BartBlog

January 12, 2010

Fox News’ New Palin Nation

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January 8, 2010

The GOP House of Misery

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December 31, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Odd Quotes at Year’s End Edition

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?]

(more…)

December 28, 2009

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

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 14, 2009

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

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.

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org

December 7, 2009

A GOP Majority in 2010?

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November 3, 2009

If Hoffman Wins, GOP Loses — In More Ways Than One

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October 29, 2009

It’s True: Junior Bush is a Motivational Speaker Now

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43 Becomes Motivational Speaker
–Politico Staff, Oct. 27, 2009.

Here’s Stephen Colbert’s take on Bush’s first ‘inspirational’ speech:
Colbert Mocks Bush

October 27, 2009

Beltway Conventional Wisdom Wrong Again

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October 22, 2009

A Politically Incorrect, But True, Cartoon

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July 20, 2009

Sarah Palin: Resigners Never Give Up, Either

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July 7, 2009

Fake Texas Idiot to Phony Wasilla Twit

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April 25, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Even Under Obama, Our Two-Tiered Justice System Rolls On Edition

Why Are Glenn Beck and His Media Colleagues Walking Free While Minnesota’s ‘RNC 8′ Are Prosecuted for Terrorism?

Real Texans, natives from those parts of the state not dominated by the alligator-cowboy-boot luxury of the oil-pump Petrograds of Dallas or Houston, claim that, even in its death throes, a poisonous snake is still dangerous. Poke it with a stick and, with it’s a final ounce of waning spite, it will snap and try to kill as it writhes its last.

Such is the case with the fading right-wing media and their cohort in the Republican Party, their only hope for continued relevance encapsulated by the fervent wish that the increasingly popular President Obama fail miserably, and take the country down with him. These neocon elite know, even from their musings of history by the dim firelight in Plato’s cave, that a successful Obama spells the end, at least in their lifetimes, of the modern ‘free market’ corporatist-conservative movement blueprinted by Milton Freidman and his acolytes, and set into motion by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidencies, culminating in the Dubya-initiated disaster of our current economic crisis, the inevitable historically-repeated result of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

But the Limbaughs and Becks, Hannitys and O’Reillys are also battling with each other for ratings from a dwindling, aging audience, causing them to engage in a war of words wherein they must out-do one another in issuing paranoia-laden proclamations in a voice of sullen outrage, bray archaic Cold War bombast or, in the case of Glenn Beck, display the tearful, fearful ramblings of a man losing his mind.

Not that any of them actually believe any of the guff they spread daily – they are mental itinerant workers who are well-paid for peddling a continually shifting ideology – when Bush said we are not at war with Islam, he was statesmanlike and diplomatic; when Obama does it, he’s surrendering to our Muslim enemies. When Bush ordered Shock and Awe bombings of Baghdad that killed innocent Iraqi teenagers, that’s understandable – the unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ of war; when Obama orders the three teenage pirates threatening the life of an American citizen shot, he’s killing kids. When Clinton was in office, seemingly his every movement, even firing staff in the White House Travel Office, was worthy of a special prosecutor; when Obama talks about holding those accountable who illegally ordered torture, he’s turning the country into a banana republic. And on it goes, an endless stream of swill offered up by the millionaire shills for the entertainment division of the Fox funhouse mirror of political propaganda, toiling in the fields planted by Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, H.R. Haldeman and unsung laborers in behavioral psychology and mass marketing who devoted their professional lives to convincing the public to buy products they don’t need and adopt political ideas that empty their bank accounts and lower their wages, while tempering their minds to accept ever larger loads of pernicious claptrap that serves the profitable interests of the wealthy moguls who bankroll the whole anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional neoconservative operation.

Every day, in the safe confines of the radio or cable TV studio, these media evangelists of the New World Order wrestle with indomitably evil straw men, unleash torpedos of invective at liberal ghost blips on the radar, launch fusillades of bile at comic book enemies from the Eisenhower era, crucify those they detect as suspicious of Jesus’ divinity or conservative Republican provenance, and, most hilariously, mount fearsome attacks on the mythical Left-Wing Media, the corporate conglomerate parents of which are owned by wealthy capitalists who invest on Wall Street, seek further tax cuts for their upper-income bracket, deregulation for their companies, pay good money to lobby politicians, and, in many cases, own a piece of the outlet that broadcasts the daily doses of outrage and hate to the lower caste of ignorant, addled Proles seeking an easy leftist scapegoat for what has happened to their country in the wake of the misrule of the elite Republican right.

(more…)

April 16, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Short Cuts in New Ruts Edition

Double-Dipping Teabag Hag: The Ol’ Tattler’s failing peepers can’t be sure, but I believe I saw the same woman who was sporting the insulting ‘Kerry Band-Aid’ at the GOP convention in NY circa 2004 wearing a hat adorned with hanging teabags yesterday at one of Fox News’ corporately-sponsored tea parties. Just a quick impression: She’s probably the head of the Pig Whistle, Louisiana, chapter of the DAR, the treasurer of the local ‘I Love Sarah’ Fan Club, chairwoman of the county Republican Party, and a good Southern Baptist who, in the name of the Lawd, beats her kids regularly “just to keep the li’l buggers in line.”

BTW, shouldn’t the videos of these astroturf ‘spontaneous events’ be repackaged by some bright young Republican sociopath into a TV reality show called “Just How Stupid Are You?”

Meantime, over at Rachel Maddow last night, a good point was made – I think by Ana Marie Cox — about the anti-tax FNC Teabag Party nonsense. She pointed out that most of these dismal events were held in public parks – in other words, land paid for and maintained by taxpayer funds. If you hate taxes and government so much, go hold your damn teabag party or your own private property and don’t make those who think you’re nuts foot the bill, not only for the land, but the clean-up afterwards. And would all of those tax-haters sprouting gray and white hair at those FNC rallies please return their Social Security checks and refuse medical treatment courtesy of the government?

(more…)

January 14, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Anti-Mythmaking and Other Conundrums Edition

“Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.”
– George W. Bush in what, we hope, is his final press conference.

SOME???

A Few Popular Media Myths Quickly Dispelled:

– There is not, and never has been, any such thing as ‘global free trade.’

– That we have, or have ever had, a ‘free market’ economy. (Another quaint media fiction that has never existed in reality.)

– There is not, and never has been, any such thing as a corporation that ‘cares.’ Corporations care about you to the extent that it facilitates freeing you from your money to buy their product or service; that is their only purpose in ‘caring’ about the customer at all. All else is marketing and public relations.

Laughable Bulls*it: Bush now admits the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner was a mistake. Hmmm, was that the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner prepared by the White House, or the one the Rove PR machine claimed was painted by the happy sailors aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln that had nothing to do with the Bush Gang?

Ponderable: ‘In God We Trust’ is an interesting motto to stick on money. Think about it – if you really trusted God, you wouldn’t need money.

To All of the Geniuses on the Left Excoriating Obama: Word up, friends. It’s said Obama is a good poker player and a good poker player doesn’t show his cards until he’s ready. Next time you think to trash him before he’s even officially president, think for a moment: The guy is one of the smartest presidents we’ve ever had, and he put together an organization to get this far, against the odds; maybe he actually knows what he’s doing.

Not a Cheeseburger in Paradise: Burger King is currently featuring something called the ‘Angry Whopper’ spiced up with slices of jalapenos and pepper cheese to burn your tongue. Geez — fast food with emotions? What’s next, the ‘Big Mad Mac’ with bone splinters, White Castle’s ‘Snarly Slider’ with fingernail clippings, or Wendy’s ‘Ass-Kickin’ Mean Stack’ with pieces of real teeth? “Gimme one a them damn nasty burgers and make it snappy, jerk! Grrrrrrrr.”

January 10, 2009

The Tattlesnake – Presidential Meeting at the White House Edition

On January 7, 2009, the four living US presidents and President-Elect Barack Obama met for lunch at the White House. Details of their private conversation have been kept from the media but, thanks to a Tattler fly on the wall, the details can now be revealed.

Scene: George W. Bush (JUNIOR), his father George H.W. Bush (POPPY), Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

JUNIOR: “Let’s all take a load off an’ get this here thing started.”

[Everyone sits down.]

OBAMA: “First, I’d like to ask you all for your opinions on the crisis in the Gaza –”

JUNIOR: “Whoa, doggies, there, pard’ner. I’m still the president here so I get to do the decidin’ of whut goes first where.”

OBAMA: “Of course, Mr. President. What topic would you like to address first?”

JUNIOR: “Uh, I dunno – hey, since muh Daddy’s here, why don’t we talk about pussy?”

POPPY: “Arrrhhhh, har, har, har, har, arrrhhhh, uuuhhhh.”

OBAMA: “Pussy?”

CARTER: “Oh, my God.”

CLINTON: “Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick.”

JUNIOR: “Yeah, ah think thass a real good topic for conversatin’ over. Hey, Bill, show us whut happened with that Lew-in-sky girl in here.”

POPPY: “Arrrhhhh, har, har, har, har, arrrhhhh, uuuhhhh.”

CLINTON: “George, you know I’m not gonna talk about that.”

OBAMA: “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I asked for this meeting to get your perspectives on some of the pressing issues of our time.”

JUNIOR: “Take th’ stick outta yore butt, Bar-rack! Presidentin’ is easy – all you do is sign yore name where they tell yuh tuh sign it, say whut they tell ya’ tuh say, and pose pretty for th’ pictures. Oh, yeah, an’ yuh gotta main-tain the dignity of the office. Ain’t that right, Daddy?”

POPPY: “Arrrhhhh, har, har, har, har, arrrhhhh, uuuhhhh.”

CLINTON: “That’s what’s known as the ‘Bush Doctrine,’ I believe.”

JUNIOR: “I sleep like a baby ever night ’cause I don’t let things get tuh me by thinkin’ about ‘em too much. Thass the key to successful presidentin’!”

CLINTON: “We aren’t going to accomplish much here. We’ll talk later in private, Barack.”

OBAMA: “I think you’re right, Bill.”

CARTER: “Let’s pose for the photo-op and get the hell out of here.”

OBAMA: “Can we have the photographers in now?”

JUNIOR: “Yuh mean we ain’t gonna talk about pussy?”

POPPY: “Arrrhhhh, har, har, har, har, arrrhhhh, uuuhhhh.”

(Photographers enter; the end.)

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