William Safire, Nixon Speechwriter and Times Columnist, Is Dead at 79
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md. on Sunday. He was 79.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Martin Tolchin, a friend of the family.
There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: there was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” ...
Safire was member of an arcane and dying profession; he was a writer, in a country that has been plunging -- headlong and giggling -- into an abyss of vicious ignorance and arrogant illiteracy for a generation.
On the one hand, one less great writer in that darkening world is a sad thing.
On the other hand, Safire used his formidable gifts to craft an arsenal which he put into the hands of many of the people who were leading the charge into that darkness.
So there you go.
According to Meet The Fox This Week with Chris Matthews, ACORN has come clean about their secret nuclear public health care option, but we may or may not have to send in one million more troops.
Or maybe two million.
Or maybe we’ll just, eventually…
But of course, aerial drones, armies, six barrel shotguns and even nuclear fire poured from orbit like the wrath of God all have the same drawback: They can kill anything except the monsters under your bed.
Captain Obvious pointed out that, while dilemmas have horns, some people like cupcakes better, while he for one cares less for them.
Or something.
While Martha Raddatz discretely stabbed Bob Woodward under the table with her "I've Covered Afghanistan for Nine Years and I Still Have to Listen to This Condescending Twaddle?" souvenir pen.
Bill “Big Dog” Clinton and David “Fluffy” Greggers attempted to settle their
longstanding feud
with an old fashioned
back-alley tint-off!
Meanwhile, the distinction between the Leader of the Republican Party
And a certain sketch comedy character from 20 years ago
that history is never kind to fat troublemakers who try to upend the status quo merely because it has been rigged by a tiny, powerful elite to produce grotesquely unfair and inhumane results for everyone who is not a member of that elite.
Here, one such impudent sassmouth has the temerity to point out to one of our national treasures of journalism that said journalist*
might actually be full of shit.
"I have held up a Looking-Glass in which some of the Ministers may see their ugly faces, and the Nation its Injustice."
In 2009, mainstream media political "journalists" were a class of corporate thralls who regularly appeared on the teevee machine demanding that Liberal interviewees respond to mean things which fictional critics might hypothetically say about them at some point in the future.
This profession continued to be an extremely lucrative variation of a mass entertainment genre called "reality teevee" until most of its practitioners were wiped out in 2013 from spontaneous cranial implosion brought on by what was later identified as the C1F2 virus, more commonly called "Future Perfect Conditional Continuous Tense Disorder" or "Fox Disease".
Palin Hong Kong Speech Blames Government For Financial Crisis; Some Walk Out In Disgust
HONG KONG — Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, criticized for her lack of foreign policy experience, emerged in Asia on Wednesday to share her views from "Main Street U.S.A." with a group of high-flying global investors.
In her first trip to the region, the former Alaska governor addressed an annual conference of investors in Hong Kong in what was billed as a wide-ranging talk about governance, economics and U.S. and Asian affairs.
Two US delegates left early, according to AFP, with one saying "it was awful, we couldn't stand it any longer." He declined to be identified.
"I'm going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street U.S.A.," Palin told a room full of asset managers and other finance professionals, according to a video of part of the speech obtained by The Associated Press. "And how perhaps my view of Main Street ... how that affects you and your business."
Palin spoke out against government intervention in the economy. "We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," Palin said, according to the Wall Street Journal. "We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom," she added. ...
She didn't refer to President Barack Obama by name, the Wall Street Journal reported, but said she called his campaign promises "nebulous, utopian sounding... Now 10 months later, though, a lot of Americans are asking: more government? Is that the change we want?"
Some attendees were disappointed by her focus on her home state and her attacks on President Obama.
"As fund managers we want to hear about the United States as a whole, not just about Alaska," one told AFP. "And she criticized Obama a lot but offered no solutions." ...
OK, two things.
First, I asked my advisers about me quitting my little job and picking up a six-figure gig trotting the globe and slamming the President.
They told me I didn’t have the tits for it.
Meh.
Second, as all of you who escaped our nation's 25-year-long Conservative prefrontal Limbaughtomy remember, six short years ago when a singer blurted out a dozen unprepared words dissing George W. Bush at a concert in London (or, as wingnuts always ominously intone "On Foreign Soil!"), the Right absolutely lost its collective shit.
There were marches. Vigils. Coast-to-coast Hate Radio rants. A virtual embargo on playing the music of "The Dixie Chicks" anywhere in this Home of the Brave.
It was pretty much this...
Hell, they made a movie about it and everything:
Or don't you remember?
But now, of course, everything has changed.
Now the White, Conservative, Southern, Evangelical, Republican imbecile failure is out of the White House.
Now the smart, Black, Centrist Democrat Secret Muslim Communist is in the White House.
And now Joe "Old Yeller" Wilson has added another chapter to the popular career and fund-raising manual for budding, Conservative demagogues: "How To Make Friends and Influence Pig People."
For myself, I couldn't care less if Bible Spice ran through the halls of the Kremlin warning the world that under Barack Obama, NASA is funding top-secret orbital abortion and gay-indoctrination camps (Because face it, it's only a matter of time.) She is merely the latest punch line in our long, tragic national joke that began thirty years ago with, "Didja hear the one about the Republican Party being turned over to crazy people?" and her carefully prepared remarks (Hello, Newt!) were obviously calibrated to lob another verbal "Pay!Attention!To!Me!" cinder block into traffic.
But while I might not care what the Wasilla Grifter has to say about anything, anywhere, every single fucking Conservative who pretended to be standing on righteous principle when they went full DEFCON 1 monkeyshit in 2003, and who now stays silent or cheers Caribou Barbie on needs to have their voter registration card confiscated and ceremonially burned atop a pyre of Tobie Keith records.
we band of Blue Dogs; For he to-day that gives his vote to me Shall be my bitch...
While some of us will always prefer classics of American rhetoric, such as Lincoln's "Your Claim Has Been Denied" Address...
... If we can just shut the nosy, quibbling socialists the Hell up, the world will little note, nor long remember, what we did here, but can never forget what profits we made here.
It is for us, the bloated plutocrats, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which Fox News, our pet Congresscritters and the low-wattage Teabaggers have, thus far, so nobly carried on.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these soon-to-be-uninsured rubes we take increased devotion to the increased shareholder value for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these soon-to-be denied meatbags shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of profits; and that this government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation, shall not perish from the earth.
...there's no denying the inspirational power of Andy Cobb's rousing call to take to the barricades in defense of the flower of American corporate personhood against the predations of grubby, breakable human beings.
...who showed up on the Cotton Mathers Chris Matthews’ Show yesterday to play a game of truth-keep-away with fellow Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, leaving poor little Ricky Stengel jumping back and forth trying to agree with everybody.
Matthews: (To Stengel and kinda incoherent): ...about this paranoiac streak in American history...is it part right now, part of it is, this white attitude towards a Black President. Is it that stark?
Stengel: You know, I start from the viewpoint that lots and lots of racists voted for Barack Obama…
WTF?
Stengel: I can’t tell you what is in people’s minds and hearts.
Ok, but what about what’s on their signs?
On their buttons?
On their tee shirts?
On their bookshelves?
In their churches?
On their radios and teevees?
Or are the tens of millions of failed, mentally underclocking losers who faithfully hang on every word that comes out of Limbaugh’s and Beck’s mouths all doing it “ironically”?
Stengel: I do believe the reaction that is going on right now would happen to a White President that is trying to do some of the same things that Barack Obama is doing.
Stengel: But I do think that us dwelling on it is not good for the public discourse. Not good for America.
Again, reasonable people must ask, WTF?
Matthews: This sign – “I Want My Country Back” – would that have happened (with a White President)?
Parker: By the way, in January, 70% of voters approved of Barack Obama. That percentage did suddenly become racist.
No, 70% of Americans approved of Barack Obama, which includes some large number of those 50% of all Americans who don’t vote.
So, yes, the 55% of the electorate that voted for him approved of him…and some large number of distracted, disengaged losers looked up “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” long enough to give him a thumbs up.
But the 30% of Americans who are hardcore bible-crazies, bigots and imbeciles – that irredeemably devolved slab of the public who now control the GOP and who make up Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh’s the loyal audience – never approved of him and never will.
Seriously, why isn’t the ghost of Pigmeat Markham
beating the crap out of these clowns with his pig bladder? Parker: When they say, “I want my country back” they’re talking about this great anxiety that is widespread about the rapid growth of gummint, and debt and deficit…
driftglass: All of which are issues -- and let’s all repeat it now for the millionth time for the people waaaaay in the back of the room in the cheap seats – about which these same “patriots” never expressed a whisper of concern as long as the President who was massively increasing the debt and the deficit and expanding the reach and intrusiveness of gummint was a White Christian Conservative Republican named “Bush”.
Or don’t you remember?
Parker: So when they say they want their country back, they’re not saying they want White America back. ... What they’re saying is they want to remain a “constitutionally sound country” and they’re in doubt about that…
driftglass: All of which are issues -- let’s all repeat it now for the million-and-first time for life forms in orbit around distant suns -- about which these same “patriots” never expressed a whisper of concern when the Constitution they love so rapturously was being shredded by a White Christian Conservative Republican President named “Bush”.
Or don’t you remember?
Matthews: Yeah, but we just sat here and watched the two douchbags who lead the GOP – Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – call the President a racist and say that he hates White people. How can “serious” journalists like David Brooks and Kathleen Parker gas on and on about how none of this is really happening when the irrefutable evidence that it is happening is staring them right in the face?
David Fucking Brooks: Yeah, what Rush and Glenn Beck are doing is just race-baiting. 100%, that’s race-baiting.
Go on…
David Fucking Brooks: So let’s just ignore it. Because its scary to me, and because if we ever seriously examined why I -- David Fucking Brooks – continue to defend Rush’s GOP and Becks’ American Conservatism Movement at the same time I pretend to abhor everything they do and say, then people might start to figure out that I’m nothing but an opportunistic weasel, willing to take every side of any issue as long as I get to continue to play the part of everybody’s favorite Non-Ranting Conservative and keep my key to the Big Dollar Media’s Executive Washroom.
David Fucking Brooks: So instead, let’s ignore everything that is actually going on around us here and now and pretend to take “a longer view”. To that end I will now recite a long list of American populists and demagogues to try to distract you from the fact that, here and now, I am the willing tool of terrible, bigoted people because the pay is really good.
David Fucking Brooks: This is a populist uprising of mostly-rural people. And they think the moral backbone of the country comes for people who work with their hands. Who are extremely suspicious when you get government power fusing with banking power…which is a lot of what they’ve seen over the past few weeks…they would be upset if Washington merged with Wall Street… the auto industry… the energy sector…the health care industry.
driftglass: Let us all now repeat the obvious for the million-and-second time for those vast, cool intelligences running empires in distant galaxies: these same “patriots” who are mere reacting to the existential terror of “Washington” merging with "Wall Street” somehow nonetheless happily voted for the Party of Bankers and Wall Street for 30 years as it fucked them over and over again.
These humble, working folk -- for some reason that David Fucking Brooks is too cowardly to name -- somehow nonetheless gleefully voted for the Party that destroyed the standards of living of millions of humble, working folk; smashing their labor unions, driving their wages down and shipped their jobs overseas.
These Sons of the Soil who would soil themselves in America-loving outrage if Washington ever merged with “the energy sector” somehow nonetheless joyfully elected an Administration which was run entirely by former oil industry executives, and whose most aggressive fundraiser was Enron’s Ken “Kenny-boy” Lay.
These same concerned Americans who are leaping from their doublewide trailers only out of their sincere concern that “Washington” is trying to merge with “the health care industry” never had a problem with Medicare, Medicaid, and somehow nonetheless never expressed a whisper of concern as long as the President who was adding an additional, multi-trillion dollar unfunded Medicare benefit was a White Christian Conservative Republican named “Bush”. David Fucking Brooks: And if they saw as what they saw as over-educated people were leading the country. They’d be upset whether it was Hillary, or John Kerry or Barack Obama. Whether it was anybody.
driftglass: I predict a sudden, violent downpour of “Both Sides Do It” in 3…2…1…
David Fucking Brooks: To me its rural small town versus cosmopolitan big city. And to me the essence of remaining sane in times like these is to not get on either side.
Yay!
David Fucking Brooks: Because they’re both driving each other nuts.
Double Yay! Matthews: That’s the same thing that said John Kerry is French.
Parker: I know Joe Wilson and he’s not an “angry white man”. I was shocked. It was an “unusual: thing for him – or anyone – to do. I think it is unfair to refer to it as racist.
Parker asserts that imputing racism to Joe Wilson – or to anyone – is unfair “because we can’t read someone’s mind or know their heart”. Of course, a year ago when she suggested that Sarah Palin might not be fully qualified to be Vice President, this same Kathleen Parker had no problem reading their emails:
Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts
By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008
Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
... "After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.
Bwahahah!
Then Stengel gave the whole game away…
Stengel (to Brooks): Yes, the thing that Hofstadter wrote about it the “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Both side, in effect, mirror each other. They have the same attributes. They see the enemy in the other because of what they’re seeing in themselves.
What Stengel is citing as an foundational authority which undergirds their whole “Both sides are always equally, oppositely and insanely wrong” Big Lie is this work by Richard Hofstadter.
But Stengel gets his analysis completely wrong.
Far from proving the Big Lie of the Mainstream Media that the political Left and Right are some kind of conjoined ethical-twins, doomed to perfectly emulate each other’s insanities and excesses, Hofstadter simply says that a toxic strain of paranoia has always been afloat in American body politic, lodging over time here and there inside of various, congenial (and almost always right-wing) political movements: the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, some of the more conspiracy-minded Populists in 1865, the anti-Catholic of the late 1830s, the Ku Klux Klan, the Birchers, etc.
Stengel also, incredibly, doesn’t bother to mention is Hofstadter’s piece is from 1964.
That it was written as a response to (emphasis added):
“…angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”
That far from being some Left/Right equal opportunity smackdown, the piece specifically indicts “the contemporary right-wing paranoid”, which grew out of an earlier McCarthyist phase, and which viewed every event in modern history -- no matter how tiny -- as integral components in the Vast Commie Conspiracy, and the American Gummint as infested with collaborators who had already almost completely destroyed the country and sold out its people.
From Hofstadter:
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”
And
“…the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”
Stengel doesn’t mention that Hofstadter’s piece was written at the dawn of the Conservative Movement’s long, careful processing of harnessing and domesticating our nation’s wild strain of Political Paranoia in a generational plan to seize and hold electoral power which would come to be known as “The Southern Strategy”.
That it was written before Fox News. Before Hate Radio. Before Focus in the Family and the Moral Majority.
Written before Lee Atwater and his ratfucking political descendents figured out how to turn cross burnings into Get Out the Vote drives, how to make a Republican ward bosses out of bible-thumping cranks, and how to carefully gather together virtually every species of native xenophobe, bigot and lunatic into a limitless electoral power supply for the Party of God.
In other words, before the lunatic Right had its own media empire, religion, and major political party.
That lastly thing that Stengel doesn’t bother to mention is that yhe 19th Century movements Hofstadter cited in his essay each only lasted for brief periods of time before their impelling fever broke, or until they mutated into something else. However it has been nearly a half-century since the publication of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and during virtually all of that time the crazy-needle has remained firmly buried deep inside the Conservative Movement.
Matthews: The Far Left enjoys the craziness of the Far Right. We know that; it makes their case.
driftglass: No, Chris, we don’t. After over 4,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq, and over 30,000 wounded… After trillions of dollars flushed down various Republican ideological toilets… After watching the GOP break the country’s back in a hundreds different ways… I can tell you authoritatively that we really, really don’t.
Helene Cooper of the New York Times finally squirts a little of the Lemon Juice of Truth into the eyes of the wildly contorting White Conservative Journalists (and Stengel the Milquetoast Centrist) as they danced anxiously around the glaringly obvious fact that racism plays a huge part in the animus toward Barack Obama. Cooper (to David Fucking Brooks): You talk about these poor, rural fuckers hating the elites, but you never saw this during the Bush Administration, and Bush was the ultimate elitist.
Matthews: Leaders run the country, not the crazies. Would they, the White House, like it if the leaders of both parties were to say “cool it!”
And here it comes again…
David Fucking Brooks: The White House understands that you’ve got 10% of the country over here on the Wacky Right, and 10% of the country on the Wacky Left… And they’re not going to pay attention to it.
Triple Yay! David Fucking Brooks: They are sticking with the independents. Like on the health care bill, which is why it’s tending towards the Center.
Quadruple Yay!
David Fucking Brooks: …The main danger of this – of the Glenn and the Rush and all that– is not that they’re going to take over the country, but that they are taking over the Republican Party. And so if the Republican Party is sane, they’ll say “no” to these people. But every single elected leader in the Republican Party is afraid to take on Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
No, David, they have already taken over the Republican Party.
They did it long, long ago.
And because they took over the Republican Party years ago -- and because David Fucking Brooks has been a happy, willing and incredibly well-paid stooge of the Limbaugh Party for his entire adult life -- it is at times like these when you can actually see David Fucking Brooks’ economic self-interests, his ideological cowardice and his willful blindness all pile headlong into each other in real-time and create these perfect moments of complete political schizophrenia.
Because in order to avoid facing the ugly fact that he is nothing but the front man for the White Power Party...David Fucking Brooks has to somehow convince himself that Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are merely the “fringe”...while at the same time and almost in the same breath lamenting the fact that they completely control the political movement to which he has devoted his entire adult life.
So what is the mechanism these “respectable” Conservatives use -- day after day after day -- to lie to themselves? To keep pretending that Conservative leaders like Limbaugh and Beck – who routinely use the massive media resources at their command in order to spew racist poison -- somehow have nothing to do with the mobs of shrieking fear-crazed wingnuts idiots carrying racists signs who show up whenever and wherever Limbaugh and Beck tell them to?
How exactly does they do it?
Parker: The wackies – by the way – on either side are way more than 10%. More like half!
Sunday, I dialed in to the Mouse Circus long enough to hear this exchange on “Meet the Press”between the Establishmentarian Marionette David Gregory
and President Barack Obama:
DAVID GREGORY: Like the public option. You effectively said to the left, "It's not gonna happen."
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well what I — no, no, that's not true.
After which I got very tired and took a nap.
Because the simple truth of the matter is, other than his well-publicized snuggle-sack-cozy relationship with members of the Cheney Administration (most infamously documented here in this iconic Annie Leibovitz photograph of a moment of quiet intimacy between
Gregory and Karl Rove.)
David Gregory really has no business whatsoever being on teevee.
As has been noted in agonizing detail by observers far and wide, he has no special skills. No particular competencies. He often gets all giggly and obsequious around Conservative power and, as demonstrated by his question above, clearly can no longer distinguish between the simple reality of what someone actually said --
(President Obama, from his Health Care Address to the joint session of Congress
But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. ...
and
But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers. It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities. ...
and
It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight. ...
and
I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. ...
and Gregory's Beltway Insiders Kremlinological Gossip Girl Speculation over what they -- wink!wink! -- really meant:
Gregory: You effectively said to the left, "It's not gonna happen."
Because Gregory is a Big Dollar Media hack, and our fucked-up, sold-out culture currently offers no effective mechanism for wee little rabble like me and thee to expel such toxic hacks from our public airwaves.
But how much of a difference might it make if, every time anyone from David Gregory to David Fucking Brooks to Conservative David from Accounting lets fly with yet another casual lie, we on the Left -- from wee little rabble like me during workday water coolers wars all the way up to the rare Real Liberal who pops up on radio and teevee -- take it upon ourselves to say the following:
Prove It.
Simple.
I'm not asking for anyone to march anywhere you're not already marching, or to contribute to any cause you're not already giving to.
I am asking that every time some consequence-averse, Limbaugh-listening goof who spent the Bush years calling you a traitor wants to blow off their last 8 or 10 or 15 or 30 years of catastrophically-bad, hate-inflected and ignorance-driven political decisions with a shrug and a "Well, ya know, both sides do it", get right up in their grill and demand that they prove it.
Anyone, anywhere who makes this bullshit "Both side are are equally wrong" declaration is making an affirmative assertion of fact without a single shred of evidence on their side. They are doing it out of brainwashed habit, and they are doing it in the service of the biggest and most pernicious lie in America today, so demand that they produce one god damned shred of fucking evidence -- one decent study, one sociological analysis or one serious non-FoxNews poll -- to prove it.
(Bonus sainthood points for everyone who refrains from hitting intellectually comatose smirkers in the head with a snow shovel every time their answer begins with, "Well, everyone knows that..." )
Be persistent. Be a little rude if you have to.
Because, as Abbie Hoffman once said:
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out."
... It can be manly in insurance, We'll up your premium semi-annually, It's all tax-deductible, We're fairly incorruptible, We're sailing on the wide accountancy. ...
“...and dyed died each in the despairing posture of his fall.” *
Every year advertisers hire experts to crack open our skulls and get a good, clear look at the current state of our most secret mortal dreads and primal hungers. They do this because they are fucking evil, as the late, lamented Bill Hicks explains here (not remotely safe for work)
for those coming late to class.
The one and only upside to Madison Avenue's relentless dredging of the American mind is that, if you happen to be interested in what is truly driving us at any given moment (and you know how to read the goat entrails of commercial culture) then it's all there, laid out for you like a Sunday brunch buffet.
Now the advertiser’s dark art has always been built on an offer of redemption through consumption; the promise of fantasies satiated or fears vanquished for the low, low, discount price of $19.99. This is the ocean we swim in, but even in the blasting glare of a million shiny lies clamoring for my attention, this particular “Just For Men” commercial really caught my eye
for the way it ruthlessly plugs directly into the main transmission lines of male existential horrors that slithering just below the surface of modern American life.
You saw a 30 second commercial?
I saw a tiny, horror haiku built by Raymond Carver out of spare parts left over from
"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"
A brutal meditation on what awaits the unlucky at the played-out threadbare end of the American Dream.
Think of the vast, implied back-story of the guy in this commercial -- this American guy I’ll call Joe the Boomer -- who we meet at his darkest hour: backed into a savage corner from which he believes his only possibility of deliverance comes in the form of a magic potion which promises to claw him out of his shallow, middle-aged grave and back into a facsimile of youth.
As the failure Joe is today, something as basic as, say, a job interview in another city probably means standing in a mile-long line with hobos and teenagers, shambling in his paper airport security slippers through pat-downs at the hands of surly strangers, until he is unceremoniously crammed into a Greyhound Bus with wings on yet another leg of his desperate hunt for a job -- any job -- across a suddenly foreign and hostile nation.
Consider how different it was when Joe was his daughter's age; when he was a young white, middle-class God and America was his Mount Olympus.
To such a Young God in America, air travel was rare and adventurous; a rocket-ride through the heavens, eating sundaes dispensed by pretty ladies in short skirts and being awarded a pair of golden Junior Pilot wings from a Competent, Noble and Mighty silver-haired Captain at the end of his tour of the cockpit. (Girls got a “Junior Stewardess” pin.)
And as Joe the Boomer grew up, it was just assumed that coming of age white, male and middle-class in America meant becoming one of the Mighty Men. It meant a rewarding and prosperous life piloting a Great Nation through war and tribulation, through the end of a century and safely into his dignified retirement, while along the way, pretty ladies in short skirts brought him sundaes...and sex...and children...and gold-tinted, silver-haired companionship.
It meant growing up to be Jim Rockford, or to marry Suzanne Pleshette.
Or at least to travel a little way into the wild, wisdom grasses with that other Suzanne
where she would feed him tea and oranges That come all the way from China.
But agribusiness efficiency experts with vinyl hair and Blackberries downsized all the flavor out of all oranges.
And it’s not tea anymore but teevees -- the same teevees that unemployed, obsolete Joe used to make until the factory was closed and the jobs moved overseas -- that now come all the way from China.
And now -- at the same age or a little older than the Mighty Men were when they bestrode his childhood -- Joe finds that instead of being the master of his own fate, he has become a peasant on someone else’s land and his dreams of a dignified retirement -- or of just keeping a roof over his head -- have been vaporized by the merciless, compound interest which failure can exact for even the smallest mistakes.
They have been frittered into confetti by young, dark-haired men who come from a far-away place called Wall Street and who are neither competent nor noble, but who nonetheless -- by some sick and incomprehensible alchemy -- now sit at the controls where Joe was supposed to be sitting. Who fly Joe's once-great nation ever deeper into an alien and inhospitable future, while pretty ladies in short skirts cater to their every whim and bring them everything they could ever want.
And of course, whatever bits of his American Dream the banksters didn't get have been shattered by divorce.
In the commercial, Mrs. Joe is obviously long gone: probably left Joe and his grandpa hair for a Wall Street kinda guy, with a bigger cock and lusher, darker pubes. A guy who is, even now, somewhere far away, fucking his ex-wife crazy while they both laugh and laugh and laugh at Old Gray Loser Joe.
Joe played it all by the Rules of American Success so far as he knew them, and yet that life full of promise and the easy power of youth is gone with nothing to show for it and there is no longer enough time or strength left in his tank to chase it all back down.
Everything is gone.
Well, everything but the kid.
Shit, ten minutes ago she was teething and Joe was her Competent, Noble, Mighty hero; now she's his daughter-wife. While Joe can't even remember how to tie his own tie, his own child has turned into June Fucking Cleaver in tiny, faux-pearl earrings -- making mommy-faces and helping him slip the symbolic noose around his neck -- as they hide out together in a furnished duplex at the ass-end of his life.
Hide out, because right outside his door the monster that feeds middle-aged men like Joe into an emasculating abattoir is waiting to finish him off.
This is where the advertisers pick up Joe's story; at his moment of maximum humiliation and vulnerability, when his manhood and his identity as a father and husband hangs in tatters all around him.
Then ask yourself who it is that Joe cannot avoid seeing almost every day, and whose very existence rubs Joe's face in his own weakness and failure? Whose life is in every way the exactly opposite of Joe's; whose attractive, prosperous and not-at-all-fucked-up family just moved into the best house in the world while Joe sweats out his slide into penury and oblivion in a couple of furnished rooms as his daughter-wife looks on pityingly?
This Guy.
Late at night while his daughter sleeps on the couch in their rent-by-the-week duplex that's not much bigger than his first apartment, Joe watches his Chinese teevee and sees this black guy from Chicago with the sinister, foreign-sounding name busy living the life that was supposed to be Joe’s.
Then, two channels away, sincere men who seem to understand and completely sympathize with Joe's problems sink shafts directly into the heart of Joe's worst nightmares and whisper to him that his deepest fears are all true. That the black guy from Chicago with the sinister, foreign-sounding really has stolen Joe's birthright. Really does intend to destroy what's left of Joe's country.
Really isn't even legally the President.
Because when measured out by the spoonful, the fears of millions of men like Joe can make a hair dye salesman rich.
But when laced with blood, sold raw and by the pound, and pointed in the right direction, those same fears can topple governments.
Which is exactly what those sincere men on Joe's Chinese teevee are betting on.
Wall Street to Obama: Yeah, we'll get right on that. Meanwhile, how about you bring us our lattes?
If you need a slightly-longer round up of various opinions of Obama’s speech to Wall Street, "The Week" has one here:
“There was no cheering section” at President Obama’s speech to Wall Street Monday, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. The gathered “top echelon” of Wall Street bankers met the speech with “grimacing” faces and one round of applause. The best you can say is that the executives were “politely supportive” of Obama’s main points—the need for reform, new federal authority to wind down “too big to fail” banks, and a “systemic regulator.” ...
Appealing to Wall Street’s “better angels” is “shockingly naïve,” said Arianna Huffington in The Huffington Post, when financial lobbyists are working overtime to gut any real reform. Obama said all the right things in his “heartfelt, well-intentioned” speech, but he’s “utterly misreading the opponents of reform,” and the opponents are winning.
"And it will always happen that he who is not your friend will request your neutrality and he who is your friend will ask you to declare yourself by taking up arms. And irresolute princes, in order to avoid present dangers, follow the neutral road most of the time, and most of the time they are ruined."
OK, for all those who live outside our particular vale of tears, you should know that there is an ongoing three-ring clown circus flaming-poo juggling act here known as some variation of "The Big Parking Meter Fuckup".
(Although it really deserves a full Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich treatment and a spiffy title like “Night Has a Thousand Meters”.
“Down these metered streets a man must go who is not himself metered…”
Something like that.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah…)
"The Big Parking Meter Fuckup" – in brief – is actually pretty easy to get up-to-speed on if you understand four things:
1. It all began with a budget hole, which Da Mare refused to fill with tax money he actually has on-hand already because, as far as he’s concerned, that money is set aside for his Olympics.
(Which, if that’s really the standard now –- if “I don’t wanna” is now considered a sufficiently good enough excuse for civil servants to blow off their sworn public duties -- then I figure the same should certainly be alibi enough for me.
So next time Da City assesses me some goofy new fee for walking on the sunny side of the street on an alternate Wednesday when I don’t live in that neighborhood and am not carrying the right permit to do so, I'll try heading right on over to the Treasure's Office and tell them that, while I'd really like to pay them, the cash I'm currently sitting on is my special tyop-shelf-hooker-reserve-money, so no-can-do my friend!)
2. So instead, Da Mare and his pals decided to fund his budget gap by taking an everyday municipal property -- paid for by We The People and functioning pretty much as-advertised -- and selling it as if were a pair of hot speakers out of the back of his truck.
3. This was done virtually in secret, to a company that then fucked things all up in a massive and publicly embarrassing way...
4. All while Da Mare explained with a perfectly straight face that this was really a brilliant decision, because everybody knows dat da private sector does everything ever so much better and cheaper that those greedy, stupid city workers ever could.
So the new wrinkle?
Well, today Da Mare allowed as how he was getting a little steamed at the company to whom he sold my parking meters off at fire sale prices.
Mayor Daley demanded today that Chicago’s embattled parking meter operator synchronize the time on its pay-and-display boxes and void parking tickets tied to time discrepancies.
“That’s unacceptable. They have to void those tickets,” he said.
Daley said the latest in a string of operational problems that have marred the transition to private control has prompted him to lose confidence in Chicago Parking Meters LLC. …
Pressed on what he could do short of voiding the lease to force the company to shape up, Daley said, “Beating ‘em up every day. Bringing them in and talk to them and say, ‘You have to straighten this out.’”
Avis LaVelle, a spokeswoman for Chicago Parking Meters LLC, said time discrepancies are unavoidable, even though pay-and-display boxes are “synched up every night at midnight with the atomic clock.”
“Synchronization is not absolute, no matter what technology you’re using. I just came from a meeting with six people who have cell phones set by satellite. There were five different times among six people,” she said. …
Except that’s not true, and the city knows it.
How do they know it?
Because every single city worker already uses a city-wide, time-synchronized systemevery single day, and has been doing so for the last three years.
See, if you're a typical City worker, you theoretically have to account for virtually every minute of your day, often to a bewildering variety of auditors, supervisors and assorted other Ticktockmen, each of whom use their own, arcane apparatus for measuring the passage time.
And yet despite this proliferation of time-reporting mechanisms, year after year, like clockwork (hehehe) dead people and 12-year-olds would still somehow continue to collect paychecks, and a whole menagerie of clever goofs (often armed only with a meager MacGyver-like array of toothpicks, gum wrappers and clout) would end up with their time-cheating antics splashed all over front pages of our local newspapers (Note to future historians: this all happened during the days when one could speak on Chicago dailies using plurals) thus angering Da Mare, and distracting him from the important work of perfecting vastly higher-order forms of malfeasance.
Until, that is, the Fall of 2006 when his former Chief of Staff decided to buy and install a whole buncha these thingies.
…system to monitor the attendance of City of Chicago personnel at the Central District. The new model is a Recognition Systems Handpunch 3000. This should reduce the amount of time sheet fraud that the City of Chicago Department of Water Management has experienced in the Chicago Newspapers.
This is a synchronized city-wide time-keeping system that not only uses magnetic cards, but also "biometric technology" (Built with space age polymers no doubt!)
Which the workers, in turn, watch for accuracy like a fucking hawk to make sure not a single minute of their time is lost --
(City workers shown here on "Wear Your Bowler Hat to Work Day"
lining up at a swipe machine at 4:59)
-- and which Handpunch corporate literature brags:
…transmits the employee’s In and Out transactions to a company’s time/attendance/payroll software. Multiple units can be networked into a central time and attendance record keeping system. Interface software can be tailored to meet multiple record keeping needs, including programmable data management keys that collect specific data when employees’ hands are verified.
Got that?
Since 2006, hundreds of millions of your dollars and the entire payroll and personnel system of the third largest city in America have depended upon the accuracy and temporal synchronization of a whole bunch of little electronic boxes scattered far and wide over the entire city…
…which in 2009, the spokesperson for Da Mare’s hand-picked private, for-profit parking meter company now says is technologically impossible.
In a city where facts, causality and fiduciary rectitude were held in high regard, such a hilariously glaring contradiction dropped smack in the middle of an already-suspect, high-dollar shakedown might spark a little official interest.
Ah, but this is Chicago.
And in Chicago, Da Mare’s whims maketh and unmaketh all things.
The "full Ginsburg" is a buzzword that refers to an appearance by one person on all five American major Sunday-morning interview shows on the same day: This Week on ABC, Fox News Sunday, Face the Nation on CBS, Meet the Press on NBC and Late Edition on CNN.[1] In January 2009, Late Edition was replaced by State of the Union on CNN; no one completed a full Ginsburg involving the newer show until May 3, 2009.
NEW YORK — President Barack Obama is visiting David Letterman on Monday, part of a media blitz to sell his health care plan. ...
The president is scheduled to visit Sunday morning talk shows this weekend on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. That's a highly unusual schedule, even for a president eager to get his message across throughout the media.
Media purists will of course note the omission of “FoxNews Sunday” from the President’s schedule and argue that this disqualifies him from scoring an authentic “Full Ginsburg”.
Such people are sad, pedantic wankers who desperately need to get laid.
They are also factually wrong, as the International Ginsburg Commission recently noted in a 7-to-2 decision which said, in part:
...given that the “corporate and political interests of Fox News” have always been “so incestuously commingled with the interests of the Republican Party as to constitute a single entity”, the IGC would consider “having Joe Wilson scream ‘You Lie!’ at him for 6-7 minutes, either in-person or via satellite” to be the exact mass-energy-douchbag equivalent of appearing on Fox News and would qualify the President for “Full Ginsburg Honors”.
There is no word at this hour as to whether the President is considering this alternative, or if he will perhaps simply exercise a so-called 'Bush Manuever' and issue a signing statement to the effect that silly, little rules don't apply to him anyway.
I rarely post full-length videos of anything (the damn thing kept auto-starting no matter what I did, so click here for link), but as an amalgam of almost everything that turns my stomach about American politics and the Mouse Circus, this episode of "Murphy Brown" from 1995 is just too depressingly and hilariously prescient not to share in its entirety.
14 years ago and it was all there: Limbaugh, Gingrich, looking stuff up on "the Internet", the "Liberal Media Elite", all afloat in a wishful fantasy that somehow both sides were equally wrong and we could all work together if only the Left bent over a little further.
Wallace Shawn positively heists the show playing Stuart "All's I Know" Best with a gleeful, itchy Willy Loman-desperation. Stuart -- a failed, irritating and mostly-forgotten media celebrity -- returns as newly-minted (Or DeMinted) Republican Congressman Best, who ran for office only because he wanted "a full-time job with a pension and a health care plan" and didn't realize until too late just how dangerously crazy his supporters actually were.
If you want an explanation of everything that has gone fatally wrong with American politics in under 20 words it is this:
in which the public airwaves are now simply turned over to whichever Confederate Loyalist
the meatsticks are dancing around and calling Leader this week.
Meet the Press reruns that episode of
“The Lie of the Beholder”
in which serial-liar Newt Gingrich -- for reasons that continue to remain unfathomable to me --
is again let back onto my teevee to lie some more.
As if that were perfectly normal.
Later, David Gregory asks Republican Senator John Cornyn: What about Joe Wilson?
Cornyn: But the Democrats….
Chuck Todd also manages to loop in the “Both sides do it” meme: It’s hard to believe [Joe Wilson’] apology was real…Republican leaders are trying to figure out how to channel this energy…Just like Democrats!
“This Week” had a little backing-and-forthing between Sam Donaldson and George Will
Sam Donaldson: Yeah, all of that money we spent to stop the economy from completely collapsing will have to be paid back. But we spent it because we had to. I mean, what was the fucking alternative? The homunculi who are on the street bitching about “spending all that money”, would they prefer to be wearing barrels. Will: As a barrel-maker, I say yes!
George Will once again used his teevee time to advance his long-ago-humiliatingly-debunked talking point -- “We’re still arguing over what did and did not work during the Great Depression” – which doesn’t make sense until you realize that by “We”, Will means Republicans who never forgave FDR for preventing America from becoming a feudal pesthole where people like Will could buy three child brides and nine houseboys for a dollar.
Ubiquitous Non-Screamy Republican David Brooks helpfully pointed out that Americans are decadent and Wall Street traders’ are whacked out on dopamine after three good days, but his real contribution was this
We have small minorities in the country on both sides … some who watch Glenn Beck…some who watch MSNBC.
Which you would know (if you are goofy enough follow these things) was a call-back to his appearance this weekend on “The News Hour”, hammering home this weeks’ Conservative talking point:
DAVID BROOKS: I personally think we've now sort of bifurcated, where a lot of the country has lost some of the polarizing zeal, but there are minorities on each side who are watching Fox or MSNBC who are still in that high polarizing mode, and there are incentives for them to stay there.
Because when Republicans fuck things up this badly and this publicly, the only thing that keeps Republicans like David Brooks from heading down to the basement and putting the business-end of a shotgun in his mouth is the desperate, frantic fingering of that Right Wing rosary:
Yes, 1957 (emphasis added for dramatic effect by me):
Sometimes television is faced with a problem where it is physically impossible to substitute an idea. Last year I was faced with such a problem when I wrote a script called The Arena, which was done on Studio One. In this case, I was dealing with a political story where much of the physical action took place on the floor of the United States Senate.
One of the edicts that comes down from the Mount Sinai of Advertisers Row is that at no time in a political drama must a speech or character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. ... So, on the floor of the United States Senate (at least on Studio One), I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem.
To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So, on television in April of 1956, several million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics and the way the government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on the floor of the United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk.
There were long and impassioned defenses of the principles involved in Bill H. R. 107803906, but the salient features of the bill were conveniently shoved off into a corner of a side-of-the-mouth sotto voce, so that at no time could an audience have any idea what they were about. In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots.
This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.
JIM LEHRER: There's been a lot of commentary around all of this, that this is really indicative of a new kind of standard of discourse, negative standard of discourse in the country. Do you think -- is there any deeper meaning here or just one man who got up and yelled?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, there are certain unconscious standards. We all behave in certain ways. You go to a funeral; you behave in a certain way. You go to a church; you behave in a certain way. And these are deep and inbred. You don't have to think about it.
But there's been this broad corrosion over many years in the way people talk in private, and then so suddenly he behaved in a way that normally there would be just so many unconscious barriers -- you would never scream out "You lie!" to a president right there in that room. But those barriers have been eroded. He went further than anybody has gone before or at least recently at least...
JIM LEHRER: He was pushing an envelope that was already going there, is what you're saying.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I mean, and it's obvious, if you hang around Congress, the conversations you hear are just of that nature.
JIM LEHRER: Do you feel the same way?
MARK SHIELDS: I think it's a coarsening of our political language, our political life. I think it's a coarsening of our national life. I mean, I think we see things on television and public entertainment that we didn't see a generation ago.
But I think it is true, and it's reached the point where if you and I -- you're my political adversary. You're not simply wrong; you have to be evil. You know, you don't have any moral standing. I mean, that -- and that's -- rather than prove you wrong or encourage you to come to my side, my approach is to demonize you and destroy you. And I really think that it's a tragic -- a tragic reality.
JIM LEHRER: That's new? You think that's a new problem?
MARK SHIELDS: I think it has developed, and I think it has not stopped. I mean, I was hoping that the president -- it was part of Barack Obama's theme. And I don't think he can be accused of that at all, but it was part of his campaign theme. And it did touch people. People did respond to it.
DAVID BROOKS: I would just say, it's cyclical. I mean, we have periods of high polarization in American history. I mean, Alexander Hamilton was shot by a political opponent. That's reasonably polarizing. Abraham Lincoln, a polarizing period. Then we have had a high polarizing period.
…
As you can see, Mr. Serling, 52 years later the edicts from your “Mount Sinai of Advertisers Row” have not disappeared, but have instead been forcibly exported from teevee teleplays and into the real world of journalism.
Now we are daily faced with a actual reporters who have been reduced to "talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk" order to avoid offending anyone by pointing out that one side is ruled by an assortment of smugly ignorant moral imbeciles.
Now anything that veers anywhere near an honest discussion about the true nature of our real problem is shoved in terror under the rug by the mainstream media.
Now we live inside a bad dream where a national discourse dominated by lies -- obvious, ridiculous lies -- being shouted by aggrieved millionaires, bloated bigots and weepy demagogues is treated by the media as normal.
Now we live inside something that looks far too much like the "Twilight Zone", but is nowhere near as well-written.
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): You should have seen how wisely I proceeded -- with what caution -- with what foresight, with what dissimulation, I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
And goes along as if nothing at all has happened...
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): I smiled, -- for what had I to fear? I bade Helene Cooper (The New York Times), Howard Fineman (Newsweek), Joe “Jokeline” Klein (Time) and Ceci Connolly (Washington Post) welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country.
O'Donnell (aloud): Ceci, you’ve been covering the President’s one-on-one arm-bending campaign on this.
Connolly: Mad Max Baucus has been given months of running room to get drunk and tell “pull my finger” jokes in his mighty Tree Fort ‘O Six, and still hasn’t got shit done.
Until...
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definitiveness -- until, at length, I found that the noise was NOT within my ears.
Jokeline: You can never prove that something is “deficit neutral”.
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased.
O'Donnell (aloud): Doesn’t the President need to be bold? To project boldness? To reboldenate this Presidency? To reboot his boldtivity?
Fineman: OK…
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone?
O'Donnell (aloud): And aren’t people really, really afraid now? Like, soil-themselves-in-terror afraid that something awful is about to happen? Huh? Huh?
Cooper: I think the White House is hot-to-death thrilled with Joe Wilson.
Jokeline: My first reaction is “And the voice of the koo-koo is heard in the land.” But over the succeeding days it has become a real thing about jamming some “prove your citizenship” bullshit into the bill.
driftglass (dramatic aside): Like “The Simpson’s” Krusty the Clown, Jokeline has two, distinct public personas.
The loud, obnoxious, spotlight-obsessed money-whore clown...
And, once in a great while, a blunt, bitter observationalist who makes a little coin telling a little truth until something better comes along.
Today, the second guy showed up.
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And still these goof chatted pleasantly about fucking health care this and that , and smiled.
Jokeline: Now that is a ridiculous provision. Because there are all these geezers who show up at the hospital all the time. What, are you gonna make them hunt up a birth certificate that was lost in the Chicago Fire?
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): Was it possible they heard not?
O'Donnell (aloud): Could that make it into the bill?
Connolly: The White House wants to sign a bill. Any bill. And if they decide they needs to load it up with anti-abortion language, or anti-immigrant language, or anti-flag-burning language, or anti-killer-robot language, or anti-space-alien language because some inbred, South Carolina toe-picker gets on some Fox America Under Threat Screaming-Siren Breaking News Special carrying a sign that says “Commie Kenyan Obama Wunts to Take Mah Guns and Give Mah Helth Care to Aleen Space Zombies! From Space!” then, by God, you can bet there'll be some strong, anti-alien-space-zombie language inserted the next day. O'Donnell (dramatic aside): Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror!
O'Donnell (aloud): Next up, "Is the anti-Obama venom unavoidable?”
O'Donnell (dramatic aside): "Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the bleating of his hideous “Hah”!"
Epilogue:
While six of the "journalists" who make up the "Matthew's Meter" say, yes, the anti-Obama hatred was unavoidable, six say Obama partly brought it on himself.
Fineman: He didn’t talk to Main Street. He needs to spend every minute of every day constantly reassure crazy people on the Right that he doesn’t want to abort Sarah Palin;s baby and shoot grandma in the head or turn Murrica into a Franco-Islamic Communist Caliphate. This is perhaps unfair, but after all, he is Black.
Jokeline: I was at some town meetings this summer, most recently in Arkansas. And this is an awful lot about race. And not just because of Obama’s name or skin color. If you’re working class white, you’re seeing Latinos and Asians.
driftglass: And bears. Oh my.
But why is this coming up now during a health care debate?
Jokeline: Because they’re being egged on by demagogues in the Republican Party. By Boss Rush Limbaugh. And I call him The Boss, because there is not a single, Republican elected official who is willing to call him out on his lies.
Cooper: Because there are a lot of White people – particularly in the South – who have just lost their shit over a Black man being President.
Fineman: Let me repeat it in case I was not condescending enough the first time – this White House needs to constantly kiss wingnut ass every way they can think of. Maybe it’s unfair, but after all, he is Black. Also he was forced to behave like a filthy, filthy Liberal to save the economy from crashing and burning, and the doublewide trailer crowd who his policies probably saved from living in refrigerator boxes and begging for nickels on freeway overpasses will never forgive him for it.
Connolly: We’ve always had a cranky element who have been unhappy about stuff. But now they have the internet!
Jokeline: But you used to have grownup leaders of political parties who would shout the crazies down. That’s not happening anymore.
And of course, Jokeline is right about the relationship between Boss Limbaugh and GOP Party Leaders.
