Why I Wasn't At the Demonstration

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Larry is the fellow who decided to hook a pipe lengthwise behind his pickup truck so it would drag along behind him like a little steamroller, and went blasting though all the crosses and other grave markers that Cindy Sheehan and the other anti-war vigilists had erected at the protest site. Of the 1,800 markers, 500 were knocked down, and 100 destroyed. Poor old Larry tried to make his escape after this bold action, but one of those pesky crosses flattened one of his tires, with the result that the local police caught him, red-bumpered, so to speak. (Fortunately, he didn’t actually injure anyone while doing this).

But then he started talking about how the Bushes and the Queen of England and others were all secretly extraterrestrial lizards, and how that was why there were so many statues of dragons scattered about London. At that point, I turned the TV off, and went and wrote an essay, successfully managing, once again, to not allege that the Queen of England had a problem with her tail dropping off when molested by a house cat. Well, after all, I have to have some sort of standards.

Any notion that Clinton was being sneaky or devious by asking for that clarification belongs in the tall pile of utter bullshit that the right-wing likes to try to convert into truth through constant repetition, along with all the discredited Clinton "scandals" such as travelgate, Whitewater, and Paula Jones, or the infamous $200 haircut story.

One of the more moderate voices came from right winger John Leo, of the U.S. News and World Report. Unlike many of the right-to-life crowd, he actually admits that the autopsy proved there was "extraordinary damage" to Terri’s brain, and that it also showed that her husband, Michael, had not abused her. Mind you, this is one of the more moderate voices from the right.

The new Public Editor is Armando AcuZa, and he’s off to a good start in his job, which consists, in the main, of providing an independent analysis of how the Bee does its job as a newspaper for the benefit of the readers, while addressing questions, concerns and complaints that readers have about the Bee. He came at a difficult time for the newspaper, when its star columnist, Diana Griego Erwin, resigned after allegations arose over her methods used in providing quotes and background in her (usually) human-interest columns. The Bee stated that they had run spot checks on a dozen or so of her recent columns, attempting to track down sources she used, and in a dismayingly high percentage of such cases, were unable to find evidence that the people named actually existed.

Timid.

That the free press in America has taken a catastrophic plunge over the past 15 years is pretty much beyond dispute. One can spend a few days reading the Washington Post and realize that the glory days of Woodward and Bernstein are long passed. One can read its crosstown rival, the Washington Times, and realize that some segments of the American press are no better than the once-ridiculed Pravda of the Soviet era.

The nuts out front of the hospice have been sending their own children in to be arrested. A seven year old girl, carrying a plastic glass of water to give to Terri, seemed to be under the impression that her husband should be in jail for "being bossy." I wonder if that poor kid’s parents, who cravenly hung back among their fellow crackpots, knew that if that kid had somehow gotten to Terri Schiavo and tried pouring the water in her mouth, Schiavo would have almost certainly drowned? If they did know, then horsewhipping them is too good for what they did to their poor daughter.

I guess they’ve been trying to foist George Dub off as an intellectual who does a lot of reading and decision-making and other what you call your leadership stuff lately. This strikes me as one of Karl Rove’s more misbegotten ideas, and will implode the first time the kid strikes out on his own and ad libs within earshot of a reporter that he had that Edger Allan Poe fellow over for dinner last week and thought he was a real swell guy. At which point Rove will croak, "Nevermore."

He didn’t.

After a long and determined effort to get one senator, just one, to object to the certification of the electoral college vote based on the wide spread failures and irregularities in the Ohio vote, a total of one – count ‘em, one – Democrat did so. Credit where credit is due: Barbara Boxer has more courage than the rest of the Democrats in the Senate combined, and more character than the whole sorry lot in the Senate, even if you don’t bring down the curve by counting Dick Cheney.

You might be a liberal if …

On "The Daily Show" Jon Stewart showed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf stating flatly that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, followed a few minutes later by a rattled-looking Wolf Blitzer coming on to explain to his docile cable audience that he had been told that when Musharraf had called attacking Iraq a "mistake" he hadn’t meant it quite as "unconditionally" as it sounded. Protect that "access," Wolf; it’s your bread and butter, and I don’t guess those red leather pumps and matching red satin hotpants come cheap, do they? Especially with all the wear and tear of being a member of America’s fourth estate.

In Dixie county, roughly 1,500 Republicans were able to deliver 4,433 votes for Putsch. The 7,700 Democrats only had 1,959.

Of course, that was 1996, and Clinton won anyway, since Bob Dole was busily running against Bob Dole. And the Democrats were fairly adept at their own agitprop, even without VRWC radio and easily suckered reporters. They managed to create the impression that Bob Dole’s running mate, or his father, was Newt Gingrich.

In the interests of openness, the responses to the "Republicans believe" segments are, with grammatical editing, as I wrote when I responded to the post. The responses to "Democrats believe" were added after the fact.

I was pretty disgusted with the VRWC for the "Al Gore is crazy" campaign, and revolted that a licensed physician would lend his name to such a shoddy undertaking.

Now, Cheney – the same Cheney who spent much of the past three years cowering in bunkers in undisclosed locations – has declared that Kerry is ill-suited to lead America at these times of challenge. Folks, for Cheney to say Kerry is ill-suited to lead America in a time of war is like Homer Simpson saying that Steven Hawking is weak on math, or Peewee Herman saying that Randy Johnson throws like a girl.

But we didn’t have Second Amendment Zones in 1964, or in any of the years subsequent to that and before 2001, despite the fact that we had plenty of violent loons with guns who felt that shooting a president could solve their personal problems. Didn’t need them until 2001, nine months before 9/11.

Now that he’s officially dead, I imagine there will be schemes where the GOP will offer cash prizes to people who name their children "Ronald Wilson" ("But Mom, I’ve been Fred for 42 years. I don’t WANT to change my name!") and putting Reagan’s face on the flag and gawd knows what else.

Today, the junta wasn’t even trying to deal with the ramifications of Woodward’s new book. The central figure in the book is Colin Powell, who was brutally frank in discussing his doubts and reservations about the whole Iraq adventure going back to November of 2001. They sent Condi out to protest some of the milder charges contained in Woodward’s book, but let’s face it: nobody is listening to her any more. The fiasco at the 9/11 commission pretty much finished off her credibility. Woodward’s book comes on the heels of the statement by the British ambassador to America that Putsch was plotting to attack Iraq days after 9/11. That in turn comes days after Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 panel, which in turn came on the heels of his book, which contained damaging information, which in turn came right after Kevin Phillips’ book which cast severe doubt, not only on Putsch’s priorities, but his very loyalty to America.

I looked him right in the eye and asked, "Are things in Washington as bad as they appear?"

My personal favorite was a quote from Richard Clarke’s letter of resignation, dated January 20, 2003: "It has been an enormous privilege to serve you these last 24 months. I will always remember the courage, determination, calm, and leadership you demonstrated on September 11^th."

Except, to my surprise, it didn’t. The sense of revulsion and disgust and outrage was pretty close to universal, and Republicans as well as Democrats were attacking Coulter for her vile words. I looked at various editorials, all saying pretty much the same things I wanted to say, and realized that I wasn’t going to say anything that wasn’t obvious and redundant. She’s a vicious, nasty bitch who brought shame and disgrace down upon her head and the heads of those who support her. How could anyone say a man was "lucky" for losing three limbs while in the service of his country? Even more appalling were the bare-faced lies that accompanied that paragraph; that he was picking up a grenade while on a beer run, not anywhere near a combat zone, and if it had happened at Fort Dix instead, he would be no hero.

At first, everyone thought it was just another incredibly blatant and bare-faced lie from an administration that has made an art form, not to mention a national policy, of blatant and bare-faced lies.

On Usenet, we have a group of refugees from Newsmax and the GOP who live for nothing but to spin everything they can Putsch’s way. One of my readers, Mad Cat, ingeniously named this group "The Chimp Pimps," and I do wish he would stop coming up with lines like that when I’m sipping my morning coffee. This keyboard is shot.

The reason is that the numbers surrounding the employed labor force show, once and for all, what a load of pure hooey the "unemployment rate" really is.

Back at the end of September, CBS also asked its respondents, "Do you have confidence in George W. Bush's ability to deal wisely with an international crisis, or are you uneasy about his approach?" Putsch was trailing in that one by a 45-50 margin, and given the large number of US casualties and the damning CIA report that declared that the Resistance in Iraq had grown to an estimated 50,000, and the US stood to completely lose control (the actual phrase the CIA used) of the situation, it’s a wonder it wasn’t lower. Indeed, the White House realized that his domestic support threatened to crumble over that as casualties soared to well over 400 dead and at least 7,000 injured or otherwise disabled in the war. (That "otherwise disabled," consisting of thousands of troops with symptoms that sound suspiciously like they inhaled depleted uranium, may yet be the biggest lingering afterstory of the war.)

It wouldn’t be a bad life. She would start out with a nice big grubstake that she could use to buy a house and a new car and plough the rest into a retirement fund and have a fairly comfortable life. And when she’s recognized, she can look forward to deferential cops not giving her a ticket for speeding, free meals at restaurants, and the occasional request to come to a junior high and give a lecture on patriotism. Not bad for a girl who joined the army only because she couldn’t get a job at the local supermarket and had to do SOMETHING.

But the fun is only beginning. Antonin Scalia, the Negative Stereotype of the Supreme Court, has recused himself. It was a given that Scaly was going to vote against Newdow no matter what, and the fact that he was foolish enough to give speeches on the Newdow case last winter meant that he pretty much had to recuse himself. The Court is trying to regain the legitimacy it lost in the Bush vs. Gore decision, and having Scaly sit in judgment on a case he had already tried in the press would have just made a bad situation even worse.

Limbaugh, in a cynical ploy by Disney/ABC/ESPN, had been hired as a "color commentator" for a football show on the sports network. Limbaugh knows little about football, but a lot of the droolers who listen religiously to his three hour daily rants on the radio are also football fanatics (funny how that works) and ESPN reasoned that a little of the Limbaugh sneers would boost the ratings. And in fact, it did, by 10%. Of course, that meant the market share went from minuscule all the way up to teeny-weeny, but that meant profits for Disney, and that was all that really mattered.

No President, not even Ronald Reagan, willingly clung to a economic model that so clearly showed economic catastrophe for the country. We’ve seen an eight-trillion turnaround in the national budgetary picture for the next eight years or so, from a $5 trillion surplus to a $3 trillion deficit, and that’s not even counting the immense costs of our little adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the debate last night made clear, there are six major candidates, plus Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnie is limping along on name recognition, but it’s become clear that his campaign is an utter fiasco, and his role in this election is that of being the biggest clown.

Well, it’s pretty crappy. Not just the unemployment rates. Those exemplify pretty crappy, of course. Officially, it’s around 6.3%, and unofficially (counting the people who have given up looking for work and whose benefits have expired) it’s somewhere around 10.5%. It isn’t just the pay, which is lagging further and further behind the increases the top 1% of wage earners see. Although with discretionary income falling each year, many west European nations have caught or surpassed us. (Yes, Americans have higher wages and lower taxes than their European counterparts, but said counterparts don’t have to deal with such privatized taxes as health care, pensions, higher education, and so on.)

There are different theories about who was responsible for the car bombing, of course. The FBI (and would someone explain just what the HELL the FBI is doing in Baghdad) has confidently pronounced that the bomb was a Soviet model, and stated it belonged to Saddam. Paul Bremer, viceroy of Baghdad, claimed it was al Qaida. American puppet Ahmad Chalabi thinks the deed was done by Iraqi Ansar al-Islam, which is a loose coalition of Moslems who aren’t either Ba’athists (Saddam’s people) or al Qaida, but who disapprove of American presence in Iraq on general principles.

The number of highway auto accident deaths during the three day holiday period.

The Republicans claim the ad is misleading because it forgets to mention that the intelligence on the so-called "Niger memo" which claimed Saddam was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium radioactives to make into nuclear weapons came from British intelligence. It’s not Putsch’s fault that he’s an incompetent fuck up; his buddy Tony gave him bad info, is all.

On one level, I could relate. Gray Davis isn’t the most memorable person ever to hold the governor’s chair. I can’t remember bad movies I’ve seen, like the one where Arnie acts like a robot. What was that called?

And a constant among all those places was the most irritating one of all, the wimp who wanted to be a bully. Other kids would tease him, and he would immediately burst into tears, and in a full rage, declare that he was going to tell, and his dad or big brother or some other protector, real or imagined, would come and make them all sorry they had made fun of him. Only rarely did such an authority figure turn up, and usually if that happened, everyone faded into the woodwork until the threat went away, whereupon everyone would emerge and pummel the wimp.

And they struck down the sodomy laws on 14^th amendment grounds and to preserve the right to privacy. On this one, they didn’t just ignore stare decisis; they reversed themselves. (They did the same partially in another case, backing away from the lunatic assumption that campaign contributions were free speech.)

OK, I ‘ve got a higher opinion of the American people than Mencken does. They aren’t all serfs and goose-steppers.

Then the next day, two more got liberated, apparently for complaining about the liberation exercises of the day before, and 15 more were given omelet recipes.

Charming, is it not? The fruitloop who said that also came up with these howlers: "Because of the peace movement, we had the Holocaust," and "The Democratic Party is keeping the Ku Klux Klan alive, and if we’d listened to Southern Democrats who wanted peace in the Civil War, we’d still have slavery."

Maybe I should invest $50,000 in the lottery. Then I could retire two or three years earlier.

The English tabloid, the Mirror, is reporting that Putsch was planning to address the Parliament of the European Union in order to try to shore up some support for his proposed attack on Iraq, but that the idea was scuttled when the European Union refused to guarantee that Putsch would get a standing ovation from Parliament members when he strode in to begin his speech.

This weekend was different. No howling mobs, no cities in flames, no shots being fired. And we can all take solace in the fact that this time around, Nixon is still dead. The man most responsible for turning American politics into the vicious reactionary circus we see today is dead. There’s that, at least.

There were a few tattered remnants of old-style conservatism left in the GOP in the late 90s. They still claimed to stand for state’s rights, small unobtrusive government, and a balanced budget, and often fought for constitutional amendments and laws that would uphold such notions.