09.07.11
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath at 2:52 pm by George Smith
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi is great when he’s on the Wall Street as economic gangsters beat.
He’s lame as someone now attempting to cover extremism. In the last couple of posts at his blog — it’s not really that — he updates about once or twice a week max, he’s been finally seized by the idea that GOP extremism poses a real threat.
Doing that, he’s very late to the story. And the only thing that gets to him are the pieces everyone else has already passed around a million times, like Mike Lofgren’s TruthOut confession about the psychopaths he used to work with as a Congressional staffer.
I mocked this earlier in the day because it hews to the cowardly slime modern American tradition of publishing the tell-all, not when it might do some good early on, but after you’ve been run off or retired. At which point it serves as momentary candy for the professional left and, cynically, the demo first chapter for the inevitable big book contract.
Taibbi seems to think calling GOP extremism was formerly uncool. It was, he opines, too easy to beat up on the party
This is how he puts it:
I’ve always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it’s intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war.
That’s an ignorant rationalization being used as salve for his troubled brow.
Taibbi is too big a star journalist now to have been down in the weeds being washed and corroded by what’s been commonplace from the party for the last two to three years. Taibbi’s last piece on Michele Bachmann, which he conceded he did mostly by copying from others, showed he’s someone who prone to floating by and, if the fancy strikes him, taking a swipe at the news, adding his own sprinkling of stylistically unique slurs.
And now he’s changed his mind about GOP extremism. It’s really dangerous, he says:
But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we’re used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin …
Most people aren’t thinking about this because we’re so accustomed to thinking of America as a stable, conservative place where politics is not a life-or-death affair but more something that people like to argue about over dinner, as entertainment almost. But it’s headed in another, more twisted direction …
America might be a politically unstable country? He just found the courage to write that?!
Insightful.
The entire piece, at his blog, is here.
Permalink
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath at 10:28 am by George Smith
A great cartoon, pointed out to me by Frank’s post at Pine View Farm.
The comic details the now commonplace and distasteful phenomenon of members of the GOP who confess how psychopathic the party has become. After they’ve either been voted out or aren’t collecting a paycheck from it.
None of these people ever have the stones to speak this sort of “truth” when their livelihood still depends on working for the psychopaths.
The recent names: Mike Lofgren and his widely publicized confession published at TruthOut and ex-GOP Senator Chuck Hagel.
“The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party and … becoming more like an apocalyptic cult,” is the immediately famous quote from Lofgren.
Adds the comic artist, August J. Pollak: “Actual quote from guy who had no problem with said cult for … years.”
Bravo!
See it here now!
Permalink
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent at 7:24 am by George Smith
Howard is “volatile,” it is reported.
Today’s laugher re Howard is an interview conducted by Detroit music journalist Gary Graff for Billboard.
Almost all US music journalists are milchtoasts. They’re simply not capable of doing honest interviews with the likes of Ted Nugent.
Today’s piece in Billboard is no exception.
Entitled “Ted Nugent ‘Too Divisive’ to Get Role in Rick Perry Campaign,” the headline telegraphs what any reasonable person would find obvious.
However, most of the story is devoted to more puff hagiography for Ted Nugent.
It’s not the first time.
DD has mentioned Graff in the Ted Nugent tab before. Last year, right around the same time — Labor Day — when Ted had just finished his annual anti-union ritual.
I put it this way:
Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.
Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.
Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.
Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.
The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.
And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.
If you find anything in Graff’s Billboard piece on Nugent in late August of last year about the man’s animus toward union workers and Detroit, you’re better than me.
At the time, from the Nugent tab here, I wrote:
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ???
Guts, of course, are almost entirely ruled out in music journalism. It’s a black mark, a sign of mental illness and unreliability to have any.
But back to today’s Billboard piece on Nugent, again by Graff, which skips all mention of Nugent’s virulently anti-union piece for the Labor Day weekend in the WaTimes. The same weekend Ted played his “homecoming” gig in Detroit.
An enterprising reporter might have pleasantly asked Ted if he took time to share any of his opinions with the crowd at the DTE theatre in Clarkson.
Ted often shares his opinions, sprinkled with profanity, from the stage.
Here’s what could have been asked:
So, Ted, did you tell your crowd in Detroit last night that auto unions fucking suck, teachers unions blow and you despise them all? If not, why not? Did you not have the time?
It’s simple, really. You just have to be prepared to hear Ted curse at you and call ya a “limey prick” or something.
Graff just went with this:
As a Texas resident for the past six years, a diehard conservative and a personal friend of Gov. Rick Perry, there’s no question where Ted Nugent’s loyalties will lie during the 2012 presidential campaign. His capacity to be vocal about his candidate, however, is still up in the air …
“I don’t know if I’ll get a stamp of approval because I am so volatile and because the line in the sand in a political campaign can be so ambiguous — and I’m anything but, [Nugent tells Graff]. The reality is that Perry must penetrate what is presumed to be the non-Perry demographic, and if I scare them away so he doesn’t get their ear, then I’m being counterproductive” …
“That bully pulpit can also have a serious tone to it,” Nugent explains. “But on a rock ‘n’ roll stage, I can tell Hillary Clinton to straddle my machine gun. The more something causes problems with people, the more I’ll say it ’cause it’s rock ‘n’ roll and you can eat me. But that’s a rock ‘n’ roll show. I know how to change the tone …
“Volatile.” It’s like calling the first H-bomb test, the one that dug a crater a mile wide at Bikini atoll, a “big bang.” Here’s Ted being his usual tricky self when he knows a journalist won’t call him on it.
The tone in Nugent’s regular opinion pieces for the WaTimes contains no real differences from his stage rants.
Well, wait, let me correct that.
There is one difference. Ted is not allowed to use a constant stream of profanity at the WaTimes.
But otherwise, it’s the same. Ted hating on huge swaths of American society — condemning teachers, education, all aspects of the government, all Democrats, Muslims, just about everyone not exactly like him.
It’s easy to review and DD has done so. Hey, Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and it did not miss Nugent’s anti-labor Labor Day generosity this weekend.
Gary Graff, and Billboard, I’m reasonably certain, know all this. They just choose not to share it with readers or take time to make Nugent defend himself. It’s just too damn distasteful to have to walk Nugent back over most of his proclamations, particularly those which are totally indefensible in a reasonable society with any kind of heart.
At one point Nugent is asked about his “I Still Believe” song.
He seems to acknowledge it’s a duff piece, asserting that if only he’d had more money to spend on it, that would have fixed things:
[Nugent] considers it more of a demo than an actual single.
“It’s [sic] doesn’t have the big, musical sound I’d normally get,” he explains. “The guitars aren’t what they need to be. The drums aren’t what they need to be. But I’m not going to spend $100,000 to give something away. I’ll spend $10,000 to give something away, and I wanted to get that song out there.”
Ten thousand dollars to give that song away? More horseshit.
The Billboard piece includes the Ted concert vid on YouTube, the one I laughed at and linked to over the weekend here.
Nugent threatens a new album, one he knows his current audience won’t buy.
Permalink
09.03.11
Posted in Extremism, Psychopath & Sociopath, Ted Nugent at 10:50 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent has many beliefs. And he’s not a courageous enough a musician or lyricist to fit ’em into his songs. He also knows his new smallish audience of bottom-out-of-sight white assholes in wife-beaters and motorcycle gangster colors wouldn’t have it.
Not because of the actual political content. But because, in songs, they would sink a set where all anyone wants to hear is “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
So here is today’s Nugent bit at the Washington Times, for the second year running, an anti-labor column on the Labor Day weekend. Which takes stones and no heart.
Most people reading it won’t perceive the double paradox this weekend.
Ted performs one of his summer tour wrap-ups in Detroit. He’ll be performing at the DTE Energy Music Center in Clarkston, Michigan, today.
In the WaTimes today, Nugent:
Unions are no bargain for Americans
The real purpose of Labor Day is a day for the Democratic Party to celebrate. Labor unions and their members are solidly in the Democratic camp. At every Democratic campaign rally, Big Labor is there.
The National teachers union (NEA), one of the nation’s largest unions, is a rock-solid supporter of the Democratic Party, as is every other large union. The NEA cares more about maintaining taxpayer-provided benefits for its members than ensuring our kids get a world-class education. On the NEA’s watch, test scores have plummeted and dropout rates have skyrocketed.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has been a solid supporter of the Democratic Party for decades and has had automobile management under its thumb. The end result: Automotive plants have closed all around country. What was once the envy of the world, the American automobile industry has been totaled.
Al Capone-wannabe Richard Trumka [etc] …
Public-sector employees should be banned from joining a union …
The result of the labor movement has been a disaster. Labor unions have not sustained labor but rather have destroyed it …
Ultimately, you get what you bargain for – an unemployment check.
The Ted message: He despises unions, school teachers, and all public sector workers. Unions are responsible for mass unemployment, not the economic collapse of 2008. The unemployed deserve it because they supported unions.
Published on Labor Day. In the evening Ted plays Detroit, where the audience obviously won’t have read this column or hear him cursing them from the stage. Or they’d tar and feather him.
While Nugent’s name recognition in Michigan is still significant, there’s a reason he left it for Texas years ago.
I feel good mocking Ted Nugent’s mediocre “I Still Believe” in the previous post.
Related: Ted’s banishment from a big Michigan summer festival years ago.
Permalink
Posted in Decline and Fall, Psychopath & Sociopath at 7:33 am by George Smith
From Krugman, this morning:
I’ve actually been avoiding thinking about the latest Obama cave-in, on ozone regulation; these repeated retreats are getting painful to watch. For what it’s worth, I think it’s bad politics. The Obama political people seem to think that their route to victory is to avoid doing anything that the GOP might attack — but the GOP will call Obama a socialist job-killer no matter what they do. Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp, of a president who doesn’t stand for anything …
[Tighter] ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.
“Sometimes I Wonder … When Obama was a little kid if the big kids didn’t bounce basketballs off of his head in gym.” — from EZSmirkzz
Permalink
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath at 9:24 am by George Smith
Smokestack industry isn’t in the Second Great Depression Great Recession because of uncertainty and corporate displeasure over smog regulation?
Well, then they should all start hiring on Monday, right?
Oops. Maybe not. Zero job growth.
The daily odious:
President Barack Obama on Friday scrapped his administration’s controversial plans to tighten smog rules, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders.
Major industry groups had lobbied hard for the White House to abandon the smog regulation, and applauded Friday’s decision.
“The president’s decision is good news for the economy and Americans looking for work,” [said some member of the petroleum lobby].
But perhaps more than some of the other regulations under attack, the ground-level ozone standard is most closely associated with public health — something the president said he wouldn’t compromise in his regulatory review. Ozone is the main ingredient in smog.
The President can lose the election by not standing for anything.
He makes the choice one of picking him only because he’s not a psychopath like whoever winds up being the GOP nominee.
Every week he gets another dose of what the GOP plans to do to him all the way to election day. Surrendering on smog regulation, even if it had no chance of passing the House, was pointless.
The rage vote can beat him.
Toying with adding a new tab — The Psychopath Vote. Done!
“Lloyd Blankfein” at over 600 views/listens. Thanks, folks! Keep it up! Boost the class war for our side!
Permalink