Sarah Palin – The Don Rickles Of The Right

If Republicans aren’t having buyer’s remorse and no small sense of terror at what they have wrought on themselves in Sarah Palin – they had better. I’m sure they put up with her because they like to see the loathing and flat our beshitting terror she evokes on the left. But she is being taken seriously by the cross-eyed base they worked so hard to nurture these last twenty years. She is a Frankenstein of the right’s own creation. And everything that comes out of her mouth – whether they like it or not – is being attributed to the GOP. When she puts words in Pat Buchanan’s mouth – and suggests that Obama might actually get re-elected if he plays The War Card, and go to war with Iran – something Sarah Palin says with the disconnected calmness another person might employ to order a pizza – even though it’s not true and Pat Buchanan suggested no such thing – people believe it. (As if being at war with five countries isn’t enough…)

There are very few places the Tea Party could have held their convention where their false narrative could be believed. Where Sarah Palin could make one hundred thousand dollars to victimize her audience with a voice that sounds like a dying hyena. Factcheck.org needs an entire division just for her. I know there are serious Republicans out there. They might be retired or drunk in some bar, but they do exist – and they would do their party a favor by standing in opposition of this type of politics: where truth is tossed aside and personal intolerance and fear is carefully nourished.

When Sarah Palin lashed into Obama for the Christmas Bomber, her story could just as easily have been describing the Shoe Bomber, who did try to attack our country when George Bush was in office. The system didn’t work then either. And, he, too, was tried in a civilian court. He too had a lawyer – just as he would have had he been tried in a military court. The only difference is that George Bush was a Republican and Barack Obama is a Democrat. And the Shoe Bomber turned out to be an American from Virginia instead of a black Nigerian. It is this double standard in politics that slows it to a crawl as both sides bicker over who did what as the big things that really need to be worked out go ignored. It was Bush who sat on his ass and ignored the pleas and warnings of the outgoing Clinton administration of the seriousness and danger of Al Quaida and Bin Laden. The notion that Republicans are better at prosecuting war and protecting us is just their own violent-spirited – and completely false – propaganda. If true, we wouldn’t have the same people plotting against us that were plotting against us ten years ago. Bin Laden wouldn’t still be out there and Mullah Omar wouldn’t still be out there. But they are. Republicans need to accept that their last leader sucked donkey balls and that the reason he was almost elected in 2000 because people wanted to have a drink with him even though he’s a teatotaler.

The Democrats might not be in power right now if the Right took themselves just a little more seriously. Running the country isn’t something that should be decided based on popularity. Just because some political retard from Alaska has nice legs and looks like an adolescent porn fantasy doesn’t mean she deserves a public platform to toss out complete unverifiable falsehoods. Just because some dude in Massachusetts claims he can fix Washington by cutting taxes across the board and he once posed nude in Cosmopolitan magazine doesn’t mean his name should be floated as a possible Presidential candidate before he even steps foot in Washington.

Now there are some things the Right does do better than the Left: obstruct, lie, cheat, steal, instill fear, declare their weaknesses to be strengths (fiscal responsibility my ass), wedge issues, grandstanding, civil liberty trampling, bigotry, laziness, false folksiness, bribe acceptance, paper shredding, torture, criminal negligence, corporate submissiveness, denial, Constitutional fuckery, naked aggression, brutality, illegal warfare, graft, greed, demagoguery – and stealing elections.

Whew! That wasn’t easy! Consider that my attempt at bipartisanship: complimenting the other side for their obvious strengths is something we probably need more of. So I might as well be the first.

Sarah Palin is not a pit bull in lipstick. She’s a human apocalypse: the very face of our country’s possible doom. And it’s time the GOP told her so. I nominate John McCain.

We Have To Start Telling Ourselves The Truth

We lambaste our politicians for telling huge monster whopper lies to our faces. But they aren’t the problem (well they aren’t the root of it anyway). We are. We’re the ones who don’t like it when an honest politician comes along and says something we don’t want to hear. That Republican actor guy from Law And Order and The Hunt For Red October from Tennessee saw his campaign fizzle before it began by telling a room full of donors that the economy was going to be shitty. And this was before Wall Street came crashing down! He said the wrong thing to the wrong audience. He should have said something absolutely impossible: he should have said that if you cut or up and just did away with all taxes, you could win the war and pay down the deficit. People like to believe the impossible; until it doesn’t come true; then they feel tricked; even though, deep down, they knew it was all a bunch of bullshit from the very beginning.

We can’t blame politicians for whispering sweet nothings into our ears so they can get the fuck out of the cow towns and shit-bergs and dying hamlets of this country and get paid to shoot the shit in Washington and get paid for it. But we can blame ourselves for not asking for and expecting the truth. In our real lives, we appreciate the truth. We like it when our boss lets us know he thinks we could work harder; we like it better than when the boss tells us we’re doing a great job and then lets us go out of the blue. We are grown ups. Grown up enough to start families and drink boos and go to war and catch diseases from floozies and max out our credit cards so we can have flat screen televisions the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s bed. So we should be able to handle the truth. Especially when it’s important. We need to be told – from both sides – that the deficit is so large that we can no longer ignore the tough choices. There will always be some water-head half-wit who can get in front of a microphone and tell us that we can cut taxes, fix health-care, pay down the deficit, and go to war with the 285 countries that aren’t us – all with a big happy grin on our exceptional faces. It’s our job to call bullshit on them. It’s our job to demand details from our politicians and hold their nuts to the fire when they don’t serve our interests because some fuckwit with a huge wallet pays hush money to their weekend trannys and wants them to undermine the national interest.

If we can do that, if we can demand the hard truths and take an interest in our own future – and go to the trouble of actually learning the facts – and then actually going and voting, then all this back and forth whiny media orgy of propagandic bullshit will be impossible – as the gullible and the deluded will no longer exist. And our politicians won’t be able to lie to us, and if they do, we’ll be able to sniff them out. Which will make those that can get through the gauntlet better.

But best of all – if the shit hits the fan – we really can blame the politicians. Because we will have done our part; and we’ll be off the hook.

YES Is Not A Choice

You can pay down the deficit or you can keep entitlement spending. Yes.

You can shrink government or you can escalate the war. Yes.

You can pay down the deficit or stimulate the economy. Yes.

You can pay higher health care premiums or reform it. Yes.

You can have earmark reform or earmarks. Yes.

You can reform Wall Street or take their money. Yes.

You can berate the Federal government or take their money. Yes.

You can hate the Federal government or accept you Social Security and Medicare benefits. Yes.

You can be outraged by deficit spending or accept unemployment benefits. Yes.

You can pay down the deficit or keep your fiscally irresponsible programs. Yes.

You can reject federal funding or have policemen protecting the streets. Yes.

You can pretend to work together or get in the way. Yes.

You can play the populist card or get your face ironed once a week. Yes.

You can be part of the solution or part of the problem. Yes.

IF YOU DO ONE, YOU CAN’T DO THE OTHER. BOTH IS NOT AN ANSWER. Um…er…ah…