Blithering Idiots

Must Read

riverhealer — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:10:11 +0000

This is an excellent article written by that terrifying terrorist that had McNasty and Palin and all those Real Americans so scared of Obama (pssst! he’s an Arab, or Muslim, or….terra-ist)

What Now?

riverhealer — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:45:03 +0000

Right wingnuts are out shopping for guns before Obama and his gun-banning Socialist mob take over.

The rest of us are wondering how the hell the next administration and Congress are going to dig out of the monumental cesspool created by the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, Bush/Cheney waste not what little time they have left to further weaken environmental regulations, according to this McClatchy article.

It’s such a relief to be rid of the electioneering and focus on more positive pursuits.

Flustercluck rules…

riverhealer — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:06:32 +0000

One of the more positive posts from one of the more curmudgeonly writers:

A Nervous Nation

This is a nervous nation. Though I’m usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there’s a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments — like fifteen minutes before the closing bell — at the direction of Mr. Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can’t put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain’s friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with “the enemy” for laughs.
Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I’ve ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He’s run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that “kiss-of-death” endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr. Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater’s Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion.
What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we’ve just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.
People are nervous not just because Mr. Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die — as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr. Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco — lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse — they might just “get her done!”
Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans — such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don’t have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become “energy independent” is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we’re going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We’ll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently — in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia — our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future — will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label “gloom-and-doomer” where these difficult transitions are concerned. There’s a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic — from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don’t know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.

Holy Crap!

riverhealer — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:43:19 +0000

According to Truthdig (my favorite) the Christian Science Monitor is “going paperless.” They plan to only do a website and ditch their newspaper.

This is a major development and obvious wave of the future.

A week from today…

riverhealer — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:52:06 +0000

McCain at this point is left with the lowest of his base – the “wretchedly ignorant and hopelessly malicious” as the below columnist puts it. That may well turn out to be the face of the Republican Party going forward after the election. Or perhaps Palin will head a third party of malicious and ignorant goons – she’d be perfect. As for McCain, he is a pathetic man, a shell of his former mavericky self.

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Here we are, still a week to go, and analyses of why John McCain lost versus how John McCain can win are outpacing print and cable-network commentaries by at least a 10 to 1 ratio. And that’s being generous.

Even the professionally poltroonish are “going rogue.” For example I saw number-cruncher Charlie Cook making the rounds again last night on cable and public tv, and the man was downright dazed — in fact, he was awestruck and reveling in the unmistakable throes of some sort of weird, statistical transubstantiation.

“Sure, it’s not over,” Cook drooled, “it’s never over till it’s actually over, but I mean, come on, on the other hand, it’s over.” That, at least, is a close approximation of words from an analyst I single out for a reason: Charlie makes his living by being cautious and noncommittal. He wouldn’t have a political report to vend very long if he took risks. But calling this race, he no longer regards as risky.

What did the trick as much or more than anything were the numbers being beamed out of the Old Dominion. “By wide margins,” reports the Washington Post on its latest poll, “Virginia voters think that Obama is the candidate who would do more to bring needed change to Washington, who understands the economic challenges people are facing and who is the more honest and trustworthy of the two rivals.”

In short, Obama beats McCain among Virginians in virtually every category of contemporary concern.

But it’s the geographical twist within that tells the deeper story — indeed, the national story.

Perhaps unsurprising is that Obama “has an almost 2 to 1 advantage over McCain in Northern Virginia.” But get this: “He and McCain each drew 48 percent of the vote outside Northern Virginia.”

That’s stunning, and indeed it’s what has stunned the Charlie Cooks of this world and has them forecasting with unaccustomed confidence and bravado. “Outside Northern Virginia” — otherwise once known as the reliable land of George W. Bush, Protector of Real America.

Now? It’s gone as rogue as Sarah Palin. Like that Saturday Night Live skit, in McCain’s face Virginia at large sees the face of Bush. And it ain’t pretty.

Which leads, of course, to just about the only interesting question left in this presidential campaign. And that question is: In what ways did McCain himself contribute to his impending disaster?

I have already weighed in on the potentially, politically restorative matter of the bailout bail — in failing to demagogue against it, McCain blew it — and have noted as well, on occasion, the McCain camp’s most curious and indeed singular strategy of assiduously playing to the conservative base, which was in full and disorganized retreat well before the stock market’s Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday and so forth.

Yet in playing to that base there came an inherent and even inexorable substrategy: Going not roguish, or mavericky, but really, really nasty. And that, I think, was as responsible for McCain’s doom as George W. Bush and his catastrophic economy.

Consider for a moment the gothic mental architecture of Donna Tilley, 58, a full-fledged member in excellent standing of John McCain’s Virginia base: “I honestly believe Obama is a socialist, a Chicago thug,” she told the Washington Post.

Now, it almost goes without saying that Donna would not enthusiastically and honestly believe that Obama is a thuggish Chicago socialist if the McCain campaign hadn’t felt compelled to inform Donna that Obama is a thuggish Chicago socialist. That much is a given.

The key word in that passage, however, is “compelled.” Donna, you see — not George W. Bush — (and if I hereby overstate slightly, it’s only to make a necessary point) has become a significant face of the conservative base: wretchedly ignorant and hopelessly malicious. Hence when McCain decided to pander to the base, the only way he could gin it up was through cranking up the volumes of ignorance and malice.

I don’t think McCain wanted that. I think he sincerely desired something resembling an honorable campaign, just as he once promised. But once he committed the fatal mistake of committing to the venomous conservative core, the above substrategy naturally and ineluctably followed.

His base had come to demand red, raw meat. It’s addicted to it. It doesn’t just thrive on it; it now requires it for motivation, otherwise things just don’t feel “right.”

This wasn’t the year for that. Reality intruded, and it’s likely to intrude for a long, long time. Which leaves the GOP of tomorrow with two options: either remain an irrelevant, malicious minority or detoxify as well as expand its base through massive infusions of moderation.

fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Am I dreaming?

riverhealer — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:38:22 +0000

Thank goodness the 2008 campaign is nearly over. I’m sure every citizen feels the same.

Whoever wins will inherit a terrible mess created by Bush/Cheney and the wingnuts. The next president will have to be FDR, Lincoln and Barnum all rolled into one and on steroids. As the economy continues to nosedive no one seems to want to talk about our neocon war adventures, which are contributing in a big way to the problem, not to mention that our people are still being killed over in Iraq and nobody seems to care anymore. Why are they there? Why were they sent? How is it that Bush and Cheney have not faced impeachment? On a positive note the Bush administration has but a few months remaining to torture, steal, lie and murder their way into history. That’s assuming they allow the election to take place at all. These people could decide to “wag the dog.” An entire empire is slipping away.

Below is an article that entertained on a groggy morning and aftermath of a Phillies victory in Game 4 of the World Series. Had to pinch my self to see if I was dreaming.

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

What delightful intrigue. A “senior Republican” cloaked in anonymity has informed the Politico that Sarah Palin has chosen — you’ve gotta love it — to “go rogue.”

That’s right, you heard it here last; that was the media’s weekend obsession, especially since there’s nothing left of substance or suspense to talk about in this late-October campaign that was unofficially over in mid-September, if not June or March.The initial coverage, I might add, was as delightful as Palin’s intrigue itself, what with the Politico crooning with operatic understatement that her skulduggery is “complicating” John McCain’s campaign.

The latter, such as it is — and if you saw it portrayed by Tom Brokaw yesterday on “Meet the Press” as an unending series of Great Moments in Hypocrisy, you know what I mean — was what the Politico chose to call an existence of “already-tense internal dynamics.”

On the street — and please do allow me this one and most fitting colloquialism — that is otherwise known as a colossal clusterfuck.

Oh my, continued the Politico, numerous sources have kissed and told that “Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard” — or for that matter, to increasingly disregard — “the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations…. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image.”

Well, politics is largely about finding someone to blame, and in this respect Palin is merely getting the jump on McCain’s loyalists (yes, I know, that is perhaps stretching an epithet). Said one “McCain insider,” referring to the feckless Machiavellis of Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace: “These people are going to try and shred [Palin] after the campaign to divert blame from themselves.”

Actually, they’ll do so with some justification, since it’s also widely reported that Mr. McCain did in fact have his little self-destructive heart set on Joe Lieberman as a running mate. But aides talked him — begged him — out of it. Joe might have been even worse; we’ll never know. On the other hand, when it came down to either Sarah or Joe, those clever aides should have recalled that most elementary of aphorisms: “The Devil you know….”

Palin’s allies have, however, insightfully drawn their sharpest sword to bamboozle the base. They are, that is, blaming the McCain campaign through the heaving of indirect blame on that oldest and most reliable of bogeymen, the media elite. “The campaign,” said one Palin humbugger, “as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she’s completely inexperienced.”

So what we’ve got here, to paraphrase Strother Martin, is a failure to internally communicate at a critical time, resulting in a right-wing woman scorned. “She felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised,” the humbugger continued, so — here it comes, oh joyous pronouncement — “she’s gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts.”

Yes, just when we thought the McCain campaign couldn’t possibly get any better — which is to say, get any worse — Gov. Sarah Palin has decided to act as the detonating atomic bomb to John McCain’s hydrogen implosion of Nov. 4.

We’re now promised Sarah in the raw, a ravishing moose on the loose out to butcher her mother tongue in the further and bloody execution of what’s left of the campaign’s discernible policies.

McCain, for instance, has remained conservatively mum on the matter of another stimulus package, since his natural opposition to it might prove wildly unpopular. But it was his silence that proved wildly unpopular with Sarah: “I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there? This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans…. No, you know, we were told when we’ve got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, ‘No, OK, that’s enough.’”

That’s what she said in an “off the reservation” moment, as a McCain aide put it, with CNN’s Glenn Beck last week — and I’d wager even the cerebrally oxygen-deprived Mr. Beck looked upward in syntactical puzzlement when he heard, “we were told when we’ve got to be believing if….”

But that’s our girl, and you gotta love her.

She was but stating the self-evident, however, in her own amusingly diabolical sort of way: “I hereby declare my 2012 candidacy for the presidency of the United States. It’s now obvious to virtually everyone that this numbnuts I’m working for has cluelessly toasted his own chances, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to take me down with him.”

For personal questions or comments contact PJ at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

An uplifiting prognosis?

riverhealer — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:20:20 +0000

This is not uplifting: the latest from Clusterfuck Nation

The most recent post is a bit too much, but I generally agree with Kuntsler’s ideas about the ‘end times’ for the oil-based culture.

Watershed event?

riverhealer — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:25:13 +0000

A watershed event for print journalism? OK…maybe merely historic. This Chicago Tribune endorsement…seems more significant than your average major daily editorial. The simplest sentence is the most profound: “It believes that government has to serve people honestly and efficiently.”

Imagine that? A government that serves people, as opposed to multinational corporate interests?

excerpt:
“…This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

The Tribune in its earliest days took up the abolition of slavery and linked itself to a powerful force for that cause–the Republican Party. The Tribune’s first great leader, Joseph Medill, was a founder of the GOP. The editorial page has been a proponent of conservative principles. It believes that government has to serve people honestly and efficiently.

With that in mind, in 1872 we endorsed Horace Greeley, who ran as an independent against the corrupt administration of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant. (Greeley was later endorsed by the Democrats.) In 1912 we endorsed Theodore Roosevelt, who ran as the Progressive Party candidate against Republican President William Howard Taft.

The Tribune’s decisions then were driven by outrage at inept and corrupt business and political leaders.

We see parallels today.

The Republican Party, the party of limited government, has lost its way. The government ran a $237 billion surplus in 2000, the year before Bush took office — and recorded a $455 billion deficit in 2008. …”

Lyers, cheaters and Rethuglicans

riverhealer — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:14:13 +0000

Most of my adult life I’ve known that Republicans cannot win a national election without one or more of the following elements: demagoguery, cheating, lying, and more recently suppressing the vote. There have been a few exceptions to the rule. Nixon and Bush II were not among the exceptional.

It’s obvious they will have to do all of the above for McCain to win and to avoid a total blowout in the congressional races. It’s equally obvious that they are already doing all of these things.

They still might lose big time.

If it wasn’t for the advent of Palin the Impaler I would not be to exercised over who wins or loses. In a way it might be more fitting for McSame to inherit the mess left by Bush & Cheney. Then Palin can be the next Hoover, if McSame dies and becomes the next Coolidge; and we we’d have a ruthless, shallow and ignorant fundamentalist as the leader of the free world. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

It appears enough voters have had it with Republicans. But will enough of these voters even get to the polls? If they do will the votes be counted?

Here is a column by Bob Koehler on the topic of voter supression.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrggghhhh

riverhealer — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:48:26 +0000

Watching the debate…a virtual tower of Babylon between the robotic Palin and windbag Biden. What a disgusting display of BS American political theater.

Palin sounded sharp and confident but in substance she was a robotic idiot. This gem for example: “we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.” They have plans?

Biden came to the debate untrained and totally dependent on his ability to sling shit, and maybe he was just a bit fatigued.

Biden screwed up, not because he lost in the arena of ideas and facts, but that he just babbled insider BS dropping names and statistics that 92% of the population can’t begin to decipher (Chuck who?). Palin just rambled on with a litany of lies and lame talking points.

I have met Republicans just like her – spouting off total nonsense with conviction and a straight face. Enough is known about her record versus how the McSame campaign portrays it to be certain that she is a lying sack of moose poop.

What is most amazing is that she is kind of like a female version of Mussolini…I mean that quite seriously. Just take one of Benito’s speeches and turn it upside down and you will be hearing Sarah Palin. American Christo-fascism with a soft mommy-like visage. Make that Mooselini.

Biden won the debate according to the quick polls, especially among the undecided voters which is all that mattered.

Thank goddess that the Phillies won game two with our favorite pitcher coming up in game #3- Jamie Moyer of Souderton PA – a true fellow scrapple and apple butter eater. Very few teams have a local guy playing much less a star, and Moyer is a throwback to another era – a Hall of Fame pitcher who also happens to be the oldest player in Major League Baseball. And this is one of his best seasons ever. It’s the the apple buter for sure.