Sunday Mornin' Coming Down – Part I

Your fast, unbalanced and possibly entirely fictional account of the events of the day.

Fox…has nothing to say that I want to listen to today.

If you watch Fox for anything other that entertainment and reconnaissance value you should know that your puppy has just run out into heavy traffic and you should get up right now and sprint after him.

Blindly.


On This Week...John Kerry.

No one gives up their right and responsibility to tell the truth. No enemy will profit Americans telling the truth if we have people and policies to respond the them honestly.

Kerry giving it another run? Maybe. But now he says he is spending his time traveling cross-country for Dems candidates.

He’s a stuffed shirt and has the charisma of a beet, but he does light up when he talks about what he loves. Same thing with Gore. Smart, competent and stiff as collar-stays.

Dems gotta take a lesson here. Passion sells, but you cannot send Mohammed to the mountain, and build strategies around making public men animate themselves around issues that don’t move their souls.

Let a man like Gore be a sonorous prophet…about energy and the environment and education. Let someone like Kerry sing paeans…to foreign policy and veterans affairs. And then just let them vote right and pack competent people around the other twenty issues that make the Party stand up and dance.

And quit pushing them to be the Party’s Passa Passa Girl.


Quit demanding that they dance against the beat.

From the Los Angeles Times

Dancing Against the Beat
Grenada's elders condemn the suggestive Passa Passa. They say it is vulgar and exploits girls, many of whose parents work abroad.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

April 10, 2006

GOUYAVE, Grenada — The girl in the flounced white micro-mini and green glitter tube top writhes to the dancehall beat throbbing through the Q-West nightclub. She drunkenly gyrates in a motion that sends her skirt riding up high enough to show her panties, if she were wearing any.

Throughout the club, sporadically lighted by the flash of a camera or strobe light, barely clad girls dance themselves into a frenzy of carnal excess.

At the crossroads of obscurity and nowhere, this rustic seaport scented by nutmeg, diesel and decomposing fish seems an unlikely venue for the most controversial new dance craze in the Caribbean. But anyone who makes the journey here on a Friday night — actually, Saturday morning — is likely to get an eye-opening glimpse of Passa Passa and an idea why parents, clergy, government and cultural guardians are trying to exorcise the Jamaican import from the island.

Grenadian elders have condemned Passa Passa, performed to the fast, rhythmic percussions of the reggae style known as dancehall, charging that its strip-tease eroticism exploits directionless island girls. In this nation where many parents have gone abroad to find work, they say, the young women lack moral guideposts, leaving them susceptible to attention-getting stunts.

"It's vulgarish. People strip and grab at their bodies," said Carl Charmaine, a father of five, including three teenage daughters. "This is not good for Grenada."

…

Because when you get right down to brass tacks, either of these men would have made fine Presidents.

Then came Ahnuld.

I can’t watch Ahnuld.

On…Face the Nation.

Pat Buchanan says he respects Bush’s need to stand by Rumsfeld. The issue was civilian control of the military. But that he also agrees with the generals to a tee. We did everything wrong. Shit, we should never have gone in in the first place.

Fundamentally, the Preznit and his coalition have profoundly different opinions on things.

Buchanan essentially offers Dubya the same advice that Craig Shirley offers in Saturday’s WaPo (hat tip to commentor mac)

How the GOP Lost Its Way

By Craig Shirley
Saturday, April 22, 2006; A21
The immigration reform debate has highlighted a long-standing fissure in the GOP between the elitist Rockefeller business wing and the party's conservative populist base. Whether the two groups can continue to coexist and preserve the Republican majority is increasingly doubtful as conservatives begin to consider -- and in some cases cheer -- the possibility that the GOP may lose control of Congress this fall.
…

There is nothing new about this division. It is a 40-year-old fight that has its roots in the cultural, economic, regional and ideological differences between the two camps. Still, most conservatives felt that after the victory of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Revolution of 1994 their point was made and the country-clubbers would know their place. They were wrong. The Rockefeller wing is now attempting to reassert its control over the party and is openly hostile toward the Reagan populists who created the Republican majority in the first place.

Major Republicans have taken to attacking others within their own party as unsophisticated nativists. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie warned populists to cease and desist from promoting "border enforcement first" legislation. "Anti-immigration rhetoric is a political siren song, and Republicans must resist its lure," he said. And in a recent editorial, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party."

Conservatives see this kind of rhetoric as inflammatory, anti-intellectual and offensive. Far from being driven by xenophobia and intolerance, conservative populists are motivated by a profound respect for the rule of law and by a patriotic regard for America's sovereignty and national security.
…
The Republican Party is now unraveling. ... On top of all the scandals, it has just come to light that the RNC paid millions in legal bills to defend operative James Tobin, who was convicted with associates in an illegal phone-jamming scheme aimed at preventing New Hampshire Democrats from voting. In doing so, the GOP appears to sanction and institutionalize corruption within the party.

The elites in the GOP have never understood conservatives or Reagan; they've found both to be a bit tacky. They have always found the populists' commitment to values unsettling. To them, adherence to conservative principles was always less important than wealth and power.

Unfortunately, the GOP has lost its motivating ideals. The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles. The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view.
…

Bwahaha!

You know, the irony is that there’s a reasonable middle ground to be found on Immigration. And trade. And Education.

On a lot of things.

But the Randall Terry Right does not believe in the reasonable middle of anything.

Sorry, bitch: This is the Party of the Southern Strategy and now you get to suck on that Fudgesicle all the way down.

The Party rose to power fueled by hatespeech and bombthrowing. On the indiscriminate flaming rage of Talk Radio. On calling anyone who believes other than they do a traitor.

Any woman who doesn’t want to be a brood mare and the perfect Christian Purpose Driven Wife is a feminazi.

Anyone who believes in Science and doesn’t want to see the planet milked dry and left for dead is a treehugger.

This is the Party led by sociopaths who really, truly, actually believe hurricanes are dispatched by Yahweh to punish the ungodly and 9/11 was the fault of queers, feminists and the ACLU.

This is the Party that only wins because of is its grotesque and carefully cultivated alliance of Armageddonists and bigots.

And after five years of lies, arrogance, treachery and murderous incompetence on a scale unique in American history, there is no one left outside the asylum that believes a single fucking word that Dubya says anymore.

About anything.

And the advice he is being offered by Buchanan and Shirley and (one would presume) by The Riechitect himself -- Don Karleone -- is to mine the base even harder. Jam down even deeper into the Wingnut Snuggle Sack.

Please, Mr. President, listen to them. Pleasepleaseplease fire up the Swiftboats and roll out the Presidential Back-hoe and try to dig out a subbasement that is somehow beneath the basement apartment of Jerry Falwell’s outhouse that you already occupy.

Careful though. If the GOP goes any lower, you could find yourself popping out in Canton.

And speaking of China…

End Part I