Here in the heart of Red America, Beth Cox [of Hendersonville, TN] and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign …
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline??? …
Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it.
From the social conservative point of view, the election results were bad. Really bad. That does not mean bad for social conservatives, though. It means bad for the country …
By far the most problematic result of the election for social conservatives was two states’ legalization of homosexual “marriage??? by popular vote for the first time in our nation’s history. But once again, that is not problematic because of some perceived loss of power or influence with the electorate. The other side’s victories are minute compared to our record on the issue. The problem comes from the pain that inevitably will follow from those states’ decisions.
Forty years ago, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, after Richard Nixon stomped the South Dakota Democratic senator, George McGovern at the height of the Vietnam War:
Senator McGovern had hoped too that Americans would share his concerns that the Nixon administration was ignoring the interests of the people and consorting only with industrial giants, the special interests of the super rich and generally sacrificing the welfare of the country at large.
Nothing that Mr. McGovern had to say on these questions got through to the people sufficiently to persuade them to vote for him …
[McGovern campaign manager] Frank Mankiewicz and I spent about three hours in a roadside hamburger stand talking about the campaign. Three weeks earlier, just after the election, he had said that three people were responsible for McGovern’s defeat: Tom Eagleton, Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Bremer — but now he seemed more inclined to go along with the New York Times Yankelovich poll, which attributed Nixon’s lopsided victory to a rising tide of right-bent, non-verbalized racism in the American electorate.
Forty years later verbalization of “right-bent racism” became one of the motivational tools in the Romney bid for the White House. More than half turned away.
The WhiteManistan roflbot art is viewable and freely usable in much larger form. It is here.
It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. — William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Mitt Romney is the president of white male America …
Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional??? America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.
Forty years ago, reprinted from Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72:
Hear me, people. We now have to deal with another race — small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. — Sitting Bull, 1877
The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with election day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we now seem on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself …
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality — the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts — that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of the century,” bur on a level he will never understand he was probably right … and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. — Hunter Thompson
Below, the plentiful evidence of widespread self-delusion and the corrosive legacy of Norman Vincent Peale.
Pay the pearl-clutchers no mind. That way lies disaster. The actual fine print on the label of reality reads: “Kumbaya” not included.
We have decayed into a nation of gluttonous, soulless pigs who feast on whatever Fedzilla provides by taking from one group of Americans (the producers) and giving to others (the takers) who haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it …
The pigs have come home to wallow in the mud of the Washington swamp … And you thought “Planet of the Apes??? was a movie …
The stealth white bigot’s riff on the Obamaphone.
Free cellphones aren’t free. Food stamps have become vote-getting extortion vouchers …
If you voted for Mr. Obama, you are thunderously dumb and incredibly naive … Thanks for nothing, numbskulls.
Twenty years ago, the results would have been different. America wasn’t nearly as stupid back then as we are today.
Bush the Elder lost to Bill Clinton in November 1992. But, yes, the angry white guy had a much stronger proportionate grip on rule then.
Krugman, on the Ted Nugents, the Psychopath Vote:
[What] we’ve just seen is a peek into the modern right-wing psyche, which is obsessed — more than anything else — with power. Policy is one thing; but equally or even more important is the sense of being with the winners, of being part of the team that will stamp its boots on the faces of the other guys.
Fresh from decisive losses in seven of Maryland’s eight congressional districts and its worst performance ever in a U.S. Senate race, the Maryland Republican Party is searching for answers to stop its slide into irrelevance in the increasingly deep-blue state.
The party lost one of its two congressional incumbents Tuesday when Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett was defeated in a heavily gerrymandered district, leaving incumbent Rep. Andy Harris as the party’s sole representative in Congress.
Also Tuesday, voters approved ballot initiatives to legalize same-sex marriage and give in-state tuition to some illegal immigrants, despite heavy opposition from conservatives.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy grandfather Roscoe Bartlett, who has been in Congress for 20 years, got about 38 percent of the vote in his failed re-election bid. That’s the same as Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern did nationally in the disastrous 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon.
“Party electorate a paltry 26 percent,” reads the WaTimes piece.
He won because he gave the parasites Obamaphones — a white man’s racist group psychosis.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The head of Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group says he will invite dozens of American engineers to his factories in China to learn about manufacturing.
News reports here say Terry Gou told a business meeting on Wednesday that he did not believe President Barack Obama could succeed in moving production lines back to the U.S. because Americans have outsourced those jobs for too long.
But Gou says he hopes the Americans can learn how factories are operated so they can return home to set up facilities with automated equipment to resolve the lack of skilled laborers.
Foxconn employs 1.2 million people in China to assemble products for Apple Inc. and other global firms. It has introduced more robots in China over the past two years as it faces soaring wages there.
[“I assume said training also involves advice on where to put the suicide nets…” adds Chuck in e-mail. Couldn’t resist.]
The short news piece contains an internal contradiction. Introduction of automation so as not to pay higher wages is not congruent with a lack of skilled labor.
In fact, anyone who has read the stories on iJunk manufacturing at Foxconn knows that it is hardly skilled labor.
And in the US it has been repeatedly demonstrated that unemployment is the result of lack of demand, rather than labor skills mismatching.
Paul Krugman has dealt with the issue again and again. It is one of those zombie stories used to explain away the need for doing anything about the recession, as accepting the present as the new normal.
Lazear goes through the data, and finds overwhelming evidence of inadequate demand, little if any evidence of structural problems.
I was especially struck by his data on “mismatch??? (which everyone I know calls mishmash): the extent to which there appears to be a misalignment between where the workers are and where the jobs are. In the early stages of the Lesser Depression some data seemed to suggest a sharp rise in mismatch; it was left for us demand-siders to argue that this was actually a cyclical, not structural issue, and not fundamental to the employment problem. Now Lazear informs us that sure enough, mismatch was cyclical, and has in fact come way down even though unemployment remains high …
What all this tells us is that the vast suffering still going on is gratuitous — that we could end this quickly with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Unfortunately, between the GOP and the Very Serious People (who love, just love, the idea that it’s structural), it won’t happen any time soon.
Timely as ever. First simple video, too, actually.
Morning after snapshot of country vote analysis by the Los Angeles Times.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party bet on the New Confederacy and lost in an electoral college landslide.
In the process, they played on the basest feeling, loathing, rallying the middle-aged white voter against everyone else. The result is that everyone in the world can’t help but see the US as two countries, one that’s old fearful, motivated only by lies and anger, and one ready to try to deal with the present.
Your country has been polarized and an incredible amount of arms [are] in private hands.
These two facts alone are enough to do everything one can to deescalate.
In my opinion the quote “elections don’t change anything, otherwise they’d be forbidden??? holds true.
The US is reigned by capitalism and Obama’s reelection doesn’t change that.
You yourself have on this blog never even mentioned, that other parties exist in your country, probably for fear that democrat voters are more likely to think about their choice and thus would weaken Obama’s chances.
But a two party system imho doesn’t offer a real choice if it exists for a longer period of time. Even less so if it gets trampled on:
I think Taibbi is right, when he thinks about conciliation rather than fighting it to the grave. Especially when you remind yourself, that you would have to fight against intellectually challenged white supremacists who live in selfmade bunkers.
Indeed, Christopher Hechl has a point. I never mentioned any third party runs. Roseanne Barr, the famous tv sitcom actress, was on the ballot in Pasadena. And so was Jill Stein of the Green Party.
And much earlier in the year an organization funded by centrist hedge fund managers called Americans Elect tried to mount a third party campaign. Americans Elect was ignored, I believe rightly so, being more of the same rich man’s business. And Jill Stein of the Green Party had a hard time getting the mainstream media to cover her even when she was getting arrested as a publicity stunt.
The truth is third party runs have been rendered impossible. And it’s because of money.
Everyone has noticed the plutocrats funneled hundreds of millions into the extreme right’s campaign in an attempt to remove Barack Obama. They didn’t choose to start a new party. They bought one off the shelf, the Tea Party, in a concerted campaign that started prior to the 2010 election.
There are many lists now circulating of the biggest winners and losers from the election; oddly, however, none of the lists I’ve seen mentions just how bad this result is for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe.
The story, as you may recall, is that the financial industry — having brought both itself and the rest of the world to the edge of disaster — was bailed out by taxpayers. Yet far from being grateful, top financial types were furious at Obama for occasionally hinting that some of them might have misbehaved a bit. And investment bankers — who normally lean Democratic — went overwhelmingly to the other side, pouring cash into Mitt Romney’s coffers in the no doubt correct expectation that a Romney administration would dismantle financial reform and treat their wealth with the adulation they believe to be their birthright.
But Romney lost and Obama won. The limits of their power have been cruelly exposed, and the reelected president now owes them nothing.
There was also a lot of air time wasted last night on how the country must be stitched back together.
It can’t. Those who call for it, like Tom Brokaw, seemingly whenever he was on camera on NBC last night, have brains not fit for cheap canned dog food. The map at the LA Times shows it very plainly.
The New Confederacy bet won all the votes in the south and in the big wasteland states with very small populations. That’s the angry white man, what this blog calls the Psychopath Vote. And it lost everywhere else, in the cities where polyglot America lives.
One sees it in California. It looks like two states. One that doesn’t count, in the interior. And the other California, the one Republicans like to mock, where most of us live, near and on the coast.
Even San Diego county went for the president. The military, it looks to me, trusted him more to steer the country right than the always war drum beating xenophobe anti-Muslim hawks.
Look close along the mighty river bordered by the bright red states — Mississippi. Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s all blue. That’s where the Americans the bigots hate live.
They live in the big blue strip along the southern border of Texas and it shows everybody that eventually, sometime in the future — maybe not anytime soon, the Republicans — even in Texas — will be finished.
That’s the present and the future coming.
Oysters take an irritant, sand, and turn it into something wonderful — pearls. That won’t happen in the United States. There won’t be anything good that transforms out of the vast expanse of irritant fighting mad red. It will just get less so. The inexorable long march of time will dispose of the modern GOP.
The election won’t correct anything. The Republicans will persist in going after all their imagined enemies, denying science, trying to impose control on the reproductive rights of women, jamming up everything where they can, damning gay people and loudly proclaiming how they are the makers and everyone else, swine. Many of them have already proclaimed the election an historic world tragedy.
The parasites won! The election result only confirms this ugly paranoid belief — the Democratic strategy is to make as many people as possible a government dependent, a moocher, and in so doing cultivate a voting base that outnumbers the “producers.”
It’s a horrible slur to regard over half the country as nothing. But it’s their encapsulated delusion and nothing can change it.
Expect more of the same from the Republicans. Love is transitory. Hate is forever.
“For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the ‘real America,’ all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people … Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way,” wrote Krugman in a similar vein.
I called it Guns, Booze & Jesus. And it’s a nasty, mean hard rock tune, unlikely to get that generous spirit of Norman Vincent Peale-ism swelling in the breast of the listener. But that’s exactly how what lost last night is.
The New Confederacy was stillborn. Not for lack of trying, though. Mitt Romney and the billionaires made the cynical and loathsome decision to polish white animosity to the sharpest serrated edge that could be managed in a long presidential campaign. Sure, that animus was always there. However, they made it everything, turning it into the biggest, baddest, most damaging brand they could. And they came up short.
Even at the bitter end, Mitt Romney still wasn’t able to be magnanimous in defeat. He emphasized he and his wife would pray for the Obama administration and the country. They would pray for all of us. In the extremist Republican lexicon, you are prayed for because you are thought flawed, unclean, a sinner who may fall. The quality of faith is most insincere.
Decency and the forward look was triumphant. However, the rancid toothpaste won’t be going back in the tube. It’s what we have now.
I would have paid a movie fare to see the blood squirt from the corners of Ted Nugent’s eyes like a Texas horned toad before the man collapsed in a heap on the floor in Waco. I have heard Nugent is on an obscure Turkish painkiller called Wallot to control the agony of exploding kidney stones from decades of over-consumption of fatty hog meat and diet soda. Wallot can loosen inhibitions leading to crazy outbursts of reptile-like hissing and subsequent unconsciousness.
And, yes, he did manage to call everyone who voted for Obama a subhuman varmint. The hate is still strong within him.
Roscoe Bartlett, the Maryland House Republican whose entire career can be almost be entirely encapsulated by the phrase — Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — saw his political career end about fifteen minutes ago when the Washington Post called his race for a faceless Democratic Party banker, John Delaney.
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
However, out-of -power politicians (and you can make a good argument that Bartlett was never actually ever in any position of real power) don’t lose their membership in the cult. They just become pure lobbyists. And expand into plaguing the British.
Bartlett also has an emergent career as a grandfather to the survivalist/prepper demographic, that group of white people on the extreme right who think American civilization will soon come to a catastrophic end.
Gen. Michael Hayden, principal at security consultancy The Chertoff Group, was director of the National Security Agency, and then the CIA, during the years leading up to the event. “I have to be careful about this,” he says, “but in a time of peace, someone deployed a cyberweapon to destroy what another nation would describe as its critical infrastructure.” In taking this step, the perpetrator not only demonstrated that control systems are vulnerable, but also legitimized this kind of activity by a nation-state, he says.
The [Stuxnet] attack rattled the industry.
What’s amusing is Hayden’s tying himself into a knot trying to avoid saying that his unnameable example, Stuxnet, was written by US virus labs. And in so doing tacitly recognizing the country is in a poor position to argue the perfidy and danger of cyberattacks on our infrastructure by others — like, say, Iran.
In other words, Hayden is perfectly aware of the details and that we started the war.
“For example, if the DOD is planning a cyberattack abroad against a type of critical infrastructure that’s also used in the U.S., should information on the weakness being exploited be shared with U.S. companies so they can defend against counterattacks?” reads the article.
Haw. That’s one way of theorizing on the issue.
The piece, at CIO magazine, also illustrates of phenomenon of government defenders against cyberwar who immediately go into the private sector to lobby for more cyberdefense spending.
While it may not be the case that everyone is out to immediately engorge themselves on taxpayer-funded contracts for national cyberdefense, the general appearance is now of a standard and straightforward influence-peddling avarice.
Hayden, for example, is played as part of the ubiquitous Chertoff Group (Yes, that Chertoff.)
Also standard — the compilation of enemies lists, made up of foreign groups generally much smaller, weaker, and poorer.
The Somali pirates, Michael Hayden would have you believe, will be able to threaten the US from cyberspace, along with many, many others. It is a story with no resonance in the middle class, meant only to help keep the computer security industry at full employment:
“Over the next five years, low-level actors will get more sophisticated and the Internet [will expand] into areas of the Third World where the rule of law is weaker,” says Gen. Michael Hayden, principal at security consultancy The Chertoff Group. “The part of the world responsible for criminal groups such as the Somali pirates is going to get wired.”
The rule-of-law, eh? Which naturally and rightfully is abridged when we find it convenient and necessary to attack someone else.
There’s no more rule-of-law in our cyberwarriors than there is in a stewed prune.
We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.
But we don’t make that assumption about our politicians anymore. We don’t believe the other side would have our backs even in an emergency. People today on both sides are genuinely terrified of a wrong outcome in this election. They’ve been whipped into a state of panic – people everywhere are freaking out and muttering to themselves and firing off vitriolic emails. That’s incredibly sad. As a member of the media, I feel sick about it. I think all of us in this business owe America a hug, or something . . . All of this has gone too far, and man, we’d better pray this doesn’t end in a 2000-style mess tonight. Year 2000 America seems like a veritable Buddha of perfect composure compared to the already-terminally-pissed, stress-crazed populace that has been dragged to the final lap of this terrible contest. Like crime victims, we deserve closure. Can we at least have that?
No. Shove it. Never been quite up to it after the high point of describing Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid poking its blood funnel into the face of humanity.
