July 9, 2012
July 8, 2012
January 29, 2011
January 27, 2011
December 29, 2010
October 11, 2010
The Tattlesnake – Even More New Entries for the (Politically) Askewed Dictionary
Aspigmatism: The inability to see that wealthy elites are making a sucker out of you. (See ‘Tea Party Express.’)
Atwatering: Throwing up so many specious charges that your political opponent is forced to spend all of his or her time responding to them, thereby destroying any chance they have for election by leaving the impression in the minds of the impressionable that some of it must be true, even though each charge is found to be false. (See ‘Swift Boat Veterans.’)
Cantstitutionalism: Inventing parts of the Constitution that, in your imagination, prevent a Democratic president from exercising the same powers you approved of when the office was held by a Republican. (See ‘Issa, Darrell.’)
Deficitmock: A conservative who only worries about the deficit when Democrats are in control of Congress. (See ‘Boehner, John.’)
Freedumbery: The notion that attaching the word ‘freedom’ to any half-baked conservative idea or title, especially when used in the form of ‘protecting freedom’ by incarcerating innocent people or naming your corporate-funded Washington Astroturf group ‘FreedomWorks,’ magically confers a patina of true American patriotism on your efforts, rather than exposing you for the greedy fascist sneak you really are. (See ‘Armey, Dick.’)
Hyde-rophobia: Rabidly denouncing a sitting Democratic president for the same sins committed by senior Republicans in Congress. (See ‘Gingrich, Newt.’)
In Flagrante Demento: Displaying an embarrassingly excessive number of American flags at your speeches and rallies, as if you needed a visual reminder of what side you’re supposed to be on, but aren’t. (See ‘CPAC Convention.’)
Noonanery: Pretending to be an objective and rational political observer while maintaining the late Ronald Reagan could do no wrong, no matter how you have to inflate his record. (See ‘Noonan, Peggy.’)
Quaylery: Making an egregiously stupid statement – e.g.: “Social Security is welfare” or “Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya” — and then retracting or denying it when it might hamper your chances of winning an election, only to later repeat it when among a friendly crowd. (See ‘Angle, Sharron.’)
Teabuggery: Demonstrating your ardent belief in freedom of speech for all Americans by shouting down those who disagree with you. (See ‘McCarthyism.’)
Xetgeist (pronounced ‘Zeet-geist’): The conviction that changing your name will also eliminate your past criminal record. (See ‘Blackwater.’)
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
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April 4, 2010
March 29, 2010
The Dying of the Right: Frum Fired For Telling the Truth
“Republicans originally thought that Fox [News] worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
– David Frum on Nightline, March 22, 2010, blowing Fox’s whole ‘fair and balanced’ mumbo-jumbo, as quoted by Media Matters.
“Waterloo”
– David Frum, Frum Forum, March 21, 2010
“David Frum: “What the Hell is Going On at Fox News?”
– Jamison Foser, Media Matters, March 18, 2010
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March 13, 2010
November 21, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Frank Luntz is a Scum-Sucking Pig Edition
(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.
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October 23, 2009
October 21, 2009
It’s the Truth That Hurts
From the Shoq Value website, by way of the William K. Wolfrum Chronicles:
Best Letter to Editor, ever!
To Washington Post Letters:
Steven F. Hayward wrote: “The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level. . . .”
No.
The single largest defect of modern conservatism is that it has ruined the nation.
Conservatives do not have ideas; they have interests.
Conservatives are not “thinkers”; they are rationalizers who give an intellectual gloss to their belief that an alliance of predatory businesspeople and religious extremists should rule the rest of us.
The wreckage caused by modern conservatism lies all around us, and speaks for itself: If conservatism isn’t dead, it should be.
DANIEL ROSEN
BaltimoreFrom the Washington Post, October 9, 2009.
Thanks, Mr. Rosen. It’s a shame the members of our so-called ‘liberal’ party don’t repeat these points at every chance.
June 25, 2009
Conservative sentiment in Pasadena
How conservatives see it.
This conservative sentiment was seen in a church’s parking lot in Pasadena CA.
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March 10, 2009
March 7, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Odds and Ends from the Week’s News Edition
…With No Particular Place to Go But Here
If This Were in a Book, You Wouldn’t Believe It: It’s been hilarious watching various members of the GOP hierarchy criticizing the Rush monster, and then scurrying hat in hand to apologize or ‘clarify’ their comments, the new Republican euphemism for kneeling at the ‘flabulous’ bloviator’s altar and seeking forgiveness. (Michael Steele’s ‘clarification’ – “Really, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about!” – was worthy of a Monty Python skit.) Doubling the fun is watching some of the same humbugs deny the bleeding obvious — Limbaugh is the 500-pound elephant in the middle of the Republican Party’s leaky punchbowl and he’s calling the shots now. This is killing the GOP and there’s nothing they can do about it – welcome to your self-made hell, neocons.
Speaking of the Mouth of the Wingnut South, Limbaugh recently challenged Obama to debate him on his show, knowing full well, naturally, that the president has much more important things to do than goose Lard Lad’s ratings. If Rush really wants to debate Obama, here’s something he could do, if he has the guts: Run for president in 2012 and, if he’s the Republican nominee, he’ll get his debate with Obama, probably even two or three. Don’t bet on that happening, though – Limbaugh would never face the people that way – he only talks to Dittoheads and other psychotics. (Incidentally, the Radio-Dazed Monarch’s assurances of 20 million weekly listeners may be as exaggerated as his bulbous torso – it also doesn’t confirm how many are tuning in to laugh with him and how many to laugh at him.)
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March 5, 2009
The Tattlesnake – GOP Shrinks Into a Cult Edition
The CPAC-Right Left Behind as America ‘Moves On’
“The country’s conservative, Republican-dominated strongholds have shrunk to the Deep South, the Plains and talk radio. […]
“This is the first time since the aftermath of Watergate that conservatives have known what it is like to be so completely out of power, out-funded, out-organized and arguably irrelevant to national governance.”
– Joel Achenbach, “The Conservatives’ ‘Cleansing’ Moment,” Washington Post, March 1, 2009.
It’s said when it rains it pours and what’s currently happening to the ultra right-wing remnants who still call themselves conservative Republicans is no trickle-down sprinkle – they have put themselves in the path of monsoon season, apparently trying to hasten their status as a fringe political cult akin to the People’s Temple or the Moonies.
The new Know-Nothing Party, assembled in Washington for the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Conference last weekend, proved both its penchant for blockheaded obliviousness and rare talent for unintended hilarity by honoring as ‘conservative intellectuals’ (that whirring sound you hear is William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater spinning in their graves) a nerdy little wimp, a has-been simp and a bloviating blimp, also known as, respectively if not respectfully, 13-year-old annoyance Jonathan Krohn; long over-The-Hill GOP retread Newt Gingrich and, of course, the Master of Disaster, the rotund right-wing radio bleater Rush Limbaugh.
While adorable future drug addict Krohn studiously and without irony recited to appreciative hoots and ringing applause the common themes tilled up by most of the CPAC speakers – conservatives stand for respecting the Constitution; respecting life, (at least the unborn kind as opposed to that in uniform or in jail); less government; personal responsibility, and protecting the freedoms and rights of the people – neither he nor his big brothers Newtie and Rush bothered with a brief history lesson of America under conservative Republican rule. Not surprising, since it pulls out the rug from beneath their empty claims. For example:
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The Tattlesnake – East Coast Blizzard Buries Snow-Job Political Futures Edition
Your Tattler remembers well the Chicago blizzard of 1979 that buried the city under several feet of the stuff, along with the political future of Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic. Days after the snow stopped, the side streets were still not plowed, main arteries were narrow two-lane ruts in the snow, and parking was a matter of driving into a snow bank and digging your car out the next day. If that was not aggravating enough, Bilandic had the chutzpah to go on TV and assure Chicagoans all was well and that things had been plowed – including designated public parking areas – that were not. The anger of city-dwellers reached the boiling point over those jaw-dropping pronouncements and, in one of those incredible political miracles, Daley Machine inheritor Bilandic lost his sure-thing nomination to Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary, and Byrne went on to become Chicago’s first woman mayor.
New York City’s independent ‘No Labels’ Mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently forgot the lesson of Bilandic, if he ever learned it. Yes, voters often have short memories, but not when it comes to the tangible physical and mental stress engendered by a massive snowstorm. Seeing your expensively-attired billionaire mayor, appearing dry and comfortable on TV, braying that everything is fine, all that can be done is being done, and to stop complaining, is not the message snow-besieged proles want to hear. I think this stunt finishes Bloomberg’s future in politics, just as NYC Mayor John V. Lindsay’s presidential ambitions were plowed under by his failure to adequately respond to a Big Apple blizzard 41 years ago.
Next door, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the GOP’s emerging Golden Boy already declining in popularity back home from his managerial incompetence – he lost $400 million in federal aid for state public education due to bumbled paperwork, for one – and obsessive Republican addiction to cutting any program, including state pensions, that benefits the ‘little guy’ while protecting his wealthy benefactors from economic pain, will likewise see his political future melting like a Newark snowball in June, as the clueless Guv has remained on vacation in warm and sunny Disney World in the aftermath of the crippling storm. Christie has, as yet, made no public announcement or curtailed his vacation in order to deal with his state’s weather crisis – perhaps an acknowledgement that his blustery Tony Soprano style of governing may intimidate some, but not Mother Nature.
Massive blizzards demonstrate the need for full-capacity city and state services during a time of crisis, the very things manic cost-cutters like Bloomberg and Christie have put on the chopping block; and the need for leadership that understands what’s happening on the ground, even when that ground is covered with snow; something these conservative budget-balancers forget, to their political peril.
President Bloomberg? President Christie? Fuhgedabouit!
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.