Caustic and Cutting

With Carlin dead, I can only be talking about Bill Maher. His take on why the American founding fathers would have thought the teabaggers are idiots is more than worth the price of watching.

Having a Nice Day? I Can Fix That.

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education--in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs.  They will become the new class.Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible.  It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration. 

Hedges, Chris  American fascists : the Christian Right and the war on America  New York : Free Press, ©2006

If you haven't read this book yet, you really should. No, really. the Christian Right from the inside.

Naah, nothing crooked here....

Chris Kelly from HuffPo:

Sarah Palin's $159,050 Conflict of Interest

While you read this, Alaska's First Dude, Todd Palin, is riding a snowmobile -- I'm sorry, snow machine -- 1971 miles from Big Lake to Fairbanks. In the course of performing this awesome feat, his Arctic Cat's powerful two-stroke engine will emit the same amount of hydrocarbons as an automobile driving from Chicago to San Francisco and back 150 times.

A small price for the rest of us to pay to honor the indomitability of the human spirit and one man's ability to sit and hold on.

It's not just a blaze of glory and aromatic hydrocarbon. A conventional two-stroke engine emits as much as a quarter of its fuel unburned, directly into the air. This week, as a participant in the Iron Dog™ snow machine race, Todd Palin will release as many cancer-causing and smog-forming pollutants as a Chevy Malibu driven around the Earth at its equator 28 times.

Seems like a lot of work, just to get away from Sarah Palin.

But Todd's not just doing it because he hates his home life and likes things that make loud noises and emit benzene. He does it because it's there. And for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts from corporations who do business with the Governor's office.

For riding a snowmobile.

Something you could train a bear to do.

The Emperor Nero used to clean up at the Olympic games. It was eerie. He won everything. According to Suetonius, he once won a chariot race despite falling off and not finishing the course. That's how good he was. He also never wore the same clothes twice. So he would have fit right in with the Palins there also.

I'm not insinuating anything. I'm just saying.

The total purse value of this year's Iron Dog™ is $159,050. The sponsors include the petroleum giants Tesoro and Conoco-Phillips; State Farm, Wells Fargo, Frontier Airlines, Alaska Airlines and the Alaska First National Bank.

The Iron Dog™ has fewer than 40 entrants a year, and one of them is always Todd.

Does this smell? I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I hate the cold and I think motor sports is an oxymoron. But he is Alaska's First Lady, and Tesoro is an oil company.

Let's say this was Louisiana in the '30s. If Texaco sponsored a pancake-eating contest, and Huey Long's wife kept winning it, there would have been talk.

To be fair, Todd can't win the whole purse. There are lots of little door prizes just for rookies and women and steak dinners for Cutest Hat. Just like in Jack London days.

And, to be fair, Todd doesn't always walk away from the camping trip with the hundred grand first prize. He's only won four times.

Once after Sarah was elected to the Wasilla City Council, once after she was elected mayor, the year she was appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, and the year she was elected governor.

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Well this is disturbing ...

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More about the Wackaloon

So I'm sitting here thinking "WTF?" a lot the past couple of days. Sarah Palin is being savaged by her own people for the fair and balanced ass-kicking Americans handed McCain a few days ago. Hey, McCain picked a woman who (it is alleged by Fox News) didn't know Africa was a continent and not a country, that she couldn't name any of the members of NAFTA (as Jon Stewart put it, "there's us, gay us (pointing overhead) and the burrito place (pointing down)), and thought the US was at war with Iran. But according to Fox News' Carl Cameron (who broke this), they couldn't report on this because "it was off the record until after the election." To quote:

CAMERON: There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency.

We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement. That’d be Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series — a country just in itself. A whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability.

It should be pointed out that yes, Cameron did use the word "knowledgeability"--which should give rise to some concern over his own "intelligenceability." But more importantly, here is a woman who was supposed to have been vetted by the McCain campaign, who was one bad heart day away from the presidency should the ticket win, and Cameron couldn't find a way to bring out how woefully unprepared the VP nominee was? WTF? that is not just a story, but is essential information that citizens need to make a decision. To my mind, that is a firing offence, the kind of thing where you wind up in journalism courses under "bad decisions you really should avoid making." Look at Woodward and Bernstein--where information was "off the record", they pursued other sources until they could put the info on the record. To hide that kind of thing from the public, that's not journalism, that's being nothing more than a tool of a propaganda machine.
The post-election attacks on Palin, while perhaps deserved (the Wackaloon is, after all, pretty scary as a politician and human being), have, from the Right at least, taken on the worst of the anti-female rhetoric typical of the attacks on Hillary Clinton from the same sources.
Now, today in the Telegraph comes this report:

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

Now, I might argue a bit with the line "her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged." I would suggest that there was nothing unintentional about it. This was the Wackaloon playing to the base. Hell, she may not have been playing--I suspect that the fear and anger she was playing to were in fact her own. McCain himself never seemed too comfortable playing the race card--perhaps because he actually knew Obama as a human being. But "[i]rate John McCain aides, who blame Mrs Palin for losing the election,
claim Mrs Palin took it upon herself to question Mr Obama's patriotism,
before the line of attack had been cleared by Mr McCain." (from the Telegraph article) Again, I hesitate to buy that argument, as that kind of attack has Lee Atwater and Karl Rove written all over it. I suspect that Palin was seen by the big fixers like Rove as the perfect weapon to get the campaign back in line with previous winning efforts (Willie Horton anyone?). My suspicion is that McCain was running the campaign more his way than the fixers liked, and that they grabbed at Palin as their chance to run a classical Republican hate campaign in tandem with McCain's. Worked too--Palin did fire up the base. At least until the "liberal media" began exposing her deep unreadiness for office.

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Wackaloon from Wasilia

Seriously, she does look nuts as well as talk nuts. And I was watching her on CBC introducing her husband as "the First Dude." Really? First dude? That would make him John McCain's husband, which would shock Cindy McCain, I suspect. Best he could be is Second Dude, or Vice Dude, and where's the fun in that?
And ABC News is reporting the Wackaloon as saying (in an interview with WMAL-AM radio):

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the First Amendment is about. The US press is supposed to call you on your bullshit--exactly what has been missing (with the occasional John Stewart exception) for the last eight years. And if your point is legit, then they are expected to say that as well.
But it is typical of the Amerikan Right that criticism is automatically assumed to be an attack on their constitutional rights. Their case seems to be that it is inherently unfair to criticize them. That the Bush II administration has been working as hard as it can to actually make criticism of the Amerikan government illegal seems to be a logical outgrowth of this whiney, pissy attitude among the divorced-from-reality Right.
This denial of reality, the development of what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" ("We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist," Colbert explained. "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore.") on the Right, the attempt to convince the world that up is down, left is right, true is false, is what draws parallels to Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda. (But as Chomsky et al. have pointed out, Goebbels got a lot of his ideas on the manufacturing of consent in the public from the American Walter Lippmann).
So when the Wackaloon from Wasalia gets into the act, trying to generate a reality more to her liking than the one she's forced to inhabit (~"I never supported earmarks. Or the Bridge to Nowhere. I don't abuse power."~), she is absolutely in the mainstream of Amerikan thinking. It's as if the ability to reinvent oneself--long an Amerikan tradition and a valuable one--has been extended to reinventing reality to a more congenial version. This kind of magical thinking leads to national obsessions like fascism and empire--as Amerika parallels Nazi Germany in the rise of fascist thought and over-reaching into empire based on the belief in the intrinsic unworthiness of the enemy.

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When It All Falls Apart

...put the pieces to use. Like sound-collagist Kumquat, who has created the fascinating "Redheaded Sasquatch For Jesus" (it's an MP3--not the most inventive I've ever heard, but certainly worth a listen).

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Sarah's New Name

In a recent post, PZ Meyers offhandedly renamed Sarah Palin: the "wackaloon from Wasilla." Works for me!
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He runs the science blog, Pharyngula. And if you're not reading it occasionally, you're really missing out.
Oh, and in related news, the Anchorage daily newspaper has now backed Obama for prez--not the McCain/Palin ticket. What're you gonna do, eh?

Susie Bright

Love her. Really. Honest, intelligent, opinionated, Susie takes the "k" out of Amerika. If you're not a regular reader of her blog (or her books, or listening to her podcasts, or just generally following her in whatever medium she's exploring) you're missing a lot of interesting stuff.
And now Susie is sponsoring a Hallowe'en contest; "Susie's Screamin' Sarah Palin Costume Contest"! Read it, have a chuckle, and get your costume ready! All Hallow's Eve is almost here!