"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Mar 31, 2010

An Example of How Them Kneelers Kneel

"In an act of vision and courage, given the hostage the nation has become to the oil industry, oil interests, and the likes of OPEC, the Obama administration is proposing opening vast expanses along the Atlantic coastline, the Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling.

This is a momentous moment and brings to mind the leadership of another time and another president. In the depth of the depression, President Roosevelt, with courage and imagination, sought different solutions to confront the crippling economic conditions that had descended on the nation. He petitioned Congress to mandate the creation of "a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of private enterprise". In May 1933 Congress passed the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) Act to revitalize the economically stricken Tennessee Valley in areas of power generation, river navigation, flood control, reforestation and erosion control. It became outstandingly successful in each category."

HuffPo Swoonery

I have no bile left, to spit at this clownery.

Well almost none. Shorter swoon: to escape grasp of oil companies, make them richer. Hmm...sounds like Ezra Klein on insurance companies...

...Shit, wait - I missed my two minute hate for the sorry besots of Glennbeckistan, didn't I? Fuck. I will never a good liberal make, if I keep missing the misdirections...

Anyhows, for useful enough additional commentary, see post below:

The lesser evil, y'know...

The Democrats and other liberal kneelers didn't hate what George Bush did. They hated George Bush. They didn't so much despise the wars, the encroachments on civil liberties, the torture and the torture network, the abortion and science restrictions, the theft of the remaining shreds of the commons, the entrenchment of corporate behemoths as they loathed who went about making it possible.

Think of a  "hallowed principle" these kneelers won't compromise, when their princes hold the bulk of the thrones, and please get back to me if I've erred.

I can think of countless people less easy to hate than George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the gang of looters who followed Bill Clinton, and improved upon his smarmy, less overt corporatization of the Republic.

Not a difficult emotional state at which to arrive, honestly. Pity or hatred, calumny or condemnation, Poppet George earned it all.

But, the differences between Barack Jesus Reagan and the Poppet's followers come down not to ideas,*  so much as temperament and personality. Some people loyal up for the testosterone warrior alphas. Some people get their beta validation from serving the seducer alpha.

Liberals and conservatives belong to the same social order. Members of both groups rather broadly accept that people with guns and offices ought to tell the rest of us what to do, for our own good of course. Sure, they disagree about the against whom, and even the cui bono, now and again.

But neither segment of the voting public takes any significant, notable umbrage with voting for people to rule. Or, the fact that the same class of people ends up ruling us, time and time and time again.

When it fleshes out that Barack Jesus Reagan, McPalin, Clinton, Original White Reagan, Poppy and Poppet Bush all pretty much aim for the same ends, no one ought pretend surprise.

And when it also follows that the current crop of licensed sycophants (yes, you JournoListians, et al) jumps to defend Barack Jesus Reagan for the exact same shit, when previously done by Poppet Bush, that they leveled their moraline ire (and made their fame and fortunes) against, perhaps we who walked away ought ponder how this all can change?

Today, lesser evilism in the age of Barack Jesus Reagan has lost it's last fragile underpinning. At least as I see it, you probably cannot find a more McPalin position that "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

So, what's the difference between the War Hero and the Constitutional Scholar?

The batch of sycophants, shills and kneelers defending the decisions of those with power.

I don't know if this means that the ground is ripe for more walking away. I still have a lot of thinking and learning to do, about this subject.

 I do know that this confirms for me, yet again, that walking away from all that adds up to the best decision I've made in a very long time.

* -  Except as hollowed out campaign slogans, and Barack Jesus Reagan pretty much dispensed with all that, in lieu of the perpetual chanting of two one word slogans, and a three word anodyne for the rigors and pains of tempered, original thought.

Fuck You Ezra Klein, Part the Third

Obligatory follow up to the previous post.

How will Reb Ezra spin whale killing and oil drilling, me wonders aloud...

Drill, Baby, Drill! (yelps Sarah Palin, er, Barack Obama)

...more on lesser-evilism, later (and a follow up on some sage critique) - but, can anyone please explain to me the differences between the failed McCain/Palin Administration and the present Obama one?

A HuffPo link thankfully short on historical historickiness or embarrassing swooning. 

So now we've got taxpayer funded, but privately held, nuclear plants coming down the pike. We've got expanded offshore oil drilling, right after El Presidente mouths some moth eaten platitudes about climate change and greenification. We've got giant transfers of the commons to Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, pharma companies, mercenaries, defense industry behemoths and energy consortiums. We've got escalation in Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Colombia and Georgia. We've got all sorts of provocations of Iran, Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas. Plus the whole "hemming in the Russians" thing. Israel gets even more dough under the cover of "strained relations," with Americans still funding the expansion of colonial displacement of Palestinians.

We have extensions of Clinton-Bush encroachments on civil liberties, strengthening of the security state, including the Patriot Act and legal defenses of the MCA2006. We've got the continued use of the American gulag system and continued protection/coddling of admitted torturers. We've got an expanded war on drugs, with Mexico slowly edging out Colombia as the hobgoblin du jour. We've got idiot Christianists playing right into the FeeBee trap, with all sorts of police powers abused out in the open.

We've got speech de-legitimized and demonized, by kneeling admin loyalists, because the speakers happen to be ill informed political opponents with a grievance against real, distorted and imagined gubmint enemies.

Oh, how terrible, this horrible age of President McCain...

Mar 30, 2010

Fuck the Fuck Yeah

"Perhaps they shouldn't just be ignored, but until Glenn Beck's followers kill two dozen people in a remote village, I'm going to spend most of my time focusing on those with control over the tanks and nuclear weapons. And rather than seeking to bolster the state and reinforce the idea of some mythical, mystical social contract, I just might seek to undermine this government, so far as I can, for as long as it continues enriching a politically connected corporate elite while imprisoning and enlisting the rest of its population, no matter how "duly elected" our politicians might be as a result of the sham two-party electoral system. When political leaders are engaged in senseless war and widespread human rights abuses -- and the occupation of Afghanistan and the U.S. prison system at home and abroad qualify -- the person of conscience's duty is not to the state but to justice, which usually means opposing the state and questioning its presumed legitimacy."

 False Dichotomy

"I hate America's economic elite for deciding the best thing to do for working people in the U.S. rustbelt was punch them in the face over and over for the past thirty years."

A Tiny Revolution

Mar 29, 2010

The Association of the Stability Operations Industry

Yes. For real.

(Please note what occupies the largest portion of their main page advert: "extractive industry security." Roll that one around on your tongue for a moment.)

Mercenaries and wetworkers as "stability operators."

O brave new/same old world.

h/t Naomi Klein

Post script: check out that members list. Lovely people, these "stability operators."

Mar 28, 2010

Thank You, False Dichotomy

"...The tradeoff seems to be this: in exchange for a president that can speak in complete sentences and not embarrass Americans in front of Western European audiences, and who is willing to throw a few more crumbs to the middle and lower classes, liberals will accept a little murder abroad. Oh, there might be an open letter or two, but few are willing to call the current occupant of the White House what he is -- a war criminal with a million dollar smile -- instead going to great lengths to defend this administration, working earnestly to support Obama’s agenda even when it’s entirely at odds with their own stated views...."

Source.

Must Read

Perhaps the best short treatment of the problem so far. High kudos to Penny Red for a brilliant piece.

Conspiracies and Boiler Rooms

I don't think every political outcome emerges from "backroom" deals.  Or very many of those outcomes, in all honesty. If any, at all.

It don't believe most conspiracy theories because they generally require the intended audience to believe that it takes six to six hundred people, working for six decades, across six continents, to move six grains of salt across a six foot table just so the other six billion of us don't catch on.

I do accept as a starting principle a basic rule of politics (which perhaps explains why I think electioneering and progressive caucusing, and the self-recriminations which follow after these methods inevitably fail to deliver intended outcomes, add up to so much shitbunkum):

Rich people (this means, people with concentrations of wealth and power) use available resources to keep what they have, and obtain more, or more kinds, of it.

Sure, they make deals outside of public scrutiny. That gets easier and easier, mind, as the perceptional topography know as "the public" dwindles. The more shit gets privatized, the more the res privata grows, the less material, space and loyalty to find tied up with the res publica.

Powerful people build the organizational pathways which allow them to best meet this end. Call it access, or superstructure, or just country club living.

To those without power, this might look like a conspiracy, a world of backroom deals. But that perspective comes with a primary error (I believe), namely that the existential spaces in which the majority of us live (that dwindling public space, and our own tenuous private and familial existences) provide the main arena where political and powerful shit really happens. If we believe that power derives from our quotidian choices, it doesn't take much leaping clearance to assume, wrongly, that what rich and powerful people do behind our backs amounts to conspiracies, backroom deals, boiler room corruption and all the rest of the distracting movie narrative fare.

That dwindling public space, and our own parochial lives, do not constitute the arena of power, no matter how many times the boss types try to placate us with tired slogans, such as "consent of the governed," "Main street," "will of the people" or "security of the homeland."

They do what they do, as a class, because they want to protect their wealth.

They pass and enforce laws defining property relations (with concomitant punishments for failure to obey), because doing so keeps them rich and powerful. They pass health care reform legislation, built on threats of force, because it keeps in place the mechanisms which transform our labor into their wealth and power. They send us to die in their wars because it puts nice toys in their yards and their kids into the best schools.

They don't need conspiracies and unwieldy epochal plans to do so.

By and large, they get away with it because we've got no effective choice in the matter. The consequences for insurrection (or even mere disobedience) range from heinous to fatal.

Sure, the rich and powerful collude.

Don't be surprised or even offended by this fact.

Don't call that a conspiracy.

Call it class values. The members of their class value their wealth, possessions, access, power, offspring and edification more than our very lives. They expend us in obtaining, keeping and protecting what they own.

Remember, they see us as staff, consumers, employees, personnel - as human resources. Raw material, refined material, some more heavily invested in than others, but instruments nonetheless.

Sometimes, they even look like us, as in the case of Ezra Klein (Fuck You, Ezra Klein), when he dutifully explains to us why we ought to consume political sewage ("health care reform"); or like the many others (yes, even you Jane, whom I personally respect; and all you domes over at the TPM, and most especially you silly Kosnikauts) who want to steer us into electioneering and narrow political struggles to determine who next gets to rule us, to the benefit of the moneyed classes.

They might not want us to be crushed so much that their consciences become troubled (you know, because they actively benefit from "the system"*), but they do not (often, or willfully) challenge the very organizational relationships of that systemic oppression itself.

By and large, these reformers (yes, you, Pseudo-Dennis) belong to the class which dominates us. They might want a nicer, gentler domination. They may even despise the foreign military imperialism, or the power of certain kinds of banks within the economic imperium.

Just don't count on these folks to go much further than that. From their perspective, they probably feel they've already gone really far out on a limb.

 They might even try super duper hard to end corruption, and stop back room dealing.

Which explains, I think, why they so often get it wrong, these reformers. They get it as wrong as the rightwingnuts who think that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have returned as avatars of Lenin and Stalin.

Their reformism obliges them to preserve the relationships of power whilst simultaneously trying to undermine a few of  the social, legal and political retaining walls by which wealth and power are kept from the rest of us (even though we build it, with our lives and labor).

They need "the system" to turn it against those parts of it which they reject. They need, as desperately as wingnut conspiracy theorists, to believe that back room deals and corruption and boiler rooms explain the problems of inequity, oppression, and power. They depend on this mythos of corruption.

And this explains, I believe, why they never fail to dive right into electioneering, into primarying "sell outs," into building turn out organizations, PACS and pressure groups.

It explains, also, why our dear reformist cousins (in much the same fashion as their wingnut counterparts) always fail to net the chimaera they so desperately seek.

You cannot reform the class interests of the rich and powerful, because they get and stay rich and powerful by looking out for themselves.

That shit cannot be "reformed."

Get it?

Got it.

Good.

* - I reject reifying human decisions into anonymous and amorphous systems, such as "inevitable monopolies," or "the Man," or the old standby, "The System of Oppression." As much as I reject "the People," et al.

(Thanks to ladypoverty and jeffroby @ corrente for the inspiration for this crowvian exercise in vanity.)

Mar 26, 2010

Hey, Gun Fetishists

You cannot defeat the US armed services in an uprising. Not gonna happen. You really willing to wager your lives on the improbability that the people who have willingly followed orders in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Silver Springs, Colorado Springs, Colombia, Gitmo and wherever else will come of a sudden to a new moral conclusion, that pulling the trigger, driving the drone, loading the bombs and otherwise doing the bidding of the corporate state must all end, now?

You really think that the arbiters of the Amurrican military abattoir, that the company gatekeepers, the mercs and contractors, the bag men and wetworkers, the hired knives, the hired guns, the finks and skinks will stop doing whatever they do for the House that the Dollar Built?

You think the cops and prison wardens, the officers of the court, the judges, the punishers and prosecutors and other legal parasites will stop taking cash for their part in the incarceration racket?

Think the condottieri in the corporate press will put aside their class values and report the truths of your bumpkin angst?

You think that the believing public will come to your defense? Well, do you?

Here's what happens shortly after you take up arms. You die, and then come the arrests of those you love, and many of the people connected to you. And then the lies, and the half truths, printed and sprach'd from the ones who egged you on, and they who tsk-tsk'd in solemn condemnation, alike. Those of you who survive, and decide to fight on, you'll end up making bombs, and cutting throats in the dark. You'll snipe uniformed agents of the state from the backsides of dark alleys. You'll start running drugs to pay for mere survival. You'll trust no one, not even yourselves. You'll murder and kill and one day, perhaps long after your usefulness as an advertisement for the necessity of power passes, you might get some sort of amnesty. But, probably not.

Instead: a constant reminder to a docile public that the protection racket must continue. A cautionary tale. A reason for budget increases and further domestic militarization. The two minute hate. And then the twenty.

And yes, sure, lots of you harbor stupid racialist nonsense and notoriously bad moral logic. You fetishize killing tools (just like any number of those who'll be sent to stop you, natch), so what can we expect, right?

But, that doesn't mean you deserve to die, that your political and economic fictions should end up grist for the censors' mill, used against those that follow on after you, in courts of law and "public opinion."

So, just fucking stop it already. 1776 has come and gone. The imperializers live next door, not an ocean and months away by sea, with supply lines spanning watery wastes, and parity in weapons and resources

Find another way.

A hint, offered in honest comradery: try corruption.

Not the exposing of it. The doing...

It's hard to jail the rot, and Robin Hood has many friends.

Cordial, As In With a Mallet

"...Earlier in the week, Coulter had received a cordial letter from Francois Houle, the vice-president academic and provost of the University of Ottawa welcoming her to the nation's capital and suggesting that she review what constitutes hate speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Houle pointed out that, for instance, "promoting hared against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges" under the Charter..."

Some Guy With No Sense of Proportion

Yeppers. You read it right. Warning someone to watch her words or else the coppers might grab her and teach her an ("so sorry, lass, that we've got to save ya from yarself with a spell in the prison kitchens") important lesson about right speech and keeping the environment safe for dissent-fee profit and docile kneeling.

Yah yah, Ann Coulter sucks. She has spent more time spilling verbal puss across the airwaves than almost anyone except El Rushbo, Glennbeckistan, and Hopey Changey Hisself. Sure, all that rings true. This has got Lady Irony right out of her home digs and wandering the wide world collecting justly due tithings.

But.

Characterizing an intimidation racket's censorship warning as a "cordial letter" takes the prize.

Chutzpah.

Liberation

You cannot die my death. It follows, then, that you don't get to live my life.

Typing Aloud Whilst I Slowly Go Blind 3

Isonomy. (also, Wiki and Wiki-On-Isocracy)

Something like, "equality before the law, or, equality in tradition."

I'm not in favor of interpreting the efficacy/extent of isonomy exclusively with relation to states or governments. I'm not sold on the usefulness of states.*

But, since I first discovered the term in Christian Meier's brilliant Athens, some many years ago now, and he used it to explain the development of pre-state phratries, especially those which began to break away from exclusively tribal affiliations, and particularly those which violated then existent Attican norms, I might have a latent bias.

Isonomy. Equality before some custom, some accepted standard, some useful approximation. **

An interesting concept.

But does it work?

Can we truly live as equals before a standard which itself exists separate from our multitude of existences, such that we can judge our actions and measure our equality before it?

Dunno. Don't think so. I don't think that we could ever really verify the reality of that standard, it's intended autonomy from our lives, any claims about its objective application to demonstrably different persons, or whether or not our own apprehension of it approached the perfection necessary to decide if all persons, everywhere, measured equal before it.

But, as the sort of concept which must of necessity have a "reach which exceeds it's grasp," I think then that we can really dig out a place wherein we give isonomy a limited and specific function.

To repeat, I don't think we can treat any law, custom, tradition or set of principles as universal, such that we can measure the equality of it's application to any and every person who ever existed, or just who exist within a specific social group, during a specific period.

But we can treat with isonomy as a gyroscope, functional for very specific tasks, according to evolving but agreed-to metrics. No need for universality, exactly defined. No need for identical planes of existence.

Just agreements to keep, given such and such environment, during such and such a period of time. Agreements to understand how a custom, law, standard or tradition creates inequalities.

For example:

No woman exists with exact identity to any other woman. Not one. Not every woman possesses a uterus. No woman occupies the exact space, time or personhood of any other. The category "woman," like any other fiction, serves a communicative need, but does not express a universal condition. But, enough women have a uterus, that the possession of one (if we can really treat any organ as a "possession") approaches the norm.

Not every man exists with exact identity...yadda yadda yadda. Most men get by without a uterus. Enough that any given man not having a uterus approaches the norm.

Women have wombs, men don't. Against some allegedly universal standard (person, human, citizen) women and men fail to measure up as functionally equal (or, identical, level). Women and men have different genders.

(Caveat: I don't hold any position which follows from gender difference to subservience of one gender to another.)

A person enforcing a law defining how a woman "uses" her uterus cannot apply that force equally to both a man and a woman, cannot treat the law as a universal, because nearly one half of any group of subjects or citizens lacks the organ in question.

Because it applies only to women, can only apply to women.

In applying the law, enforcement erases the presuppositions (any chance, really) of  "equality before the law." Or, in other words, any law requiring women to use their wombs in any manner at all necessarily treats with women as unequal to men, before the law. It isolates women as possessing generative organs in need of regulation, in relation to men who have generative organs which don't require regulation.

Let's repeat: it creates an enforceable inequity. Not the functional non-equality of variation, such that men and women have physiological differences, discussed above.  A very different sort of inequality. One which sets up women as subjects of enforcement never applied to men.

As I wrote above, I don't think isonomy works, that people can apply it in real and contingent circumstances. But, I do think it can serve a gyroscopic function. A function outlined, in the negative, by abortion, contraception and gender laws. We cannot enforce equality before any standard, because no circumstances remain so unchanging and no standard so universal that enforcement will achieve the intended outcome. But we can look at the existing standards and ask, "Do these create or enforce demonstrable inequality?"

Again: such as abortion laws.





* - "The state" works as an operative fiction. Look for "the state" and you'll just find people getting together to tell other people what to do, backing up those orders with violence or the threat of violence. People filling offices. Offices treated as separate from the occupying person. Offices treated as a sacred category independent of any personality. Personality subordinated to the office. Minds colonized to treat the office itself as a conveyor of the authority to tell others what to do, and back it up with force. In other words, fiction, but a story so widely believed that it allows operators and officeholders to wield it with tremendous utility.

** - The law, for example, can only ever approximate. The claim to universality, in any law passed to provide sanction for the government of others, fails the moment someone attempts to enforce it, to demonstrate in any use of it's sanction. No situation allows for "perfect" universality, since causality, distance and duration all function to separate, to engender contingency. All events unfold with particularity, and the environments in which we move (and these environments include ourselves, as participators) trap us in those contingencies, so to speak. The enforcement of law (plainly, the use of force or the threat of force) might come with the assumption that the law applies always, and in exactly the same manner, to every person, to all persons, in any possible set of events. But no set of events unfolds exactly identical to all others. Differences exist. Really. Persons develop differently, and live in varying circumstances. The use of force by three arresting officers against one person, at 4 pm, during a sunny afternoon, some summery Saturday, in a suburb of Boston will not result in the exact same outcome as the use of force against another person, several hundred miles away, during the winter, by 25 cops, midday and midweek, in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood - even if the law they attempt to enforce looks identical on the books. The law can only approximate. Force (like any expenditure of calories, effort, labor) erases the claims to universality inherent in the law. For the law to "work," then, it's intended universality must fail.

Hopium

Will the drug warriors get a budget increase to go after the pushers of this iniquitous and pernicious social affliction?

Typing Aloud Whilst I Slowly Go Blind 2

Can we just call it the Clinton-Bush-Obama regime already? Or does that, lacking teasing irony, violate the literary canon?

This.


Source.

h/t Corrente

Mar 25, 2010

Typing Aloud Whilst I Slowly Go Blind

"...That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -he said,  'I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.' Hah! You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, 'I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?'
Fat chance!

He was old enough to remember the sleigh rods under the boxcars, riding the rods. Fry Pan Jack, the true bum...

...the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind, the other is driven around to his club, is fetted, wined, and dined

and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad

the bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite, the bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night

the bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel, but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal

as long as we sanction the bum on the plush, the other will always be there, but rid ourselves of the bum on the plush, and the other will disappear

and make an intelligent, organized kick: get rid of the ways that crush; don't worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush"

~ Utah Phillips

*

Yummy.

Fuck You Ezra Klein, Part the Second

"After vehemently opposing the Democratic health care plan, insurance companies are doing an about-face..."

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/03/insurers-now-heart-health-reform-0

1. If the last nine months counts for "vehement opposition," I'm going to have find the updated dictionary definitions for both "vehement" and "opposition." I had a running coach who did the real deal vehement. I ran faster.

In truth, what happened went something like this: representatives and former executives from health insurance and pharmaceutical consortia wrote draft legislation which favored their bottom lines, as well as their collective organizational longevity. Republicans spent the better part of Obama Year One legitimizing the industry favorable legislation by acting like Republicans (this scares Donks into a stampeding herd, apparently), whilst Democrats spent the better part of the same year confirming the validity of Crow's Law. Donkalots lapped it up, because the Republicans continued to busy themselves acting like Republicans. Lackeys, hangers-on, well paid sycophants and other white males celebrating the possibility of proximity to power heaped derision on any and everyone who didn't sign on to lesser evilism. Occasionally, they conceded that all these "compromises" were shit, but only to turn around and explain that the dirty fucking hippies also needed to acquire a taste for feces. Especially managerial feces, served from imperial and/or bureaucratic and/or corporate anal orifices hovering above us all.

2. Fuck You Ezra Klein, you sycophantic shill. You've pushed this shit for too long now.

3. Ipso facto, no "about face." Just a change of backdrops. A new set of platitudes. New lighting, in softer colors. Empire rolls on, domestic edition, part 3945, section b413, paragraph 12.

4. FYEK.

And how will kneeling loyalists defend this?

Oh my fucking head, the dissonance, it burns! - Or: How I learned that mad cow disease had gone pandemic, since no other rational explanation can possibly make sense of this shit...

Fuck You Ezra Klein

Does any more need be said?

Re: this crummy fecicle.

Are you really asking if more of the same (corporate friendly legislation resembling draft bills written by former corporate execs) will lead to more of the same?

Pseudo-Dennis

The longest running one man fiction show has finally come to an end.

Dennis has a new gig.

Scapegoats, Part Two

In a different key, with tonal modifications:

Of course the Republicans played along as the OCP* sold off another swath of the commons, under the banner of future hope, of promised rewards delayed, with promises. It comes quite easy to them, this part of awful evildoer. They would like to commit any number of future assaults on the commons. No stretch to scape the goat, these conservatronics. Like Brad Pitt playing any role requiring Brad Pitt to act like Brad Pitt, these Republicans.

So, here we have it:

The OCP enacts legislation which the Republicans would've offered, but with lots and lots of bloviating about the common good and historicky historicality and saving Hopey Changey from - alas! Oh Noes! geewillikers! - political defeat that might cripple his political agenda and dent his Lincolnroosevelkennedyesquian gravitas.

The eleven dimensional chess master, Mr. Cool Aplomb, needed keyboard pwogs to save him from the...

...scapegoats, y'know. And from firebrands and other assholes who won't eat shit without complaining. He needed disciples, to explain his brilliant, pragmatic thrust towards the mean, towards the status quo ante, towards more of the same.

He moved those pieces with such supralapsarian foreknowledge, with the wisdom of the Divine chess player Hisself, just so the evil Republicans could find themselves stymied, stopped in their tracks, defeated and treated to a - oh, the horror! -  political setback.

Oh, how we shudder at it, how we scrape the floor in wonder and awe, we grateful denizens of post-Reaganific Amurrica.

But, remember!

Remember it well: it took the highdomey pwogs - those lords of flickering key strokes - to make it known. To show us the power and the glory. Oh, Shrill Paul, Apostle of the Moral Dollar, Matthew the Bright, Reb Ezra and Mr. Numbers About Baseball - without you how would we have known that you knew better than us? That you knew, that you know, the best possible world so suddenly available to us? That we need saving from ourselves. And, oh, from the evil Republicans.

We needed you to tell it. To sneer and lecture, to scold and deride. Lest we forget. Lest we forget.

How would we have known that Hopey Changey verged on victory, historic and mighty, clutched everlasting in the last moments from the claws of the scapegoats.

Who got a bill they've promoted for the better part of fifteen years. And with a pretty little door prize, a consolation bauble, the uterus in chains.



* - Other Corporate Party

Scapegoats, Part One

Oh, what a story:

A single moment. Mayhap, the only one. Ever. Very bad agents, agents of greed and dominion, in roots abounding. Poised, crystalline. Poised to steal away the future.

A man in a white hat comes. Cool, collected, a new kind of cop. Not just law and order, this guy. Not just the savoir faire. He loves us, fatherly, brotherly. He wraps us up in his arms. Sweet deliverance. He comes armed with a new world entire, hauling it around on his back. The burden of it, the burden of the history he must overcome. With our help, he rides in. We made it possible. We chose him. Picked him to hold out against the evil ones. We vanguarded the vanguard, and now it's His Time.

Time to make historical historicality.

Time to box the paradigm and break it, this man riding in.

But he needs help. He's no lone gunman, this new savior brother. He's too smart for that. Too smart for the mistakes of his predecessors. He looks back over his shoulder, sees the sins of those who went before.

The empire mismanaged. The treasure rooms empty. The bankers in sackcloth and the oilmen crying.

Someone has to take the blame. Someone plays the enemy.

He's got allies, faithful friends. Their demands, their price for compliance - nothing. Feather light. So easy, so easy to bear. He's got bigger burdens. Don't we all know it.

Really, we better know it. He's a master in eleven dimensions. A rabbi told us so. Catholic school girls run their eyeliner, a fawning princess believes so fervently, and history turns on this moment. The man of peace, awarded, his rockets red glare washed in the glow of nobel nobility. Those broken bodies, virgin sacrifices on the rooftop altar of the world, making way for the potential of his hope for peace.

His allies gather, identifying enemies.

They assemble to level blame in sheets and waves of invocation, naming them aloud, in print, in prophetic declarations. Imagined future crimes, prevented. We're so grateful, we could just self-defenestrate.

The filthy enemy ensnared, forced to run the rabbit race.

And on the other side, sweet suffering justified. Deliverance, and the enemy on the run, muttering words of madness, their ersatz queen in erstwhile chains of her own deceitful devising.

What a story, what a wonderful story.

Told with all the passion of a  master crafted lie.