Still Waiting

Onan the Establishmentarian

Tonight we whine in Hell!

File under: When masturbatory fantasies attack!

If pressed to summarize David Brooks' entire career in 30 seconds or less, it would probably sound something like this exchange from "Full Metal Jacket":

Private Cowboy: Tough break for Hand Job. He was all set to get shipped out on a medical.

Private Joker: What was the matter with him?

Private Cowboy: He was jerkin' off ten times a day.

Private Eightball: No shit. At least ten times a day.

Private Cowboy: Last week he was sent down to Da Nang to see the Navy head shrinker, and the crazy fucker starts jerking off in the waiting room...

David Brooks: compulsive masturbator.

Column after column, year after year, literally unable to stop himself from choking that Buckley in front of millions of strangers over and over again.

Which, from a spiritual point of view, is a pretty sad existence to begin with (the pain of which is mitigated, no doubt, by the Publisher's Clearing House-sized checks from the New York Times that show up at his door twice a month) but which suddenly nose-dives deep into genuinely creepy-debilitating-fetish territory when you realize that, not only can he not stop compulsively debasing himself like a public transit flasher every day, but he is utterly incapable of getting it up enough to do his filthy business in the first place without first enacting exactly the same complex, obsessive ceremony each and every time.

No matter what the topic or the facts, first Bobo must!must!must! ritually tape up a picture of Karl Marx on the Left side of his New York Times editorial jerkoff grotto, and a picture of Rush Limbaugh on the Right. Only then can he permit himself to Solemnly and Reasonably Curve his Laffer onto a picture of Ronald Reagan, which he has scrupulously placed at the exact midpoint between his two Daddy Demons. If anything -- a slight breeze, a stray headline, E.J. Dionne -- alters the the positioning of his fetish menagerie by even a micrometer, he becomes panic-stricken and begins prattling wildly about fictional Applebees or the time he gobbled down a fistful purple greenspans and hallucinated for 18 straight hours about jogging through a 1971 Coke commercial:


But this Friday he trekked right on past both ideological dishonesty AND crippling politio-sexual obsession and into the realm of I don't-know-what.

Seriously.

This time, Bobo went so far down the hole that his own fantasy life actually turned on him.

First, rather than fiddling around with a lot of autopolitical foreplay, Our Mr. Brooks got his freak immediately and completely on by abandoning the smelly, arthritic world of facts and causality right off the bat and building himself the Lefty Policy Sexbot of his dreams:

"In my previous column, I tried to imagine what a moderate Democratic growth agenda would look like. You could call it the Moon Shot Approach."

Then he built an equally imaginary Wingnut Free Market Blowjob Queen of the Universe to spec by cherry-picking whichever spare parts and leftover -isms tickled his fancy from the Paul Ryan goofbag.

Ryan's own batshit ideas and words here (via digby):

For me, it doesn't take anything other than this, to tell me everything I need to know about the breadth of Ryan's intellectual capacities:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."
[...]

"Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill  . . .  is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict - individualism versus collectivism. If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society.  . . .  That's that many more people in America who are not going to listen to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues," said Ryan
...

That sounds pretty damned dumb to me.

But some people think he's brilliant, no doubt about it:

GLENN BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.

PAUL RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

GLENN: I love you.
...

And the process by which Bobo perfidiously frappes this cask-strength Crazy into some kind of Reasonableness Smoothie is reverse-engineered here by the good people at Reality Chex:

We could look back on the period between 1980 and 2006 as the long boom. -- David Brooks

Or, we could look at it for what it actually was -- beginning in about 1982 -- a long & still vibrant boom for the wealthiest Americans. The most casual observer knows that in this period, rich Americans have gotten richer & the rest of us have gotten poorer. To pretend otherwise, as Brooks does, is intellectual dishonesty that rises to the level of a crime of conscience.

As for Brooks' touting Paul Ryan's "intellectual heft," I can see why someone who thinks the 1980s began a long boom period would admire Rep. Ryan. As Paul Krugman notes, Ryan's fabulous budget plan "wouldn’t balance the budget, even after two generations. What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population." And, "Paul Ryan’s budget plan ... calls for a huge increase in public debt over the near term, offset by hypothetical spending cuts four decades from now."

Prof. Krugman is not pulling these "opinions" out of a hat & he is scarcely alone in his observations. He draws his conclusions from solid economic calculations & plain ol' arithmetic.
...

So then, having scuttled into his own, dank, New York Times editorial jerkoff grotto with his own hand-crafted Simulated Fuck Toys in tow, he sat them each down and began -- I kid you not -- to argue with them.

To whine about the imaginary imperfections of these figments of his own imagination:

"Both the Democratic and Republican approaches have problems. The Moon Shot Approach relies on omniscient experts to pick out the engines of future growth and on public-spirited legislators to pass bills that maximize productivity instead of special-interest favors. The weakness of the Brooks and Ryan approach is that their sociology is off a bit. America is not a nation of risk — embracing pioneers. It is a nation of heroic bourgeois families who want to thrive within a secure social order."

Now I will cop to more than my fair share of NC-17 adventurism and encounters with the strange, but to-date I can safely say that I have never been spurned by imaginary lovers.

So it was with some degree of horror and pity with which I read David Brooks' latest 800-word embarrassment.

I mean, what else can you feel for someone who spent all that time and effort building himself his own Perfect Ideological Sexbots,

only to be told by them that they don't want him touching them there!

Tough break for Handjob.

iMageddon*

Ooooh!

Shiny!

I should Tweet thi...



* (h/t Blue Gal for the terrific inspiration)

Your Friday Podcast

On Planet Facebook, compulsive and compulsory overshare of every aspect of one's life has become the norm. Part of the social contract.

Anything less marks you as a friendless hobo living in a cave, flinging poo at census workers and Amazon.com trendhunters: an illegal alien skulking around the halls of a High School from which there is no escape, and where gossip is the coin of the realm.

Fuck that.

"O tempora! O mores!"
-- Cicero

Steve Gilliard vs Journolist

Footage from a Journolist Meetup

In aid of maximum clarity, let me repeat this one more time: the notion that anyone would be shocked by reporters sitting around in a semi-private setting bitching about their beats in salty language that would never make it past an editor's blue pencil

is objectively hilarious.

On the other hand, idea that journalists fresh from the smelly Bush-era trenches would build a club-house-and-mutual-aid-society complete with velvet ropes and secret handshakes? A digitally tyled lodge,

...guarded so that non-Masons may not enter or overhear the proceedings. The Tyler or outer guard, as his name implies, is situated outside the door of the lodge "being armed with a drawn sword to keep off all intruders and cowans to Masonry.

protected from the thousands of grubby prole bloggers with whom they still wanted to glean a street cred contact high, but didn't want to let in to use the bathrooms? A place so clean, well-lighted and safe that Joe Klein had a table by the window and Tucker Fucking Carlson applied for admittance?

That aspect of the story makes me wonder what my blogfather -- the late-Steve Gilliard --

would have to say on the subject.

A careful reader might detect a hint or two in this 2005 post ("Outlaw Journalism and the Blogs") Gilly did on the occasion of Hunter Thompson's death :

...
Thompson had been a newspaperman, had worked for Time and hated it. He didn't fit into the neat box that people wanted to place journalists in. Was it really any wonder that David Halberstam didn't wind up running the Times or that Sy Hersh still has to deal with people who call him a traitor. Journalism wasn't embracing the outcasts, not then, and not now. Thgompson didn't wind up in Rolling Stone because he was in high demand as a political commentator. Just like people aren't falling over themselves to read Bill Grieder finance stories today. He was a refugee from American journalism, just like many bloggers are today. Remember, the people we scorn today were the people who fit the idea of the ideal journalist. Judy Miller is what every editor, secretly dreams about, the sexy, tempestous man-crazy reporter. The fact that she's a tool for those in power doesn't discomfort them.

Bloggers are not some new creation, but the newest set of the barbarians at the gates. They are the people who don't trust the system and it's artifacts. It is to writing, what rap is to music, the coming of democracy to a trade. What Thompson and his peers did in the 60's and 70's, we do today. But free of the constraints of editors and publishers and the need to hustle up work.

Why?

Because of two different trends in writing.

One is the coopting of journalists. The insiders beat back the challenges from the Sheehans, Halberstams and Arnetts. Those who played the game won, those who didn't became heroes and authors, and exiled from the newsroom. Arnett hung on longer than most, but most were gone from the daily papers by 1975. Or they became enamored of celebrity, like Bob Woodward. Some like Sydney Schamberg and Ray Bonner, following in their tradition, were booted from newsrooms the minute their bosses felt uncomfortable. Or exiled to "alternative" papers. The newsroom became the home of the tame dissident and the complient office holder. Carl Hiaasen saves his most brutal critques of Florida life for his crime fiction. Bob Greene wrote drivel for years, finally canned, not for a lack of talent, but an excess of hunting teenaged trim. The best writing in the Washington Post is Tom Boswell's sports columns.

If people are disheartened by this, they shouldn't be. Ernie Pyle died 60 years ago this week, because he loved soldiers and the stories of their lives. Edward R. Murrow was forced out of CBS. Thompson was lucky in that since he was never inside the tent, they could never kick him out. But most of the great heroes of journalism were and will be forced from the newsroom, because that is not a place for uncomfortable truths. There has never been a national columnist like Jack Newfield or Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin, and never will be. Because they will never play the game, or even recognize it.
...

Were he alive today, I like to think Gilly would be busy ventilating the stale air of the blogosphere with columns that would read a lot like this:


Which is why I miss him.

Every day.

UPDATE the 1st: Welcome Sun-Times readers.

UPDATE the 2nd: Welcome "Vanity Fair" readers.

Do Not Play Pool

With this man.

Little Green Slag

After a long morning explaining to the software security service I use that, no, they cannot charge me for an account and a computer I haven't used in 10 year...

...and arguing with a credit card company that a policy which results in charging me a late fee (2 days late) that is half the size of my account balance (I keep it as close to zero as possible) put their immortal soul at risk (note to self: they don't have souls so quit trying to appeal to them)...

...I'm going to take it easy on myself and respond to David Fucking Brooks' extraordinarily Godawful, almighty mawkish (even by DFB's own, debased standards) 800-word upchuck...

The Long Strategy
By DAVID BROOKS

I was a liberal Democrat when I was young. I used to wear a green Army jacket with political buttons on it — for Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. I even wore that jacket in my high school yearbook photo.

It’s a magic green jacket. I can put it on today and, suddenly, my mind shifts back to the left. I start thinking like a Democrat, feeling a strange accompanying hunger for brown rice.
...

...by reprinting (with a few touch-ups) these comments I left at the NYT last night:

Except, of course, you are not a liberal or a Democrat. You are the carefully bland, studiedly tepid apologist for a depraved and failed ideology whose livelihood depends entirely on continuing to pretend that there is some reservoir of "reasonableness" remaining w/in the Conservative Movement which could be magically activated IF ONLY the Left would just keep compromising over and over and over and over again.

This is a lie.

It has been a lie for 30 years.

You know it is a lie.

Your colleagues know it is a lie.

Everyone who pays attention to politics knows it is a lie.

And yet week in, week out, you continue to get paid top-dollar to dress up in a costume, put on makeup and tell your paying customers things which both of you damn well know are not true.


Was there ever a more breviloquent definition of "whore" than that?

UPDATE: Welcome Reality Chex readers.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"There. Are. Four. Lights." Edition (h/t Malacandra)

The other day I was out at a local beach.

At that beach, there were various groups of people – some white and some black -- engaged in various peaceable activities.

During the few moments I observed the activities not a single person pulled out a gun and started shooting.

So what can we learn from this?

Well, according to Ace Journalist David Fucking Brooks, it must mean there is no homicide problem in Chicago!

Which would be awesome if it were in any way remotely true.

Homicide rate jumps in Chicago, Daley pushes for more gun control

By Mark Guarino | Published Wed, Apr 28 2010 9:30 am

CHICAGO — The homicide rate in Chicago has jumped in the past month, and the city is grappling with how best to respond.

At least two weekends in a row have been marred by multiple killings. For many Chicagoans, the breaking point was last Wednesday, when a 20-month-old girl was shot in the head while in a parked car on the South Side. The alleged gunman, who turned himself in, was reportedly aiming for the girl’s father.

As of last Sunday, Chicago tallied 113 homicides for 2010, compared with 101 for the same period last year.

The city’s mayor, state lawmakers, and the Chicago Police Department, among others, are weighing in on what should - and shouldn’t - be done.
…

This Sunday at the Mouse Circus, E.J. Dionne very carefully and methodically laid out the problem with our media… (the link is here, but NBC has completely screwed up the attributions on its transcript, swapping the names of people and what they actually said almost at random.)

Dionne: We can't have a good discussion on race if the facts don't matter. And I think it's, it's not only that Shirley Sherrod was smeared, it was a perverse smear. Because, if you look at that speech, what she was giving is a speech about racial reconciliation. She was saying poor blacks and poor whites have a lot in common. And this was twisted into a, an allegation, false allegation that she was somehow a black racist.

Now, what's going on here? I think the traditional media are so afraid of being called liberal, God forbid they be called liberal, that they are willing to run with any kind of right-wing propaganda and treat it as news. Challenging propaganda, or not running it, or taking your time before you run with a story, that's not liberalism, that's journalism. And I think that the right has been running this campaign for 30 years, they've had a lot of success, and we should worry about it. With the--you got to look over both shoulders, and you got to look at the facts.

Now hold the camera still for just a moment and watch as David Fucking Brooks practically shits himself and does the Electric Slide in his own offal at the idea that his Bullshit Centrism Fantasy-land bubble is being directly and cogently breached….

Bobo: There's not only a right-wing squabble media. I mean, there's a squabble culture out there. There's regular media--we were trained in one media. When I started working in Chicago, we were given a phrase: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. And so that's it. That--you would never run an excerpt from a speech unless you saw the speech. That's just unthinkable.
...
So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

Got that kids? It isn’t the Conservative media that is wrecking this country: it’s the “squabble media”.

What was genuinely breathtaking was David Fucking Brooks’, well, bravado, at citing the famous motto of the Chicago News Bureau (that now-sadly defunct, hardbitten-reporter factory) -- “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” -- just before proceeding to pull miles and miles of ridiculous and utterly unsupported Centrist claptrap straight out of his ass.

Bobo: So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

See! See! The Right AND the Left do it! The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the Left
“don't care about government”.

Not one statistic.
Not one correlation.
Not one fact.
Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast by a fact.
Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look like.
Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of a loner who kept pretty much to himself."

Nothing.

Over the last six years since I got my "squabble media" credentials and began trying really hard to ruin everything good about America, every blogger I know has written hundreds or thousands of posts asking/begging/demanding that someone, somewhere on the Right show us this correlation, year-by-year for the last 30 years: Where was the Left’s Limbaugh? Where was the Left’s Falwell? Where was the Left’s Atwater? The Left’s Liddy? The Left’s Murdoch? The Left’s Coulter? The Left’s Impeachment Fetish? The Left’s Gingrich? The Left’s Beck? The Left’s fucking “Fox and Friends”?

I could go on for hours. Any of us could. As I have said many times elsewhere, the reason Conservative Establishmentarian Testicle Cozies like David Fucking Brooks work as hard as they do seven days a week to keep this Giant Lie propped up is that, the instant it falls apart, they lose their jobs and have to go out and get honest work.

They know that being forced to answer this question honestly is the Karate Kid Crane Kick of political debate:

"If do right, no can defense"

Which is why they are far, far too cowardly to ever step into a genuine arena with anyone armed with the facts.

To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard.

Dionne: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement, a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and people should condemn it.

Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.

So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted by Ameroica's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden Journalistic Rule?

Bobo: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too.
...

Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.

Bobo: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.
...

Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable" Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, Bobo airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoid of millions of Pig People for personal and partisan gain...because Bobo saw some people getting along on the Mall in D.C. once.

Just as Chicago does not have a homicide problem, because I went for a walk on the beach the other day and no one was murdered at my feet.

Of course, when the going got too tough for Bobo to handle by himself, host Dancin’ David Gregory leaped in to help his pal and underscore -- also without a single supporting fact or quote -- that Liberals are always just as kooky and angry and unhinged and Conservatives.

I don’t blame Dionne. He tried, but he simply does not have the killer instinct to lock onto a target and refuse to back off until they concede the point or run away crying.

And so, once again, America's timorous, brain-dead Center was reassured that squatting in the middle and loathing both the fact-and-policy-based Left and the fact-free-and-bigoted-Right equally makes them fucking outstanding Americans!

And once again I sit in front of the teevee machine shouting this:


Because no matter how many times asshats who have been handed terrifying media firepower like Brooks and Gregory insist that there are five lights...no matter how many times we are told to that we are bad people if we won't shut up and go along...just say it...just go roll over...just give in...even if you don't mean it just say it and the pain will stop...

...There. Are. Four. Lights.

And there always will be.

The Original Journolist

Five Sun-Times Pulitzer winners at Riccardo’s, 1970s: (Bill) Mauldin, (Roger) Ebert, (John) Fischetti, (Tom) Fitzpatrick, (Ron) Powers. (h/t Ebert Chicago)

The idea that journalists getting together in semi-private to bitch about the subject they cover in less than punk-ass "objective" and safe-for-work terms would be considered some kind of scandal is hilarious.

The idea that the tens of thousands of journalistic paupers and red-headed stepchildren who were never told about and were not invited into Ezra Klein's "No Homers Club" care about it

is doubly hilarious.

Massive Weasel to Leave BP

From Yahoo News:

Hayward leaving behind daunting tasks at BP

By CHRIS KAHN and EMILY FREDRIX, AP Business Writers Chris Kahn And Emily Fredrix,

NEW YORK – For BP, removing Tony Hayward is just the beginning.

The departure of the man who became the vilified public face of the Gulf oil spill changes very little for BP. His successor still faces what could be decades of cleaning up and paying for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

Experts said Sunday that the new chief must also persuade thousands of employees to embrace a culture of safety that Hayward apparently failed to instill. He'll need to mend fences among BP's partners in the Gulf and convince the U.S. government and public they can trust it to safely do business here.
...

Gimme a "D".

D!

Gimmie an "E".

E!

Gimmie an "F".

F!

...

People of the Lie

"[Narcissists]...project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others."

— M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to the Conservative Movement for the last 30 years that the Breitbart BigGovernmentMiscreant site has quickly rallied itself to respond to the glaringly indisputable fact that its owner is a lying shitbag.

I hope you weren't waiting for an apology...

Here's the headline:

From JournoList to Shirley Sherrod: The Left’s Default Response Is Fascism

by John Nolte...

Since I don't link to sites run by liars and frauds, if you want any more of Nolte's scintillating defense of his meal-ticket, you'll have to Google it yourself. Suffice it to say, you'll probably want to have a Kevlar sick bag on hand.

I post it here today (along a few of the comments it generated) to underscore a larger, sadder and much more important point: sooner or later, Liberals as a Movement must come to terms with the fact that people like Breitbart -- who operate with a free hand and a blank check at the very heart of the Conservative Movement -- are not simply crazy or misguided or possessed of a strange but equally sincere ideology, but genuinely evil.

And the reason we keep banging our heads when trying to cope with evil is that evil renders our entire Liberal toolbox worse than useless.

Evil doesn't care about policy or governance. At. All. Which is why we are so often reduced to a spluttering "But don't they realize...?" incomprehension when the Right stomps on the throat of the weak and defenseless...again. While smiling...again

Evil does not have a conscience which can be appealed to, or a sense of shame which can be invoked.

Evil doesn't give a shit about fair play or reason or causality or the niceties of democracy.

When faced with positive proof that what it is doing will harm others, Evil says "Go piss up a rope, hippie."

"Evil deeds do not make an evil person. Otherwise we would all be evil. If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. This is because those who have "crossed over the line" are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness."

— M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

Instead of a conscience, evil has vanity, megalomania, greed and an all-encompassing fear that they will be found out and ridiculed for being the wretched, little scuttlefish that they are.

They live in terror that someone might see the sorry state of their mingy soul, which is why they band together for protection under the banner of an ideology which glorifies cruelty and heartlessness, and why they reserve their most furious hellfire for kindest of people.

This is why they hate Shirley Sherrod -- a woman they did not even know existed a week ago -- with such hysterical, berserk fury, why they eagerly swallow every ACORN lie that churns out of the Breitbart/Beck/Limbaugh Paranoid Conspiracy Factory and beg for more: to Evil, those who advocate publicly on behalf of kindness, justice and compassion, and who -- by lesson and language -- implore their fellow citizens to assay their souls in a clear and Christian light are the sources of scalding pain.

Every act of decency rubs Evils' nose in the horror of its polluted existence, and every public gesture of confession and humanity threatens extinction. Faced with these threats, Evil has no recourse but attack!attack!attack!

To illustrate my point, I have mined a few, representative examples from the Breitbart Commenteriate and arranged them in no particular order on the Left.

I have arranged a few quotes from M. Scott Peck's "People of the Lie" on the Right.

---------------------------------------

Rebas_Thgil...
How about we keep Breittbart's websites alive
and well, as surely Shirley Sherrod's charade is
the thing that does not advance this country.

ninecats...
the more she opens her mouth,
the more she proves Breitbart correct...

---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Think of the psychic energy required for the
continued maintenance of the pretense so
characteristic of 'the evil'! They perhaps direct
at least as much energy into their devious rationalizations
and destructive compensations as the
healthies do into loving behavior.

Why? What possesses them, drives them?
Basically, it is fear.

They are terrified that the pretense will break down
and they will be exposed to the world and to themselves."

-- Page 124

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------

doawkins...
Mark Levin says she is an idiot.
Sherrod is nasty.
...
She is racist and seems to deserve trouble.
My own company handbook wouldn't allow
her to trash talk at the NAACP and get
by with it. It creates a hostile enviironment.


peaches1...
I can't believe how absolutely stupid
these people are.
They are the racists.
Every word coming out of this woman's mouth
is a lie or some sort of racist remark.
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"A predominant characteristic of the behavior
that I call evil is scapegoating.
Because in their hearts they consider themselves
above reproach, they must lash out at anyone
who does reproach them.
They sacrifice others
to preserve their self-image of perfection."

-- Page 73

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------
The_Great_Satan
Would liberals like to shut down
any broadcaster that doesn’t follow leftwing ideology? Yes.
Would liberals like to shut down talk radio? Yes.
Would liberals like to ban
Conservatives from liberal infested academia? Yes.
Would liberals like to shutdown
companies they don’t like? Yes.
Would liberals like to
imprison dissenters? Yes.

There is a name for people like this, it is Fascist.
...


pnipni
This whole thing is a disaster.
Shirley is a racist liar,
and the Democrats are mostly socialists,
and we have a mad Socialist/Fascist
out to destroy America!
...
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Since they must deny their own badness,
they must perceive others as bad.
They project their own evil onto the world.
The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures."

-- Page 74

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------
Cali~Gal
The left is chasing it's tail, and Obama
and the thug's in-charge are getting
trigger happy. Ms. Sherrod is a phony,
paid liar and a fraud...


attila_the_pun
I think liberals do this on purpose.
Their hypocrisy is so utterly mind boggling
that it stuns any decent human being
like a taser gun, thus incapacitating them for a short time.
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity.

...

While they lack any motivation to be good,they intensely desire to appear good. Their goodness is all on a level of pretense. It is in effect a lie. Actually the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves.We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. At one and the same time 'the evil' are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of 'the evil' is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it."

-- Page 75

There is little point in engaging people like this directly. They are a cultural dead-loss who live 24/7 in a madhouse furnished floor-to-ceiling by Hate Media tropes and venom, and with whom we no longer even share a common vocabulary.

However, to the fake Centrists like David Fucking Brooks and Equivocators like Anderson Cooper who automatically flee and cower behind the Big Lie of "Both sides do it" every time another bigoted, psychotic wind blows inconveniently in from the Right I would ask when exactly are we scheduled to finally arrive at the Magic Reasonable Centerpoint between us and these people that will satisfy you?

How much further Right must sane people tack and how much more of what is good about America must we surrender to these scum in the name of the mindless, capitulating "compromise" that you sanctify?

To Conservative Revisionists like Andrew Sullivan I would ask, just how far back into the history of your beloved Conservative Movement do people like me need to fucking hand-walk you before it will start to sink in that the core of the Right has always been like this? That it was designed from the start to manufacture people like this?

And to my fellow travelers on the Left who despair at the realization that our homegrown enemies of democracy do not respond to reason and right, I would remind them that we have access to an inexhaustible stockpile of the one weapon against which they have always been powerless:

"The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked."

-- St. Thomas More

Or, in the modern parlance...

Vae Victis

From Yahoo News:

The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking.
Here Are the Stats to Prove it

Posted Jul 15, 2010 02:25pm EDT by Michael Snyder in Recession

Editor's note: Michael Snyder is editor of theeconomiccollapseblog.com

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
...

The Conservative solution?

More please!
More please!
More please!

The original Sackers of Rome had animal skins and swords:

"The sack of Rome (390 B.C.) was the worst recorded disaster in the history of the early Roman Republic, and saw a Gallic war band led by Brennus capture and sack most of the city, after winning an easy victory on the Allia.

"The speed with which the Gauls had approached the city seems to have caught the Romans by surprise. They were only able to raise a small army, which was easily defeated on the Allia. Most of the survivors took refuge in Veii, which was much better fortified than Rome. The rest escaped back to Rome, where they took refuge in the Citadel, the strongest defensive position in the city.
...

"On the following day the Gauls made an unopposed entry into the city. Finding it empty they looted it, and then turned to the Citadel. A direct assault failed, and after that they settled down into a blockade, probably using Rome as a base for raiding Latium while conducting a fairly loose blockade of the Citadel. The Romans were able, with difficulty, to open communications with Veii and eventually a truce was arranged with the defenders, ending active fighting but not the blockade.

"Eventually the defenders of the Citadel ran out of food, and were forced to come to terms with the Gauls. A ransom of 1000lbs of gold was agreed. When the Romans complained about the Gaul's scales Brennus is said to have thrown his sword onto the scales with the words 'Woe to the vanquished' (vae victis). After this the Gauls probably left the city safely, taking their plunder with them."

Ours have Blackberrys and this guy.

Your Friday Podcast

As 88% of the Liberal Blogosphere beats the blazing summer heat by gathering in the temperate highlands of Las Vegas to sip sweet tea and calmly discuss policy issues --

(I came to Netroots Nation for the waters.
The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
I was misinformed.)

-- the Master Media Cylinder asks, "But who will feed my aggregator machines?"

Hey, here's an idea!

Communism Conservatism, like any other revealed religion,
is largely made up of prophecies.
-- H. L. Mencken (slightly updated by me)

And Now For Something

Completely Different.

Once upon a time, some number of years ago, I had an informal but clear understanding with the publishing industry: I would send them an original short story or novella every couple of months, and they would send me cheery letters explaining how they could not use that particular story at that time. Or how they liked the story, but it wasn't quite in their wheelhouse. Or that they really, really liked the story, but they didn't publish 'genre' pieces. Or that they had gone out of business and that future correspondence should be sent to a Kinney Shoe store in Orlando.

True, it wasn't optimal, but at least there was a system, and using that system I finally amassed a collection of such letters large enough to build that guest cottage for the castle

I'd been planning for years.

I also built up a small reserve of short stories which I still enjoy disinterring and reading from time to time but which -- given the general "Holy Fuck, we're all doooooomed!" state into which the publishing industry has fallen since the days when were doing our quaint pas de deux -- are unlikely to ever see the light of day again.

This one I did on a flight from Baltimore to Chicago. I set myself the goal of writing an original science fiction/murder mystery that would:

1. Explain the very strange circumstance surrounding the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and,
2. Be executed entirely in an authentic Poe-style voice.

I posted Part One last year here.


Here is Part Two

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part Two

...
I can tell you exactly the moment when the idea came into my consciousness.

It was aboard the short rocket flight to Chicago. In the children's section, an attendant was reading one of his stories -- "The Incredible Tale of the Fantastic Prince Mothbury" -- to a crowd of rapt faces. Even adults were taking pauses from their work to lean back and listen to the old, familiar tale being quietly related to the youngsters in the back.

It was at that moment that I resolved to kill him.

I could see, all in a flash, how much like the remorseless murderers of his later works he really was. No one escaped him. I could also see how the idea of his obliteration had always been there, building gradually, by degrees, but had been hiding and waiting for some moment of divine inspiration. After all, since I am not mad, what would be the point of dwelling on avenging myself upon a man who had been dead for more than a century?

As you know -- or rather as you could not know --“Mothbury” is the tale wherein are mentioned the first inklings of the author’s great insights about the nature of time itself. It is here, in this children’s fable, where he first writes of both the “rubbery skein of the real” and the “soap-bubbles of time.” These humble beginnings were the starting point for a journey that led at last to his final masterpiece – “The Helical River of Chronos.” Until the day he died he vowed that the premise of “Chronos” was simple fact (or would be) and that the traversing of time by men would one day be as common as the traversing of seas.

It took a century, but again he was proven right.

Upon hearing those famous phrases again, at that moment, the plan came to me, unfolding itself into my mind, fully formed and complete in every detail. I threw my head back and roared with laughter at the perfection and symmetry of it. Through his smallest work the Great Man had delivered to me the means to eradicate him!

I was astonished by the change that had come over me.

I had been, I might fairly say, a sullen sort of fellow, prone to nervous affectations and halting speech. As I disembarked the flight, I could feel a physical change sweep over me. My step was confident and sure. I smiled and nodded to all. Instead of heading off to attend to business, I made my way to the University, to the building that had been named in the Great Man’s honor and to the very laboratory where work progressed on the methods of moving men through the veil of time and safely back again.

My means of gaining regular access to the lab and thence, uninterrupted, to the machinery itself is a matter that, no doubt, you would find incredible even if you were inclined to believe the rest of my story. And yet I tell you that this above all is the easiest to believe.

To begin with, in my world, science is not so closely guarded a trade as it is here.

Scientists are classed somewhere among the artists and professorial class, much lower than, say, a captain of industry. Entrée into even the most prestigious lab would not present an insurmountable problem, especially as I offered myself as an educated man who would work the lowliest position for pennies.

It was so very simple! Even you can no doubt call to mind a dozen occasions where a man of a certain temperament with a mind properly focused on a single task and inflamed by God has performed amazing feats, and my cause, I assure you, was every bit as infused with divine fire as any have ever been. The clarity of my thoughts, my absolute focus on a single object, made straight the path to my objective and, in no time, I found myself as a trusted assistant in the Temporal Studies Laboratory at the University.

That I had made it past all obstacles with such ease only strengthened my belief that my mission was directed from some divine source. That I had been given such zeal and glibness of tongue as I had never experience before was beyond doubt. What further proof did I require that the Almighty Himself had taken a hand!

My first journey was almost my last.

I had earned the confidence of the staff to such an extent that they left me to secure the facilities on nights when they all left to dine at local establishments. I waited for such a night all through the Fall, waiting for the solid, heavy Chicago winter to ensure that, once out and away on their own affairs, they would likely not brave the streets again to return to the lab whatever the cause. Snow and sleet began falling on just such a night and as I locked the door behind the last of the scientists, I began to prepare.

I had studied the steps involved well, if indirectly. I had asked many, many questions (scientists do so love to talk), but in small bunches and never of one person too often. All was prepared, but first I had to wait: thus far no one had ever returned to the laboratory after midnight, so I resolved to wait until one a.m. to begin the first step.

The hands of the large clock that dominated the far wall crawled by interminably. I checked the accuracy of the device against my pocket watch three times, and once, certain that it had stopped, I clambered up the filing cabinet to press my ear against the machine. It dully ticked off the seconds oblivious to my anxiety.

As the moment approached I began cursing the slow passage of time aloud. ‘Why,’ I shouted, ‘must this damned night limp along like a dying dog?’ Especially, I wondered, when I was about to leap a span of over a century!

I was then startled almost to death by a sudden, rapid tapping on the front door. The hour stood at five minutes before one. How could this be!
...

Gee Our Old LaSalle Ran Great...*

How Ronald Reagan Killed Edith Bunker

On November, 2 1980, Norman Lear killed off his beloved "Edith Bunker": the sweet, implacable moral center of Lear's multiple-award winning "All in the Family".

In case you never saw the show (based on the hit British teevee series "Till Death Us Do Part"), she was the gentle, Christian governor that kept Archie Bunker's raging, bigoted, ignorant, homophobic, misogynist, misanthropic White Conservative Id from running completely out of control.

In a strange quirk of history, two days later -- on November 4, 1980 -- Ronald Wilson Reagan won the American presidential election.

Reagan won that election by promising -- with a wink and a smile -- to finally let America's raging, bigoted, ignorant, homophobic, misogynist, misanthropic White Conservative Id unapologetically off its leash.

By promising, in other words, to smother Edith Bunker once and for all.

And 30 years later, whatever few, gentle, humane, Christian, Edith Bunkerish angels may have existed within the Conservative Movement in some dim, fictional, Jurassic past are long, long dead, and we are now living chin-deep in the shitpile that letting America's raging, bigoted, ignorant, homophobic, misogynist, misanthropic bugfuck crazy White Conservative Id run hog-wild has bequeathed to us.

Modern Conservatism is a disease.
If you don't understand that, you're already infected.

UPDATE: The title of this post has been changed because Caoimhin Laochdha's suggestion was sooo much better.*

Who's Next?

Liberals: We're What's For Dinner.

In case no one had the balls to tell you the unvarnished truth, Mr. President, the thing that has been so dispiriting about Brietbartgate is that it happened right in front of us and in real-time. The very speed of it gave us all a window not into your good intentions or high ideals, but into the raw and naked organizational reflexes of the Obama White House.

And what we saw made us ill.

Not only did it confirm every Liberal's ugliest fears about how completely craven and appeasement-happy your Administration is when it comes to dealing with Right-wing scum, but in the heart of the Great Recession, you also managed to morph yourself into just about the worst possible caricature anyone striving to gain the trust of an unemployment-shell-shocked public could be:

You became Everybody's Nightmare Dumbass Boss.

You let yourself become the stereotypical feckless employer who can be cowed and bullied by any sleazy consultant with a loud mouth who knows which buttons to push (and which everyone but the Clueless Boss seems to know is a criminally reckless fraud) into making truly astonishing, bonehead decisions that end up:

1. Costing some of your best, most-loyal and most hard-working people their jobs, their peace of mind and their good names for no damn good reason, and,
2. Badly damaging the morale of the very people you most need, while at the same time,
3. Enhancing the reputation and prestige of the scumbag consultant who fed you poison in the first place.

In case you didn't recognize it as it whizzed by, this was your 3:00 AM phone call Mr. President, and you failed the test of it pretty fucking spectacularly.

Organizational culture comes from the top, Mr. President: you set the tone.

So Learn, Baby, Learn: man up or lose your base, Mr. President.

It's really that simple.

...Against All Enemies

Foreign

and

Domestic.

The Negrological Constant REDUX

In light of ease with which a racist scumbag like Andrew Breitbart chummed the entire Very Serious American media and political establishments into a fucktard feeding frenzy...and the speed with which all of the those very same, Very Serious institutions are now trying to out-outrage each other in their exclamations of Shock!Shock! that they could all be so effortlessly duped by the same bunch of criminally insane and bigoted Fox News buffoons who always dupe them, I offer this reprise of my August, 2008 post.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Because the prevailing model of the Universe at the time was fundamentally flawed (presumed to be static, not expanding), when Albert Einstein first tried to apply his general theory of relativity to the Universe\, the results thoroughly freaked him out (Universe collapsing! Cats and dogs living together!)

So, being a clever man, Einstein invented a kind of mathematical fairy dust -- a “cosmological constant” -- which, when factored into the equation, made everything come out ever so much nicer and less Armageddonish. Einstein later dropped the whole idea and acknowledged that it had been his biggest blunder.

In this election, the predictive model we use to explain our cultural Universe is also deeply warped. Warped by race. Race is, yet again, the 17-ton mastodon in the room, but continues to scud and swirl quietly around the dark corners of American political discourse like errant dust bunnies.

And so the media develops a suite of “Negrological Constants” to explain what is happening in the polls without having to face the reality that we are not a post-racial society.

Not by a damn sight.

Better than we have been? Yes.

Getting better every generation? Yes.

But in 2008, to pretend that that all objects in motion in the American political system are not being acted on by racism is as silly as pretending that all objects on the face of the Earth are not being acted on by gravity.

During Big Convention Roundup on the Charlie Rose Show, Ronald Walters pointed out that he (rough, high speed transcription):

"…cannot understand why the press keeps insisting that Barack Obama is not being specific. I went over the +100 speech he has given since 2007 and there are dozens of specific policy recommendations all over the fucking place."

To which David Fucking Brook responded:

"I think there is no doubt that Barack Obama is much more specific than John McCain. If this were about issues, Obama would be winning by 15 points. The mystery is, why he's not."

driftglass: No, David Fucking Brooks, it is absolutely no mystery at all.

It is about race, and our pathetic, comical and ultimately lethal refusal to understand racism's many faces and means of transmission. How it is passed along, generation to generation, like hemophilia.

White male Christian supremacy was a major component of America's Genesis meme; long before the radical notions of liberty and democratic rule took root in the soil of the New World, racism and chattel slavery had set up shop and become a highly profitable self-replicating and self-propagating idea, which act (from the Wiki definition of "meme"):

“… by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate."

Racism is a highly successful and seductive virus that bundles White Privilege in with Divine Right and market economics, and has always sought to aggressively reinforce and spread itself through media, law and violence.

From an epidemiological point of view, the Missouri Compromise was nothing more or less than an argument over whether or not America was going to arrest the spread of its Racism Virus.

The Civil War was the disease's violent response to being quarantined.

And when Lee Atwater said this in 1981 --

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

-- he was merely affirming that, in order to survive and grow, our Racism Virus had mutated. Had adopted the protective coloring of “economic things” in order to continue to poison and destroy the culture.

9/11, of course, gave the Racism Virus a massive dose of rocket fuel: now, instead of having to sneak behind the barn and talk about “quotas”, bigots can once again scream a simple, simpleminded, two syllable word – Muslim, Muslim, Muslim -- wave around an American flag, and feel perfectly certain that their dog whistle has been clearly transmitted.

Of course some people do speak up.

Like Charles Barkley.

Like this from the Guardian:

US elections: Why has Obama stalled? No one mentions race

On the eve of the Democrats' convention in Denver, Barack Obama finds himself struggling against a resurgent John McCain. Why isn't Obama doing better in the polls? There is one answer no one wants to hear. Paul Harris reports on how race has become the great unspoken issue in the campaign for the White House - and why it may yet be the decisive factor

This week's events in Denver are fast turning into a critical moment in Obama's bid to be America's first black President. What was once seen as an anointing of his candidacy is becoming a chance to right a campaign facing a series of unexpected crises.

The Democrats are starting to struggle in a presidential race which they should be dominating. America is beset by economic troubles, mired in an unpopular foreign war and facing an unpopular Republican party. A stunning 80 per cent of Americans think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. Yet Obama and McCain are virtually tied in the polls. The possible explanations are multiple. The Democratic campaign is being daily assaulted by withering Republican attack ads. At the same time, there are still deep scars in the party left by the ferocious battle between Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.

And then there is the issue of race. It gets much less attention than the battle with Clinton, or the daily barbs traded with McCain, or Obama's struggle to rise in the polls. Yet it might provide the key to understanding the strange inability of the Obama campaign to achieve lift-off in the polls.

'The question of this election is race. The answer we are looking for is, how much will it matter?' said Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside. America will soon find out. When Obama speaks on Thursday to more than 80,000 people in Denver's football stadium he will also reach a television audience of millions of Americans. They will look into the face of a man who could be their next President and for the first time it will be a black face.

By the end of this week, America will finally be facing up to the question that might truly define the 2008 presidential race: is America ready to elect a black President to the White House?
…

In research published in New York magazine, the pollster Thom Riehle, who founded the AP/Ipsos survey, calculates that even if the black turnout were to rise by 25 per cent from 2004, with Obama gaining a 92 per cent share, and significantly more Hispanic voters and under-50s voted for Obama than voted for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, he would still need to win 40 per cent of the white vote - just one point less than Kerry got. As Riehle points out: 'This is a daunting task as the first black candidate for President. To get there, he's got to win roughly the same proportion of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that all other Democrats get. If he doesn't he's in a world of trouble. He can't win it just by changing the electorate.'
…

There is little doubt that race is going to play a starring role in this election after the convention season. 'It has not been too much of an issue so far. Or, at least not talked about. But that is not going to last,' said Bowler. It is already getting a lot of play on conservative talkshows and in books. Rush Limbaugh, the 'shock jock' who is hugely popular with white conservatives, has stepped up race-baiting on his broadcasts. He recently claimed Democrats chose Obama as a sort of 'affirmative action' programme. 'I think it really goes back to the fact that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy,' he told his millions of listeners. Warming to his theme a few days later, he said: 'You can't criticise the little black man-child.'

…

Like Michele Norris appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:

"One thing we've only touched on lightly here is the issue of race, and the polling has shown that many of these voters when they say "he's not patriotic enough", "we just don’t know who he is", "we don’t know what he really stands for", if you dig down a little deeper there are suggestions that some of these issues are proxies for this issue of race."

Like Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:

“It hurts me to say, as the child of working class people, what these people were saying. When I get email from these people, there ain't a lot of nuance.”

And

Connie Schultz: I think Michele makes a very important point about race ... I've been writing about this because I come from the working class, and I am very troubled by some of the things I'm hearing from the working class. About race. And I said, you gotta go home and have the tough conversations with family members.

Rose: What do they say?

Schultz: (They say) "I will not vote for..."

Rose (because he is congenitally unable to stop interrupting people trying to finish their sentences): "...an African American?!?"

Schultz: Right. If they say it well. If they say it kindly. I think it's code when they say "Well we really don't know if he's a Muslim" and "we don't know if he's patriotic". That’s all code for race. And for us to pretend that isn't happening is irresponsible for us in the media.

And let me give it up for the usually unctuous and trifling Charlie Rose. With a couple of exceptions, the people gathered around his table over the last two nights actually talked about race and politics in remarkably clear language.

Which is a very good thing.

Because among all the trivial nonsense being kicked up by wilding packs of network haircuts going mad chasing each other's tails and getting bent sniffing each other's panty-liners, that is real, genuine news.

Because 100 years from now, the Tale of Election 2008 will be the story of several million ignorant, white, working-class voters – both Democrats and Independents (the Republicans are a lost cause who will remain an unashamedly morally bankrupt open-sewer for at least another 30 years) and which way they turned.

Period.

Right now there is so much pressure on these voters -- so much torque to their sense of identity being wrenched onto by them by the economic and cultural disasters wrought by the liars and sociopaths they keep electing -- that they are almost in tears, moaning and clawing at their skulls, trying to figure out how to simultaneously:

A) Keep from drowning in a rising tide of ruin and failure of their own making, and

B) Stay faithful to the deep, ugly foundation stones of bigotry they dutifully learned at their father’s and grandfather’s knees and which, up until now, they have been spared the pain of facing by the use of pretty, perfumed code.

They are becoming unhinged trying to reconcile this massive, existential dissonance at the core of their lives, except this time applying the Negrological Constant to magically explain away their fundamentally defective model of the Universe will not work.

This time there they cannot escape the choice the have to make. And this time we on the Left will remind them -- loudly, rudely, and from every street corner, blog, and microphone -- exactly what those choices are: to adapt and change and live in a Progressive and tolerant nation, or stay just as they are and die in a Conservative and bigoted one.

And right now it is 6-to-5 and pick ‘em which is stronger: the people, or the American Racism Virus that hagrides them.

Through An Ass Darkly

I managed to choke down about 20 minutes of Robert Gibbs' letter-perfect impersonation of Scotty Dog McClellan at his tap-dancingest today: after watching him bibble on about "teachable moments" and "mistakes were made" and the "media environment" without coming within a million miles of either the primary problem (Conservative media now completely runs the GOP and is wholly owned and operated by lying partisan shitbags and every single person in the press room fucking well knows it) or the secondary problem (The Obama Administration has now been exposed as absolute cringing pussies when it comes to taking on the Stormfront Right) I had to shut it off and haul out the puke bucket.

Gibbs never managed to utter the words "Fox" or "Brietbart" one, or even brush up against the Multibillion Full-Immersive Shoutycracker Media Machine until he was directly and repeatedly questioned about it; instead, Gibbs couched it all as some gauzy, metaphysical issue having to do with "urgency" and our modern news cycle and Teh Internets.

Or something.

Jesus Pistol-Packin' Christ.

Of course, this of all started from before Day One: back when, if you wanted to work for the new Administration you basically had to confess in writing to every email and web site comment you ever made that might in some way be taken by someone somewhere as embarrassing to the White House. (Personal FYI: even though I would be considered very well qualified to work in at least two of the Obama White House's cabinet departments, this sort of thing is exactly why I never bothered to apply.)

So what have we learned about the key difference between how the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration handles prickly personnel issues?

The Bush Administration showed that even in cases where high ranking members Administration were caught dead-to-rights committing fatally flagrant acts of incompetence, high crimes or actual treason -- even where the Administration had made public promises to get rid of just such people if it turned out they were in any way in involved in such activities -- time after time the Bush White House would circle the wagons, protect their own, dig in their heels and just fucking lie about it.

And get away with it.

And when the smoke cleared, most of the perpetrators had gone on to prosperous careers as Fox News kapos.

But the Obama Administration?

Based on their record to-date, if the critique comes from the Right, apparently all it takes is one wet fart in their general direction from a con man like Breitbart or a sociopath like Beck and the White House will fall all over itself to kiss your wingnut boo-boo and make it all better, and under the fucking bus the allegedly offending staffer or organization must go, go, go!

If the critique comes from the Left -- no matter how loud, or righteous, of fact-based, or reasonable -- you are simply ignored.