Are You Better Off? Well Are Ya, Punk?

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!
                - President John F. Kennedy
                   Inaugural Address, 20 January, 1961

 

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

That's the question, isn't it?

That’s the question both sides are asking.

Are you better off today than you were when President Obama took office four years ago.

Are you better off?

Depending on your political affiliation, it’s pretty obvious what the correct answer is.

If you’re a Democrat and you want President Obama to have another four years, the answer is, yes, of course I’m better off. Look, here’s a list of all the things Obama has done in the last four years.  See? Totally better off.

And if you’re a Republican and you really, really hate the idea of Obama stinking up the White House for another four years, the answer is, hell no, I’m not better off. Here’s a list of all the things that suck giant donkey balls about my life right now. See? Worse off.  Also, Nazis.

People don’t use that question to determine who to vote for. They already know who they’re going to vote for - and that determines how they answer the question, that determines whether or not they think they’re better off.

If they’re liberals, they’re better off.  If they’re conservatives, they’re worse off. Quod Erat Demonstrandum

But, you know, it’s the question itself that bugs me.

I think the question says more about the questioner than the answer does about Obama. 

Are you better off?

To which you’re supposed to ask yourself reflectively, “Well? Am I better off? Am I?”

Not, are we better off?

Not, is the country better off?

Not, is the world better off?

Not even, is business better off? Or Is the economy better off? Both of which would be more useful questions in an election year.

No the question is, are you better off?  Am I better off?

Am I better off?

What better question than “Am I better off?” to summarize an intellectual and morally bankrupt worldview?

It amuses me that people who claim to embrace a religion of selflessness, who loudly and persistently claim that the United States itself is a county based on that same religion of supposed love and shared sacrifice, who profess to follow in the footsteps of a prophet who supposedly preached selflessness above all else, would use “Am I better off” as their political compass.

“Am I better off?” so perfectly describes the self-centered, win at all costs and damn the consequences tactics of political parties and their PACS and their legions of bitterly blind followers. 

“Am I better off?” is the secret fear of the TV Preachers, the pundits and their flacks, the politicians and most especially their hidden (and not so hidden) masters.

“Am I better off?” is the justification used by the manipulators and the schemers, the immature and the insecure, and by every bigot and supremacist and hater.

“Am I better off? is the operating philosophy of Wall Street, of the rich and the powerful and the greedy who, no matter how much better off they are than everybody else, are somehow never better off enough. What if people think I’m not better off than everybody else? That’s the fear that gnaws at their guts every single day.

“Am I better off?” is the root cause of everything that’s wrong in Congress and our dysfunctional government as a whole. Am I better off? Am I better off in votes? Am I better off in fund raising? Am I better off than other guy, the other district, the other state, the other party?

“Am I better off?” is a pissing contest, a measure of who has the biggest willie.

“Am I better off?” is so very, very Ayn Rand.

“Am I better off?” is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. A bunch of folks got themselves loans and mortgages they couldn’t afford because our society told them they could be better off without having to pay for it. The banks offered up those loans because their CEOs and investors and managing directors were more interested in making themselves better off than they were in the inevitable consequences.

Meanwhile, we have a fifteen trillion dollar national debt because we thought we’d be better off with a couple of wars bought on credit. Remind me again, are we better off?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Without some degree of “Am I better off?” we’d all just sit on the couch eating Pop Tarts and watching Life’s a Tripp until our legs fell off from lack of circulation. “Am I better off?” drives us to do better, to learn, to dream, to create, to build, to strive and design and desire. But the mindset behind “Am I better off?” when taken to the extreme, when it is allowed to become all consuming, when it becomes your only guide-star, is the root cause behind damned near all of our woes as a country, as a people, as individuals.

When you Super-Size “Am I better off” sooner or later there’s going to be consequences.

Are you, personally, better off than you were four years ago?

Is John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, better off? He destroyed an entire company. He put tens of thousands of people out on the street. His actions contributed directly to the global financial crisis and Great Recession. He sold the wreckage of his company to Bank of America, pissed all over his shareholders and employees, and walked away with his hundred million dollar salary intact. Is John Thane better off today than he was four years ago? He sure isn’t any worse off.  Does he resent the thought of ending the Bush Era tax cuts? Does he resent his tax dollars going to help out the people he and his pals left destitute and ruined? Beats me. He doesn’t answer my email.

Is Grover Norquist better off today than he was four years ago?  Are the Koch brothers? Is Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelson?  Of course they are, along with the rest of their Wall Street cronies. The stock market is higher now than at any time in history. If you’re rich, it’s been a damned good four years.  Is Mitt Romney better off today than he was four years ago?  Yes, he most certainly is – that’s one of the reasons he’d prefer you not see his tax returns.  Is Paul Ryan better off?   Do these millionaires and billionaires resent paying taxes and helping out the less fortunate? You don’t have to ask them, their opinions are a matter of public record.

Is Chuck Norris better off today than he was four years ago?  He’s in one of the biggest movies of the summer, one of the biggest movies he’s ever starred in, for one of the biggest paychecks. I’d say he’s doing OK.  How about Clint Eastwood? Is Clint better off now than he was four years ago? He’s got a brand new movie too. Is John Cusack better off despite his vitriolic hatred of Barack Obama? Is Jon Voight better off? Is Ted Nugent? Hank Williams Jr? Yes, they all are. Though to be truthful, none of these celebrities were doing particularly badly four years ago either. They’ve also made their opinions well known. They love to make movies about the working man, they love to sing the songs about the poor and unfortunate and the downtrodden, and they don’t mind taking your money - but they’re not real happy about giving any of it back to help the people they portray (with maybe the exception of Cusack, he’s mostly pissed that Obama isn’t liberal enough).

How about Rush Limbaugh?  Is Rush Limbaugh better off today than he was four years ago? Barack Obama is the best damned thing that ever happened to Rush Limbaugh.  Obama made Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck millionaires many times over. If the two of them had any sense, they’d invest in their future by sending the Obama Reelection Campaign a cool million each. Is Anne Coulter better off now than she was four years ago? Hell that cadaverous bitch can’t sell her bilious books fast enough. Is Michael Savage better off? Do me a favor, point to one, one, conservative pundit screaming about doom and gloom and socialism (also, Nazis) that isn’t better off today than they were four years ago.

How about the Professional Christians? Are they better off? Billy Graham? Pat Robertson? Rick Warren? James Dobson? Business is booming at Evangelical Inc. Couldn’t be better. Frankly I’m trying to figure what all the complaining is about.

Is Sarah Palin better off than she was four years ago?  She was a nobody, a hick chick from the sticks of nowhere Wasilla (trust me on this, I live here). The unknown big haired governor of a remote bumfuck state (trust me on this, I live here). Four years ago, nobody, including about three quarters of Alaskans, had ever even heard of Sarah Palin. In the last four years she quit her job – she had the actual luxury of quitting her job – at the apex of the financial crisis, she went from being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to being an unemployed multi-millionaire.  She’s got hundreds of thousands of enraptured fans hanging glassy-eyed on her every word. When she’s not touring the country in her Juggernaut Of Patriotic American Freedom, she flies from show to show on a chartered jet and has a nanny to wipe the drool off little Trig’s chin.  She lives a charmed life, everything she touches turns to gold, she could sell jars of her own feces on eBay for piles of cash. Hell even her Wasilla Valley Trash hairdresser got a TV show out of it.  Her kid came home from Afghanistan with nary a scratch or bad dreams and married the prom queen.  She’s a celebrity wherever she goes. She never has to work again, ever, if she doesn’t want to.  Seriously, what in the pluperfect hell does this woman have to complain about? But complain she does, endlessly, snidely, bitterly. She never stops harping about how goddamned bad she’s got it and how it’s all Obama’s fault.

Ironic isn’t it?

The folks who cry the loudest, the ones that complain most bitterly, are the very people who – if they were honest – would have to answer the question “are you better off than you were four years ago?” with a resounding “Yes! Hell, yes!”

The problem is, for them, they’re just not better off enough.

How about you? Are you better off?

Am I better off? Me personally? Two years ago my wife lost her high paying job. She was laid off due in some small regard to the crappy economy, but mostly because shady business decisions by her global employer led to a legal and financial catastrophe. The folks who made those decisions, a small cadre of directors far up in the company hierarchy, did so because they kept asking themselves “Am I better off” instead of “Is the company better off?” or “Are my employees better off?” or “Are the hundreds of thousands of people who depend on us better off?” Sound familiar? My wife, despite being highly recommended and highly skilled and holding a Masters Degree in her field, was unemployed for a bit more than a year. Fortunately we own more of our house than the bank does, all of our vehicles are paid off, we don’t carry much debt, and we plan for disaster – those things saved us. But we have a teenager and many pets and a big house and let me tell you something, my electronic friends, Alaska is an expensive place to live.  Despite significantly cutting back in every area, we burned through our savings and college money and various other resources and things began to look fairly grim. My wife worked at finding work every single day, every single day, fourteen to eighteen hours a day, for more than a year. She approached finding a job as a job. And eventually she found a new employer, one that pays significantly more than she made before, one that’s significantly closer to home, and one provides an actual path to promotion and advancement and growth – unlike the old job. I, on the other hand, while still getting used to being a civilian, went from being a government civilian employee to being a contract consultant and I took a significant pay cut doing it. It wasn’t by choice, but I was grateful to have the work. And damned grateful to have my military retirement and especially my medical benefits – because if not for that, my family would have been without healthcare or dental. Got kids? That’s a goddamned scary fucking thing, the prospect of going without healthcare coverage.

So, am I better off now?

I know I am, and I think I’ll get better.

It’s going to be a while before we can fully recover the assets we burned through in the last year. But my wife and I are doing well enough that we don’t resent paying our taxes and helping others who are less fortunate.  We don’t resent it because we’re Americans, because we’re citizens of the world, and we think it’s the right thing to do. We don’t resent it because we got help from the government when we needed it. So did  our families, once upon a time. So did a hell of a lot of people, who seem to have conveniently forgotten it.

That’s what civilization is for.

Are we better off? As a people, as a nation, as the world?  In a word, yes.  Not great, not where we’d all like to be, but better. 

There’s still war, and violence, and terrorism.  Are we better off in that regard? I think that question is best answered with the question asked by Senator John Kerry at the recent Democratic National Convention, “Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off than he was four years ago.”  Are we there yet? No, not if the recent events in Libya and Egypt and Yemen are any indicator. Will we ever be there? Probably not. Are we better off than we were four years ago? Yes we are. Ask all the troops that aren’t dying in Iraq right now.

There’s still poverty and hunger. There’s still too few jobs and the economy is still not strong enough. But it’s getting better. It’s getting better every day.  Is it better for everybody? No. Certainly not. And it would be foolish and crass to say otherwise. It’s still damned hard for a lot of folks. And there is still a long, hard way to go.

But it isn’t going to get better if everybody keeps focusing only on themselves.

And it for damned sure won’t ever get better for you, personally, if your answer to the question depends on your political party.

Now, more than ever, we need to remember the words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

We need to stop asking if you’re better off, am I better off, and start asking what we can do to make things better.

For all of us.

Together.

Mitt Romney and War By Other Means

"When our grounds are being attacked and being breached, the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation."

The first response of the United States must be outrage.

Yes, outrage!

That’s what we need, some good old fashioned American outrage.

Because really, we haven’t spent enough time in the last ten years paying the tab on decisions that were made in the throes of outrage, right?

Our first response should be outrage.

That was wannabe Decider In Chief, Mitt Romney, in response to a statement issued by the United States Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, as Muslim extremists prepared to storm the consulate grounds.

And it’s not enough that the nation should be outraged, Mitt himself is personally outraged:

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Say what?

President Obama sympathized with who now?

I’ve read through the President’s public statement regarding the attack last night on American embassies in Egypt and Libya.  I’ve read through them twice.  I watched the videos. Hell, I even watched Fox News, because I figured if anybody would have tape of Obama palling around with terrorists, it would be them.

Nowhere, no Goddamned where, did I see President Obama express anything even vaguely resembling sympathy with those who waged the attacks – unless Mittens was implying that the family of US Ambassador to Libya, the late J. Christopher Stevens, and the families and friends of the other three slain State Department employees were in fact Muslim extremists who assaulted the embassies in Egypt and Libya.  See, because those were the only people President Obama expressed sympathy for.  

What Obama actually said was:

“I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Right now, the American people have the families of those we lost in our thoughts and prayers. They exemplified America’s commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives. I have directed my Administration to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe. While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants. On a personal note, Chris was a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States. Throughout the Libyan revolution, he selflessly served our country and the Libyan people at our mission in Benghazi. As Ambassador in Tripoli, he has supported Libya’s transition to democracy. His legacy will endure wherever human beings reach for liberty and justice. I am profoundly grateful for his service to my Administration, and deeply saddened by this loss. The brave Americans we lost represent the extraordinary service and sacrifices that our civilians make every day around the globe. As we stand united with their families, let us now redouble our own efforts to carry their work forward.”

Today, the President pledged to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice.

"We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done."

Given Obama’s track record, justice will very likely be done indeed.

Justice is likely to fall on the attackers from the sky, delivered via drone or at the hand of US Special Forces – at which point, of course, Conservatives will have some other complaint about how Obama isn’t focused on the economy or some such thing. Also, Nazis.

Looking at this event in the cold light of a rainy Alaskan afternoon, this is what see I immediately:

Barack Obama condemned the attacks, he spoke against violence and expressed sadness for the dead and sympathy for their families and friends, he told us what he was doing to protect our people in similar situations around the globe, and he promised us justice.  About what you would expect from your President in such a situation.

Mitt Romney attacked his own government and his fellow Americans.

The President was coldly angry, but determined in his public response to prevent further bloodshed, further violence.

Mitt was outraged.

The President’s concern was for the dead, for their families, for people.

Romney’s concern was that somebody touched our stuff.

Obama responded like a president.

Romney acted like a businessman.

Do the math for yourself.

"When our grounds are being attacked and being breached, the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation."

Outrage.

As a first response.

Outrage must be our first response. Outrage at  the breach of sovereignty of our nation.

Our first response shouldn’t be measured action to ensure the safety of our people, both in the midst of the unfolding violence and elsewhere in the world – even if that means holding our tongue.  No.

Our first response shouldn’t be to ascertain ground truth before acting on impulse or making rash statements or beating our sword against our shield – or wading into yet another ill-considered military action.  No, certainly not that.

Our first response shouldn’t be to avoid putting more of our people at immediate risk by inflaming tempers and hatred elsewhere in the Middle East.

Our first response shouldn’t be a call for calm, for reason, for an end to the violence, or to make an appeal to common ideals. No, not that either.

Our first response shouldn’t be to stand together as Americans. Oh fuck no, wouldn’t want that.

No, no.

Step 1: Outrage! Outrage, by God! Outrage, because that’s what Angry Jesus would do! Outrage!

Step 2: Blame our fellow countrymen.

And then what?

Based on the recently adopted GOP platform and past performance by Republican administrations I suspect Step 3 is probably “bomb some random brown people.”  Then a year or so later realize that we killed the wrong people, but stubbornly pretend that they had it coming anyway, because, well, you know, brown people. Fuck ‘em.

This morning Mitt Romney said America should set the example:

“In the face of this violence, American cannot shrink from the responsibility to lead. American leadership is necessary to ensure that events in the region don’t spin out of control. We cannot hesitate to use our influence in the region to support those who share our values and our interests.”

How, exactly, leading with outrage as your first response keeps things from “spinning out of control” is beyond me.  But that’s far from the only thing Romney has said regarding this matter that perplexes me.  Romney was upset that the embassy had issued, apparently without authorization from the White House, the following statement:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

The attacks, at least the one in Cairo, were apparently sparked by a YouTube video.  The video allegedly was uploaded by an “Israeli-American” living in California. The man is supposedly a real estate developer and filmmaker named Sam Bacile, though it seems that both the name and alleged professions are fake. The uploader may not even be in north America at all.  The film portrays an, extremely, unflattering depiction of the prophet Muhammad and Islam, and is obviously designed to inflame Muslim extremists and goad them into action against the United States.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The filmmaker has apparently gone into hiding. Why am I not surprised?

Now, here in America, that kind of assholery is permitted under the First Amendment.  In America we have the right to freedom of speech, and freedom from having to be responsible for the consequences of what we say. Somebody else will do it for you, suffer the consequences that is.  You make a film or burn somebody’s holy book and generally act like an asshole, and somebody else, a soldier or a diplomat or even just some random American who happens to be in the wrong place, why they’ll be happy to step up and take responsibility for your freedom of speech.  And you? Well you can hide behind your rights and your internet anonymity and your God and bask in your patriotism.  Good on you.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Ironic that the very people who scream loudest and demand that the “poor” and the “socialists” and the “liberals” and the “parasites” start taking responsibility for their lives are the very same florid patriots who never seem to take responsibility for their own actions, for their own words, for the consequences of their hatred and bigotry. They’ll condemn the violence inspired by the Occupy movement, but defend the violence inspired by Right To Lifers or some hateful bigot on Talk Radio.  One has to wonder if Romney and his followers would be so quick to defend freedom of speech if that YouTube video depicted Jesus gay marrying Brigham Young.

Funny how these patriots, these Great Americans, always hide behind anonymous uploads and anonymous comments on blogs like this one.

Funny how a conservative like Romney would condemn his fellow Americans under attack in the Cairo embassy for exercising their right to speak freely in an attempt to save lives and quell rising violence, but defend an anonymous bigot’s right to free speech when he posts a film that may have gotten Americans killed.

In an interview this morning Romney outlined the first step in his, as yet, mysterious foreign policy:

First, confidence in our cause, a recognition that the principles America was based upon are [not] something we shrink from or apologize for. That we stand for that principles.

Christ, it’s like the second coming of Word Salad Sally.

What principles are those again? What principles was Mitt Romney talking about? Up there, above, when he said, “We cannot hesitate to use our influence in the region to support those who share our values and our interests.”

Bigotry? Hatred? Attacks on other peoples’ religions?  The bile in the video that supposedly sparked this firestorm? Are those the founding principles of America Mitt was talking about?

Excuse me while I go consult my copy of the Federalist Papers. 

"I think it's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values."

I’m pretty good with the English language. I score extremely high in reading comprehension.  I have a very large vocabulary.  I spent most of my life as a military Cryptologist and an Intelligence officer, I’ve had some very specific and extensive training and more than twenty years experience in ferreting out meaning from all forms of communication. I’ve read that offending statement, the one from the Cairo embassy, over and over.

I just don’t see where the embassy, or President Obama for that matter, was apologizing for anything. 

The statement was issued before the attack began, while there still might be time to de-escalate the situation, while there still might be time to prevent violence and bloodshed, while there still might be time for reason and not mindless outrage to prevail.

Look at the message again:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Go over it line by line.

First, we’re the embassy. The embassy, not the United States, not the President. The embassy you are thinking about attacking. Embassy. First line, you can’t miss it. We condemn bigots, we understand why you’re pissed off, really we do. And we don’t agree with those who would deliberately give insult to Muslims, i.e. the religion of our host nation and the region by which we are surrounded right now.  On this of all days, we Americans know only too well what the end results of bigotry and intolerance and violence are. We honor our own, those who fought the terrorists and oppressive regimes, something you Egyptians are familiar with yourselves – this is yet another thing we have in common.  Respect for religion and speech is a cornerstone of American democracy, and by implication your fledgling democracy too. We firmly reject those who would abuse such freedoms.

Even if I squint my eyes and put on my Genuine George Dubya Bush rubber mask, that statement still looks exactly like what it is: an attempt by US State Department personnel to defuse a bad situation.   To be diplomatic.  Before they were overrun.

It looks exactly like what it is, the embassy doing its job with the only tools it had, diplomacy, words, information.

You better believe that the people besieged in those embassies, the folks who issued that statement, were very, very, very well versed in previous attacks on US facilities. I know that for a fact, I’ve had similar training and for similar reasons.  And I will bet you anything you’d like that they were thinking of only one thing: Iran.  Iran and the Iranian Hostage Crisis, when revolutionary religious extremists stormed our embassy and took our people hostage and held the United States at gunpoint for more than a year.

The embassy’s job wasn’t to make the situation worse.

Their job isn’t to get America into another war.

Their job isn’t to get America mired in another diplomatic nightmare.

The first job of diplomacy is to prevent war, to avoid conflict and violence, to preserve civilization.

They’re diplomats, not Marines.

And even Jarheads know better - especially when on foreign soil in an unstable land, you better believe they know it.  Their job, and the job of the diplomats, is to prevent violence. 

You’d think somebody who wants to manage US Foreign policy would understand that.

Frankly, I’d like to see Mitt Romney under siege. I’d like to see him put his millions where his mouth is.  I’d like to see him, for once, suffer the consequences of his speech. I’d like to see his policy of outrage in action when facing a crowd of crazed religious extremists – and when I say “crazed religious extremists” I’m not talking about the Church of Latter Day Saints storming across the California border en mass waving their checkbooks and hell bent on burning down gay marriage, though I suppose that works too.

Now, I’m not particularly hard pressed to guess what an officially authorized Romney Administration message to the attackers would be.

But while Come at me, Bro! makes a funny de-motivational poster, as foreign policy it’s juvenile and idiotic and counterproductive. 

These people have spent their entire lives immersed in violence, in war, in death, and blood, and torture.  They just overthrew an oppressive regime that had no reticence whatsoever about killing people. Do you really think that America, Fuck Yah! intimidates these people? Really?

They fought tanks with sticks for fuck’s sake.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly surprising about Romney’s bluster today, given where he gets his foreign policy advice. Romney campaign foreign policy adviser Rich Williamson told Foreign Policy magazine that the attacks were related to Obama’s “failure to be an effective leader for U.S. interests in the Middle East.” Go on, tell me how that’s different from Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s similar assertion that America invited 9-11 though its foreign policy.  No really, please explain the difference to me, because I’m not seeing it.

Conservatives have a self esteem problem.

They’re terrified of apologies. They’re so damned afraid on having to admit a mistake, of having to apologize, of appearing weak or unmanly – despite the very specific admonishment of their avowed lord and savior to turn the other cheek and to act in humility – that they see apologies where none were ever given. 

Sort of like how a lot of them call other people queer so nobody will suspect them of being gay themselves, but I digress.

Today is a perfect example, Mitt Romney knows that his response was wrong. He knows his attempt to make this terrible event into just another campaign sound-bite is crass and beneath anybody, anybody, who would aspire to the Oval Office. He knows it. Look at his eyes, read his words and watch him keep shifting the goal posts and tell me that he doesn’t damned well know that his comment last night was wrong.

Both conservatives and liberals alike have condemned him for it. 

But he is too insecure, too immature, too afraid, too filled with self doubt and little man syndrome to admit it. 

Instead, like a petulant child, he’s doubling down, feet spread, bottom lip out, arms akimbo.

And like a child, he’s outraged.

 

Come November, Americans have a choice. 

They can chose a guy who’s outraged over something that never happened, who wants you to be outraged over an apology that never happened, and who would  allow himself to be goaded into war over the “rights” of an anonymous troll (who might not even be an American) in the guise of shallow patriotism.

Or they can chose the guy who behaves like an actual statesman.

For me, the choice is clear.

Scream and Shout!

When in danger, when in doubt,
run in circles, scream and shout
                        - Naval adage

 

Chuck Norris isn't scared of anybody.

Anybody.

Well, OK, almost anybody.

There appears to be one exception.

There is one person that just plain frightens the jujitsu out of old Chuck.

What could possibly terrify Chuck Norris?

After all he’s a tough dude. A force of nature is Chuck Norris, right?

Chuck Norris is the guy who has a grizzly bear rug in his living room, the bear isn’t dead, it’s just afraid to move. Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door, he’s the reason Waldo is in hiding, he created the giraffe by kicking a horse in the chin, he can make fire by rubbing two ice cubes together, and he can cut through a hot knife with a stick of butter.

Death once had a near-Chuck experience.

You know what they say, “Behind Chuck Norris' beard is another fist.”

But what you may not know is that behind Chuck's chin hammer, and right under that road-killed Pomeranian we're all supposed to believe is his actual manly Kung Fu hair, is a paranoid full-frontal bug-eyed, booger-eating, batshit-crazy wackaloon.

And that wackaloon is scared shitless.

What scares Chuck Norris? 

Who turns Chuck’s sinewy bowels to water and makes his muscular lower lip tremble and causes him to lay awake at night clutching the sheet over his head in the dark peeking out at the closet door?

I’ll give you a hint.

He’s tall and black and lives in the White House.

Back in January, Norris wrote an OpEd in World Net Daily (because really, where else, right?) in which he proclaimed "civilization is on the brink."

Oh noes!

Not the brink!

What will we do? What will we do?

Civilization is on the brink! The Brink!

If only there was a bearded hero to save us! Somebody who could karate chop the National Debit and roundhouse kick social issues back into the Stone Age with the other Neanderthals – all the while glaring ferociously and growling simpleminded patriotic platitudes. If only there was a guy like that. Why he’d kill the Taliban and introduce the Muslims to God personally. He’d scare gays straight and perform traditional marriages himself. He’d kick the sick right out of people so they wouldn’t even need healthcare, socialized or otherwise. He’d stop gang violence with a single raised hairy eyebrow and kill Nazi Communists with just a stern look. Yeah, if only there was a guy like that.

Despite eight months of sustained economic growth since his dire warning, this last Labor Day weekend Chuck Norris doubled down.  He and his wife, Gena, released a YouTube video:

 

Apparently if Barack Obama wins reelection, it will will usher in a “thousand years of darkness.”

A thousand years of darkness. 

A thousand years.

Of darkness.

Ten centuries. Of darkness.

A whole millennium. Of inky black darkness.

If Mitt Romney doesn’t win, folks, it’s one thousand years of darkness.

I suppose I should probably pick up a couple packs of extra flashlight batteries on the way home from the voting booth, just in case.

It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Chuck Norris and the rest of these good God fearing patriots, people who loudly claim to be better Americans than all the rest of us combined and then some, how these people seem to have so little faith in the United States. So little faith in the democracy they profess to love above all else.  Norris and the rest of the conservative talking heads, hell, the whole goddamned Republican party, seem to think that the men who designed this country, who wrote the Constitution and formed the Union, those folks whom they revere as god-like, infallible, without flaw or weakness and who they quote endlessly … were somehow so damned stupid and short sighted that they designed a system that could be destroyed by a single man in an afternoon. 

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why these people are so gung ho to defend a system that they demonstrate so little faith in.

Of course, even they – crazy as they are – know that our system of government prevents any single ordinary human being from destroying the United States. Or taking over. That’s why people like Chuck Norris, a man supposedly not scared by any ordinary man, can’t let Barack Obama be ordinary. Obama has to be the Anti-Christ, Satan, the Devil, a robot alien reptile in a rubber human suit, a slinking communist, a scheming Muslim, a Kenyan, the Magic Negro.  He can’t just be a guy they disagree with, he has to be bigger than that.

Because if he’s not, how then do you scare everybody else into voting against him?

The video appears to have been shot in the Norris home gym.  I have to wonder if every room in the Norris Mansion flies the American flag, or just in the Dojo.

I also wonder if the rank odor of unwashed jock straps combined with too much discount toupee glue, not to mention repeated blows to the frontal lobes, hasn’t left Chuck a bit addlepated.

If you can’t bring yourself to actually watch the video, the Norrises (Norrisi?) spend about two minutes quoting Edmund Burke and Ronald Reagan out of context and basically manage to come across looking like exactly what they are – a pair of frightened prototypical TEA Party loons who’ve spent far too much time in a low oxygen environment killing brain cells with copious amounts of conservative talk radio.

Chuck Norris isn't scared of anybody.

Except for Barack Obama.

"Our great country and freedom are under attack. We are at a tipping point and quite possibly our country as we know it could be lost forever if we don't change the course our country is headed."

Could possibly maybe sort of. There’s that biblical certainty Evangelicals are so well known for right there. Oh yes, I’m frightened now.

Mrs. Chin-Fist chimed in with a dire warning of her own:

"We will preserve for our children this last best hope for man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into one thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

She was paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s iconic speech, A Time for Choosing, in which he endorsed Barry Goldwater for president in 1964.  Back then Reagan was just another has-been actor with artificially enhanced hair, sort of like somebody else we could name. Just as a point of order, in that speech Reagan warned that we were about to take the last step into a thousand years of inky black darkness, not the first.  Now, far be it from me to question paranoid conservative mental acuity, but if America took the last step in 1964 I’m not quite sure how we take the first step in 2012 – but then creationism math has never been my strong suite.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan assured Goldwater. 

Turns out Reagan was wrong. Wrong about the darkness. Wrong about the rendezvous. Wrong about destiny.

And Reagan didn't win the election for Barry Goldwater either, despite warning everybody that the world would literally end if they didn’t vote Republican. 

It didn’t work for Reagan, but, hell, maybe Chuck Norris can scare Americans into voting Republican this time around.

Say, did anybody else notice that conservatives were once sweet on the name Barry? No? Just me then. Right.

So anyway, as I was sa… wait, what?

Hold the hell on here. Just hold on. Back the Kung Pow Chicken up. Say that again, Gena. Willard Romney is the last best hope for man on earth?

Romney is mankind’s only hope? Mitt Romney?

Mankind’s only hope is nicknamed Mitt?

OK, she didn’t actually say “Mitt Romney” but unless Wookie Jesus is in the running, who the hell else could she possibly mean?

Mitt Romney is the last best hope for man?

You’re kidding me, right? You’re married to Chuck Fucking Norris, and Mitt Romney is your last best hope?

It’s Mitt Romney in IMAX 3D! The Last Best Hope For Mankind On Earth. Dant dant Daaaah! Costarring Chuck Chin-Fist Norris and Seamus the Wonder Mutt. They did all that they could. For America! For the children. For the children’s children. And the children’s children’s children. And some other kids. And Wall Street. In theaters this November! Dant Dant Daaaaaaaah! Also, Kung Fu.

Gena Norris also warns that America has a "rendezvous with destiny.”

Destiny again.

Really? A thousand years of soul destroying darkness isn’t enough?

It isn’t enough that the savior’s name is Mittens?

No, we have to rendezvous with destiny too? And really what’s that destiny going to be? Oceans rise! Mountains burn! And a giant comet streaks towards earth! It’s the size of Rush Limbaugh, Mr. President! Only Walker, Texas Ranger and a plucky band of out of work oil rig workers who didn’t graduate high school but are really, really good at boozing and making wisecracks, can save the day! Also, Wookie Jesus. And Nazis – because, really, there are always Nazis, right?

They could probably get Hank Williams Jr. to do the soundtrack.

“We’ve got a Muslim for a President who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him!”

That was Hank last Sunday at the Texas Stockyard Music Festival.  He’s said stuff like this before, this time he added in gay farmers. Needless to say, Hank was cheered by the crowd – it was Texas after all.  Last year he got himself into some hot water by comparing President Obama to Hitler – because, really, Obama wanted to give everybody affordable healthcare, Hitler gassed six million Jews and blew up Europe. The similarity is striking, right?

President Obama, of course, isn’t actually a Muslim, and he isn’t actually Adolf Hitler – but then Hank Williams Jr. isn’t actually a cowboy either so I suppose it all works out in the end.  Personally, at this point I think Hank and Ted Nugent should probably get gay-married, but I understand that’s not legal in Texas.

Yet.

Methinks, somebody, and I’m not saying who, has watched about one too many Kung Fu movies.

 

They say that Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep, he waits.

He might want to stop waiting and take a nap because people who don’t sleep go psychotic.

And frankly, at this point? It looks like Clint Eastwood might be the sanest guy in the room.

The Good Old Days

A version of this post appeared here on Stonekettle Station on Labor Day, 2011. I’ve made some additions and updates to the text, but for the most part I see little to change on Labor Day 2012.

Lately certain folks keep asking, “are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Right question, wrong timespan. 

The question, my electronic friends, is not “are you better off than you were four years ago?”  The question is, are we better off now than we were a hundred years ago? The same folks who pose the first query seem to  say the answer to the second one is no, and they yearn for the good old days of centuries past.

I think they’re wrong.  Utterly wrong.

//Jim

---

 

You ever stop to wonder what your life would be like if it was a hundred years ago?

Imagine.

Imagine what it was like to be your great grand parents.

As the second decade of the 20th Century dawned, the United States was in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution.

It was a time of wonder and ever advancing technology. It started in the 1860’s and would last right up until the beginning of World War I. It began with steel, the Bessemer process to be specific, a cheap and easy way to mass produce strong and reasonably lightweight metals. Strong lightweight steel was the skeleton of the modern age, the core of everything from the new cars to steamships and oil rigs to utensils and lunchboxes, to the machines that manufactured the future, to the finest handgun ever made – Colt’s model 1911, named for its year of first issue and still in production a century later. In 1911 a tall skinny fellow by the name of Eugene Ely landed Curtiss Aircraft Company’s #2 Pusher on the deck of USS Pennsylvania and took off again. Thus was born naval aviation, a single small moment in time that would change the very way wars were fought – and thus change everything else too. Many of the pilots who, a few years later, would fly over the battlefields of WWI carried Colt’s Model 1911. A year later, in 1912, Curtiss was building the first military flying boats for which the company would become famous. That same year Zeppelins were first used in military operations in Europe, while in the United States a fixed wing aircraft made the first transcontinental flight across North America – both events heralded the dawn of long range aviation. These small, seemingly insignificant, events were the harbingers of ever advancing changes that would reach culmination on December 7th, 1941 and profoundly change the entire world forever.

In 1912, If you were well off, you could buy a Cadillac with an electric starter, everybody else risked injury and even sometimes death with a hand-crank. And despite the fact that there were still plenty of horses on the roads of America, the car had become so ubiquitous that states began following Michigan’s example and started painting lines down the middle of their roads. Electricity itself was no longer a novelty. Though many factories were still powered by steam, electricity was becoming increasingly common. The first modern public elevator began operation in London, England, and soon became common everywhere – leading directly to the modern city skyline.

In 1912, America was booming. Her factories were churning out new products at a record pace. The western frontier had all but disappeared – oh, there were still a few bandits and cattle rustlers out there, but the wild lawless west was long gone. The gold rushes, the boom towns and gun fights were long over. Hell, by 1912 Wyatt Earp was living in Los Angeles working as a “trouble-shooter” for the city police department. He’d fought his last armed battle two years before and would soon move to Hollywood as a consultant for the new movie industry. In 1912 the earth and moon were as close together in their respective orbits as they would be until the 21st Century. So was the Earth and Mars –  and the alignment drove Edgar Rice Burroughs to pen the first in a series of novels and short stories that would become the John Carter of Mars books and inspire millions for many generations, including me. In 1912, explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole, only to discover Roald Amundsen had beaten him by a month – Scott wasn’t a lucky man, he and his men would die on the trek back to the coast of Antarctica. Scott and his men weren’t the only unlucky souls that year, or the only ones to die by freezing, on April 2nd, the great ocean liner RMS Titanic set sail from Queenstown, Ireland bound for New York on her maiden voyage, she would never arrive.

In 1912 the Progressive Party, commonly called the Bull Moose Party, nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt as their party’s candidate. Roosevelt lost to Woodrow Wilson and how different the world might be today had it been otherwise.

In 1912 US Marines invaded Cuba for the third time, then Honduras, and two months later Nicaragua – where they’d be until 1925.

And lost in all the chaos and clamor of the early 20th century a small thing happened, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers in a single factory walked out on strike when the mill owners decided to lower wages after a new law shortening the work week went into effect. It wasn’t long before the strike spread to every mill in the city and more than twenty thousand workers, mostly immigrants and women, refused to return to the factories until fair wages were restored. The work stoppage lasted more than two months and became known as the “Bread and Roses” strike. Things turned ugly. There were riots and murder. There was violence on both sides. Eventually martial law was declared. In the end Massachusetts passed the first minimum wage laws in the United States and the workers returned to their factories triumphant.

The gains made by the laborers in Lawrence were short lived however.

See, those churning factories were horrible places. In 1912, most were still powered by a massive central steam engine which drove an enormous flywheel, which in turn powered shafts and belts and pulleys, which finally powered the machines. And though, as noted above, electricity was becoming increasingly common, most of those factories were still poorly lit simply by the light coming in through skylights and banks of single pane glazed windows. Often boiling hellholes in the summer and fetid dungeons in the winter – both air conditioning and central heating were still decades away – the buildings were filled with smoke and poisonous fumes from the various manufacturing processes, lead vapor, heavy metals, acids, chlorine, bleaches, all were common. Normal working hours were from dawn to dusk, typically anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day, sixty and seventy hours per week for wages that would barely pay the rent and put food on a factory worker’s table.

Child labor was common, especially in the textile industry, though in some states there were supposed to be laws regulating it. The kids toiled right alongside their parents. The children typically worked the same hours as adults, but for a quarter, or less, of the pay. Pictures of the time show children working barefoot among the machines, ragged sleeves flapping near the flying belts and spinning pulleys. Whole families hired out to the factories, the men doing the heavy labor, the women and children doing the more delicate tasks. Towns sprang up around the mills, often controlled by the factory owners. Company towns, where workers very often became little more than indentured servants. Life in a company town was often better than the alternative on the streets of places like Hell’s Kitchen or out in the fields of the South. Company towns gave workers a higher standard of living than they would otherwise be able to afford. But the running joke was that while your soul might belong to God, your ass belonged to the company. Mill towns and mining towns and factory towns and logging towns were common across America, places where the company owned everything from your house to your job to the church you prayed in to the store you bought your food from. And prices were whatever made the company the most profit and in many places there were laws that prevented you from renting or buying outside the company town. The company might pay you a decent wage for the time, but they got a lot of it back too. Get crosswise of the company and you lost it all. Get injured on the job and could no longer work, and you lost it all. Get sick, and you could lose it all. Get killed, and your family was out on the street. There was no workman’s comp. No insurance. No retirement but what you managed to save – and since you probably owed a significant debt to the company store, your savings were unlikely to go very far.

Of course, you could always take a pass on factory work and return to the land. In 1912, prior to the world wars that would change the very fabric and makeup of the country, millions of Americans were farmers. Farming was hard backbreaking work (it still is, just in a different way) – so hard that seventy hours a week in a smoke filled factory with a high probability of getting maimed or killed looked pretty good in comparison. Most of those farmers, especially in the South, didn’t own their fields. They were sharecroppers, living in conditions little better than slavery or the serfdom of the Dark Ages. Of the small farmers who did own their own land or rather owed the bank for their own land, more than half lived in abject poverty. In the coming decade, the decade of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most would lose everything.

Most of America was powered by coal in those days and if there was anything that would make life in a factory town or in the sweltering fields look good – it was working in a West Virginia coal mining town. It was a race to see what would kill you first, explosion, cave-in, or the black lung. And just like in the fields and factories, children worked alongside their parents – if they had parents, orphanages were also common. And orphan labor was even cheaper than the average child, both in life and in pay. Renting out orphan labor was a good gig, if you could get it.

You could always become a merchant seaman, though life at sea was damned rough. You could move west and become a logger, though you’d probably live longer in the mines of West Virginia. You could still be a cowboy, or a cop, or carpenter none which paid worth a good Goddamn and had the added benefit of a short lifespan.

Since people got sick and injured a lot, and most couldn’t afford even rudimentary medical care, many turned to patent medicines. The pharmaceutical industry was only loosely regulated, but by 1912 there were some few laws in a handful of states regulating the more outrageous claims for the various elixirs. The big medicine shows were gone, but in 1911 there were still plenty of drug store shelves stocked with hundreds of varieties of patent medicines. Some were mostly benign – like Coca-Cola – and some were downright toxic – like Radithor, made from water and radium. As late as 1917, The Rattlesnake King, Clark Stanley, was still making Stanley’s Snake Oil, a worthless mixture of mineral oil, turpentine, and red pepper, and fleecing sick people out of their money and making them yet sicker (hell, as late as the 1960’s TV’s commercials touted the benefits of smoking for sore throats. And, as late as 1970 there were still X-ray foot measuring devices in use in a handful of shoe stores across America).

In 1912, only a few states mandated that your kids attend school, and then only though elementary. In the South segregation and Jim Crow Laws were in full force and civil rights were decades away. Lynching was common. On the other hand, women could actually vote in exactly five states, well, six if you included California which grudgingly acknowledged in November that females might be citizens too despite their unfortunate plumbing.

In 1912, maybe three out of ten Americans could ever expect to own a home, most would pay a landlord their whole lives. Few had any rights in those relationships either, you paid the owner and you lived with what you got or you got thrown out. Period.

In 1912, a lot of Americans were hungry. More than fifty percent of seniors lived in poverty, but then the average lifespan was only about fifty-five, maybe sixty if you hadn’t been breathing coal dust or lead vapor all you life. Few of those seniors had pensions, most lived on the charity of their families – if they were lucky enough to have families. Sanatoriums were a common place for the aged and infirm to spend their brief final years.

In 1912, if you had ten kids, you might expect six of them to survive to adulthood. If you were lucky. Polio, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, whooping cough, hard labor in the mines and factories and fields, lack of social safety nets, lack of proper nutrition, lead paint, food poisoning, poverty, orphaned by parents killed by the same, would probably claim at least four of those kids. Likely more.

Funny isn’t it? How people from that generation always wax nostalgic for The Good Old Days

And then they immediately proceed to tell you why life was so much harder and more miserable back then.

The simple truth of the matter is nowadays, even in this time of economic downturn, we Americans live a pretty damned good life.

And we live that good life because since the time of our great grand parents we’ve put systems and laws and regulations in place to improve life for all of us. Programs like Social Security and Medicare have a direct and measurable affect on how long we live, and how well. Regulations governing working conditions and workplace safety have a direct and measurable affect on the probability that we’ll survive to retirement. Laws that prevent the rich from owning a whole town, or abusing workers, or turning them into indentured servants, or hiring children at pauper’s wages to maintain the machines in their bare feet, have directly benefitted all but the most greedy few.

The American dream isn’t dead, far from it.

I’ve been to countries where dreams have died, America is far, far, far removed those hellish places.

It is a measure of just how far we’ve come, and just how big an impact that those laws, regulations, and social safety programs have had that those who directly benefit from those very same laws, regulations, and programs can complain with full bellies just how terrible they have it.

Things like Social Security, Medicare, Workman’s Compensation Insurance, The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance, child labor laws, federal minimum wage, occupational health and safety standards, the Environmental Protection Agency, The Centers for Disease Control, The departments of Education and Health, Labor Unions and workers’ rights, and yes, even Welfare, all of these things were created for a reason. For a good reason. For a compelling reason.

These things were created because when you leave it up to the church and charity to fed the hungry and clothe the poor and heal the sick, a hell of a lot of people go hungry and cold and ill. It is really just that brutally simple.

These things were created because when you leave it up to charity and family to take care of old people, a hell of a lot of old people end up dead, or stacked like cordwood in institutions. The moldering remnants of such places are all around us.

These things were created because when you leave it up to people to save for their retirement or a rainy day or for accident and infirmity, a hell of a lot of them don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

These things were put in place because when you leave it solely up to the market to weed out poor products and fake medicine and unsafe machines, they don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to industrialists and share holders to treat their workers with dignity and respect and to pay them a living wage for their hard work, you get indentured servitude.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to devoutly righteous people who go to church every Sunday to decide what is right and proper and moral, you end up with lynchings and segregation and Jim Crow. And that is just a Goddamned fact.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to the factory owners to decide wages and safety and working hours, you get this:

Look at that picture carefully, note how very different that world is from our own in nearly every way.

Ask yourself this: what if those were my children instead of my grand parents?

See, when you leave it solely up to bankers and the factory owners and the industrialists, well Sir, then what happens is they end up owning it all and you get to pay them for the privilege of eating out of their garbage cans.

And right up until very recently that’s exactly how it was.

Fundamentally, government exists to protect the weak from the ruthless, otherwise what damned good is it?

Lately there are a lot of folks who think they want to live in 1912, rather than in 2012.

The question you need to ask yourself, on this of all days, is what century do you want to live in?

Happy Labor Day folks.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

How about that Republican National Convention?

That sure was something wasn’t it?

Who would have guessed Obama could control hurricanes? I mean I knew he had a mean hook shot, but hurricanes? He must have used his Magic Negro Ray, or maybe it was HAARP. 

I particularly enjoyed the part where Anne Romney explained how Mitt is just a regular guy and how they lived on Top Ramen and rotten cabbages that they scavenged from dumpsters behind the IGA. 

I enjoyed Paul Ryan story time. Seriously, who doesn’t like a tall tale or two? Or six?  I admit I was a wee bit disappointed he didn’t make a pit bull and lipstick joke though.

I thought it was darned nice of the Republican National Committee to be so honest and upfront about how the rest of us will be treated once Republicans retake the reins of power – i.e. the part where they changed the rules to declare the Ron Paul delegates null and void.  Nothing tells you more about how your dissenting views will be regarded under a Romney Administration than that little maneuver.  That’s the GOP version of democracy folks, if we don’t like how you vote, you just don’t get a vote.  Now, sit down and shut up or we’ll have your ass waterboarded.

We finally got a look at the new Republican Party platform, 1) Hate Gays. 2) Hate Abortion. 3) Hate Gays. 5) Subjugate Women 5) Hate Gays. 6) Love Jesus. 7) Hate Gays. 8) Guns! 9) Also, Hate Us Some Gays.

And the best part? Clint Eastwood.

Wow.

Just … wow.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything that cringe inducing since the San Diego Padres invited Rosanne Barr to caterwaul her way through the Star Spangled Banner back in 1990.

Surprise guest - that’s what Clint was billed as, the Republican National Convention surprise guest. 

He sure was that, all right.

The sea of fixed smiles and frozen surprise as the camera panned over the audience said it all.

Now look, let’s not get off on the wrong foot here, Clint Eastwood is an American Icon. There’s no doubt about that. 

Clint Eastwood is a lousy singer, a decent musician, a fine actor, a better writer, and a fantastic director. The guy has made terrific movies for fifty years on both sides of the camera. All those spaghetti westerns, The Outlaw Jose Wales, Kelly’s Heroes, Unforgiven. Grand Torino. Even the ones with the orangutan, those were pretty funny. And sure, he’s made some real stinkers, there was Space Cowboys, and that one about the the Russian super fighter plane that could read minds or some such nonsense, and City Heat. And there was the whole Yoko Ono Sondra Locke period starting with that astounding piece of shit, The Gauntlet (Seriously, that pasty wan walleyed woman must be really, really good in the sack. I’m just saying).

Still, I love the man’s work, I do.

But Improv?

Yeah. Not so much.

 

At least that’s what I thought at first. 

 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Eastwood, everybody from Rachel Maddow to every media outlet, pundit and talking head, to Barak Obama himself is shaking their collectives heads in puzzlement.

Even Eastwood’s friend, broadcaster Tom Brokaw, wondered what the hell was going on as Clint wandered off script.  Brokaw quipped that Eastwood had made a career out of being a man of few words, but in his introduction of Mitt Romney, Brokaw tweeted that "As a surprise guest on the Tampa stage he [Eastwood] had too many words (I say as a friend)."

Even Fox News questioned Eastwood’s sanity and the sanity of the people who put him up to it (at least at first, until Fox found themselves on the same side of the fence with rest of the mainstream “liberal” media, and which point they reversed gears and proclaimed Eastwood’s act the single most hilarious bit of impromptu comedy ever performed, but I digress).

Could be they’re all wrong.

The more I look at it, the more Eastwood’s bizarre rambling interview with an empty chair appears to one of his best performances ever.

Could be Clint Eastwood was having one over on the GOP.

No really, think about it.

On the surface it appears to be a sad and poignant example of the disintegration of a once great institution.

But as a parody of the Republican Party itself, of the disintegration of a once great institution, Eastwood’s act was just plain brilliant – even if that’s not what he intended.

Crazy rambling old Blue Hair chasing phantoms only he can see? Good gravy! It’s John McCain!

Hell, Eastwood could have been a stand-in for Mitt Romney. Remember the “Half Time in America?” commercial? Clint Eastwood did a commercial during the Super Bowl last year where he talked about how Detroit, and the auto industry it’s famous for, is making a come back.  Eastwood didn’t exactly say so, but the implication was that Bush and Obama sponsored industry bailouts were responsible.

Predictably, conservatives went apeshit  – declaring Clint Eastwood a big government shill.  

And today? Today he’s back in the fold, the GOP’s golden boy.

Just like Mitt. Flip flop, flip flog.

What Eastwood intended with his act is pretty obvious – Ha ha, Obama is an empty suit, an empty chair, ha ha, get it? Isn’t that funny? Obama’s not real, he’s not an American, ha ha, see? Let’s dress him up and put some words in his mouth and make him caper around around like one of them old timey minstrel shows where the white guy is painted up in blackface and singing in a funny version of Southern Negro.  And then we’ll attack that. Ha ha, clever, right? 

Isn’t that exactly what the GOP has been doing for last four years?

Isn’t that exactly what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachman and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin and the Birthers and the Truthers and the conspiracy theorists and the Evangelicals and Fox News and all the regular old bigots on the street have been doing for the last four years?  Well, isn’t it?

Sure.

Conservatives haven’t been attacking Barack Obama for the last four years, they’ve been screaming at a fantasy, a strawman of their own creation. 

Conservatives haven’t been attacking the actual president, instead they’ve been losing their minds over a supposed Muslim Communist Nazi Socialist Kenyan who wants to give everybody “free” healthcare by destroying capitalism through death panels convened by the New World Order of leftist radicals secretly controlled by Bill Ayers and the Black Panthers through the Federal Reserve and a program of forced vaccinations which causes young girls to become whores and which in turn forces young men to become crazed mass killers which is, of course, a false flag operation by the Obama Administration to usher in the United Nations who will confiscate our guns and herd us all into FEMA Death Camps of Death where everybody will be forced into an unending string of gay marriages and drone launched abortions in order to destroy the free market, give everybody free birth control, and bring about the End Times. Also, Nazis.

Clint Eastwood’s act at the RNC was a brilliant analogy for the republican party itself.

Seriously.

Folks, nothing, and I mean nothing, sums up the current state of the once great party of Lincoln like a raving old white guy yelling at an empty chair while everybody in the audience uncomfortably tries to pretend like nothing’s wrong.

If he could have worked in an orangutan, it would have been perfect.

Whole Lot Of Crazy

 

 

Lady, you're about a half a bubble off plumb, and that's for sure and for certain.
                                                                      Matthew Quigley to Crazy Cora
                                                                      Quigley Down Under

 

Is it just me?

Or do there seem to be a whole lot more crazy people than there used to be?

Now when I say “crazy” I don’t mean weird funny sexy crazy like Laura San Giacomo’s Crazy Cora from Quigley Down Under, a madly scrambled soul who, despite displaying moments of sober lucidity, spent much of her existence living in a make-believe world of could-have-been that was, for her, happier and better. Crazy Cora’s fantasy world was one where a life, instead of being violently lost, survived and prospered – in both senses of the word life. Cora was nuts, sure, and the events that drove her over the edge where terrible and tragic, but her manic insanity was bent to the selfless preservation of the helpless.

Crazy or not, Cora wanted to make the world a better and safer place and often did.

No, when I say “crazy” people, I’m talking the kind of thin lipped murderous crazy displayed by Alan Rickman’s Elliott Marston. If you’ve never seen Quigley Down Under (and really, you haven’t seen this movie? Seriously? This is one of the best non-western Westerns ever made. Stop what you’re doing and go watch it right now), Marston is the dangerous kind of crazy. Marston is oily smooth and greasy evil as only Alan Rickman could make him, oozing paranoia and casual malignance. Like Cora, Marston lives in a fantasy, only his world is a nightmare of an old American West transplanted to the Australian Outback, a place of Dodge City and Boot Hill and pistol duels and genocide. Marston laments that he was born too late and on the wrong continent. He wishes for the kind of place where he can just eradicate the undesirables, the weak and the helpless and the outcast. He regards the Aboriginals like vermin, like rats, to be exterminated without a second thought.

Elliot Marston wasn’t interested in making the world a better place. The only thing Marston wanted was more of what he already had.

Quigley, at least in some respect, was about the various facets of insanity and how we see our world. For that reason I often quote the Matthew Quigley line above to myself whenever I run into craziness.

Lady, you are about half a bubble off plumb, that’s for sure and for certain.

Maybe it’s because this is an election year.

Or maybe it’s because the GOP is meeting in Florida in the middle of a hurricane.

Maybe it’s just the heat.

I don’t know, but when Todd Akin is the head of any Committee with the word “science” in it (and that word isn’t proceeded by the word “creation”) and Mitt Romney's advisors are pushing Congress to preemptively declare war on Iran while Newt Gingrich is running classes at the RNC to teach conservatives how to tell the truth, well, it just seems like there are a whole lot more crazy people than there used to be.

Walleyed crazy.

Bug eating bang bang crazy.

Elliot Marston crazy.

For example, this morning I was reading an article about circumcision.

Maybe you’ve seen the hoopla about this? In light of the recent stiff resistance to the banning of male circumcision in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made a statement supporting the procedure, reiterating their position that infant male circumcision significantly lowers the risk of HIV, genital herpes, HPV, and other sexually transmitted diseases. According to the AAP, circumcision also reduces the risk of various infections and other health problems.  A little less than sixty percent of American males are circumcised at birth nowadays. The AAP would like to see that number raised a lot higher.

They say it’s for health reasons. They say medicine and science back them up on this.

But, of course, that’s not the real reason, is it?

No, circumcision is really a secret Jewish plot to rule the world, one foreskin at a time.

This conversation, from a couple of commenters under the Yahoo article:

- i guess these doctors are getting ready for wwIII, and they need to make
every one seem like a jew, i for one, dont believe in this, and i will not
circumcise my kids, i think the skin is designed to protect, just wash it
every time you take a shower.
                - Funny enough, most of the doctors in the Task Force that wrote
                   this policy are Jews, and I am almost sure that the current 
                   president of the AAP is also Jew - not 100% sure of that though…
                            - The CEO of Yahoo is Jewish. There have been 7 pro-cutting
                               articles in 4 days. And since the recent layoff, Yahoo
                               has little news to report as it is...

Oh Noes! The Jewish doctors are getting ready for a Jewish World War III and therefore they want to Jewinate newborn baby boys so they’ll be more Jewey.

Got that?

How, exactly, the shorn manliness of America’s newborns will help the nefarious Jews achieve world domination escapes me, but rest assured my electronic friends this threat to our national sovereignty must be rubbed out before it grows.

Oh what?  We’re talking about circumcision here, if you didn’t see the dick jokes coming (oops, sorry), you haven’t been paying attention.

I went looking at a few of the usual websites, apparently Jews taking over America through foreskin confiscation isn’t an isolated idea.   On a totally unrelated note, I’m still trying to figure out why the same people who are so afraid of secret Jewish Evil Plots of Evil are so adamant in their demands that America must sacrifice all to defend Israel. Are you afraid of Jewish people taking over the world and stealing our foreskins or aren’t you?  Make up your damned minds, I’m getting tired of trying to figure out the plot.

Crazy?

Oh, we’re just getting started.

Speaking of dicks, over on Fox News today’s guest columnist is none other than Michael Reagan, son of former President Ronald Reagan.  Michael is a political consultant and the founder and chairman of The Reagan Group. And let’s just say that the nuts didn’t fall far from the tree.

Michael Reagan is afraid of liberals hiding in his email.

Yes, that’s correct. Liberals. In the email.

Now we’re not talking about liberals using email to send Michael dick jokes. No, we’re talking about actual Liberals.

Hiding in the email.

Stealing from conservatives.

One of the benefits of the Internet revolution has been access to free e-mail.  However, as we now know, the supposed "free" e-mail has come at a cost. As a believer in the free market, it is impossible to begrudge online companies their success, however, conservatives are sacrificing privacy and supporting liberal causes. If you use a Gmail or Yahoo e-mail address and are pro-life, support gun rights and oppose ObamaCare, you are funding activities aimed at trashing your own beliefs.

Bawazah?

Reagan’s premise is this:  Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft, and other “liberal” companies trick conservatives into signing up for “free” email, and then they “make a fortune by selling all sorts of sensitive customer data to all kinds of companies that want to sell every imaginable good or service.”

Oh no! It’s capitalism run amok! Not every kind of imaginable good or service! Anything but that!

Predatory capitalism is only American when conservatives do it. That’s a freebee, Kids, write it down.

And then, see, those companies donate their ill-gotten dirty money to Obama.

According to Reagan, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang recently contributed $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Committee. Adding illusionary insult to imagined injury, Yahoo! employees contributed more than $17,000 to Obama’s reelection – but only $2,875 to Mitt Romney. Google employees contributed $263,000 to Obama and just $5,000 for Mitt Romney. Microsoft employees sent $362,742 to the Obama reelection campaign compared to a paltry $82,000 for Romney. 

Reagan writes that in 2012, the fifteen top members of Congress received contributions from Google, thirteen of those congressmen were Democrats.  Reagan doesn’t identify who he considers the “top” fifteen members, but he is particularly outraged by the fact that Google was the “eighth” biggest contributor to Nancy Pelosi’s war chest (Reagan doesn’t bother to mention how much Google contributed or who made the seven larger donations. Probably because those people don’t give out free email to conservatives).

Reagan also points out that this has been going on for some time, back in 2008 Google, its employees, and their families gave Obama nearly a million dollars.  And once he was elected, a bunch of Google executives went so far as to pony up $25K a piece of their own money, which they made at least in part by apparently tricking conservatives, for Obama’s Inaugural Committee. This is apparently totally different from those Wall Street banks who took our money without so much as a reach around and are now busy giving it to the Romney campaign, totally different. But I digress.

First they came for our foreskins, now it’s communism via email! Oh those Nazi bastards!

It’s an outrage!

Yes, an outrage!

Outrageous that good God fearin’ conservatives should be tricked into signing up for the liberal socialism of free email! That’s the first thing Hitler did, you know, hand out free email accounts. True capitalists, i.e. patriots, should pay for their email accounts.

It’s outrageous that a company not only embraces liberal ideas that obviously can’t possibly work but do anyway in total defiance of God’s Will, but then they go and make billions doing it while at the same time employing millions of Americans right here at home. And they have the unmitigated bald faced effrontery to be some of the most profitable and successful companies in America.  It’s blasphemy! How dare they flaunt Jesus like that? How dare they?

It’s outrageous that companies should support people and candidates Michael Reagan doesn’t approve of.  Conservatives granted corporations personhood and this is how they’re repaid? Holy Moly! Why what if this catches on? What if all those nearly aborted babies conservatives save grow up to be democrats? The ungrateful little bastards!

Can you believe that Google and Microsoft and AOL and Yahoo! would go and spend their money on candidates that they like?

And if that wasn’t enough, their employees and their families do too.

These people act like they can just support whoever they want! Just like conservatives.

God damn it! Have these liberals no shame? No shame at all?

Son of Reagan (And really, why didn’t Ronny rename the kid Jesus when he adopted little Mikey?), mentions, sotto voice, that these companies also, maybe, have affiliated political action committees which, uh, well, sort of also contributed to Republicans too – but those contributions are far smaller than the ones to Democrats. Mike doesn’t think that’s fair.

“Conservative friends and associates are often surprised when I ask, ‘Why are you supporting liberal candidates and causes with your free e-mail?’ They react with disbelief, but that is precisely what is happening.”

Yeah, I bet they’re surprised. 

Surprised Michael Reagan is allowed to wander around without a nurse. 

Reagan then casually mentioned how you can get an email address from Reagan.com without the taint of stinky liberalism on it, quite a bargain at $40US per year.

Show of hands, how many of you are going to sign up for an @Reagan account?

I was thinking about doing it, just because I so enjoy the idea of the kind of people who send me hate mail having to address it to TrickleDownThis@Reagan.com. Frankly I think that’s worth the $40. 

Michael Reagan will likely make a couple billion off of Texas all by its lonesome self.

Because there’s some major crazy going on down Texas way.

"[Obama is] going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens? I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy. Now what's going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He's going to send in U.N. troops. I don't want 'em in Lubbock County. OK. So I'm going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say 'you're not coming in here'. And the sheriff, I've already asked him, I said 'you gonna back me' he said, 'yeah, I'll back you'. Well, I don't want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me."

That was Judge Tom Head, county judge in Lubbock, Texas – land of pointy toed boots, hats, heat, and all the sun drenched crazy paranoid Elliot Marston you can shovel.

Judge Head, in his quest to help Texas remain the laughingstock of Crazyland, offered up that opinion last week on a local news show.

I get the impression that the judge is actually visualizing himself as some kind of Boris Yeltsin, standing in front of imaginary socialist tanks.

But come on, UN troops?

UN troops?

Seriously.  Have you ever met any UN Troops? Who’s going to invade Texas, the Dutch? Ecuadorians? All twenty members of Fiji’s Peace Keeping force? The Belgians? Who? You know who leads UN invasions? Us. Usually with the dickweeds from Texas in the vanguard a whoopin’ and a hollerin’ and waving their giant hats.

Jesus Hopalong Christ, what in the hell are these people smoking?

Why is it that those folks who think of themselves as the biggest bestest Americans are always the first ones to talk about revolution and revolt when they think they’re going to lose an election?  And you’ve really got to admire the raw naked crazy inherent in Judge Head, he’s the guy who thinks that raising taxes to help fellow Americans is communism, but raising taxes to hire his own private army to kill Americans and overthrow the government is somehow patriotic. 

Needless to say, Judge Head claims his words are being taken out of context.  He says he’s not calling for revolution in the event of an Obama reelection per se, just that he needs to be prepared to support fellow Texans if they rise up in revolt and Obama sends in the Belgians. Or something.   

If it had been anywhere other than Lubbock, Texas, Judge Head would have been sedated with a hypo-dart fired from a safe distance, netted like a blood maddened hammerhead during Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, hauled off to a remote spot in the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch and unceremoniously dumped in deep water where he can’t do himself or anybody else any further harm. 

Seriously, Judge, you’re about half a bubble off plumb, that’s for sure and for certain.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

But it sure seems like there are a whole lot more crazy people than there used to be.

And not the good kind of crazy either.

Todd Akin, Social Media’s Bitch

What good is social media?

Why Twitter?

Why Facebook?

Why all the rest of it?

As a modestly popular blogger and somebody who spends an inordinate amount of time on social media, I’m often asked those questions.  And I see those questions posed repeatedly in the media outlets where I tend to hang out.

What good is social media?

Typically I don’t reply, I think the answers are obvious.

We’ll come back to that.

 

By now, I’m certain that most of you have read or listened to Representative Todd Akin’s infamous remarks regarding women’s supposed natural ability to ward off unwanted forcible impregnation:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy after rape] is really rare.  If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

It really raises the question, doesn’t it?

What do you mean, what question? Read that last part again:

…the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

See?

Obvious question is obvious.

If all women have this heretofore unsuspected superpower, what else are they capable of?

Now, I’ve long suspected that that women can spit venom. No seriously, you should see the look my wife gives me when I’ve done something dumb. Venom. From the eyes.  Like a cobra.  And I think it’s a provable fact that they can read minds.  And I’m pretty sure women can secretly levitate too. Women can actually use a Port-o-Potty, or any other unsanitary public facility, without sitting down – they literally hover over the seat in perverse defiance of gravity. Levitation.  What’s to say they don’t secretly slip out of bed at night after we’ve gone to sleep and then put on skin tight spandex and a cape and fly around Gotham fighting crime?  After women become mothers, they are able to conjure a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tissues and those baby-wipe thingies directly from the fabric of the universe with nothing more than a simple wave of the hand.  Magic. Dads don’t get this ability, only moms. Why is that? (because we’d use the zero-point energy hidden in our sleeves to summon an endless supply of beer and hot wings, that’s why. But I digress).

Perhaps a woman’s inability to locate her car in a mall parking lot after an hour of shopping is just cunning misdirection?

What? I’m just asking is all. Sheesh.

Actually, Akin’s comment raises a whole bunch of questions.

See, Akin didn’t give us enough information.

He doesn’t say how the female body shuts the whole thing down.

And, really, how does that work exactly? Are there special muscles? Does the rapist eventually get a package in the mail marked “Return to sender?” Are there force fields involved? Magic fairies? Jesus? What?  I’ve got my old college biology textbooks around here somewhere, and I’m pretty sure there’s no mention of this ability.  Is it something new?  Recently evolved, mayhap, in the decades since I graduated? That would be pretty exciting, wouldn’t it? 

Kind of craps all over creationism though, huh? Bummer.  

Next question, if the female body prevents impregnation by preventing sperm from fertilizing the ova, isn’t that basically birth control? The end result is no different from using any barrier method of contraception.

Or does the female body prevent impregnation by preventing implantation of the fertilized ova into the uterine wall? Because that would be no different from hormonal birth control like The Pill  (including the morning after variety) or Norplant, or IUD’s for that matter, and so on. 

Does the Pope know about this?

Here’s a thought, does this ability work by rejecting the implanted zygote?

Because, see, seems to me that a deliberate miscarriage is functionally no different from an abortion – just without the hardware and assistance. 

If women can do any of this on demand as Representative Akin seems to believe, then why would his Bearded Angry God get so upset over assisted birth control and/or abortion? After all, if God gave women the inherent ability to “shut the whole thing down” then by definition he must approve of birth control and/or abortion. Right?

And we improve on God’s design all of the time, from conceiving and birthing babies to eyeglasses to cooking our food to pacemakers to using technology to kill other human beings. 

God, should he actually be up there somewhere frowning down on the lot of us, doesn’t seem to object to any of that. So what makes this situation different? Because there are children involved? Really? This from the Deity who offed every first born child in Egypt on a whim and demanded the blood sacrifice of children in the Old Testament? 

God killed a lot of children in the Bible. No really, a lot. Frankly I’m trying to figure out what a few more matter. 

Funny they left that part out.

Since it’s so important, you’d think somebody would have mentioned it in at least one of the Testaments.

They mentioned the killing part all right, over and over. But not the part Todd Akin and his friends think is so important.

Now, I admit that I tend to empirical evidence and logic and things that I can see and feel and touch and therefore mumbo jumbo juju, especially the evangelical version, makes my head hurt. So maybe somebody can explain something to me. Here’s the part I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around: If a woman can prevent impregnation in the event of rape, “legitimate” or otherwise, why don’t more woman actually do so?

No, seriously, if a woman can prevent pregnancy resulting from rape without help, then why are we having this whole conversation in the first place? Why don’t women just close their eyes and squeeze their fists and bunch up their butt cheeks (I’m a little unclear on the actual process here, just go with me) and Voila! Presto Change-O, problems solved. Right? If this is an option, why don’t more women avail themselves of it? Why would they run the anti-abortion hate gauntlet in front of Planned Parenthood when they can just do it at home through force of will?

And how come woman can’t do it all of the time? For any pregnancy? Why just rape? That seems kind of, I dunno, specific from a biological trait stand point. 

In evolutionary terms, a trait like this would require that women get raped a lot and need some kind of ability to get rid of the resulting offspring. That pretty much makes us men assholes as a species, but if I squint my eyes I can maybe conceive of certain biological pressures that might result in such an ability (and now you know how science fiction stories are born).

However, if God gave women this ability on purpose, well then He must have expected them to get raped a lot.

That sort of make Him a big fat asshole, doesn’t it?

But here’s the real question: If Akin’s small petulant god gave women the ability to magically disappear rape babies, and He really, really, really gives a good goddamn about all babies as Akin says He does, then why the hell didn’t he give women the ability not to be raped instead? 

Or at the very least the ability not to be impregnated against their will?

Doesn’t seem that difficult of a design problem to me, if you’re God, I mean.

Any of the above methods would work and are biologically practical. A muscular sphincter  that closes off the uterus from the vagina would do it.  A mucus plug would as well, and the uterus grows one of those during pregnancy so the mechanism is already there – God wouldn’t even have to throw in anything extra.  Volitional control of hormonal balance or control of the uterine menstrual flush cycle would work too. Or the actual ability to spit nerve poison. Or teeth. Something.

But no.  According to Akin, rape first. Pregnancy second. Then, then, you get to shut shit that down.

Oh yes, that makes perfect sense. Sure. That’s the kind loving Christian god Akin believes in, right there.

 

Here’s what I want to know, why is it that ridiculous gibbering dolts like Akin aren’t held to account?

 

Seriously, why aren’t these people and their idiotic ideas held to account? Why aren’t the very questions I posed above, ridiculous though they might be and that’s sort of the point anyway, why aren’t those questions asked of people like Akin during the debates? During every interview? During every campaign stop. This is your bullshit idea, Congressman, explain in detail please. Don’t shift the goal posts, don’t look away, answer the question, yes or no, do you believe in the bullshit you’re shoveling or not.

The media needs to step up and start doing their jobs.

Akin is in no way unique. 

The House, the Senate, the Judiciary, the White House, Governorships, all the way on down to the local school board, are far, far too often filled with these people. Creationists. Birthers. Flat Earthers. Moon Landing Deniers. Truthers. Holocaust Deniers. Conspiracy nuts of every stripe.  Misogynists. Bigots. Anti-Vaxxers. Fearful little haters.  They range from those who think you can actually make it rain by singing and doing some kind of fucking rain dance, to people who believe, literally believe, that you can pray the gay away.

These people are just plain goofy.

There’s just no polite why of putting it and frankly I’m sick and tired of trying.

If these people had their way, we’d still be hiding in caves pissing our animal skin kilts in blind fear every time the sky gods made boom boom thunder.

And the thing is they know that they’re goofy, a lot of them do anyway at least at some level, otherwise they wouldn’t try to hide their silly nonsense. No they know just how stupid they sound, otherwise they, like Akin, wouldn’t backpedal so easily when called on their nutty bullshit.

They get away with it because too many Americans don’t call them on it. 

They get away with it because, we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of belief without consequence or responsibility.

So people like Akin and the other idiots at large aren’t held to account. And because they aren’t made to drag their idiotic beliefs out into the light of day and suffer the ridicule and mockery that such bullshit deserves, they just keep at it.

Akin is just the latest in a long line. 

It’s not limited to the Left or to the Right, though in the last few decades it certainly seems that the GOP has more than its fair share of raging nut cases probably because the Right has increasingly become the party of religious extremism.

Today the press, the blogosphere, the pundits, the professionally outraged Left, the professionally outraged Right, and the politicians are focused the wrong thing.

They’re outraged over Akin’s use of the word “legitimate.”

Sure, it was an asshole thing to say. Sure it implies that there are different kinds of rape, some more valid than other forms of sexual assault. And sure, it implies a certain common belief among people like Todd Akin, that in many cases the victim was really asking for it, or suffered “buyer’s remorse” after consenting to sex, or some other silly excuse for a heinous and terrible violation.  And sure, that’s a damned revolting viewpoint in a sitting lawmaker.

I grant you that the phrase “legitimate rape” is cause for some degree of outrage.  In degrees of douchebaggery it ranks right up there with Whoopi Goldberg’s “rape rape” dismissal of Roman Polanski’s sexual assault on a young girl. It’s an asshole thing to say. No doubt.

Predictably, everybody is off either condemning Akin’s use of the word, or attempting to justify it by saying he meant something else.

Akin himself apologized for misspeaking, whatever the hell that means.

But what everybody seems to be missing is this: Akin’s comment is a manifestation of a much larger problem. It’s a symptom of a much deeper disease. It is a warning sign of superstitious theocracy, a religious fascism cloaked in freedom of belief.

Akin’s religious viewpoint is nothing more than an excuse to remain willfully ignorant of provable science and indisputable facts.

The so-called “doctors” that he quotes, if they actually exist, are no more doctors than creation scientists are actually scientists.  If there really are actual medical doctors who hold this bizarre falsehood as truth, they should be immediately relieved of their license to practice medicine.

This is the “science” that Akin and his ilk would impose on us, on our children, on our nation. 

It’s a repudiation of everything that we have learned and a return to the ignorant fearful Dark Ages.

 

People often ask me, what good is social media. Facebook, Twitter. What purpose do they serve?

Social networking serves to shine light where none existed before.

Todd Akin said the things he did because in the past he could get away with it.

In the past the Todd Akins of America could take to local stages, local media, and spew their ignorance with impunity, as fact. They were rewarded for it, as Akin has been up to this point.  They were supported by people who were just as ignorant as they were. Whatever gaffe they made was contained, limited in scope.  Hidden from the greater world, a needle in a pile of hay chaff.

Now, as Todd Akin found out Sunday, when you speak nonsense, increasingly it goes viral.  Millions of Americans see it almost instantly.

As they should.

Because the parochial ignorance of people like Todd Akin is not limited to the dolts who vote for him, it affects us all. Each and every one.  It affects our society at every level, now and into the future.  Because we are America, the ignorant foolishness of Todd Akin affects the entire world.

These people have enjoyed freedom of speech and freedom of belief without consequence for far, far too long.

What good is Twitter?

What good is Facebook?

What good is social media?

You’re looking at it.