"...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

Jan 9, 2011

Shorter Howard Fineman

Shorter Fineman: Political violence and murder is wicked good for dickheads who routinely murder innocents during the course of their own lucrative working days, as long as those dickheads make publicly appropriate mouth noises whilst consciously and deliberately acting grave and calm, pretending to empathy they obviously lack, since they routinely order the deaths of hundreds, and thousands, during the course of their lucrative working days.

Even shorter Jack Crow: Fuck you, Fineman. May you get herpes of the eyes.

5 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

He made many mistakes thereafter. We are living with the consequences of them. But it is hard not to conclude that his bullhorn moment in New York--capturing Bush at his ardent best--all but insured his re-election three years later.

His bullhorn moment was Bush at his best? Or was it, like his carrier landing moment, and the endless appearances at the weed farm, just another cheap photo op relentlessly hyped by a complicit corporate press busy manufacturing consent for an ongoing series of disasters?
~

Jack Crow said...

Isn't the whole public expression of government a series of photo ops, ones which soften the hard reality of cops, guns, prisons, judicial murder and enforcement of property by treating them as entertainment?

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

CSI Jack Crow: Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

I don't know if the American audience will go for it in this day and age, Jack.

/teh producers (of wealth and jobs)
~

Richard said...

The Fineman column is a classic illustration of the mystification that pervades American social life. The extreme violence perpetrated around the globe by the US military, and the Presidents who order it into action, is completely absent, while domestic episodes which pale in terms of scale are highlighted. The notion that US violence abroad is related to US violence at home, as expressed by McVeigh, is, of course, a taboo subject.

Ethan said...

Hah, Jack, at first I thought you were quoting directly, and I was like, "Herpes of the eyes? That quote is great!"

Then I realized you were summarizing and clarifying, and I was like, oh, yeah, herpes of the eyes, right on.