"Punching out of your weight class" Edition.
If you were to watch Stephanie Miller level Carly Fiorina (Sunday on "State of the Union", from Raw Story) --
“A lot women including me are sick of the ‘war on women’, and we saw it in spades on Monday after the Hobby Lobby case,” Fiorina told a CNN panel. “Somehow this is the long arm of business and the Republican Party reaching into the body of women. It’s ridiculous.”
“The war on women is shameless, baseless propaganda, there’s no fact to it, and it’s worked because it’s scared women to death,” she insisted. “Enough. Enough.”
“I respect you very much as a woman for your accomplishments,” Miller snarked in response. “I even read that you studied medieval history, which I think will come in handy with trying to defend the Republican war on women.”
Miller noted that every woman she knew was “furious about he Hobby Lobby decision.”
“This is not just a war against women, this is a war against science, Carly,” the radio host explained.
“Oh, for heaven sakes,” Fiorina gasped.
“These religious people believe certain drugs cause abortions, doctors and scientists say they do not,” Miller continued. “They prevent abortion… I have friends who need it for endometriosis. How do you say you’re small government, and get the government involved in those personal decisions between a woman and her doctor?”
-- like Abraham Lincoln axing a vampire to dust --
-- your takeaway might reasonably be, "Fuck Yes!"
Which is a pretty reasonable reaction. After all, pit your average, bright Liberal against your average, dogmatic Conservative bullshit talking-point Pez dispenser, and what you get in a matter of minutes is a Conservative yak-bot running in circles and yawping incoherently.
Which is why you probably were delighted to see Steph take apart the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus' favorite Serial Political Failure and Destroyer of Companies, Carly Fiorina.
It is also why you're probably not an executive producer for the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus. Because if you were, you would know that the product American political teevee exists to sell is a puppet show in which comforting, establishmentarian Beltway truths are relentlessly reinforced. And the centerpiece of the every show is supposed to be that, while Conservatism may sometimes sometimes be misguided, it's not really bad. And that however seditious or insane or bigoted or bloodthirsty or fuck-stick-stupid overeager Conservatives may be, Liberals are undoubtedly worse, which is why the Wise Murrican should steer a nice, safe David Brooksian course straight down the middle.
Which, of course, isn't really the middle at all; just a slightly less flamboyantly downsloping path to the same corporate/theocratic feudalism where Conservatism has been taking us all along.
But none of the smoke-foofers or mirror-spindles that make the Beltway Magic Machine run will operate correctly without the liquid fear of the Nefarious Schemes of Fake Liberals to lubricate the works. Which is why, none of the professionals who turn the cranks on the Beltway Magic Machine saw what you saw on Sunday.
For them, the takeaway will be a cautionary tale about how you should never, ever let real Liberals inside the happy, clappy perimeter of the Beltway Magic Machine.
For examples of how the Beltway Magic Machine is supposed to work, just flip the remote over to CBS where this happened, or to the absolute freak show which was once, long ago, a marginally-reputable program called "This Week..." and behold :
...air time being happily handed over to discredited felon and slavery's last defender, Dinesh D'Souza, so that he can report on what the voices in his head are telling him about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's Sekrit Compact with Saul Alinsky.
...Newt Gingrich, who is still permitted to exist on the Earth and be treated like something other that one of the worse cases of ambulatory moral syphilis in modern American political history for reasons no one can explain.
...And lookie here! It's Rick Perry sayin' something stoopid!
I don't really have a neat, button-hook ending here.Poor Governor Goodhair. No one on his staff had the guts to tell him that smartifying glasses don't really have the power to unstupid him.During a Sunday interview on ABC News, host Martha Raddatz gave the Republican governor a chance to back away from his conspiracy theory."Governor, do you really believe there’s some sort of conspiracy to get people into the United States by the federal government, by the Obama administration?" Raddatz asked."When I have written a letter that is dated May of 2012, and I have yet to have a response from this administration, I will tell you they either are inept or don’t care, and that is my position," Perry said, doubling down on the theory. "We have been bringing to the attention of President Obama and his administration since 2010, he received a letter from me on the tarmac... I have to believe that when you do not respond in any way, that you are either inept, or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from."The former Republican presidential candidate added that his theory was proved by the fact that the president had not responded to his letter, and had not deployed drones to the border.
I'm just really, really tired.
13 comments:
Mate, your compulsion to bring the monster to task is wearing you down - take a break, have a sleep, catch a fish, listen to some music. Then jump back into it; you're indispensable.
I just assume Carly, and her ilk, to be an alien form of extra-terrestrial life. "Carrot Top" was the quote I took away. Unfortunately, you can't ridicule the privileged back to reality. I fear it's going to take something like an open-carry prole plinking at the local country club or taking out the front row of the Kentucky Derby to get their attention undivided.
Let the games begin.
Carly Fiorona says it's "...birth control for free."
For free? Gee, and I thought these folks worked for a living.
Maybe they do these jobs as a favor to the boss and their pay checks are just party favors. And those health care benefits? Well help yourself but don't take too much 'cause they are for free, ya know.
Anon @ 6:35 AM:
That wouldn't work, either. It would merely cause the neo-feudal lords who compose our misruling class to turn their Panopticon Police State up to 11.
They think this time, the surveillance capability available to a police state has become so powerful that such a police state can nip all truly dangerous dissent in the bud, so they only need the police state, without any welfare state (for us peasants) worth mentioning. They think their police state will spare them the fates of the French and Russian aristocracies.
I wish I could be sure they were wrong about that--though yes, it is bizarre that the U. S. right wing, which serves the interests of the rich faithfully in other ways, does not merely blithely allow members of the exploited classes to arm themselves, but staunchly defends their right to do so.
***********
NOTE: I said "for us peasants" above to distinguish between the welfare state for us peasants and the welfare state for our feudal lords and their high-ranking henchpeople, aka "crony capitalism".
Id, "the welfare state for our feudal lords and their high-ranking henchpeople" has always been around; it's the essence of dominator society. "Crony capitalism" is just how it manifests in this day and age.
And I, too, wish I could be sure they were wrong. But I think the way the lugallim encourage the zeki to gun up is not so bizarre, considered as a sign of how confident they are in their programming of the masses. The white zeki (including those who just identify as white) will never turn their guns on their masters, any more than Txffu Mpwfs could have turned his weapons on his Beastly master or any other Blattid. The zeki of color might, but the white zeki are pre-emptively aimed at them.
Also too, what waldo said. I expect any day to find out DG's true identity from news reports of a Chicago man deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off.
Ambulatory moral syphilis is probably the most apt description of Newt Gingrich I've ever seen. Thanks again, DG.
As Fiorina was beginning her tenure as CEO of HP, I was involved in reverse-engineering the laser printer cartridges for HP's line of printers. HP did not manufacture these cartridges; they were made by Canon, and all the patents belonged to Canon.
Canon had a cross-license on laser cartridge technology with IBM, and that license went to Lexmark when it was spun off by IBM.
After HP cancelled a deal for Lexmark to remanufacture their empty LaserJet cartridges, Lexmark decided to reverse-engineer and manufacture clones of the most popular (and most profitable) LaserJet cartridges.
I led a team that reverse-engineered, tooled and manufactured cartridges for three HP printers. Ours were equal in print quality and reliability, up to 30% greater yield and 10% lower in price.
HP lowered its price: Lexmark went down another 10%. Rinse, repeat a number of times.
Lexmark's market penetration was only about 5%, and still made money at the lower prices. HP had to pay Canon to make its cartridges, so the price cuts were more costly to HP.
Cartridges are the profit-makers in the printer biz, but here is the thing HP never figured out: For every dollar of profit HP denied Lexmark via its price war, it denied $19 of profit to HP.
*sigh* I wish that NT had used less obscure references. I assume NT is referring to some F&SF work which I have not read. :p
The elite should not place such confidence in their programming. Some of the Uruk-hai are showing signs of breaking free. If enough of them do, the Tea Party might become a genuine 3rd party.
Dr. Frankenstein did not think his monster would turn on him, either--and Ruk finally decided that "Survival must cancel programming."
(See, NT? Most of us know at least the basics of Frankenstein, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek.)
Wait until Billy Bob's wive tells him he can't buy that new pickup because there's another baby on the way because her boss didn't approve of her lifestyle.
Thanks for chasing all the girls away from the club house.
"We never say, 'Who's going to get this?' We always say, 'The right people will get this.'" -- Joel Hodgson
"Txffu Mpwfs" is revealed in Spider Robinson's "The Blacksmith's Tale" (one of the last Callahan's Place stories to be set at the original Place) as the birth name of "The Guy with the Eyes" from the story of that name (the very first Callahan's story); I put it that way because telling you the use-name he adopts at the end of that story would constitute a spoiler for those who haven't read it.
The terms "lugallim" and "zeki" are from Fredy Perlman's classic of anarcho-primitivist philosophy Against His-Story, Against Leviathan. The moment when the ruler of some city-state in the Fertile Crescent realized he could set the captives his followers had taken from another city to doing the shit-work and leave his own people free to pursue higher things than day-to-day drudgery was, in Perlman's reconstruction, the birth of what he called "Leviathan" and the Eislerians call "dominator society", of lugallim -- kings who claimed the ordination of the nearest convenient deity -- and zeki -- slaves, those defined as legally subhuman. (Perlman ports the Sumerian and Russian words directly into English, pluralizing them as "lugals" and "zeks" -- a convention I've obviously not followed.)
If I have to explain deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off, your education has failed.
And now you know... the smuggest of the story.
The mainstream kinda-sorta-maybe homeopathically-diluted Left in the USA appeals to Mr. Hodgson's "right people", and doesn't care if anyone outside the charmed circle of the Kewl Kidz gets it or not.
The mainstream Right in the USA carefully concocts its propaganda to appeal to the average citizen, using images anyone in the USA of normal intelligence has seen before, and words they have heard before.
I trust you've noted their differing levels of success?
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