The Lunatic's Asylum

Wait A Second...When Did Romney Become a Conservative?

2012-01-26T14:08:00.009-05:00

I love Ann Coulter. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if it were possible, I would gladly bear her children. Our prospective rugrats would be so exceedingly adorable, so wonderfully smart and sarcastic that they would probably be some of the most dangerous (in an irreverently cutesy kind of vicious way) people to ever walk the face of this great Planet Earth.

I'm also a great fan of one Mark Steyn, a talent so great that the bounds of our Solar System are hardly sufficient to contain it. I sometimes find myself wishing that I had one tenth the sheer writing skill of Mark Steyn, if only because that sort of eloquence would be an acceptable substitute for the hundreds of hours in the gym needed to sculpt myself into a Greek Adonis.

When in doubt, go for brains. Brains will always beat great abs, you know.

However, when I'm listening to or reading either of these two great luminaries of the Right Wing Galaxy of Intellectual stars, these two stalwart defenders of the Conservative Position on All Things nowadays, I find myself somewhat confused and consternated by their support of one Willard "Mitt" Romney to be the eventual Republican nominee for The Presidency of these United States.

Primarily because I just can't figure out what the fuck is so conservative (small 'c' intentional) about Mitt Romney. It's almost as if Ann and Mark have taken leave of their senses when they make the case that Mitt Romney is the 'real' conservative hope in the 2012 Sweepstakes to replace The Gross Mediocrity of Tried-and-Failed Socialism that is Barack Obama.

Now people are entitled to their opinions, and I'm going to admit that there might just be something in this intellectual formulation of Romney As The Next Reagan that I'm missing; stranger things have happened. But just based upon simple appearances, I'm hard-pressed to understand the appeal of Romney to some within the greater Conservative Movement.

Romney possesses, at first blush, none of the core qualities that gets one tagged Hardcore Conservative these days.

Romney has had more positions on the Right to Life Question than I've had hot dinners. In years past, such seeming fickleness on what is supposed to be one of the foundation blocks of Conservative ideology would have discounted Romney as a flip-flopper and political opportunist which would have had 'real' conservatives jumping up and down like schoolboys bursting for a pee, screaming "hypocrite"!

Historically, conservatives have always claimed that while the Left considers hypocrisy to be a virtue, it is a deadly vice which automatically excludes any candidate calling himself 'conservative' from any race, because conservatives are supposed to stand "on principles" which are considered inflexible and unyielding. This formulation has torpedoed many a would-be candidate before, but apparently the conservatives this time around are giving Romney a free ride on this particular failing.

Romney is also, at least in spirit, the midwife of the greatest bugaboo since the Red Scare, which is state-run healthcare. The Romneycare scheme in Massachusetts is perhaps the greatest contraindication of Romney's conservatism; it applies the power of the state to the individuals' greatest possessions, i.e. their bodies and health, and forces individuals to make certain choices (they're called "mandates") against their will. None of this screams "Conservative!" in my mind, and worse, Barack Obama himself has proudly proclaimed that Romney's monstrosity was in fact the blueprint for much of Obamacare.

It's hard to see the conservatism in this, and Romney has not had to do much more than answer a few unpleasant questions in this regard. I'm wondering when it became a conservative principle to use the power of the state to force people into making health and economic choices they might otherwise not make, given the possibility of other free-market options? After all, conservatives are supposed to be all about personal rights, including the choices one makes about their personal care, and against the creeping power of the overbearing state, and all for unbridled economic freedom.

Romney has hit the campaign trail loudly boasting of his ability to "work across the aisle" and "bring Democrats and Republicans together" while he was the Governor of the People's Republic of Taxachusetts, a job I would liken to being president of the Glee Club if only because Massachusetts is such an insignificant little state. It's not like being Governor of Texas, California or New York. Massachusetts, whatever it's virtues in the history and folklore of the United States has, historically, been little more than a socially-retarded boil which occasionally erupts for good or ill. Good when it is the cradle of the American Revolution and Abolitionist Movement, grossly ill when it occasionally vomits up yet another generation of Kennedys.

It has been 'real' conservative boilerplate for decades now that "working across the aisle" is a bad thing. Coulter herself has often said that there is no way that any conservative worth his/her salt can work with the political Left in this country and still be considered a conservative, generally speaking. Compromise with the left, in any way, has always been one of the greatest sins a conservative can commit. One does not, according to Coulter at least, elect Conservatives in order to accommodate Socialists and Communists.

Otherwise, what was the point? I mean, doesn't accommodating the Liberal Left (which is what bi-partisan compromise is) sort of negate the purpose of a Conservative Movement in the first place? Coulter has gotten wealthy, one assumes, by writing a ton of books implying that the political Left has a devious scheme for turning us into something akin to an East German police state, making the accusation that the Liberal is never to be trusted and should be thwarted at every turn by all means necessary. So why would she support someone who boasts of his ability to compromise with her social and ideological enemies? What is it about Romney -- the half-a-loaf-is-better-than-no-bread-friend-of-Lefties -- that strikes you as particularly 'conservative'?

At least Steyn makes a better case for Romney in terms of free-market economics, and one gets the impression that his support of Romney is more a fervent wish to see Capitalism sustained and Obama vanquished than it is a matter of non-priority social/ideological goals being met. Steyn is nowhere near as hysterical in his calls for Romney over Gingrich/Paul/Santorum as Coulter is. One gets the distinct impression that where Steyn's assertion of Romney's conservative chops is tied to policy and possibilities for sustaining the American ideal, Coulter's may be, sadly, childishly tied to personalities and a need to be perceived as right.

She just doesn't like Gingrich, et. al., and although I'm certain that she could give you a hundred reasons to justify this dislike, it still doesn't square with christening a flip-flopping, accommodating, quasi-statist as the best conservative hope to beat Obama. She's been so wrong in identifying the Next Great Hope of the Republican Party so often in the recent past that just this once, you get the impression, she wants so badly to be right that she'll even try to sell you that someone she wouldn't consider conservative on his best day is suddenly the Next Barry Goldwater.

Frankly speaking, a bread mold with a half-assed economic plan and a pledge to do the right thing -- rather than the expedient thing -- and with a history of such behind him, ought to be able to beat Obama next November, and rather handily, at that.

Obama, entering the home stretch of the lamest presidency in American History, is little more than an empty shirt that utters speeches fed to him by brilliant writers. Obama doesn't do anything; he simply floats the idea out there and then expects someone else to do the actual work. If anything, Barack Obama is set to achieve the impossible, and start a movement to get James Earl Carter's portrait on a postage stamp, or the $4-1/2 dollar bill, as people begin to refer to the flabby malaise of the Post-Nixon 1970's as "The Good Old Days".

It took Barack Obama to make the days of Odd/Even gas rationing, Iranian-held Hostages, stagflation, wear-your-sweater paternalism, and the Pet Rock appear to be a Gilded Age of Great Statesman and Happiness. Anyone could beat that, and Romney not least of all, but the question is not "who will win?", but "what will win?".

If we're talking "what" in terms of hard-core political philosophy and ideology (and here we mean the hard-core social conservatives), then it's hard to see how Romney is your choice of champion. But apparently, Romney must possess some strange power that I'm not aware of, because the greatest advocates -- amongst them Coulter -- of that sort of conservatism are willing to fervently back that which they formerly despised, discounted and discarded, labelling such people with the approbation "not a REAL conservative", and "just as good as a democrat".

Steyn's position is easier to see; he likes Romney because he agrees with him, in the main, and because Steyn thinks in terms of a conservative movement which makes advances where possible under present circumstances, rather than in terms of a all-consuming conservative activism. Coulter, apparently, likes Romney simply because he's not Gingrich, and this, somehow, suffices, even if he does have a problem with telling the truth or staying on the same side of the Pro-Life Street for more than five minutes. Then again, it wasn't all that long ago that Ann Coulter told us that Mike Pence was the Greatest Conservative Evah! and should have been pressed into service as the REAL conservative alternative to G.W. Bush tenure. One wonders what Ann Coulter is smoking, sometimes.

Of course, Pence was never any such thing, and was happily earmarking his way through a lackluster Congressional career, like any good ticket-puncher who's main ability was never much more than to parrot the proper slogans, pretend to believe in what everyone else did, and then do what was good for Mike Pence.

Then again, perhaps this is the similarity that explains Coulter's support of Romney? In any case, it is my opinion that no matter how brilliant she might be, no matter how smart and acute she is in making her case for conservatism, that Ann Coulter is perhaps the worst judge of who or what actually is conservative; her aim, apparently, is not so much to advance a conservative agenda, it's to be one of the shapers of conservative thought and activism. In this regard, she's willing, in my eyes, to drive the Romney bandwagon for the simple reward of having been right and relevant.

There can be no other explanation for this "Conservative Mitt Romney" meme on Coulter's part, at least, except to raise her own profile in "the Movement" by backing the "right" horse, this time, even if it means hypocrisy. Coulter has gone all "Establishment" on us, while Steyn makes a better case in terms of pragmatism: it's better to have someone who espouses and advances some conservative views (mostly economic) where possible, and who then leaves much of the social folderol where it belongs -- for a time when we're not thisclose to starving and living in a Third World State. Only populations which are comfortable, confident, and unthreatened by the impending doom of terrorist attack or collapse have the time and energy to discuss such matters like Abortion, Gay Marriage, and whether you should be able to own an unregistered Sherman tank and a brace of RPG's to serve all your recreational deer hunting requirements.

Steyn's support of "Conservative Romney" is easier to explain, then, if your purpose is to set things aright in this country in stages and by priorities, and to work within the framework of what is presently possible: you must first fix the economy and restore some semblance of free-market capitalism in order to begin addressing all the other problems we face, and so Romney, the businessman, does seem to offer more in this regard than any of the other candidates. Romney the social-conservative-lite in the race (discounting Ron Paul's insanity for what it is), the prevaricator, the flip-flopper, the slick used-car-salesman-huckster with a reputation for saying anything he thinks he needs to say and contradicting himself at every turn, is not what Coulter, just three short years ago, would have termed "one of us", i.e a REAL conservative.

Especially since the Pray-All-Day Rick Perry has dropped out of the race, and Ann's once evil arch nemesis, John McCain, has endorsed Romney with gusto.

Go figure.

Steyn's position is more tenable, and understandable; one must fight the conservative fight in much the same way as a military commander would fight a major battle. Columns of troops advance where they can, hold their positions where they must, and the overall strategy is tied to winning and pressing piecemeal incremental strategic advantages, rather than in attempting to annihilate a formidable foe in one fell swoop.

But in either case, is Mitt Romney really all that conservative? I don't see it, but then again, I don't make a fortune writing books, gracing National Review or guest hosting for Sean and Rush, so what do I know? I'm just some dude in his pajamas that asks stupid questions, and then gives half-assed opinions.

I'll give Steyn and Coulter credit (they've earned it) for being smarter than I am, but unless there's some great subtlety that my tiny intellect has missed, I'm hard-pressed to figure out how a guy most said was a shill a few years ago suddenly became the Ur-Conservative choice for 2012, and how it was that they both arrived at this formulation.

UPDATE: Edited, as I've apparently spelled Ann Coulter's last name incorrectly at least fifty times. My apologies.

If This Is What Real Life Looks Like…

2012-01-18T21:50:00.006-05:00

...then we're all screwed, blued, and tattooed.

I am a voracious consumer of television. I don’t know specifically when this bad habit started, I only know that television is a part of about half my normal day. I watch the news religiously (thank that non-existent deity for Fox) and The History Channel, and most sporting events (hockey and football) are about as close to a religious experience as I can manage.

My television viewing habits used to be quite selective, but this has changed since I have taken up residence with my new/old girlfriend. Her viewing habits are, shall we say, not quite as discerning as mine. This fact has led me to a whole slew of new viewing experiences that, quite frankly, cause me to fear for the future of the human species.

Because my beloved is addicted to what is euphemistically referred to as “Reality Television”, and unfortunately, some aspects of the genre now have me hooked. This makes me want to simultaneously vomit and volunteer to be forcibly sterilized. If this is what Reality is like for most people then I must have been sleeping under a rock somewhere; I can honestly say that I have never known anyone like most of the douchebags I’ve see on these programs. Amazingly, I was not aware of just how much stupidity is going on around me, apparently 24 hours a day, that I’m failing to notice, and it has me thinking that I have to get outside more.

Armed to the teeth, of course. Because I do need to be protected from these idiots.

Most of this “Reality” fare is simply shocking, and leaves one to ponder this question:

If an extraterrestrial being landed on this planet tomorrow, and if he all he had to learn the basics of human culture was television only, just what would he learn, and would it cause him to either; a) tell the home world not to bother coming here, seeing as there is no intelligent life, or b) advise his superiors that the bags of flesh inhabiting this world are ripe for conquest and enslavement?

Let’s start with one of the more disturbing reality shows which is the newly-returned Fear Factor, a show in which contestants are apparently willing to risk life, limb, and their dignity for the chance to win $50,000.

The show consists of a series of stunts that follows a repetitive pattern which always include tests of stamina, agility, and intestinal fortitude, undertaken in an extreme manner. Contestants are left to hang upside down 15 stories above concrete, to try to unshackle themselves from all sorts of contrivances underwater before they drown, and of course, eat the most vile and disgusting substances known to man that did not originate in a Waffle House or White Castle.

Because let’s face it; one has not really lived until you’ve eaten raw elk penis, rancid fish heads, hissing cockroaches, all manner of molds, spores and fungi, and done it while lying within a locked, Lucite coffin, full of snakes and scorpions, trying to free yourself from a couple of padlocks before said box is destroyed in a horrific explosion. From what I've been told, the stunts are becoming ever-more extreme and it's simply a matter of time -- in my opinion -- before they end up killing someone.

I don’t care about anyone’s “competitive nature”; that’s simply too much danger and degradation to endure for a prize that will eventually equal less than half-a-year’s median salary, after taxes. If you’re lucky. One gets the distinct impression that there is a certain class of Americans out there that would literally eat their own shit for money, and the only way they can somehow manage to make that unpleasant prospect fun is to do it before a national television audience.

If our alien visitor wanted to know all about a certain class of people we call “Italians”, then he’s in store for a real treat.

We Italians were once the people who ushered in and fostered the Renaissance. We used to be the inheritors of the Roman legacy. We used to beam with pride at the Italian Roll Call of the world’s greatest men: Caesar, Da Vinci, Marconi, Michelangelo, Cicero, Galileo, Dante. Anyone with half a brain would be damned proud to be associated with, arguably, the brightest stars of the intellectual, scientific, political and artistic galaxies.

And then you watch an episode of Mob Wives and you begin to wonder if it’s possible to change your ethnicity in the same way that others get new noses or boobs.

Mob Wives follows the exploits (such as they are) of four Mafia princesses. They have achieved this lofty ideal either through accident of birth or marriage, but somehow it entitles them to be famous and play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. Personally, I find it little more than four illiterate whores living vicariously on the vile misdeeds of others, and presumably upon the ill-gotten gains, as well. About the only accurate thing in the show is the Italian propensity to both yell and curse, and it does nothing to indicate that Italian women are very often true ladies. But, it can, and does, get worse, because they're all living and hanging out in my hometown of Staten Island, New York.

So now you know why I stay inside the house so much, I guess...

Of course, there’s always The Jersey Shore, a show about the exploits of what we call in these parts ‘The Bridge and Tunnel Set’, only suspended in a noxious jello mold of massive quantities of hair gel and rank stupidity that can only be remedied, I think, by multiple gunshots. One wonders just what a girl has to do to get a name like ‘Snooki’, and how many arrests and STD’s did she accumulate whilst earning it?This show proves, once and for all, there’s a very good reason why stereotypes – of all kinds – exist; because they’re often all too sadly true.

I rather doubt you'd find one legitimate high school graduate on The Jersey Shore, and the one girl who actually did get her diploma probably performed an act of oral sex in order to get it.

If you’re interested in what life is like in most of America’s ghettos, then you can watch one of my new favorites, The First 48. The show follows the investigations of real-life homicide detectives, and all too often, the victim is a minority. In this show you will learn that although African-Americans all have given names, no one ever uses them. Instead, men prance about with names like G-Bizzy, Skeeter Man, and Goldtoof, and very often, their closest and dearest friends (often their partners in crime) can say – with a straight face – that while they’ve known Boo Boo, Hammerhead and Stankypants forever – they’ve been tight, solid homeboys for 15 years now – no one knew they’re REAL names were Robespieere, Eustacean and Vitalis.

You’ll also learn that all African-American males, either suspects or victims, appear to be “aspiring rappers” or “music producers”, which I guess is a polite euphemism for drug dealer, gangbanger or deadbeat dad, which is what most of the people covered truly are. You’ll also discover that most of the victims are often dead for no logical reason whatsoever, except that the preferred method of conflict resolution in many African-American neighborhoods is to break out an AK-47 and indiscriminately spray bullets rather than settle things over a beer and a burger.

When there is an unfortunate case in which an upstanding pillar of the community -- a good father, a beloved coach, the well-known neighborhood watchman -- is killed, there is typically absolutely no remorse shown by the suspects at all. There is usually also no help forthcoming from witnesses or other members of the community who will then consequently bitch and whine about the violence done in the streets everyday, expecting someone to do something without their input or help. For some reason,. African-Americans seem to think -- one would get this idea from watching The First 48 -- that the police don't really need their help, and that talking to a cop about your dead relatives' activities and associations (they call it 'snitching') is the next best thing to sticking your bare tongue up a leper's ass.

About the only emotions one ever sees on The First 48 are the raw grief of the victim’s loved ones, or the policeman's irritation and frustration, and then there's always that one scene at the end, the one where the cops know they have their man because you can see him on the hidden interview camera tucking his arms inside his shirt. Invariably every suspect does it. It’s the reaction one expects from someone whose blood has just run cold in the presence of the police, and not because he fears for his safety or feels remorse for having taken someones life, but because he knows he’s about to lose his freedom, a commodity he usually badly abused while he had it.

There's another brand of nonsense shows which display that category of people I like to call “Possessed-of-just-enough-animal-intelligence-to-eat-shit-and-fuck”. This category cuts across all racial and ethnic lines and proves that Darwin just might have been right.

The Jerry Springer Show and The Maury Povich Show will introduce you to a class of human being that ranks somewhere between slime mold and that brown ring you find around the toilet when you don’t clean it regularly. These shows are a cornucopia of the decidedly lascivious underbelly of American Life – transvestites, lesbians, S&M aficionados, Rednecks, Trailer Trash, Welfare Mothers, the professional deadbeats, in short, the reason why most people should have to take a basic IQ test before they’re allowed to breed.

Springer’s show is so infamous, I should think, that its standard fare barely bears repeating. The truly interesting, and disgusting, sideshow takes place on Povich’s show, which is a wall-to-wall fourth-rate melodrama of paternity disputes, cheating baby daddies/mommas, polygraph tests and pap psychology. Recently, here in New York state our politicians have been debating the question of requiring all convicted felons to submit a DNA sample to a state database for use by the various police departments. They shouldn’t bother: Povich has done so many paternity tests (Is He or Isn’t He the Father -- it’s virtually the entire show) they should just ask him if they can use his.

It would certainly be a much cheaper option, and save the taxpayers a shitload of money.

Our rhetorical extraterrestrial would probably despair of finding anything worthwhile about this planet, if television was his only guide.

Watching this disgusting parade which masquerades as entertainment makes me despair, too.

Don't Take That Victory Lap Yet, Mitt...

2012-01-12T11:13:00.001-05:00

#Excelsior502 - Mitt Romney has won the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, and has, de jure, become the presumptive GOP nominee in the Great Battle to Defeat Stupidity in 2012.

Big Deal.

I do not wish to pee in Mr. Romney's Wheaties; after all, winning a beauty contest that is typically dominated by the man who manages to dish out the most potato salad to the Godbot farm-welfare set (Iowa), or winning a contest which is designed to cater to the specific mental deficiencies of the blue-blooded descendants of 17th century witch-burners (New Hampshire) cannot be easy feats. They certainly are expensive accomplishments, I'll grant you.

But then again, it's not as if we're talking Mitt's personal fortune here, is it?

The President of the United States, strictly speaking, is not elected to pass out the corn dogs and fried Twinkies, nor is he elected to pay lip service to the questionable social psychoses of the most unreliable of political beasts -- the Northeastern Republican who's conservatism begins and ends with his wallet and special social status (so he thinks). You know, the sort who on the one hand complains the current dipshit in the White House is a radical socialist peddling dangerous class warfare demagoguery, and then somehow finds it perfectly acceptable to question Romney's unbridled capitalist past when he's winning?

But, I digress. The point is this: neither Iowa nor New Hampshire represents the will of the majority of Americans. They are simply Potemkin displays of democracy in which the purpose is not so much to begin the serious business of selecting the best candidate, but to begin the process of excluding candidates. The one's who win these two contests are typically those who have the money to spread around and who can pass an extremely narrow test based upon mostly-bullshit ideological concerns; those who haven't greased enough palms, or who can't talk the talk, fall into a secondary status which begins the process of starving them of funds and media attention.

After all, who is going to keep paying Jon Huntsman's bills in the next few months? Who would want to? But while Huntsman might be a rotten candidate who's view of Republican politics and conservatism may be skewed by his own special brand of stupidity, it doesn't stand to reason that he should be silenced for lack of funds, either. Those who cannot pass the test of Iowa and New Hampshire drop out of the race, almost a full year before any vote that really counts is actually taken. Let's not even begin to discuss the mind-boggling system of some of these states coming up in which registered democrats are able to vote in republican primaries -- talk about the potential for fucking with the integrity of the political process? -- and vice-versa.

Anyways, we're talking about Mitt Romney and why he shouldn't get all excited about his little winning streak. His problems begin in earnest next week in South Carolina, where his money probably won't buy him as many votes. The problem, from my point of view, with Mitt Romney is that he's not liable -- at this point -- to achieve much better than a dead tie with Resident O-boo-boo, and he doesn't inspire much confidence that he can do better.

Mitt may think he's begun the process of coasting to eventual victory (many in the media seem to agree), but the process is about to get tougher, as it should, and today's presumptive front-runner just might be tomorrow's also-ran. One just hopes against hope, however, that the candidates already being dismissed because of two third-place-or-lower showings aren't totally starved of the contributions they'll need to keep going. Romney will eventually falter, and someone credible will need to still be on the scene to either pick up the banner, or join his team and bolster any chances he has left.

He's (Romney) gotten his "Gimmee's". That is, he's bought all the contests that can be bought, and he'll need something extra this time. Can he deliver? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here's why Mitt's got some trouble brewin':

1. Religion: although it should not matter to anyone with a full set of chromosomes just how another goes about the process of worshipping an imaginary being, it most certainly does in the places where the primary process moves to next, i.e. South Carolina and Florida. Religion usually looms as a pretty large subject in places where incest is rampant (although I have it on good authority that, somehow, second cousins don't count), like parts of the South and Utah.

Okay, that was gratuitous. Sorry.

Anyways, the bulk of the GOP electorate in South Carolina calls itself Evangelical Christian, which is twice the stupidity for half the price. To these people, Romney's Mormon faith marks him as some sort of pagan savage. It is safe to say that unless someone puts a gun to his head, no self-respecting southern Christian (regardless of denomination) is going to pull the lever for a Mormon candidate. That's almost like joining the Dark Side, and they cancel your reservation for the Rapture.

The GOP is (shotgun?) wedded to a strategy of winning the South, which means that the party must present a candidate who can speak to the Southern Christian trinity of God, Guns and Gays, or at least gain a modicum of their trust and respect. This means they want someone who will promise to put the Ten Commandments on condom wrappers, make sure everyone gets their own RPG without a licence, and builds concentration camps to house the queers and abortionists. Okay, so that's a bit of hyperbole, but this is what truly matters to many of these folks more than most other things.

Romney represents a branch of Christianity that they cannot abide for a bunch of reasons that mostly revolve around...who the fuck cares? So far as I'm concerned, there's no difference between an Evangelical, Presbyterian, Mormon or Seventh-Day Adventist: it's all insanity to me.

But it's not just religious differences and prejudices which come into play; it's the social views attached to them that are probably even more important-yet-less-relevent in an election in which economic and systemic issues are the real vital questions. Romney's had more positions on the issue of abortion than appear in the Kama Sutra. Who knows what the fuck Romney thinks of Gay Marriage, as I haven't heard him address this question yet. The Southern Evanglical Douchebag wants those questions answered, and he'll ask them.

I haven't any confidence that Romney can explain his way out of those questions in a way that keeps him a decent level of Southern support.

2. The "Electability" Question; I question as to whether this should even be a question at all. I wonder who the fuck invented it, too. As far as I understand it, it's all about appearances and assumptions, mostly ginned up by the media so that they have something to talk about for the next 11 months.

In animagined contest between Romney and Obama, Romney should squeak out a victory, if only he can manage to avoid saying anything completely out of left field. Obama is such a bad president and rotten leader that his only means of achieving victory is to count on the 40% of the population that votes democrat like most people take a dump (casually, reflexively, with little to no thought in it), and then let his opponent do or say something that make him -- on a very shallow level -- appear to be "out of touch" or "unprepared".

Romney would simply have to avoid saying anything astoundingly stupid or untrue for about four months next spring and summer. This might be tricky, as Romney has a bad habit of talking himself into corners. He's too slick, by half. He's ideologically all over the place. His thought process is half republican boilerplate, half social liberalism. It's hard to keep from saying the wrong thing, and Romney has the bad timing thing down pat.

Which is why I wonder who it is that keeps saying Mitt Romney is "electable". He's only such in the sense that the alternative is so painfully bad. Romney, on his own in a general election, is no more electable than anyone else. Romney alone does not give one hope that he can generate the down-ticket buzz that gets him a few more GOP senators and congresscritters to make his job easier, should he get elected. Romney alone is not electable, but Romney as part of a GOP team that combines two candidate's strengths is far more electable than anything else.

Which is why you hope that Santorum and Gingrich, at least, manage to stay relevant to the process, and why you also hope the candidates don't beat the rhetorical snot out of one another; Romney, should he prevail, is going to need one or both of them to shore up his weaknesses.

There's your "electability" right there: a GOP team, rather than a single persona. Let the dimwits run their deity Odoofus, divorced from a plan of action and without the ability to formulate one, against a Team America consisting of members who can focus expertise on an issue, like...say...the economy, while the other tackles government reform or foreign policy.

If the GOP runs a campaign of personalities and "It" factor, it looses with Romney. It must offer a solution that is not based on such intangibles as who has the nicest hair, speaking voice, or is better-dressed. That's how democrats vote, not adults.

I wouldn't start poping champagne corks and building floats for Inauguration Day just yet. Romney is about to be vetted some more, and in ways which he hasn't had to deal with, either. Stay tuned.

GIRL WHO WAS MISTAKENLY DEPORTED TO COLUMBIA GOT WHAT SHE DESERVED

2012-01-06T10:35:00.001-05:00

Sorry to break up the pity party, but I can't believe the outrage around the blogosphere and in my Twitter feed about Jakadrien Turner, the young lady who was mistakenly deported to Columbia by ICE agents in April of last year. There's all kinds of hate toward the ICE agents, the Columbian government, Houston police and the media for not treating it like they would a White girl in the same situation. If that's the argument, say that, but don't bash the agencies for doing their job.

I've read and re-read every piece of information available about this incident - ten, eleven times - because I wanted to be sure that I wasn't missing anything. If I am missing anything, somebody please let me know because all I see is a series of unfortunate events that she brought upon herself, and a bunch of people tripping on this girl's race.

At 14-years old, when she lived in Dallas, Jakadrien ran away from home. Her Grandmother said that her Grandfather's death and her parents' split-up drove her to do so. She ended up in Houston where she was arrested for theft. She didn't have an ID on her, so she did what anybody who doesn't want to get caught would do: give a fake name. Ahh, but the fake name was a real name indeed, belonging to someone who apparently earned deportation status.

So...she was deported.

After Columbian authorities couldn't find anything wrong on their end, she was released. She obtained a work card and has been there ever since. She's pregnant now and apparently has or had a steady boyfriend, as advertised on her Facebook page. I also understand they've detained her since our government has begun to show interest in her.

Jakadrien choose to lie about her identity. She even maintained her fake identity throughout the whole deportation process. It's not like she was arrested in Houston one day, then sent to Columbia the next day without a process. She could've called home then.

I mean, I understand her Granny being upset and everything, but Jakadrien seemed happy in Columbia up until the part where they began holding her again.

Why Iowa Shouldn't Matter...

2012-01-03T12:58:00.007-05:00

Ho-fucking-hum. Iowa caucuses...can't....stay...awake...

I'm wondering why it is that we should expend so much time and energy wondering what Iowan republicans think. I'm not suggesting that the good people of Iowa are not worth listening to -- if only because even blind hogs still find the occasional acorn, after all -- but because of the sort of republicans they generally tend to be.

Personally, I'm of the mind that there are really only two Iowans one should ever take seriously:

James Tiberius Kirk and Iowahawk.

And while one may be a fictional character (seriously, has anyone ever seen Iowahawk and his mild-mannered, beer-guzzling alter-ego in the same place, at the same time, ever?)they still make more sense to me than any of the morons on display in those Man-in-the-Street interviews from Ames or Des Moines which have dominated the news for the last month.

(Author's Note: If you're still not reading Iowahawk regularly, you are a flaming retard. Iowahawk should be considered one of the basic food groups like caffeine, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG and saturated trans fats. Get your daily requirements!).

I know, I know...you can't tar the inhabitants of an entire state based on the drooling responses to a dopey trick question asked by an openly libtarded journalist with the epithet "moron"; that's totally unfair in that way that your liberal friends will often ask you to consider the self-esteem-sapping, psychobable-y consequences of a risque joke by inserting "black" in place of "homosexual" or 'jew". But one would be hard-pressed to find any signs of intelligence in the process of the Iowa Caucuses.While we expect the majority of candidates to be stupid (sorry, Rick Perry), it's quite frightening when you realize just how stupid the mass of the electorate seems to be.

Then again, the stupidity of the common man was evident long before this latest go-round. After all, Bill Clinton got elected twice and some 52% of the electorate -- particularly Iowans --pinned their fortunes to a clearly unprepared and unqualified Barack Obama. It's just that the exquisite, honey-sweet and specific brand of republican stupidity that has been on display this last month leads one to start to question the validity and direction of the Modern GOP.

To begin with, let's start by examining just what calls itself 'conservative' (small 'c' intentional) in Iowa. They seem to come in two varieties:

The first species seems totally concerned with telling other people how they should live. They believe the proper role of the government is to impose a strict Christian morality. These are the voters who call themselves Social Conservatives, and their pet peeves often revolve around three, fundamental issues:

God, Guns, and Gay Rights.

These are the greater mass of Born-again and Evangelical Christian doofuses who believe that American Culture (such as it is) is in rapid decline, and that this decline is emblematic of a moral failing for which God herself will punish us. America must repent of it's sins (Abortion, Gay Marriage, Internet Porn, and MSNBC) and take to the righteous path of obeying the Word of God, or it shall be laid waste with great suffering, destruction, economic ruin, and military defeat. Those who survive will then need their shootin' irons to defend themselves against the Government Leviathan which possesses aircraft carriers, tanks, artillery and Stealth Bombers, if and when it should ever decide to go all Czech Summer on us in the resulting chaos. Good luck!

Except for the lucky people who managed to kiss Jesus' backside...they'll all be Raptured, of course. So they're not really as interested in my soul as they say, are they?

Because saving souls is what concerns them; however, they are impatient about it. The traditional roles and activities of religion in the process -- saving one soul at a time, building trust and personal relationships between institution, soul, and The Lord -- takes too much time, and requires great effort. Not to mention scads of cash. The Social Conservative wishes to turn the apparatus of government to the task of Saving Souls under the false belief that this will achieve God's work all that much faster.

The Social Conservative wants the government to use it's powers (particularly those of legislation, taxation and appropriation) in much the same way the Libtard wants to use them -- to support those causes they consider the most just, which is to say, those that support their own highly-suspect beliefs and mindset. That doing so, in the Christians sense, might literally mean that the earthly effects of those spiritually-directed policies might be less than stellar, doesn't even enter into their thinking (after all, what does God care if we're all gainfully employed, or that our levees are in good repair, or that the Marines have bullets when there's abortionists to hang, and Gay Boys to put in Concentration Camps...ooops...re-education camps... where they learn to Pray the Gay Away, and accept Christ as their personal Lord and Savior?).

That which is directed to the ends of a Higher Power leaves those concerned with the Here-and-Now-Rather-Than-The-Hereafter with the short end of the stick.

Now, I'm often accused of being Anti-Christianity on this page, which is patently false. Christianity, the philosophy, has much to offer. My problem is with Christians, and in particular, a certain brand of Christians who can't see the trees for the forest. Using the power of the government to first establish (even unofficially) a State Religion, and then turning it to the purposes of that religion, is hardly conservative at all. Conservatives, by and large, care about individual freedoms and personal rights, while organized religion is typically concerned with keeping people ignorant, dependant, obedient, and frightened.

After all, God doesn't grant Rights: She gives Commandments. If you disagree with that statement, then I would challenge you to count up all the "Thou Shalls..." and "Thou Shall Nots..." in the Bible, and compare them to the number of instances of "Thou Hast the Right...." you find. Get back to me on that one when you're done.

A movement, social or political, which believes that it does not have to answer to any earthly authority and does the work of an authority which is unknowable, unseen, and ultimately doesn't exist, is a dangerous movement that will instill a tyranny as great as that which it fears from it's opponents on the Left. Once you begin to justify any action by the quaint-and-unanswerable formulation of "God Wills It", it's only a short hop, skip and a jump to a Soviet-Style police state run by a the Christian version of the Taliban.

These people are not "conservative" in the sense that we would recognize the word; they're fucking nuts.

The second species of Iowan conservative is just as dangerous, and nakedly hypocritical. They bear many names -- economic conservative, small-government conservative, Free-market conservative -- but they all have one thing in common; keeping the gravy train of federal subsidies rolling, and filling their pockets. With a tax cut on top.

Iowa is awash in federal subsidy money. What this means is that Iowa's farmers are paid the the hard-earned money of New Yorkers to not grow food in order to 'stablize' crop prices. Which really means that Iowa's farmers get paid money to artificially skew the market price of their produce in their favor, and then get to rape us at the checkout counter. Iowa's farmers also, perversely, get paid the hard-earned money of Arkansas' taxpayers to grow crops specifically for use in biofuels which largely suck, don't work, and artificially inflate the price of gasoline and just about every other product you can think of.

In other words, Iowans are getting paid (twice) to fuck every one else in the backside. And the beauty of the entire scam is that the rape victim gets to pay for the privelege!

If anything, far from being free-market, small-government, economic conservatives, Iowa's republicans are probably amongst the biggest recipients of welfare in the entire country!

One cannot consider oneself 'conservative' while simultaneously arguing that the entire structure of agricultural and industrial welfare system administered by the oversized-overstuffed-and-overbearing federal government, operating specifically to undermine competition and free markets, should be preserved and extended at the expense of everyone else. Either Iowa's farmers can survive in a true free market, or they can't. People either wish to buy ethanol or they don't. Why should anyone be paid to not produce products that are needed, and conversely, also paid to make a products that no one seems to want?

Didn't the Obama Administration just get into huge trouble over Solyndra for just such a thing? Or have we forgotten already?

And of course, both species want lower taxes. Because let's face it; it's hard enough having to live amongst heathens, or spending your days not farming, manipulating markets for your benefit with the connivance of the federal government, standing at the mailbox waiting for the subsidy checks to roll in, without having to pay taxes, too.

Above all, what I truly hate about what I've seen this past month overflowing out of Iowa like a toilet at the Port Authority is the smugness. The arrogance that comes with the knowledge that one can say one thing, but mean another, that you won't get called out on it, and that some schmuck who's willing to spend a billion bucks of someone elsr's money for a job that pays $400k a year will kiss your ass for it, too. Couple this with the extraordinary belief that some Mid-Westerners seem to have that they are a race apart, a special breed, and you can begin to see why I have a problem with the Iowa caucuses that goes beyond their already-proven ability to get it all consistently wrong,destroying the promise of many a GOP candidate through their special brand of insanity in the process.

I can predict this much: by the time it's all over tomorrow night, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum will be the big 'winners' of the Iowa Caucuses. None of them matches up well against Obama in 2012; Paul is crazy. Santorum is soooo 1950's and uncharismatic. Romney is too vulnerable to the charges of inconstancy and hypocrisy. The candidates which can defeat Obama handily -- Gingrich in particular -- will be wounded (perhaps fatally) by an Iowa loss that will have largely been engineered by people who didn't like the fact that they didn't promise to toss the moneychangers out of the temple and pledge to protect the current system of farm welfare with their very lives.

In other words, the GOP voters of Iowa are no better than the Food-stamp-and-Crack- Whore voters of Watts, Detroit, or Harlem on the opposite end of the Political Spectrum.

In effect, the GOP voters of Iowa, by artificially skewing the results of the Caucuses according to issues that largely do not concern the greater mass of Americans -- may begin the process by which Barack Obama squeaks out a second term, and coincidentally bringing about the reality of that national decline they all fear so fucking much.

Let me just say it now, just in case I need to later:

Nice job, Assholes.

The Case Against Barack Obama...

2011-12-27T13:45:00.001-05:00

As if one actually needed to be made?

Anyhow, I have not bashed President Frequent-Flyer-Miles for some time now, which is not surprising: in order to criticize someone for anything, it is first necessary for them to have done something. Barack Obama, as I have said many times before on this page, is simply not a doer so it has been difficult to criticize anything after his first year in office -- except his lack of action. However, the last few months of Presidential inaction may have given new meanings to the words 'procrastination' and 'inertia'.

There simply hasn't been anything to talk about. The first year of the Obama Presidency was an easy topic to discuss and dissect, what with such juicy topics as nationalized health care, nationalized banks and auto companies, welfare-programs-disguised-as-economic-stimulus, the enormous waste of resources that was the actual Stimulus Bill, the twice-daily accusations of racism on somebody's part, the forceful implication by the administration and it's allies that mere principled disagreement with the Vacationer-in-Chief was tantamount to treason.

The second year of the Obama Experiment was simply chock full of politically-expedient bullshit; the Debt Ceiling Debates, the Libyan War, the call for an even bigger waste of taxpayer money (Son of Stimulus), Solyndra and the Green Energy Boondoggle.

Going into our Third Year with no one at the rudder, even the flow of politically-motivated crap has first slowed to a trickle and then eventually petered out into a state of complete non-action on anything. Once again Barack Obama, who's supposed to be a leader, has done what he's always done best: let someone else do (in this case, a Republican-led House of Representatives) and then cry "Obstructionist/Racist/Unfair!" at the top of his lungs.

Let's start at the very source of all of this apathy and political spinmeistering; it was clear to anyone who could draw breath without mechanical assistance in November of 2008 that Barack Obama was little more than a slick marketing campaign that took advantage of the sense of panic which gripped America at the time. If you bought the bill of goods that was the new-and-improved Kennedyesque kabuki play that was the rise of Obama, if you seriously believed in the nonsensical rhetoric about lower sea levels, international brotherhood, and an economic recovery sparked by more social and political welfare programs, then you cannot be in the least surprised that we have arrived at this current state of affairs, with a crippled President reduced to ducking hard issues and honest work.

It was perfectly clear then that Barack Obama was not prepared to do this job, and even more apparent that he didn't have the slightest clue as to how to do it. He didn't even have the intellectual honesty to admit that he wasn't even willing to learn, or to even try. Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid ran things for the first year of the Obama Presidency, dragging a clueless Commander-in-Chump along for the ride.

When the ride ended at a Republican recapture of the House of Representatives, the people around President Doofus set about portraying their wounded and clueless man as the victim of a conspiracy of racist Tea Parties and nasty Republicans, and cried victim.

When that didn't work, it was back to the old democratic (small 'd' intentional) party tactic of good old fashioned Class Warfare, and when that, also, failed to do anything except make Obama look like an even bigger retard, Plan C was to simply do nothing at all (the better to safeguard any chance of squeaking out another electoral win) and complaining that your political opposition is dead set against your special brand of mental diarrhea (did you really expect them to embrace it lovingly and enthusiastically?). All the while, Barack Obama pretends to be above the fray, to be shocked and concerned at the acrimony of the political landscape...and go on vacation...again.

We're now into Plan D, similar to what Muhammed Ali once coined the Rope-A-Dope Strategy; go totally defensive and protect yourself. Avoid the offensive by doing or saying anything that threatens to keep people interested in the political process, or which gives an opening to the ideological and political enemies of the regime. Barack Obama is more than willing to simply sit back, and make his political enemies punch themselves out, all the time sincerely hoping that the crowd gets bored or that your opponent will make that one fatal mistake. This plays out politically in the following fashion:

Obama says and does nothing, and lets the business of government be carried out through the two warring houses of Congress. The man who simply polluted the television screen with useless, bullshit speeches a year ago is now rarely seen. Every once in a while he presents what appears to be an opening in his defense, and then comes out punching when the enemy falls for the feint (and often, even when he doesn't). He then throws haymakers and prays that one connects, only to return to the defensive posture when he doesn't.

If you need a literal explanation of how this works in the political sense, then think of it this way: the recent Payroll Tax Cut debate has Obama actually agreeing to extend the tax cut, but only for two months. He basically says "You republicans love tax cuts, you should love this one..." knowing full well that he's only appearing to give them what they want, just on terms he knows that they cannot accept. When they, predictably, don't fall for this feint, Obama goes back on the defensive, saying the Other Side won't take "yes" for an answer, and is doing further damage to the economy.

Anyone with half a brain knows that a two month extension of a tax that does absolutely nothing to spur hiring or to increase demand for goods and services is no economic panacea. However, the purpose of this whole deception is not intended to produce any tangible result: it's simply to keep up the pretense that Obama, who does nothing, is actually trying to do something against unreasonable opposition.

Let's be completely fair to President Marriott-Suites: he was never prepared, by education, temperament, experience, or intelligence, to do this job. He was doubly unprepared when you stop to consider the the circumstances under which he took the job. Still, he should have known (or the people around him should have told him) all about the trouble he would soon face. Apparently, no one cared: the purpose of Obama's elevation wasn't so much to fix pressing national concerns as much as they were the last gasp of a 1960's brand of socialism. For that task, Obama was perfectly suited; for the task of running a country embroiled in two wars, teetering on the brink of insolvency, politically divided, Obama was the proverbial plaything of democratic party interests who knew how to manipulate the levers of power to their advantage.

Obama was the perfect empty vessel, the perfect figurehead behind which the Woodstock and Communism-was-a-good-idea-only-poorly-executed crowd could hide behind while they gave it once last try.

And now here he stands (when he isn't on vacation, that is) with the following record to run on in 2012: the economy is no better, and arguably worse. We may be withdrawing troops from Iraq, but the War in Afghanistan continues and we've become embroiled in a third in Libya (don't you believe that we're out of that one, yet); the democratic party -- barring some unforeseen miracle -- is poised to suffer electoral defeats next year that may banish it to the political hinterlands for a decade or more. The country's debt has tripled on Obama's watch. And quite frankly, one wonders just how much Obama hands-on time was spent in crafting the policies that will, now, be forever associated with him.

My guess is none. Obama simply reads what someone puts in his teleprompter, and exudes a pretense of intelligence and competence. Work and sacrifice is always somoene else's responsibility, whether it's America's fault for being too soft and lazy, or Republicans' fault for not passing a bunch of legislation and regulation that's tantamount to their own suicide note as elected officals or a party. All the while Barack Obama plays the victim; pretending to be misunderstood one day, a victim of racism the next, the helpless plaything of political forces beyond his control the day after that.

And every day that goes by, he does less and less, and accepts responsibility for even less than that. Note, however, that he doesn't seem to have any problem whatsoever picking up the paycheck, attending the fundraisers, or dragging Air Force One and the Secret Service to yet another tony vacation destination on someone else's dime.

Frankly, the less he does the better, so far as I'm concerned. He done enough, already, by being either easy to manipulate, too stupid or stubborn for his own good, or just plain ideologically unsuited to our current realities. It's often said that "Less is More", and never was this adage more apt/

If there's anything Barack Obama HAS accomplished, it is sadly this:

He has reinforced every negative stereotype about a black man it is possible to think of. He has also lent even more credence to the voices of the pro-colonialists of the past who warned that the dissolution of the old European Empires would spell world-wide catastrophe because never before in recorded history had a stable, economically-secure, militarily-strong democratic state ever been run by a black man. They have been proven right, unfortunately, and surprisingly it's all happened on the watch of an African-American, a native to this culture, educated in our finest universities, but unfortunately still obsessed with discredited racial, economic, and social theories that blind him to reality.

Barack Obama makes Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela look like fucking Pericles of Athens.

The tragedy of Barack Obama isn't so much that he hasn't been effective; it's that the next African-American with Presidential ambitions will wear his failed administration around his/her neck like a lead albatross. This isn't fair; but it will happen. Obama may have been the first Black man to be elected President, but he stands a very good chance of being the last...ever.

There is no reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2012, unless you, like him, still live in the 19th Century world of exaggerated Dickensian inequity; you still believe that welfare is better than work and personal merit, or are a lazy bastard who leaves the heavy lifting in all things to others and takes undue credit where available, or are somoene who lays approbation for your own failure at someone else's feet. If you believe that symbolism is more important than substane, if you believe that stirring up the animosities of the the past is more important than fixing the problems of the present from which they've spawned, if you believe with all your heart that stealing borrowed (Chinese) money from Peter to pay Paul is sound economic policy, then by all means, vote for Barack Obama.

I'll see you on the bread line, assuming there's any bakers left by then, and they haven't all been unionized, legislated out of existence, or the trade falls completely by the wayside because there's no more carbon-spewing bakeries.

But, if you care about your country, if you'd like an opportunity to have a job one day, if you're sick and tired of the pantomime theatre that democratic party politics has become, if you're tired of seeing latter-day hippies roaming the streets demanding high-paying jobs geared to their useless Master's in Gender Studies, all the while complaining it's Wall Street's fault they're having to pay off college loans and wait tables, then go the other way. Romney, Gingrich, it almost doesn't matter, anymore, so long as it's somebody with a makes-sense plan and the seeming ability to at least put in a day's work. And vote Republican all the way down ticket, too. It only works if there's enough R's to make sure some of those ideas get a fair hearing and can be passed.

At this point in time anyone but Barack Obama -- Charles Manson, Adolph Hitler, Stalin, Francisco Franco, Ebola Virus -- is a better choice for President of the United States in 2012.

Why Conservatives Fear Newt Gingrich...

2011-12-19T13:50:00.002-05:00

I used to think I was a Conservative, but that was before I realized what the difference between a Conservative and a Republican really was. This realization didn't just sneak up on me, arriving with one of those "Eureka!" moments where the skies seem to part and thunder echoes across the valley, with the trumpets of angels heralding some great epiphany.
Rather, this realization came about as the result of a banning from the 'real' conservative (small 'c' intentional) website, FreeRepublic, the hip and happenin' gathering place for the mentally constipated.

My crime back then, it seems, was to make the case in 2007 that one Rudolph Giuliani was far more conservative than his other Presidential candidate cohorts in that year's primary contests. You know, the contest that eventually brought us John McCain and Sarah Palin and the national heartbreak that has been the Obama Administration, and put Mike Huckabee on television? Yeah, that one.

Anyways, it seems that if you make a halfway decent argument that someone with a proven record of conservative governance behind him would make a good President of the United States, the denizens of some Republican/Conservative precincts will argue back that unless the person in question has an impeccably unimpeachable moral record (and perfect church attendance), or that there may be a relatively minor disagreement on ideological grounds, that background means jack shit.

One of the denizens of FreeRepublic was actually alarmed enough by a simple question in 2007 that he/she saw fit to report my support for Rudy to the moderators of the site. I was (and still am) banned from making comments on that site, although if I wished it I can still read all the Biblically-infused political dribble I want. This does not bother me personally, as I've since realized that what I truly am is a Republican with some conservative leanings, and not a complete retard. But, the message was sent:
We're not interested in debate, or free speech, we just want to associate with people who think and believe the way we do.

The question I had asked? Paraphrasing, it was this:

Why was Rudy Giuliani, who many on FreeRepublic deemed unfit to hold the Presidency and vilified for having been divorced, not a credible conservative, but Ronald Reagan, himself a divorcee, lionized and almost elevated to sainthood?

The general answer was that even if Giuliani was a small-government, law-and-order, no-nonsense, fiscal Conservative, his lack of orthodoxy on other issues (most revolving around abortion, Gay Rights and Gun Rights)made him the next best thing to Satan. Rather than have to answer such questions with logic and reason, the good doofuses at FreeRepublic just decided it was easier to silence me, letting me know my posting privileges were revoked because I was, quote, "trolling for Rudy".

It was then that I realized that what I had once considered a righteous political ideology to no longer be anything of the sort. Whatever conservatism had once been, it was no more (the last Republican Congress, packed to the gills with 'Family Values" conservatives, pretty much killed the idea that conservatism was a responsible force) and not because it had many failings as a philosophy but because it was steadily being embraced by a bunch of retards who put their faith and their bulletproof stupidity ahead of their logic and enlightened self-interest..

Giuliani eventually bowed out of the primaries in 2007, having never gained a critical mass of support. Mainly this was because the Republican primary process is not about policy or even achievement; it's about kissing the asses of the self-appointed hall monitors of American Society. If the contest had been about actual achievement and policy, Giuliani would have wiped the floor with his rather lackluster competition, and then it's not much of a stretch as to whether he would have won a general election. Rudy might have been a much better option than the two we eventually got, anyways.

But several months of 'real' conservative (small 'c' intentional) invective -- Rudy once wore a dress as a gag, Rudy was the Anti-Christ because he once had a gay roommate, Rudy was tarred with the label of Adulterer because of his marital problems, his children hated his guts, he was widely seem as a 'gun grabber' and deadly threat to the 2nd Amendment-- were the proverbial Death by a Thousand Cuts. There was no inbred redneck who would ever pull the lever for Giuliani in a primary because he just wasn't one of them, and by that we mean that he didn't spend seven day a week in prayer, praying for an eighth day just so he could have the time to repeat the process, and spend the rest of his time cleaning his shotgun, guzzling cheap beer and watching NASCAR.

Above all, however, was the fear that while a Giuliani presidency might well have addressed many of the pressing problems of the day -- ballooning federal deficits, an out-of-control court system, terrorism, tax and economic policy -- that because Rudy did not hold out the prospect of being the type to engrave the Ten Commandments on all public monuments, execute abortionists, frog-march the Gay Rights crowd to the ovens, and promise free flamethrowers and RPG's for everyone -- none of that really mattered. What truly matters to these folks is that they get to tell everyone else how to live according to their own questionable moral code and wild-hair-up-your-ass mindset in much the same way they claim their opposite numbers do. That means that every GOP primary must produce at least one candidate who invokes God every four minutes, makes the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, kisses Franklin Graham's behind, and promises a new reign of saccharine-sweet Norman Rockwell Americana from sea to shining sea; these things keep you in the race at least until your other -- more frightening -- failings come to light.

That's the only conservatism they truly care about; any other kind is just gravy, so far as they're concerned. The real purpose of the new conservative movement is to address what many consider to have been a shortcoming in the mindset of the Founding Fathers:

Since the political system does not establish nor validate any Religion, then Religion must be the force which remakes and validates the political system.

What today's Evangelically-minded, abortion-and-gay hatin' inbred wants is a candidate who promises to elevate their religious and moral values above all other concerns. Only with a tax cut. Because if there's anything worse than having to live amongst heathens, it's having to pay taxes for the privilege. There's also the question of having to kow-tow to the Pantheon of Conservative Flapping Rectums, the professional commentariat that earns it's daily bread by analysing everything in America within an inch of it's very life through the narrow lens of ideology.

Which brings us to the topic of Newt Gingrich and the recent display of 'real' conservative (small 'c' intentional) ire, and the beginning of his own Giuliani process of Death By a Thousand Cuts.

Never discount the ability of the conservative (small 'c' intentional) wing of the Republican Party to shoot itself in the ass, and then complain loudly that "if only we had selected a REAL Conservative, things would have been better...". If they were being honest with themselves (which they never are; after all, they believe in God) they would recognize that they are the main obstacle to Conservative victory, rather than it's bravest foot soldiers.

The truth, as I see it, is that if a 'Real conservative' (by their definition) ever managed to obtain the highest office in the land with a Congressional Majority, and therefore the ability to enact the entire Ultraconservative Platform, there would be riots in the streets. As it was, we had just this circumstance with George W. Bush, but since Bush apparently failed in his Divine Mission to have sayings from the Book of Matthew imprinted on condoms, or to forcibly baptize illegal aliens by the millions, it became axiomatic that Bush failed because he found it necessary to compromise these important principles, or -- even worse -- because he was betrayed by a pack of RINOs- (Republicans in Name Only), people who only pretended to be conservative in order to get elected, and who now must be purged.

The idea that, often, our political system operates this way, in fact was designed to work this way, eludes them.

And much like the Muslim Douchebags we're currently bankrupting the country to alternately fight and then bribe into leaving us alone, when a Religious Conservative doesn't get his way it must be because of some personal moral failing on the part of the chosen vessel, or a conspiracy of outside influences, all dripping with a Satanic Evil that threatens to undermine the Will of God. The answer is never to be found in cold, calculating reflection, a careful process of evaluation of success and failure, but rather in a renewed, ever-more-obnoxious, more militant, fundamentalism. We failed because we lost the favor of God, you see.

Of course, in GWB's case, the leader of that pack of Apostate RINOs was last round's loser, John McCain, but let's not quibble about those sorts of details. McCain only got the 2008 nod because Huckabee couldn't quite part the Great Lakes and feed the multitudes with three Cheetos and a box of Fig Newtons, proving that he was, indeed, merely mortal. McCain just managed to survive a deeply-flawed primary process. In any case, the problem for today's brand of principled conservative, ruled as he is by his faith and innate fear of anything related to the genitalia, is that what's needed to correct America's list to port is a candidate who embraces an uncompromising viewpoint on every issue...and who wears out the knees of his pants in fervent prayer.

Gingrich, by nature, is an intellectual. Intellectuals, by and large, often reject the dictates of faith in favor of reason. Reason often dictates compromise. Compromise means that a Conservatism wrapped in the Flag and drenched in the Blood of Christ, can never truly be realized. If the country cannot be made 'perfect' by a renewed moral crusade the Rapture will be delayed, and the self-righteous douchebags who assume they've got First Class tickets for the Great Ride in the Sky, will be condemned to stay here amongst filthy sinners who watch South Park, frequent tattoo parlors and saloons, and engage in sexual activities explicitly proscribed in Deuteronomy.

That type is more concerned with their immortal soul, more focused on the Next Life than they are on this one, and this preoccupation causes them to skew the reason, function, and role of and for Conservatism, to the point where the word itself no longer means what it once did and becomes instead little more than a label, a tribal affiliation, the religious version of Gang Colors. Nowadays when one calls himself a 'Conservative' what he really means is 'Bible Thumping Asshole who would cut off his own nose to spite his face, because he believes -- sans evidence -- that God somehow commands it."

Why we should paying this much attention to people who don't even want to be here, and who have such obviously selfish motives, is beyond me. But somehow, they have managed to slant the GOP primary process so that we do exactly that, and in the end, it leads us to pretty much the same place: we get an 'electable' candidate (i.e. one who simply managed to avoid saying the most stupid things in a debate), and a crowd of disaffected, pissed off religious nuts who cry in their Holy Water and who vow to be even bigger assholes next time around.

Conservatism, at it's base, is the natural extension of what used to be called Classical Liberalism. Instead, with the influx of so-called 'Values Voters' (itself a misleading term, as many Values Voters are simply people too stupid to recognize that which is in their own self-interest because they are blinded by superstition) into the GOP, the Republican brand begins to slowly drift away from it's roots as a party defending the Natural Rights of Man, and becomes a party devoted to cleansing the Earth in preparation for the End of Days. It's not about improving the conditions of life and opportunities for enjoying personal liberty for the largest number of people anymore; it's about religious values, which have nothing to do with Natural Rights (and I don't care which Enlightenment philosopher you trot out to gainsay that; what those guys were doing was trying to find an intellectual foil to the thorny question of Divine Right, and decided that if the King could arbitrarily claim the authority of God to rule, then so could the masses. It's not like God was going to settle the question for anyone, seeing as how She doesn't exist). But I digress...

On the question of Conservatism, pure Conservatism divorced from mindless superstition, we can discern the following from Gingrich's history:

There is much more Conservatism in Newt Gingrich's little finger than there is in Rick Santorum's whole arm. There's more Conservatism in Newt Gingrich's record than there is in Michele Bachmann's entire body. In the great "I'm-more-conservative-than-you" pissing match that GOP primaries have devolved into, there's more conservatism in one hair from Newt's butt crack than there is in Mitt Romney's entire genealogical history.

But the issue of Gingrich is not really about Conservatism the political/religious amalgam, as much as it's about Gingrich and the prospect of Compromise. Gingrich just might compromise what he considers minor principles in order to make a much bigger splash someplace else, and gives no assurance to those who can't walk and chew gum at the same time about what stays and what goes. This frightens the fertilizer out of some Conservatives, because they're not quite convinced that Newt is "one of them", and he has not given them any insight into just what aspects of conservatism he might consider to be expendable.

If you're one of those religious faggots, a Snake-Handling Baptist or Speaking-in-Tongues Evangelical who thanks the Almighty for a proper bowel movement in the morning, you get the impression that Newt Gingrich would gladly allow Gay Marriage and unfettered abortion (or at least pay no mind to those issues) if it means getting significant cuts in the Federal Budget. If you're a Conservative Intellectual, you fear that Gingrich will be apt to appoint Federal or Supreme Court judges who will continue to allow some of the worst excesses of Modern Progressives to stand in American Law or Government as a temporary political tactic. If you're a Free Trader, you're afraid that Gingrich will gradually destroy the carefully-constructed edifice by which you enrich yourself while impoverishing your country through a complicated system of legal wrangling, tax code gerrymandering, and outright bribery of Congress.

After all, he refuses to say outright what he might do if faced with that possibility, and when he does make his positions clear, you're persuaded by the past airing of Newt's dirty laundry so as to avoid giving him the benefit of the doubt that he might actually mean just what he says.

Gingrich threatens to establish a pragmatically-feasible version of Conservatism that rubs many the wrong way because it would tend to treat their particular pet peeves as so many bargaining chips to be expended in the quest for a Better America -- one that doesn't need, eventually, to pay attention to their special brand of stupidity. Gingrich stands, if successful, to make many who currently enjoy special power or status within the party extraneous to the process.

So when you hear that Newt Gingrich is "undisciplined" what you're really being told is that Newt is not ideologically rigid, and possessed of a mind of his own that doesn't require the approval of the Krauthammers and Lowrys of the world. When you hear a criticism of Newt as 'profligate' in his personal affairs, what you're really hearing is the criticism that Gingrich isn't one of those idiots who considers the Bible to be literal truth, and the promise of Divine Retribution all that unsettling. When you hear the criticism that Gingrich's intellect is 'disordered', 'scattershot'. 'unfocused', what you're really hearing is "This guy will sell your narrow-minded, single-issue concern down the river for a vote on ______". When you hear that Gingrich has "a checkered past" and "made many enemies in Conservative Circles" what you're hearing is a feeble attempt to damn the man with insinuation and not with objective evidence.

What frightens some conservatives about Gingrich is that he might prove to be pragmatic, and so successful in a way that turns the entire structure and focus of the modern GOP upside down and inside out. And if he does, then who needs Franklin Graham? Who needs Charles Krauthammer? Who needs National Review? It'll be a republicanism of the right and center, and not of the Self-interested Right that makes it's (very good) living by tut-tutting at everything under the Sun, and which would be happy to let us all burn in Hellfire so long as they get to be seated at the Right Hand (the perfect spot from which to begin the process of snivelling grovelling which protocol deems necessary when Kissing God's Holy Buttocks. Oh right, forgot: She doesn't exist. My bad).

It's why many of the very people who pooh-pooh a Gingrich candidacy, those who say that Newt is "unelectable" because he displays no central principles (or no principle they can agree with, at least), are so busy lining up behind Mitt Romney -- the one man in this race for whom that can be genuinely said! They hide their concerns behind words like 'undisciplined' and 'unelectable', and say them as if they were engraved upon stone, but they're not being honest. They fear Gingrich because he, finally, threatens to do something which has never been tried before and which would destroy the foundations of the entire Modern Conservative charade: he might make choices and advance policies that make actual sense, as opposed to making choices and policies that depend upon the approval of narrowly-defined and often mentally-deficient constituencies.

They'd rather lose with Romney and endure another four years in the wilderness, than to win with Gingrich and therefore be made irrelevant to the process.

Personally, I've advocated for a Gingrich presidency for many years on this page. It seems to me the only real choice now -- unless you truly like your Presidents to be flip-flopping self-promoters or the self-elected keepers of the Sacred Flame of an America that no longer exists and which cannot be resurrected without much societal turmoil and perhaps even violence. That Newt has not obliged me has often vexed me, but perhaps he was just keeping his powder dry? In any case, considering the choices we'll soon have between Gingrich and a man who will say anything to be popular (Romney), facing off against a man who couldn't find his own ass with both hands, a compass, and a battalion of aides giving him conflicting advice (Obama), the decision couldn't be an easier one to make.

However, the way the GOP runs it's primary system will probably guarantee that Romney gets the nod, if only because he'll be the only one left standing due to the scads of money he has available to pay off this or that off-the-reservation constituency. Gingrich will be gradually worn down by having to answer mostly-annoying charges made against his character (by people who demand their candidates have all the attributes usually only associated with Jesus) while the guy with very little of that quality about him gets to mostly skate. In a General Election it's a toss-up as to whether Romney can avoid saying something obviously untrue, screamingly self-interested, or inanely stupid, for long enough to beat even a weakened-and-out-of-his-depth Obama.

And that's assuming that Romney's Mormon faith doesn't cost him the South (not that this matters, but somehow you know it will). The System, as it now works, produces that sort of skewed result: it gives far too much weight to the purists and the pious, and not enough to the general consensus. It's how you wind up with an aging-Cold-Warrior-Gang-of-14-RINO-bordering-on-Alzheimer's John McCain and a clueless Sarah Palin, rather than a Rudy Giuliani and maybe Condoleeza Rice as your ticket.

In retrospect Rudy Giuliani might have been a credible candidate and President, but we'll never know because the process played against him in the primaries. The same thing is happening to Newt Gingrich, and it's mainly the same people who are doing it. One hopes that Gingrich's ideas and force of intellect can carry him through to eventual victory, because the alternatives, quite frankly, are far scarier. And if the process doesn't produce the right result (meaning the best-qualified candidate, rather than the candidate who can manage to garner the Seal of Approval of people who you wouldn't follow through your own front door), we're well-and-truly fucked.

Five Reasons Why You Can Stick a Fork in Herman Cain…

2011-12-02T09:52:00.003-05:00

#Excelsior502- I really liked Herman Cain, truly. To me, Mr. Cain was a breath of fresh air cutting through the rank, musty effluvium of Our National Political Scene. A self-made man, not a professional politician, with a record of success, and a homey sort of demeanor that made him downright likable from the get go.

Cain might have been somebody in this 2012 GOP nomination contest, he could have been a true contender. He might even have found himself as the eventual nominee’s Vice-Presidential choice, but alas, it is not to be. For Herman Cain, far from being the mighty planet in a crowded political solar system has instead turned out to be little more than a streaking meteor, flashing spectacularly in our metaphorical night sky before crashing to Earth with a mighty "Boom!".

For Herman Cain, Grandfather figure, kindly old gentleman math teacher, solid businessman, apparently suffers from some of the same weaknesses -- some expected, some wholly surprising – as any other man, and particularly some which you’d expect to find in the professional politician he so obviously wasn't. It’s all crushingly disappointing to a people who have become both inured to slimy political figures and simultaneously repelled by them. Herman Cain, in whatever capacity he survived the primaries, would have stood as something refreshingly different.

Herman Cain would truly have been Change You Could Believe In, if only he hadn’t had been all too human. Barring some miracle, the Cain candidacy is over, but for the shouting and post-game analysis.

Here are Five Reasons Why You Can Stick a Fork in Herman Cain.

1. Alleged Victim #1, Alleged Victim #2, etc., etc…

The appeal of Herman Cain was that he seemed so thoroughly smart and decent. It turns out that this is certainly not the case. Now, it’s still entirely possible that Cain was the victim of a political whack job (the jury is still out), but it’s difficult to make the case that the string of his alleged sexual antics is totally a matter of political or financial opportunism when there seems to be so many of them.

Think of it this way:

If one woman accuses you of such base conduct, you just might be the target of a gold-digger or a disgruntled employee. If two should accuse you of the same, then you just might be an unlucky person. If a third accuses you, then where’s there’s smoke there’s probably fire, and if a fourth comes out of the woodwork with phone records, evidence of gifts, and an allegation of a 13 year-long extra-marital affair, then you, Good Sir, are entering “Liar, Liar, Pants of Fire” territory.

America has had to suffer its share of philandering douchebags in the Oval Office, for sure. But the public believes, for the most part, that we deserve better. Considering the dire straits we currently find ourselves in, we can be forgiven if the general trend is to want to elect, if at all possible, an honest man, seeing as how the present occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue avoids telling the truth as if doing so would put his immortal soul in jeopardy of eternal torment.

Herman Cain seemed to be that honest man, so much so that when Anonymous Victims Numbers 1 and 2 were unceremoniously thrust into the political spotlight by cowardly political operatives who used the shield of non-disclosure agreements to tar Cain without him being able to confront his accusers, that we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Contributions to Cain’s campaign and his poll numbers went up, not down. We believed him.

Until it became too difficult to continue to believe, naturally.

Now with the apparent demise of Mr. Cain, we’re down to a bunch of people we’re pretty much certain have some slime on them, the only questions are “how thick is the slime?” and ”how much slime are we willing to tolerate in the course of defeating Barack Obama and the democratic party?”

Which sadly means that we’re back to business as usual.

2. Herman Cain Knows Dick about Foreign Policy…

An eleven second pause before a convoluted answer on the question of a nuclear Iran was the stake through the heart in this area.

To be fair, Cain wasn’t exactly the strongest candidate in this area to begin with, but he did make an effort to learn a few things. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn enough, and what he did learn he seemed to quickly forget or misconstrue. There is nothing deadlier in American politics than to be asked a direct question about an important issue, repeatedly, and not be able to answer it. Even Barack Obama would have been able to issue a stream of bullshit that would have neatly danced around inconvenient questions and yet still satisfied the 50% of Americans whose attention spans can be measured in RPM’s, most of whom seem to work in the Media.

Cain’s problem is that in this arena, he simply looks lost. We already have a President without a clue, and people will have little patience for another.

3. The 9-9-9 Plan…

This was perhaps Herman Cain’s biggest mistake: he put forth a tax policy that was simply too easy to understand, and way too easy to politically demagogue.

The Plan’s biggest structural strength was also the major structural weakness: since the plan was so simple it threatened to remove the fog of obfuscation surrounding the current Federal tax codes which is the sea of graft within which both political parties swim.

Additionally, it did nothing to protect the tax payer from losing the gains in Federal tax relief from the depredation of State Legislatures, who would regard that potential windfall as ‘found money’, and as an excuse to raise local taxes.

Billions of dollars in ‘free money’ (in the sense that it would not be going to Washington, or into the coffers of tax preparers, but rather the pockets of the people who earned it) was simply too big a loss for the Washington, D.C. set to suffer, and so the Plan was beat to a bloody pulp day after day, by pundit after pundit. They had to: that money is their lifeblood, which allows them to buy votes. The Monument to Graft that is the Federal Tax Code had to be protected for the benefit of those who thrive on it.

Then again, after one absorbed the very simplicity of the 9-9-9 concept, one also began to notice it’s other major holes, namely, that it didn’t seem to have been thought through much past the concept stage. Even Cain couldn’t answer the questions surrounding it. After the experience we’ve had with ObamaCare we want to know the details beforehand, and in great depth.

4. Racism, Or Just a Proper Vetting?

One has to ask this question for a very simple reason, and that reason is Barack Obama.

Obama practically sailed into office with nary a nick, scratch, or dent put in him by the Press. The reasons for this are numerous, and mostly ideological, and we don’t need to go into them here, but the salient point is that Barack Obama never had to answer very many tough questions about his background, his ideology, or his experience in the lead-up to the 2008 Elections.

We’ve learned the unfortunately painful lesson that when you don’t ask questions beforehand, when you don’t do your homework, when you trust to blind faith rather than cold, hard facts, you end up with a leader whose greatest attributes are the ability to whine, pander, and go on vacation every three weeks, and who doesn’t seem very interested in doing the job he’s set to spend a billion bucks (of other people’s money, of course) to keep.

If we had only done a little more research on Barack Obama we might have avoided the reality of this Presidency: we (and by that, I don’t mean ‘I’; I voted for the other guy) elected a complete boob to the Highest Office in The Land. In retrospect, it would appear (and it pains me to say this) that had Obama not dazzled with the connivance of a sympathetic Press, and McCain not disappointed by being himself, that Hillary Clinton was perhaps the least of the three possible evils we could have chosen.

While that thought gives me douchechills, one could still say this: things would have been far different, and perhaps a bit more tolerable, to the point where the specter of having Billy Jeff around to soil more White House furniture might be considered the needed comic relief a Hillary Administration would scream for.

But getting back to Obama, there’s one other aspect to his reign that can’t help but have put some people off on Herman Cain, and this was even before his personal foibles became public knowledge. Barack Obama has, in three years, probably done more to destroy racial relations in this country than any militant Klansman could ever have hoped to achieve. Why? Because Barack Obama has neatly reinforced in the minds of many just about every negative stereotype about Black Men that you could ever think of.

Obama doesn’t s appear to like work, but loves picking up the paycheck. Obama likes the trappings and perquisites of office, but not the responsibilities that come with them. He’s not detail oriented, preferring to let others handle that for him. He whines and cries about racism whenever he doesn’t get his way, and often for no reason at all. He’s quick to accuse others of having base motivations, but slow to consider his own. He seems to spend more time on vacation than he does in his office, leading to the conclusion that he’s lazy and a procrastinator. Obama talks a good game, but then never follows up. The aroma of ‘scam artist’ clings to him. The Shadows of Affirmative Action and Incompetence seem to seep from every pore…

…and let’s not get started on his wife.

It’s quite possible that having achieved something that many thought they would never see – the elevation of an African-American to the Presidency of the United States – that it’ll be a very long time, if ever, before we see another one. And if we do see another one, he or she is going to be subjected to the sort of scrutiny that one usually only associates with a colonoscopy.

In this sort of electoral environment it was probably inevitable that someone was going to go through Cain’s life with two fine-toothed combs and find some dirt on him, and to cite it and his lack of experience in the field of Foreign Policy and lack of Legislative expertise, and use them to put a hole in his boat. It might not have been fair, but this is now the gift that the legacy of Barack Obama has bequeathed to a new generation of Black Politicians who have national aspirations: you’d better be squeaky-fucking-clean, My Brother, and extraordinarily well-prepared.

5. We DO Have Other Choices…

And as much as it pains me to have declare the Cain Candidacy a Dead Duck, we can at least take some solace in that at least one of the remaining candidates has the wherewithal, experience and intelligence to wipe the proverbial floor with Barack Obama next fall.

Personally, I was holding out for a combination of Romney, Gingrich and Cain, and it looks as if I’m going to get my wish. I’ve lobbied on this page for a Gingrich run for 8 years now. I can abide Romney, if the choice was strictly between him or Obama, figuring Romney to be the lesser of two evils. However, I was hoping to see someone new on the political scene, someone not marinated in the sewer of politics, who might bring a measure of sanity to the political discourse, but alas, I am to be disappointed.

Which is the natural state of life, I figure, but damn if it doesn’t seem a great pity to me today.

Previous: Five Reasons Why Michele Bachmann Should Quit While She's Ahead.

Five Reasons Why Michele Bachmann Should Quit While She’s Ahead…

2011-11-30T13:18:00.003-05:00

#Excelsior502- Pity Michele Bachmann. It must be tough enough to be a Congresscritter without the added burden of being a punching bag for the political Left in this country, it must be doubly-hard to be a Congresscritter running for national office with the added bonus of being way too easy to tag with a torrent of left jabs in the immediate seconds before the final knockout blow is delivered.

And, yes, the mixing of metaphors vis-à-vis boxing and politics is especially relevant when discussing the candidacy of Mrs. Bachmann. For all intents and purposes, Michele Bachmann is the Vito Antuofermo of the 2012 GOP field.

For those who do not remember him, Antuofermo was a knockabout boxer who made it relatively big in the mid-to-late 1970’s. His greatest attributes (if you can call them such) were a propensity to take a tremendous asswhipping at the hands of otherwise mediocre pugilists, and to bleed profusely the second anyone gave him as much as a cold stare. After a short stint as the middleweight champion, Antuofermo pursued a short-lived acting career (he was in The Godfather, Part III), and then promptly vanished from the collective memory of all but the most ardent boxing fans. What most can remember was Vito’s ability to step into a ring, be pummeled insensate, and then somehow emerge still breathing.

That short stint as Middleweight champ was the highlight of Vito’s otherwise lackluster career. A wiser man with similarly average talents might have retired while he was on top, figuring that lightning would only strike once, but not Antuofermo.

One always wonders just why it is that a man would subject himself to such a horrific experience repeatedly, but I as I remember it, it often appeared as if Vito just didn’t know any better, and probably didn’t even know what day of the week it was after a while. He was a fighter, after all, and that was what he did. It was second nature to him, in much the same way its second nature for a neutered dog to continue to hump the sofa: he’s not sure exactly why he must do so, just that he’s compelled to do it, and the end result is so much wasted effort.

Bachmann has repeatedly referred to herself as a ‘fighter’. She fights for this or that cause, many of them taken up by the recently-ascendant Tea Party. Much like Antuofermo, however, she often manages to come out on the losing end, battered and bloody, and seemingly unaware that victory might require a change of tactics, or that it’s perhaps best to let someone else take the beating and give this particular fight a miss while you perfect your footwork.

Without further ado, here are five reasons why Michele Bachmann should quit while she’s ahead:

1. Michele Bachmann, The Fighter, Has Fewer Victories Than Even Vito Antuofermo:

Since the beginning of the 2012 popularity contest that is the GOP primaries, Bachmann has regaled us all, ad nauseum, about how she ‘fights’ for us. She fought against TARP and the other government bailout plans. She fought against Obamacare. She fought against raising the Debt Limit Ceiling. She fought against the Obama-era explosion of Federal regulations that have probably done more to tie up capital than anything else.

Last time I looked, TARP not only passed through Congress, but has apparently gone even farther than was originally transmitted to the American people. We thought that ‘only’ $700 billion was being funneled into the banks, but it now turns out that number was closer to $7 trillion, and that foreign banks received a good deal of that money, too.

Obamacare is the law, and the only reason it hasn’t sent us into the economic equivalent of the Ninth Ring of Hell is because it hasn’t taken effect yet, and won’t until 2014, unless a sweeping republican victory in 2012 makes repeal a foregone conclusion.

The Debt Limit was raised anyway, not withstanding the fig leaf of promised Federal budget cuts…someday…in one of those backroom deals that promise much, deliver nothing, and keep issues alive for political – rather than practical -- purposes that Washington politicians have shaped into an ultimately self-defeating art form that destroys the lives of the Average American.

Michele Bachmann seems to keep losing fights, and while one must give her proper respect and full credit for continuing to tilt Quixotically at this at this or that political windmill, one begins to wonder just when it is that the gap between intentions and results became so unimportant, and when it became irrelevant to the process of deciding just who is fit to be president of the United States.

It’s one thing to fight; it’s an altogether different thing to win…even occasionally. While one might learn more from defeat than it is possible to do in victory, it’s also true that people will follow winners if only because winners are usually proven commodities who seem to know what they're doing.

Besides, Congress is a major part of the problem, anyway (the real problem is cultural; Congress is just the seeping rash that is symptomatic of a deeper disease), so why should we expect the solution to come from within the ranks of that body, regardless of party affiliation? Bachmann, for all intents and purposes, is part of that despised subset of Americans with a 9% favorability rating. At this point, gonorrhea rates higher than most members of Congress, and no amount of ‘fighting’, let alone unsuccessful fighting, changes that fact. You might as well answer the bell next round with one hand tied behind your back and a blindfold on.

2. Michele Bachmann is Very Good at Telling You What She’s Against, But Just What The Hell is She For?

I’ve asked myself this question a number of times, and can’t come up with a good answer. Bachmann is very good at playing up general themes – taxes, government intervention, out-of-control A, B and C, Family Values (and why is that supposed to be the government’s concern, one wonders?) – but then often falls way short in terms of specifics.

And I’m not surprised at that, either. She’s a Congresscritter, after all, and Congresscritters often don’t do details. That’s what Congressional Aides are for. If there’s any American still under the mistaken impression that your Congressbeast actually has much of a hand in crafting the legislation with which we’re all taxed and regulated within an inch of our lives, guess again. Very few are.

Legislation in this country gets written by a conclave of Congressional Gophers, lawyers, lobbyists and interest groups, and Congresspeople are just the visible face, much like Alex Trebek flogging life insurance on Television. Hell, if we’ve learned anything these last few years, it’s that Congress doesn’t even bother to read most of what it produces, and if you did manage to have no life and therefore the time to give it a go, you’d be comatose within five minutes.

When Nancy Pelosi infamously said “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it…” in reference to Obamacare, she wasn’t being coy, nor was she just putting her notoriously colossal stupidity on public view yet one more time, she was accurately describing the culture of Modern Washington. It’s a “Ready, Fire, Aim!” mentality that is one part self-serving inanity, one part media manipulation, and three parts pure, evil asshole.

Giving Bachmann the benefit of the doubt for having at least a sense of professional ethics, it just might be too much to expect that anyone who’s been steeped in that sort of culture for any appreciable length of time can avoid being infected by that bass-ackwards thinking. If the point of the whole Obamacare debacle was to get something passed for the sake of it, or merely for strictly political purposes, then it’s safe to assume that what one side does the other does just as readily. Considering the results this form of Congressional action has brought us in recent years, just why the hell should we elevate anyone from the Congressional ranks at all?

One would think the remedy to that handicap – being a prominent part of a massively dysfunctional body that routinely fucks up by the numbers, and which passes laws without giving a second (or even first) thought about what a) the law is intended to do, b) it’s utility, c) it’s practicality and d) it’s ultimate costs and effects – would be a candidate who would be specific. Bachmann is anything but. Even Mitt Romney – flip-flopping, opportunistic used car salesman that he is – is incredibly specific about whatever politically-expedient positions he thinks he must espouse this day. Until Michele Bachmann can say more than “I fight”, and then explain her reasoning, motivations and strategies, she’s just another member of a mass of clods you wouldn’t hire to mop your floors.

3. The Curse of The Brilliant

It is my considered opinion that, contrary to what the Leftard Press would have you believe, that Michele Bachmann is quite literally brilliant. Before running for Congress she was a tax attorney, and by all accounts a very good and successful one. Stupid people don’t enjoy success in that sort of environment, which is why is so many mediocre to sub-par lawyers find their way into politics -- where brains and talent are not prerequisites -- much to our detriment.

But most very smart people I know suffer a lack of common sense. It’s one thing to be able to recite the cannons of law by heart, or to manage to manipulate the tax code for the benefit of a client, quote Shakespeare, or know the Periodic Table inside and out; it’s quite another to put that knowledge to practical use. In the Private Sector, Michele Bachmann made herself a fine living; in government, she’s not exactly covered herself in glory, mostly because government should be about common sense and the majority of people within it are profoundly lacking in such, regardless of their actual intellectual talents.

By all accounts, Barack Obama is a brilliant man, but that’s belied by his inability to speak without having half-a-dozen teleprompters loaded with speeches that someone else wrote for him at hand. Bill Clinton was said to have been a keen intellect, but then again, he fucked trailer trash and married Hillary. Richard Nixon was a brilliant politician, but he was arrogant enough to believe that he was above the Law. Smart people don’t necessarily make the best leaders, particularly when they get too clever by half, which is what the trappings of power usually do to people.

That’s not to say that we should be electing complete retards to public office (at least any more than we are now); only that it may be great to be the smartest guy in the room, but this means absolute jack shit when that intellect is not tied to an ability to grasp the practical aspects of the problems at hand. By her own temperament and actions, Michele Bachmann has proved (to me at least) that she doesn’t have the same sense God gave an Irish Setter.

All of her fighting rhetoric is tied to failed causes. All of her anti-whatever lip service is divorced from an explanation of the practical considerations of reversing this or that policy, stating this or that particular goal. It’s seems to me that like most smart people, Michele Bachmann believes that she’s so clever that she can find the shortcuts that turn idea into action, and that the forces arrayed against her ideas and policies don't have something to say about these issues. For better or worse, this is a still a representative democracy, and it’s one thing to say “I want to reform Social Security” and quite another to manage that feat. This requires more than just being smart; it requires an appreciation of the finer points, something which Bachmann was good at when she was making a living as an attorney, but thus far has shown no evidence of having while sitting in Congress.

Once again, we have to consider Bachmann’s history of inglorious defeats on the broader range of issues, and her seeming inability to change tactics in order to overcome those defeats. This is the first sign that Michele Bachmann hasn’t got much in the way of common sense. To be fair, it’s a common disability in the ranks of government service. Better we should be led by one person with a high school education and enough sense to avoid sticking their privates in a wall outlet, than by 100 ‘smart’ people who ‘fight’ the same battles with the same tactics over and over again, expect a different result every time, and then wonder why that more favorable result never materializes.

If you needed yet another example, consider the recent Jimmy Fallon Show kerfuffle: someone with common sense and a level of awareness would have walked right the fuck off that set the second “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” began playing. Instead of doing the right thing, Bachmann got her face time and complained about the obvious bias inherent in that selection afterwards, and then probably only after someone else had pointed it out to her. In the end, while I cannot condone what Fallon and his crew did to Bachmann (would they do that to Michelle Obama or Maxine Waters?), it’s screamingly obvious to me that Bachmann either couldn’t figure out that she was being insulted, or simply didn’t give a fuck. Take your pick.

4. Michele Bachmann Can Scare the Fertilizer out Of You

I find Michele Bachmann rather attractive, personally. She’s not a bad-looking lady at all. Unless, of course, there’s a television camera nearby and then you begin to wonder if there’s anyone at home inside that mannequin on the screen.

While Bachmann may be brilliant, she exudes an aura of airheadedness. This manifests itself in what I like call “The Thousand Yard Stare”, a sort of unblinking, detached visage that gives one the impression that she’s not really here, that she is perhaps some form of alien robot being operated remotely from the Mother Ship. Somehow, she is unable to find a camera to look into whilst talking on any televised show; she always seems to be looking off center out in to some mystical distance, as if her attention is divided, or as if this whole thing is simply a routine that she has down pat so that she can do it in her sleep.

This might be an unfair observation on my part, but watching Michele Bachmann on television reminds me of the stellar performance turned in by Cate Blanchett as Queen Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings; Galadriel spoke in this dreamily airy semi-distracted fashion that led you to believe that while she was, in fact, living in this world, her true attention was drawn to another, invisible realm, someplace just over the top of your head.

For better or worse, we live in a visual age. Michele Bachmann does not make for an attractive visual, not because she’s ugly (far from it). but because you get the impression that she really just isn’t here, and the visual cue is that she either stares somewhere beyond you, or presents this vacant stare that Vanessa Redgrave once had down to a tee (five points to any reader who can identify the source of THAT reference).

People are looking for leadership they can put their confidence in. Michele Bachmann, mostly because of how she appears on television, doesn’t inspire much. All in all, one gets the distinct impression that Bachmann figures she can just ride the wave of national discontent embodied in the Tea Party spirit to higher office, and that her shortcomings – the distracted, detached look, the dearth of specifics, the lack of common sense, the long string of losses cooked up by the same old charge-up-the-middle strategy – would be discounted by an electorate that’s just fed up with being pissed off and pissed upon, a feeling that anyone would be infinitely better than what we currently have.

Considering the rush of people who made the fateful decision to vote for Barack Obama (a man with even fewer qualifications than Bachmann) she could be forgiven for making that vital strategic error. After all, the point of elevating Obama was that he was supposed to be something different, that he wasn’t one of the Usual Gang typically at the center of American Politics. He was to be the New Blood that would revitalize the Body Politic, a breath of fresh air, a new way of thinking, a divorce from the Old Politics -- and if you bought that I have a few bridges to sell you – so why couldn’t Bachmann expect likewise?

In the end, Michele Bachmann is much like Barack Obama in this regard: there’s no ‘there’ there. She is as much an empty vessel as he was, the major difference being that while people filled their Obama Cup with a new version of the old Socialist-With-A-Smiley-Face Kool-Aid, Bachmann’s is being filled with vintage Silent Majority wine given an exciting new bottle, rebranded as "Tea Party". Both taste like shit, but then again, the package was designed to be more important than the product, but marketed in the exact opposite fashion.

5. We DO Have Other Choices

And while I’ve been running them all down, one-by-one, at least one of them will eventually display enough of the skills and abilities needed to become President of the United States. In short, these are:

a. An ability to articulate a national agenda, with some broader details attached.

b. An ability to show a track record of success that inspires confidence. Beyond some minor Congressional dogsqueeze on single-issue advocacy items, Bachmann has few successes to show for all her ‘fighting’.

c. An ability to relate to the American people, to tell them the unvarnished truth about the current state of affairs and to convey your ideas in meaningful and tangible language – something beyond simply always ‘fighting’ – for righting the Ship of State.

d. Display the ability to be both adaptive and pragmatic. Bachmann is neither; she can’t be, because this would invalidate her self-created public crusader shtick, exposing her to the same approbation which clings to Mitt Romney like Saran Wrap covered in Crazy Glue, that once you set yourself up as the Fidei Defensor of Everything you’ve lost your ability to adapt and compromise without appearing to be a complete sellout. Michele Bachmann, by her own words and actions, is doomed to go down with the ship of her candidacy. This is a self-inflicted wound, probably taken by someone who thinks they’re too clever by half.

Michele Bachmann appears to have none of these qualities, whatever her real virtues may be, and one gets the distinct impression that the underlying motivation in her candidacy is sheer opportunism. She believes that she has the right combination of factors in her favor – massively displeased electorate, connections with the Tea Party, the sort of biography that sets ‘real’ conservative (small ‘c’ intentional) hearts a-flutter, Iowa roots that might gain a victory in at least the Iowa Caucuses that could propel her further -- but these are not exactly qualifications; they are simply taking points, the sort of thing one might jot down on the simple Pros-and-Cons list you might compile before buying auto insurance, not when electing a President.

This might be completely unfair of me, but it’s what I believe to be true.

Bachmann has gained herself some attention on the National Scene, which might be useful to her later on in her Congressional career, but without any record of even half-decent results or a program of action to go with it, it’s not likely that Bachmann will ever get much further, or achieve more prominence than she has to date. Frankly, I believe she’s already gotten far more attention than she’s ever truly warranted.

Previous: Five Reasons Why Rick Huntsman Should Be Mowing My Lawn.

Next: Five Reasons Why You Can Stick a Fork in Herman Cain.

Five Reasons Why Jon Huntsman Should Be Mowing My Lawn...

2011-11-22T10:12:00.003-05:00

...and for free.

#Excelsior502 - One of the many services we provide here at the Lunatic’s Asylum is the proffering of unsolicited opinion on topics various and sundry. One of my personal favorite past times is in serving up my cynical and jaundiced political views with a large side order of sarcastic invective, and the latest targets of my diseased political outlook have been the current crop of 2012 GOP contenders.

I’m licking my chops in anticipation of a 2012 GOP victory as much as the next guy, but it appears that there are some folks in this race that have less utility in that quest than a boar hog has for teats, people for whom, I should day, I have less use for than a dog has for it’s fleas.

I have been quite harsh in expressing my viewpoints thus far on Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry, and it is perhaps time to turn my venom upon the person who, in my opinion, is the least qualified in the current batch of wanna-be’s, and that would be former Utah governor and Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman.

Huntsman is one of those people who just rubs me the wrong way, but for all of the right reasons. Quite frankly, when one stops to consider the fact that others in this race, like Michele Bachmann, have even less of a reason beyond shallow politics to be involved, Huntsman leaves one wondering just why it is he has decided to do what he has done, and just who was stupid enough to give him some money to do it.

So far as I can discern Huntsman’s overall motive, it would seem that reforming the system (as they say) is not prime amongst them. The 2012 election is likely not to be simply about Barack Obama, nor is it about mainstreaming some narrow points of view, like Messrs Santorum or Paul appear to be trying; whichever republican nominee wins the selection process on their way to defeating President Marriot-Suites will have to be fully on board with a program aimed at changing our political culture for the better by:

1. Taking on the subjects of government spending, tax and regulatory reform, entitlements, and general economic and legislative processes.

2. Devote him/herself to ensuring that victory not only entails an end to the democratic party business-as-usual (tax and spend) process, but GOP business-as-usual (acting like democrats…only with a tax cut) process, too.

3. Arresting the reach of the Federal Government into the private and economic lives of its citizens and then cutting its fucking rhetorical hands off at the fucking rhetorical elbows.

4. Preparing the way for future generations of sober, intelligent, pragmatic republicans (because democrats are neither intelligent or pragmatic, and hardly ever sober)to build upon the foundations of responsible government left behind (one hopes).

It’s argumentative as to whether many of the current front-runners can actually achieve most of these things solely on their own, and it’s certainly unrealistic to expect the Pauls, Bachmanns, and Santorums of this world, speaking as they do to narrow constituencies ,to do these things at all -- even accidentally. In Huntsman’s case, it’s entirely possible that there would be a Second Coming (complete with a Puppet Show) before a President Huntsman would even get around to working up the ambition to administer to any of the considerations mentioned above, if only because Jon Huntsman doesn’t give me any indication that he considers the current state of business-as-usual as all that bad a thing.

Then again, he was the governor of Utah, which is sort of like being President of the Glee Club, and he lacks the so-called gravitas that a career that doesn’t involve just being idly rich brings with it. Without further ado, here are five reasons why Jon Huntsman Should Be Mowing My Lawn for Free instead of running for President of the United States.

1. Huntsman is a Free-Trader

Normally, this would be considered a good thing, but only if you took the words “Free Trade” at face value. Like much in American Political Life, the words “Free Trade” are not concerned with the actual business of ensuring that international trade is conducted under fair and equitable circumstances, much like the current appellation of “Liberal” has no connection with anything actually Liberal, and instead concerns itself with forcing people to do things against their will by government diktat.

The definition of Free Trade in this day and age is a misrepresentation of a program of self-destructive Globalism. In this formulation of Free Trade, America is certainly Free to send its jobs, productive capacity, and capital overseas -- where rapacious American robber barons can produce cheap crap at high prices by exploiting the availability of cheap labor and lax regulation in foreign countries. In return for being able to ship your sparkplug plant to Shanghai -- where wages are low, legal systems are a joke, and government ministers are easier to bribe -- the New American Robber Baron gets a slew of benefits all of which he has paid our elected officials to embed within Federal Law, and profit grossly at the expense of his fellow American Citizens. These benefits are:

a. The ability to dodge American taxes,

b. The ability to dodge American Labor and Environmental Law,

c. The ability to maximize profits by taking advantage of near-slave labor overseas.

In this formulation, a Free Trader gets to produce t-shirts in Nicaragua where workers have no rights, there are no established wage scales, and where the only environmental law is “don’t shit in your own living room -- assuming one might have a living room inside a cardboard-and-tin shanty on the edge of a garbage dump with wall-to-wall dysentery", that is. In return, he gets to ship his produced-for 14-cents t-shirts to America with a reduced import tariff and the ability to put a “Made in America” sticker upon it, and sell it for $9.95, making an exorbitant profit. And then, utilizing the banking and tax regulations he has paid Congress to produce, offshore that profit back into his “foreign subsidiary” (the storefront in Managua where the t-shirts are made), thus avoiding the sting of U.S. corporate taxes.

In defense of his wholly outrageous action, the Free Trader explains it away as a matter of providing American consumers with the best quality for the lowest price, or in terms of delivering shareholder value, both of which are supposed to be good for the American People (normally, these would be good, but this system reduces American’s ability to buy those products as it puts them out of work). He (The Free Trader) then cries poormouth and screams for a new round of tax cuts, special benefits, set-asides, and reduction of regulatory hurdles so that he can squeeze every last penny out of the whole thing.

American workers – who cannot compete with coolie labor, pay 40% or more of their income to a government who then wastes it upon eye drops, band aids, and Disney-style theme parks for Haitians -- lose their jobs, savings, and purchasing power, and capital that might re-employ them flows outwards to make Nicaragua a better place to live than Detroit. Or at least one might think that; one of the supposed benefits of NAFTA, the Free-Trader Holy Grail, was that it would keep Mexicans employed in Mexico and, therefore, on their side of the fence.

Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?

The Free Traders are, under the guise of economic conservatism, undercutting their own country and citizens for personal gain. Most Free Trade agreements signed by Congress are no such thing, mostly allowing finished products (constructed with American investment) to return here with lower tariffs, and little to no safeguards or standards regarding quality, in return for campaign contributions. If you doubt this, take a good look at the recent recalls of all sorts of Chinese made products made with lead paints, deadly chemicals, and poor quality control that allows them to fly apart at high speed, and then take a gander at all the Wall Street pointy heads who are still insisting that investment in ‘emerging markets’ is a good thing juxtaposed against the Rogues Gallery of dimwits they have supported for President and Nancy Pelosi’s ‘ethical’ Congress.

Of the major elements in recent American economic collapse, the most egregious have occurred under democratic stewardship: NAFTA, CAFTA, repeal of the Glass-Steagell Act, failure to audit Fannie And Freddie. All were done (or undone) under the false-flags of “What’s good for business is Good For America”, or ‘Don’t rock the boat”.

Free Trade is no such thing; for if it was, then we’d be able to sell Pontiacs with the steering wheel on the wrong side in Singapore in greater numbers, while importing fewer plastic ashtrays that spontaneously explode upon contact with air.

Huntsman beats the Free Trade drum with a vigor that could only be generated by someone with an extensive portfolio constructed with the fruits of American-style Free Trade, that is, by the collusion of bought-and-paid-for elected officials, bribed ministers in foreign countries, avoidance of domestic taxes and fees, cheap labor, and the poor quality control and liability systems of the sort to be found in Kazakhstan, meeting the extensive bank account of someone who inherited large sums of money from his probably even less-scrupulous ancestors. All put to good use in picking which foxes get to guard the henhouse of course.

Huntsman doesn’t understand business in the conventional sense of making and selling things, as much as he understands it in terms of a managerial system in which those best poised and prepared to manipulate the system in their own favor win biggest.

If there’s anything those Occupy ______ protesters have to say that’s even remotely worth listening to, it’s this: Corporatism is one of the factors in the decline of America, and its genesis lies not only in greedy Wall Street Bankers, but in Stupid Politicians, as well. And when the two are allowed to combine in the fashion that they have been for the last 25 years, the end result is both predictable and shameful.

Huntsman’s version of Free Trade is not an economic boon for America: it’s an economic boon to Jon Huntsman and other super-rich doofuses like him. Quite frankly, Huntsman has never held a job that didn’t involve administering to his family fortune, or in government, and this makes him unqualified to pontificate about what’s “good for business”.

2. Huntsman is a Mormon

While this does not bother me, personally, it bothers a whole lot of other people who view Mormons as the next-best-thing to convicted child molester. Many people who will gladly tell you that “God commands me to love my fellow man” are the same people who will then discriminate against , even hate, their fellow men just because their competing versions of the New Testament are contradictory or incompatible.

Jon Huntsman, much like Mitt Romney, will have severe problems in winning a primary in the American South, and should either actually win one, it will be such as to embolden democrats to make a play for a southern state or two that they currently consider out of their league, believing those states to be in play. Nothing divides people more than religion, especially when you get into those “my Jesus is better than your Jesus” pissing matches which mean absolutely jack shit to anyone not currently funding Reverend Mudd’s Biloxi Tabernacle and Bait Shop with their entire life savings because the good Reverend Doctor insists that the Lord will take him if he can’t raise the necessary $32 million.

It’s also entirely probable that Huntsman’s rise in politics has been entirely due to the Mormon Vote in his home state of Utah, which is not exactly a mean political feat. Mormons will vote for their own kind in much the same way African-Americans do (unless your name is Alan Keyes or Herman Cain, and your sort of Blackness is not their sort of Blackness), reflexively, automatically, without engaging in critical thinking, because of the “Us-vs.-Them” (Mormons vs. Non-Mormons) nature of politics in that state.

At home, Jon Huntsman has his own, built-in voting bloc; nationally, he couldn’t win an election in another state short of offering booze and hookers at the polling places, and in many places the vote for Huntsman might still be contingent upon whether or not the voter and the hooker were biologically related or not.

A Huntsman candidacy just doesn’t fly nationally. The only reason the Other Mormon, Romney, has gained any traction is because he’s the ex-governor of a Northeastern State where religion doesn’t count for much, few people actually know Romney’s a Mormon, and for whom the majority could care a Tinker’s Cuss. Not so below the Mason-Dixon.

By the way, Huntsman and Romney are third cousins, just in case you didn’t know.

3. Huntsman Has Advocated in Favor of Gay Marriage and Believes in Man-Made Global Warming…

…which just warms the cockles of every good, God-fearin’ conservative’s (small ‘c’ intentional) heart.

You might as well come out in favor of public puppy burning, incest, free drugs at taxpayer’s expense, and unfettered public defecation.

These issues make Huntsman a non-starter in many republican precincts (and to Independents, there are more vital economic and political issues that take precedence), and both are extremely stupid issues to bring up in the context of the current state of American politics. Anyone dumb enough to announce to a room full of Iowa conservatives (small ‘c’ intentional) that they support Bob and Doug’s right to enjoy a condo in the gated community of their choice, complete with a set of adopted Chinese twins and shared health benefits, and that this is a matter of civil rights, is someone too stupid to be President. Even Barack Obama won’t go that far!

I believe both of these positions to be simple opportunism, an attempt to gather ‘political moderates’ to Huntsman’s tent, a move that some GOP candidates just can’t help but make, if only for appearances sake. In that case, then, Huntsman’s positions are phony and self-serving.

We already have enough stupid and phony people in Washington, D.C., thank you very much. We shouldn’t send any more.

Huntsman’s advocacy for Gay marriage is probably a stealth attempt to eventually allow the bigamy that some especially-fervent Mormon’s seem to love so much. If you allow Gays to marry, why not allow bigamy, right?

4. What, Exactly, Has Jon Huntsman Ever Accomplished?

Besides three awesome daughters (Abby, please call me. Although I already have a girlfriend, I’d be happy to accept you as a Sister-Wife!), Huntsman’s accomplishments read as follows: assistant to Ronald Reagan (who refused to fetch his own coffee, methinks), Ambassador to China and Indonesia (Ambassadorships usually go to high-level political donors, not always to the best-qualified people), Governor of a state where being a Mormon automatically assures you of at least 51% of the vote, and inheriting a vast fortune by virtue of being born.

While even these slim pickings are considerably more substantial than Barack Obama’s resume (his consists of being half-black and having had two bullshit biographies written for him by a terrorist), it’s hardly worth stacking up against many others in the current field: Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain can at least claim to have worked for a living once (putting them up on Obama, too), Gingrich can boast of having a long record of Congressional experience and books to his credit, and even Romney can show an actual career in the business world for his efforts. Not so Huntsman, whom so far as I can tell hasn’t worked a day in his life that wasn’t connected to either maintaining the family fortune, or to the Mormon Missions.

But hey, he was once in a rock band, so that’s something…unfortunately, he was a keyboard player, and we all know what prima donnas they all are. Oh, and Haley Barbour called him a conservative…once. If Haley Barbour is your sort of conservative (small ‘c’ intentional) then you probably opted for John McCain over Rudy Giuliani. More fool you.

So, if Jon Huntsman wants a real job for the first time in his life, maybe he should set his sights a little bit lower: He can come mow my lawn, and in the process discourage those Central American coolies that NAFTA was to keep at home from crossing the border in great waves. Huntsman can mow my lawn in order to see what work is really like, and since he needs the experience of being able to relate to the Common Man, I figure it’s all a Fair Trade – I get cheap labor, he gets the experience of a real job, and through it all, America’s economy is helped in that esoteric, nebulous, mysterious way that an unequal arrangement of labor, capital, and perceived-vs.-real value is supposed to bring in the Free Trader ‘s eyes. At Minimum Wage, of course.

Let’s see how he likes getting screwed over by the very policies his ilk advocates for a change.

5. We DO have other choices, you know:

A vote for a Free Trading, Gay-Marriage-supporting, no-talent, No-Office-Daddy’s-Money-Couldn’t-Buy nebbish who can’t even garner more media attention than Rick Santorum is, objectively, a vote for President Frequent-Flyer-Miles, no matter how you slice it.

Huntsman’s candidacy is not about change at all, not even in the abysmal way Obama’s Change You Can Believe In changed anything; what we need is the Change That Has Been Urgently Required, and it will require someone other than one perfectly satisfied with the Status Quo…with Gay Marriage, to boot. Huntsman stands for a certain republican (small ‘r’ intentional) mindset that has little to do with America, and more to do with ensuring he gets to continue to draw dividends from his cancer-producing plant (they’re actually creating cancers for export there, I figure) in Bangladesh.

If you’re happy with the state of America’s economy – Free trade policies in which Americans are put out of work and foreign competitors are granted unfettered access to our markets, where massive trade imbalances are considered a feature and not a bug by the few who benefit, where the legal status of marriage is turned upside down and it’s traditional value is spit upon, where the ‘struggle’ for homosexuals to have their diseased lifestyle choice normalized simply to avoid the stigma of activities and attitudes which the vast majority consider morally repugnant, and where a complete dipshit with little obvious talent can rise to the top of America’s Heap – then vote for Jon Huntsman. He’ll bring you all the NAFTA, WTO, G-20, China-is-an-emerging-market bullshit you can handle, all the while shipping more jobs overseas and importing more illegal aliens along with the lost-cost, Wal-Mart-quality penicillin, steel, and sub-standard auto parts you can handle.

Yessirree, a vote for Jon Huntsman not only promises to prolong our economic agony by continuing some of the policies that made it possible, it promises to complete the process of disintegration by ensuring that the rat poison we all take to end our suffering is simply chock full of ingredients that made their way past those otherwise notoriously-scrupulous Peruvian Quality Control Checkers, purchased with borrowed Chinese money.

Anyone but Huntsman, please.

Previous: Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is More Annoying Than a Parakeet on Speed.

Next: Five Reasons Why Michele Bachmann Should Quit While She's Still Ahead.

Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is More Annoying Than a Parakeet on Speed…

2011-11-10T14:02:00.001-05:00

#Excelsior502 – I hate birds. I hate birds even more than I hate cats, which is something, since I believe that in the future the only use we’ll have for them is probably as food once the Global Economy finally collapses. Anyways, the reason why I hate birds so much is because of a former paramour named Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie was a girlfriend of mine for a short time, and when I say ‘short’ I truly mean short; within three weeks I was thoroughly sick of her ass and showed her the door. Anne-Marie was a bird lover, one of those people who eat, breathe, and shit all things avian, in much the same way as those pathetic cat people – you know, like the ones who insist on dressing Mr. Buttons up as Jack Sparrow or Adolf Hitler and then putting the resulting sappy video up on YouTube? – do.

Anne-Marie’s house was a virtual aviary; she had a parrot, a cockatoo, a pair of miserable budgies, and an insane parakeet named Chester. Chester was, as far as parakeets go I guess, nothing special. However, he did have one singularly annoying quality that drove me right up the proverbial wall every weekend when Anne-Marie just had to have me stay the night because…well, because I know what a woman wants, see? Besides, the lasangna was good, too.

Anyhow, about Chester...

Chester’s annoying habit was the ability to screech his tiny little heart out at all hours of the day and night. Chester, apparently, was a light sleeper who pretty much napped his way through the day, so that he could have the energy to annoy and keep you from sleeping all night long. Now, Chester’s preferred method of being a pain in the ass was to sing, as far as parakeets actually sing. It was more of a repetitive series of screeches, chirps, and puking sounds.

After three weekends of Chester’s midnight antics it had gotten to the point where I could anticipate not only when he would start sounding off, but what ‘song’ he would sing. I knew the pattern, the cadences, the volume, the rhythms, of Chester’s stupidity and could even reproduce them, sound for sound. Chester, so far as I was concerned, was dead meat just as soon as I could get his ass out of that cage and wring his neck. Of course, Anne-Marie would never allow that to happen; that was her ‘baby’, and I was a mean fucker for even thinking such things.

One day Anne-Marie was cleaning all the bird cages in the house. She cleaned the cages one at a time, and while she was thus engaged allowed the birds to fly free about the house, as they would come to her when she called them afterwards (you must have no life whatsoever if you have the time to train birds to do this kind of shit), except for Frederick the Parrot, who had to be chained to a perch, presumably because he was pissed off at Chester, too, and would probably peck the motherfucker to death, if he could.

So, Anne-Marie is cleaning Chester’s cage and the little bastard is flying free about the house, alighting and shitting wherever the fuck he pleases. One of these aeries was Anne-Marie’s kitchen counter, where something absolutely amazing happened right before my eyes.

You see, Chester had found himself an open box of them chocolate diet aid thingies (Anne-Marie had some junk in the trunk; the bigger the cushion, and all that…), if you remember those from the days before medical science told us that everything except breathing and blinking was a deadly threat to your health. Chester had decided to sample one, and within seconds was flying off like a Kamikaze, bouncing off walls and generally behaving like a cocaine addict: fidgety, full of energy, and probably on the verge of a heart attack. You see, in those days (late 1980’s), those diet aid candies were simply chock full of amphetamine-like substances. Chester was fucking wired.

Chester died the same afternoon. His little heart just couldn’t take the 6,000,000 volts of adrenaline that had suddenly coursed through his tiny veins. But before he shuffled off this mortal coil, Chester’s death throes were a sight to behold. He was screeching his little ass off, flitting from one place to another as if he had no clue that he was trapped inside a room with a closed door. He couldn’t sit still, and he wouldn’t come back to the cage when Anne-Marie called him. He was all nervous energy expended to no good purpose, and finally, he fell right off the curtain rods in a flurry of fluffy fragments and landed in the Wandering Jew upon the window sill.

It was, I imagined, like watching Icarus fall from the heavens.

I don’t miss Chester one little bit, and I see many parallels between the story of Chester the Annoying Parakeet and Presidential Contender Rick Santorum. Only worse.

Here are Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is Worse Than a Parakeet on Speed:

1. The Message:

Much like Chester’s song, Rick Santorum ‘s stump speeches and debate appearances have an annoyingly repetitive quality about them, which must be explained in two parts.

The first part is that Santorum repeats the mantra of the Social Conservative (small ‘c’ intentional) cause that everyone and their mother has heard from countless other messengers for near on three decades now. It is an amalgam, one part Norman Rockwell visions of an America which never existed, one part recycled folk wisdom which is nothing of the sort, and three parts droning insanity that makes you wonder if those who repeat it actually know they’re living in the 21st Century, and not Plymouth Colony, chasing witches.

The second part consists of a litany of non-issues and questionable achievements that have little to do with politics and everything to do with a constipated view of the current state of American Culture. Santorum has two stock responses for every question or issue posed to him: the first is to invoke the sainted memory of the good ol’ days of Ronald Reagan, and the second is to regale you…again…with the list of legislation he either crafted or co-sponsored…20 years ago… which no one either remembers or cares to remember.

That’s when he isn’t complaining that the media pays no attention to him, that is.

One can anticipate Santorum’s answers and talking points before he even begins to utter them. You can anticipate his response, his speech patterns, his cadence, the volume, and the rhythm. Rick Santorum is so predictable that after 30 seconds his voice fades off into the background and is lost in a sea of static, white noise. One day with Rick Santorum, I guess, and you will regard anything he has to say in the same manner a New Yorker deals with the bewildering array of sirens, horns, screeching subway trains and screaming mental patients let loose to wander the streets does: you ignore it, if only because devoting time and energy to focus on it will only leave you with a variety of minor-but-persistent mental disorders.

2. The Messenger:

I’m sure that Santorum himself is a pretty decent guy. You imagine him as one of those dudes who in his down time resorts to polo shirts and Brady-Bunch-style tartan plaid golf slacks and loafers, hovering over a bar-b-que overflowing with butcher-selected Chateaubriand, sipping his non-alcoholic beer, and regaling you with stories of his wild college days when short-sheeting the Dean’s bed, stealing the rival school’s sheep mascot, and pledging for his white-bread-short-haircuts-only fraternity was all the rage. “Otherwise, you’d have to go to Vietnam, you see…” he says, as he nudges you with a friendly elbow.

He’s not exactly the sort that I would hang out with, but I would probably buy insurance from him, if I had to. This doesn’t make him a bad man, but it does make him a bad candidate. He can’t relate to the common folk, you see, and while I’m certain that Santorum was never the sort of Thurston Howell III/ Harvard legacy/Blue Blood type, he certainly looks and behaves the part now, even more than Mitt Romney does.

In terms of his ‘legendary’ governmental prowess, so far as I can tell, Santorum’s main claim to fame is that he beat three democrats…barely…on the way to a career in government that was hardly distinguished. Subsequently, he also lost to a democrat, in a bad way, too.

Santorum relates the heady days of his thrice-barely-elected elevation with a sense of musty nostalgia, invoking the semi-forgotten Republican majority of 1994, you know; the one that ‘forced’ Bill Clinton to ‘end welfare, as we know it’ but only succeeded in ensuring that it would be future generations of Republicans who would spend the money saved like democrats or drunken sailors on shore leave.

Santorum has no accomplishments of note that don’t originate in that time of GOP ascendancy, which is now nearly 20 years past. Santorum hasn’t been relevant to the electoral or legislative process in America for much of the same period. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that 60 seconds after Rick Santorum left the political stage he was nearly forgotten, except by a handful of die-hard social conservatives who regard their own has-beens in much the same way some music lovers will remember one-hit wonders and eagerly line up to pay good money to listen to songs that no one remembers 20 years later, performed by the old artist who has lost his voice, gone gray, and tacked on 75 pounds.

Santorum is not presidential. He doesn’t inspire confidence. He reminds you of what many perceive to be the major turn offs about the GOP: he is a relic of the past, still living in the past, singing a song that no one remembers or cares to hear anymore. Like Chester the Parakeet, Santorum is teetering upon the curtain rod in that final second before cardiac arrest and gravity take over, and it’s painfully obvious to anyone with two good eyes.

3. Social Conservatism is a Non-Starter in an Election over Economics and Process:

This is something I have told my social conservative friends now for many years; cultural and moral issues, while important, will always take a back seat to pocketbook issues and matters of immediate need.

Social conservatives aren’t interested in hearing such obvious truths; they’re too busy trying to tell everyone else how to live in much the same way as social liberals do. Both are convinced of their own superiority and assured of their own eventual victory, in much the same way the Taliban or the Iranian Mullahs are, and so clear-thinking and pragmatism are not exactly priorities for them, nor does it ever occur to them to consider either as an alternate tactic for putting their worldview across to the greater mass of the people.

This upcoming presidential election is not about abortions, prayer in schools, displaying the Ten Commandments, or bringing civility back to our public discourse; it’s about putting people back to work, and in filling in the enormous fiscal hole that previous generations of elected officials have dug for us. This election is about restoring some sanity to the political process, restraining a government – at all levels – that has intruded ever-deeper into people’s lives, and which threatens to legislate and regulate us all into a state of virtual slavery. Both political parties have had a hand in creating this state of affairs, and when you stop to consider the amount of weight social conservatives have brought to the electoral process in the preceding two decades – there is hardly a republican that gets elected Dog Catcher in this country without a social conservative stamp of approval – one wonders just why anyone should continue to listen to them, or champion their priorities over any other.

In fact, the whole idea of a social conservative agenda being advanced by government is an extremely silly one, for two reasons. Reason 1 is that a social conservative is generally motivated by a moral imperative that is dictated by his/her religious faith and moral teachings. This requires that there be no compromise between the imperative and the operative action. Government is not exactly the best instrument for the social conservative because it only works well in a spirit of co-operation, i.e. when compromises are made for the welfare of the common good. A government is a body which often cannot function efficiently without compromise.

Reason 2 is because even if social conservatives managed to get enough of their own into positions of authority, they would still be constrained by the Constitution and the courts so that any changes they can effect take place only about the margins of American Life, and would mostly be temporary in any case, because no one party stays in a dominant position forever. What one political faction does today, the other undoes tomorrow.

Besides, if we elected a slate of social conservatives to Congress, many bearing Calvinist Christian views that went out of favor 150 years ago, we’d only get an American version of the Taliban.

Social conservatives are better off using those tools that have already served them so well for 240 years, already: mentoring programs, churches, community organizations, saving one soul at a time, changing one heart and mind at a time, which is where they are the most effective. But that would take too long, you see, what with the Rapture due to occur at any time, so it’s best just to overthrow the government from within and force people to accept Jesus…at gunpoint, if necessary.

Santorum hopes to tap into that pent-up frustration of those who hunger and thirst for their Savior to return and the Earth scraped clean of sinners, which is why they’re always looking for ‘the Next Reagan’, and finding themselves continually disappointed and disaffected. And much like the Muslims, whenever a religious, social conservative is thwarted, the defeat is not the result of bad planning, poor execution or external factors; it’s always due to a lack of piety, which means the next attempt gets more Medieval, more fundamentalist, more obnoxious than the previous one.Hence, the continual lament that "if we had only elected a REAL conservative, things would be better...", and the renewed, more-fervent quest for that REAL conservative next time around.

More Presidential candidates, people who could have been better-than-average to off-the-charts dynamite Presidents have been lost to this dialectic, many being dead meat before they even earnestly begin the process, and it's about time it stops. I can think of three victims right off the top of my head: Rudy Giuliani, Condoleeza Rice, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. If you can't pass the Godbot smell test, you get sent to the showers early.

A vote for Santorum, in this regard, is a vote for people who view homosexuality being taught in schools as an intrusion of government in to the sanctity of the home and family, but who in the same breath would loudly cheer if the FBI were given free reign to peek into people’s bedrooms to make certain they weren’t engaged in sexual acts proscribed by Scripture.

You can’t take people like that seriously, nor give them any power.

4. Santorum’s Run Isn’t Really Serious:

Santorum is one of those issue-advocacy candidates, much like John Huntsman (more on him later) who’s purpose is not so much to win, but to remind people that there’s a significant constituency behind this or that issue.

Santorum is there to draw voting blocs away from the other candidates, and in so doing, trying to prove a point: if I can draw off this many voters spouting regurgitated pablum over an issue which is both a non-starter and non-priority, imagine what would happen if these people were to feel disaffected and stay the fuck home on election day? His purpose, then, is to force the other candidates who have a better chance of winning to kiss the collective ass of a constituency that might otherwise have been ignored, and for good reason.

Santorum doesn’t expect to win, because if he did, we’d be seeing a whole lot more of him and he’d have something else, something more relevant to our current circumstances, to say. He’d have more money, he’d be polling higher, many more people would be lining up and beating down doors to go see him, he'd be advocating for solutions that are relevant to the times. He’s there to put pressure on the front-runners to not forget there are a sizable number of folks who might realize that their particular pet peeves aren’t on anyone’s menu, but that you daren’t forget that they are there, nonetheless.

Santorum, in other words, is a cardboard cutout, like the ones you typically see in front of a third-rate restaurant imploring you to try the three-day-old fishcakes before they pass their sell-by date.

5. We DO Have Other Choices, You know:

By comparison with some other candidates, Rick Santorum is hardly worthy even of the appellation ‘Dark Horse’. Currently, your front-runners are Mitt Romney (Wall Street’s Fave), Herman Cain (America’s Fave), Rick Perry (quickly fading, but the brain-dead Evangelical Fave), and Newt Gingrich (the Thinking Man’s Fave). Santorum, when he figures into any part of the discussion at all, usually finds himself low on the list, behind Michele Bachmann, who fizzled and dimmed the second she confused Elvis’ birthday and the date of his demise (my, how fickle they are out there in Middle America!), Ron Paul who is about three debates closer to the Special Hospital With Rubber Walls, and John Huntsman, soon to have a paramedic surgically grafted to his wrist to periodically assure people that he does, indeed, still have a pulse.

The election of 2012, unlike many of the past, is going to be one where the make up of the entire ticket is going to be a, perhaps THE, major factor in a GOP victory. The current front-runners are not, individually, strong enough to defeat even the enfeebled and confused Barack Obama, and I predict that it will be the synthesis of two candidates – each combining to shore up the other’s shortcomings --that will be an important factor.

In this regard, a Rick Santorum who lives in the in-retrospect-not-so-great past, reciting a checklist of bullet points of a narrower constituency that espouses concerns that are low on the To-Do List, is not the way to go. He doesn’t add anything to the front-runners, and he brings little return in terms of either excitement or swing voters, the people who will really decide the election.

Not even a shot of chocolate-encrusted speed can help Santorum now.

Previous: Five Reasons Why Ron Paul Should STFU.

Next: Five Reasons Why John Huntsman Should be Mowing My Lawn.

Five Reasons Why Ron Paul Should STFU…

2011-11-09T13:30:00.005-05:00

#Excelsior502 – Presidential hopeful and Texas congressman Ron Paul fascinates me, in much the same way that Gollum from the Lord of the Rings does. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of his undeniably inspirational sense of stick-to-it-iveness, or maybe it’s the romantic notion that even in the depths of utter despair and hopelessness one can still find something noble and human in the deeply-flawed-and-ultimately-doomed tragic figure who manages to achieve some greater good against his original intent.

Ron Paul has performed a public good in that he has asked questions that need to be asked. He has at least begun conversations about certain aspects of American life and government that we, as a people, need to have. Paul has given proof that the GOP is, indeed, the party of the Big Tent, if only because he and the ideas he espouses are tantamount to some form of minor, but acceptable, minor illness and we haven’t ostracized him for it.

The thing is, you see, that you can’t actually disagree with much of what Paul preaches. He’s right when he says that the U.S. government has overstepped the bounds of its Constitutional authority; he’s correct when he speaks against a foreign policy which is little more than a modern-day, neo-Conservative version of the White Man’s Burden; he’s absolutely spot-on when he asserts that the American economic system has become the plaything of a tangled web of special interests and government.

The problem, though, is that he’s Ron Paul, and although it’s a wise man who avoids shooting the messenger who bears unpleasant-but-vital news, that doesn’t change the fact that Paul comes off as some sort of crazy old codger, like your mentally-deranged Uncle Bob -- the one with the steel plate in his head, the early-onset Alzheimer’s, and unresolved post-Iwo Jima PTSD -- that you hide in your attic, and dread seeing at Thanksgiving.

Paul’s real problem, though, is that he mostly preaches to a self-selected choir and this choir mostly consists of people you wouldn’t follow through your own front door, if you spent any appreciable amount of time with them. Nor would you feel secure enough to let them walk your pet Airedale without adult supervision. They call themselves Libertarians, and while the vast majority of Libertarians I’ve encountered in my lifetime can be described as harmless, well-meaning people with a slightly weird set of ideals, I’ve also found a goodly number of them to be stark, raving bonkers.

With Congresscritter Paul obliquely hinting (and by that I mean he denies it, but not convincingly enough) to run as a third-party candidate should he not garner the GOP nomination for president, here are five reasons why I think Ron Paul should shut the fuck up before he does enough damage to the GOP cause as to re-elect Barack Obama by default.

1. Libertarianism, the Political Philosophy, is a Joke:

If you’ve ever read Ayn Rand, you’d agree. I have read Rand, and not just Atlas Shrugged, but many of her lesser-known opuses, especially one entitled Philosophy: Who Needs It (I would recommend it). In fact, though I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person (and by that I mean I do not need a government watchdog to ensure that I’m not festooning my private parts with rusty safety pins on a lark), I have had to read much of Rand’s work at least twice just to get a grasp on many of her central points.

Rand, once you get by the Cold-War era political gobbledygook, was apparently slightly insane. Her sexual proclivities would raise a few eyebrows, and her anti-Communist sympathies, while commendable, give one the impression of an obsessive-compulsive disorder spiced with a liberal dose of anal fixation. The resulting political philosophy (if you could call it such), and the people who seem to gravitate towards it, can basically be summed up, thusly:

A Libertarian is an over-educated, effete snob with an over-exaggerated sense of self. He/she is an opportunistic, selfish, fence-straddler who would like to reduce all political and social issues down to a simple formula: If I like it, I want more of it. If I hate it, I want less of it. In no case should government ever be able to dictate it to me, or expect me to pay for it if I don’t want to.

A Libertarian is a strange bird: Fiscally conservative, they hate taxes just like everyone else and believe they should never have to make a financial sacrifice they don’t agree with, even if it is for the common good. Socially liberal, a Libertarian just wants to live in a world where they get to choose which laws and conventions they wish to obey, and most of what they choose to disobey revolves around issues of personal pleasure. The law (whether constructed by consentual government or social convention) should stop, literally, at the tip of their nose when it runs afoul of their own, unfettered enjoyment of life.

This is a rather attractive notion, certainly, but it’s also a cowardly and selfish one. A Libertarian simultaneously holds that governments are constituted to protect civil liberties and social peace, but that the individual should be free to opt out of any law or convention that they find inconvenient. They also reserve the right to change their minds on such questions frequently and as they see fit. A Libertarian then is a shamelessly hypocritical liberal disguised as a republican. He only sides with the GOP because it promises to let him keep more of his money; in other words, economically, it is to his advantage to vote republican, while on most non-economic issues, the Libertarian is often more inclined to adopt the democratic (small “d” intentional) viewpoint.

This is usually reflected in the Libertarian’s propensity to stay home on Election Day when a die-hard social conservative is up for election, and come out of the woodwork when an economic liberal with flexible social views is on the ballot.

We already have enough people like this in America today, and they vote for the party of the donkey. In short, a Libertarian is someone who wishes to be left alone to get stupid rich under a system of laissez-faire capitalism, avoiding taxes and responsibility, whilst ignoring his fellow men, to smoke legalized hash to his tiny heart’s content. As a political philosophy, it’s not much to hang your hat upon. As the basis for a system of government, the contractual society that Libertarians espouse (all government functions, where possible, should be privatized, and Private Enterprise and Individuals should be able compete to provide those services, or opt out of them as they see fit) leaves much to be desired.

2. Libertarians are a Joke:

As discussed earlier, a Libertarian is simply a fiscal conservative with expansive, transmutable, socially-liberal viewpoints, presuming to reserve to themselves the right to decide what they will and will not do, as it suits their immediate need or desire

The hardcore Libertarian engages in the same sort of confidence trick that is usually practiced by most established religions, only in their case, the stay-one-step-ahead-of-logic-do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do dialectic is couched in political, rather than ecumenical, terms. For example: many Libertarians are bitterly opposed to anti-drug and anti-drunk-driving laws, seeing such things as drug or alcohol use as extremely personal matters that fall outside the realm of Constitutional government’s purview. At the same time, the Libertarian is not oblivious to the often-dire consequences that substance abuse has upon the greater society.

The Libertarian makes a great show of insisting that such things are simply matters of people exercising some mystic level of personal responsibility, setting up the idea that while Mr. X may be a deadly weapon behind the wheel because his booze is cheap and no one has the right to keep out of his SUV after a bender, the Libertarian is a paragon of judicious virtue. The result is that while Mr. X might have just killed a family of six on the interstate because he drove against traffic in an alcoholic stupor, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone who gets drunk is a threat to society. When tragedy befalls, as it almost must under such conditions, it’s not because government did too much or not enough, it’s always because Mr. X was an irresponsible douchebag. Why should they (Libertarians) have to suffer just because Mr. X can’t hold his Wild Turkey?

A Libertarian, then, would prefer to live in a world where consequences don’t matter. This makes them almost indistinguishable, in many respects, from your typical Leftard; it’s all about the Libertarian getting to enjoy his buzz, and fuck everyone else.

3. Ron Paul is (somewhat) a Joke:

Give Congressman Paul full marks for intellect; he is a brilliant man, and he can be a persuasive one, too, but he’s also the sort that hardly inspires confidence in his competence. For all of Ron Paul’s supposed Libertarian virtues and his near-constant drumbeat about an out-of-control government that does too much, too expensively, and in a non-transparent fashion, he’s somehow managed to stay a part of the very system he claims to despise so much.

His supporters would chalk this up as a man willing to fight the good fight, even against titanic odds, and there is some truth to this formulation. One can never say that Paul hasn’t at least tried to practice what he preaches, but it’s also apparent that whatever it is that he preaches falls upon mostly-deaf ears, and that when push came to shove, Paul has probably thrown his lot in with the rank-and-file GOP more often than he has stood firmly on Libertarian principles.

People don’t get to stay in government as long as he has without compromising their core beliefs at least some of the time. Paul may rail against US military adventurism in Afghanistan, but if you looked into the Congressional record I doubt you’d find many times when he voted against a use of force or appropriation of funds to continue it. Doing so would probably put him in a bad electoral position, and so it is easier to perhaps rationalize those positions and votes away rather than to admit that he has done anything against principle.

This makes Paul exactly what most of the mouth-breathing idiots we send to Washington, D.C. are: a politician, only one who comes out every four years to beat the drum for a political philosophy which is detached from reality, and mostly drawn from the political novels of a sex maniac. Ron Paul, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing special. He’s simply as opportunistic, as ethically-challenged, as self-interested, as the next man, only he wraps himself in the flag of constitutionality and personal rights every so often as a means of disguising it.

A President Ron Paul would be reminiscent of a slightly-more-right-wing Barack Obama. There is no ‘There’ there; only a confused mish-mash of convoluted expediencies and philosophies flung together haphazardly, this or that convention drawn out of the resulting soup as needed, and as seems sufficient to achieve the barest minimum with the least amount of fuss. A Paul administration could be horribly pacifist one day, rabidly hawkish the next; playing to this constituency to gain some temporary advantage, only to shun it when the advantage is gone. A President Paul may rail against the excesses of Barack Obama and Wall Street bankers, but he is, in many ways, cut from the same cloth as they are: ethics are fungible, responsibility is never a shared burden, government exists to collect the trash and defend the country, but not to govern some of the worst excesses of men.

When Ron Paul stands up and fights against something that matters, rather than merely suggesting that “something be done about…” while sitting on the sidelines, I’ll begin to take him seriously.

4. There’s No Incrementalism in Paul’s platform:

One of the most astonishing features of American Life is that we almost never take any great action all in one leap. Every aspect of our lives is an exercise in compromise and tolerance, of incorporation of incremental change. We examine most subjects in exacting detail; we audit those who are supposed to be responsible for things; we investigate, evaluate, think and re-think, and replay the consequences of our collective actions. We’re certain that we’re not perfect and that no one has all the answers, and that there is no such thing as a One-size-fits-all approach to most things in our daily lives.

Although one would be hard-pressed to find this virtue present in many of our recent decisions; the American Public ran to the polls to elect a complete dingbat with an interesting (mostly-self-constructed) biography to the highest office in the land, and in the aftermath of that election we have seen the nationalization (or near nationalization) of our industry, banks and financial services, and the looming nationalization of our healthcare system. We’ve seen a Balkanization of our national politics, the collusion of government and business which have led us to bankruptcy, wars seemingly without end.

It’s time that the process by which such sweeping changes were implemented was halted. Ron Paul’s platform, however, promises much the same. In his own way, he’s as dangerously ‘transformative’ in terms of approach as Barack Obama is.

Paul would eliminate the Federal Reserve Bank, the very day he was sworn in, if he could. Now, as to whether this is a good idea or not, I’m not qualified to say, but it would seem to me that in so doing it’s quite possible that without a longer-term (and slower) reform of the overall financial system, simply knocking out one of the current pillars upon which it rests is exceedingly radical and potentially dangerous. Why not opt for a slower, more controlled transition? Paul insists the Fed is at the root of all of our economic evils and should be abolished, forthwith.

The same could be said of much of Paul’s foreign policy initiatives, as well. I personally would like to see the US military turn much of the Middle East into a glass-topped, self-lighting parking lot and bring the boys home A.S.A.P., but that would have been the best strategy at the beginning of the conflict, rather the most effective solution at this point in time. To simply pull out precipitously, as Obama is doing, and as Paul suggests, might do more harm than good. A staged withdrawal is probably a better strategy, overall. As for Iran getting nuclear weapons, since three previous administrations (Clinton, GWB and Obama) didn’t seem to give a shit about a nuclear Iran (covering this indifference with a façade of diplomacy), what Paul suggests – leaving Iran alone to build all the damned bombs they like – is simply more of the same, with the added disadvantage of openly admitting that we’re powerless, or don’t care enough, to stop them.

Paul would probably abandon Israel, or any other American ally, if it seemed the most expedient solution to him, despite any protest to the contrary. Paul would allow unfettered access across America’s borders if there was a sudden shortage of pool cleaners and hotel chambermaids, if only because stopping them would necessarily involve granting government expanded police powers and cost money, even if doing so prevents the government from doing that which it is specifically empowered to do.

The one advantage to a Ron Paul presidency, though, might be a cultural change in the direction towards more federalism and less centralization. This is a core republican belief, in any case.

5. We DO have other choices, you know:

I won’t say that Ron Paul is the worst presidential candidate the GOP could vomit up for 2012 (after all, it selected John McCain last time around, and a wholly ineffectual and totally lost and confused Bob Dole once upon a time), but he’s certainly not the best of the current crop.

While I can see the appeal of an outspoken champion of a political philosophy that most people would find amenable -- at least until they delved deeper into it and made an effort to understand it. I’m not even certain I totally understand all of its nuances – there is simply little appeal to Ron Paul, the Man. He’s interesting, he’s entertaining, but after a short while this spell wears off as he tries to explain his point of view and you get lost in the On-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other-and-then-please-allow-me-a-third-hand-for-rhetorical-purposes explanation of it all. One gets the distinct impression that Ron Paul could certainly win a campus debating society bout, but not a national election.

The great mystery of Ron Paul is how it is that he continues to win election to Congress as things now stand. Then again, a number of Libertarians I know happen to, coincidentally, come from Texas. Maybe it’s just a Texas thing, or maybe it’s a matter of intellectual snobs (and you know you are one, Tucker Carlson!) banding together to look down their noses, figuratively, at all us drooling doofuses, but he manages to hang in there, and that’s a wonder.

But, is it a reason to vote the man into the White House? I think not. Especially not if Paul follows through on his subtly-delivered and conveniently-evaded threat to split the GOP with a third-party run. Ross Perot tried that crap with fiscal conservatives and brought us eight years of Billy Jeff Clinton and his pale imitation of the Benny Hill Show. Nothing haunts me more than the memory of a smugly arrogant and triumphant Paul Begala, after all. For this reason alone, Ron Paul is probably just as dangerous to America’s political system, economy, sanity, and world standing as Barack Obama is.

But bless him for asking some pointed questions and for opening a few eyes. He has served his purpose, now he should simply exit stage right…

Previous: Five Reasons Why Rick Perry is a Major Douche.

Next: Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is More Annoying Than a Parakeet on Speed.

Handy Herman...

2011-11-08T10:52:00.002-05:00

Boy, it's sure beginning to really suck to be Herman Cain!

Let's put this out here right at the top: I don't believe, based upon the scanty and mostly anonymous evidence presented so far, that Herman Cain has molested or sexually harassed anyone. I believe, in much the same way the lamestream, libtard press believes, that is, sans incontrovertible evidence, that Cain is innocent in much the same way as his political opponents would like you to believe that he is guilty.

It is a crying shame that in this day and age the presumption of innocence is so casually tossed away, and it's even more sickening that even this thin protection of human rights and dignity is even more quickly discarded when the accusation in question is so obviously related to one's political beliefs and affiliations.

Four women (so far as we know, there's only actually one woman, since the other three people supposedly making the accusations lack enough courage of their convictions to actually identify themselves) have said that Herman gets a little suggestive and perhaps takes the term 'hands-on training' a little too seriously. Three of them hide behind a shield which is constructed of three parts anonymity and one part stupid media.

The one that has come forward did so with a story that stinks on ice, led to a podium by Gloria Allred.

It should be a law in this country: if Gloria Allred is your (paid) representative, the general public should be able to automatically assume that you're full of shit. Gloria is to Women's Rights what Je$$e Jackson is to Civil Rights, that is, merely the visible symptom of a much more pernicious disease.

Je$$e and Gloria are like the boil, canker sore, or a raging itch that precedes the onset of something that will eventually suck the life out of you. In their cases, the deadly maladies are politically-motivated brain death and a blood-curdling inanity.

Be that as it may, let's take a look at this new accuser's story, so far as I know it.

She goes to Herman looking for help in getting a new job. Somehow, this career-counselling session takes place in a parked car on a busy Washington, D.C. street, because apparently she can't get an appointment to see him in his office, or maybe all the coffee shops, bars, and Public Parks in Washington were crowded that day. According to the accuser, Herman first makes an effort to get to third base, and when he is rebuffed, he then attempts to force her to perform an act of Mouth-to-South Resuscitation.

Somehow (and the how is never explained) she manages to escape with her virtue intact. Upon avoiding a potential rape, she does none of the following:

a. call a cop
b. scream for help from passers-by on the street
c. seek professional help -- no doctors, no lawyers, no grief counsellors, or such -- so far as we know, from anyone.

What she does do, however, is tell her girlfriends who sign an affidavit a decade-and-a-half later with an extreme clarity or recollection concerning the details of the alleged sexual assault, and under circumstances in which neither the accused or his counsel gets the opportunity to depose them. Apparently, neither of these (anonymous, too) girlfriends makes an effort to call a cop on her behalf, either, when that would have made a great deal of sense. Fourteen years later, when Herman Cain rises to national prominence, the woman suddenly remembers her ordeal at his hands, and does what all right-thinking crime victims do: she gets herself a professional moonbat to lead her to a press conference in the middle of a republican primary season, denouncing the would-be rabid sexual predator roaming the streets in a three-piece suit.

And still, so far as anyone knows, no one has ever called the Police to report what is a serious crime in every corner of Planet Earth not ruled by Sharia Law.

I'm so glad Feminism came along to 'empower' women, who to this day can so frankly speak to their girlfriends, their lawyers, and the media about the intimate details of their ravishing, but who somehow still haven't gotten the message that when a crime is committed it's a good idea to let someone in authority know about it so that criminals don't go free.

Which just goes to demonstrate something I have contended all along: Feminism is complete bullshit. So is an otherwise-unreported charge of sexual harassment.

Somehow, one gets the distinct impression that the slow drip-drip-drip of unproven allegations is supposed to destroy the Cain candidacy, that the longer his opponents get to paint him as some sort of unsavory character with a penchant for feeling a chick up without buying her dinner first, that he's some sort of cad that is unfit to hold the highest office in the all the land. It's quite a comical circumstance when you stop to consider that many of the people who would like you to believe that Herman Cain -- sans evidence -- is some sort of sexual deviant are the same people who have beatified JFK and RFK, worship at the altar of Bill Clinton, fawned over John Edwards, and went to great extremes to ensure that the stories of their sexual proclivities remained hidden, and so too their actual victims.

Until someone comes forward with ironclad proof that Herman is a pervert, I think he's entitled to the presumption of innocence, and it is incumbent upon his accusers to prove their claims rather than just engage in a game of innuendo and unreported charges.

Gettin' With the Times...

2011-11-08T10:02:00.000-05:00

It was inevitable.

One day I knew that if I had ever wanted to make this collection of diseased rantings a viable commercial enterprise, I would have to get with the program and make it accessible to morons of all stripes.

Hence, you can now Tweet the Lunatic's Asylum (the tag line is #Excelsior502), and let your friends know just what sort of scurrilous and sanctimonious nonsense comes out of my fevered imagination. Coming soon, the next signpost on the Highway to Hades: a Facebook connection for the Lunatic's Asylum.

I had hoped to keep both of these technological menaces to civil society at arm's length, but unfortunately, the Lunatic likes Pepsi and Marloboros and these, alas, cost money. Part of the compromise between insanity and cash is to bow to the inevitable and stoop to the level of those whose only connection to anything approaching humanity is the ability to use their opposible thumbs while disengaging their critical thinking skills.

I'm still working out all the details, so please bear with me.

I weep for the future as I discover just what it is that people are really doing with Facebook and Twitter, but fortunately, if this sort of thing actually works in raking in the bucks, I will at least be able to afford Kleenex.

Tell your friends!

I REALLY MISS GEORGE W. BUSH

2011-11-05T10:45:00.002-04:00

You know what? I miss President Bush, and I'm tired of people still dissing him like he's some chump. Yeah Clinton was great, but who would you rather have had in office after that, Gore? Kerry?

With either of those guys as President, we would've been as lame as our neighbors by now. Don't get me wrong, I like Canada. They got free health care and poutine (which makes culinary sense). And Mexico...Mexico is warm.

Anyway, you need President Bush, like everyone else in this world does. Who else could have removed the threat in Iraq, trained the Iraqi people to defend their land, and instilled civility to a country? Who else would've given us stimulus checks in order to pump up the economy? If you don't like that, then you're most likely a Democrat...a crack-whore welfare Democrat.

Behold, my favorite President of the United States of America, in the greatest State of the Union Address ever. A speech you probably missed because you were busy hating him and wishing that your lives were miserable:

Have a good weekend...

*this post also appears at the Insane Asylum Blog*

Your Ad Here

TEXAS JUDGE CRITICIZED FOR BEATING HIS DAUGHTER WITH A BELT

2011-11-03T17:00:00.005-04:00

Seven years ago, Texas judge William Adams caught his daughter Hillary (who was 16 at the time) downloading music illegally from a website. So he did what any parent that believes in not sparing the rod would do. He disciplined her with his belt.

Hillary, unbeknownst to her parents, recorded the whole incident. She held on to the video over the years, but decided recently to upload it to YouTube in an attempt to make him "get help" according to her. She said that he's been harassing her over the years, and she wants him to stop. She doesn't go deeply in the details about the harassment, so I can't justify her uploading the video especially since she said the intent wasn't to get him trouble.

Since Hillary, 23, who has ataxic cerebral palsy (read the definition before you start criticizing) uploaded the video, it has been seen over 2 million times. People have already expressed outrage over the judge's actions, and a facebook page entitled Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams has been set up in an effort to get him off the bench.

First, let's watch the footage. Jump to the 1:00 mark if you don't want to wait for the action. At 2:45, go to 3:15 for more. The video will pop open right here so you won't have to leave.

Your Ad Here

You've watched it, so what do you think?

Personally, I didn't see anything wrong with it at all. I watched it with my referee shirt on and everything. Listen, the talking that typically goes with a whipping is rarely nice. It's part of the psychological effect. What's getting people in such an uproar is the fact that this is happening inside of a White family's home. This type of discipline is never seen on TV or in public places because Whites tend to favor the "time-out" approach over the direct-connect. I understand the reaction, but how would it look if his IP address was connected with illegally downloading music, and he got sued for millions like the others who got caught?

I used to get my share of the belt. Hell, the belt had a name, too. "Jim-Buck", short for "Jim Buckle". I got the standard whuppin', nothing fancy. There was no using of the buckle, no hitting in the face or my nuts or anything like that. And trust me, I deserved every one I got. They tried the punishment approach on me, too. I mean, they mixed it up and stuff, but the whuppins were more effective.

Hey, if you think that's bad, I know people who got beat with the first thing their parent or guardian could get their hands on. Sometimes they were beaten with extension cords, broom handles, clothes hangers, chairs, fists...whatever.

What the judge did was textbook discipline with a belt, and there was nothing abusive about it at all.

Do you think judge Adams committed a crime? Do you think his daughter uploaded the video to be spiteful? Judge Adams presides over cases involving children (child abuse cases), and they've taken those away. Do you think that's fair?

*this post also appears at the Insane Asylum Blog*

Your Ad Here

Five Reasons Why Rick Perry is a Major Douche...

2011-11-03T14:11:00.004-04:00

I have an almost visceral dislike of Texas Governor and Presidential hopeful Rick Perry. I wouldn't go as far as to say that I actually hate the man, because I don't know him personally. Rather, my dislike is based upon certain politically-motivated factors which manifest whenever the man appears on television.

Here are Five Reasons why I believe Rick Perry is a Major Douche:

1. Rick Perry is Everything The Left said George W. Bush Was:

Rick Perry does not appear to be any of the following:

a. Smart enough to be President.
b. Prepared to answer even the simplest of direct questions during a debate.
c. Serious enough to at least give the appearance that he truly wants and can do the job.
d. Engaged intellectually in the vital issues of the day.

Rick Perry apparently can't speak a solitary sentence without contradicting himself, invoking the deity, or displaying an ability to grasp or convey even the simplest of details. Remember the Left's portrayal of George W. Bush as a simple-minded, frat-boyish, Cowboy who mangled the English language? Compared to Rick Perry, GWB is Winston Churchill, Cicero, and Daniel Webster, combined.

Perry comes off as a stuttering dunce, unable to see the contradictions inherent within his own utterances and positions. One cannot be a conservative, you see, and at the same time insist that the government has the right to order pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against their parent's will, or that the proper role of the federal government is in right smack-dab in the middle of someone's abortion. One cannot claim the mantle of 'the real conservative in this race' while simultaneously defending certain aspects of illegal immigration and calling for the taxpayer to continue pick up the tab for educating the children of illegal immigrants.

Perry is clueless, as the recent Niggerhead teapot-tempest-scandal should have made clear. Even in the 1980's, it should have been painfully obvious to the dimmest, ass-backwards Texan with political aspirations that even second-or-third-hand association with anything associated with the N-word should have been avoided like typhus. The only reason one might assume that Perry didn't see that association with a place called Niggerhead might have been bad news for a 'conservative' (small 'c' intentional) politician is that Perry, quite possibly, can't read.

Perry's call for a flat tax is, indeed, welcome, but again he's short on actual details. According to most experts on the subject, Perry's tax plan leaves the federal government $1 trillion short of it's core obligations and Perry has not been forthcoming about what he would cut out of the federal budget to make up that shortfall (because that would mean announcing cuts which the Dimwits and his opponents could criticize all day and night, naturally, which Perry would then have to defend, intellectually). One gets the distinct impression that Perry and his people assume it's simply enough to suggest a tax reform platform and that this should suffice.

One last thing about Perry's intelligence and acumen: apparently Perry does so poorly in answering questions in a debate format that his campaign has decided to forego debates, wherever possible, going forward. This would indicate that Perry is a pussy-ass retard who can't think on his feet, and who runs scared when it comes to standing up to the scrutiny a presidential candidate must endure.

2. Perry is not even a Real Republican:

In fact, he was a democrat (small 'd' intentional) who changed party allegiances so as to become George W. Bush's Lieutenant Governor. It looks to me that Perry still hasn't forgotten that he was once a democrat when it comes to his positions on certain issues (See HPV vaccinations and illegal immigration, above), which leads one to the conclusion that Perry can't tell his Left from his Right, in both the political sense, and in the literal sense (see 'intelligence' above).

Perry's not even a 'real' conservative (small 'c' intentional), either, mostly for the reasons listed above. In fact, the only thing 'conservative' about Rick Perry, perhaps, is his constipated brand of religious faith which he wears upon his sleeve, and brandishes at every opportunity. This is, in my opinion, the only reason Perry is able to stay in the race; he resonates with those who's religious beliefs trump their reason. It's the only way to explain how Perry became a 'frontrunner' within 24 hours of announcing his candidacy; while Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul and the others were up in Iowa pumping hands and dishing out BBQ and cornbread, Perry was getting himself photographed at massive prayer meetings, the Evangelical version of a Nuremberg Rally.

Perry, politically, is a contradiction, but one that is not exactly an uncommon one in many Republican circles unfortunately. So long as he espouses the correct religious beliefs, he's superior to anyone else in the minds of the like-minded people who perhaps make up about 25% of the Republican base.

3. Rick Perry is the Establishment's Choice:

Because Perry has a certain pedigree (governor of a large state, followed a republican into office, prays like a maniac, can raise money from the braindead who believe in an Invisible Man in the Sky like Billy Graham does), he is the Establishment GOP's choice for an eventual nominee. He has, so to speak, punched all the right tickets, kissed all the right backsides, parroted the right slogans, regurgitated all the right positions.

About the only thing that makes Rick Perry distinguishable in 'conservative' (small 'c' intentional) circles from, say, Ronald Reagan, is that Reagan, at least, had some real talents. Perry is, as they say, slightly Reaganesque, but only on the basis of shallow appearances (i.e. democrat who switched parties, perceived economic conservative, holds the right social views, makes a show of religion, says the right things when they need to be said, although in Perry's case, these things are fed to him by his minions rather than being the products of his own intellect). And herein is the major problem with certain aspects of Today's GOP.

Some in the GOP want Reagan to return in the same way they want Jesus to return. In fact, the entire GOP meme of 'The Next Reagan' is not so much political as much as it seems religious. Everyone wants The Savior to return to lead the People into the Promised Land. Reagan and Jesus, alas, are dead. There will never be another like them and Rick Perry, in my opinion, couldn't even aspire to be a pimple on Ronnie's wrinkled gray ass. But, Perry is, accoridng to some who are supposed to be running things, the Next Best Thing to Reagan, an assumption I find highly suspect.

Much the same Messianic Complex was on display with the adoration of Scott Brown, who, it later turned out, was about as 'conservative' as Ted Kennedy, and who, ultimately, failed to hand the GOP a victory in the Healthcare Debacle when the other side neutralized his potentially-decisive vote with a tortured parliamentary maneuver.

Quite frankly, Perry simply is the formulaic candidate; he's a Southern Christian, governor of a Southern State, who talks a good game about religion, conservatism, and holds onto the stupendously ridiculous notion that Hispanics are the 'natural' allies of the GOP because of their supposed Family Values. Hispanics might hate abortion and gay marriage just as much as the next snake-handling Baptist, but they'll vote democrat just as soon as the border is mined and patrolled by helicopter gunships with orders to open fire on anything that moves, or if it promises an expansion of the Welfare State in their direction.

The Establishbment GOP holds such a weirdly contradictory position on the subject of Illegal Immigration -- i.e. it patronizes Illegal Aliens at the same time it screams about Border Security and the value of citizenship -- that makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever, and this entails making compromises that cannot withstand ideological scrutiny.

In a way, the Establishment wants what they perceive as the best parts of the Hispanic mindset -- aspects the GOP sees forming a natural alliance of convenience in the wider Culture War, paired with the ability to work like a sled dog for mean wages -- while at the same time demonizing the Illegal Immigrant as an expensive pest who brings with him crime, disease, the bugaboo of multiculturalism, and government bloat. GWB did this dance very well, and the fawning divorced-from-reality adoration of Marco Rubio (someone who, frankly, hasn't yet achieved anything noteworthy) is yet another symptom of this love-hate relationship with Hispanics, which is little more than a grudging admission that demographics makes it necessary, sometimes, to kiss Hispanic ass. But not too much...

Perry embodies this contradiction quite nicely. It oozes out of every fucking pore in his body, and as the Governor of a Border State, Perry is infinitely familiar with how to dance to this particular tune.

4. Rick Perry is a Raging Doofus:

One need only see the...I guess you can call it a speech... he gave in New Hampshire the other day to notice this. Seriously, does anyone want a President who can behave like a stoned-out, skateboarding slacker? There was no difference between Perry at that podium and half the turds wasting their time getting high at an Occupy Wall Street rally.

And even this particular aspect of Perry's personality has little to do with (lack of) intelligence; it's almost symptomatic of how the man comports himself and approaches serious issues. I've heard various explnations of Perry's behavior the other day, and they ran the gamut from 'punch-drunk from a long day' to 'lubricated'. Ask yourself this: would you want your X-box playing, knit-cap wearing, hacky-sack-carrying kid to be President of the United States, with his fingers on the nuclear buttons? If your answer is 'yes', then go out and vote for Perry, but don't come back crying to me. I warned you.

Seriously?

5. We DO have other choices, you know:

And many of them make far more sense and espouse far more conservative (and base republican) positions than Perry.

Mitt Romney is not my first choice...for anything...but he at least has the intelligence to frame the race, thus far, in terms of the most important issue facing the American Public and that is the economy and putting people back to work. He has at least put forward a prospective agenda on paper.

Newt Gingrich, hands down, is always the smartest guy in the room, and has the legislative experience and historical perspective to enact an agenda which turns this country 180 degrees. He has at least put forth a prospective agenda on paper.

Herman Cain has a proven track record of success in the private sector, is an affable and respectable figure, and has the singular distinction of being the only non-professional politician in the race, We need fewer politicians and more thinkers and doers. He has, also, at least put forward a prospective agenda on paper.

As for the other GOP contenders, quite frankly, they leave much to be desired, being little more than the mouthpieces of single-issue voters, or of a smaller-but-still-vocal ideological point of view. Rick Perry falls somewhere in the middle of all of this, which is to say that Perry is not really all that distinctive, and quite frankly, that should frighten you.

Rick Perry is simply not a Presidential contender, in my opinion, and a vote for him is a vote for more of the same, only with The Lord's Prayer and a goofy laugh attached.

Next: Five Reasons Why Ron Paul Should STFU.

Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment...

2011-10-31T14:36:00.002-04:00

By now everyone should have heard about Herman Cain's little trouble with some allegations of randiness. I won't recap the whole, sordid...ahem...affair, because the facts are still in question, as are the circumstances, and the story still needs some time to play out fully before comments are made by me.

I'd like to make a few observations:

1. You just knew this was coming, eventually. As soon as Herman began to make some hay ahead of the primaries, you knew someone was going to find something to slime him with. Good going, Mitt Romney (I assume), you might have just handed America back to Barack Obama, or more likely, to Hillary Clinton when she beats the snot out of Obama in the Leftard Special Olympics (then again, maybe it was the Clinton people who put this out here? Something to think about...)

2. In my (limited) experience, most lawsuits involving allegations of discrimination or sexual harassment are total bullshit. They are usually filed by sack-of-shit-lying-douchebags who don't get rewarded to their liking for doing a mediocre job, or by people who are too stupid to make it in Corporate America the old-fashioned way: with hard work, talent, and effort.

In the case of sexual harassment suits, you'll usually find them originating with women who have a higher opinion of themselves than what might otherwise be considered reasonable, and which can often border on the disturbing. More often than not, these suits are filed by women looking to get even with someone -- a boss who may have just gotten on the bad side of Betty Sue's menstrual cycle today, an ex-lover who's continued presence in the office reminds her of her mistakes -- and are often used as a means of legal blackmail. The point is to make the allegation (which is usually almost-impossible to prove one way or the other) and then wait for the settlement, because that's cheaper than paying lawyers to litigate.

In Herman's case, the allegations reach back into the 1990's, which if my memory serves, was the Golden Age of Sexual Harassment suits. No one heard of sexual harassment before Anita Hill (since proven to be a liar and a crank; I mean, who puts public hairs on soda cans, and thinks it's a turn on? Really! You gonna tell me that wasn't made up by some lunatic?), and it was all we heard right up until the rage in the business community was a 'Commitment to Diversity', the second biggest pile of dogshit in America. It's mostly all about using victimhood, or creating a perception of victimhood, to prise cash out of someone's wallet.

3. If the reports are accurate, Cain can't even respond to the allegations because there's a non-disclosure agreement in force. So this makes it a doubly-dirty trick.

4. Who gives a shit? I mean, if democrats want to say that this sort of allegation means Herman Cain isn't qualified to be President of the United States, I have two words to say in response:

Bill Clinton.

You can't sit there and compare Herman Cain to a plead-guilty-to-avoid-conviction liar, serial adulterer and alleged rapist. You Dimwits thought Billy was fine when he was shoving cigars up the hired help's backsides, so you should shut the fuck up. Don't get me started on the Kennedys, either.

If you're a 'real' conservative (small 'c' intentional) and believe that such alleged disgusting and immoral behavior constitutes a character flaw which precludes Cain's ascendancy to the Office of President, then please kindly explain your hypocritical support of Senator Bob Packwood when he was kicked out of the Senate for sexual harassment? And anyway some of you people probably still think Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Baker, and that Gay Televangelist Dude are still going to be saved by Jesus.

If you're one of those people who are easily offended and in fact live your life in such a way as to actively seek offense so that you can walk around in a sanctimonious manner (and you know who you are!), I would say to you: who cares what you think? Who made you the most important people on Planet Earth? It's people like you that helped fuck everything up in the first place, so shut it.

This is what happens when you're winning, Herman, so get used to it. In the meantime, I'm fairly certain that most Americans with more than two braincells to rub together -- unless they're at one of the Occupy Wall Street Circle Jerks -- couldn't care less about something that happened twenty years ago, because they have more pressing concerns in the present.

My advice to Mr. Cain is this: if you did, indeed, do something wrong, then fess up to it right away and fuck what your lawyers tell you. If you didn't, then demand that the anonymous (cowardly) sources that made the accusations step forward and put whatever proof -- that's beyond-reasonable-doubt proof, not the usual Libtard rigmarole of loose threads and conspiracy theory woven together into a controversy with no point -- on the table, otherwise, they'd best shut the fuck up, too.

Until someone proves something, Herman Cain is still my man.

Someone Hired Me?

2011-10-31T14:06:00.001-04:00

With regards to the lack of content, recently:

I'm busy. I've got a new job (sort of) that I'm working on, and so far as I can tell, the only good point in it's favor is that I'll get to (legally) fleece Senior Citizens -- the second biggest community of mollycoddled crybabies in the United States (Baby Boomers come in first).

I've said it before on this page, and I'll say it again:

If you've outlived the money you put into Social Security, your savings, and your economic usefulness, then do us all a favor and have the good taste to finally shuffle off this mortal coil.

Unfortunately, I can't help them do so without prison time, and let's face it: it's not worth third-rate bologna sandwiches and toilet wine just to have the opportunity. besides, that's someone's grandmother, even if that someone only tends to regard grandma as a substitute for her lost house cat. But, I will be helping them to prepare for that day when the Grim Reaper finally gets off his big, fat, probably-Unionized ass, and starts knocking off the so-called Greatest Generation and their demon spawn, the Baby Boomers, in the millions.

That would mean lower taxes, more hospital beds, fewer auto accidents, and cheaper housing for everyone, you know, so the mass extinction of otherwise-useless humanity has benefits for greater society that extend far beyond what one might think when they first hear the idea.

Be that as it may...

One of the hallmarks of the 'new' economy under President Never-Met-a-Vacation-He-Wouldn't-Take-if-someone-else-paid-for-it is that there are, indeed, jobs available, but they are, alas, the sort that few people not desperate for a steady diet of Ramen Noodles would take. In the last few weeks of job hunting, I've found that sales positions abound.

Which sucks, since I'm a qualified Computer Programmer and Systems Analyst. All those jobs went to China and India, because somehow that was good for the American Consumer.

But about those sales positions; they're not what you think they might be. They're mostly commission-only jobs, which means you could spend all day peddling someone's products, and not get paid for it if you don't make a sale. In other words, no one is hiring permanent, salaried employees, because that means:

a. Having to pay for benefits, and
b. Having to deal with the jungle of Federal Red tape.

So, anyone with a job to fill seems perfectly content to hire 'contract' employees, or as the vernacular currently in use puts it 'independent contractors'. It's a nice, neat little trick your typical Fortune 500 is using these days so as to not have to deal with ObamaCare, Frank-Dodd, and about 5-bazillion pages worth of Federal crapspeak disguised as 'regulations'.

Anyways, it's not a bad gig, provided I can get over my desire to see anyone over the age of 60 given the plastic soda bottle treatment; i.e. they're either buried under tons of earth and garbage in a landfill, or recycled into patio furniture. For every sale I make I get somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred buckaroos, and it should be easy to make some decent sales every week dealing with people who have both one foot in the grave and fond memories of the days (assuming they don't have Alzheimer's) when everything from a loaf of bread to a kidney transplant only cost a nickle.

Stay tuned.

A Round of Applause for Mr. Chap...

2011-10-31T13:42:00.000-04:00

Nicely done, Mr. C!

Mister Chap will be helping us keep our insanity levels at '1.000 mg of Thoraizine...stat!' .

He's a good man, a good writer, and a snazzy dresser, so lend him your eyes and your brains while he dishes out his own brand of expert-approved mental pablum. You can also visit him at the Insane Asylum.

You'd better....don't make me come up there and make you...

Welcome aboard, Mr. C, and thank you, thank you, THANK FUCKIN' YOU, for helping to destroy that totally-invented Kennedy aura that has done so much damage to our beloved Republic!

J.F.K., M.L.K., D.D.E. AND BLACK JESUS

2011-10-30T10:08:00.003-04:00

[author's note: Allow me to introduce myself. I go by Mr. Chap, and I am the owner of the Insane Asylum website (http://www.insaneasylumblog.com/). At the Insane Asylum, we strive to make people think about the things they normally don't. From unbelievable news to politics, we cover the issues that drive our society.

I'm really honored that Matthew, who is an all-star contributor at the Insane Asylum, has given me the green light to write here. For the record, I do think I should let you know that I'm a sympathetic Grammar Nazi who is open to beginning sentences with "because" and "but", I rarely use curse words, and I'm also a serial comma killer.

Enjoy the ride...motherfuckers.]

I hope they don't take my Black Card for this...

January 19th was the 50th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's Inaugural speech, and if it wasn't for Google reminding us, most people probably wouldn't have noticed. It's funny how Mr. Kennedy is seen as this major proponent of civil rights. He's earned a spot on the walls and mantles of many Black households next to Dr. Martin Luther King and Black Jesus...the one with the dreads. However, Mr. Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a Senator, and after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to Dr. King's 1963 March on Washington which was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a Black Republican.

Your Ad Here

During the civil rights movement Dr. King fought the Democrats who turned fire hoses on blacks, stood in the school house doors, and let dogs loose. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. Eisenhower appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. It was also Eisenhower that actually ended segregation in the military.(edit)

The 1963 March on Washington was initially opposed by Kennedy because he believed that any march during his presidency meant that civil rights leaders were critical of his stance on civil rights. Kennedy also felt that the march could affect Congress when it was in the process of discussing his civil rights bill. Only when it was agreed that the Federal Government would have a presence Kennedy eventually endorsed it. He might have been playing politics when he opposed the 1957 Act. I'll give him that. And while is was status-quo for the Dems to be against civil rights at that time, maybe he recognized that he needed the ‘Black Vote’ if he was to beat Nixon. Hence the complete about-face in policy.

Your Ad Here

Given the circumstances of that era, it is safe to say Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was to be fair to Blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (designed by Black Republican Art Fletcher). Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to Blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Nah, I'm not a Republican, Democrat, Progressive, Tea-Bagger, Independent or Watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside). Their stances change every day and a good idea is a bad idea to a Party if another Party brings it up first. I'm not much into relying on man to do what's right. The only thing we have dominion over are animals and we can't even do that without effing up. I'll just sit back and watch the political dogfights while eating my popcorn.

Oh, about Black Jesus...um, here you go

*this post also appears at the Insane Asylum Blog*

Your Ad Here

Stuck In Neutral...

2011-10-24T09:42:00.002-04:00

It must really suck to be Mitt Romney. I mean, if you took away the rugged good looks and the vast personal fortune you'd start to wonder just what was left, and then, upon reciting your (extremely short) list of remaining virtues, slowly begin to understand just why it is that Mr. Romney can't seem to break the 25% mark in most presidential polls these days.

Before we begin to explore the primary reason behind Mitt's relatively abysmal showing thus far, let's take a good look at some of the tertiary issues that plague the Romney candidacy.

The first issue is the man himself. Mitt Romney just isn't a very good candidate. He has some issues with telling the unvarnished truth, and he's got a layer of slick on him that would rival that of Bill Clinton's vaunted slipperiness. His biggest shortcoming is the millstone of RomneyCare, that forerunner of the ObamaCare abomination, hanging about his neck. Romney is unable (or unwilling) to tell the truth about this issue: that, all things considered, the Massachusetts health Care Laws and ObamaCare are barely distinguishable in terms of cost, efficacy, and legality.

For an electorate for whom one of the biggest marks against the current regime is the underhanded methods by which socialized medicine is being foisted upon us, this makes Romney vulnerable to the charge that he's no different than Obama. Romney could have defused this ticking time bomb a long time ago by simply saying "Gee, I guess I was wrong about state-run healthcare systems, but I've learned some important lessons about why this is a bad thing, and here they are..."

Whether he actually believed that his own state-run healthcare system was a bad idea or not is irrelevant; he would have still been on record as having repudiated his own bad policy in this area, and that might have led more people to believe him when he repudiates ObamaCare. Without a denunciation and a public mea culpa on this issue, Romney is pretty much dead meat. GOP voters are notorious for forgiving a flip-flop if the resulting mental somersault results in the candidate arriving at the 'right' position (i.e. GHW Bush's painfully-transparent flip-flop to the Pro-Life agenda for the purposes of being Reagan's VP choice).

But then this would have left Romney open to the second most-often-repeated charge made against him, particularly by 'real' conservatives (small 'c' intentional), that Romney flip-flops without a second thought and as he deems necessary, as evidenced by his 23 or so previously-held positions on Abortion. I find it laughable that a portion of the electorate infamous for it's own hypocrisy and self-interested twisting of logic should hang this tag upon another under the misguided belief that no one ever notices.

Then again, they believe in an invisible man in the sky who is alternately responsible or not responsible for everything, depending on which argument you need to make today, so maybe I shouldn't be so shocked. But, I digress...

With the health care disaster and the untruthful flip-flopper appellation hung on him, the wonder isn't that Mitt Romney's not running away with a race in which Ebola Virus should be able to beat Obama in a straight-up vote, but that he's still in it and maintaining the support he has garnered to date. You have to give the guy some credit for hanging in there in a game in which the deck has been stacked against him.

The real reason why Romney hasn't broken away from a GOP pack that seems to include all of the following; a dingbat (Bachmann), your crazy Uncle George with the War Wound(Paul), a lazy bastard (Gingrich), a complete dipshit (Perry), the creepy next door neighbor you don't want talking to your kids (Santorum), and a guy with no political experience at all (Cain), is because in a GOP wedded to a southern strategy of bringing in the Evangelical Christian vote, Romney is basically running into the proverbial brick wall without a crash helmet.

Romney can't win a southern primary, and even if he does, it'll be by a razor-thin margin against a guy who, personally, has no business being in this race in the first place, and that's Rick Perry. And those razor-thin margins (assuming there are any) will have yet another unintended consequence in that they will embolden democrats to make a play for some of those southern states.

The problem for Romney in the south is that he's a Mormon, which is the next, best thing to being a convicted sex offender in some parts of the Bible Belt. Rick Perry's meteoric rise within sixty seconds of announcing is due entirely to the support of the religious fanatics in the GOP. Unless someone produces a credible report that Rick Perry is a serial donkey abuser, he'll continue to get the support of those who would rather pray than think.

When the television talking heads talk about a division within the GOP ranks that makes it difficult for them (because they're mostly douchebags who need to know what they'll be pontificating about for the next year, in order to keep a steady paycheck) to see a 'clear front-runner', they're missing a far bigger point (which is not surprising, since they don't really have to think about anything, just spout conventional wisdom); there is no division on the overall goal of the GOP -- defeating Obama -- there is simply a division over which religious denomination should be recognized and given precedence in American Life.

Is it to be Perry's brand of constipated Evangelicalism, or Romney's more-moderate Mormonism, which most snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues Evangelicals regard as twice as bad as a Gay Marriage?

Perry manages to stay in the race because he has managed to convince the Godbots that he prays in the 'right' fashion, despite the fact that he's a raging fucktard who probably couldn't find two braincells to rub together. Perry is no conservative (given his positions on HPV vaccines, Illegal immigration, and the laughable position that you can't be pro-life without believing the government has the right to be involved in your abortion, it's hard to see the conservatism), and is dumber than a sack of wet dogcrap, but it is his ability to draw the attention and money of Evangelicals willing to (hypocritically, of course) overlook these shortcomings that is the primary reason why Romney can't break 30%.

Yet another reason why Romney can't get much more traction is Herman Cain.

If Perry has tied down a sizable portion of the dumb-as-dogshit Southern Evangelical vote that Romney needs to top Obama, then Cain has him outflanked on the even more important moderate GOP/Reagan Democrat/Independent voter front. Cain resonates with people who haven't been brain damaged by too much Bible Study. He's plain-spoken, he isn't a professional politician, and he has a great deal more economic acumen than even Romney's handlers reserve for their man. Romney is stuck in neutral, and will probably remain there come primary season.

Of course, there's still time for events to sort themselves out to Romney's advantage: perhaps those pictures of a drunken Rick Perry and Barack Obama getting matching tattoos in that Thai whorehouse could still surface, but that's an exceedingly-long shot.

Personally, I don't even believe Perry is Romney's greatest long-term threat, anyway; that's Newt Gingrich, or would be whenever Newt decides to get his fat, bloated carcass out of his fucking Lay-Z-Boy and begin to take this thing seriously. I think, when all is said and done, we're looking at a GOP race between Cain and Gingrich in the end, with Romney becoming a distant third just as soon as the southern primaries begin in earnest. By then, Perry will have shot himself in the foot with his own inarticulate and untenable positions, no matter how many times he recites the Lord's Prayer, and done so in such a manner that you'd have to be completely braindead to pull a lever for him afterwards.

Romney is doomed by his Mormon faith; Perry's supporters have unabashedly said it, Herman Cain has even tepidly alluded to it, and there's your Modern South in miniature: the brain-dead Bible Thumpers who complain about religious persecution when they can't get a creche into a Synagogue are quite happy to persecute Mormons at arm's length, and southern blacks who have experienced the sting of Segregation are pretty certain they know what their white neighbors are thinking, religion-wise. Even if the chips were down, and the final choice was between Obama's Second Term and Anyone With A GOP label, the Godbots would still be more than happy to stay at home and not vote at all (and sulk about it!) if Romney were to be the only one left standing.

They'd rather elect a philandering Gingrich, or another black man, than to turn the White House over to a Mormon. And then complain that only if the GOP had stood a 'real' conservative, they might have won. The ultimate goal for this branch of the GOP is a creeping theocracy under the guise of republican politics. Don't ever let them tell you otherwise. The only reason they haven't succeeded is because there's (thankfully) still more people interested in this world than in the next.

In the unlikely event of a Romney-vs.-Obama election, never underestimate the ability of the 'real' conservatives to cut off their collective nose to spite their face, or their inability to make a pragmatic choice when confronted by an issue which touches upon their faith.

Mitt Romney had better start praying for a miracle.

Khaddaffi Dead, NATO Protects Next Dictator-in-Waiting...

2011-10-21T11:01:00.002-04:00

While the news of the gruesome and all-too-late death of Colonel Moammar Khadaffi is welcome, it should not be greeted with all the expressions of hope that many in the Obama Administration, particularly President Frequent-Flyer-Miles, himself, have attached to the event.

Despite the evocation of a belief that, with this brutal jerkoff now pushing up the daisies, Libya is on the path to democracy, exasperating experience (and history) has often shown that no such thing will happen, nor should it be expected to happen, without continued sacrifices in blood, treasure and political capital by the West. Particularly, by the United States.

Democracy, you see, is not native to the culture of either North Africa or Islam. In fact, there is no functioning (in the sense that we Westerners would understand the term) democracy anywhere in the Middle East or in the Islamic Lands. There simply can't be, and while some might point to the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, I would ask that you consider what I have to say before you get all smug about it: Democracy is not, as some would suggest, simply a system of government -- it is a cultural phenomenon.

And it is a uniquely western cultural phenomenon, at that, with a 4,000 year old pedigree that has gone through several periods of transformation, acclimatization, compromise, social and religious turmoil, legal wrangling, and historical review. It depends upon institutions that fall outside of the realm of the purely legislative and political. Democracy is, for the most part, the still-evolving result of a continuous experiment in which compromise upon a broad range of issues are daily debated, examined, tested by experience, assimilated, folded, spindled and mutilated, and subjected to the often-harsh process of trial-and-error. That which works, or which can be accommodated, is kept; that which is not, is thrown upon the dustheap of history.

Such a process could only occur within a dynamic culture with values dissimilar to those found within the tribal and sectarian world of superstition which is the Middle East and Islamic World. These Western, democratic values can be summed up as:

1. A belief in individual rights, primary amongst them are the rights to life, property, self-defense, and a belief in the ability of every Man to rise or fall upon his own talents and merits.

2. A cultural atmosphere in which experimentation, scientific or otherwise, has been divorced from the practices and dogmas of religion, and is not subject to the whims, tastes or requirements of the ruling elite.

3. A respect for legalism and legal systems which aren't simply the playthings of the rulership class, and which are intended to promote the general exercise of individual liberties rather to safeguard the prerogatives of the ruling authority.

4. Democratic systems promote the primacy of the intellectual and practical above the concerns of tribe, sect, and superstition.

In other words, Purple fingers, dead dictators, and State Department press releases do not a democracy make. In the Islamic World of today, even in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the principle building blocks of true democratic institutions do not exist. It is one thing to be able to vote in a former dictatorship, it is quite another to have that vote actually count for anything.

Democracy is not like an iPhone app that one can download and run; it is born of a culture that is amenable to it, and which welcomes it. This has been the greatest misapprehension within American Middle Eastern policy for the last century, a mistaken belief that inside every _________ is an American just dying to get out, if only we could 'give' them 'freedom'.

This extraordinarily naive belief was the primary factor in American defeat in Vietnam, and it may still prove to be the underlying reason for potential failure in democratizing the Middle East and Islam. Words like 'freedom', 'democracy', sovereignty', 'consensual government' and 'legality' haven't the same cachet in those lands that they do here. So far as your typical Islamic douchebag is concerned, 'freedom' means the ability to continue doing that which he has always done -- raping his livestock, beating his wives, plotting the destruction of foreigners with the blessings and encouragement of his religious authorities, bullying his neighbors, stealing whatever isn't nailed down, killing or enslaving his enemies -- for as long as his religion can justify it, and his supply of ammo holds out.

Western democracy has gone through several revolutionary and evolutionary changes since it's inception in Ancient Greece, you see. The Islamic World cannot boast of anything approaching a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, a Reformation, an Age of Discovery, or the slew of associated social, political, scientific, legal, artistic, moral and religious changes that came with each. These changes and challenges, often incremental, more often than not violent and massively-and-traumatically transformative, have made us in the West who we are, and were all vital ingredients in the amalgam that is the Democratic Tradition.

This is a distinct cultural difference and not a merely political one that will be solved by 'giving freedom' to anyone. It is an intellectual issue which cannot be resolved in a world and a mindset which is set in the mental concrete of the 7th Century, and colored by the cultural taboos and practices of the desert nomad.

Islam does not recognize any of the four principal factors mentioned above in the creation of a true democratic state, therefore there cannot, and will not, ever be a true democracy in any of these places, particularly not in Libya. Even in Egypt, where the experience of that culture has been influenced by the Greek, Roman, French, and British Empires the battlecry of the people there has not been for a Western-style, pluralistic democratic state that would be recognizable to your typical American or European; it has been more of a movement in which the people have clamored to be able to elect the Islamically-approved dictator-for-life of their choice.

In non-Western lands where democratic tradition has taken root, notably in India and Japan, it has only done so through a process involving both catastrophic military defeat and long-term military occupation which has served to implant Western values in the host culture, often modifying or destroying the prevailing cultural atmosphere in the process.

Until Islamic culture advances beyond the dictates of a book written by a dead child molester, and expands beyond the petty dictates of the might-makes-right mentality that dominates it, democracy -- as we would understand it -- is not possible, at least not without a 'true' War on Terror, which will require great destruction and loss of life. In the case of Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the first thing these nominally-democratic, popularly-elected governments did was to establish Islam as the national religion, and then turn the revolutionary forces that 'fought for freedom' loose upon religious and racial minorities who may be, or actively are, in opposition to an Islamic state.

Life will go on as it always has, only this time the people at least have the impression that they have legally elected the scumbags who will continue to oppress, deprive, and kill them in the name of religious fanaticism. Nothing much will have changed.

Which brings us back to Khadaffi.

Who or what comes after him? So far as I can tell these 'rebels' and their 'interim government' are largely unknown factors. They have not demonstrated much in the way of democratic intentions, and they are also apparently rent with factional differences which will undoubtedly result in both more bloodshed and the reestablishment of some form of dictatorial rule just as soon as the Crusaders have coughed up some cash and gone home.

This 'War on Terror' of ours, which was supposed 'to bring democracy to the Middle East', has instead installed a thuggish kleptocracy in Afghanistan, half-a-dozen future Saddam Husseins in Iraq, left Iran to develop nuclear weapons, and now promises to install what amounts to an angry mob of lunatics into a position of power in Libya.

And they're all being protected by American guns, propped up or bribed by American cash and political support, and ultimately, American Lives. All we may have accomplished is the simple replacement of vile and disgusting regimes with something more amenable to our control or liking, but we shouldn't dare to call it democracy.

Short of a decades- or even centuries-long occupation coupled with a systematic destruction of what passes for Islamic culture, there is no hope that Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans or Iranians will ever develop democracy on their own, and certainly no hope for sustaining what little has been built to date. It's the New White Man's Burden.

Some might say that what is probably on the horizon will be similar to the battles that we in the Democratic West once fought when the process of evolution towards democracy first began, but I'm not all that certain. We're not speaking of Greek freeholders, Roman republicans, or English yeomen steeped in traditions of sovereign rights and legal discourse, imbued with a respect for life, as much as we're dealing with infantile baboons who's greatest fears are menstruating women and modernity, and who are willing to blow themselves -- and anyone else caught in the explosion -- to smithereens on a quest for 72 virgins in an imagined, extra-earthly paradise in which they're expected to think and behave more or less as they already do.

The rational is not to be found in the Islamic World, and without the ability or ambition on our part to destroy what currently exists there and replace it with what exists here, there never will be. There are no traditions of freedom. There is no recognition of the sovereignty of the individual. There is no record of compromise. There is only conquest, repression, and violence there. Hardly the materials for a democratic state.

Khadaffi's death is welcome news, indeed, but let's not rush to celebrate just yet because we're still not exactly certain of what it's going to continue to cost us, and because our present leadership (such as it is has been) is under the mistaken impression that while culture may count when it comes to deciding who gets into law school or who is protected by federal law, it means absolute jack shit when it comes to potentially transforming the lives of a billion people who would rather kill you than say 'Good Morning'.

At the moment, the Death of Khadaffi should only elicit a polite golf clap and a healthy wait-and-see attitude.

Blogging Has Been Light, My Apologies...

2011-10-19T12:19:00.000-04:00

I have been busy moving and getting settled in. The insanity spigot will be turned back on within the next few days, I promise.

In the meantime, occupy yourself at our Wall of Infamy, otherwise known as the Blogroll on the lower right hand part of this page, and take a gander at the Blogs this Lunatic reads. It only takes a few minutes, it doesn't hurt, and why not bump up some page views for the people who have helped me bump up mine?

Socialism With a Smiley Face...

2011-10-13T06:25:00.004-04:00

Green Energy is all about Wasting Energy…and Cash.

So no one should be taken by complete surprise that yet another Obama-administration-backed Green Energy company is about to get flushed down the toilet, but only after it has wiped it's ass with millions of taxpayer dollars.

There’s a variety of reasons why these Green Energy companies get their funding from the federal government:

1. No self-respecting venture capitalist or wise investor puts his cash into technologies that don’t work, aren’t profitable, and are the result of a badly-understood, and mostly-made-up ‘scientific theory’ that even the scientists can’t agree on, itself the product of bad science and political douchebaggery. If the bulk of Green Energy startups had to depend on the Free Market to attract investment, there’d be no Green Energy startups. They’d be laughed out of the boardroom before they even finished their sales pitch.

2. The American Political system has been perverted to operate on a model of issue-advocacy and symbiotic relationship between Big Business and government, rather than on the founding principles of responsible government that serves the Public Trust. All issues have constituencies, but some constituencies become more important than others when they can contribute campaign cash or round up voting blocs for a particular politician or political party. To keep access to that cash and those voting blocs, individual politicians, and entire parties make certain that these donors and organizers are kept happy with large dollops of taxpayer money or special privileges, as often and as quietly as possible.

3. The ultimate purpose of the Green Energy industry is not, as one might assume, to produce energy, but rather to suck cash out of taxpayer pockets under the guises of 'good public policy' and technical and industrial advancement which will provide jobs for citizens. Many of these companies, however, are started specifically to get at the federal subsidies. They may build a factory, or a small wind farm, and maybe even a showcase solar farm, but the actual expenditure and project scale are rather small and cheap; the bulk of that subsidy goes into someone’s pocket, and as soon as the government cash dries up the company goes out of business. Instead of ‘Too Big to Fail’ we get ‘Intended to Fail, but only after I’ve gotten stupid rich on taxpayer money, and Senator Dingleberry's re-election is assured’.

4. The whole Green Energy scam is part of a wider political scheme. Green Energy policy is but a tool with which World Socialism is stealthily introduced at the expense (literally) of Capitalism. Green Energy is a boondoggle in which advanced, industrialized nations actually conspire to arrest their own development with a system of laws, regulations, taxes, carbon emissions standards, and so forth, but then exempt ‘emerging’ economies like China, India and Indonesia, so that they may ‘catch up’ to the Western economies. That this involves the use of technologies and fuels which the West has deemed ‘dangerous’, and this sets up a double-standard is irrelevant; the point is to artificially stop Western economic growth to such an extent that there is virtually no difference (in say, 25 years) between the American and Chinese economy or living standards.

Everyone will be made equal, one side by continuing to pollute to its heart’s content, and the other by committing economic suicide. There you go: everyone’s finally equal, and since the West will have destroyed its economic and technical base in the process and will be hard-pressed to recover, everyone will stay equal for a very long time to come. Socialist World Revolution without the need for messy wars, and the West will have done it under the false impression that they have followed some great moral imperative.

But, companies like Solyndra and Sun Power serve an even more insidious purpose, in the longer run.

By wasting such huge amounts of capital, materials, and labor for no purpose beyond ensuring they can't be accumulated by anyone (this is how people get rich, you see?) and operating on a flawed economic model (ex: Solyndra produced solar panels at $6 each, and then sold them for $3!), they effectively manage to eliminate ‘excess’ wealth that otherwise would have raised people’s standards of living and thus created greater disparity in wealth between people, but only in a way that appears beneficial that the government openly seizing someone's home or checking account by force, wouldn't.

You could have achieved much the same results by building one million homes and then setting fire to them, or by baking fifty million loaves of bread and then dumping them into the local landfill. The point is to relieve an economy of what Socialists consider ‘excess’ wealth which will become a point of contention between social classes, and thus, bring violence, discord, and instability. That much of that ‘excess’ wealth still finds it’s way into someone’s pocket is, again, irrelevant; those who are of the Nomenklatura are always allowed a few excesses, as befits their station, connections, and dedication or importance to the cause.

Occasionally, you do get an honest-to-God Capitalist or two turning up in these things, but these guys weren’t in it to make the company a going concern: they were just the people who knew which backs to scratch and which campaigns to contribute to in order to secure the ‘loans’ and subsidies; the really dangerous people in this conspiracy of stupidity are the government apparatchiks, bureaucrats and politicians who run the scheme. The capitalist is simply motivated by greed, whereas the government douchebag has a deeper, hidden, sinister political and ideological agenda.

The two always meet at the intersection of Greed and Devious. That it isn’t illegal is not shocking, either, as both have vested interests in keeping it that way. They call it a Public-Private Partnership, but it’s more like a Public-Private Rape Gang.

That it all has the appearance of Capitalism (factories are built, people get (ultimately temporary) jobs, the companies might be publicly traded, and so forth) is just the beauty of the whole scam. Lenin once said that Capitalism would sell the Commies the rope with which they would ultimately hang us, and he was right. Only nowadays, we term this insidious circumstance a ‘government investment’. And it doesn’t only happen in the Green Energy industry; the same is true of the Educational Establishment, for example, producing worthless products (a Bachelor’s degree in Gender Studies or Hip Hop, for example), at great, usually public, expense, that serve no useful economic purpose and improve very few lives.

That some of these companies will fail spectacularly is not all that surprising, seeing as how that’s what they were intended to do, but that the American taxpayer has been suckered to such an extent by its own leadership. Considering the absolutely crappy people we send to Washington, D.C., and the authority we give them, this is perhaps our just desserts.