Tattlesnake « BartBlog

January 26, 2010

The Tattlesnake — His Majesty O’Keefe: Karma Chameleon Edition

Filed under: Commentary,News,Opinion — Tags: ACORN Pimp, Arrested, James O'Keefe, MSNBC, Republican Wingnuts, RS Janes, Sen Mary Landrieu, Tattlesnake, Watergate — RS Janes @ 7:23 pm

There are just some stories that warm the cockles and whatever else is in the Tattler’s heart — this is one of them.

Remember this phony Republican ‘Simp Pimp’ that I wrote about in December 2009 in “Why the GOP Hates ACORN and the Poor”?

okeefe-pimp

Well, now he’s in the pokey for committing a federal felony in attempting to bug the offices of Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. I can’t wait to read the right-wing blogs reaction to their ACORN Golden Boy turned latter-day Watergate Twit, and it would also be interesting to read the reaction of real pimps in the Graybar Academy when presented with this pathetic dweeb. When they’re finished laughing, that is. Don’t drop the soap, Little Jimmy!

Here’s an excerpt from the MSNBC story today:

Activist filmmaker arrested in senator’s office

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December 31, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Odd Quotes at Year’s End Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion,Quote — Tags: Balloon Boy, CNN, Dana Perino, David Broder, Dick Cheney, GOP, Jesse Ventura, John Cleese, Junior Bush, Kyra Phillips, Media Matters, Michael Palin, Monty Python, MSNBC, Quotes, Rachel Maddow, RS Janes, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tattlesnake — RS Janes @ 7:26 am

Random blips on the mental radar selected randomly, with commentary in brackets:

“One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people’s money to help prevent there to be a crisis.”
– George W. Bush, Jan. 12, 2009. [Translation to English from Bushspeak: 'I used your money to bailout my family and wealthy friends on Wall Street and in banking because my administration didn't do its job of properly regulating them.']

“Um, you guys said that we, um, did this for the show.”
– Falcon “Balloon Boy” Heene, to his parents during a TV interview, Oct. 15, 2009. [This should be the motto of the Republican Party.]

“I think we all have a screw loose in this business.”
– Kyra Phillips, inadvertently speaking the truth on CNN, Oct. 9, 2009. [This should be the motto of the US national media.]

“Give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”
– Jesse Ventura, former MN Gov. and Navy SEAL, on CNN, May 11, 2009.
[This line should be emblazoned across the bottom of the screen every time a clip of Cheney speaking is shown.]

“I don’t know anything about cars.”
– Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., when he took over as CEO of GM, June 9, 2009. ['Gee, how could we be going bankrupt?']

“You can’t convince me that the founding fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede.”
– Glenn Beck, April 14, 2009. [They might make an exception in Beck's case.]

“So you need to get deep into why he is what he is, instead of just saying, ‘Well, he’s a homosexual so how do I handle him, and how do I be Christian?’ Well, I think you ought to tell him, ‘Listen, son, you know, here’s what the Bible says about this, and it’s called an abomination before God, so I’ve got to tell you the truth because I love you.’ That’s what I think.”
– Pat Robertson’s advice to the parents of a gay son, on CBN’s “The 700 Club” June 9, 2009. [Right after this broadcast, Pat ordered out for a BLT.]

“An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Inuit earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’”
– Annie Dillard

“Ted Kennedy’s dad, by the way, Joe Kennedy, sympathetic to Hitler, sympathetic to the Nazis.”
– Rush Limbaugh, as quoted by Simon Maloy at Media Matters’ LimbaughWire, Aug. 8, 2009. [George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazis even after WWII began, and was forced by the US government to stop. Whatever Joe Kennedy's sympathies, he never contributed financial backing to Hitler's Third Reich.]

“The Army, the Marines do not have uniforms that fit that big an ass.”
–The always classy Limbaugh again, commenting on Hillary Clinton, Sept. 22, 2009, also via Media Matters. [This from the manly Lard Lad whose 'anal cyst' was too big to allow him to wear the uniform.]

“Nearly half of all US children, including an overwhelming majority of black children, will eat meals at some point during their childhood paid for by food stamps, an indicator of poverty, a study showed Monday.”
– AFP, “Half of US kids depend on food stamps during childhood: study,” Nov. 2, 2009. The study was done by the American Medical Association’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. [Out of a population of about 300 million, 66 million Americans now collect food stamps, a record high number. Nearly 50 percent of US children need food stamps to eat regularly.]

“The urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right.”
– David Broder’s sage advice to Obama on Afghanistan, proving once again why Uncle Fudd is the dean of doomed Washington punditry, from the Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2009. [Say, Dave, if your life were on the line, would you be this cavalier about whether Obama's decision was wrong or right?]

“The white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America!”
– Michael Savage, from his radio show June 17, 2009, as quoted by Media Matters. [Okay, so when does the former Michael Alan Weiner come out of the closet?]

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December 28, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Why the GOP Hates ACORN and the Poor Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2012 Elections, ACORN, American Aristocracy, Big Media, Bill Clinton, Bill Kristol, Democrats, Fox News, Freedom, GOP, Hannah Giles, Hatred, James O'Keefe, Jimmy Carter, Junior Bush, Limbaugh, Meritocracy, Obama, Pundits, Republicans, Right-Wing Media, RS Janes, Sarah Palin, Tattlesnake, Teabaggers, wingnuts — RS Janes @ 4:51 am

Remember those ACORN-office videos that a right-wing ringer named James O’Keefe, posing as a pimp, surreptitiously taped with Hannah Giles, a young woman pretending to be his prostitute, that were a media kerfluffle a few months back?

okeefe-pimp

Watching them gave me a familiar feeling – it was the same feeling I had back in 2003 when glowering TV Doctor Colin Powell, performing at the U.N. Club in New York, shook a vial of white powder in front of the camera and claimed it was Saddam’s Very Own Anthrax. The feeling only increased when ‘Dr.’ Powell produced artist’s renderings of super-secret Iraqi chemical-labs-on-wheels, views that we apparently couldn’t catch photographically from sophisticated spy satellites or aerial reconnaisance overflights because – well, he never actually said why.

This feeling, as close as I can come to describing it, is akin to doing Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture trick, wherein the master magician was suspended upside-down in a glass-paneled cabinet filled to the top with water — only instead of water, imagine horse manure.

The Tattler was wincing with disgust while laughing as I watched geeky white boy O’Keefe, dressed for all the world like Sonny Bono when he had Cher, babe, trying to pass himself off as Mr. Bad Ass Pimp to a collection of black women from the ‘Hood who had doubtless seen the real thing at sometime in their lives – it was like casting Wally Cox as Don Vito Corleone: “Gee whillikers, we’ll make ‘em an offer they won’t get mad at and refuse!”

Hannah didn’t play her role much better – she was dumb enough, but a little too clean and preppy – but hers wasn’t the important role.

The college-educated ofay voice of O’Keefe, in the same tone as a census-taker, earnestly asking for help to avoid paying his pimp taxes and advice in running a brothel with underage girls rightfully had the ACORN women stifling grins. This was a surreal spectacle that only a teabagger could swallow whole without gagging on the absurdity.

Well, a teabagger, our vacuous illiberal media, and the growing crop of space cadets in our Congress.

It was expected that the GOP would indulge in their usual over-popped level of fake moral outrage – they paid for the video, after all — and the pundits live off their crumbs, but couldn’t we have had at least one Democrat call ‘bullshit’ on this silly nonsense? No one but a halfwit would believe this skinny white boy wearing his mother’s old chinchilla coat is actually a pimp, and anybody who’s been around a city block more than once knows it. But the risible sight of O’Keefe in his cartoon pimp outfit is instructive, both as to the contempt with which the corporate Republican elite hold the public, and to their knee-shaking fear of the extension of democracy and equality to people without money.

The Republican Party’s fringe-right wingnuts, excuse me for repeating myself, have long had a bitter grudge against ACORN, the community service group that registers voters and helps poor people. Why? Because, to put it simply, the GOP hates the poor, even though they work diligently to produce more of them to reward their corporate backers with a large pool of ever-cheaper labor. This is filtered through several levels of the corporate Republican psyche:

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December 19, 2009

The Tattlesnake – The Political Good, Bad and Ugly Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 1984, Andy Borowitz, bill o'reilly, Bush, Cheney, Dick Armey, Fox News, FreedomWorks, George Orwell, Glenn Beck, Joe Lieberman, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, Obama, RS Janes, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, satire, Tattlesnake, Teabaggers, Tom Paine — RS Janes @ 6:51 am

Good: Your husband has decided to get more involved in
local politics.
Bad: He’s running for congress as a conservative Republican.
Ugly: He’s Karl Rove.

Good: Your wife just got a great-paying job.
Bad: She’s on Fox News.
Ugly: After fifteen years of marriage, you never knew she was a wingnut.

Good: Your 22-year-old daughter just announced she’s marrying the man of her dreams.
Bad: He’s old enough to be her grandfather.
Ugly: He’s Mitch McConnell.

Good: Your 21-year-old son’s new book is about to be published.
Bad: It’s a biography of George W. Bush.
Ugly: He’s started talking like him.

Good: Your wife buys a new hat for her birthday.
Bad: It has teabags hanging off the brim.
Ugly: They’ve all been used.

Good: The recently discovered Bush emails prove conclusively that Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al, committed high crimes while in office.
Bad: Holder’s Justice Department refuses to prosecute them.
Ugly: Obama excuses them by saying, “Anyone could make a mistake.”

Good: You laugh at an Andy Borowitz satire about Glenn Beck ‘editing’ and releasing an ‘abridged’ version of “1984″ wherein Big Brother’s name is replaced by Obama’s.
Bad: Turns out it’s not an Andy Borowitz satire.
Ugly: The MSM quote from the book as if it were George Orwell’s original version.

Good: Your daughter just got a new job.
Bad: She’s working for Bill O’Reilly.
Ugly: She just bought a case of loofahs.

Good: Your son just got a new job.
Bad: He’s working for FreedomWorks.
Ugly: He’s Dick Armey’s ‘butt boy.’

Good: You just got a tenured job at a university.
Bad: You’re teaching ‘Creation Science.’
Ugly: At Messiah College.

Good: The ideas of Tom Paine are being discussed on TV.
Bad: By Glenn Beck on Fox News.
Ugly: Beck has made liberal agnostic Paine into a far-right Christian fanatic just like himself.

Good: Your son has been signed to star in a major motion picture.
Bad: It’s “The Life of Rush Limbaugh.”
Ugly: He was hired due to his strong resemblance to the subject.

Good: You’ve accepted a $50,000 speaking gig.
Bad: At the next CPAC convention.
Ugly: Your topic is “The Incredible Genius of Sarah Palin.”

Good: You’re not feeling well and your friend says he will find you a good doctor.
Bad: You’re flat broke.
Ugly: Your friend is Joe Lieberman.

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December 14, 2009

The Tattlesnake – A Stake Deep in the Heart of GOP Texas Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2010 Election, 2012 Election, Annise Parker, AP, Corporatists, Democrats, economy, GOP Radicals, Houston, Jim Hightower, Junior Bush, Lesbian Mayor, Liberals, Neocons, Populists, Republicans, Rick Perry, RS Janes, Tattlesnake, Texas, Tom DeLay — RS Janes @ 5:43 am

Judging by this, Lone Star state Republicans may have much to fear in the future.

I’ve made plenty of fun of Texas and that breed of Texan that keeps electing crooks and nitwits like Tom DeLay and Junior-clone Rick Perry against their own best interests, but it seems things have gotten bad enough down there that even Houston, the nexus of Bush Oil Country, has elected a lesbian Democrat, former City Controller Annise Parker, as Mayor rather than face a corrupt and/or dumb Republican. (Albeit that Houston has been trending Dem for some years and the last mayor was a Democrat.) Although Parker has some past ties to the energy industry, her most recent non-political gig was running a bookstore and she is regarded as fairly liberal, at least by Texas standards.

It’s no secret the GOP has raped the state from one end to the other, giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while cutting social safety-net programs to the bone, eviscerating the educational system, and putting workers at the mercy of employers – it was the neocon corporatist blueprint for what King Junior tried to do in Washington, but didn’t quite succeed at entirely. Now that the economy has gone all to hell, fed-up Texans are worse off than most of the nation, and they have no one to blame but the laissez-faire policies of the Republican Party.

Sure, the voting machines have been rigged and districts redrawn to keep the GOP in perpetual power, but even that may not be enough to underwrite the Republican Party’s future in Texas.

The Tattler’s prediction: Within ten years all the major state offices will be held by Democrats, as well as the two US Senate seats. Texas was, at one time, a populist state; I think it will be returning to those roots – who knows, maybe the great Jim Hightower will end up in office again, if he can stomach campaigning one more time.

Houston biggest US city to elect openly gay mayor

Monica Rhor, AP Writer
December 13, 2009

HOUSTON – Houston became the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay mayor, with voters handing a solid victory to City Controller Annise Parker after a hotly contested runoff. [...]

Parker, 53, has never made a secret or an issue of her sexual orientation. But it became the focus of the race after anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups endorsed Locke and sent out mailers condemning Parker’s “homosexual behavior.”

Read the rest here.

“Anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups” couldn’t defeat an openly gay woman in TEXAS?! Oh, yes, the doom come soon for the GOP.

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December 10, 2009

The Tattlesnake — The Reason Sarah Palin Should Never Be President in One Answer Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2012 Election, bill o'reilly, Cenk Uygur, Dan Piraro, RS Janes, Sarah Palin, Stupidity, Tattlesnake — RS Janes @ 6:54 am

Read this answer and reflect…

Bill O’Reilly: “Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?”

Sarah Palin: “I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the um, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.”

(See the YouTube video here.)

All that’s missing is the ‘such as’…

sarah_palin_dan_piraro
Palin Poster © 2009 Dan Piraro, Bizarro.com

The Irrefutable Stupidity of Sarah Palin
– Cenk Uygur, The Huffington Post, Dec. 7, 2009.

A h/t to Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks for his article and video.

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December 6, 2009

The Tattlesnake – GOP Nuts ‘n’ Money Edition

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: 2012 Election, Birthers, Corporatists, Democrats, Fox News, Frank Luntz, Glenn Beck, GOP, Jerome Corsi, Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Orly Taitz, President Obama, Radicals, Reagan, Republicans, RS Janes, Rupert Murdoch, Sarah Palin, Tattlesnake, Teabaggers, wingnuts — RS Janes @ 6:07 am

“The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.”
– Paul Krugman, “The Politics of Spite,” NY Times, Oct. 5, 2009.

“… [T]he 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
– Alex Carey

Now Alaska’s Hockey Momster has had her ‘Birther’ moment, alternately encouraging the Orly Taitz Bizarros to pursue their vain quest to besmirch Obama’s presidency by endlessly questioning his birth certificate, and then backing away from that stance on her Facebook ramblings. This madness has reached its limit – every sane member of Congress should condemn this insanity and then demand that Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Jerome Corsi, random Republican politicians, and any other right-winger who has questioned Obama’s American citizenship post their own birth certificate publicly and, in keeping with the Birther’s rules, it can’t be a stamped copy. Of course, they won’t be able to do this – every US state keeps the original document and issues a photocopy or duplicate certificate when legal proof of birth is required – and perhaps that will finally shut these fringe-freak nitwits up.

Speaking of Wasilla’s Gift to the Democrats, word is her book tour is something of a bust, leaving a trail of disappointed Palinites in its wake, and not just in Indianapolis where she left a crowd of cranky book-buyers standing out in the rain. Not only is her speaking bureau allegedly regretting signing her on after her Hong Kong fiasco, but now her publishing company may be thinking twice about that $1.4 million they paid her in advance. Sure, they’ll probably make it back in book sales, but Palin’s unstable personality, and her unpopular insistence on selling photos of herself posing with her fans, have driven her bus tour handlers eye-rolling, hair-pulling crazy.

But Palin is just the most prominent peak of a small molehill of the American public — ignorant, peevish, narrow-minded, misinformed, angry, intolerant — they are an army of everything that’s wrong with America, denizens of a weird trickster God who speaks to them through words they don’t completely understand, or tint with their interior wrath, rendered and interpreted by preachers, politicians and other charlatans either crass or confused or both, but they’re all making a quick buck from peddling hatred-on-a-cross to this crowd.

They wouldn’t matter much except they are whipped into a frenzy and ‘played’ by cynical manipulators like Frank Luntz, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who, in turn, wouldn’t have much impact without the billions of dollars spent to spread their message from right-wing corporatists like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.

If Sarah continues to implode, even Fox News and Limbaugh may not be able to save her presidential chances in 2012 – at some point, we may have to form a Progressives for Palin coalition to make sure she’s the GOP nominee in three years, assuring Obama’s reelection and the ultimate crack-up of the radical GOP.

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December 3, 2009

The Tattlesnake – The Reality Behind Obama’s Afghanistan Policy Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion,Toon — Tags: Afghanistan, Bush Junior, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Pentagon, President Obama, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, RS Janes, Tattlesnake, war, Washington Groupthink — RS Janes @ 9:11 am

First, forget Obama’s purported reasons for staying in Afghanistan; those are just easily understood anti-terrorist bromides for the media and the viewing audience. He supposedly knows we aren’t fighting any real threat to the US in Rock City, nor are there enough Al-Qaeda hanging around the Af-Pak border waiting to be captured to make it worth the billions we are pouring into this new ‘surge’.

Word is the real reasons – the ‘clinchers’ presented by the Pentagon chieftains and the president’s staff – for maintaining an American and NATO military presence there are threefold:

1. Pakistan’s government, contrary to Obama’s speech, is weak and has little sway in the northern and western parts of the country, the same regions where various anti-American groups operate with impunity. Ostensibly, the Pakistan military has the country’s nuclear arsenal under tight control but, then, it’s known Muslim extremists have infiltrated the army. The nightmare scenario, barely touched on by Obama, is of a band of Islamic fundamentalists getting their hands on nukes. The thinking is that, if such a scary scenario unfolded, the US and NATO troops in Afghanistan could move to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons before the wackos could launch. Obama could not say this publicly without offending the Pakistan government, damaging our relationship with them, and causing a diplomatic furor. He also allegedly privately promised India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that he would not hesitate to use American troops to keep Pakistan’s military in check, if need be.

2. The Pentagon believes that a large military force on both Iran’s eastern and western perimeters will staunch any ambitions they may have in Iraq or Afghanistan. Forget the nuclear distraction; the fear is that Iran will try to fill the power vacuum left by US withdrawal from either nation. Whether this is a valid concern, the groupthink in Washington convinced Obama of this even before he started his run for the presidency.

3. Obama’s most trusted advisors and the Joint Chiefs believe he must not be trapped into a test of his resolve and willingness to employ force. While he has extended the olive branch of peace with one hand, and repaired most of the damage done by George W. Bush’s my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy, the world must know he will be ready to use the sword that’s in the other. In order to avoid another ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ test of wills, it’s believed by this faction that he has to show that he’s capable of bucking the peace faction in his own party and US public opinion in order not to appear weak and invite challenges. Afghanistan is a chess move to establish his readiness to use force to avert future, potentially more disastrous, tests of his strength. Another example of Washington groupthink with dubious legitimacy, but a theme Obama has embraced entirely.

If you think we will be withdrawing from Afghanistan completely in 2011, put down that crack pipe. There may be some troop withdrawals by then, but a sizable US military force will remain in the country until, like the USSR, we are forced out by economic circumstances and/or insurgents, a highly probable outcome historically.

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November 30, 2009

The Tattlesnake – The Tiger Woods Rumor Theater Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Adultery, Car Accident, Elin Woods, RS Janes, Rumors, satire, Tattlesnake, Tiger Woods — RS Janes @ 6:04 pm

“The Tiger’s Fuzzy Tale”

A short one-act play featuring Tiger Woods and his wife Elin Woods.

ELIN WOODS: “So you’re telling me you haven’t talked to that woman in six months!”

TIGER WOODS: “Absolutely, babe, I broke it off completely.”

EW: “You filthy liar! I checked your cell phone and there are three calls to her just today!”

TW: “Ulp!” [Audible gulp] “Look, I’m getting out of here until you’re more rational. I can’t talk to you when you’re crazy like this.”

[Tiger exits room with EW in pursuit. As she leaves, EW grabs a golf club from a bag by the door.]

EW: [Enraged] “Don’t you walk out on me, you lousy bastard!”

TW: “What are you doing with that club?! [EW swings and hits TW's arm with the club.] “OWWWW! What the hell are you doing?!”

EW: “You’re not running out on me, you little creep!”

TW: [Getting into his black Escalade and starting it up] “I’m not running out on you – I’m just going out for a drive until you calm down. Oh, Jesus, my arm is numb – how do you expect me to play golf with a numb arm?!”

[TW quickly drives off. As a parting shot, EW hits the back window of the Escalade with the golf club, shattering the window.]

TW: [Yelling out the driver's side window] “You crazy bitch! Take a chill pill!”

[Moments later there is the sound of a car crashing at the end of the drive. EW runs to where the Escalade has hit a tree.]

EW: “Ha, ha – serves you right you steaming pile of crap!” [Mood changes to concern] “Wait, are you hurt, Tiger?”

TW: “My arm isn’t right where you HIT IT with the GODDAMN GOLF CLUB, but I’m okay otherwise, just a couple of scratches. Shit, just look at my friggin’ car!”

EW: “You’d better go to the hospital. I’ll call 911.”

TW: “Wait, wait! Don’t call yet. You realize if it comes out what we were fighting about you can kiss $20 million in endorsement deals good-bye. We need a good story to tell the cops first.”

EW: [Skeptical] “Yeah, sure, what kind of story could cover your arm and the shattered back window? I want to hear this.”

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November 26, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Some Things Not to Be Thankful For Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: American People, Beck, Big Corporations, BS, Christopublicans, Curmudgeon, Fox News, Hitler, hypocrisy, Jesus, Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, Monetize, New Testament, Obama, Prayer, Previously-Owned, Racists, Republicans, RS Janes, Savage, Stalin, Tattlesnake, Teabaggers, Thanksgiving — RS Janes @ 6:22 am

Or, What a Curmudgeon Does on Thanksgiving

Major minor aggravations that ‘wear on the mind and make you old before your time.’

– These people who leave comments on various websites claiming they’ve been to teabag rallies and never once saw anyone who was a racist. Really? Not even a single racist? This is just as incredible as those who say there’s not a Republican in the land who hates Obama because he’s black — nope, it’s all about his policies, and that’s why we’re waving this here Confederate flag.

– The Obama/Hitler, Obama/Stalin comparisons. Seriously, think about this for a minute, paranoid teabaggers: If Obama were really anything like Hitler or Stalin, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, et al, would all be off the air. For that matter, you wouldn’t be listening to crazy Michele Bachmann at a teabag rally, because government troops would have closed down the event long before she had a chance to speak. In fact, there wouldn’t be any teabag rallies and Bachmann and her GOP ilk would be in jail for treason by now, if not executed. Of all the Obama smears invented by the fringe right, this is, along with the Birther nonsense, the most ludicrous and easiest to disprove.

– Then there are the good Christopublicans praying for Obama’s death or bodily harm. Saved by Jesus were you, you hateful little twit? Did you ever bother to read what the man you worship is quoted as saying about those who judge others, engage in hypocrisy, and misuse his name for spite and revenge or their own advantage? Hint: It’s all in the first four books of the New Testament.

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November 21, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Frank Luntz is a Scum-Sucking Pig Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion,Toon — Tags: Add new tag, Bill Berkowitz, C-Span, Conservatives, Failure, Fox News, Frank Luntz, Hucksters, Joseph Goebbels, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, lies, Marketing, Media Matters, MSNBC, Obama, politics, Polling, propaganda, Rebranding, Republicans, Right-Wing Media, RS Janes, Steven Poole, Tattlesnake, Wikipedia, Words — RS Janes @ 5:59 am

(With apologies to our porcine friends who also happen to suck scum, but don’t have much influence on the electorate.}

While some readers may chastise me for gross understatement in the title, and I take their point, I decided to keep this clean, or as clean as you can when describing the contents of the sole working Port-O-Potty on free chili and beer night at a baseball game.

“[A]sk a question in the way that you get the right answer.”
– Frank Luntz on his ‘fair and balanced’ polling methods.

What makes Republican word-whacker Frank Luntz my target is that he is an intentional and dedicated deceiver of the public, smart enough to know full well what he’s doing, but blithely willing to trot out his wares — borrowed from the misuse of modern psychological techniques to sell the gullible what they don’t need joined with a carnival conman’s shell game pitch — for the temporary benefit of his bank account, while his country slides into a wreckage of divisiveness and debt. If you’d like to find the home base for the decimation of our public speech into ignorant, inflamed, fearful, flag-draped hatred; the revision of our history into a reeking bonanza of selfish suicidal capitalism, evangelical Christian crapola and nasty neoconservative warhawk bilge; and the reduction of our political discourse into so much overheated, oversimplified, covertly racist, sound-bite slag, you can point to three names: the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and the lesser-known, but every bit as important, Frank Luntz as the authors of the meltdown in progress.

“Luntz is glibly amoral, worrying only about whether language has the right effect, not whether it’s true.”
– Steven Poole, commenting on Luntz’s book “Words That Work” in The Guardian (UK), July 21, 2007.

It was Frank’s notion to rename a bill allowing more pollution as the ‘Clean Air Act’; it was Luntz who told the GOP to re-label estate taxes as ‘death taxes’ so that the wealthy paid less while the rest of us took up the slack; it was his demented mind that connected Iraq to 9/11 and instructed Republican pols to always preface any mention of the failed Iraq incursion with ’9/11 changed everything’; behind nearly every current and past GOP talking point, endlessly repeated in the Right-Wing Echo Chamber, you’ll find Frank’s pasty round face, tirelessly choosing just the right words to convince a malleable faction of the American public to eat corporate Republican turds and think it’s prime rib.

frank-luntz-pig

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November 6, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Post-Election Portents and Predictions Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: 2009 Elections, 2010 Election, 2012 Elections, Beltway Conventional Wisdom, Big Media, Bill Owens, Bob McDonnell, Bush, Chris Christie, Creigh Deeds, Democrats, Dick Armey, Doug Hoffman, Glenn Beck, Humor, Jon Corzine, MSM, New Jersey, New York, Obama, Political Satire, Pundits, Republicans, ROVE, RS Janes, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Tattlesnake, Tim Pawlenty, Virginia — RS Janes @ 6:33 am

…And How the Big Media Speculators Got It Wrong Again

The usual Big Media Punchinellos were out in force the past few days, blaring and bleating the Beltway Conventional Wisdom that the Democratic Party’s loss of the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey are a sure referendum on Obama Administration policies. This is the sort of doomed facile reasoning found in the bottom of a Washington cocktail glass typical of Our Pundit Class who, from non-existent Iraq WMD to Fred Thompson’s popularity with voters, can never seem to fit the square peg in the round hole, pound though they might.

A brief review of the Dem candidates in VA and NJ clearly shows why progressives and like-minded independents didn’t bother to vote for Creigh Deeds in Virginia or Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and it had nothing to do with Obama. For various reasons explained below, they were both terrible candidates.

Creigh Deeds: In an era of change, Deeds was a shambling throwback, a dismal campaign clunker with four flat tires, who rejected Obama’s advice and help until it dawned on him in the final weeks he was going to lose in a landslide. He ran a miserably negative campaign, devoid of ideas, and presented his pap on toast so dry even peppy Dem loyalists fought to stay awake during his speeches. A Dem Blue Dog so blue he threatened to opt out of a public option should it become available to Virginians, he was nearly as conservative as his GOP opponent Bob McDonnell. Why leave the house to vote when the choice is between a Republican and a Dem who thinks like a Republican? Seen clearly, this was a referendum, and portent of the future, for Blue Dog Dems rather than President Obama.

Jon Corzine: The one-time ‘Garden State’ US Senator who was just bounced from the governor’s mansion is a Goldman Sachs Golden Boy who made piles of money on Wall Street and insists on spending it on vanity campaigns. Why he doesn’t just buy a new summer home or sumptuous overpriced yacht instead of squadering his fortune to impose himself on our political process is beyond me, but Corzine has never shown much talent for governing once elected, and what few things he has accomplished were always moderate to the point of invisibility. Jon is the kind of drab Dudley Do-Nothing the Democratic Party needs to send packing, if they expect to keep the majority in the future. Again, the portentiousness of Corzine’s defeat was not his affiliation with Obama’s policies, but the yellow line up the middle of his back from avoiding tenaciously either the right or left lane. He will not be missed, at least by this writer.

The point? Neither of them were progressives and didn’t stir independents or liberal Dems to go out and vote for them.

And now to stare into the crystal – but not Kristol – ball for some predictions on the Republican winners of those two elections:

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October 23, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Who Said What? Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Quote,Uncategorized — Tags: Adolf Hitler, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Benito Mussolini, Conservatives, Dick Cheney, Fascism, Liberals, Quiz, RS Janes, Tattlesnake, war — RS Janes @ 4:21 am

Time for a quiz? I thought so. Grab your paper and pencil and no cheating with the Google machine. As you read, you’ll catch on to the theme of this baker’s dozen of questionable quotes:

1. “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”