February 19, 2010
February 3, 2010
December 6, 2009
The Tattlesnake – GOP Nuts ‘n’ Money Edition
“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.
© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org
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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November 11, 2009
October 19, 2009
August 25, 2009
October 7, 2008
The Tattlesnake – McPalin: It Just Gets Deeper and Deeper Edition
Random Notes on the Worst Presidential Campaign in Modern History, Tonight’s Debate, and Other Rumorous Swill
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
– Mark Twain
“Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or you’re not ready to articulate it.”
– John McCain in 2000.
Gov. Cosmetically-Enhanced Pit Bull has hit the road, eructating hoary disproved Obama slurs and smears to try and save what’s left of McCain’s Electoral Death March from burial under an FDR-sized landslide next month.
The McCainiacs have become so tone-deaf, and run out of so much of the infamous bullshit alluded to by Howard Beale in “Network,” that McCain’s camp is inexplicably continuing to chase the GOP base that responds to Palin’s cutesy-wink tirades and snippy town-gossip slights. Even if the 30 percent of registered voters that comprise this ballyhooed base turn out to vote, McPalin still loses big, in no small part due to the most badly managed presidential campaign in modern history.
Faced with an economic crisis that may eclipse the Great Depression, the McCainiacs bafflingly went small-bore with discredited petty minutiae: Obama hung around with ‘domestic terrorist’ Bill Ayers; received favors from Tony Rezko; was part of the Chicago political machine that breathed it’s last a decade before Obama entered politics. If they are enthralled by the notion of legions of Working Class Independents showing up to save the day, maybe they should check Frank Luntz’s focus groups of Uncommitted voters who are checking the box for Obama this election — the blue-collar voters of yesterday are the blue-vest voters of today, and they aren’t happy with the Republican Slide to Doom. As the Time blog noted on Luntz’s focus group in August:
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September 17, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Pondering Political Ponderables Edition
– If McCain and Palin are such maverick reformers, why haven’t they quit the corrupt Republican Party?
– Why doesn’t Obama, Biden or the Big Media ever mention that McCain’s tax cuts are going to directly benefit John and Cindy McCain, worth over $100 million? Meanwhile, under Obama’s tax increase for those making over $250,000 per year, the Obama’s would be paying more in taxes, since they’re worth about $4 mil. Who is really putting country first here ahead of their personal interest?
– Is McPalin actually trying to say that we are going to cure our current economic crisis by continuing to do the same things that caused it? Listen to them closely; yes, they are, only they are going to appoint a panel to study it.
– If the McCain-Palin ticket has so energized the Republican base, how come there are so many glum faces among the party hacks assembled behind them at campaign stops?
– Who do the McCain handlers think this ‘deference and respect’ for Palin nonsense is playing to – ‘dissed’ working-class women who shop at Walmart? Think again – it reminds them of their hated country-club bosses. Uh, not to be disrespectful of the Ice Princess Moose-Killer or anything, but they are making her sound like a tinhorn Queen Victoria. Was this the best Frank Luntz could come up with to cover her alarming ignorance?
– Speaking of the Thrilla From Wasilla, she’s fading in popularity now that the public has gotten a good look at her — why doesn’t McCain replace her with Tina Fey? She’s funnier and more talented than the original, and most Republicans would never know the difference, as long as Tina didn’t slip up and tell the truth.
– Who’s dumber: ‘First Dude’ Todd “How’d You Get Pregnant Again So Quick?” Palin or McCain ‘advisor’ Carly “I Nearly Destroyed HP and They Paid Me $20 Million to Go Away!” Fiorina?
– Laughable: Following yesterday’s Wall Street meltdown, some Republican half-wit on one of the cable news channels that isn’t Fox said, without irony, “There’s a danger here we might slip into a recession.”
– Laughable Deux: Did I hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson just praise Bush’s economic programs today? Yes, I did. And did he really tell us all to “remain calm”? Yes, calm in the Kevin Bacon at the end of ‘Animal House’ sense, right before he was flattened into the sidewalk.
– Laughable III: If Sarah Palin’s husband Todd is Alaska’s ‘First Dude’ does that mean we can call her the ‘First Chick’? (Or would that be the ‘First Dudette’?)
– Laughable the Fourth: Is it true Sarah Palin’s kids actually hate hockey?
– Laughable de Cinco: The Obama camp should start referring to McCain as ‘Republican John Sidney McCain the Third’ and Palin as ‘Republican Gov. Vinnie Barbarino.’ Of course, Sen. John Blutarsky and Gov. Hockey Rink to Nowhere are possibilities as well.
– Finally, Obama in Elko, Nevada, Sept. 17th, and I wrote this down fast so every word may not be verbatim: “McCain says he’s going after the old boys network in Washington … the thing is, the old boys network in Washington is called a McCain campaign staff meeting.” Ha, ha, keep punching, Barack, they’re on the ropes and McCain’s no Ali.
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CPAC’s Big Idea — Dick Cheney in 2012?