Reality shows again and again you can’t spoof the Tea Party.
Abe Lincoln messed up everything, sez a descendant of John Wilkes Booth one Tea Party man.
In Hey Craig Man, at 2:12, a Tea Party marcher with a poster of preposterous assertion, MLK was a Republican. At 2:17, someone promenading with an “I Love Capitalism” placard. You scratch your head and laugh a bit when you see such things. It’s immediately offset by realization that most of the Obama administration’s tenure has been crippled by the ascent of Tea Party dogma and that the annihilating nature of such views could easily take the country down in November.
In a sea of soulless, sheeplike dependency, it’s easy to spot the fiercely independent people who continue to declare our independence. We are the producers, the people who make the country work …
Fiercely independent Americans are shocked and saddened by how far our beloved country has slid into socialism.
Defiance is in the DNA of fiercely independent Americans. We defy the notion that the wealth we create through our hard work, sweat and risk can or should be spread around for others. We find that concept to be abhorrent – anti-freedom and anti-American.
July 4, like most big American holidays, morphed into something utterly phony decades ago. Eat hot dogs and hamburgers, watch the fireworks, have a big party for the sake of a party. That’s it.
However, I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything anywhere linking the philosophy of Ayn Rand to the day commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
When the economic collapse disgraced certain Ayn Rand acolytes, the novelist’s [biographer Jennifer Burns] told Politico in 2009: “Wow, Ayn Rand. Dead and buried forever. But she’s come roaring right back.”
Frank informs that Objectivism — the catch-all name for Rand’s philosophy of pure selfishness as the pinnacle of rationality — was essentially whatever she said it was.
He does this humorously.
“When [Rand and her cohorts] weren’t banishing one another from the inner circle … the novelist and her followers were determining, by dint of pure deductive reasoning, that cigarette smoking was life affirming … ” reads the book in one tongue-in-cheek takedown.
McCarthy-ism is far from dead in the US. From e-mail today, a push by some of the most famous douchebags on the GOP side of the house, to investigate Islamic infiltrators in US government:
In what may be a watershed moment in the fight against radical Islam, five members of Congress have written letters to the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence asking for investigations of the Muslim Brotherhood influence in their agencies.
The five members of Congress are Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Rooney (R-FL), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Collectively, they sit on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Armed Services Committee and Judiciary Committee …
Below is a sample email you can send to your representative in Congress. You can easily find out who that is and get to his or her website by entering in your zip code at this link. Use their contact form to send your message.
Below is a sample letter you can send to them (copy & paste and then add your details):[sic]
Dear Representative [Name of Congressman]
I am contacting you to urge you to endorse the call made on June 13, 2012, by your colleagues — Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — to launch an investigation into the influence of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups and individuals in the U.S. government.
These congressmen wrote letters requesting investigations by the Inspectors General of the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Each letter referenced concerning incidents related to the Muslim Brotherhood in the department or agency it was addressed to.
As I’m sure you’re aware, the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamic group which supports terrorism worldwide and is using stealth jihad to install Sharia and undermine the freedoms we cherish here in the U.S.
As a voter in your district, I urge you to endorse their letters and show your concern about this important issue.
Ludicrous quote on Mitt Romney, Bain and the corporate downsizing that’s the equity biz:
When more is done with less throughout a market economy, billions of people are made better off, which only shows that firms like Bain are not vultures preying on the dead, but bees bringing the pollen of life from plant to plant.
There is so much good news that goes largely unreported that it makes me want to scream. As I write this, just a couple of days ago, a 14-year-old boy in Phoenix who was watching his three siblings at home shot a punk who busted through a door and pointed a gun at the young man.
This is an incredibly wonderful news story that should be the lead story on the evening network news. It should be the front-page story in the New York Times …
The real shame is that similar incredibly good news events happen every day countless times across America … When Americans use guns to stamp out evil, news reports are virtually nonexistent.
But today I’m screaming with joy.
Readers will note the many newspapers do, in fact, report shootings of this nature although it almost never makes the front page except at the very small town level.
“Smile, America … Good conquered evil in spite of the liberal anti-freedom agenda,” Nugent concludes. He reasons, if reason is the word to use, that one way to prosperity is to shoot more criminals outright.
I’ve never met a person, from the right, left or middle, who screams with joy upon hearing an anonymous story like this. There may be some satisfaction over a home invader getting a comeuppance.
Screaming with joy — now that’s psychotic behavior. Pity the copy editors who have to endure it weekly.
In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted fake Democrat Senator Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a sick Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. What Specter got that day, he had coming. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved so much better than him.
The outburst was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
I wrote the melody, a very hard rock funk thing (in the Seventies it would have been heavy metal), called it Hey Craig Man! and realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative. The only thing that worked was non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
I stuck it on the web as an MP3.
Yesterday, with the upholding of Obamacare, I remastered it and added Tea Party video.
Readers will note it’s still nonsensical. There is no other way to describe what went on and what still goes on. Craig Miller may have never appeared at a political rally/townhall meeting again but tens of thousands like him continue to do so.
(For the rock music types, I was imitating an effect from something old called the Seamoon Funk Machine.)
Reader Mikey D secured a copy of Thomas Franks’ “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right” for DD blog to review and it arrived yesterday. I again thank him profusely!
It describes a stupefying chain of events in American history. With the world economy leveled by Wall Street misdeeds, the time was ripe for a popular uprising to rival that of the coming of the New Deal.
That didn’t happen. Instead, against all reason and common sense, the opposite. The popular uprising, in the guise of the Tea Party, instead blamed the US government and all of civilized democratic society, coming to accept a twisted conspiratorial story which blamed the economic collapse on secret liberal plots that inflated government for the express purpose of interfering with, and then destroying, pure capitalism.
It was as if at least half the country suddenly decided, bizarrely, that their favorite characters in the tale of Robin Hood were the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne.
It marked signal failure by the Democratic Party, a total inability to tell and sell a moral story on the true nature of what happened, for reasons ranging from alliances with the wealthy class that had caused the disaster and inability and unwillingness to communicate that it stood for anything populist. From the nobodies to President Obama, the party engaged in what amounted to political malfeasance toward its base.
The outrage at what became derisively known as Obamacare was part of this.
I’ll share a complete review of “Pity the Billionaire” in the days to come.
The movie star A-list is further politically left than Fidel Castro, and the thought of Mitt Romney winning the White House will cause glitzy movie stars to raise stacks and stacks of cash for Mr. Obama while promising to leave America for a bankrupt, socialist country if Mr. Romney is elected president. (More proof, although not needed, that no copy editors work on a Ted Nugent column.)
The Occupy hippies could be requested to send in a portion of their unemployment checks or other government assistance to the Obama campaign. For donations of $100 or more, the Democratic Party could send the Occupy idiots a gold-painted brick to toss through the window of a Wall Street bank or other greedy, imperialistic American business (not Apple stores, though – even Occupy hippies need iPods and smartphones).
Unions and Eric Holder also vetted as roots of all evil. In more light news, a Lehigh Valley newspaper interviewed the Nuge for his weekend gig at a casino on what used to be part of the property occupied by Bethlehem Steel. The interview tells those who can read between the lines that no one is interested in helping Ted Nugent make a new album..
It’s now down to this: If Barack Obama holds the White House, and if Democrats win control of either house of Congress, then Obamacare will be unstoppable, and America will become the United States of Europe …
Obamacare was forced upon us by 219 representatives, 60 senators and one president. Simply put, their time in office must end. As I’ve said before, politically speaking, we must level their cities and salt their fields. The barren wastelands of their once-promising careers will be a stark reminder to future would-be statist politicians who are willing to betray the will of Americans and break the covenant of our Constitution.
“Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a radiologist and President Obama’s cousin,” reads the by-line. [1]
1. When Barack Obama and I first met he had already become president and was furiously erecting the government-controlled health care system that bears his name and I had already begun a very public crusade to save America from it. Fate would never reunite our mothers who grew up together as young girls, cousins and friends, after they were separated decades ago, but now their sons bridged a divide in our family that was created by decisions not our own. It’s not often that a president’s most vocal critic comes from his own family …
Today, ObamaCare is on the ropes …
— from here,My Cousin Barack Obama And Our Obamacare Family Feud
Google’s news tab highlighted a weak column by some nobody writing for US News & World Report.
Lara Brown, who has allegedly written a book entitled Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants, asserts the upholding of Obamacare will only inspire the opposition to greater heights of … what, exactly?
As extremists, they’re already as aggressive as possible. (In an aside, someone actually used the word “aspirants” in a title for a book. That level of unconscious self-sabotage is virtually Freudian. Either that or she can’t write at all.)
But nothing excites a party more than a political loss. And so today, while Democrats are basking in the sunlight of this decision, Republicans are raising unbelievable amounts of money and strongly coalescing behind Romney’s candidacy. Social conservatives and small government libertarians now believe their only hope to save America from becoming a European-style social democracy is to elect Mitt Romney and repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
If anything, the Supreme Court has helped the GOP more than it helped Obama.
I think the GOP is more like a colony of fire ants that once inhabited a driveway crack next to a house where I lived in Pasadena.
I discovered they were fire ants, not the usual common brown ants, when I inadvertently set up the weekend evening’s barbecue grill over their colony one summer. As I stood there grilling I noticed brown ants underfoot.
Believe me, these boots don’t help.
Three minutes later I was in the house with my boots, trousers and socks off, trying to get them off my lower half. My foot swelled up to just short of the size where I could put on a shoe. I wore flip-flops for ten days but not anywhere near the fire ants.
I found that if you stood within even three feet of the fire ant colony they came for you. I made that mistake twice.
The fire ants were implacable. Their level of hostility never varied. If you got in their space, appeared on their insect radar, they attacked in a swarm. Very quickly.
You had to hand it to the fire ants. They never did the live and let live thing. The house cats also gave the colony much respect.
Only the yard mockingbirds had an answer. They ate them occasionally. And I could not discern how they managed it.
Spraying the fire ant colony didn’t do much except force them into hiding for a couple weeks.
We were reluctant to call authorities or outside pros. Fire ants had been in the news as unwanted interlopers in the area. If you found a colony you were to inform local government and someone, or a crew, would be sent to handle it. I reasoned that if this was done half the driveway would be destroyed and the yard made sterile for ten years with insecticide.
So we lived with the fire ants, learning to give them a wide birth. And one winter season there was so much rain, the part of the driveway where they lived was under an inch of water for two weeks.
All the fire ants drowned and were never seen again.
The GOP, an extremist party, was like that colony of fire ants. They are always inspired in their hostility to enemies. And no matter the conditions, like the fire ants, they are 100 percent united and always totally vigorous in their fury.
The only fault is that the nation is now seen to lack character and a basic morality in men of this station — except for Jimmy Carter. The silence from everyone else is deafening. And it tells you everything you need to know about the empire in decline.
THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.
Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended …
While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past …
At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice … But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies …
Takes his campaign tour to where everyone was fired, my old homeland, southeastern rural Pennsy:
WEST HAZELTON, Penn.—Mitt Romney takes his bus tour to Pennsylvania Saturday, hoping to turn the focus back to the economy after a day in which his message was largely overshadowed by President Obama’s immigration decision.
The Republican nominee will begin his day by touring a casting and machine company in Weatherly, located in a rural eastern part of the state. He’ll then make his way west, stopping at a WaWa convenience store in Quakertown and an old iron furnace in Cornwall that is a national historic landmark.
Mitt Romney has nothing in common with the people of the area. The idea of this man at a WaWa in Quakertown, also home of the Q-Mart bazaar, is almost enough to induce tetany. (Follow the link)
Do you think candidate Romney would look good in this? You used to be able to buy them where he’s campaigning.
Romney’s campaign stop is slightly reminiscent of part of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, about football-obsessed Odessa, TX and the Permian High football team. Staunchly conservative in values, the area was destroyed economically by the mid-Eighties and Bissinger tells the story, since watered down and over-simplified in a movie and television series, of how elevation of high school football to a level dwarfing many collegiate programs held the place and people together.
Through Friday Night Lights Bissinger infrequently cites Pennsylvania, Ohio and a couple other states where high school football holds places together, too, just as in Texas.
The American Dream, Bissinger writes, is destroyed but in these places there is Firiday night football.
Through it the people can still have the very special — an event, a shared experience of tremendous emotion, athletic achievement, and vicarious thrills, anodyne from September to near Christmas, if the team made the playoffs, to a shriveled, diminished life of no future and no opportunities the rest of the year.
Friday Night Lights takes place during the elder Bush’s run for President against Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Nothing has changed between then and now except for the fact that the American economy is much much worse for all except those at the very top.
Unsurprisingly, Odessa was no place for the Democratic Party.
In Odessa, Michael Dukakis was the candidate for “homos,” a “minority of sexual perverts.” He was a socialist who ignited “fear that he would take away the rights of people to protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would beneift from his administration would be the poor, while they, the hardworking guts of the country got sold down the river.”
Familiar?
In the book the elder Bush makes a brief campaign appearance in the Odessa area. George H. W. Bush, like Mitt Romney in West Hazelton today, was no more like the people than the all-destroying Martians were like the narrator in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. (To be fair, Bush had lived in Odessa for a short period after WWII when he was in the independent oil business.)
“Their belief in [George H. W. Bush] seemed ironic, even crazy,” writes Bissinger in Friday Night Lights.
“[The economy] of Midlands-Odessa had fallen apart during the Reagan-Bush administration, and it was hard to think of any other single area of the country that had suffered as much … The statistics were numbing. in 1986 the unemployment shot up to 20 percent. The number of bankruptcies filed with the federal court in Midland shot up 65 percent.”
In the book, the arrival of the elder Bush is met with near hysteria, virtually, but not quite, the same support inspired by the Permian High football team.
“[Bush] created the image of a country that was still as good, as fundamentally sound as it had been in the fifties, when [he] and thousands of others had watched the American Dream blossom before their eyes …” writes the author.
That place no longer existed, Bissinger dryly observed. The GOP candidate created an “amazing illusion.” The people of Odessa wanted and needed it, anything to lift the spirit and assuage the desperation.
And that’s what Mitt Romney, an unprincipled liar and brazenly unlikeable oligarch from the upper atmosphere of the ruling class, works in eastern PA.
Size of check recently written to Romney campaign by kook right wing billionaire — $10 million.
That would buy most of what’s left north of Philly between Quakertown and West Hazelton.
“Some Romney advisers sound especially bullish, with one positing that a big win by their side is now more likely than a narrow Obama victory …” — TIME
Coincidentally, Paul Krugman has a blog post on Texas and the state recession caused by a collapse in oil prices and the S&L banking scandal in the late Eighties, the period in Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger devotes nearly a chapter to discussing the people and the economy of Odessa in relation to it.
