Live from The Ministry of Money.
At the Mouse Circus, the walking dead took the stage this week. With nothing else to talk about (except everything of importance) and everyone on vacation, the Sunday Gasbag review rolled out their "B" teams, and a guest-list packed wall-to-wall with the one group that never sleeps: Wall Street apologists.
Needless to say, not a single, remotely full-throated Liberal voice was to be found anywhere.
Regular readers know there are any number of political unicorns which no amount of cheap talk and expensive liquor will ever get me to believe in: phantasms like the Tea Party (There. Is. No. Tea. Party), Centrists and, most especially, "The American People".
Other than legally and geographically, there is absolutely no such thing as "The American People" about which one can speak authoritatively or monolithically. Half the adults who comprise "The American People" haven't got the slightest fucking clue what's going on around them at any given time. They zoom through their days barely aware of the most basic elements of government and how they work, or don't work. Completely oblivious that one of America's political parties is now fully insane, and is run by economic terrorists, oligarchs and theocrats.
They only know what they absorb during their quick suck off the Mainstream Media teat, which means all they know is that "both sides are wrong", that their taxes are too damn high, that they don't trust nobody, that they don't want nobody messin' with their Social Security and Medicare, and that those damn Washington D.C. politicians bicker too much.
Also that the United States is, without question, the greatest single accomplishment of Almighty God in the History of Recorded Time.
Also gas is too high, and I'm sick of having some "Do you wanna speak Messican?" option on the phone every time I call my bank!
They are, in a word, morons
but since they don't vote, in the end I don't really give a flying fuck what they think, and mention is made of the Great Wad here merely to underscore the fundamental absurdity of the idea of speaking on behalf of the dreams and desires of a group 50% of whom are flat-worm oblivious to the most basic, A-B-C's of politics, economics and culture.
Of the other 50% -- the ones who do vote -- 40% of those are stone crazy, and another 8-10% believe only in being on the winning side, and so blow with the prevailing wind.
Which is why an entire Mouse Circus that is now no longer much of anything but back-to-back...
The American People believe...
Everybody knows...
The American People are frustrated...
The American People clearly...
The American People no longer...
Everybody says...
The American People are angry...
The American People intuit...
The American People hear...
Everybody understands...
The American People touch...
The American People feel...
The American People taste like chicken...
...feels a lot like being hit in the head over and over again with a hot lump of stupid, underscored by the presence of the truly loathsome Frank Luntz, on hand to lend his special expertise to the discussion of which phonemes can be used to stimulated which parts of cerebellums of "The American People" in order to induce them to commit mass suicide.
That it involves something called "The Three P's" was all I could catch before my overwhelming contempt for Frank Luntz and everything he stands for made my cerebellum move my hand to the teevee channel changing thingie just in time to stuff Frank Luntz back into the Schrodinger Cat Box (yay!) only to be replaced by the even-more-existentially-loathsome Karl Rove (sigh), who came on my teevee long enough to lecture me that one shouldn't question the motives of "Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McChinless" and "people on the other side".
Yes, this Karl Rove:
"...liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.What is/was/never-will-be mentioned on my teevee are subjects like the indisputable fact that Karl Rove should be in a federal prison right now, getting his ass traded around the cell block for cigarettes.
Mentioning really, really important stuff like Rove's treasonous past, or lying present, or the fact that the Party he serves is now 100% insane makes Wall Street People nervous, and so we do not talk about such things.
Instead we get Harold Ford Junior -- Wall Street's most faithful manservant -- bookended between the staggeringly irrelevant Peggy Noonan (rubbing one out under the table to the Sainted Memory of Ronald Reagan once again) and Maria Bartiromo (a Wall Street stooge reporter for CNBC) repeating the latest focus-group-tested Wall Street Mantra:
Substitute "Meet the Press" host Savannah Guthrie: What does Wall Street think of Rick Perry being a lunatic, Maria Bartiromo?
- Lower taxes.
- Less regulation.
- The President needs to stop talking mean about Big Business and Wall Street.
- Wall Street is Main Street.
Maria Bartiromo: Wall Street, Main Street, people are sick and tired of the us-versus-them. This country has never been more divided.
Except, of course, we have
And Conservatives have never gotten over it.
Peggy Noonan: The crazy Right wants more crazy people to choose from!
Harold Ford, Jr.: Whoever the Republicans nominate will be a Serious Candidate. Chris Christie! Somebody! Giuliani! Is there anybody out there?
Harold Ford, Jr.: We need certainty! We need a moratorium on new regulations! Repatriation of the money my rich friends have stashed overseas. Who cares if we don't tax it: if you just beg hard enough, my rich friends might give you a job.
Harold Ford Junior: Truly one of the finest Imperial testicle cozy money can buy.
On "This Week...", John Huntsman made his big, bold move.
Huntsman giving the Centrist Party Line: America is a center-right country, and I am the Sensible Center candidate.
Huntsman giving the Villager Party Line: Fringes on both sides; Barack Obama on the Left, and "some" on the Right.
Huntsman giving the Wall Street Party Line: Cut taxes! Chloroform regulation! "Broaden the base" (translation: cut taxes on my rich friends, and make up for it by taxing the fuck out of the poor and middle class.) Fix our "heroin-like addiction" to imported oil (presumably by using up every last drop of oil.)
Finger-pointing!
Name-calling!
The extreme ends of the political spectrum.
Huntsman on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis: If we had defaulted, we would have been fucked. There was zero leadership from the President.... He should have walked away from the TelePrompTer.
Substitute Host Jake Tapper: But you raised your hand in agreement with that incredibly stupid "10-to-1 cut is still not enough" question at the Republican debate. Doesn't that make you just as guilty of reckless brinkmanship as the other crackpot assholes who are running for the nomination of your Party?
Huntsman: It was a nonsense question so my answer doesn't count.
Tapper's eyebrows: WTF? So...you just lied?
Huntsman: I prefer to think of it as my Magic Mormon Underwear protecting me from the consequences all the stupid Republican shit my Party is hooked on.
On "Reliable Sources", Mistah Kurtz interviewed The Moustache of Understanding
about golfing with Obama and how nice it would be if all the imaginary stuff Tom Friedman pulls out of his ass were actually real.
Friedman: Cable and media generally is so fucked and the issues I'm talking about are so important that we stepped back and wrote a book about it.
Mistah Kurtz: But don't you have a very big megaphone in that you have a column in the New York Times?
Friedman: Lalalala.
Mistah Kurtz: So you played golf with Obama. How was that?
Friedman: Very journalist-y.
The Ministry of Money never closes.
Moments later my teevee made a long, pleasant dopplerish sound as it sailed out the window.
5 comments:
Karl Rove should be in prison, pure and simple, if for nothing else than the outing of Valerie Plame. Bush the Elder once proclaimed the revelation of a CIA operative's identity was treason and Rove's fingerprints were all over that. Character assasination is his specialty. But we here in Texas know Rove only too well. If our former governor, Ann Richards, were still alive, she could vouch for that. When once asked if she knew Karl Rove, her response was "Hell yes! He cut his teeth on me down here in Texas". That was when Bush the Younger was running against her. He was also instrumental in foisting Rick Perry onto us, although now he seems to be having seconds thoughts about Governor Goodhair. We have been having more than second thoughts about Perry for years, but he's like Michael Myers. Just when you think he's dead, he comes right back to life and cuts off your head.
So far as the MSM goes, it's nothing short of a farce. There's not a dime's worth of difference between any of them. If you want the facts, go to the blogs. I thank you again for enduring that shit for the greater good of us all. Every time I try, I end up yelling myself hoarse or risking a concussion from banging my head against the wall.
Hi All,
I know I've emailed this, but I think that "Tea Party Base" is useful. As you have said, no, it is not a new movement, but I think it is a distillation of a segment of the base.
Movement Conservatism, as you have said, has three attractors around which leadership can be mapped, Evil, Stupid, and Crazy. The bottom half of this I think is Stupid, Crazy, and Lazy. I don't think any of us would be comfortable saying that large segments of the population are Evil, but they sure as shit are lazy. Stupid, Lazy, and Crazy are the three spices in the spice rack of the Koch Brothers, Rove, and the leadership of Movement Conservatism. When you spill one of those spices, you get the Tea Party Base, the Evangelical Base, and the Centrist Base.
The “Tea Party Base” is willful stupidity as a movement. The “Evangelical Base” is crazy-and-loving-it as a movement. I know there is a lot of overlap, but I think there are two separate spices here. (Can you tell I'm cooking dinner as I type this?) The TP is willfully ignorant, and has also absolved themselves of memory. They can forget Romney laid off and outsourced jobs and claim the Democrats are against jobs. They can even forget when things happened, and believe Obama was president in 2007 for TARP or 2003 when “Prez-O” ordered the invasion of Iraq. They are the infinitely re-programmable golems, created simply as kill-bots.
A big difference is that the Evangelicals have a mythology and memory, and I think that is the key reason they should be separated. The TP has a mission statement, “Liberals hate 'Murica and want to destroy it, and I'm a good person for hating them and fighting them.”. That's all they have. Their history goes back a period that can be counted in days. The Evangelical movement has a mythology entrench. Yes, it has been changed, but change is generational. They are crazy in their fanaticism, but they are not infinitely reprogrammable. They have a mission statement, vision statement, code of conduct, employee handbook, and history, and their instructions for action must fit within the confines of all those things.
Lastly, the TP has an anarchist or nihilist streak, whereas the Evangelicals want a large and powerful monolithic power structure.
The Centrists are lazy. They have been lured into sloth. While the TP is angry and the Evangelicals are bitter, the Centrists don't give a fuck and so snark and bitch on Twitter and Facebook. They are inherently reactionary, and so can be pushed into voting against their interests by simply voting for the party out of power and being moved by appeals of “both sides do it!” and “reasonable centrism! Common sense solutions!”.
Mike.K.
I gotta run for some sort of office just for the pleasure of saying "you, the voters, are so very stupid" in every speech and "you, the media, are so very stupid" in every interview.
It doesn't sound constructive to say "you're stupid" over and over. But it's nearly the only substantive and relevant truth left.
Thank you, again, for watching the Sabbath gasbags for us. I can't do it anymore. Just listening to Friedman's voice makes me want to stick my head in the oven.
Were it not for blogs like this one, I would totally lose hope. The system is rigged, the press is part of the game, and the majority of the voters are criminally stupid. How do we save a country that no longer wants to be saved? -- Or possibly, no longer deserves to be saved?
"I wish that I could find a good book to live in...
"The American People taste like chicken ..." is the best rawk-LP name ever.
"The Three P's:" Paraphilia, Protestant Work Ethic & Puberty. Here's to America living past its Turbulent Teens with a better overall standard of living than Mauritania.
Post a Comment