSA) was wild about the dangers of excessive gummint control. And evil gummint takeovers. He warned that the “2,000 page bill is full of “Must” and “Shall”…”

Bad, scary words indeed. Word you certainly wouldn’t want the Evil Gummint throwing around.

Even though that Gummint was elected by the people, giving that Gummint something called “the consent of the governed”.

Still, “Must” and “Shall” are words that real patriots would never use to lard up Important Gummint Legal Thingies. like, say, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Ok, well, what’s one little “Shall” between friends? It's moral Mulligan; like having a gay fling while you were in college and drunk. And isn't the First Amendment sort of a practice amendment anyway? Not like the Almighty Second Amendment

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well, OK, but at there are Guns in there, and Guns trump bad, scary words every time. Like when we used to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shotgun in school.

Moving on.

The Third Amendment

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be…

Hol it right there. Everyone knows this troop-hating amendment was a bone that we Southron boys had to throw to the Liberal Yankees to get Negroes counted as 3/5th of a person.

The Fourth:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue,

Uh…I’m pretty sure the Patriot Act finally fixed this one.

The Fifth

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case...

WTF?

The Sixth

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law...

(Bond flips hurriedly through the Bill of Rights, then though the Constitution.)

Jesus, Mary and Reagan!

(Squirts a quart of Purell onto his puerile little paws)

It’s all over this thing like a diaper rash on Vitter’s sweet little ass!


Over on “This Week” two Name Brand Republicans -- Tom Coburn and and Marsha Blackburn – and one Off Brand Republican-lite -- Ben Nelson -- took turns drowning out the only real Democrat and Health Care reform proponent on the show -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz – by yelling “Big Gummint Is Comin’ To Get You!” in their Outside Voices.

Nelson: I don’t want a big, Gummint-run public option that would threaten the profits of the insurance companies that own my balls.

Coburn: Everything run by the Gummint is a failure. Everything the Gummint does sucks. All Gummint health programs are disasters.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Medicare.

Coburn: No! Medicare sucks! Everything the Gummint has ever done or will ever do sucks!

Lastly, Stephanopoulos drop in a mention that Tom “Hordes of Teenage Lesbians are Gaying Up Oklahoma’s Proudly Hetero High School Bathrooms” Coburn has been accused of acted as consigliore/bag-man for has pal and “C Street” Alpha-and-Omega House bunk-mate Senator John Ensign in the scheme to pay hush money to Ensign’s staffer and friend – Doug Hampton -- whose wife Ensign was fucking.

Needless to say, everyone involved in this Republican glue-sniffer summer stock version of “Double Indemnity” is a Family Values Christian Conservative Republican

American Conservatives: Putting the “MONY in “Sanctimony” for the last 40 years.

Later, the daughter of War Criminal and Profiteer Dick Cheney smugly lectured everyone about how we should be conducting ourselves in Afghanistan. But not to worry; no one was rude enough to mention – even tangentially -- her grotesque, blood-soaked hypocrisy on-camera.

On ”The Chris Matthews Show”, Tweety wanted to know how Obama gets “independents” back? As usual, all quotes are not as they literally were, but as they should have been...

Joe Klein: The problem is, “independents” are friggin morons. They think a “public option” means a gummint bureaucrat shooting grandma and using her body to block access to their doctor.

Matthews: “Gummint”. Mmmm. Independents sure don’t like that word.

Klein: “Independents” are like the Taliban. There are 3,4,5 different groups in there. One of them are the “Ron Paul” independents, who want to see every form of gummint larger than rural high school student councils burned to the ground.

Matthews: Jobs? Independent voters blame Obama for everything and give him credit for nothing.

Anne Kornblut (who will be seen 60 minutes later on FoxNews Sunday, because there are only 11 pundits in the whole wide world): “Job summit” is one step up from “task force”.

And a hearty laugh was had by all.

Klein: There is a really strong populist tide against “bigness”.

"Bigness" apparently being defined here as any number that you need to take your socks off to count to.

David Ignatius: Voters want results. The want performance

Then…Optics!

Noron: Presidents never get anything done on foreign trips. The only thing that matters are the pretty, pretty pictures.

Matthews: Pictures are remembered more than words.

Shorter Matthews: "Whales, Mr. Melville? No one is interested in whales."

Sadly, Tweety and the rest of them may be right. Pretty pictures matter more than words. Slogans beat ideas, bumper stickers beat slogans, and stupid is just better for business because a nation of yahoos are easier to con into electing demagogues and cutting their own economic throats than a nation of critical thinkers.

This is fatal to freedom and ruin for the middle class, but the rich and the powerful always hated those institutions anyway.

Maybe the important battles were lost long ago. Maybe we’re fooling ourselves, wagging our little quills and pixels in the face of Titans, fighting at the margins over scraps.

But never doubt that there was a moment in time when an infant medium at least pretended to be as interested in art-as-social-commentary as it was in attracting traffic and ad revenue.

When serious writers made a living doing their work.

When serious subjects were treated seriously,

When "writing something you really believe in" and defending it on that basis was not treated as naive, and being openly smart on teevee was not treated like public masturbation.

When artists like Rod Serling were willing to use the very last episode of Playhouse 90 that was ever committed to film ("In The Presence of Mine Enemies” starring a young Robert Redford playing “Sergeant Lott” with Aryan master-race perfection) to tell America in the starkest terms possible about how evil men find a "morality in hatred":

Captain Richter: Nations can feed on it. They can find their strength in it. They’re nurtured by it, Lott. ... But there must be an object of hatred. Suddenly, in front of us, out steps a Jew. He can be all things to all men: money-lender, Communist, world banker, revolutionist, an unassimilated foreigner in our midst. And so we hate him. And in the process, we're unified. ... The Jews dies so that we can live. That is morality.

When people smoked on-camera, and a member of the Wallace family committed acts of journalism on the air every week in a way that didn't shame his family.

Imagine if you will…


(h/t Phil Rosenthal)

I Can No Longer Sit Back And Allow

Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious Yuletidey fluids.

Begun, this War on Christmas has.

From the LA Times:

Gap's Christmas cheer makes a boycott backfire
The American Family Assn. attacked Gap for not using the word 'Christmas' in its advertising -- but in fact it does, and in a big way too.

The Mississippi-based American Family Assn. last week issued a fatwa against Gap Inc. -- the retailing giant whose brands include Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic -- calling for a "two-month boycott over the company's failure to use the word 'Christmas' in its advertising to Christmas shoppers."

The War on Christmas season has officially begun.

Gap "does not use the word 'Christmas' to avoid offending those who don't embrace its meaning," writes Buddy Smith, executive assistant to the president of the AFA, on the organization's website. "Christmas has historically been very good for commerce. But now Gap wants the commerce but no Christmas."

"I interpret Gap's decision as a warning sign to Christians to get out there and tell people about Jesus Christ," writes Smith.

...
But here's the real question: Why attack Gap for not using the word "Christmas" in its advertising when in fact it does, and in a big way too?

Were I a speculating sort of person, I would speculate that it's because Donald Wildmon, his son Timmy, and the rest of the vicious inbred shit-kicking colporteurs at the American Family Association find perverting the teachings of Christ in order to extort nuisance, go-away money from corporations and terrorize contributions out of credulous hillbillies easier than, y'know, honest work.

But that would be mean.

And Mithras Claus doesn't leave libidinous liberal lasses and 20-year-old scotch under the Solstice trees of mean bloggers.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?


Dear Associated Press,

Holy Joe Lieberman is a man of many parts.

He is a sleazebag, a warmongering Neocon, a sanctimonious backstabber, "Armageddon" John Hagee's

special Zionist Reacharound Buddy

a serial betrayer of the leaders

of the Democratic Party

...and many other things which could not be adequately described given the family nature of your publication.

One thing he emphatically is not is a "Senate Democrat".

Perhaps as they clean out their desks and make their way out the door, one of your many hundreds of newly laid-off reporters could pass along to you that portion of their notes which detail the recent political history of Joesph I. Lieberman wherein he:

1. Lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut to an actual Democrat.
2. Formed his own Lieberman Uber Alles Party (Motto: A Smarmy Of One)
3. Ran against the candidate of the Democratic Party and,
4. With massive assistance from a cartel of banks, insurance companies, credit card companies and Republicans who now collectively own his quisling ass, managed to win back his former Senate seat.

Which means, as I said, despite the fact that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama both still inexplicably seem to want to have his babies, Joesph I. Lieberman is not a fucking Senate Democrat, and is most certainly -- as your strange photographic juxtaposition suggests -- not THE fucking Senate Democrat.

I hope this clears thing up.

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

Greg Stillson's Glenn Beck's

Date With Destiny

From the NYT:

Glenn Beck Stakes Out a More Activist Role in Politics
By BRIAN STELTER

Glenn Beck, the popular and outspoken Fox News host, says he wants to go beyond broadcasting his opinions and start rallying his political base — formerly known as his audience — to take action.

To do so, Mr. Beck is styling himself as a political organizer. In an interview, he said he would promote voter registration drives and sponsor a series of seven conventions across the country featuring what he described as libertarian speakers.

On Saturday he held a festive campaign-style rally in The Villages in Florida, north of Orlando, in which he promoted his recently released book, “Arguing With Idiots,” and announced another book to come next August filled with right-leaning policy proposals gathered from the conventions.
...

In describing the conventions, he told the crowd on Saturday: “You’re going to learn about finance. You’re going to learn about community organizing. You’re going to learn everything we need to know if you want to be a politician.”

His staff would not say whether particular candidates for office in the 2010 midterm elections would be invited to speak at the conventions or the August rally.

As for the question of Mr. Beck’s intentions, “He might just be trying to sell books, but there are much simpler ways to sell books,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, a vice president at Media Matters, the liberal media monitoring group. He said Mr. Beck sounded more like a presidential candidate than a pundit.

Catch an average, semi-literate "Conservative" Beck fan out in the cold light, brandish one or ten or a hundred of Beck's million racist, liquidationist, of just plain fucking de-ranged public remarks in their face and they'll smirk and shrug and swear on the life of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. that Beck ir harmless. That he's just an "entertainer".

That it's all just fun and games.

Of course back home, jerking off under an Army blanket to a rerun of their favorite Beckian rant

while they whimper "Mister Preeeeesident" into their commemorative "Fair and Balanced" needlepoint throw pillow, it's quite a different story.

A very old and very ugly story.

Glenn Beck is as pure a product of News Corp as Big Bird or Elmo is a product of The Jim Henson Company; Rupert Murdoch's own fascist stalking horse Lil' Lonesome Rhodes

Crying Baby Doll.

One of Hate Media's gibbering, raging band of veal crate-raised rough beasts.

Slouching relentlessly towards Washington and Destiny.

Tommy Can You Hear Me?

Can you feel me near you?

The Moustache of Understanding -- he who has been profoundly wrong about everything from the nature of the free market (from Thom Hartmann) ...

...
Had South Korea adopted the "free trade" policies espoused by [Thomas] Friedman and The New York Times, it would still be exporting fish and still have a per-capita income like Kenya's.

Another great example of this is Toyota's success with their luxury car the Lexus. Toyota has been touted by free traders as a clear example of why free trade works, mostly because of the widely cited example outlined in Thomas Freidman's book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.

Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.

... to foreign policy, and so spectacularly and publicly wrong about Iraq and the Bush Administration that blogger Atrios named the infamous "Friedman Unit" after Tommy-boy (From the dkosopedia)...

"The term is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006, in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of journalist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the time period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making these six-month predictions since November 2003.)

-- was back again.

Not that he'd ever been away, of course -- The 'Stache That Wouldn't Die

is the billionaire, Neocon centrist nose-tackle of the Fightin' Villagers journalism All Star team -- but he was on my teevee again for reasons that no one in the American media has the nerve to come right out and admit.

He had brought his moth-chewed, maudlin, context-free brand of wide-eyed, breathless know-nothing reportage on matters which would already be obvious to the averagely bright eleven-year-old back to the Cholly Rose show.

Which, believe it or not, marked a staggering 66th appearance

for Captain Obvious on ol' Cholly Rose's Soft Ballin' Dance Party.

And he was pushin' a new book.

Not a new-new book, mind you.

An old book, (I think it might have been called "Rot, Scat and Shrouded", but I couldn't clearly make it out over the sound of me cursing God) but Tommy Friedman wants you to know that he has rewritten the entire front end. The first three chapters? Redone! Now with 35% more cliches, maudlin tripe and saccharine homilies apparently gleaned from reading Bazooka Joe comics and other, smarter people...and just in time for Christmas!

So Joy to the World.

One assumes that if the quality-arc of his writing continues along the same trajectory, his next book will consist of a Kindle-downloadable series of McDonald's cash register-type icons which, when pushed, will extrude little poo-ribbons of Friedmanistic wisdom.

You'll be able to buy it at the convenient, regional Hypermall that his wife's real estate company will have helpfully erected on the rubble of your local mom-and-pop story, and then your real fun times can begin. After that you'll be able string your oven-fresh Friedmanistism together into epigrammatic one-act Noh playlets if you wish. Or play 'em like guitar chords ("My baby done left me/'cause my world's too flat/at least that's what she heard/from some billionaire twat"). Or mix and sample them for the blissed out masses writhing on the dance floor at the nation's now-abandoned Hypermalls in the frenzied, all-night Moustache Raves that are surely in our future.

The only limit will be your imagination, but sadly that's all still in the happy, sparkly Tomorrow.

Here and now you still have to made do getting your Fried Green Conflatos the same place as the rest of us: on the editorial page of the New York Times, at the Mouse Circus, in every book story in Christendom, and of course on The Cholly Rose show, where Captain Obvious may have finally given up wearing his signature creepy, all-black Vietcong/Star Trek villain unitard

but where he is still to be found, as in the days of old, hoppin' and poppin' and squiginfiying like somebody had shoved a particularly itchy baby olive tree up his ass.

One of the first thing Friedman wanted us to know is he's thinking about stuff.

Thinking hard.

One of the next things Friedman wanted us to know during this 66th appearance on the Cholly Rose Show was that:

"Afghanistan is like adopting a special needs child."

And no, I am not kidding.

This is when the world started going a peculiar shade of dove-gray and I started losing track of time, so I cannot be specific about the exact moment, but at some point after that Friedman went on to say that he didn't "want the moonshot of my generation to be trying to fix the most dysfunctional Muslim country in the world." Forgetting, somehow, that the moonshot of Thomas Friedman's generation...was the fucking moonshot.

Later, as I began to lose consciousness from my brain burrowing out of my skull to escape the freakish horror unfolding before me, I could swear I heard Friedman chirp out the phrase, "Up yer nose with a rubber hose!", in response to some issue over which non-Thomas Friedman Americans are currently fighting and dying far away from home.

As I passed out, it occurred to me that Cholly Rose is a pretty tall guy.

Plenty tall enough to kick Friedman's nads all the way up into his tummy, even from across his interview table.

And yet for some reason he didn't.

Instead he made a series of complicated clicks and hand gestures that I believe translates from Bohemian Grovian into:

"Please come back on my show soon for a 67th appearance to insult my viewer's intelligence. Perhaps next time you could spend an hour reading us the labels on whatever happens to be in your underwear drawer?"

The Republican Plan

For America's Future

For you.

For your children.

For your children's children.

Forever.

"Do you want to have a good time?"

...said a voice from a doorway.

"As far as I can tell," said Ford,
"I'm having one. Thanks."

"Are you rich?" said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture.
"Do I look rich?" he said.

"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe you'll get rich.
I have a very special service for rich people ..."

"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued
but careful. "And what's that?"

"I tell them it's OK to be rich."

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them,
but it was only a bass player getting shot
for playing the wrong riff three times in a row,
and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.

"You what?" he said.

The girl laughed and stepped forward a little
out of the shadow.
She was tall, and had that kind of
self-possessed shyness which is a great trick
if you can do it.

"It's my big number," she said.
"I have a Master's degree in Social Economics
and can be very convincing.
People love it..."

From "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish", by the late Douglas Adams

Going Vague

Like Neddy Merrill (the protagonist of John Cheever's surrealistic story "The Swimmer") paddling boozily though the chain of public and private pools that run the length of his affluent suburban neighborhood, oblivious to the passage of years, tragedies and the growing hostility of his surroundings as he moves inexorably towards the ruins of his abandoned home...the bizarrely ubiquitous David Fucking Brooks continues to back-stroke his way across the American media pitching the preposterous theory that "Palin Wing" of the GOP is just a loud, angry, goofy bunch of cranks way out on fringe of the his Party.

A "joke".

Other than Bobo's vague assertions of the existence of a secret cult of "serious people" who meet "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P." there is no evidence whatsoever to support his bizarre hypothesis.

On the other hand, there is enough documentary evidence covering the last the 40 years of ever-more-aggressively crazy, bigoted, Orwellian tactics employed by the Republican Party in rich and sickening detail to fill a big-city library. Tactics which were applied with all the meticulous precision and care of a black market agricultural biologist trying to up the throw-weight of the THC of his lab-grown weed.

It took decades, but the Party of God has finally produced it's perfect wingnut warrior caste; dog-loyal, allergic to reason and programmed to hate whoever their leaders tag as the enemy this week. They are the ones who spent eight years screaming for Clinton's blood. They are the ones who made George W. Bush an emperor, applauded like trained seals as he crippled their nation, and smirked as his cronies looted it. They are the ones who make Glenn Beck rich, Rush Limbaugh powerful and Michele Bachmann famous. They are the ones who would rather see their country burned to the ground rather than see the Socialist Kenyan Usurper succeed.

And yet, week after week, year after year, Bobo swims from spotlight to spotlight across the blighted media landscape of a country his ideology helped to mutilate...speaking gauzily of a political Party that does not exist, economic True Crime fiction --

"The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true."

-- that somehow always manages to omit the name of Supply Side perpetrator of the crime (hint: it rhymes with Fonald Fagan), and fantasies of conservative cultural movements that never were.

And for telling these malignant fairy tales he is paid like a pasha.

And that, my friends, is the real joke.

An Affair to Dismember

(Click pic for larger)

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...” edition.

If your idea of eternal damnation is watching the watching the same, lame junior varsity debating team banging the same, stupid arguments together forever...then welcome to Hell.

The usually non-vomit-inducing “Face the Nation” was the worst of the lot yesterday, with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich) building his Party's rhetorical fortress on the following foundation:

"We're going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11. We're now going to rip that wound wide open, and it's going to stay open for, what - two, three, four years, as we go through the circus of a trial in New York City?"

Hoekstra's concern-troll distress over "going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11" would seem a lot less, oh, liar-ish had the political party to which he proudly belongs not spent virtually every fucking day of the last eight years making an entire multi-level marketing industry out of ruthlessly mining the "wound" of 9/11; using every propaganda tool in Karl Rove's toolbox to flay and scald and salt the "wound" from the worst national security failure in America history into a bottomless cornucopia of politically exploitable rage and fear.

A campaign of terror which reached a peak of depravity at the 2004 Republican National Fear-Fest

which the GOP held in heart of New York City...

...and their Fear-Fest Redux in 2008, which was carefully scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 and reaching its depraved apotheosis with in a three-minute 9/11 "snuff film" which Keith Olbermann eloquently deconstructs here.



Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy effortlessly demolished the idiocy (video available at C&L here) --

"I think that Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is right; I think the president is right in holding the trials of these murderers in New York City. What we're saying to the world is, the United States acts out of strength, not out of fear.
...

I was a former prosecutor. I'd like to just see them prosecuted, in the same way which we prosecuted Timothy McVeigh. We're not afraid to do that. We're the most powerful nation on Earth. We have a judicial system that is the envy of the world. Let's show the world that we can use that power."

-- but I doubt it changed any minds.

Because the pants-pissing cowards of the Party of God just love America too darn much to have any faith in its most sacred institutions or values.


On “Meet the Press”

David Gregory got Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promise to not sock Sarah Palin in the cake-hole if they ever meet, but she also said she already has more to read than she “can say grace over” and so probably won’t read her book.

Later, serial-liar Newt Gingrich slithered back onto teevee by hiding behind school children, paired with Al Sharpton, who -- having recently shown up at the Mouse Circus as “the liberal” more than mere chance can explain -- is clearly being fitted for the “Jesse Jackson” black teevee preacher jacket.

They were joined by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and many important, impassioned sentences were uttered by the Synergy Troika -- sentences with which I completely agree.

So good on them.

However there were a couple of subjects which were not broached.

Such as the fact that Arne Duncan’s signature program -- Chicago Renaissance 2010 -- is widely seen here as a thinly veiled effort at union-busting.

CORE Charges Daley/Board of Education with Union-Busting

Calls for Overturn of the 1995 Amendatory Act and an End to Mayoral Control

CHICAGO – Quietly, with little public debate, on November 18, 2009, the Chicago Board of Education could authorize 8,130 additional charter seats, increasing charters’ current Chicago share of Chicago’s non-private schools from 7.9% to 9.8% according to Chicago Public Schools data compiled by CORE researchers. CPS proposes to open nine new charter schools in 2010 and 2011 and convert seven contract schools into charters.

Since the onset of Renaissance 2010 in 2004, Chicago Teacher Union membership has shrunk by approximately 6,000 members.

“Labor law doesn’t allow a company to close down a union plant and open up a non-union one across the street, but that’s exactly what Chicago Public Schools has done for the last six years without pause,” said Jackson Potter, CPS teacher at Little Village-Lawndale High School and CORE co-chair.

Karen Lewis, CPS teacher at King College Prep and co-chair of CORE stated that, “It is increasingly clear from mountains of research that Renaissance 2010 schools generally do not offer a better education than traditional neighborhood schools. So today we have to identify the real reason behind school reform in this city — union busting.”
...

And that a damning, June 2009 study of Arne Duncan's Chicago Public School System by the well-respected Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago (“Still Left Behind” – PDF link here) was peppered with observations like this:

"The reality is that most of Chicago s students are still left far behind. Real student performance appears to have gone up a little in Chicago elementary schools during the past few years and even those gains then dissipate in high school."

And this;

The performance of Chicago’s high schools is abysmal – with about half the students dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat over the past several years.
...

To be clear, I have no doubt that creating the next generation of competent, educated citizens is the issue on which the long term viability of the United States will be decided: if we get that right, almost everything else falls into place; if we blow it, we’re doomed.

That being said, I have to ask, in the service of that noble goal, is a skeevy, spotlight-obsessed preacher, a power-obsessed megalomaniac/lobbyist and a Secretary of Education with a very problematic resume being interviewed by a Muppet really the best we can do?


On The Rudy Giuliani Show “Fox News Sunday”

Ghouliani authoritatively

informed the Pig People that...

...delay on Afghanistan is being done because of politics.

...terrorist trials in New York are being done to please Obama’s foreign masters.

...the motives behind the shootings at Fort Hood are cut and dried, but we’re not allowed to call it the “war on terrorism” anymore.

Chris Wallace muses that "there are obvious downsides to having a trial" and then asks, "So what’s the upside?"

Pause for a moment to consider that the chief anchor of one of Americas most widely watched "news" network doesn’t understand the “upside” of democracy. Can't summon to mind the “upside” of due process.

Wallace: What if one of these guys gets off? It could happen...

For wingnuts, the world is always the second reel of "Dirty Harry".


Later, the poison fruit of Dick Cheney's loins bats her massive fake eyelashes and coyly deflects a question about the Wasilla Grifter's qualification to be President by opining that the hardest job a President Sarah Palin would have would be undoing all of the damage done by the Kenyan Usurper.

Juan Williams makes his little, whining, "house liberal" noises and collects his paycheck, after which everyone jerks off in horror that the President of the United States' gesture of respect towards the Emperor of Japan.

Well, take heart, wingnuts; it was only a first date.

As opposed to, say,


an arranged marriage.



"The Rudy Show" continued on “This Week” , followed by a panel discussion featuring George Will, Bob Woodward, Gwen Ifill, David Corn, and of course,

David Fucking Brooks.

DFB on Sarah Palin:

"The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host"

Corn: She’s a joke…and she may destroy the Republican Party. There is this huge gap between the GOP base -- who love of the Wasilla Grifter -- and not-crazy-Americans, who want her off the fucking stage already.

Will: If conservatives of a sort are looking for a populist they have Mike Huckabee.

DFB: Awesome populism is OK. Reagan? Awesome! Small town luvin'? Awesome! Hay-scented homoerotic Conservative man-crushes and certain, ooey-gooey editorial-page mash notes throbbingly inspired therefrom? Mentos Super Awesome! But hostility towards intellectualism in general? Not awesome at all.

OK, quick history lesson.

Nixon was a monster.

Republicans elected him twice.

Reagan was a radical who was good on camera. He and his people set off bombs inside the American economy that have been blowing the pylons out from under our country for a generation. He traded weapons to terrorists. Outsourced the conduct of a blatantly illegal, secret war to a traitor/convicted felon/FoxNews regular named Ollie North.

Republicans elected him twice.

George W. Bush was vicious, dimwitted moral imbecile whose contempt for the Constitution made Nixon look like Thurgood Marshall, and who destroyed everything he touched and visited more long-term catastrophe on this country during any one year of his reign than Reagan managed in eight.

Republicans elected him twice.

All of this was made possible because the GOP has spent the last 40 years aggressively recruiting people who think these

were the good old days.

Angry, fearful bigots who have been feeding off of the rancid Confederate leftovers of white entitlement, victimhood and Bible-sanctioned hatred of "big gummint" ever since Lincoln took their slaves away.

The Pig People have been the margin of Republican victory since 1968. They have been growing stronger and more vocal every year; seizing more power every year; destroying the Party of Lincoln a little more every year; driving more non-crazy Conservatives screaming into the streets every year.

Now the Pig People have their own anti-Christian religion, and Sarah Palin is their Madonna.

They have their own anti-factual "News", and Sarah Palin is their Talk-Show-Host-in-Chief.

They have their own anti-literate publishing houses, and Sarah Palin is their own, private Bestselling Author.

They have their own anti-intellectual ideology, and Sarah Palin is their Philosopher Queen.

And they have their own anti-American political Party, and Sarah Palin is its heir presumptive.

As David Fucking Brooks fucking well knows, is was his party and his movement who -- despite ample warning that what they were doing would lead to disaster -- spent the last 40 years methodically weaponizing the hatred and fear of the Pig People.

So now that it has all gone to shit, pardon me for laughing as Bobo continues to frantically pretend that the Mutant Atomic Monsters his Party's despicable Southern Strategy unleashed and that are stomping the Party of Lincoln to rubble right before his eyes

are really just a joke.

Finally, on ”The Chris Matthews Show”, Peggy Noonan tanks up her Punditmobile on high-test rocket fuel and boldly predicts that if Barack Obama succeeds in Afghanistan…he’ll be praised.

And if not, then he won't.


And having surveyed the Mouse Circus landscape once again, I can only look over the ramparts of the castle the the coming darkness, sip a couple of fingers of single malt and warm myself with the knowledge that the men who froze at Valley Forge did so blissful ignorant of the fact that they were sacrificing all they had for a future of Noonans, Bobos, Ghoulianis, Sharptons, Gingrichs and Fox News.


UPDATE: Welcome Daily Kos visitors.

Sometimes I Wonder

If I should mention
That Mayans marked time
Using hexidecimal notation?

Countdown to Palin "Interviews" Begins

They're out to eats us, but they can make your celebrity dreams come true.

So which side are you on?

Tom Waits Friday Will Not Be Denied

Today a Very Large bill that I was not expecting crashed into my life. And upon sitting down to catch my breathe, panic a little and read it in detail, I discovered that the castle feline had decided (for her own, inscrutable reasons) that today was the day she would take random revenge on my favorite spot on the couch, and that I was now seated in my suit and tie in a little puddle of cat pee.

And after a moment of pure, scalding, self-pitying rage, I abruptly found I could only smile and tip my hat with great respect and admiration to the Great Comic in the Sky.

Because that, ladies 'n gemmin, is low humor of the very highest order.

All your cryin don't do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood
Come on up to the house...

Facebook Confessions

In which I apologize to all those nice people I may have inadvertently pissed off.

There are a lot of things that warp the orbits of our lives that we never got to voted on.

For example, I don’t remember ever holding a national election on the question of whether or not we should massively de-industrialize the United States, shutter our factories, ship millions of middle-class jobs overseas, eviscerate whole regions of the country, turn the American economy into a feudal state and the American workforce into WalMart greeters...all to radically enrich a fraction of one percent of the population.

But that’s what we did.

We also never held a referendum on whether or not an adult American citizen has to have a credit card; we just made it inconvenient-to-the-point-of-impossible for adult American citizens to function without them. I know. I tried. If you ever wanted to be treated like a Unibomber suspect, try telling the company you work for that you can’t just charge your trip to Albuquerque and they can reimburse you later because you don’t have a credit card.

We never voted to make cellphones mandatory. Like credit cards, they are a theoretically fine idea that has become a pestilence in practice, turning us into a nation of Pavlovian droolers for whom the siren's song of the ringtone trumps everything else.

Virtually every oblivious asswipe who nearly (or actually) rammed me on Lake Shore Drive, or tried to kill me in a crosswalk, was yap-yap-yapping away. Every trivial morning-meeting-muffin-misdelivery gets escalated into a frenzied round of phone-and-Blackberry tag. Every tinpot dictator boss with a sense of absolute entitlement to your time whenever and wherever the mood strikes them has turned a benevolent technology into a leash that stretches all the way around the world, and a siphon to steal away the precious days of your life.

And if you want to be looked at like a sex offender making your court-mandated neighborhood notification of your arrival in Mayberry, try telling that boss, "No, I do not have a cell phone and have no plans to get one just so you can interrupt my personal life when you can’t find the 'Any' key on your girlfriend’s computer."

Which brings me to Facebook.

Some months ago a certain bastid fellow blogger (who virtually never posts anymore, which I realize now sadly covers about 4/5 of all the bloggers I have ever met) sent me an innocent-seeming email.

See, there were these pictures…

But they were on his Facebook page…

So, being a credulous idjit, I clicked on the link provided, which jumped me to a friendly screen, which informed me that I had to sign up with Facebook in order to see the pictures which, at this point, I’m thinking better be really spectacular.

And so, discovering that someone out there had already taken the appellation “driftglass”, I chose another variation of my nom-du-blog and waded in up to my ankles, intending only to flip through a few photographs this pal of mine wanted to share with me.


11 minutes later…and I have 53 “friend” requests.

WTF?

Suddenly I have a home page. or at least I think I do. I have a “wall”. Or maybe I am part of a wall. Or I'm another brick in the wall.

I discover that the someone who took the appellation “driftglass” has been uploading my posts to Facebook wholesale. Trying to be helpful? I haven’t a clue.

I start getting little bursts of traffic from various islands far out in the Great Facebook Ocean.

Inquiries.

Invitations.

As a happily private person who can barely keep up with his email, this is one of my favorite, little nightmares come true: finding myself down a Kafka-scented rabbit hole where “friend” is a verb and I am suddenly a member of a club aggressively geared towards share-share-sharing pictures and poems and personal details; a club I never had any intention of joining, with mores, widgets, protocols, norms, duties, obligations I never asked for, have any desire to learn, or was even dimly aware existed.

I realize that millions of people feast on Facebook (and then clean the table with a crumb sweeper called Twitter) and jolly good for them, and if my inattention to the medium into which I was softly press-ganged has caused anyone insult, I apologize. Believe me, I always try to make sure that my insults are clear, direct and full-frontal.

So if anyone is interested what I have to say on any given day, come to the blog: it’s one mouse-click away. If you want to sound off, that’s why I leave comments open, and why I sometimes reply, although y’all do just fine without me. If you want to drop me a note, I have email, and am also on Twitter (although I haven’t used it weeks, can’t belch in fewer than 140 characters, and in my most narcissistic fever dreams could not imagine that anyone would give a titmouse’s taint what I’m planning to have for dinner, or how many step there are between me an the local “el” station.)

But no Facebook: for now, the conveniences I already use are surfeit enough for me.