Glenn Beck to Hold Tea Party Rally on Anniversary of MLK Speech: How Conservatives Are Trying to Hijack Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream
Only a few weeks after whitewashing the entire slave trade by falsely claiming our Founding Fathers were both black and white, Glenn Beck is on another mission: the Fox news host is planning a massive “take our country back” Tea Party rally at the Lincoln Memorial -- on the anniversary of the day Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Beck's publicity event pulls the rug out from under civil rights champions who planned a rally honoring King’s memory on that day, but they are organizing to fight back. “We're going to get together because we are not going to let Glenn Beck own the symbolism of Aug. 28, 2010,” said National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial. “We need to collaborate and bring together all people of good will, not just black people, on Aug. 28 to send a message that Glenn Beck's vision of America is not our vision of America.”
...
Can we all finally get over the idea that there is some sludgy, hate-ridden depths to which the Wingnut Leadership Caste will not sink, and for which the Pig People will not wildly applaud them?
...Our business has slowed to a halt, after we'd already plowed what we had in the bank into our new project, an organic and hydroponic farm powered by alternative fuels (wind and solar), once the wholesale ornamental plant business ground to a quiet halt thanks to the commercial real estate sector grinding to a far more spectacular and explosive halt in 2008. We figured, people will always need to eat. And they will. But it's taken all we've got, I'm down to the last dregs of my retirement money--my beloved's has long since evaporated--and we are crossing all functioning fingers and toes that a Clean Energy grant we recently applied for comes through. Thereafter, I don't know what we'll do. I really don't.
I never gave that much thought to what life would be like when I turned fifty--later this year, I'll do exactly that--but if I'm honest, I'll admit to a hazy, sun-soaked vision of myself sitting in my lush garden, relaxing at last as my children would be well past the diaper stage and able to make their own PB&J's; I'd be halfway through writing my novel, my car wouldn't be making weird, expensive-sounding noises--it might even be one of those snazzy electric cars!--and worrying myself sick at night would be a dim memory of what things were like when the children were little and always coming down with something.
Instead, I'm looking three months down the road to the dread date, and I can't envision anything at all--it's like trying to read a distant cluster of unlit road signs while peering through the dense fog at dawn. Or else sunset.
Our beaches offer little comfort: it's much too hot this summer--even for Florida--and the breezes seem to sputter and choke before they reach us. Besides, with every passing week, those vast clots of tar creep further southward. Seaside is ruined; our escape grounds will be next. ...
Because however efficient and efficacious his work may be in solving the specific problems you brought him on to unsnarl, eventually he will catch hold of some loose ends and contradictions that make no sense.
He will begin to turn his gigawatt X-ray vision on the rest of your organization and ask questions like "Why are things done this way?", "What does the meathead in the huge office who is never around actually do?" "If we're cutting costs, why aren't we considering getting rid of Sleepy Junebug who spends her days dozing, doing her nails and catching up with her friends' trials and tribulations?"
Most organizations I have ever worked for were like alcoholic families: there was always some shit you just did not talk about. Eventually, of course, whole divisions end up being created and oceans of cash end up being used up to work around, go under, deflect, deny and otherwise avoid talking about the shit you were never supposed to talk about.
And when you bring Sherlock Holmes on-board, it is inevitable that he will start asking questions about That Which Must Never Be Mentioned.
...
That’s why the Irish debacle is so important. All that savage austerity was supposed to bring rewards; the conventional wisdom that this would happen is so strong that one often reads news reports claiming that it has, in fact, happened, that Ireland’s resolve has impressed and reassured the financial markets. But the reality is that nothing of the sort has taken place: virtuous, suffering Ireland is gaining nothing.
Of course, I know what will happen next: we’ll hear that the Irish just aren’t doing enough, and must do more. If we’ve been bleeding the patient, and he has nonetheless gotten sicker, well, we clearly need to bleed him some more.
In other words, Potterism is in now in full effect:
Batocchio explains is all beautifully in a post entitle "Kindness, the Social Contract and Gilliam" that includes a Tom Waits clip so tasty I may just have to steal liberate it for Tom Waits Friday over here.
In the last 48 hrs. I have been flooded with the kindest, most supportive words you can imagine, and several hits to the tip jar.
Thank you very much for both, although I'd like to make two things clear about donations.
First, if you yourself are hurting, put your wallet back in your pocket. No kidding.
Second, what happened to me was not a natural disaster; like millions of my fellow citizens, I just lost job at a very inconvenient moment. I will always gladly accept contributions from anyone in any amount because they appreciate the work I do and feel it is of tangible enough value to help pay to keep it going, but if you are dipping into your "charitable contributions" or "emergency relief" dough to send money my way, please don't.
Of course, none of this applies if you are named George Soros or Warren Buffett :-)
I am still more than a little sore and dopey from yesterday's Encounter at Drillpoint, but I will be replying to all individual messages individually as soon as I can.
Lastly, many of you have shared your own stories of getting creamed by our new economy realities, both in the comments section and via email. As Andrew Sullivan and others have done, I plan to post some of your experiences over the next few days and weeks because A) I am a lazy, lazy man and, B) In some quarters, I think it still hasn't really penetrated just how different the Great Recession is from any of its predecessors over the last 70 years, and how radically it and the toxic ideology that led to it are changing American life forever.
And if we ourselves cannot shape policy, we can at least bear witness.
He didn't quite get around to whining about interposition and nullification, but as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Little Jeff made quite the cottage industry of trying to figure out how many syllables he could add to the word "Socialist" to make it sound extra scary.
Also -- with a straight face -- the Party of "Bush v. Gore" and "Citizens United" thought it would be a genius move to spend most of the day tarring the late justice Thurgood Marshall with the evil "activism" brush: the man who won Brown v. Board of Education, went on to serve with great distinction as this nation's first African American Supreme Court justice, and for whom Elena Kagan once clerked and spoke admiringly.
Because when your Base has the IQ of Boo Radley, the temperament of Veruca Salt and the memory of Leonard from "Memento"
("Bush who?") it really doesn't matter what kind of gibberish you spout or how incoherent it is. As long as you conjure up an imaginary hippie or uppity Negro to explain every problem and punch him in the face to solve that problem, you're fucking golden with the Pig People.
A year and a half ago, I was kicked to the curb after almost 10 years from a job I was doing spectacularly well -- and into which I was pouring 80-100 hours a week -- so that others who were in greater political favor could be spared.
I was let go a few weeks before my tiny pension was vested. A fight ensued over that. My small "victory" was bitterly Pyrrhic. I'll tell you about it someday.
I remember stopping at a Radio Shack on the way home to watch the impeachment of Governor Rod Blagojevich live.
Turned out, Blago and I lost our jobs on the same day.
This time around I have been remaindered from an organization that I was hired to help turn around. Which I did. Ferocious economy and all, I brought it back from deep in the weeds where it had gotten lost. Got its key numbers back up into the range of respectability. Rebuilt damaged relationships and internal discipline. Restored its good name in places where it had gotten tarnished. Hacked the kudzu off of the web site and got it looking sweet again.
In general, I made organizationally straight what had once been crooked, and while it never paid enough to cover my nut, it did slow the slide into penury while I tried to stitch together enough such gigs to keep the wolf from the castle door.
But others were in charge of the budgets, and they were not paying such careful attention, and so what was going to be a tough, lean, belt-tightening year next anyway turned into a catastrophe. It did not have to be so, but now it is, and so once more into the teeth of the Great Recession I go.
And this time around it is General Stanley McChrystal with whom I share a termination-date.
I know the ins and outs of the issues facing the labor force very well. Better than most -- from the for-public-consumption bad news delivered via Yahoo News to the heartbreaking personal accounts that show up everywhere these days (One selection from Andrew Sullivan's "The View From Your Recession" feature):
...I am a 58 year-old male, and my white hair proves it. I was laid off an executive position in a real estate company in January 2009. I directed international marketing programs and was responsible for over $200 million in transactions. But I have been unable to find work, even well below my former position. I am told that I appear too smart, too qualified. I have applied for many, many jobs - jobs I could do in my sleep.
Playing by the rules, I post and scour Monster and Career Builder to no avail, not even an interview. When I see a job that particularly fits my skills, I break the "rules" and contact the employer directly and consistently. Still, no job. The State of Florida has a service to help the unemployed. When I met with my counselor, she was shocked that with my resume I didn't have a job. As we pursued opportunities, she finally suggested that I dumb down my resume. That proved a bit difficult. I was in charge of a large development marketing operation. My former company was extremely successful (until the financial world changed and mortgages disappeared).
How do I feel? I cry. From there it is anger, then depression. As I like to say, I lost my job that January, and lost my pride by June. I have now lost hope...
to the technical and policy literature on the subject -- I am well-versed and I know that in so many ways I am a lucky guy: my situation is not in any way unique, and I am blessed to have more tools at my command and more supportive people in my corner than many millions of my fellow unemployed Americans.
I have no idea what comes next. Probably going to have to start over and re-invent my career for (Pauses to count. Shakes head in disbelief. Counts again.) the eighth time, which, to be frank, is starting to lose its charm.
Three things I am pretty sure of.
First, the topics I cover on this site are going to change a little in terms of emphasis. I have always covered the subjects of work, organizational behavior and the root causes of (and possible cures for) middle class anomie, so expect more of that.
Second, based on my own, exhaustive-if-exotic research it is clear that absent a patron, a spouse who can carry more than their share of the weight for a long time, a clean, well-lighted place at a profitable publication, a Wingnut Welfare gig, a call from "The Daily Show" begging me to help hang onto The Funny, or a sinecure in academe, in these parlous times there is no chance that writing will ever pay the bills. Not even close.
Third, I'm done working in a strategic or planning role for people in the thrall of the latest management fad, or hustlebuck consultant, or political fantasy that -- when you strip away all the knowing winks and aromatically bovine byproduct buzzwords -- means they're making one ruinous decision after another based on magical thinking and the notion that 2+2 does not equal 4. It doesn't work in politics, government, education or business and following the Pied Pipers who tell you it does only ever leads to tears.
I'll hire on to do any of the many things I do very well, up to and including helping to mop up up the mess left over from their last, disastrous assignation with snake oil salesmen. I'll even help chart courses out of dangerous waters and into better futures, but to do that I have to seek, speak and act on the truth, and if you don't want the truth, quit pretending that you do, and quit penalizing people who hand it to you on a silver platter.
Because 2 + 2 does equal 4.
Every single time.
UPDATE: In a feat of pitch-perfect timing, I just returned from some intense oral surgery which I had scheduled before I knew I was going to be "at liberty". And I'll tell you, if you ever want to take your mind off of looming disaster, may I recommend having a nice man pound away at a tooth for an hour with what strongly resembled tin snips and a coal chisel.
Former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge — the face of police torture allegations in Chicago for decades — was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice by a federal jury this afternoon.
When the guilty-on-all-counts verdict was announced, Burge did not visibly react. The courtroom had been warned against outbursts.
But people standing outside the courtroom cheered — including attorney Flint Taylor, who has been pursuing justice against Burge for years.
“We’re totally elated at the verdict,” he said. “It’s 30 years too late. We still have plenty to do to get people out of jail. He should have been convicted of torture not perjury — but this is a good day.”
...
For those of you who have not been following this story at the indispensable "Beachwood Reporter", well, first, shame on you.
Second, what you need to know is that Jon Burge was a powerful Chicago detective and commander who, over the course of his career, tortured confessions out of over 200 suspects. In addition to other factors, the volume and credibility of reports of Burge's sadism and corruption led then-Governor George Ryan to institute a moratorium in the death penalty.
At the time, a certain State's Attorney with a Famous Name is alleged to have turned a blind eye to information he possessed regarding the illegal behavior of Burge and his flunkies.
The investigation revealed that in three of the cases prosecutors could have proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court that torture by the police involving five former officers including Burge had occurred. Half of the claims were deemed credible, but because of the statute of limitations no indictments were handed out. Mayor Daley and all law enforcement officials who had been deposed were excluded from the report.
Yes, the State's Attorney who showed such remarkably poor civic and legal judgment grew up to be the Honorable Richard M. Daley, Mayor-for-life of the City of Chicago. Who says there are no second...or third...or fourth acts in American life? Provided, of course,
you are in The Club.
As for, Burge, he is a thug and a monster: a throwback to a previous era when cops in Chicago could beat, maim and murder almost at-will. An age which some of our more atavistic fellow citizens still look back on fondly as the good old days.
Burge will never serve a day in stir for torture, but like Al Capone -- who was never even charged with any of the hundreds of murders he ordered and dozens he personally committed -- he will now rot behind bars for lesser crimes.
The Mouse Circus today was much like it is every Sunday.
Like the view from the window of my ratty apartment near the northern borderland of the blighted Winthrop/Kenmore Corridor slum on any given night of the week in the 1980s: a spirited, open-air exercise in unfettered, free market Reaganomics, with dealers dealing, hookers hooking, buyers buying, drunks drinking, muggers mugging, and nobody particularly concerned that the Authorities were going to do much about it.
A little like this...
with the occasional band of frat rats venturing down from the safety of Loyola University for thrills or liquor from the 2 A.M. place or weed.
And so, for example, as has happened a thousand times before, David Gregory “Meet the Press” featured Exclusive! Senator! John! McCain!
Exclusively!
Inspired by Actual Events, we pick up our dramatized version of the exchange near the middle...
McCain: If I say “clearly” often enough, I hope people won’t notice that I have no fucking idea why we’re in Afghanistan.
Gregory: Well what about…
McCain: But I know one thing – Obama is ruining that country.
Gregory: What do you mean? We’re going to end up dumping a trillion dollars down that crack house.
McCain: Not enough.
Gregory: And we’re sending in 30,000 more troops
McCain: No, no, no! That doesn't matter. None of that matters. We’re setting a “date certain” for leaving. Which means were dooooomed. Because the only way to win is to never, ever, ever leave.
Gregory: But that’s not what President Obama said.
McCain: Fuck you.
Gregory: Also all his generals agreed with him.
McCain: They’re all assholes and liars.
Gregory: But Tom Friedman said…
McCain: I love Tom Ricks. He's on as one of your guest later and maybe if he's listening he can bring me some pudding.
Gregory: No, not Tom Ricks. Tom Friedman.
McCain: Oh. That's different. Friedman's a douche.
Gregory: Under your BFF George Bush, we had, like, 90 guys with shotguns and Radio Shack walkie-talkies in Afghanistan. Under the guy who whipped your ass in 2008, we’re going to peak out at around 150,000 troops.
McCain: Which is still not enough. It will never be enough, because sending young men off to die in lost causes makes me feel alive!
Gregory: Wow. You really are a vicious old whore aren’t you?
McCain: That’s “Senator” Vicious-Old-Whore to you. And where's my fucking pudding Ricks!
Gregory: What happened to you, Senator? I mean, I thought we really had something special.
McCain: You’ll take it and like it, Fluffy. ‘Cause your choices are me or Obergruppenasshole J. D. Hayworth.
Gregory (weeping and looking around hopelessly): How did we ever let it get this bad, Senator? How did it all go to shit?
McCain: We got here one step at a time, Fluffy, with my dick in your mouth every inch of the way.
Daley has new plan to outsource some city hiring
Mayor also says corporations will be able to sponsor, decorate bridgehouses
June 24, 2010
By FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
Mayor Daley revived his failed plan today to outsource city hiring to cut costs and restore public confidence shaken by the hiring scandal that culminated in the conviction of his former patronage chief.
The latest example of Daley's privatization frenzy will start with a request-for-proposals from firms interested in recruiting and hiring tradespeople in five city departments: Streets and Sanitation, Transportation, Water Management, Aviation and General Services.
If it works to have an outside personnel firm recruit and hire carpenters, electricians, laborers and plumbers, City Hall will move to outsource all other hiring, the mayor said.
Private firms will still be required to abide by the city hiring plan tied to the long-running Shakman case. And Inspector General Joe Ferguson will retain oversight over city hiring.
“I'm determined that we get our hiring procedures correct. The people of Chicago need to have confidence in all the procedures and know they have the same fair chance of getting a city job,” Daley said.
The mayor noted that the city spends an “enormous amount of time” wading through the mountain of applications for each job.
“Especially today . . . If you put one position on line, you get 5,000 applicants. We don't have the expertise. Let's get out of this,” he said.
“Let the private sector do it. They have better technology, a better way of doing it. Why should we just sit there. I'm just telling you — it's mind-boggling.”
...
Ald. Joe Moore (49th) said he's “not a big fan of privatization,” especially after the parking meter fiasco.
But he said: “Because the mayor has thoroughly failed to manage hiring in a legal fashion, he has no choice. He just received another scathing review by the inspector general on contracts. The monitor has continued to find fault with the mayor on his hiring. It's clear he's just not capable of managing certain aspects of the city.”
Here are a couple of fun facts that didn't make it into print that made me smile when I read this latest example of Daley getting his privatization freak on.
First, screening people for skill-specific jobs like swinging a hammer or driving a forklift or pouring concrete is just not that hard.
Second, Da Mare already spends an enormous amount of your tax money to run a system that does exactly this: a fact that he seems oblivious to, despite pictures like this, showing him standing next to a Commissioner -- who he pays handsomely to run this system -- at the grand opening of one of the many, many locations across the city where these activities are considered pretty routine and take place six days a week, rain or shine.
Yeah, it's been four months, so instead of formally kicking off this quarter's fundraiser a month late, let's just say that the second trimester has started.
Me, driving through the Great Chicago Downpour of 2010.
Complete with lightening, empty streets, jiggly camera work, a lakefront accident and God's revenge on the Asian carp.
Once I find a more stable, mobile platform I'll probably kill a few million bytes fiddling with this sort of thing as the spirit (of Ed Wood) moves me.
That a certain real four-star general never bothered to figure out.
Captain Miller:I don't gripe to you, Reiben. I'm a captain. There's a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, so on, so on, and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that as a Ranger.
This is why Attila doesn't drink with the Huns: because subordinates take their cues about organizational culture from their superiors, and while has is been a time-honored tradition for young guns to hang and bang and bitch about goddamn, know-nothing REMFs since before the time of Xerxes and well after the invention of Technicolor
if you're the boss and under the color of that authority you give your young guns explicit approval to use their Outside Voices when they are Inside, then eventually every room becomes the locker room and the discipline that holds the whole enterprise together breaks down.
Of course, on this topic, since the actual history of the United States does not comport particularly well with David Fucking Brooks'
"Hippies Ruined the World" hobbyhorse version of history, he has been forced once again to use his column in the New York Times today -- "The Culture of Exposure" -- as his own personal Wingnut Procrusteanizer to mash the past into a more pleasing shape.
For example, in Bobo's edition of American History a General George Patton could never have had his career derailed by something as trivial as a slap
and a few editorial cartoons.
And General MacArthur could not have been fired for mouthing off in public:
Such things simply were not done back when the press knew its place.
Then, of course, came the Fucking 60s, when, according to Bobo,
"...after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down."
Yeah, I wonder where anyone would have gotten that idea:
Hes goes on and on like that -- straining at gnats and swallowing, apparently, the entire Bush Administration -- until we arrive at the Present Day, when the thoroughly supercalifragilisticexpialidawesome McChrystal, (who was
...excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.
)
was done in by some filthy insect of a "journalist" who "reported" on what McChrystal "actually said" while speaking "on the record".
Which, in turn, will of course kick in afterburners on the hand-baskets which we are all riding straight to Hell:
"...Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.
The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see."
In other words...
But you know, for once, I can absolutely understand why Bobo is so very pissed.
First, as professional bootlicker to the rich and powerful, seeing some unshaven beatnik working the body of one of Bobo's biggest man-crushes (while in the pay of that magazine!) must make his flunky soul shiver with rage.
Second, if this "reporting" thing ever catches on in a big way, David Brooks damn well knows he'll be out of a legit* his day job as the official NYT/NBC/PBS/NPR establishmentarian testicle-cozy and forced to seek work as a Fox Weather Bunny quicker than you can say "Judith Miller".
Usually the self-loathing and fury come wrapped in soft, pastel batting and tied up in a word-string bow about Edmund Burke or behavioral psychology. but yesterday it all came off in one, long, whining, splenetic, passive-aggressive mess.
A wreck apparently banged out in some kind of feverish Benzedrine and Dulcolax rage that has something to do with Liberals and Dr. Faustus.
Or maybe it was Bobo’s considered opinion -- launched from deep inside his gated, Beltway life in Bethesda -- as to why Liberals don’t understanding Missouri.
Or maybe it was about imaginary Moderates who live in a place called the “suburbs” that – after eight straight years of deficit catatonia – are suddenly shrieking mad about the fact that America is broke.
Whatever the theme was supposed to be, it came pooping out as a long, strange, disassociative mental breakdown captured in ink in which “people” (as opposed to “Liberals”) loathe their “gummint” even though -- for reasons left glaringly unexplained -- their fury is about eight years too late and pointed in exactly the wrong direction. Also left flamboyantly unmentioned is the possible effect that having virtually everyone in David Fucking Brooks’ political movement spending the last 30 years jumping up and down in front of every teevee camera and microphone they could commandeer (or that Rupert Murdoch would buy for them) screaming that the Big Gummint is a Commie Plot to “KIIIIILLLLLL YOOOOUUUU!!!!”…might have had on public opinion.
This is one of the many, many, many things Bobo did not have time to delve into during his 800-word shillippic , preferring instead to steep in the bile of the protagonist’s jilted, bitter I-told-you-so best friend;
(See, “Perkins, Elizabeth” in “About Last Night”.)
(See also, “Belushi, Jim” in “About Last Night”.)
(See also, “Strickland, KaDee” in “Fever Pitch”)
Or if those are a little low falutin' for your liberal, elitist, Missouri-hatin' Faustian tastes, have a little slice of Iago from "Othello" and note the eerie snugness with which it fits the relationship between the "reasonable” Conservative New York Times columnist and the President of the United States into whose confidence that columnist brags he has been taken many times:
The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will tenderly by led by th'nose...
And in that voice Bobo crooned his column; the stage-whispered soliloquy of the false friend who secretly wagers against you and takes a corrosive delight in your failures because your fall will vindicate his view of the world as a crooked and vile place.
The words of a man stomping hard on the fingers of a nation hanging on for dear life so that he can feel smug about the mercilessness of gravity.
Or maybe he’s saying something about why Liberals don’t understand Arkansas.
Beyond that, I don’t much care today. Today, for a host of reasons, taking out the boning knife and giving Bobo’s words a full fisking seems pointless in the face of the knowledge that tomorrow…and next week…and next month…Mr. Brooks will abide: his movements through the world – his bad ideas and crappy words -- utterly untroubled by any, bloggy water balloons thrown against the shiny rims of the Great Villager Machine in which he rides.
It is at times like these that rebuttal from so far below seems so puny and weak.
Which is why, at times like these, I am grateful to have the masters to lean on.
To remind me that, every once in a while someone comes along who gets a good, solid, funny, righteous literary beatdown so fucking right that it can last forever:
It would be tempting to label this "The Return of the Ratfuckers", but of course the GOP Ratfuck squad (from Corrente) --
Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks. It was first brought to public attention during the Watergate scandal investigation that during the 1972 presidential campaign the Nixon campaign committee maintained a "dirty tricks" unit focused on discrediting Nixon's strongest challengers.
According to Woodward and Bernstein, Nixon aide Dwight Chapin hired fellow USC alumnus Donald Segretti to run a campaign of dirty tricks (which Segretti dubbed "ratfucking") against the Democrats in 1972. The purpose of the operation was to create as much bitterness and disunity within the Democrat primary as possible. One notable example of Segretti's wrong-doing was a faked letter on Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie's letterhead falsely alleging that U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a fellow Democrat, had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old.
...
-- has never left us.
They have simply become the Conservative movement, outright. Root and branch.
And it isn't really that surprising; after all, the long, deprave and successful history of GOP Ratfucking means that most of today's Conservatives have never lived in a political world where punching Liberals (and feminazis and gays and immigrants and unions and the ACLU and poor people and brown people) in the face wasn't considered great sport.
Have never known a time when smirking in blood-drunk delight at doing things that they believe will irritate and enrage the the imaginary Dirty Fucking Hippie that hides under their bed
-- even what the actual outcomes of their filthy, little machinations result in one ecological, economic, constitutional, and foreign policy catastrophe after another -- was not the absolute core of the Modern Conservative Movement.
Whatever their calendar age may be, they are vicious children who simply do not -- or will not -- remember or believe that once upon a time, buried in a shallow grave along with the rest of the Actual History of the United States that Modern Conservatives so frantically struggle to wish out of existence...
...Republican’s were known to have consciences. Even the most conservative among them would rise up from time to time over matters of principle.
Consider this statement from Representative Lawrence Hogan, a Republican from Maryland, from over thirty years ago, as the Watergate scandal was coming to a head:
“The thing that's so appalling to me is that the President, when this whole idea was suggested to him, didn't, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, "Get out of here, you're in the office of the President of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent? This is the presidency of the United States." But my President didn't do that. He sat there and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn't come to light.”
Ah, but such inconvenient men and memories have been all but obliterated; shoved aside or down the memory hole to make room for the monsters that Conservatives were breeding inside their fascist whelping box.
Creepy little sociopaths like Nixon Ratfucker slug Don Segretti:
June 27, 1971, and Beyond: Nixon Campaign ‘Agent Provocateur’ Funded by White House
Donald Segretti.Donald Segretti. [Source: Spartacus Educational]Three attorneys—one the assistant attorney general of Tennessee, Alex Shipley—are asked to work as so-called “agent provocateur” for the Campaign to Re-elect the President (CREEP), an organization working to re-elect President Nixon (see October 10, 1972). The three tell their story to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein in late September 1972, and Bernstein’s colleague Bob Woodward learns more from his FBI source, “Deep Throat,” days later (see October 7, 1972 and October 9, 1972). They all say they were asked to work to undermine the primary campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates by the same man, Donald Segretti, a former Treasury Department lawyer who lives in California. Segretti will later be identified as a CREEP official. Segretti, the attorneys will say, promises them “big jobs” in Washington after Nixon’s re-election (see November 7, 1972). All three says they rejected Segretti’s offers (see June 27-October 23, 1971). Segretti himself will deny the allegations, calling them “ridiculous.”
Part of a Larger Pattern? - Bernstein and Woodward connect the Segretti story to other Nixon campaign “dirty tricks” they are already aware of, including efforts by Watergate burglar James McCord (see June 19, 1972) to “investigate” reporter Jack Anderson, attempts by Watergate surveillance man Alfred Baldwin (see June 17, 1972) to infiltrate Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s successful attempts to electronically “bug” Democratic campaign headquarters (see May 27-28, 1972) and his investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Edward Kennedy (see June 19, 1972), and McCord’s rental of an office next to the offices of Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. To the reporters, the Segretti story opens up speculation that the Nixon campaign had undertaken political espionage efforts long before the Watergate burglary. In their book All the President’s Men, Bernstein and Woodward write, “Watergate could have been scheduled before the president’s re-election chances looked so good and perhaps someone had neglected to pull the plug.” Bernstein has heard of CIA operations such as this mounted against foreign governments, called “black operations,” but sometimes more colloquially called “mindf_cking.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 114-115]
Segretti a 'Small Fish in a Big Pond' - An FBI official investigating CREEP’s illegal activities will call Segretti “a small fish in a big pond,” and will say that at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives have worked around the country to disrupt and spy on Democratic campaigns.
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The Rogues of "K" Street -- Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant
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"You’re going to see something spectacular," an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. "About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within." Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.
That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and—for the first time in a decade—scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control? That may have been me too.
Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORN’s Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, "That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work."
The ACORN blood tasted good.
...
The cynical among us think it’s a group of peasants with pitchforks controlled by an underground cabal of Glenn Beck, wealthy donors and the guys who killed JFK. But the worst thing I can say about the Tea Party I work for is that it can make lots of noise but can’t win without professional help. I love the irony of helping run this organization from the St. Regis Bar.
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And of course now the wingnut infrastructure is fully in place and battle-tested as it has never been before.
They have their their own, profitable and lavishly-funded propaganda arm, facing off against a Corporate Media which is either hopelessly compromised, or staggering under legions of Centrist jellyfish.
Their own firmly indoctrinated alternate history of the Unites States, so laughably fraudulent that it would make a North Korean blush (from the Playboy article):
"Bush mangled the GOP brand into a grotesque form that conservatives haven’t recognized in five years."
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In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.
It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.
And most importantly -- despite the confessions of the anonymous political button man in the Playboy article -- they have achieved a genuine, long-term radical victory in that there really is no longer any need to hire "agent provocateurs", because to be a Modern Conservative in 2010 means that you have so completely internalized all of the metric tons of self-delusional, self-deceptive doublethinkful horseshit that you must practice every minute of every day that you can remain a Modern Conservative.
In other words, they're all Ratfuckers now.
*[From left, Don Segretti, H. R. Halderman (Nixon hatchet man) and Pat Buchanan (Nixon hatespeechwriter)]
Keith Olbermann announced Wednesday night that he will cease blogging on the liberal Daily Kos over a comment directed at the MSNBC host’s coverage.
Olbermann and some of his MSNBC colleagues surprised their left-leaning fans on Tuesday with eviscerating critiques of President Barack Obama’s Oval Office address on the oil spill spewing off the Gulf Coast.
“It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days,” Olbermann said of the president’s remarks, echoing similarly negative comments from fellow MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow.
One commenter on the Daily Kos, where Olbermann has maintained a diary over the years, speculated that the pattern of hosts generally sympathetic to the president bashing the administration was too consistent to be a coincidence.
“Can’t verify, of course,” the commenter began, “but a friend in the news biz tells me he got a damaging e-mail from one of his pals at NBC. Something to the effect that their anger was pre-planned because ‘beating up on the president has been good for ratings.’ I haven't checked, but I'm hearing that Olbermann slammed the speech on Twitter before it even started.”
Olbermann, incensed by the commenter, later fired off a posted titled “Check, Please” explaining that he won’t be “back” to the site until it stops delving into “conspiracy theories.” ...
Meh. Lover's tiff; I give it three weeks before the hot, makeup blogging begins.
With a fairly small change, Andrew Sullivan's blog could go from an often hilariously contorted Conservative revisionist fan dance about the true nature and history of his own movement...
...to a fairly honest representation of the product
("Fit to Print" -- A cautionary documentary about American journalism circa 2010 [h/t AnnaTarkov])
...pair depressingly well.
("Broadcast News" -- A cautionary movie about American journalism circa 1987)
Imagine the wingnut coup leaders' surprise when they come up out of the basement down out of the mountains to seize control of the teevee stations only to find that, first, they have to dig through about a mile of shit to get to them.
After which they have to fight their way through a gauntlet of corporate sock puppets who just want to interview them to see if they think Obama is "angry enough".
Except of course at Fox: there "Murdoch's Marauders" will be greeted as liberators with sheet cake, bunting, a wide selection of Fox News pleasure 'droids, "Welcome Home" signs, and their own prime-time show right after Glenn Beck.
Meanwhile, on what was once the supposed other side of the adversarial lens, our Elite Media proves yet again that he as no idea what the concept of "holding people accountable" even means anymore.
... The point is that {Meet the Press host David] Gregory, like [CNN Senior White House Correspondent Ed] Henry, cannot even begin to comprehend the issue. It's not that these media figures fail to perform their assigned function or consciously decide that they won't. They don't even conceive of their purpose in this way, because holding government officials accountable is not actually their purpose. With some accidental exceptions, the corporations which own these media outlets don't choose people for these positions who want to or who will perform these accountability functions. They choose the ones who have no interest in doing so, no ability to do so, and who simply won't -- and thus don't. ...
This is what the media and the punditocracy's fetishitic obsession with Centrism and Objectivity (as opposed to facts and truth) have wrought.
As I have said on this blog many times (and as George Carlin said long before me), if you want to understand Chicago politics, or big business, corporate media, academia or, really, any large, modern institution that has been captured by the "New Capitalism" philosophy of perpetual disorientation, perpetual dislocation, and pauperization of the great majority of society at the bottom in order to indulge the perpetual winner-take-all, zero-accountability ideology of the tiny, privileged minority at the top...you have to understand the Two Commandments:
1. There is a club. 2. You ain't in it.
(Above, various participants at the 2009 Futures of Modernity Symposium wrap a lot of insightful language like "risk is a consequence of elite solidarity" around the subject.)
So many of the tragic and infuriating failures of modern American life are created by this simple, binary state of affairs, which is why, on all the many occasions I have worked this idea into an essay, I have never intended it to be taken as hyperbole, but as a plain and literal truth of our age. And as Blue Gal and I began working up subjects for this week's podcast (and possibly next week's, because I am a friggin' chatterbox) it surfaced again as one of the topics we are probably going to touch on under the general heading of the Preconditions of Reform. Not the desirability of reform -- I assume anyone with functional frontal lobes and access to the news of the day can see that our culture is horribly broken -- but the principles on which any hope of effective and humane reform depends.
And so to pre-iterate (tm) what you may hear in tomorrow, or next week (or never, if my constant swearing and uncontrollable Charlie Callas feernt-feernt effects
render that portion of the recording unusable) I do not believe that fundamental reform is possible if we do not return virtues like honesty, duty, excellence, experience, responsibility, labor, craft, patience and honor to positions of respect at the center of our civic and economic lives. These virtues do not come from On High; they are all learned behaviors, which means they must be deliberately manufactured, transmitted and reinforced by our cultural, political and media institutions.
Take a good, hard look at the leaders you see -- the ones that actually affect your life, from your boss to the CEO of multi-billion dollar, transnational corporations -- and ask yourself to what extent they actually embody traits like honesty, duty and a commitment to excellence, and to what extent they mouth those words due to social obligation, but will betray those ideals at the drop of a hat, or the whiff of a marginal increase in their bottom line.
Take a good, hard look at the institutions that intersect with your life and ask yourself to what extent they embrace and reward experience, labor and craft.
Take a good, hard look at the authorities who have real power over your life and ask yourself if you believe that, behind closed doors, they behave honorably, responsibly and patiently.
In a culture where these virtues are publicly and privately practiced and rewarded with the same kind of zealousness that the Right now rewards Sarah Palin for being a wincingly-ignorant, amply be-titted demagogue, or that Wall Street rewarded Lloyd Blankfein for being a rapacious, economy-wrecking vampire...then reform is possible.
In a culture where these virtues are merely ritually and perfunctorily intoned in public, while they are openly scorned and evicted from the corridors of power, this is what the future looks like:
BP chief says he wasn't in loop, enraging Congress
By CALVIN WOODWARD and FREDERIC J. FROMMER (AP)
WASHINGTON — Channeling the nation's anger, lawmakers pilloried BP's boss in a withering day of judgment Thursday for the oil company at the center of the Gulf calamity. Unflinching, BP chief executive Tony Hayward said he was out of the loop on decisions at the well and coolly asserted, "I'm not stonewalling."
That infuriated members of Congress even more, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Testifying as oil still surged into the Gulf of Mexico and coated ever more coastal land and marshes, Hayward declared "I am so devastated with this accident," "deeply sorry" and "so distraught."
Yet the oil man disclaimed knowledge of any of the myriad problems on and under the Deepwater Horizon rig before the deadly explosion, telling a congressional hearing he had only heard about the well earlier in April, the month of the accident, when the BP drilling team told him it had found oil. ...
The Nationreports that creepy Blackwater owner Erik Prince, who has abruptly put his company up for sale, may move to the UAE, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. He hasn't been charged with any crimes, yet.
For those of you arriving 7-8 years late to the party, "Blackwater" is a "corporation" that "kills people" for "money". This short documentary explains the whole thing:
As always, the silence from the Right when another one of Cheney's genuinely depraved little roaches is forced into the light is deafening, because in one person, Prince represents all those traits the Right most admires; he is a multi-millionaire fundamentalist zealot who stays rich by killing people for money, a walking testament to radical gummint deregulation who smirks an inherited-privilege smirk every bit as good as Dubya, and snaps off his oath before ineffectual Congressional hearings with the Real Good Posture of a young Ollie North.
No, Prince is merely a "murdering thug neo Christin Crusader and private army boy to Cheney"; the sort that wingnut men want to be, and wingnut women want to be with. So he gets a pass (and a secret prayer that they could make themselves worthy of having a Real Man like Ewick lay his glorious Christian eggs in their abdomines.)
