January 11, 2011
December 31, 2010
America’s Looted Generation: The kids are NOT alright!
Here in America today, Old White Guys tend to be rather angry at the way things are going — but theirs is not the generation that should be getting truly pissed off. The OWGs are doing fine financially. They have nothing to complain about.
Their walkers and scooters are paid for by MediCare.
Their pensions come regularly in the mail.
Social Security buoys them up, they have lots of savings left over from the good times, they have home equity to fall back on and they don’t have to worry about finding a job.
All that these Old White Guys have to do nowadays is take an occasional cruise to the Bahamas, enjoy their golden years and bitch about how hard life is — until they die and can buy themselves a fabulously expensive new coffin. They got theirs. Why the complaints? They should be as happy as pigs in a trough.
It’s the youth of America who should be really pissed off.
Their sweet little old grandfathers have just sold them all down the river without even a second thought.
“Hey, Grandpa! Where’s my education, where’s my job, where’s my clean air, where’s my future?”
“Sorry, sonny. I bought a war with that money instead.”
You bought a war? A war? I mean seriously, grandpa. You didn’t just splurge on one or two occasional wars. You bought a whole bunch of wars. “World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean war, the Vietnam War, the wars on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror….”
And now, Gramps, you are happily buying your grandchildren a war on Social Security.
“I got mine, sonny-boy. And now I want yours.”
If I was a member of the American generation that is just graduating from high school right now — if you are even that lucky — I’d be out screaming in the streets, “I’ve been robbed!”
And then when the police come and ask for a description of the felon who robbed me, I would say, “It was an old guy, looked a bit like Alan Greenspan, about as tall as Ronald Reagan, sort of bald like Dick Cheney, appeared at first to be my friend like Barack Obama, shed crocodile tears like Rush Limbaugh and lied to me like Rupert Murdoch on Fox News….”
Don’t trust anybody over 50.
PS: Speaking of being robbed, Princeton professor and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges tells us exactly how this “Looted Generation” heist-of-the-century has been pulled off. In his recent article in TruthDig entitled, “2011: A Brave New Distopia” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/, Hedges lays it all out.
“The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s ’1984′ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’” And as we head into the greatest dysfunctional dystopia the world has ever known, who will be right? Huxley or Orwell?
“Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.”
Then Hedges goes on to pretty much describe you and me — and Gramps. “Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.”
I just love quoting Chris Hedges. Here’s some more of his stuff: “The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ to Orwell’s ’1984′. The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity.”
PPS: I also really like Stephen Colbert’s new satire, “Jesus was a Liberal Democrat,” http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/368914/december-16-2010/jesus-is-a-liberal-democrat, wherein Colbert jokingly implores us not to end up like Jesus, who mollycoddled the poor. “Actually, we shouldn’t be talking to the poor at all. They’ve got Unemployment Cooties!”
And America’s “Looted Generation” has the most unemployment cooties of all. Good job there, Grandpa. Thanks a lot.
September 9, 2010
October 29, 2009
It’s True: Junior Bush is a Motivational Speaker Now
43 Becomes Motivational Speaker
–Politico Staff, Oct. 27, 2009.
Here’s Stephen Colbert’s take on Bush’s first ‘inspirational’ speech:
Colbert Mocks Bush
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October 15, 2009
Rush Channels Colbert
Hear Limbaugh’s ‘color-blind’ rant here.
“First: Color-blindness is an impossibility. Socialization, history and the institutional facts on the ground make being honestly color-blind quixotic. But, second: Were it possible, it would be a disability, just like, well, red-green color-blindness.” […]
“Simply put: It is impossible to be color-blind in a racist society. And anyone with pretenses to the contrary is not only lying to themselves and everyone else by extension, but is also perpetuating racism.”
– Frederic Christie, “Racial Color-Blindness: As Bad as Regular Blindness,” Associated Content, Nov. 18, 2008.
Limbaugh’s “Color-Blind” History of Racially-Charged Comments
– Media Matters, Oct. 13, 2009.
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October 22, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Lipstick on a Pygmalion Edition
Plus a Ray of Light on McCain’s Silly Phillie Charge and Other Diversions
“If your actions speak louder than words, you’re not yelling loud enough.”
– Stephen Colbert, October 20, 2008.
What’s up with God’s Own Hockey Mom, that plain small-town Wasilla girl we’ve all grown to know and love, dropping $150,000 bucks of RNC cash on clothes and jewelry from such snooty elitist shops as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman-Marcus? Say it ain’t so, Joe – has Alaska’s neo-secessionist pitbull become a pampered poodle, corrupted by her trip to the lower 48? (Perhaps it was associating with all those liberal socialists on Saturday Night Live is what did it, the same way as Obama meeting Bill Ayers turned him into a 1960s domestic terrorist by osmosis.) Jeepers, next we’ll find out she doesn’t know what the Vice President’s job is, according to the Constitution.
Speaking of Mrs. Bent Mooseburger, why isn’t the following a bigger story among the Big Media bobbleheadery? McCain’s Bullwinkle-Killer spent Alaska taxpayer money to drag the whole fam damily along with her to various events, paying out $21,000 for daughters Piper, Willow and Bristol to travel and hotel in luxury at the public’s expense. Worse, she lied when she claimed that the kid’s were invited to these events and, worst of all, altered the expense accounts after the fact. Alaska law is clear: Gov. Palin’s expense account is to be used only for official state business, period. This used to be the kind of Enormous No-No that got state executives and those playing executives on TV fired, yet the BM has hardly peeped about it. C’mon, Beemers, step up to the plate here.
Speaking of stepping up to the plate (in the head), Cap’n McCrash is indulging in yet another head-scratcher by using Obama’s innocuous political hat-tip to both World Series contenders, The Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, as some kind of example of BHO’s horrible hypocrisy. This is interesting since the Ol’ Straight-Talker himself, appearing on Pittsburgh TV station KDKA last July, recited his usual anecdote about telling his North Vietnamese captors way-back-when that some of the officers in his squadron were the starting offensive line of the Green Bay Packers, but for purposes of political pandering, changed the Packers to the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers, even though the story was in his friggin’ book!
“When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the pressures, physical pressures on me, I named the starting lineup, defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron mates.”
– John McCain on KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 2008.
“Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron.”
– John McCain, from his book, “Faith of My Fathers” (1999).
“Imagine if Al Gore or John Kerry had changed the facts of a story they told forever in order to appeal to whatever swing state they were speaking in? … Also, the famous Steelers defensive line that McCain was trying to refer to (Mean Joe, L.C. etc.) didn’t become famous until after McCain was out of Vietnam.”
– Chuck Todd and Domenico Montanaro, MSNBC First Read, July 11, 2008.
Keep digging, Johnny!
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September 29, 2008
The Tattlesnake – McCain’s Bonfire of the Inanities Edition
The ‘Stop Making Sense’ Campaign Just Did
“Never mistake motion for action.”
– Ernest Hemingway
In one of the topsy-turvy, fun-house-mirror aspects of this election, the hypothetically conservative Palin-McCain bid for the White House is being run as the most post-rational, incoherent, chaotic, image-driven, short attention span, non-factual, theatrical, emotional, ‘truthiness’-spewing political campaign in our history, worthy of the amorphous meanderings of a liberal French deconstructionist or a parody of reactionary outrage by Stephen Colbert.
Sure, we know that the Bush neocons like to create their own reality and let the rest of us catch up but, eventually, as has happened to King Junior, reality does come thundering down — as it has in Iraq, in Katrina, in our economy — where it can’t be ignored anymore, but the wildly lurching Palin-McCain extravaganza has decided to tempt fate and test the limits of the public gag reflex one more time by resurrecting every sordid, dishonest battering of reason and civility that Atwater and Rove have ever dreamed up.
Like the TV show “Seinfeld,” it is really a campaign about nothing: McCain’s economic policies – cut taxes and wait for a miracle – are a sour joke that we are feeling the punch line to as BushCo asks for a $700 billion bailout for trying the same thing; McCain’s phony Surge – which was really mostly just bribing the warlords to keep quiet — has worked successfully to keep our combat forces tied down in Iraq with no end in sight; his health care proposals will actually cost middle-class families more money for health insurance, and on and on it goes. Slip the rug out from under the rubes and call it real conservatism while you soften the fall of your rich cronies with golden parachutes – McCain should more accurately use the campaign slogan, ‘Country Club First.’
That McCain, a man who once campaigned against the interference of religion in secular politics, signed on as his Veep pick a born-again Christian zealot who knows more about the Rapture than she does the world she lives in and wears her narrow-minded ignorance and screwball religious beliefs as a badge of pride, to cynically solidify his hold on what remains of the Republican base says more about the current corrupt state of his character than five years in a POW camp in North Vietnam thirty-five years ago.
So, this is the shell game McCain and Palin are running: It’s not about what he or she would do as president or vice president – that’s archaic thinking — but rather the two-word message and the photo-op – McCain putting ‘Country First’ by suspending his campaign, yet still airing ads and keeping his campaign offices open, and jetting to Washington to appear for the cameras as if he’s already president, supposedly to deal with our economic crisis that he helped create and still doesn’t fully understand. That he just sat on his hands with no real authority is a reality trumped by the man-in-motion image – or so his Rove-trained advisors hope. There’s Palin, now appearing in several interviews and displaying her keen memory for brief neocon clichés and homey aphorisms provided by her handlers, but little grasp of what she’s babbling about, culminating in the low spot of her performance thus far, appearing in frothy TV talk-show spots with Hamid Karzai, Bush’s installed president of Afghanistan; a bulbous and lethargic Henry Kissinger, and a bemused President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, wondering if this insipid woman will help him get more foreign aid if he cooperates. She discussed babies with Karzai, emitted vacuous platitudes with Uribe, and flattered Kissinger’s obese ego in his blubbery senility. (Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, he thought he was dating Jill St. John again.) She increased her knowledge not one iota, but she ‘knows’ world leaders – see we have pictures!
The Conservapedia Delusion of Andrew Schafly
As Stephen Colbert remarked during a speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner at which a visibly uncomfortable ‘President’ Junior Bush was on the dais, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
To counter that perceived ‘bias’ at Wikipedia, Eagle Forum nutcase Phyllis Schafly’s kid, Andrew, mounted a dimwitted Christopublican-Free Market-Literal Bible site in 2006 to spread the neoconservative message with bile-laced faith-based delusion, the same delusion that’s damn near destroyed the country, and may succeed in tearing it apart yet. But, hilariously enough, even the Bible as it’s written is not conservative enough for raggedy Andy – he actually launched a ‘Conservative Bible Project’ to rewrite those portions he considers too ‘liberal.’ (One would guess that would be any passage expressing kindness for the homeless and poor, berating the rich and telling them to give their possessions away, or asking the reader to forgive one’s enemies and renounce the judging of others.)
Here, Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary drags the little Liar-For-Jesus and his buncombe-packed ‘encyclopedia’ over the glowing hot coals of rationality:
While I’m not necessarily an atheist – deeply cynical agnostic is more like it — and tend to agree with J.B.S. Haldane’s quote: “Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.… I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy,” I admire Bob Carroll and his Skeptic’s Dictionary for attempting to bring some needed rational and scientific enlightenment to a country that’s drowning in revisionist history, goofball religious gullibility, and pure idiotic tripe.