The Two

So, it’s down to two – way, way down.

We’ve heard quite a lot from Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum these last few weeks.   Enough really to disqualify them both from public office, the post office, the box office – hell, if you have an office, lock it down.

Monsignor Santorum is the talk of the town for his recent anti-choice, anti-birth control, anti-gay, anti-education and anti-environment comments.  Quite the inventory, Rick . Deus vult!

Poor Willard is more in the news for his love of Michigan’s trees and inland lakes than anything else.  Touching.

But, it was what these two political goliaths had to say in the beginning of their campaigns that set the table for their inspiring surges to the top of faith-based politics.  It’s then that they told us what they believe.

Let us travel back to those summery months.

Last June, Mitt Romney finished off his “big announcement” barnburner with a now familiar flurry of mindlessness: “I’m Mitt Romney and I believe in America, and I’m running for President of the United States.”

It was thus that Romney joined with fellow wingnuts attempting to soothe our anxieties over his party’s compulsory aversion to science by assuring us that it’s all right—even if he doesn’t believe in evolution, he sure does believe in America.

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This mindless mantra, or its equally cretinous cousin “I believe in the American people,” have come to dominate right-wing speechifying and bloviating.  Last May, when he was more a mess than a candidate, Rick Santorum found himself professing to Sean Hannity, “I believe in the American people.”  Amen, Rick!

Early Santorum

Either way one slices it – a “belief” in America or in her people—the depth of idiocy evinced by these statements is breathtaking.  What does Romney mean by saying that he believes in America?  Is he saying that he believes it exists?  If that’s what he means, then all he has established by uttering this banality is that he is sane.

Lots of people these days talk about “believing in” a Palestinian state.  Of course, that “belief” reflects a preference that a country that presently does not exist should exist in the future.  Does Romney’s belief in America similarly suggest a preference that America should exist?  If so, then Romney’s prattle establishes that he is not sane.

By saying he believes in America, was Romney artlessly trying to suggest that he believes something about America?  If so, what?  And why didn’t he just say it?  Does he want us to guess?  Or does he want us to fill in whatever fuzzy notions suit our own beliefs?  It’s a tragedy how far one can get in politics by saying nothing.

And what of Santorum’s belief in the American people?  This assertion suffers the additional infirmity (together with being inane) of being a lie if it is meant to say anything at all.  Because if believing in the American people suggests in some way having faith in the goodness and righteousness of the American people, then surely Santorum has overshot his mark.  Lots of gay people are American people.  Abortion providers are American people.  Many Muslims are American people.  Does Santorum believe in them?

The term “American people” admits of no exceptions, so to profess a belief in “the American people” is to profess a belief in all of them.  In this sense, who among us does “believe in” the American people?  I sure don’t.  Do you?  I don’t perceive righteousness in bigoted right-wing American people any more than I perceive righteousness or trustworthiness in American rapists, American thieves, or American televangelists.

Maybe Santorum meant that he has faith in the majority of American people or in Christian American people.  What a pity, if he had meant either of those two things, that he said something different.  But to many Teabagger types, language does not have meaning; it is just some kind of code about us and them.

And what is a belief, anyway, but a mere opinion?  “Believe” or “belief” are words we use to fudge when we don’t know or can’t prove something; in our culture, it has unfortunately become more popular to believe than to prove.

The worthlessness of mere beliefs is elucidated by the likes of teabag standard-bearer Sarah Palin.

It was in those summery months that Sarah, who, although she doesn’t know anything, believed that Paul Revere warned the British (not his American compatriots) about Americans being armed (rather than about an oncoming approach) by shooting and ringing bells (rather than with lanterns).  So to say “I believe” is itself ignorant; to add “in America” is nothing short of fatuous.

Welcome, America, to the Republican primary – believe it or not.

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By Brendan Beery and brian boru

 by H. Stephen O’Neil ~

Can you smell it!  Republicans are once again firing up their barbecues, preparing for the annual Red Herring Festival. A celebration of that smelly conservative fish so malodorous that you can’t catch of whiff of another damn thing.  It’s cooked up, after all, to distract you.

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. 

We should all have grave concerns about reactionary juveniles playing with matches – especially given their long obsession with fire and brimstone. Oh, they love to play with fire.  There’s a darn good chance that some of them might accidentally self immolate –  burn their own britches in teabag parlance – setting the stage for yet more government intrusion into their God given right to flaming hyperbole.

The theme of this year’s shindig, “Much Ado About Nothing”, will focus on Barack HUSSEIN Obama  requiring employers to include contraceptive coverage in their insurance plans.  Now there’s a helluva wedge issue.  Maybe no one will notice that the Teabag House hasn’t passed a single bill to spur job growth.

It’s going to be a Grand Old feast.  A traditional menu that has whetted the right wing appetite since the Regan era will include misrepresentation, rhetorical gymnastics, righteous indignation, and a nice slice of paranoia for dessert.  Those in attendance may also enjoy a few gourmet items, including the separation of church and state, an assault on religious liberty and everyone’s favorite main dish – freedom of conscience.  Delicious.

The “Super Committee” in charge of planning has invited a distinguished group of speakers including John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Ralph Reed, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a cadre of other well known religious fanatics.  Hero-virgin, Tim Tebow, is scheduled to provide the invocation.

Some nuggets from the official announcement include:

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Rick Santorum: “This administration is fundamentally hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians and specifically Catholics.  I’m not going to stand for it, and I’m going to call them out on it and they’d better change it. If they don’t, I’m going to make it an issue every day of this campaign.”

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Mitt Romney: “Think what that does to people who are in faiths that do not share those views. This is a violation of conscience. We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s first right, our right to worship God. The Creator gave every human being his rights. I’m just distressed as I watch our president try and infringe upon our rights.”

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Family Research Council: “As part of the Obama Administration’s health care mandate, beginning next year any organization that offers health insurance to employees will be forced to cover contraception, sterilizations, and abortifacients – no matter what their objections. This is not only an attack on the consciences of employers and employees, but a direct attack on religious freedom. This mandate must be stopped.”

When asked to comment on the upcoming festivities one Tea Party Patriot responded “Ain’t this a fine kettle of fish”?

Red Herring, that is.

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Puppet Head

The cocktail set and Beltway types just can’t get their free market, inheritance class puppet head over the top.  And how they want their Lamb Chop in the White House for more glorious tax breaks and less onerous regulation.  Oh for the heady days of George W. Shrub.  

But, no matter how much the Karl Rove, George Will and David Brooks types huff and puff in their venerated – if vacuous – columns, they just can’t convince a bagger base that Willard is the man.   Take last week.  No delegates were officially awarded in the Republican primary “mini Tuesday” of February 7, but voters in three states sent a clear message: Mitt stinks. Did you catch that, Karl?  In both Missouri and Minnesota Rick Santorum abused Romney by nearly 30 points. In Colorado – Romney Country – Santorum scored an impressive upset by surging in the end to a 5 point margin.

Atop news that the U.S. economy has a faint but undeniable pulse, the White House is embroiled in a women’s rights debate with the Catholic Church, the Christian Taliban and sundry religious wingnuts.  A double whammy for Mitt whose job creation bona fides and economic prescriptions are pablum and who dodges religious questions like a three legged squirrel in rush hour traffic.

Bring on the populists! Republicans dropped their beloved, mind-numbing copies of Atlas Shrugged long enough to pick up pitchforks and launch a spirited new assault in their equally beloved Culture War. Consequently Romney, the undead result of a diabolical Republican experiment, sewing together the imaginary brain of John Galt to the imaginary humanity of Gordon Gekko, was once again abandoned. After all, few teabaggers could imagine Galt Gekko risking his manicure to defend their right to tell lesser people what to do.  They’d need a Santorum for that.

 I know the unimportance of suffering …

John Galt (Atlas Shrugged)

Until he is beaten back by superior campaign spending and the man skeletons on dog skeletons in his closet, Santorum’s time in the center ring of the Republican circus has come. There, he prattles on about America’s halcyon days – before birth control, priest scandals, the public mention of women’s health, gay weddings, and a Kenyan Muslim in the White House.  The days of McCarthy in the Senate, Nixon in the House and Jesus in your bedroom. His stump speech climax is the orgasmic war cry of a moralizing scold and xenophobe.  It’s enough to send a tingle up a Hutaree Militiaman’s spine.  

There is some delicious, if temporary, irony in the Citizens United ruling so famously handed down by this quite unsavory Supreme Court.  It has provided unexpected amusement for Democratic strategists while acting as a force multiplier for Republican chaos.  

The ‘machine’ can no longer so predictably control the process. Massive amounts of money allow the re-animation of monstrous candidates who would otherwise have died in the lab before anyone really noticed.  Now, the Republican establishment is suffering outsider insertions into their private places.  The outsiders – whacked out millionaires – can keep their Frankensteins alive so long as they pump the green into those Super PACs. 

Just as Sheldon Adelson’s pocket change gave Newt Gingrich a second wind to blow whistles he thinks only Confederates can hear, so have Foster Friess and John Templeton, the two major contributors to Santorum’s Super PAC, kept his traveling salvation show on the road preaching the evils of Massachusetts Mitt.  

It’s all become quite the Santorumy mess.  Ricky’s numbers are up all over the country and he is now polling first in Michigan – Willard’s other, other home state.  Lansing, we have a problem!  Unregulated money and unhinged ideology are mucking up the very machine that produced them both.  

Mitt and the machine may survive the Santorum surge but they’ll be a seized up wreck by the time Obama comes calling. Americans can jam the final monkey wrench in that damnable heap come November. 

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/14/bonobo-love_n_1275381.html

-bb

by brian boru ~

‘“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
Vince Lombardi

updated 2-5-12

I’m a secular humanist and I love my mother, my country, my flag and my football. That’s right teabaggers.

We’re a few hours out from Superbowl XLVI and, like many liberal-minded Americans, I’m stoked. I’m really too old to say stoked, but what the heck, it’s exciting. My GMEN somehow managed to turn around a season that was looking damn awful – Republican primary awful.

Around this time of year, though, I get the sneaking suspicion that we liberals aren’t supposed to like football. The snobbier set seem to think it’s a silly, brutal game. A herd of hydrocephalic ogres slobbering down a field in pointless pursuit of the other end. Ah, the chilly opprobrium of academe. Shouldn’t an educated person have something better to do than watch a football game? Isn’t there an Ezra Pound reading at the Athenaeum?

The scolds remind us that two football teams crashing into each other on a field as their generals and colonels plan movements from the sidelines is an obvious metaphor for war. It’s all a very nasty affair.

One of my favorite liberals, the late, great Mary McGrory, once said, “baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.”  Ouch.  Baseball must represent ‘good America.’  America back in the 19th Century.  We were a genteel people then.  That is, when we weren’t busy killing 600,000 fellow Americans in a civil war or ethnically cleansing the native American population.  But, I digress.

What Mary was likely alluding to is American football as the analogue to Rome’s gladiator games.  Violence and brutality celebrated in the arena suggestive of a decadent empire crumbling from within.  Not a wholly original concept or a precise comparison, but ok Mary, football is violent and America has seen better days.

If Mary didn’t make you feel bad enough about being a football fan, the conservatives won’t make you feel much better.

Modern day conservatives, that is to say, medieval baggers, reject the very notion that a liberal is constitutionally capable of liking football.  After all, liberals hate the Constitution.

Libruls are book learnin’ Frenchies who despise everything ‘Merica stands for.  Hell, football was invented in ‘Merica just like Mama, Jesus, apple pie, the Bible and the A Bomb.  No godless, fancy pants lib is going to take football away from rightful bagger ownership.  It’s theirs, just like the flag.

Well, here’s some news for the snobby set and the mouth breathers: progressives love their flag and their football too.

I’m tempted to go into an extended disquisition on the finer points of the game.  How it teaches discipline, teamwork and the rest.  How it’s a complex game and how I had to memorize a playbook the size of War and Peace back when I played (the Dark Ages).  How a competitor learns to win with grace and lose with dignity.  But, Vince Lombardi covered that ground.  It’s all true too, but a progressive can like football without all that.

You see, there dwells another kind of progressive in this big bad world.  Let’s call him a pigskin progressive.  He drinks a nice Cabernet, reads Bernard-Henri Levy, listens to Claude-Achille Debussy and loves fromage frais.  But, he likes a brat and a beer too and if you talk about his mama he’s going to pop you in the nose. That progressive is union tough.  He’s not pretentious or one dimensional and he is competitive and combative.

So we pigskin progressives cheerfully accept some of the criticisms of our liberal compatriots while at the same time disabusing our conservative antagonists of a few of their notions.  Football is all American and so are we.  It is a violent sport and a metaphor for war.  And, we are FDR progressives.  If you screw with us, be you bagger or brown shirt, you’re going to have a war on your hands.

To the ivory tower set, we plead guilty.  There is a bit of the brute within us.  And, to the cave dwelling conservatives we plead nothing.  A simple F U will do.

Now on to the game.  GO GIANTS!

 I  don’t know whether I prefer Astroturf to grass.  I never smoked Astroturf.

~ JOE NAMATH

Ike

Do conservatives want to run against Barack Obama? Hell no. He’s an Eisenhower Republican for Christ’s sake. Most people in America happen to think they’re Eisenhower Republicans, too. Sure plenty of them wouldn’t know an Eisenhower from a Heineken – but if there’s one thing they do know, it’s that they’re “centrists”. Just like Ike.

Americans simply can’t get enough of centrism. Just ask ‘em.

There was a day when this humble writer and many readers of this humble blog used to vote for Republicans – that’s right, when there was such a thing as an Eisenhower Republican. You remember them – Republicans who believed in quaint little concepts like evolution, science and the social safety net. Republicans, who touted the EPA and the Department of Education. A few of those poor, pragmatist bastards even managed to make it into the 90′s. That seems like a hundred years ago, doesn’t it? A brutal national teabagging does tend to fuck with the space-time continuum.

The baggers who have hijacked the Republican Party and the pusillanimous mongrels who let them do it – the John Boehner types – do not want the American public to know that Barack Obama is more like Eisenhower than they are or that Obama’s policies are more conservative than those of the trust busting, environmentalist, Teddy Roosevelt. You see, Barack would win a landslide re-election if Joe Blow knew all that.

What then are baggers to do about Obama’s centrist policies? Quick, hide ‘em! Hurry up and invent policy positions that do not exist – then scream like banshees proclaiming the coming death of America. That’s sure to scare the hell outta Joe Blow. And, if you scare him, you got him.

In hoity-toity debate halls, inventing an opponent’s position, so as to easily deconstruct it, is known as the straw man technique:

A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet nonequivalent proposition (the ‘straw man’), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

That’s a lot of verbiage to say that a straw man argument is bullshit. And, boy, how bullshitters love the straw man.

The straw man’s been around for 6,000 years – that’s when America was born and Jesus wrote the Constitution. So, it’s true, people of all varieties have been bullshitting for a long time. It’s just that there’s never been a political party that wallows in shit like the GOP.  A grand old fecal festival.

Conservative bullshitters work like this:

Position: President Obama does not endorse the use of torture to elicit information from detainees.

Conservative straw man: Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a Muslim who is losing the “war on terror”!

The straw man argument is last refuge of a forensic scoundrel. A desperate opponent, lacking the facts or temperament to make a persuasive case. You know – wingnuts. Now, the political landscape is replete with scoundrels who are a little too lazy for facts and too

Sarah

damn crazy for temperament. But, there is only one party that truly celebrates lazy and crazy. They have kids like Sarah, Michelle, ‘Herb’ and Reince, playing all day in the fact free zone – dropping atomic wedgies on hapless Democrats.

Hell, there’s an entire network that is a fact free zone. Thanks to a certain paranoid, crooked, Australian lunatic. His network ‘educates’ millions of Americans every week and over the course of fifteen years it has graduated an entire generation of neocon nitwits – the least informed citizens of a poorly informed citizenry. Patriotic work.

But, we digress.

It’s no real surprise that Republicans make up shit about policy positions – death panels, socialist takeovers, sharia law. That’s standard operating procedure. Just good, old Republican fun.  They’ve been doing it for so long and with such gusto that the mainstream media doesn’t even report the lies anymore – who can be bothered.

But wait – there is something exciting and new! The GOP is taking the 6,000 year old straw man for a 2012 makeover. Why spend all that time inventing policy positions to debunk? Why not just invent a politician? Not just partially invent, either. Ersatz, baby – a fake Obama!  A Turd Blossom master stroke. 

Bill Maher nailed it – as he often does – on his show last Friday.  Behold:

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For the first time in modern American history a political party has created, out of thin air, a president who does not exist. The straw man personified – the dastardly President Barack Hussein Strawbama!

This Strawbama is one real contorted son of a bitch – colored too.

A media darling with a Messiah complex who can’t speak without a teleprompter. A leftist, Nazi dictator who’s going to take away your guns and your plastic Jesus. A Kenyan, Muslim, anti-colonialist, Indonesian, madras-educated radical. An anti-American defeatist who runs around the world apologizing for America. A “gut the military” lib, weak on defense. A tax and spend, anti-business Keynesian, blowing up the deficit. A nationalize the banks and car industry socialist. A tree-hugging, sandal wearing, lead from behind, community organizing hippie.

Whew! Now, that doesn’t sound like our beloved Ike. Nope, and it sure as hell doesn’t sound anything like President Obama, either.  

Here are a few facts the baggers just don’t want anyone to know about President Obama:

• Obama’s media coverage during the 2008 general election campaign was determined to be more negative than McCain’s: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/27/nation/na-onthemedia27 . Some media darling.

• Teleprompter, please. A complete fiction. Obama is a policy wonk who’s command of the issues is penetrating. He wiped the floor with Republicans during their own 2012 retreat and then again during the health care summit. Check out this one hour smack down (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vOMIN673A . 

Next time the baggers invite the president to one of their shindigs, they’ll be begging for a teleprompter.

• Gun rights have been expanded during the Obama administration: http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20100224/NEWS/100229892
• Obama is a Christian (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzQMsC_4q2w
•  Obama is an American: 
• Obama believes in American exceptionalism. The first stop on Obama’s “apology tour” was Cairo where he extolled American democracy and warned Arab governments to open up their political systems. Not one apology – just the facts (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaxZPiiKyMw . 
• Obama is pro military and has increased military spending (Video): 

 .

“Gut this”, Dana!

• Obama has lowered taxes and has reined in deficit spending:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/comparing-obama-and-reagans-economic-records/2011/08/25/gIQAHFJcaQ_blog.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/adding-to-the-deficit-bush-vs-obama/2012/01/31/gIQAQ0kFgQ_graphic.html

•  The Recovery Act worked (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJoE0ZJ7Rn8&feature=uploademail
• Auto industry loans worked: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/20/133694/us-auto-industry-shuts-door-on.html . We didn’t even have to ‘socialize’ GM, did we? And, they’re paying the loans back.

And just a couple of other tidbits:

• The stock market has doubled since the Bush crater
• Corporate profits are at record levels
• Obama had, for all or most of his first three years, a Republican treasury secretary, a Republican defense secretary, a Republican FBI chief and a Republican Fed chairman. Some lefty.
• On the environment and Wall Street, Obama’s no TR – sadly.

Republican Hay

Funny, that all sounds pretty centrist.   A lot like Ike.  Might be hard to beat a guy like that.

Wouldn’t it be something if the bed-wetting, chicken hawk baggers had the balls to run against the real President Obama.  They don’t though, do they?  They’d rather shit all over democracy and run against a bale of hay – they love ‘em some hay.

To attack “Strawbama” is to create the illusion of having refuted a president by replacing him with a superficially similar yet nonequivalent president and refuting him, without ever having actually refuted the real man.

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The racism inherent in Newt Gingrich’s fondness for ‘food stamp’ references is manifest, and in fact it is the shiny object that has attracted the attention of even the doltish mainstream media.

And the media has been right to focus on it; it is dog-whistle politics worthy of those racist buffoons who invented the dubious term ‘states’ rights.’  It’s just cover for those who can’t any longer use the ‘N word’ in public, as much as they’d like to; and it gives soulless Baggers plausible deniability: ‘If you think food stamps and African Americans are somehow bedfellows,’ the Bagger will say, ‘then it must be YOU who is the racist.’  I say again, as vapid as right-wingers are when it comes to policy, they are equally venomous and deadly when it comes to politics.  They are bulls in the proverbial china shop at policy, buy effete ballerinas at politics.

But in its zeal to chase Gingrich’s shiny-object racism all around the dog track, the mainstream media has—naturally—neglected and entirely missed the idiocy of the substance of Gingrich’s claims.

Pasty jowls all aflap, Gingrich has said, “More people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”  To begin with, presidents don’t put people on food stamps, as Gingrich knows unless his IQ is far less lofty than he himself seems to imagine.  People apply for food stamps and obtain such assistance if they qualify.  So people put themselves on food stamps if the economy is so disastrous that they feel they must.  So not a single citizen has been “put on food stamps by Barack Obama” as His Pastiness suggests.  (And shouldn’t it be ‘President Obama’ to an insect as banal as Newt Gingrich?)

And of course, Gingrich ignores that any spike in applications for food stamps resulted from the eight years of neglect and greed overseen by the intellectual goldfish who preceded Barack Obama in office.

Today CNN dolt Wolf Blitzer asked the depressingly predictable question about today’s ‘revelations’ about Newt Gingrich, his apparently plentiful ‘manhood,’ and his request to his second wife that she accommodate all the manhood Newt had to share with women other than her.

Blitzer intoned gravely, “If you can’t keep your promises to your wife, how can you keep your promises to the country?”  Or something like that.

Thus was reborn the mindless drivel undergirding the Republican mega-church witch hunt against Bill Clinton.  So let’s be intellectually honest.

In answer to Blitzer’s vapid query, I offer the following: Because one’s promises to one’s wife—namely the promise to remain monogamous for all eternity—involves a base animal instinct known as one’s sex drive, while one’s promises regarding public-policy matters, presumably, do not.

Is that clear enough?  One is plainly unlikely to be lured into a public-policy switcheroo by animal instinct.  One might have animal-instinct problems without having intellectual or policy problems.

This is not to say that Gingrich doesn’t have both.  In fact, he clearly does.  But one has nothing to do with the other.  To indulge a sexual impulse is to be merely human.  To use public-policy positions to prey on the weak and minorities and the unlucky is, on the other hand, diabolical.

Let’s stick to Newt’s public-policy missteps.  His personal missteps are not calculated or even irregular.  His public missteps are epic and intensely evil.

-BB

What a crock of mucousy birdshit.  Teabaggers and their ilk pretend to be aghast at ‘Obamacare’ and its requirement that responsible citizens possess health insurance—Baggers claim that it’s an intrusion into personal decision making.

This same crowd seeks to regulate everything from whether a husband may wear a condom while fucking his own wife (reference Rick “the froth queen” Santorum) to whether a rape victim must beget her rapist’s crack baby to whether consenting adult gays may touch or even spit on each other’s genitals.  Limited government my ass.

In Michigan, anyone who seeks treatment for HIV will, WITHOUT NOTICE, have his or her name, private-homestead address, personal phone number, and medical condition (HIV positive) turned over to government agencies for their inspection and use WITHOUT THE PATIENT EVEN KNOWING ABOUT IT.

Naturally, there is not a teabagger alive who would object.  After all, Jesus hates fags.  So big-government intrusions into the lives of those infected with HIV are no problem at all.  That may be a medical issue, and it may be a personal matter, but unlike ‘Obamacare,’ it doesn’t involve a black man imposing his will on the white man; it just involves the mega-church majority imposing its will on homo fags.

Welcome to the world of teabagger “small government.”

-Brendan Beery

“Ketchum, Idaho, July 2, 1961 – Ernest Hemingway was found dead of a shotgun wound in the head at his home here today.  Mr. Hemingway, whose writings won him a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer Prize, would have been 62 years old July 21.” ~ Special to the New York Times

There is something about the death of a writer – however he decides to die or the world decides to kill him. It is more tragic or more heroic or sadder than other deaths.  It is nearly always a romantic death. Or so it would seem.

When he was very young, Hemingway would learn a little about death – it was all around him. Around and in the ambulance he drove through Italy in The Great War. Death and its screams and its stench. He learned a little more too when his father committed suicide 10 years after the war. Death and its irrevocability and futility. Then there was the horror of Spain and its hundred Guernicas. Death in a dark, tortured jumble. Yes, Hemingway would become quite well acquainted with death.

Guernica

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them … It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there is no special hurry.”

~ Hemingway

Houston, Texas, December 15, 2011 – the world killed another man. He could be very good and very gentle and very brave and he could be none of those things too. It killed him oversoon but then there seemed no special hurry. Hitchens turned 62 years old in April.

He was a war correspondent, father of two families, son of suicide and a writer. He fought his cancer like an Encino bull raging against the matador so adept in the art of his killing. A bull knowing that for whatever his majesty he would be little match for man armed as he is with the knowledge and tools of death.

That is the way of la corrida – the bull dies. The bull knows it and Hitch knew it too. It is the way of life – man dies. Cancer would bait him and prod him and exhaust him until, in its final thrust, it would take him. And there, in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, like the great bulls before him, he would die a good death – more heroic than most.  A Hemingway death.

Hemingway was a war correspondent, father of two families – husband to four wives, son of suicide and a writer. He died of his own hand a half century ago. He was no great bull when it happened and he would not put up anything of that last grand fight in the ring. No, he died an old, bloody mess in the foyer of his Idaho home. He’d lived hard and written well and fought to last as long as he did. He’d done all he could but they’d say he died a bad death – more tragic than most.

He died in the romance of brokenness. The burning emptiness of a story teller who had nothing left to tell. Just a crippled hunter, hunting the last life he could.  As he’d killed the kudu in Kenya or bear in Wyoming or marlin in Cuba, he’d take himself too.

Hem used to say that he’d died after writing each book along the way – having emptied every emotion and expended every energy. He never really knew if he could fill up again – come alive. Of course, that he did many times.

He used to chase after the perfect sentence and he thought he’d come close a few times.  In his home in Ketchum, the sentences were chasing after him.   He couldn’t write them anymore but they were all around him, haunting him.  That is when he knew what life he’d had inside was gone. At last, after all of those books and all of that living, he couldn’t fill up again.  Because, that’s what happens when the world empties you or maybe that’s what happens when you empty yourself to the world.

For Hemingway and for Hitchens writing was living. To write was to think and to feel, to journey and to challenge – to laugh, to cry, to love and to hate. One fought death to the bitter end to do all of those things until that end came to him.   The other called out for death because when he could no longer write he could no longer laugh or cry or do all the rest – he was dead already when the trigger was pulled.  Was one death really a better death than the other – or one man braver than the other?

The world took Hitch’s body before his mind and spirit but it would take all of him nonetheless. For Hem, it was the mind and spirit that the world chose first – the order of these things being peculiar to the man. The world sure killed both of them though.

The writer finds some solace in the ‘work’ he’s left behind. He lives on through the ages with that.  And so it is for  Hitchens and Hemingway – they shall endure so long as their work does.

Perhaps, that’s the thing of it all – to make sure we leave some ‘work’ behind. Good work, too. So that when the world kills us, it really doesn’t.

It was a feel-good movie for Southern white racists who convince themselves of their own ‘Christian’ values by reference to anecdotal evidence of some mega-church impulse among whites to save black people from their own selves and families and culture.

The movie portrayed the white heroes as sophisticated and educated and charitable.  As the story goes, a white family took in a young black man, changed the way he thought and behaved and believed, and left him far the better for it as a football hero for Ole Miss and then the NFL.

Of course, before he was saved by white Mississippi southerners, the black protagonist was portrayed as a dolt and a simpleton bereft of social skills, education, or grace.  But thanks to the intervention of well-meaning and utterly superior white people, the young man became a human that he was not otherwise programmed to be—a decent, disciplined, and good Christian contributor to society (as an oversized and easily trainable athlete, of course).

I came away wondering when we will see a movie about a black family saving a helpless white person from his own self, his own family, and his own culture.

-bb

The mortgage, or whatever it meant to do violence to that ethereal being, was to cause the first loss I can remember: the loss of the beautiful home my family inhabited on a hill, complete with six acres and a pony (I’m not kidding) and an apple orchard.  My mother ran a preschool on the property, and we would lose that too.  My father had taken her money to invest in some of his own ‘projects,’ and he’d lost it.  And so my family would suffer loss outside anyone’s control but my father’s.

It seems to me increasingly clear that all human behavior is utterly predictable, and that all human behavior repeats itself as surely as a virus copies its own essence in replica.  So this loss became a ritual: every two years or so, my father’s failure to work, and his devotion to ‘projects’ divorced from the mundane trappings of sacrifice and reward, would lead to another loss.  Another home gone, another school left behind, another maternal meltdown into depression and isolation, another desperate prayer that it would all stop, that our being so abnormal would yield to normalcy and then to whatever rewards must surely have been the prize for so much loss.

But it never stopped.  Everything we had, we lost.  And just when my mother had harnessed the wisdom and energy to leave my father and live her own life free from his lies and stealing, she was lost too—to cancer at age 48.

Recently I have suffered more loss.  The losses just keep coming.

And I begin to think that life is all about loss, and that he who survives loss smiling is the winner at this game.  So I try to smile.

Sometimes I can’t help but smile. 

-bb

What kind of person must be reminded to be humane?  Only one who is not inclined to be, or has been less than humane before, or both.  And as McCain has implicitly said, the entire Republican Party needs to be reminded to be humane.

To be humane, of course, is simply to avoid being cruel, evil, sadistic, and oppressive.  It is no more than that.  A humane person evinces some base concern for the comfort and well-being of others that is not consistent with sociopathic violence.

And that is all McCain thinks he can ask for—not that Republicans stop being impolitic or crude or less than Christian, but just that they stop being inhumane.

McCain is right, of course.  This is the Party that would ship every manner of American off to the Island of Misfits if it could—gays, feminists, Mexicans, Muslims, whatever other ‘Other’ might appear next.  This is the Party whose adherents boo when a candidate suggests that tearing immigrant families apart might be avoided.  This is the crowd that applauds executions and proposes to let uninsured compatriots rot and die.

So indeed inhumanity characterizes the entire Republican Party; one cannot be a Republican and claim humanity as her concern concurrently.

It has come to this: A call from an elder statesman that Republicans simply behave like humans.

-bb

So isn’t it interesting?  The only real difference between Jerry Sandusky the innocent young victim and Jerry Sandusky the reviled old pervert was … the inevitable.  It was simply to be, and so the little boy we all want to hug is the same as the wretched filth we all want to fry. 

This is all very unsatisfactory to the millions of mindless moralizers populating our land, all aghast and indignant in their mega-churches and VFW halls.  It’s as true as it is unsatisfactory, however.

Years ago a mother told her son, “I love you unconditionally.  You could be an axe murderer and I’d still love you.  There is only one thing that could change that.  I wouldn’t be able to cope with it if you were gay.”

So what was that boy to do?  He developed a deep self-loathing, hid his sexuality from his family, engaged in reckless sexual conduct borne of secrecy and self-contempt, and died young of AIDS.  Who owns the fault?  The boy, or his mother?  What about the Catholic priests and nuns who infected the mother’s mind with their poisonous swill?  Shall we not accuse each of them of negligent homicide?

Now Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine has been fired.  He appears to have sexually abused young boys.  He was closeted in a closet where his parents and his church and his community put him, and now we’ll set about tying Fine to a pillory while ignoring all the social crimes that created him—the crimes of religiosity, of oppression, of prejudice, of teaching little boys and little girls that when they begin to feel uncomfortable stirrings, they’d best run and hide and set about the long, slow spiritual death that ignorant bigots have chosen for them.

Meanwhile many in the Syracuse ‘family’ have been defending Fine the abuser rather than Fine as victim or Fine’s victims themselves.  How are some skinny little boys with homo tales to be believed when so many macho Christians don’t want to believe them? 

How utterly predictable. 

-bb

This is just what it means to be a Republican in November 2011, isn’t it?  One must inhabit a fact-free zone, a universe where one simply invents his own facts to suit a tale born of ignorance and prejudice.  It’s a place where not knowing is celebrated, where study is forbidden, where books and research and asking are as lawless as mayhem.

Of course Herman Cain doesn’t “support” Obama’s Libya strategy.  After all, it worked, and what interest do contemporary Republicans have in results?  What is good to your average Republican today is a world where we waterboard detainees, where we execute the possibly innocent, where we heat our planet, where we start wars with countries that haven’t attacked us and eschew wars with those who have, where we call hate moral and call happiness sin.

If you are still a Republican, after all this, then you are an idiot.  You are a marcher in a parade of idiots.

-bb

by Diogenes ~

There is a fundamental divide in our politics that the current, brutal recession has exposed. It is not just a problem for liberals – it is a fundamental problem for the country. The majority voice has been silenced.

The decline of the middle-class and muting of its voice was largely concealed in the era of easy credit.  We felt ok financially and because we felt ok we kept quiet.   Quiet while corpo-criminals weakened democracy’s safeguards – from union participation to financial regulation.  Not satisfied that we kept silent while they dismantled democracy, the wealth-class now rejects the credit it offered to secure our acquiescence. They want even that.

The economy is a wreck, we are all in pain and everyone wants to know what the hell happened. There’s no more pretending that everything  is ok because we can run out and buy new Hummer, eat at a fancy restaurant or flip a house.  In the halcyon days we felt first-class, but the real elite were quietly running the show.  Now, they are unmasked as the One Percent.

The Republican Party has long been a minority party – the party of the One Percent – despite trumpeting itself as the “Silent Majority” and the “New Majority.” Nikita Kruschev, as I recall, once thought that the Democratic Party was the natural ruling party of America. He also said that the Democrats and the Republicans were a “pair of boots.” That may have been true at the time, but no longer.  If one party is a boot, the other is a ball and chain, weighing down the entire body politic.

To put this in perspective, we need only look at disturbing trends – not only in the Republican philosophy of government –  but in their political tactics.  Deception, corruption and manipulation.  It all famously coalesced with Richard Nixon and the Watergate break in.  The ultimate dirty trick.

Since then, the Republican playbook has clearly been based on divide-and-conquer tactics. Fear-mongering, distrust and enmity toward the “other” is the order of the day.  Damn the liberals, Democrats, immigrants, people of color, politically active women, NOW, ACORN, the Tri-lateral Commission, gun control advocates and on and on.  All demonized and held up to scorn by a legion of talking heads from Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage to Sean Hannity.

Resenting the perceived “liberal bias” of the old, Big 3 broadcasting networks, conservatives even created their own cable channel and turned it into a propaganda organ – one that only mistakenly features actual news.  Dictionary.com defines propaganda thus:

prop·a·gan·da
[prop-uh-gan-duh]
noun
1. information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to
help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation,etc.
2. the deliberate spreading of such information, rumors, etc.
3. the particular doctrines or principles propagated by an organization or movement.

The combination of Fox News and conservative talk radio has created a Republican echo chamber  in which “facts” are transmitted only after they have been filtered and embellished by a host of talking heads. Almost always, these facts are lies, distortions or gross exaggerations.  But then, propaganda does not require truth.  It requires impact.

Propaganda, often originating at the Republican National Committee, is distributed in the form of talking points which become the text of right-wing radio and television shows and even opening statements at Republican debates.

The overseers of the Republican Party – the ultra rich and various whole industries from Wall Street and international oil to health care and pharmaceutical interests –  pay vast sums of money to control information and manipulate the electorate.  Wealth-class propaganda, when not being spouted directly but puppets, is disseminated in the form of campaign ads – particularly attack ads.  An art form perfected by Lee Atwater and his nefarious acolyte, Karl Rove.  Indeed, these ads reached their highest pitch in the shameful “Swift-boating campaign” against Senator Kerry.

How does the One Percent control the Republican Party – money and lots of it.  Corrupting politicians by means of campaign contributions and promises of future riches is not confined to Republicans of course, but it is part of the conservative fabric. That fabric is stronger than ever in the age of the SuperPac - grand old political slush funds activated by anonymous donors.  Thanks to the Citizens United case, decided by radical conservatives, we suffer under the destructive assertions that corporations are people and money is speech.

This year, the propaganda and money playbook is augmented by naked attempts to tilt the playing field by voter suppression measures aimed at likely Democratic voters. Whether these measures will survive constitutional challenge remains to be seen, but many state governments where Republicans run the show are giving it the old college try.

To this we add their stubborn obstruction in Congress where they have a majority. They are now truly the Party of No.

Republican tactics and innovations do nothing less than undermine and subvert our democracy.  Their agenda is clear: Preserve, protect and advance the interests of the financial elite and large corporations. They champion minority interests and in a real democracy they would lose more than they’d win. They advocate minority rule – plutocracy.

There are four levels of Republican voters. The first is the true power elite – the One Percent – the masters. Second, is a collection of resentful, fearful, often bigoted, mostly-white folks that we call the Tea Baggers – the old Republican base with new branding. Third, is what is left of traditional Republicans – people who are comfortable with staid, wealthy politicians promising to maintain the status quo (people like my mom).  The fourth level consists of true independents – voters looking for the best candidate, regardless of party.  The first three, taken together, are a significant minority. GOP victories hinge on manipulating independents and mitigating the vote.

Republicans cannot win unless they corrupt the process. They must make wealth count for numbers and keep the electorate fearful and confused. Herein lies the fundamental problem with Republicanism – it can never claim the electoral majority. It is anti-democratic.  Whether you call it aristocracy, plutocracy, corptocracy or fascism, it amounts to the same thing – the many subordinate to and serving the few.

The One Percent and the party it rules has overreached and America is waking up.  That overreach has produced the Occupy Movement which focuses on a prime symptom of the American malaise – gross mal-distribution of wealth.  It has produced an awakening in Wisconsin where Republican radicals were unceremoniously evicted from the state senate. It has produced the results we saw in Ohio and Maine and all over the nation on Tuesday night.  The many are refusing to be subordinate to the few – the radicals who would see their wealth blossom while the riches of  a nation were spoiled.

For whatever destruction this economy has wrought, perhaps it will produce something else. Perhaps the majority will be heard again.  Perhaps democracy will be restored.

~