You and Your "Therefore"

Back in early 2005 when I first started this blog, I went out of my way to engage people who didn't share my political views at all. I figured that everyone needed to keep talking, regardless of how we spoke to each other. I never shied away from calling them bigots, they never tired of reminding me that I was was going to Hell. And that's dialogue: to my mind it's better than silence.
It wasn't always name-calling, either. I went out of my way to let them know I agreed with them on the few occasions we agreed. I tried damn hard to show the places where our interests overlapped. I often spoke of how we had lots more in common that we were being told by the media. They rarely did me any of the same favors in return.

So why'd I stop? Well, aside from getting sick of batting away the same shitty arguments over and over again, I noticed early on that all those people on the Other Side were always damn quick to go to the "We Should Just Kill All Of Them" variety of joke. And it was never long before it went past jokes, and into the real thing.

Naturally, reminding them that they were being kept in a constant state of irrational, barely coherent anger by a well-funded media apparatus that sought to do so entirely for the short-term political gain of one particular political party never came off well. Turns out people hate to hear that sort of thing about themselves.

But in any case, I always went out of my way to remind anyone who would listen that this isn't a sustainable state of affairs. You can't have this many people this angry at each other for this long, and still have a country that works at all. What you have in that case is something more like Rwanda, actually.

After a while, I noticed the random appearance of the word "therefore" in lots of their arguments. Always in some sort of syllogism that didn't exactly work, like -"if (thing that isn't true) is true, then therefore (other thing that isn't true) must also be true." Like watching a class on logical fallacies, like first day in Philosophy 101.
I knew what this was, too. They had been made to feel bad by your science-y types enough times that they just wanted to throw a few "therefores" and "hences" of their own because that's what you get to say when you're right, or at least sound that way. It's a way of speeding past that whole having-to-prove-something part and just go, "I win!"

That's why I'm not terribly surprised that Jared Loughner had that as his favorite method of argument. And why those arguments were all loaded down with not just poor comparisons but things that didn't seem to connect to any thing at all. (Matter o' fact, here's a great interview with the guy's philosophy professor from community college. It's almost funny.) As if he only attended half of the class on logical fallacies, and was now actively trying to prove that bread really is stones.

So lots has been made of how he's basically too crazy to have a coherent political position. That may be, but he himself described what he was going to do as an "assassination." I'm pretty sure that didn't refer to the little girl who died, either.
Lots has also been made about how we musn't interpret this as some sort of failure of Arizona's gun laws. No problem AZ; you didn't fuck up colossally and see to it that crazy there was comfortably armed and actively concealing. Feel better now? Didn't realize you states were so damn sensitive.

I think I should get to have a gun myself. And I think that other people should get to have guns. But I think that even the staunchest gun-rights activist doesn't like crazy, stupid people having guns.
And if all these lone nuts throughout our history were never doing it for politics but simply because they were crazy (or "evil," whatever), then why is it pretty much always a liberal that gets it? Why aren't people shooting the Michele Bachmanns of this world? Why the hell hasn't anyone put three well-placed peach-sized holes in Glenn Beck?

Lots of reasons, I suppose: maybe those same people who want us to all be mad at each other all the time also want us to be scared all the time, and it scares us more when people who at least try to talk about us all being nice to each other end up gettin' got. Maybe it's something I've never even gotten close to considering.
(Also: I kinda forgot about George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. Yeah, they sort of got shot too, I guess...)

This is that thing I keep going on and on about: we have so completely let the stupid take over the argument at this point that we all have to speak their baby talk. It's our fault: wouldn't want to be seen as An Elitist, would you?
Well, as I often said to those nice people who told me I was going to Hell for thinking as I thought: you're the one who claims to speak for God, and you're calling me the elitist?

But there's nothing wrong with telling people who have nothing good to add to shut the fuck up. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; they're probably doing it for a very bad reason. We pride ourselves on our inclusiveness and rightfully so: but, if stupid there just keeps on barking the same stupid ideas over and over again, it's your duty as a thinking person to tell them to fuck off and be quiet.

So these days if I want to go make fun of stupid people with terrible arguments, I go over to Yahoo! Answers and stalk the "Religion and Spirituality" boards. (Actually, I don't even do that anymore, but my year of experimentation with that lowest level of public debate is going to get a blog of its own, whose inaugural post is here. Yes, I know: because I'm doing such a fantastic job keeping up my other five blogs. )
Pretty much it's all bad arguments, skewing toward the pseudo-scientific, often just childish (because I suspect a lot of the questioners are actually children). It has given me way too many opportunities to begin my reply with, "You and your 'therefore'..."

Aggressively Wrong-Headed

"Everyone's such a tryhard in this business. God help 'em, they just won't rest until they've outdone themselves in bringin' you some quality entertainment." -something I said this morning on the 'AV Club'.

So true. Let us pour out a 40 for Jay Reatard, who was a pretty damn talented musician, who happened to give himself a deeply stupid name. Of all the people in the neo-Garage scene, he truly was a person who stood out, musically. Also, he decided to call himself 'Jay Reatard'.

This led to a scene in which someone among those who called him a friend actually had to deliver the line, "It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our good friend Jay Reatard."

Hardly the dumbest thing I've seen in my life, though. As you can tell, I've been a little obsessed lately with the different varieties of stupidity.
Like that last post? I wanted to go somewhere completely different with that. I was going to remind congressional majorities exactly how one goes about exercising power. More on that later.

Letters To Phillipa (1937), by Dorothea Brande, is one of the books I found in a bag on the sidewalk. They were all books that had recently been withdrawn from the library at Marylhurst, a local Catholic college.
In it, an older conservative woman writes to her Goddaughter about those things to avoid in life, and that which to seek out. It is telling that most of the really great literature of the day is sternly thrown onto the Avoid pile. There is this ongoing flintiness and overwhelming sense of someone being Put In Their Place that makes the book a hilarious read.

But although I am fond of making fun of it in my finest Awful Old Lady voice: "It is a wicked book, and you must not read it. You must do as I say," actually it differs from similar screeds of the present day in that Brande actually makes an intellectual case for her dislikes. I may not agree with her, but she felt the need to make her case well, in case someone was paying attention.
In short, learning was not shunned as being inherently evil, even among those whose husbands proudly described themselves as "fascist". Now, you need to go a long ways to find someone who will try to make their case at all.


Another example of gloriously well-researched and relatively reasonably stated lunacy resides in the works of John Lilly, M.D. I read The Center of the Cyclone (1972) a long time ago, when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about psychedelics. In the years that followed, I apparently also bought Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer and Simulations of God, and forgot about them.
Go long enough in this world, and you will find a lot more people than you expected that literally believe in angels. Even odder than that though: there's a pretty large subset of them that will tell you with absolute certainty what colors and fragrances are pleasing to angels, and what their houses look like.

Now Lilly didn't do that. But he made a mistake I've seen lots of people make: your experience will be exactly like mine. This is a huge problem with those who write about spiritual and/or psychedelic experiences (Carlos Castaneda is notorious for it), because your trip ain't like mine, and the wise will already know that.
So where Castaneda will do the whole "now after you take the jimson weed, you will be flying. You will see a house. When you go inside, you will see a green woman..." John Lilly was more interested in formulating a large scientific framework with which to understand the oft-confusing and contradictory nature of what he was exploring.

And his central premise -that the human brain is basically like a computer, in that it all depends on what input it receives- is pretty sound. Almost immediately afterward, he falls off. Using words like "adultly", and phrases like "goodness of fit with the real universe", he goes further into the idea's natural next step: so if "mind" is computer, then one may install new programs/realities. And while this is -within limits- true, once it turns into a belief system, you have problems.
Before long, it turns into a mishmash of what is clearly just what he got out of it. What things became clear to him due to the filters through which he viewed them. Like any good scientist, he tried to make a workable formula out of it. Like most people, he set aside a place within his cosmology for a god.

What it ended up looking like (in excerpt) was this:
C*, [+]*, [-]*, L*, Z*, the five energies, the five sources.

and:
Plus star, [+]*, pure positive energy seeking, always seeking, the positive, the orgiastic, the orgasm, the fucking of the universe fucking itself, always doing the fucking.

(Have I, at times, tried to do my own version of Unified Field Theory? Of course I have. And Lilly is still to be admired for his work with dolphins.)


Check this out:

The great thing about Robert Gibbs in this clip is that out of all the things he could have said (all the way from "unfortunate" to "evil"), he picked "stupid," which is exactly the right word. Robertson says shit like this all the time (about 9/11, about Hurricane Katrina), and is only ever briefly made to feel like shit about it.
No doubt that it will be Gibbs who is made to apologize. And he will, since he is a press secretary, and not some rich bastard who lies to stupid people for a living*.

The point I didn't make last time was that there are people still alive now who remember how to push through highly unpopular legislation, from the perspective of the party in power.

One: go ahead and let a shitty version of your bill pass. I think something along these lines is already happening with the health care bill. Once you've got the legislative framework in place, and it gets a budget, and staffers, you have created something that will never go away, for better and for worse. The flawed product opens to door to the improved product replacing it later.
Case in point? The Civil Rights Act went through several much lesser permutations -that all failed- before finally becoming law in 1964.

Two: act like a majority while you have one. So, all those senators and representatives in 1964 who didn't want to pass the Civil Rights Act? You know; most of them? So what got them to change their vote? Withholding federal subsidies on wheat, cotton, and tobacco until it passed.
I mean, some horse-trading was done, but this was the kind of thing where the gentlemanly art of politics had been largely thrown aside, in favor of the bloody artlessness of ancestral hatred. Strom Thurmond tried to strangle Ralph Yarborough, to prevent him from voting 'yes'.
So yeah, the Dems played dirty. And rightfully so.

Three: be okay without those people you could do without. And when the '64 bill passed, Lyndon Johnson signed it, saying that his party had lost the South, for a generation at least, if not forever. Yep, and at times that has really hurt the Democrats.
I have said that the Democrats need to stop thinking that they're ever going to get the evangelical vote in this country, and far more importantly need to stop degrading themselves in trying to get it? Well, I hold it to be true, and at times it will bring pain, but shit: be reasonable. Not only will you not get them, you don't really want them, so be okay without them.

You know, unless you want to be the Unreasonable Jeebus Party. But that's just it: there already is one, and you, my friend, are not it. Not yet.




*(the author is unclear on whether or not he was being ironic there)

The Bargain

"We’re not smart as a nation. We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t plan for the future. "

Wow, Bob Herbert. Really? Course, David Brooks made pretty much the same point, same day:

"Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement..." Yeah, I suspect he isn't. The more Teabaggy our public discourse becomes, the even less room there is for what passes for a thoughtful conservative.
But Bob, Dave; maybe you personally didn't do this, but your industry did. "You let them in, and now they're everywhere..."

I know what it is, too: you wanted to seem less elitist. It scared you when they called you that. You wanted to seem like you paid attention to the good common folks, so you might make some money selling them things. Like all journalists, you feel that in order to truly explain something well, you need to dumb it down to embarrassing levels. To reach all people and let no one feel bad, you need to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

So now the Loud and Stupid are everywhere on the march, because you continue to give them coverage. They could have marginalized themselves in peace, but no; you liked the numbers. To ridicule someone's gramma moaning, "I'm skeeered of OH-Bah-ma!" would open you up to criticism, something you apparently can no longer take at all.
But the ridiculous deserve ridicule. And to act like they are to be taken seriously just because they are loud is to steal from us all.

And Mr. Obama himself is the worst offender in this area. He wants to spread the blame around for his failures, and made certain to set out in every way possible to fail. Rather than take a solid majority and use it to govern or something, he felt it necessary to let people who don't think- and only yell- get their two cents in. Then they ruined everything, as stupid people usually do.

It would take a strong person in this particular climate to say it, but someone must: Hey Stupid! Shut the fuck up! The grown-ups 'r talkin'! Now would be exactly that moment when somebody needs to remind them: you're only here because the rest of us take care of you. Be stupid all you want, on your own time, but just because you feel bad about it, don't expect me to feel sorry.
Furthermore, that means the responsibility falls to the rest of us to lead, and not turn back just because Stupid there feels his awful bullshit is being ignored.


Americans, as I often say, are a nation of people terrified of the idea that someone somewhere might think they are better than them. It informs much of their belief system. Queers? Educated n' rich 'cuz they don't hafta git pregnint! Besides, The Bauble says...Giving a shit about the planet we're on? Dey tek yer jerbs! Not bombing the living fuck out of everything and everyone all the time? Why do you hate Our Troops? Ghettoes? Gangs? Poverty? Those colored people are just lazy!

I've lived in the United States my entire life, and I'm pretty sure that I can safely make some generalizations about it. Wanna know about stupid people? Lemme tell ya' about stupid people!

Stupid people beat and scream at their children, sure they're doing the right thing, because that's what their parents did to them. They believe in God, but it doesn't make them happy. It makes them feel somewhat better that here, finally at the end of life, is the possibility of Revenge on all those Smarty Pants who made them feel so small. It doesn't make them nice people: it makes them want to kill their neighbor. The fact that Wrath is one of the Seven Deadly Sins always eludes them; they weren't specifically told the words This Means You. They think they're the only ones who know anything, but people who know too much are dangerous. They cry all day long when they don't get theirs, but feel that no one else is entitled to anything. Torture's funny when it happens to somebody Brown, but if it happened to them or one of their Babies, it would be the biggest fucking tragedy in human history.
And they feel that the only pure form of expression is yelling. At this point, why would they feel any different? People keep pointing cameras at them!

So yeah; it's not like this is a new thing, or an uncommon thing. The stupid are with us always, and always have been. They comprise the majority of most crowds. But now, since being smart is no clear ticket to immediately clearing up the shitty decision making of previous stupid office-holders, it's somehow those int'lecshuls fault.
And it gets reported as if it is news. Hey; stupid people are incoherently angry! Imagine that!

But hey; you're right. The smart people have failed us, too. Not due to a surfeit of intelligence, though...more like that problem Bob mentioned earlier: they never learn. They will keep on trying things the same awful way we always do, fooling ourselves that the chiefs of industry who long ago abandoned American society will somehow come back and save us.
The whole while, there will be much milksoppy talk about listening to the other side's point of view...Let's find out what Shouty there thinks; no, no...Let the man ta-aalk...
As if they'd ever do that for you.

So real quick: two things we should do while there's still a Democratic majority...
Make campaign contributions taxable. Tired of watching you drunks get sloppier.
Penalize U.S. corporations that move offshore. Tariffs, taxes, whatever. Fuck them. They are the problem.
...Oh hell, while we're at it, tax the churches too. They never kept their side of the Bargain anyway...

And it's time the Democrats finally admitted to themselves that they will never, ever get the evangelical vote. Never. So stop degrading yourself trying to get it.

All the way back in a magical time called the Nineteen Eighties (the Reagan Years!), a band called Shriekback did a song called "Hammerheads," and it is oddly prescient:

our time has come
age of the hothead
this is our mission
to be the darlings of god
too late for silence
too late for anything
it's all too much for me
it's roots go down too deep for me

all-punishing fire
an animal frenzy
these hammerhead people
they know what danger is for
you let them in
and now they're everywhere
if it's vegetable or mineral
it's back a little up a little


Shout, push, hammerheads!
bold and resolute
marching, balancing
in too far to go back
Yes, yes, hammerheads!
swimming, kissing
we are big and clever
and we don't know anything

Onward, hammerheads!
bright and dangerous
jumping, running
in the fields and factories
God save hammerheads!
keeping going
we are sleek and special
and we're sure of Something


And just to see if we can Google-bomb this one again:
Lars Larson is a cheap little punk.

Makin' it Safe, Keepin' It Better

The unsung, unmissed early '90's ABC show "Cop Rock" episode titles include:

'A Three-Corpse Meal'
'The Cocaine Mutiny'
'Oil of Ol' Lay'
'Cop-a-Feeliac'

Oh, man! Wouldn't you love to see a full-length movie called "The Cocaine Mutiny"? Anyway, it also famously included this sequence:



How could anything be called The Foundation For A Better Life be bad? And its domain name Values.com...It just sounds like a combination of wholesale bargains and unmitigated goodness.

So The Foundation For A Better Life, with that vaguest of names, what is it that they do? Well, they were responsible for billboards like this...

I have always recommended that one read this billboard with a different inflection:
"Quadri-plegic. A minus, Harvard!" As though to say, she was perfectly fine when she got here...

They do have a wonderful feature on their site that allows you to make your own billboard suggestions. Not unlike the church sign generator sites out there, you could just put whatever you want onto a blank template. So I went and uploaded my pic of Dean Martin, and -well...


(I had to take a picture of this with my camera. They won't let you export anything from their site, strangely. Just like the Scientology site won't let you copy and paste the results of your personality test.)

Other people's ideas in this category include:

"YOU CAN DO IT!", accompanied by a screenshot of what I believe is a test...It's the Unit Test Cover Sheet, which is Mandatory...Then, "ACHIEVEMENT"! Pass It On.

An entry from something named Jennaaa, who lives in Michigan, with a picture of her and her friend...I don't know, Brrrennndaaaaa? Sitting in a bathtub with big, striped socks on. The legend reads, "How Fun," and has a smily emoticon next to it. The value there being espoused was 'LAUGHTER', apparently.

One I really don't understand from a Laura Bunten of Washington, D.C. has a picture of her, looking drunk or something, with the legend, "Adds the Sway-eh, eh-eh, eh-eh's on a daily basis." The value is 'LIVE LIFE', because it could scarcely be anything else.

And one that I would normally assume was a joke, but I'm pretty sure isn't, from one Zhane Fulp (see?) from King, N.C., with a picture of a woman, and based on the past-tense wording, you would assume she's dead. But no, 'Thank You Jessica, You Made All Our Days Good' is followed up with this:
"I HAVE TO SAY THAT JESSICA KUMARI IS MY HERO BECAUSE SHE HAS HELPED CHANNEL ONE NEWS ENTERTAIN THE HEARTS OF MILLIONS. I WATCH CHANNEL ONE NEWS EVERY MORNING AT CHESTNUT GROVE MIDDLE SCHOOL AFTER BREAKFAST AT THE SCHOOL CAFETERIA MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY. CONGRATULATIONS, JESSICA. CONGRATULATIONS. "

Value itself sort of gets lost here. There's one with a picture of Abraham Lincoln, and the legend is 'Was A Good President'. 'INTEGRITY'. Pass It On. Another with a picture of a spooky forest at night, and the puzzling message 'Stand up for what you believe even if you are', which exemplifies 'BELIEVE IN YOURSELF', for some reason. A picture of three girls with their arms around each other translates out to 'Be a leader not a follower', which is intrinsic to 'CARING'.

It doesn't help that the treasured half-truths that Americans live by are here utilized in what has to be some class project somewhere, which then fail to actually inspire. Two in a row about Positivity lack the veritas to pull off even the simplest of ideas:

"You will learn in life that if you don't have a Positive attitude life will be hard but if you have a Positive attitude life will be easy."

(is followed by)

"If you will have a good attitude, and not get in a bad mood you can or will have a good day and noting will maybe go wrong for you ."

Both of these are from Rockingham, North Carolina, and both of these epigrammists are, I suspect, in for a big shock one of these days.


But all of their billboards and commercials are like that. They're in favor of controversial values like 'SPORTSMANSHIP'. Another homemade one lets you know that 'There is "Value" in valuable friendships.' Are you making fun of friendship? Are you making fun of Value?
There is one in which I am -I think warned- that 'You might just start a chain reaction'. And the value is 'COMPASSION', but in small print it looks like 'COMPULSION'. Another, I'm pretty sure, is encouraging me toward 'OVERREACTION'. Pass It On.

So yes; with all this benign fatousity and generalized sententiousness, one may wonder, So what then is the mission of this great Foundation? Behind all this bland goodness and basic Hooray For Everything-ism, who wants us to spend all this time polishin' the ol' apple?
Oh my god. It's this guy, who owns a company that recently bought a company that regularly provides me with work. He's a conservative christian, too, surprise surprise. His underwriting of The Discovery Institute certainly doesn't make me view him in a positive light. Doesn't seem t' like the queers, either.

In a basic Google search, one either finds people who immediately hate the whole thing because Conservatives Are Bad, or people who want to give money to this thing (which doesn't accept donations, actually) because they find it refreshing that someone is sticking up for things like 'integrity' and 'hope'. Both of those have been under strenuous attack, you know.

So yeah, it's probably a tax dodge/money laundering thing.


Oh, but how could anything called Keep America Safe be bad? Well, let's see...

What if Liz Cheney was the first name on their board? What if they chose to publish the thoughts of one Gordon Cucullu (because his birth name, 'Chthulu', has such negative connotations?), a worse-than-crank whose background with Special Forces I'm sure warms the part of every conservative that loves a Stern Father. To say nothing of being the current home of the man who was famous for being wrong about everything-Bill Kristol!
The site is a jumping-off point for the written content of every nutbag that currently strides, knuckles down, across the greensward. Charles Krauthammer. Robert Spencer.

I dunno. I'm having a hard time actually being amused at how fucking dumb pretty much all of my countrymen are. But hey.


All of these are fun, but lack the overwhelming awesomeness of Oregon's own The Foundation of Human Understanding. I first encountered the utterly insane Roy Masters in the heyday of talk radio -which I actually date to the late '80's, early '90's, shortly before it got too polarized.
And I hear this vaguely British sounding jackass talking about what a bunch of awful people his audience are, only to have it stated not long after that he represents something with the phrase 'human understanding' in it.

The basic thesis- "if you were all good and moral and having the same vision as I do," as he too tellingly puts it- is basically that the socialists are gonna come kill us all. He's been selling that same line for a long, long time, so I suspect that it's only gotten more intense.
I see on his website now that he has a whole bunch of books and so on that promise to make you more sexy, or something. In the great tradition of all scams, when you try to go to 'preview' on the book page, it tells you that that action is 'not allowed'.

Well, it's certainly no The Association If The Enhancement of Mallard Rubles.

These Are Your Guys

So...As we know, the dumbest among us have again seized the reins of public discourse. They are never far away, they are generally kowtowed to by the media, who wish always to be seen as sympathetic to the average guy in the street.

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa wants to take credit for a completely sane and needed provision in a health care bill that hasn't passed yet being tossed, since its backers are currently afraid of being lynched when they go home. Good for you, Chuck. Let's see to it that Chuck doesn't go home without actually being lynched, eh? Oh! Just parody! Don't arrest me for threatening the life of a senator, as this is protected speech, just like these assholes suggesting that Obama should be killed is.

Now mind you; these people are just inept enough that they may very well be Democratic party operatives themselves, as I've often said about Fred Phelps.

But I don't really care. These are people who so love the insurance industry, they're willing to see to it that the people they live next door to can't talk, can't interact with their elected representatives. They so love the rich that they will gladly die from not being able to afford health care, lest someone somewhere think they might be a damned socialist.

So let 'em die! They want death so damn much, let 'em have it! But stop covering them! And hey; my Republican friends? These are your guys. This is what you have manipulated and grown in every election cycle since 1968 at least. Now it is all you are, and I can be forgiven for not feeling sorry for you.

Let's make a society in which Dick Morris doesn't get to speak in public without one of us directly in his face, screaming "LIAR!" and "INSURANCE INDUSTRY SHILL!". Where the stupid don't get the mike, just 'cuz they're somebody's gramma.

Tomorrow night, David Wu will be trying to talk to the people he works for in the town of St. Helens. I believe I shall be there to stare down any fucking crybaby that doesn't want people behaving like civilized apes. Who's with me?

August 14, 4:00-5:00

Columbia Learning Center; 375 South 18th Street, St. Helens

No Time Is A Good Time For Sarah

The day before Sarah Palin resigned -or whatever that really was- Jonah Goldberg wrote a column more or less telling her to shut up.

Or:

Dear Governor Palin,

You’re blowing it.

Hm. Gee, but you seemed to like her so much. What could possibly...

There’s a reason why the Left and much of the media establishment hated you from day one. Some hated you out of the fear that you might stop Barack Obama’s unfolding coronation. Others because you seemed to expose the snobbery, arrogance, and ideological pieties of elite feminism. Your beauty, your status as a working mom, your blue-collar husband, your bravery in taking on the political establishment in Alaska, your proud status as a pro-lifer and mother of a special-needs child: All of these things were — and are — deeply threatening to a secular left-wing cultural elite.

Although your being an idiot, on the other hand: that we found helpful.

He then points out that she has become a laughingstock (all one word, by the way, which I'm pretty sure it isn't), and even though she has a large appeal to the base...People like Jonah can see how 'the base' is fucking the Republican party.

Having said that, he really, really likes her, but...

...peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about. Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.

But he is forced to admit that she really has no business holding elected office. Yes, Republicans: these are your deeper thinkers, and the kind of candidates they dream up.

Then again, this is from National Review Online, which thinks that this is an example of advertising that will really bring in the dollars:

("Catch The Burning Flag"? Who the fuck allowed that one to see the light of day?)

So, all she ever had was charm and charisma. They all admit it now. And as it happens, even the ol' c&c is getting a bit stale, as she seems increasingly charmless, charisma-neutral.

And whiny. Hey, speaking of whiny,

President Bush had the same problem you do, which is why there’s a hunger for Republicans who can effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy. That’s why the wonks have the upper hand. Mitt Romney, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, and other hands-on types are what the party wants and, frankly, needs.

Wow. Bobby Jindal as an example of 'articulate'. Amazing. And yes please Republicans: please let Things-That-Should-Not-Be like Mitt Romney try to explain things to people. Our national comedy hour is always the richer for it.

So here’s my advice. Stay home and do your job and your homework. You’ll still be a national figure come the primaries. But if you can’t surprise your detractors with your grasp of policy when you re-emerge on the national stage, you won’t win the nomination. More important, you won’t deserve to.

And the next day, she quit.

I am unaware of how to pronounce Ross Douthat's name. I'm thinking our options here are 'do whut?' or 'douche-hat', and I'm goin' with the second one. Try n' stop me.
Anyway, he's one of those people who is for some reason still trying to make me like Sarah Palin. And uh...

I'M SORRY! I JUST CAN'T QUIT LAUGHING AT THAT FUCKING PICTURE! I mean, look at the guy! The look of deep insecurity that has morphed over the years into automatic defensiveness! The soulful, probing "serious" look! The neck beard ? The jokes write themselves!


So anyway, he...ARE YOU TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME? JE-SUS! KNOCK IT OFF! He would like you to know that you really, really owe Sarah an apology.

Had she refused John McCain, Palin would still be a popular female governor in a Republican Party starved for future stars. Her scandals would be the stuff of local politics, her daughter’s pregnancy a minor story in the Lower 48, her son Trig’s parentage a nonissue even for conspiracy theorists. There would still be plenty of time to ease into the national spotlight, to bone up on the issues, and to craft a persona more appealing than the Mrs. Spiro Agnew role the McCain campaign assigned to her.

Well hey Ross: if you're going to go that far, why don't you add 'and the Republican party would have done a better job finding someone who is actually qualified'?
And what's your problem with Judy Agnew? I'm askin'.

A Sarah Palin who stepped down for the sake of her family and her media-swarmed state deserves sympathy even from the millions of Americans who despise her. A Sarah Palin who resigned in the delusional belief that it would give her a better shot at the presidency in 2012 warrants no such kindness.

I had a Sarah Palin once. Turns out I was allergic, and had to get rid of it. Anyway, no I don't really have to have any sympathy for someone who consciously sought the spotlight, and yes, used her family as human shields at every opportunity. So what else ya' got, Douchehat?

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one.

Yes; the stupid have been tragically underrepresented up to now. Wait; I don't have a college education...

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

"And then do absolutely nothing substantive beyond there..." Besides: merit's bad now? In what way could she be considered a success story?

With her missteps, scandals, dreadful interviews and self-pitying monologues, she’s botched an essential democratic role — the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.

Those are damn fine comparisons, actually: a nutsack redneck who is remembered as the author of the Trail of Tears, and a crooked machine politician who grew up to sell all our asses to the National Security Administration.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Oh. Science! I need to do a little research maybe, but I'm not at all comfortable with a quick, categorical denial like that.
And again: she forced said family into the spotlight, and when we all failed to love her for doing so, reacted with a sharp whine about how mean we all were. Fuck that. Grow up.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

That 'anyone' can is indeed inspiring. That 'someone who doesn't have a fucking clue' can is terrifying.

Stop that!

Now we hear the plaintive harmonica from Starship's "Sara", and their disappointed observation that "no time is a good time for goodbye". But also, toward the end of the song, how -due to a lyrical conceit given in a round- they seem to suggest that "no time is a good time for Sa-ra...Sa-a-a-ara!"

Well, no shit. I coulda told you that ten months ago.

Why We Suck

Oof. It's Donna Barstow!

I hadn't even heard of her until Josh Fruhlinger (also known as The Comics Curmudgeon, and also also known as Cartoon Violence) started making fun of her. Even then, I couldn't tell whether or not I was perhaps ridiculing a developmentally-disabled five-year-old (who had strangely been given a job drawing political cartoons), and maybe should stop.

But she's an adult of some kind, and the fact that she can't create a coherent one-panel narrative is graced and enhanced by the fact that she seems to have lots of time on her hands, and answers any criticism of her fine self first person. Like the picked-upon kid in grade school who finally just screams, "YOU LEAVE ME ALOOONE!", this doesn't make things any easier.
As a rule, she shows up and starts ranting a lot of underinformed things about the Fair Use doctrine, and starts threatening lawsuits and/or server crashes. Between her lack of artistic talent, inability to make a simple joke and propensity for freaking out in public, she serves as the poster child for Why Editorial Cartoons Are Stupid, basically.

How did I put that? Oh yes:
"How to make an already unfunny joke even less funny: have one of your unfunny strawmen attempt to explain the punchline within the context of the joke.
You can do this with anything. Two (generic people, animals, items) walk into a (bar, police station, the White House) and say, “Gee, (easily generalized-about group) are sure going to (like/not like) this (thing that is going on, or is not going on)!”

But did you follow that first hyperlink up top? I haven't been able to export it back to here, so it's only a link, but that's where she becomes a special case. More on this to come.


So here's exhibit A.

Donna attempts to make the most common joke known to humanity (possibly the most common joke told among primates): Men Be Like Dis, Wimmin Be Like Dat.

But she can't do it, because her reasoning apparatus has been compromised or something. For one thing, it's not an especially funny scenario, nor is it realistic. In what I think she's showing us here, these people are already dating (or at least he just keeps showing up and watching her TV). Despite this fact, he uses a phrase that probably a stranger/maybe a distant acquaintance/no one at all would use.

And then we note how insensitive the male beast is (muted trumpet sound effect)...



Exhibit B:

Does this or does this not look like something that a seven-year-old who has listened to their parents talking politics for half a minute might draw? I certainly did, when I was kid: I came from a family of newspaper people, and wanted to be thought Clever.

But what is the pistachio supposed to represent? What are the squiggly lines? What does this actually say about the specific topic under discussion?

It's almost a political statement. But not really.



Now this, this here's a political statement, I guess.
If you had thought before that perhaps Donna is one of those people who would describe themselves as Conservative, consider the name that she copyrights under, which is "The Opposite of Wrong".
So now I feel like it's not too cruel to call her dumber than Glenn McCoy. At least he can actually make a point, regardless of how badly.

You can feel here how there's an undercurrent of anger at something, but...There's at least two attempted jokes going one here, and neither of them work. Honestly: what the hell is the joke, as laid out by its author?



We're back to a gender critique of some sort. The caption, which isn't available here, was "Paging Captain Jack Sparrow".
This image originally appeared on doubleX, who should know better. So should Slate, and the New Yorker. Her shit is everywhere, and I'm wondering why this is. What could she possibly have on them?

The fun thing is, once you get beyond making fun of how retarded she is, the assholes on the left end of the spectrum start coming out of the woodpile. I mean, there is a special kind of idiocy that allows one to create a sentence like:

"Racist cartoonist Donna Barstow, who is here seen being responsible for racist cartooning on the subject of swine flu, has unsurprisingly dabbled in racist cartoons before."

Well, thanks for that. Then they go on to get all frothy about the stupid cartoon where she renders Barack Obama as a Chia Head. This cartoon, like all of her cartoons, is underinformed to put it nicely. Not living where anyone else lives, to put it another. But to immediately jump to 'racism!' is...Ah, 'typical', is what it is.

Even better? Late in the comment thread, we get to meet the face of Donna that one could describe as homophobic -or could they? Because that cartoon doesn't make any sense, either.
She says so herself:

"Am I being disrespectful? Or funny? Only an editorial cartoonist knows for sure. I was surprised when Proposition 8, here in California, got picked up by gays all over the country as a rallying cry. I thought it was a state by state thing. I mean, didn’t Massacusetts say yes? And maybe other states."

So let's see...You aren't being funny. I can say that for certain...And I guess that if you're unable to marry in California, you could always move to Massachusetts?

But let none of this deter The Womanist, who wrote this amazing piece of freighted wordification. She starts off by referring to our (demonstrably, I believe) brain-damaged subject as a "pearl clutcher", which is a term The Womanist came up with all on her own.

And so we start to see how stupidity and shit reasoning beget themselves. Donna has a job publishing things that seem so full of political import, but mean absolutely nothing, and seem diagnosable. Renee publishes pointless diatribes with some of the worst circular logic I've seen outside of freshman year seminar, and receives the approval of others who don't reason so well...Which may very well be most people. These particular fish just happen to love their purported victim status.

So, since I can't seem to find a copy of that cartoon that will allow itself to be dragged back here (it appears on her blog), let me lay it out for you:

A white man and a white woman are seated on a couch. They are watching a television that has an poorly drawn image that nonetheless is clearly supposed to be Barack Obama. The white man has a string of words emitting from his mouth. They read, “I can’t believe it’s been 100 days and he’s still standing. Do you think it’s like Reaper, and he made a deal with the Devil?”

The comic appears in the context of some stupid little story about how her favorite teevee shows are being cancelled, like 'Reaper'. Then she suggests that somebody already should have shot the President by now. Good fucking lord, Donna. Get help.

Whatever You Say, Boss

I'm a person who truly hates a cute job application. Now, it's true that hard copy paper applications for employment are something that one rarely even encounters anymore, but for the sake of storytime (or nostalgia), let's say it happens all the time.

This bad idea is especially widespread in the service industry. Being a server in particular suggests that you must have an engaging personality -and hopefully you do- but there's still something genuinely obnoxious about having to prove it in an exceedingly contrived way.

Also, the spillover from this phenomenon can also cause inadvertent laughs. When I was applying for a position as a meat cutter at a local hippie-type food store, I declined to fill out the part of their application where I was supposed to draw a picture of how I felt the world should be, or something. I think the grim-faced, blood-covered smock guy who interviewed me that day appreciated not having to evaluate me on this basis, too. Made me wanna ask him: what was your picture like?

That's the shitty part; for as inane as the exercise is, I suspect that you will indeed be judged on your relatively light-hearted answers. I once applied for work in a bar that -for some reason- wanted to know what movie film I liked the best. I replied, "Oliver Stone's 'Nixon'," which was true at the time, but also quirky, you know? I hate to think that that wasn't why I got the job, as opposed to -oh, I don't know- not having boobs or something.

At another local eating establishment, and finally having had enough of this shit, I get asked the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
I already am grown up, I wrote.
"What is your idea of superior customer service?"
Whatever YOU say, boss!, I wrote back, knowing full well that this was why I would not get the job.

But this keeps happening. People want to talk baby talk about things that actually matter, and it sucks. You think that job applications are whimsical pieces of fun, because you're not looking for a job, Boss. Am I failing to be sufficiently cheerful? Maybe it's because I need an income, you sociopath, and you're toying with me.

Now, David Brooks last appeared here in these pages weeping about how mistreated the rich were, and how the rest of us are just straight up being mean. This time, although I have a wide selection of things to choose from, I think maybe I'll quote him on his sincere and fervent hope that a middle-aged Latina judge is capable of basic human delineation.

It's difficult to see what editors feel is acceptable to print, anymore. I mean, that which is demonstrably untrue, that which is patently false -sure. I've been seeing those my entire life.
But that which was written by one who clearly is residing in a universe other than the observable one here; that's kinda new. Dave weeps for the misunderstood rich, and now he'd like to talk about how he genuinely hopes that Sonia Sotomayor is a human.

In this wonderful piece of journalistic thinkin', titled "The Empathy Issue", a quick trip around Your Fairness There is afforded:

Right-leaning thinkers from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek understood that emotion is prone to overshadow reason. They understood that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.

Mmhmmm...Wait, so what did Salma Hayek do? Oh, okay: you're just kind of giving us a rundown of what perhaps could go wrong -or right- with any judge anywhere. In a highly generalized manner. So as to not be too specific about anything that might sort of make someone think you're perhaps being condescending to someone who isn't a white man. And, did any thinkers of other ideological bents ever think that? No? Oh.

First, can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.

Oh, brother! The Puerto-Rican brain, huh? That fiery Latin temper! "Multiple streams of emotion"! Lemme off this boat! Ooh! Tell me about the differences between emotion and reason again, Uncle Dave! And let me clean up that last sentence for you: "Anyone will be a good justice if... (et al)"

Second, does she have a love for the institutions of the law themselves? For some lawyers, the law is not only a bunch of statutes but a code of chivalry. The good judges seem to derive a profound emotional satisfaction from the faithful execution of time-tested precedents and traditions.

I dunno, does Nino Scalia have a love for the institutions of the law? Has anyone ever asked him? Why not? Because he's been a judge for most of his working life, and asking such a question would be a little Mister Rogers-esque? "Do you see the balloon? Is the balloon orange? Is the balloon a weather balloon that you've been working with for many years because you're a meteorologist?"

Third, is she aware of the murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature of her own decision-making, and has she accounted for her own uncertainty? ... Because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist. It’s prudent to have judges who decide cases narrowly, who emphasize the specific context of each case, who value gradual change, small steps and modest self-restraint.

'Semiprimitive' is about as close as David Brooks, Thinking Man's Conservative, will come to what he's really saying here. To wit: won't someone PUH-LEEEZE think of the children? He'd like you to know that a dangerous Ethnic is being considered here, and he's not so sure that They reason like Us. Or, to be fair about it, what he's really saying is: it's possible that she is undereducated on the nature of the human mind, and would fail to see the underpinnings of prejudice at work in her decision-making, which -again- I'm certain they asked Scalia about at his confirmation hearings.

The is pretty much like this too, in which he seeks to skirt around his central criticism (she's a crazy brown lady possible lesbian)with a lot of sententious ramblings about, oh you know, things in general. I note too that he got back on this topic a few weeks later. I haven't read it yet.

Thomas Friedman, on the other hand, isn't one of the New York Times' pet conservatives -usually. He's generally on the side of sanity and restraint, but that's pretty much what The Management wants. From you, especially. Let's look:

Weighing everything, President Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy. But there is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.

Quite so, Tom. I mean...

After all, we’re not just talking about “enhanced interrogations.” Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.

Yes, Tom, YES! Criminal acts! And they should be Not Prosecuted because...?

The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying; some of this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers. Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons: the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.

So again, Sanity and Restraint are called for on the part of the individual, though not nations. It should be the other way around, I've always felt, because as Dave points out above, people aren't all that rational. All the more reason for nations to be.
As to the usual "Rip our country apart" argument I've heard every time in my life that justice was crying out to be done, I'm gonna say the ripping has already long since been done, and maybe if we call a murderer a murderer in this case, we can actually learn something. The one way to assure that this keeps happening is to Not Talk About It.
The other argument, of course, is that these aren't really people we're talking about here, so even though we admit that torture doesn't even work...C'MONNN!

The rest of the article more or less can be broken down to the myriad ways in which Al Qaeda are pretty much suck-ass human beings. And while this might be true, we still admitted up front that torture doesn't work, so maybe we should just kind of shelve it as an idea, huh?

But it's really not for you and I to say, and that's my point. These two gentlemen work for the Boss, if ever there was one, and they are actively trying to change the subject. That is pretty much all they ever do. I mostly preserve this here for future generations: Here are some examples of the shitty explanations and rationalizations we had to listen to. Pity us.

Goin' Galt

So you might have noticed that what constitutes conservative thought has utterly collapsed, and is currently gnawing off its own leg. In a beautiful piece of triangulation, within a few news cycles we went from coverage of Rush Limbaugh being his usual fat fucking drug addict bigot self -the 'I hope he fails' thing- to a full-blown crisis of conscience for the Republican party.
The people who like Rush and listen to him will continue to do so. However, the only other major party in The United States has an awful choice ahead; try to stay on the good side of this idiot that represents its base, or denounce him and try to please...Who, exactly? It's nice to see the cows coming home on this one. That'd be the whirlwind you're currently reaping.

So why don't we all just...Leave? The whole "goin' Galt" thing is fascinating. To sum up: fans of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged occasionally start chirping with drooly satisfaction about what if? What if we really did it? Took our brilliant ideas and just left this society that has shunned and ridiculed us so?
Yes indeed; what if you ceased your torment at the hands of those with no economic power whatsoever, and moved to a place where there is no one to work for you, putting your Earth-supporting notions into practice? A brief piece of introductory economics for you: employers need employees. Employees need employers. Without this very basic dynamic in place, nothing ever happens. Talk all you want about the self-made man, the rugged individualist, but you're full of shit, and even you know it. No one has ever become rich without lots of not-rich people below toiling away to make it happen. Even Mister White admits this.

Besides, seems to me that the greater lot of American industrialists have already done a truncated version of this: moving their manufacturing base overseas. Now all that's left is a bunch of idiots who wish they were Jack Welch, moaning eerily about how maybe their brilliance is underappreciated here, and clearly Socialism is on the wise, and...Hey?
So yeah, hey? Since it has been made abundantly clear that your top one percenters don't care about the country that gave them this fantastic opportunity, and apparently don't particularly care if they have any consumer base to buy their products, what do the rest of us whiny brats do? Start a Don't Buy American movement? No idea.

Atlas Shrugged, though so clearly written by someone with a crippling addiction to speed, and in dire need of an editor, is nonetheless a fantastically eerie picture of a possible systemwide economic breakdown of this country. It is nice how the whole thing is presided over by clueless politicians -yes- but also by a passel of venal business types with adorable names like 'Tinky' and 'Kip', who know what side their bread's buttered on. Even a weirdo libertarian must admit: only by joining forces can these two twin aspects of Mediocrity truly begin to destroy everything.
And it's not even that they want to: they just have many, many attractive bad ideas, and the people who implement them aren't all that bright, to put it politely. Something akin to Atlas Shrugged has already happened/is happening right now, and The Misunderstood Industrialist Genius ain't gonna save us, because it was largely his fault.

On the other side of the pool from Rush Limbaugh is David Brooks. He represents what is left of thoughtful conservatism, and is not only everybody's punching bag, but often his own punching bag: he's kinda self-hating. As the longest-serving token conservative for The New York Times, he oftentide has to walk an interesting line of being scholarly while still pimpin' the same story that he's paid to pimp: The Self Made Man Will Save Us All!

"We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians."

No, no, no David; we are not enjoying this. We are wise enough to understand that as the fortunes of Jackass Up There fall, so do ours. Worse yet? Jackass Up There never seems to have learned the conversant lesson. It is fine to break contracts with workers, with entire unions. It is unacceptable to break contracts with Management.
This is why the management sector is currently a figure of ridicule. They aren't helping us, and yes- their policies did get us here. Brooks also notes: "The stagflation of the 1970s didn’t discredit capitalism. It gave rise to the supply-side movement and the apotheosis of the entrepreneur."

Well, thank you, Stagflation! You enabled a bunch of whiny Sun Belt assholes who didn't want to pay their taxes to run the government into the ground! Well done! And the 'apotheosis of the entrepreneur'? If I have to go back and show examples of how often these Self Made Men do so with help from the government, we'll be here all month.
Every libertarian I've ever met is a stickler for individual rights, as long as the rights in question are his own.

And Jim Cramer? Really? "Somewhere there’s probably a TV producer thinking of hiring Jim Cramer to do a show to tell story after story of unapologetic business success." Yes, because once you're famous or rich, there's some unwritten law that says you must remain so in perpetuity.
(How else do you explain Donald Trump? If he'd been left to the laws of basic capitalism, he'd be digging through my garbage right now.)
Mister Cramer is experiencing this brief bit of discomfort because he nicely sums up what went wrong: his seemingly no-nonsense approach mixed with Goofy Morning Crew sound effects distracted the easily-distracted from the fact that all he was doing was feathering his own bed. There is no reason whatsoever to view him as any sort of expert; just a very successful criminal. And yes, he'll never go away.

The 'gospel of success' (it is a nice little thing that he quotes a preacher named "Conwell" for an example of this actual sermon, titled 'Acres of Diamonds') is indeed that; a comforting lie. The idea that because you can get rich, you will get rich has indeed diverted generations worth of us. It has given us some good things, but ultimately it gave us Wal-Mart.

No one's asking business to apologize for success. We're asking for it to please maybe try to alleviate its massive failures. As always, Jackass Up There is suddenly feeling somewhat less self-made, and is asking the Nanny State it often decries in its fatter moments for help. I Am Jack's Utter Lack of Surprise.

So, a funeral song for the Bullshit Engine is wayyy premature, Dave. It has nothing at all to do with hatred of prosperity, either. We'd all like some, and it seems that even in the best of times, we don't get nearly enough.

Please Stop Tickling Me, y'all.

For those outside the Portland area, Sam Adams is Portland's first gay mayor. He also is a career politician going back to the entirely-unmissed-by-me Vera Katz administration. Adams always struck me as a second choice at best, and full of attractive bad ideas that were as expensive as they were unworkable. I've voted against him every chance I've had, except I did vote for him for mayor.
Not sure why I did that. Probably because he seemed better than the rest. I don't know.

The shit storm over Sam Adams' (2005) fucking of eighteen-year-old Beau Breedlove, and subsequent covering-up of same, comes as a bit of a surprise since I imagined -like everyone- that though ostensibly gay, Sam really was just asexual and achieved his greatest pleasure through Policy.

As always, the first part is sorta sordid, but still falls under the heading of "private". The second part -The Lie- is what kills ya'. Not only did Sam lie, but he told others to lie. An opportunistic real estate developer/would-be mayoral candidate was made to look like a giant schmuck for bringing it up at all, and Amy Ruiz from The Mercury is said to have gotten a job with Sam for not investigating the story more deeply.

Though I have seen several comforting denials of this, it remains pretty funny-looking. The Oregonian printed the accused parties' denials as if it put paid to any further speculation. Oh. They say they didn't do it. I feel better now...

And uncomfortable questions are raised that since Sam was not just "mentoring" (the original description of their relationship) Beau, he at least waited until they guy was eighteen...Uh, well where do we start trusting his word again? Now you're a pedophile gay pervert horndog, just exactly as the reactionaries around here would have us all believe?



I knew that if I waited long enough, I'd get to see the comment that raises itself above the mere stating of opinion that tends to characterize scandals.
The Comment that Raises Itself Above is a tried and true laugh-getter, in my life. It's what Booty refers to as "the hilarity of shallow depth" writ large. It never fails to tickle me.

And so this appeared on The Mercury's Blogtown PDX:


I cannot pretend for one minute to know, let alone feel indignant, about the private affairs of consenting lovers. This is a play for media storm, and I do believe there are deeper truths at play, whatever the case may be.
(And it's difficult for the rest of us, whoever we may be at this time, to dispute such things. It is a storm for play. We too, must not pretend to know things. There are things we do not know; that is a natural fact.)

It's quite a stretch to say that any of this casts little more than a faint shadow upon a career of political substance. Shall Mayor Adams be perversely vindicated in an apparent anticipation of torches and pitchforks raised against his supposedly corrupting influence as a gay man? The hype is mere stigma.
(No; we disagree! The stigma is mere hype! The shadow that is cast, despite being a career-ending one, is mere simulacra of a shadow. It is what it is, to quote a great man. And we want non-perverted vindication, lest we show that the torches and pitchforks were...Gay man corrupting...Sorry; that sentence holds too many directional changes in subject for me to grasp with my all-too-linear brain.)

Holding politicians accountable is not a matter of dragging representatives off pedestals; nay, it is of calling them to the duty of consistently doing our bidding to the best of their abilities. The election is over; the work of governance is what matters, especially in these tricky times.
(The Comment that Raises Itself Above makes a lot of weighty pronouncements, despite not really saying much in so doing. Nay. It then often follows up with statements that hold up pretty strongly on their own due to their sublime obviousness, albeit stated more gracefully than what we read in The Pamphlets. A comfortable generalization is the capstone of such statements, plus an appeal to that old crowd pleaser, "...these days...")

Scapegoating is the transparent leverage of political distraction. There's no place in government for the moral determinism of churches or weak journalism.
(TEE HEE HEE! STOP! YOU'RE KILLING ME! Wait; what is scapegoating again? And it sort of seems that while you wish there was no place for churches and shitty reportage, both certainly are there, and that's why you composed this vaguely worded rant about Something. I just wish the author -who goes by the unassuming handle of 'B70'- had gone even lower in the sententiousness department: "We are all here now; no one can deny that..." say.)

** ** **
There's a certain esoteric art in working a spotlight, I failed to note in my last post. I have no idea how anyone with even sub-standard eyesight does it. You need to focus a very powerful and bright light at a target far away to illuminate a point that is tiny and ill-defined. Plenty of other lights will be interfering with your ability to see whether or not that's your light wandering around the wings, or someone else's, and being able to aim the damn thing with any accuracy is something approaching the mystical.
I find the best way to do it is orienting my head a bit to the side of the barrel, so as to see the actual beam of light as it leaves the instrument, and continues on through space. If I kept on looking directly ahead as if eye and instrument were One, I'd probably lose my performer and never get them back. By backing away from Me, my aim improves.

How's that like journalism? Well, I hesitate to say. Uh, you need to be a clear light in all the dazzling bullshit? Most of it is ballyhoo (an actual term in lighting, by the way) but it's also about focusing attention on a single point. By focusing the attention, you may either deter folks from looking elsewhere, or bring greater depth of content to the one point, or both.

Uh, should Sam resign? No, I don't think so. It's just kind of disturbing that I can't find many arguments in favor of his staying.

Lars Larson is a Cheap Little Punk

One of my favorite things that reactionaries do is wax horrified at relatively minor things, in order to get you that way too. This is either for purposes of entertainment (which is always Limbaugh's excuse), or for good old market manipulation. But the basic rule seems to be -relay all information in a tone that registers you as shocked, just shocked, and you will get the ear of your average asshole quite easily.

And so professional shit stirrers like Lars Larson spend their time creating things for people to be incoherently angry at, and encouraging them meanwhile to ignore/ridicule the actual problems of others.

Lars would like you to think that he's crusading in the public interest, and Sissy Jennifer over there thinks she's a cute little girl. But really, he's a middle aged dude in a pretty, frilly pink dress. (thank you, Salty Miss Jill.)

Along with the unending need of reactionaries to get people outraged about pretty inconsequential things simply for the purpose of entertainment, there's this knee-jerk union bashing that's getting more and more ubiquitous as the economy gets worse. The UAW, you know...
Never mind that a lot of your Page 14 corrections are now coming around to noting that they way overstated how much an auto worker makes...And said nothing about how much a CEO of an automobile company makes, while consistently throughout the decades even in the best of times whining about needing to bailed out. Their crap product can't compete, you see.

I look around the media a bit, and I note almost no commensurate anger at the the geniuses actively running the economy into the ground, utterly failing to suffer from the effects of their flawed decision making. Well, there is a token story about the one German businessman who took the classic approach of jumping off a building, but that's the Germans for you; they're more about Honor over there.

For all the bluster, there remains very little oversight indeed, and I imagine it's gonna stay that way, since politicians are bought and sold by the selfsame crooks who got us here in the first place, and the media won't talk about it, because they are owned by selfsame crooks.

But of course, the really dangerous thing is the possibility that a children's book is about trade unionism. In this case, 'a play adapted from a book', by Oregon Children's Theater. Cue Helen Lovejoy: 'Won't some-one pl-eeease think of the children?'


Apparently Lars got some sand in his oyster after being alerted to a grave threat to our moral foundation, namely:
OCT press release about its upcoming show, Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type, which included the following teaser: "The book is widely used and supported by unions as it promotes their message of organizing, empowerment, and solidarity. Lawyers of labor and employment law also recommend this book."
(thanks to Culture Shock PDX. Matter of fact, more quotes from them right below:)

The plot of the slim volume is simple: The farm animals are cold. Banding together, they use a typewriter they have found to type a note asking Farmer Brown for electric blankets. When Farmer Brown ignores their repeated requests, the animals refuse to produce eggs and milk--in other words, they strike. Outraged, Farmer Brown sends his response: “There will be no electric blankets. You are cows and hens. I demand milk and eggs.”

The labor/management impasse is resolved when the farm animals offer to exchange their typewriter for electric blankets. Farmer Brown decides this a fair exchange and everyone gets what they want.

About this, Lars said;

"Aren't the animals making demands that will drive the poor farmer into bankruptcy? How is this any different than union autoworkers forcing GM out of business by making unreasonable demands for outrageous wages and benefits? Isn't using subtle messages to teach unsuspecting children that unionism is good a lot like a madrassa teaching Palestinian children that Jews are dogs that ought to be put in the ovens?"

Uh, Lars: straw-man much? Plus, I'm liking the 'Not to Painfully Overstate it, But...' argument tacked on the end there. The above quote is also taken from CultureShockPDX, because if one goes to Lars' website, one is not able to read transcripts if one is not a member of Team Lars.
This is probably just intellectual self-protection; he knows his arguments don't stand up on the page. You can't hear his overwrought, pseudo-outraged stage voice.

** ** **
'Marxism' is a word Leftists haven't used it in any serious context in over thirty years, but rightists (I guess) can't get enough of it. And unionism has something somewhere to do with Marxism, and that is a word that we have been taught to immediately fear.
So anyway, unions are bad, especially in These Tough Times. Of course, people like Larson use the opposite argument when times are good: If things are so wonderful, then we don't need unions, right?

Wrong, dick. Despite obvious corruption in some unions, they remain one of the very few ways that an average worker may hope to see anything proportionate to the extraordinary profits made by their bosses, and even that is still a very small percentage indeed.

I've ran three labor actions in my life without ever involving a union (before I joined IATSE), and every time it was simply because the employer wasn't even following the law. In each case, the employer had decided to blithely ignore basic aspects of labor law simply because they felt they could, and knew damn well that they would get away with it. When their staff responded with civil collective bargaining, it surprised them, and ultimately they went with our suggestions.

So let me leave it there: Employers will break the law if you don't watch them like a hawk, and will scream and cry even when being asked to do something that the law requires, and has required for a very, very long time. I've had to basically get up on a chair and shout, more often than you'd think, just to get what was legally my due.

And while I'm well aware that our deeply ingrained fear of Words in this country preclude there being any serious discussion of socialism, let me break it down kinda easy for you: only the coldest-hearted reactionary scold would say that the government should not take care of -say- those who are paralyzed from the neck down.
While on one hand, you think they'd fall back on some sort of 'well, that's the market!' argument for letting them die, they also have this whole 'life is sacred' clause that they don't really believe in (because it only applies to fetuses and the terminally ill), but must constantly espouse.

Anyway, I'm not asking for the gummint to prop up my useless body. I'm asking for something much simpler -the ability to bargain with those who own Things but do not own me- and am always amazed at the amount of pants-pooping this inspires among those who shout for a living.

And, as a former radio engineer, I must point out that if that pussy came into my studio wearing that fucking gun of his, I'd keep his ass waiting outside until he took it off. Nothing untoward would happen to him in there anyway, and there's nothing more dangerous than a sissy with a gun, to quote Gore Vidal.