According to the collective wisdom of the Wise Men of the Mouse Circus, it turns out, Barack Obama will have to -- just have to! -- move to The Center, both substantively and symbolically, if he wants to get re-elected.
Shocking, I know.
He'll have to -- just have to! -- lower the top marginal tax rates.
He'll have to -- just have to! -- lower corporate taxes.
Then: Moar!Palin!
Because she's so Sincere!
Sure, she's also a vicious and utterly unqualified grifter, but she's so Real!
And we point cameras at her obsessively because you can never spend too much of America's mainstream political bandwidth huffing stupid straight from the bag.
The only side-show at the Mouse Circus that was even slightly out of the sad, flaccid norm on Sunday was the Very Special Episode of the "Real Chickenhawks of the American Raj" on Fareed Zakaria's GPS.
Fareed put the perennially wrong bad-joke of a Neoconservative war-pimp-with-the-Sargent Rock-cartoon-name -- Max Boot -- in front of a camera and asked him his opinion about Afghanistan, instead of, say, why he continues to have a job anywhere in the Western Hemisphere (from Atrios in 2005)
Yglesias catches Max Boot being full of shit. But, the question is not why is Max Boot full of shit, but why the LA Times opinion editor (cough kinsley cough) puts it in print?after a career spent trafficking in this kind of bullshit:
"...Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."Of course the sad truth is that is Fareed almost certainly knows the answer to that question: that bottom-feeders like Boot have unsinkable media careers precisely because they traffic in this kind of imperial war-porn filth.
4 comments:
Here's a good quote to tuck away for a polemic some time - Gibbon's description of Byzantine teabaggers, just as Constantinople (i.e. the last remnant of the 'roman' empire) was about to be overrun by French and Venician 'crusaders' ('holy sepulchre holy schmepulcre... pickings are richer here'):
"All authority and wisdom were overborne by the impetuous multitude, who mistook their rage for valour, their numbers for strength, and their fanaticism for the support and inspiration of Heaven."
6th (final) volume, The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, Edward Gibbon, about 1783, describing about 1300. (plus ca change...)
To hasten the fall of empire there is a requisite sentiment among the ruling and privileged classes that the peasants are revolting, disgusting, unworthy... well before they actually rise up.
The lag between the prevailing attitude and the inevitable fall, in EVERY case, could have been used to prevent or correct the defect in thinking. Instead, inexorably, it buttressed privilege and ignored the simple arithmetic.
Keeping dissatisfaction beneath the critical mass threshold definitely works, but will not work indefinitely.
The great societal observationist, Dr. Theodore Giessel, has provided a library of easy to understand volumes on the subject.
The role of the SMMC in the fall of western civilization may one day be studied by scholars of the future. They will note the shift between its prophylaxis phase and its enabling phase as one of the larger precipitates.
WV=prespuns (tee-hee)
txting 4 press puns and pre-spun?
"Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."
Last time England meddled in Afghanistan they got their self-confident asses kicked good and hard.
And we point cameras at her obsessively because you can never spend too much of America's mainstream political bandwidth huffing stupid straight from the bag.
Perfect.
You know what would be funny? To have driftglass appear on The Mouse Circus and make someone cry.
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