Gravity Is A Bitch

It’s just me, right?

Am I the only one who thinks these people need help?

Professional help, with electroshock therapy and strong medication and something involving the word “inpatient.”

Honestly, what the hell happened? Is it the Jesus Fever? The Glenn Beck Itch? Is it inbreeding? Brain tumors? Space Aliens? Government experiments with the water supply? What?

I admit to curiosity.  I wonder if they can actually hear the words coming out of their mouths? Or is it more like a buzzing noise echoing inside feverish heads?  Based on the evidence, I’m guessing it’s the latter.

These people remind me of a joke we used to tell in the military:

An Airborne Ranger standing in the pouring rain, wearing a 30lb pack, knee deep in the muck, holding his weapon overhead to keep it out of the filth, says, “Oh yeah, this sucks!”

A Marine hunkered down in a sweltering jungle, wearing a 50lb pack, waist deep in mud and biting flies, under enemy fire, says, “Goddamn, I love how this sucks!”

A Navy SEAL, after parachuting into the sea from high altitude, then swimming ten miles underwater in SCUBA gear, crawling through freezing surf up a beach under fire dragging 70lbs of gear, out numbered and out gunned ten to one, says, “Oh Yeah! I wish it would suck more!”

An Air Force “special forces” officer, sitting in an easy chair in an air conditioned van a hundred miles behind the line, turns to his CIA friend and says, “Oh maaaan, cable’s out, this sucks.”

Wait, what? The unemployment rate dropped below eight percent?! Oh maaaaan, this sucks!

Seriously, have you heard this nonsense?

Listen, when you see a drop in the national unemployment figures as a bad thing, you have lost your goddamned way.

It flabbergasts me that conservatives, these people who wave the flag and lay claim to such great patriotism, who think they’re better Americans than all the rest of us, and who daily manage to imply that the Constitution runs like hemoglobin in their veins and that they bleed red, white, and blue, yes those people, would think a drop in the unemployment rate is a bad thing – because it happened on Barack Obama’s watch.

A drop in unemployment is good for the entire country, good for our entire economy. Hell, it’s good for the whole world.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it?

These people epitomize the Rush Limbaugh mentality: I.e. I hope he fails! No matter what, I hope Obama fails. No matter what the consequences to the country, I hope he fails.  These Conservatives, who have embraced the selfish me-first philosophy of Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan and the exclusionary bigotry of the talk show pundits and the unreasoning hatred of the TV preachers, really don’t see improvement for all as a good thing. 

No, of course they don’t.

To them, a rising tide is good only if it raises their boat and the boats of those they designate truly American – and as long as it drowns those they deem unworthy.

In the conservative religion, heaven is an exclusive club where only evangelicals and their friends are righteous enough get an invite, everybody else burns forever. Conservative heaven is governed by the Bush Doctrine: you’re either with us or against us, period and no exceptions.

That’s how they see America, it just ain’t that great of place if it includes everybody.

To them, it’s not paradise unless others suffer, unless others are excluded.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised, these are the same hypocrites who dismissed the death of Osama bin Laden, the criminal terrorist who murdered three thousand Americans and sparked two wars which killed seven thousand more (not to mention several hundred thousand non-Americans, but hey, who gives a shit about those people, right?), just because it happened on Barack Obama’s watch.

Seriously, when you see a drop in the national unemployment figures as a bad thing, and not just a bad thing but as some kind of conspiracy, you need professional help.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the numbers on Friday last week, indicating that unemployment had fallen below eight percent for the first time in four years, the whole damned country should have been celebrating. Instead, the world’s best conservative and former GE CEO, Jack Welch, glumly tweeted:

“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

I don’t know what’s more bizarre, the fact that some creepy rich bastard like Jack Welch is on Twitter in the first place or the fact that a billionaire Wall Street Republican who helped cause the current economic mess and who parked his company offshore and shipped jobs overseas so he didn’t have to pay either American taxes or American wages actually managed to convince conservatives that he gives two gold plated shits and a squirt of warm tax free piss about the unemployed middleclass as anything other than a revenue stream.

If Jack Welch actually cared about unemployed Americans, he would have hired them when he had the chance.

The president may not be able to change the unemployment numbers, but Jack Fucking Welch, CEO of GE, and his friends sure could have.

When Welch said, “can’t debate, so change the numbers” he wasn’t implying anything, he was directly accusing the President of the United States of malfeasance. 

Jack Welch directly accused President Obama of cooking the numbers.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that he would think the numbers were a lie, Wall Street tycoons like Welch lie about their numbers all of the time. They lie to the board of directors, they lie to stock holders, they lie to the auditors and the regulators and the IRS, they lie to their employees and their wives, they lie to the American people in general (Go ahead, buy a GE product, check the Mean Time Between Failures number, wait, and then tell me I’m wrong. Buy one of Jack Welch’s dishwashers, but don’t forget to pick up a mop while you’re at it).  So I suppose it’s hardly a surprise when people like Welch think everybody else must be lying too – that’s the world these people live in. Anything for a buck, anything to further their own selfish goals and greed.

Welch is a coward, and what’s more he knows it.

See, when confronted, Welch immediately activated the standard Wall Street CEO escape pod and went into Cover Your Ass mode.

When he was asked point blank by CNN’s Ali Velshi to back up his accusation against the President, Welch responded,

“I should have had a question mark, Ali, at the back of it, let’s face it, OK?”

Ah, a question mark. Well then, a question mark, that makes it OK, right?

Not, “I say the the President committed a crime and I have proof!” no, rather “Well, uh, and I’m not saying he did, uh, weasel weasel, but, uh, maybe the president changed the numbers? Hmmmm?”

During the CNN interview Welch repeatedly emphasized that he was questioning how “implausible” the drop in unemployment seemed. 

Of course, by “implausible” what Welch actually meant was “unfair.” 

It’s unfair, so it can’t be true. Wah wah.

How utterly typical of these Wall Street types, eh? Crash the whole economy, hide your money in the Caymans, liquidate businesses and ship jobs overseas – and then blame somebody else when the bill comes due.  Oh yes, how utterly unfair that things aren’t going your way, Jack.

These Chicago guys, they’ll do anything. They can’t debate, so they changed the numbers.

But Welch was quick to add that he “wasn’t accusing anybody of anything,”  he’d just left a question mark off the end of his tweet.

Yes, add a question mark, by all means, sure, invoke the standard technique of agents provocateur, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, and dissembling pusillanimous cowards everywhere.

As Velshi said,

“To say something like this is like Donald Trump saying that president Obama is not an American citizen without any proof.”

Remember, Folks, so long as the Unemployment Rate shows rising unemployment, the figures are absolutely reliable and it’s all President Obama’s fault. But if the figures show a drop in unemployment and an improving economy, well, then the figures don’t matter, the math is questionable, and Barry must be lying. Of course you have to ignore the fact that the unemployment rate has been falling slowly but steadily for the last four years – despite deliberate efforts to the contrary by people just like Jack Welch and the obstructionist Republicans in Congress that he bought.

Just like so long as Osama bin Laden remained free it was a failure of the Obama administration, but when we did get the son of a bitch, well, you know, it didn’t matter because it happened on Obama’s watch.  Besides, we probably didn’t get him anyway, because he was already dead, still in hiding, or, well, whatever, man, whatever, Obama lied, the SEALs lied, the Navy lied, it’s all true, man. And even if the SEALs did get him, the President doesn’t have anything to do with that shit, he’s too busy being responsible for the unemployment rate, apparently.

Of course, this is just the second coming of the same old religion.

This is the problem with creationism.

And that’s the answer to my rhetorical question up above, i.e. what the hell happened to these people?

What happened was creationism and creationist thinking. 

Creationism warps your reasoning ability.

These are the same folks who deny anything they don’t like in favor of conspiracy theories and magic fairy dust.  Evolution, climate change, military intelligence, birth certificates, don’t like what it says? Then just don’t believe it, stubbornly avert your eyes and cover your ears.  If you don’t like the numbers, if you don’t like the evidence, just angrily pretend that it doesn’t exist, loudly reject the offending information and substitute your own made-up nonsense (no matter how ludicrous) instead. Ignore the beam in your own eye and accuse everybody else of lying for profit.

But here’s the funny thing: the universe doesn’t care what you believe.

Gravity sucks you down whether you believe in it or not.

Gravity will kill you regardless of your politics, regardless of your religion, regardless of what you believe. This is provable and repeatable.  If you claim you don’t believe in gravity and you jump off a roof, your acceleration towards the center of the earth can be predicted with precision to nine decimal places. You can deny the math all the way to the ground but it won’t change a goddamned thing.

These people have confused denial and wishful thinking for critical analysis and healthy skepticism.

Of course, there’s no actual comparison between well defined phenomenon such as gravity and squishy arcane economic calculations like the unemployment rate.   The comparison is a mental one, once denial and conspiracy theories based on politics become a way of looking at the world, it’s just as easy to deny climate change as it is an unemployment rate that happens to be unfavorable for your particular political agenda – even if it is great news for everybody else (the dropping unemployment rate, not the rising temperature).

Like the joke up above, how we approach life defines who we are.

The problem with ignoring reality is that sooner or later you hit the ground.

Hard.

And when you do, well, then it sucks to be you.