Prius Dementat

Briefly noted during a foray into the drive-time news - the now-inevitable GOP Dauphin Mitt Romney saying

"For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job ... for grandparents who can't afford the gas to visit their grandchildren ... for the mom and dad who never thought they'd be on food stamps ... for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month — to all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I've met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight."

and bitterly observed, to the solitude of the dashboard radio;

"And in that "better America" the policies you support - every act of your Party to date - every small-town, back-bench, mean-minded, spiteful Teabagger swill you've ingested and now claim you'll swill out to the nation if elected - will ensure that her second job will pay less for longer hours, that their gas will be exhausted more quickly and profit it's producers more richly, that those food stamps will be harder to come by and more desperately needed, that the small business will be more likely to be battered and beaten, sold, gutted, and re-sold by your crony-capitalist friends' megacorporation, and that all those good and decent Americans will be further crammed down, shat upon, disenfranchised, wage-slaved to the wealthy and connected who are your primary supporters and beneficiaries"

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, how huge a lie does this man, and this Party, have to tell before the American public screams "Hold! Enough!"?

And I'm afraid that we all know the answer, my friends.

There IS no lie huge enough, for the vast Gadarene herd that still gobbles up this swill.

We cannot continue in this fashion without destruction. We Are SO Fucked.

Or, as one might say in Latin, were one philosophically so inclined;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam

Hard Work II: Electric Boogaloo

Apparently the latest D.C. flame war is the Ann-Romney-vs-Hillary-Rosen Chain-Cage Death Tweet Grudge Match.

This sucker kicked off after the Romneybot trotted out the Little Woman to try and display that, yes, indeedy, he DOES understand that Wimmens Are People, Too, and so they should vote for him because he married one of these women-things so he can do women-positive stuff like cut people off those oh-so-demeaning entitlement programs and refund the money saved to the wealthy (like...Ann Romney!).Ms. Rosen pointed out, rather obviously, that Mrs. Romney wasn't exactly wet-nursing a dozen toddlers in a go-down off of Gin Lane; she was (and is) an insanely rich housewife who could afford to "stay home and raise five boys", as opposed to 95% of the rest of the moms in the U.S., who would quickly be reduced to standing on a streetcorner with a baby on one hip and a basketful of matches on the other if their family lost their share of the income.

This pisses me off on a number of levels.

It pisses me off because of the ridiculous assumption that stay-home moms "work" harder than moms who, y'know, work.

Which is ridiculous, because stay-home moms are way at the bottom of the work food-chain, below the working moms and far, far below the single working moms, for whom there are simply not enough hours in the day.

It pisses me off because of the way it automatically genuflects to the "traditional" wife and mother without any thought of how difficult it is to "choose" to be a stay-home mom after the relentless thirty-year cramdown of wages for the non-two-yacht family.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about this.

That's the Twitter feed from Rosen's original post. Go and read the comments from the Obama people walking Rosen's comment about how Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" back; "I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly.", "Families should remain off-limits" (because...Romney trotted out his little wifey for no reason other than personal pride?) and especially this one: "i personally believe stay at home moms work harder than most of us do."

To which I say; great gigongeous flaming titanic planetary-sized balls of horseshit.

And I speak with some authority because I've been a stay-at-home-dad. And a paratroop sergeant. And a diesel mechanic, a jumper stable undergroom, the downstairs guy in a JiffyLube^TM, a high school AND a community college teacher, and a professional geologist.

And I will freely tell you this; every single damn one of those jobs. Every one. Every fucking moment of every one.

Was harder than being a stay-at-home-dad.

Oh, there were things about being a SAHD that kinda sucked.

The hours often aren't great. The clientele is not always friendly. Flat-out the WORST thing is the fucking boredom; raising a kid is often like playing catch with a dog - trust me, you're going to get bored waaaaaayyyyyy before the dog (or the kid) does. Remind me I said that after reading "Thomas the Train and the Blustery Day" to your toddler for the eight zillionth time.

So at-home parenting is sort of like one of those brain-killing data entry jobs people with "computer science" degrees used to get in the Seventies and Eighties. Long, insanely dull, repetitive, occasionally panicky, sometimes stressful.


But "hard"?

Fuckety fuck, no.

And the reason this "Ohhh, those sweet stay-home mommies, they work so haaaard!" crap drives me so nuts is because - while they're doing their best to make things harder for the sort of people who don't have the Ann Romney kind of cash to hire nannies and au pairs and cleaning services and diaper services and all - the GOP sorts of people luuurves to talk about how wonderful and hard-working all those SAHMs and SAHDs are (though good luck expecting them to get excited about, you know, the people with penises staying home with the kiddos - how the hell you gonna hang with the Tea Party Commandos with that baby bag, there, dad?)

But here's the Big Reveal; staying at home with the kids really ain't hard work.Physically the worst nuisance is between about 18 months old and five or six; as babies they're basically noisy luggage - you can take them with you wherever you need to go as long as you remember their mountain of kit (diapers, wubbies, change of clothes, Cheerios...) - and after that they're in school most of the day. It's a pain again when they're older - starting in the late-grade-school tween years - because of the emotional headaches; you have to worry about herpes and smoking weed and drunk driving and on-line predators.

But the "work" part throughout pretty much consists of feeding 'em, cleaning them, and cleaning up AFTER them, and word up - nobody reading this is living in fricking "Little House on the Prairie".

And sure as HELL not Ann Romney. Little Mansion on the Hudson, probably.

Laundry? You got a machine for that. Dishes? You got a machine for that. Cleaning? How the hell long does it take to vacuum a floor and wipe down a countertop? You've got a fridge and a microwave and a range/over - you don't exactly have to hunt, kill, butcher, and roast a mammoth haunch over an open fire.

When my kid was little and I was out of work I swear, I could get pretty much all the housework done in the space it took for him to nap; maybe an hour, tops. I could toss him in the car and do the marketing, with stops on the way for the library and some coffee. Hang out at the bookstore, go to his fave indoor play place. I pretty much had a leisurely day with the kiddo, tantrums and the hour or so of housework aside.

Now...what I couldn't do was the stuff I liked doing; I couldn't sit and read (unless he was sleeping), or exercise, or watch a movie or a soccer match on television, or blog. And that was frustrating, no kidding.

But it was not effing hard work.

Nope.

So this pisses me off because it's a plain and simple attempt by a hereditary rich couple to try and con the marks suckers "independent" voters into believing that the RomneyTron 2000 is really a warm, empathetic humanoid that loves him some good ol' plain folks because he's, you know, a family man with a Hard-Working Li'l Woman just like them!

But instead it tells me the opposite.

Because as a guy who's been one; if this gomer and his wife think she was "working hard" when she was staying home with the kiddies and the nanny and the housekeeper and the gardener?

They need to go out and learn about real hard work.

'Cause hanging around the house vacuuming the carpets and wiping the baby's ass ain't it.

Nasty?Yep. I'll give you nasty.

Primum non Nocere

I wrote the other day about how tiring it was looking around at the seemingly bottomless ocean of venal and stupid that is much of my country at the moment.

Here's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, and why it's so frustrating, courtesy of Fred Clarke at slacktivist;

"Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, discussing the free-rider problem created by the millions of uninsured, spoke of “...the social norms that allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”

Scalia responded, “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?”

Justice Scalia’s remark there isn’t addressing the Affordable Care Act or its constitutionality. He is addressing an earlier law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986. That’s the law encoding the “social norm” Verrilli mentions — the law that requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone in need regardless of their ability to pay.

Scalia’s suggestion was that this law be dismissed. Or perhaps just disregarded because, eh, it’s just a law, so whatever. He did not try to say that it was unconstitutional — it clearly is not. He was simply suggesting that he finds it inconvenient and thus that we, the people, ought not to have written into law a social norm that runs counter to the social Darwinism he seems to prefer."

Now I'm willing to accept that there's an argument to be made for and against the notion of how sick and injured people's care can and should be paid for.

What I can't accept is the argument for just NOT caring for these sick and injured people at all.

That's...beyond callous. Clarke calls it stupid, idiotic.

But I'd call it worse. I'd call it insane.

And suicidial.

Let me explain why, and use an analogy I know pretty well.You all probably know that I was a medic in the U.S. Army. I am proud of that, proud that the guys I served with called me "doc" and seemed happy to see me roll up with my bag of health care. I liked that I was their country doctor and was asked for medical advice on everything from head lice to erectile dysfunction (and I had a hell of a time with that one, I can tell you...)

But, here's the thing.

Why should an army bother with medics?

I mean, a wounded soldier is useless. He or she can't fight, they can't work. Even worse - they suck up valuable resources away from combat power. Another soldier has to stop fighting and care for them. Other soldiers have to carry them - often requiring an expensive vehicle or aircraft and all its logisitical tail - back to where another soldier - a highly paid surgeon - can treat them.

And there's worse!

Then a fully staffed hospital must be organized to care for this useless soldier. Nurses and medics for daily care, doctors, therapists. If the soldier is so badly injured that he or she cannot return to duty - and let's not be all swoony, the whole point of a hell of a lot of this medical care is to get that trooper back to work; the motto of the Army's Medical Corps is "To Conserve the Fighting Strength" and don't you forget it - the Army still doesn't stop wasting time, money, and people on them.They are shipped back to a CONUS medical center where they are taught to live as best they can. Often it's not great, but compared to the injured soldiers in earlier wars the U.S. trooper has a pretty damn good deal.

Starting with all those expensive medics.

Why? Why the hell would any sensible military organization waste all this stuff?

Okay, you know the answer and so do I; it's part of the contract.

One way armies get soldiers to fight - smart armies, armies that understand how people think - is to make sure those soldiers understand the Deal. You fight for me, I'll take care of you when you get hurt.

Which is why, by the way, that old soldiers like me tend to scream at the VA when it fucks up, or at other people or politicians when they fuck with the VA. Because they're trying to renege on the Deal. And that's why, for all that it probably drives them crazy, none of our deficit-"hawk" politicians is willing to go all budget-cutty on things like medical treatment for wounded soldiers. They know their ridiculous expeditionary wars in central Asia are not popular - imagine just how not-popular they'd become if messed-up GIs started falling all over the sidewalk?

But these jokers, both the professional funnymen like Tony Scales and the non-made guys like zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan (thanks, Charlie), don't seem to understand that societies have a very similar dynamic down underneath.

Once we moved along from the Hobbesean world of pure tribalism - and even most tribes works on the basis that you care for your helpless young, old, and sick - we developed a sort of Deal; the stinky common people worked their asses off, and in return the nobility went easy on them from time to time.

This has taken a hell of a lot of different forms throughout the centuries, from largesse, panem et circensus to Henry Ford paying his rivetheads three bucks an hour.

It isn't a giveaway. It isn't charity. It's part of The Deal, and when the people on top, the people like Scalia, forget that, things can go to hell in a hurry;

"We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison’s wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen’s voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim’s head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike."

The U.S. Army isn't a perfect organization by any means, and it, like any other big corporation, can do some damn dumb things when it tries.

But it is also charged with doing one of the most damn deadly difficult things ever invented - fighting wars. And in doing so has learned that some things just don't make any sense at all, and screwing around with the privates, and leaving them to die when they get sick, or hurt, is the quickest way to break the damn Deal. And that when the little people are finally, throughly convinced that you are willing to let them fucking die before lifting a finger or spending a nickel to do something, well, they tend to figure they have nothing to lose, and from there the discussion usually deteriorates. Into something less pleasant.

Putting heads on pikes and such.

So I'm not sure if Scalia and his intellectual siderunners are, as Clarke believes, stupid, or just, like the Princesse de Lamballe, greedy and shortsighted. Or like I suspect, all the above and to the extent that it makes them functionally suicidal; if they got what they wanted they'd put us on a path that would make a real revolution, a genuine, bloody, civil explosion, not just inevitable but necessary.

But whatever there reason, their hearts or their shoes, the effect seems to be the same; a longing for a world where people don't act like people - who can be tossed out to croak and won't destroy their society if it shows it doesn't care about them.

I honestly have no idea how this nonsense will end. But if it ends, as at least one prominent conservative seems to think it should, with the poor bleeding out at the door to the emergency room, well, then...

...how fucking stupid and suicidal would that be?

Sigh.

Like I said; the damn ocean of stupid just seems to go on forever.

Sheik Yerbootie

I gotta tell ya.

Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey Chow^TM.It's been a living Hell.

Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.

Sigh.

I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.

The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.

And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.

Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.

I mean, just look:This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.

But either one is completely batshit insane.

I mean seriously fucking insane.

Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.

Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.

Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?

Insane.

But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.

What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?

Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?

I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.

Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!

Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.

We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.

And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?

Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.

But that's just me talkin'.

So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.

For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.

But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron.

Or a Republican.

But I repeat myself.

The Abyss Peers Back

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Lies that Won't Fly, or, Wingnut Defilade

I must be getting cynical or something.

It's not so much a sort of general outlook sort of thing. It's just that I've gotten completely used to - still a trifle irked with, but used to - the idea that "conservatives" will lie about whether the sky is blue or the grass is green if it serves their purposes, or if it doesn't, or when the sky IS blue, or for no reason at all.

As an example of this, I give you the second sentence in today's editorial in the World's Worst Newspaper by Susan "I'm an independent, no, really, I am, I just HAPPEN to have the same position as the wingnuts 99.86% of the time" Nielsen:

"The Obama administration picked a fight it was sure to lose by decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control."

In fact, think I gave her some extra credit for waiting until the second sentence to lie out her ass.

It's not like I EVER expected the truth from these gomers on some things.

For example, I have always and fully expected to hear lies about gays from these wingnuts, other than the truly unhinged and rabidly feral ones, the ones that really believe that Baby Jesus cries when gay people have sex.

The semi-sentient ones, the others, the ones who know full well that they have lived with and befriended and partied with and shot the shit with homosexuals of various flavors for years, who know perfectly clearly that their position on denying these other human beings the legal sanction of their personal union is both inhumane and idiotic, are just straight lying, however they may try to shove their fingers in their ears and chant "lalalalalalala!" to drown the savage condemnation of their own consciences.

They really have no option, given the unhinged condition of their faction; it's either lie to us or tell the truth to themselves, and they can't do the latter, their brains would probably explode.

But it's one thing to lie to try and save oneself from self-immolation.

So that kind of wingnut lie never bothered me. But it's another thing entirely to lie about simple, obvious facts. And it's here that I can feel myself sliding down into a sort of frustrated anger-defilade. Because it used to set me alight when I'd read these ridiculously idiotic bullshit lies, lies that wouldn't convince a four-year-old, amateurish, moron-grade, sad, shitty little lies about simple facts that were gob-smackingly obvious to a gibbering poop-flinging monkey.

(Let me add here that my experience in the fine art of lying comes from when I was posted at Ft. Bragg. I had a friend there, Alfie, who was a sort of Vegas-blackjack-dealer-class liar, a positive maestro of the lie, a man who could lie to your face about something you knew positively otherwise and may you believe him with the effortless grace of water sliding off a cat's ass.

One thing Alfie always insisted on was that you had to lie around a core of the truth; the essence of a lie that will fly is not that it's true, and is not that you'd like it to be true, or you want it to be true but that it COULD be true.

In that respect your desires actually get in the way of telling a truly effective lie, and so it has proved. The things that wingnut "conservatives" usually like and want to be true are either hopelessly moronic or physically impossible; a "free market" (as if the second and third merchant in Babylon hadn't immediately colluded against both the first merchant and all their customers or that their breed had stopped ever since...), "low taxes and strong defense", "social decency", "job creators"...you get the picture.

So the lies they tell are, by their very nature, ridiculous. They aren't built around a core of truth, they're built around a core of pink rhinoceros fairy dust, so for those of us who don't spend six or seven hours a day hammering a FOX "News" cork into the top of our heads to keep the packing peanuts from fluffing out the idiocy is so apparent as to be kind of embarrassing.

Alfie would have told them that they had their heads jammed up their fourth point of contact so far they could see the back of their own teeth; that was the kind of guy he was.)

So I've been reading wingnut after wingnut going on and on about this whole ridiculous business of how the Evil Kenyan Usurper, the New Justinian, the Scourge of God, is making all these poor holy prelates pay for flushing the bleeding fetuses out of women's wombs as they sob and pray for righteousness, just like this Neilsen idiot. And back in the day I'd have gone utterly, full-gonzo, bull-goose looney, totally Asiatic, really medieval on their lying ass. And then here comes this Neilsen goof, and I'd have hung her up and flayed her like a windsock.

Because "decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control" is, simply, an incredibly simple, rudely stupid lie. A lie as amateurish as the eight-year-old caught pissing her pants who looks down at the spreading yellow stain and mumbles "Uhhhhh...it wasn't me..."

And because the truth is a lot simpler, like most truths.

The Catholic - and other religious employers - are offered a simple choice.

Charlie Pierce describes this choice in his usual delightfully rotund fashion:

"...the president has told various Catholic institutions — and told them quite gently, too — that, yes, if they want all those nice juicy tax advantages, they must abide by the federal law and, in their capacities as employers, make contraceptives available to their employees under the new Affordable Care Act."

Period.

That's it.

So no, Susie, no one is "decreeing" anything.

No cardinals or priests are being hauled weeping and praying into the regulatory arena where they will be devoured by ruthless federal health bureaucrats.

No one is demanding that Plan B be offered up with the Eucharist, or that good Catholic matrons be offered contraceptive devices (and wouldn't these good matrons refuse the offer, anyway?) and, when they refuse to accept them, be held down by the Contraception Goon Squad and forcibly contracepted.

Tax break? Contraceptives for those who want 'em.

It's that simple.

And - as little as a couple of years ago - the incredible arrogance of this lying little Neilsen shit would have been enough to spin me up like a fucking Beyblade Metal Master.

I'd have gone off on the issue to all my friends who had the patience to listen as well as writing a long blog post about how utterly fucked-up this was and what it said about the desuetude of American politics, throwing in allusions to the fall of the Roman Republic and all sorts of other dire warnings of what this Meant To Our Future.

And now?

It's just like watching a cow. It wanders around, shits everywhere, and what the hell can you do about it? It's not worth getting excited about. It just is.

These people are just lost. Gone. Pinin' for the fjords. A rough third of the U.S. public has gone and taken the mental dirt nap. Their brains are good to holding their hats off their shoulders, and that's about it. And where that used to frustrate the hell out of me and madden me to fury, I've gotten so I just shrug.

Rain is wet, night is dark, "conservative" liars lie.

But I think there's a worse part to this.

Because I used to believe that the third of the U.S. public who sits their staring at these knuckleheads like they've never seen a cow or heard a lie would smell their bullshit and hear their lies and get tired of being lied to by a herd of goddamn beefwits and toss the idiots out into the far end of the pasture.

And I don't believe that anymore.

And that feels like heading down into a very deep defilade, indeed.

Gas! Gas! Gas!

My particular contempt for the pack of gussied-up ninnies, professional grifters, idle rich, and crony-capitalist-whores who are in the running for this year's GOP presidential nomination will come as no surprise to you who are familiar with this blog.

But I should note that my contempt is to some degree bipartisan. While the Republican streetwalkers are more than willing to perform whatever degrading tricks their corporate masters demand of them, their whoring is more shameless only by degree, and by the extent to which they attempt to turn the rest of their fellow Americans out compared to their Blue counterparts. The U.S. political system is awash with cash, stuffed to the eyes with jack, bloated and poisoned with lucre, and the Democrats have proved more than willing to ride on the gravy train with their less circumspect GOP counterparts.

But one particular nasty trick belongs to the Republicans and the Republicans alone; the bizarre insistence that "government is the problem", which helps insure public contempt for all governance, good and bad, as well as helping facilitate bad government (which is, in fact, a problem).

Because leaving aside whether government is or isn't a problem, absent the government - municipal, state, federal - what's left?

No, Mister Paul, it's not some sort of free-market individualist libertarian paradise; this is 21st Century North America, not fucking Fantasy Island.

No, what's left is private organizations.

And the wealthiest, best organized, and consequently most powerful organizations are commercial enterprises; businesses, corporations, call them what you will. From the local grocery chain to the regional branch of Multinational, Inc., these are the last tall men standing when the government goes bye-bye.

My problem with the GOP is that their message is simply; trust them. Love them. They are GOOD.

But...why would any sane person do that?

Corporations are just people in groups. Republicans are notorious for not trusting people in groups unless they all wear the same clothes (and we'll get to that in a moment). People in groups are, as my father the Master Chief was fond of saying, as smart as the IQ of the smartest guy in the group divided by the number of people in it and as honest as the least honest guy with the skills to dip your wallet.

Here's a good example. Pacific Gas and Electric

"...(cut) back on pipeline-replacement projects and maintenance, laying off workers, using cheaper but less effective inspection techniques and trimming other pipeline costs, saved upward of 6 percent of the money designated for pipeline safety, maintenance and operations programs...(and) spent $56 million annually on an incentive plan for executives and "non-employee directors."

And in 2010 a massive pipeline explosion in San Bruno, CA, killed eight people and destroyed over three dozen homes.

Now here's the thing; I don't blame PG&E.

That's right. They were just doing what a private company is supposed to do; making a profit. They shaved the edges of safety, hoping to squeeze a little extra profit here and there, and they guessed wrong, and the poor suckers in San Bruno paid for it.

But the "market" isn't designed to reward safety. Or anything but pure profit.

Which is why the human race has always found, whenever it has tried pure, raw, unrestricted, unregulated profit, that the goons, thugs, grifters, and thieves always come out of the walls. Because forming a cartel and fixing prices is always easier and more profitable than working hard to provide good service at low cost. Because stealing is always quicker and richer than trying to figure the market and the customer and the materials and work out the right price for the goods.

The GOP is right in this; when it comes to making and selling stuff, government often IS a problem. Governments just don't work quickly and subtly enough to respond to private demands - they can't; when your fuckups can cause the sort of irretrievable damage that government fuckups can, it pays to be slow and careful.

But the GOP is wrong, dead wrong, idiotically and criminally wrong in their insistence that private business is NEVER a problem. Especially today, when the business selling you things may be half a world away, far out of reach of your puny strength and invulnerable long after they have detonated your street and killed your kids.

No matter whether it's spilling petroleum into deep waters, leveling mountaintops, selling tainted meat, or blowing up your street; the private malefactors need a counterweight to keep them in fear of injuring or stealing from you.

That is the government's job, and they should be encouraged and empowered to do it. And anyone who tells you differently - Democrat or Republican - is trying to put you in the position so that someone who is paying his bills is in another position, and one that enables him to fuck you over if he so chooses.And the good people of San Bruno - those who remain - can tell you exactly what's wrong with that.

Everything Old Is New Again

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience?

Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

-- H.P. Lovecraft to C.L. Moore, August 1936

(h/t to driftglass, as always)

"Homophobic and Stupid is No Way To Go Through Life, Son"

I got a big laugh from this, the latest on the proposed re-institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (aka "Youse Homos Can Serve Until We SAY Youse Can't Serve") from Former Senator "Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum:

"What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. That's tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if rick santorum was president. That policy would be reinstituted as far as people in I would not throw them out that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual."

because if you needed to know anything about what the man doesn't know about military service circa 2011, this pretty much tells you.And that's...pretty much everything.

I never served in anything but an all-male unit until after I got off active duty. But since then I've been assigned to everything between a headquarters company and a laundry-and-bath platoon with stops along the way with every sort of military critter.

And one thing I can tell you with stone-cold certainty.

Sex is ALWAYS an issue.

Doesn't matter if it's the boys on the girls, the girls on the boys, the boys on the boys or the girls on the girls. We're human, so until we're about 68 years old roughly a third of our brain is occupied in thinking about sex. I'm not sure what the other 66 percent does; sudoku, maybe.

Obviously the most complicated is in mixed-gender units. I've worked in several, and I can tell you that you can walk and talk military discipline and the UCMJ all you want to, but you get a young man and a young woman together and you automatically have the potential for something not covered in the rest positions at the halt section of FM 22-5.

Mind you, the Army has a long history of being stupid about Sex. I saw it first all the way back in 1981, when in its infinite wisdom the Army had set up a mixed-gender BT company. 1st Platoon of A/4/3, Fort Dix N.J. was female. "First Fox" fireguards shared a stairwell with my Second Platoon, and I am told (though I was unaware at the time, being first a squad leader and then platoon guide and thus exempt from fireguard) that the young women on guard ranged from adorable to fugly and the young men from studly to dorky. But almost none of them left Fort Dix unscrewed. It's lucky we never did have a fire; the horndogs were too busy having it off in the empty cadre rooms to have sounded an alarm.And in my experience it almost always has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes Santorum's connection between the Big Gay Scary even less sensible. The disciplinary problems and/or personnel complications were 99.9% heterosexual and 85% consensual (the other 15% were a supervisor/supervised deal, which IMO pretty much can't really be counted as such any more than any other "sexual harassment" type scenerio can).

And gay?

Ask anyone who served in Panama back in '86 and '87; the women's barracks over at 210 Aviation was like a big OG-107-covered episode of "The L-Word". Damn near every one of those gals liked her girls like she liked her corn-on-the-cob; hot and covered in butter.

But y'know what? They worked their asses off and kept those aircraft where they belonged, in the air, and as a result nobody really brought up the whole "hot-girl-on-girl-GI-action" thing.So excuse me if I continue to laugh at young Mister Santorum, who seems to think that U.S. troops have to put their genitalia in the company safe before leaving Reception Station. Sex not an issue?

Maybe on your planet, spaceman...

Losing My Religion

So Friday I posted about my disgust and despair at the condition of my country's politics.

Pat, like a Terminator in a James Cameron film, came Dave Brooks to drive the last nail into the lid of that political coffin with "Creed or Chaos" in Thursday's New York Time.

Now like you, I usually ignore Bobo. He's an idiot. But...here's the thing.

As an idiot, he usually represents the mainstream Republican sort of idiot that has run the party since Reagan clubbed the last of the Rockefeller and Eisenhower faction like a blubber-chewing Inuit with adorable baby harp seals. Bobo's writings (and by "writings" I mean "nearly incomprehensible errata scrawled on the padded walls by the gibbering inmate using his big toe and a slurry of drool and his own feces") are a way to glimpse, in a sort of lifting-the-rock-to-observe-the-writhing-vermin-beneath way, what goes on inside the brainpan of a typical country club Republican.

I should be specific; this does NOT include the sort of thing that occurs inside the occipital lobes of the Palinite/Teatard Wing of the GOP. God knows what the hell those people think about; probably gypsy knives and gypsy thighs that pound and pound and pound and African appendages that almost touch the ground and little boys playing baseball in the rain. But, whatever. Bobo does nothing to enlighten you about whatever THEY think.

But for the Kiwanis-Chamber-of-Commerce-former-Quayle-supporter sort of Republican, Bobo's your man. He stands athwart the GOP like a sort of teeny tiny Colossus, mouthing the sorts of things that make the Republicans feel warm and snuggly as they enter within.

So his Thursday column was a real revelation for me, because in it the spokesmodel for the two-SUV family advocates that African - and by inference, U.S. - Christians should be more like Torquemada and less like Pastor Niemoller.

"Many Americans" he says "have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments."

But this is so, so wrong, explains Bobo.

Why? Because "The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False."

Now based on human history you might be forgiven for thinking that religions that are "theologically rigorous" (meaning: intolerant of dissent and punitive to religious deviance), "arduous in practice" (meaning: insisting on complete obedience regardless of cost), and "definite...about what is True and False" (meaning: convinced that any variation from orthodoxy is False, unrighteous, and, presumably, unGodly) tend to be by nature militant, divisive, intolerant, and often dangerous to anyone and anything not beloved of their God and his tenets.

You might be forgiven for thinking that such religions are prone to outbreaks of violent persecution and religious war when they collide with people or cultures they anathematize.

You might be forgiven for thinking that such religions tend to make people smug, self-satisfied, rigid, intolerant, slothful entitled pricks.

But Bobo would not forgive you any such thing.

Because Bobo thinks - meaning that your average country club Republican, your average Republican, period, thinks - that people qua people are stupid, feckless, lazy scumbags.

"No matter how special some individuals may think they are," says Bobo, "they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own."

Think about that for a moment.

......

Bobo goes on to insist the following:

1. Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality.

2. Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally.

3. Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity.

4. Rigorous theology delves into mysteries in ways that are beyond most of us.

5. Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character.

You got that? People whose religion demands that they accept every jot and tittle of the Holy Word (no shrimp or owl for dinner, no sex during menstruation, stuff like accepting that a consecrated celebate in a three-ringed crown is channeling the Great Spirit verbatim) are the only ones with a Michelin Guide to reality, the only ones with real intellectual acuity, the only ones with genuine originality, the only ones with the keys to the Great Mysteries.

Oh, and the only ones capable of avoiding sex with vegetables and stealing pocket change.

Okay.

I'm perfectly willing to grant you that religion, whether "theologically rigorous" or otherwise, has been the foundation of some of humanity's most incredible achievements. Faith has motivate humans to raise cathedrals to the sky, care for the sick and dying, help the poor, found cities and even nations. Religions touch something very vital in many, perhaps even most, people.

But at the same time, religion has been behind some of history's great horrors. Religions have butchered children for their "sins". Religions have sent entire populations lurching into others' lands; murdering, raping, looting in the belief that the "others" were beneath the consideration of God's love - indeed, that God demanded the others' lives as punishment for their unbelief in the invaders' God or gods.

Religions have also helped people justify those horrors, often by their very nature, in that something that helps you believe the improbable often helps you embrace the unthinkable. Bobo cites Dorothy Sayers (who was a delightful novelist and decent scholar but whose door wasn't exactly hanging on all its hinges, theologically speaking) saying that

"...Christianity’s advantage is that it gives value to evil and suffering. Christianity asserts that “perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench real good out of a real evil.” This is a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition."

No. This isn't a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition. It is fucking nonsense.

Evil is evil, suffering is suffering. Fighting evil (assuming that it IS evil and not just something "abhorrent before My God" like boys having sex with other boys or women voting) is admirable, enduring suffering bravely is honorable. But neither of those "give value" to evil and suffering.

Evil and suffering are plagues on humanity, full stop, and anyone who believes that they are valuable because they allow Christians to achieve perfection through fighting them are as fucking nuts and stupid as a bag of hammers.

So, resolved; anyone who tortures, or butchers, a tiny baby is a vile criminal bag of fuck. Unless, says Dotty and Bobo, it allows a Christian "to wrench real good out of a real evil."

What.

The.

Fuck?

It is just this sort of tortured logic that allowed Crusaders (or their Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist equivalents) to believe that their evil had value, that by slaughtering infidel women and children got them closer to Paradise.

This is madness. THIS is evil.

If this were all Bobo brought with him I could simply walk away with a shrug. Theocrats are a nickel a gross; they have arisen throughout history, usually from a heap of human bodies, and have largely been tossed aside when the survivors realize what an intolerable pain in the ass being ruled by someone who insists that all his or her opinions are crafted in God's toy shop. Theocracy is probably the worst single form of human governance and has been proved as such again and again by practical example.

But remember - this isn't just Bobo.

This is the mainstream wing of the GOP that Bobo represents. It is this group that honestly believes that their fellow Americans are unable to think, plan, or control where they put their penises or vaginae (vaginas?) without Baby Jesus there to point out Tab A and Slot B and what doesn't go where. This group seems to think that what the U.S. needs is more "theologically rigorous" religion and less "...(v)ague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity..."

The real genius of the Framers was not to toss religion out of U.S. public life. They knew their country and knew their fellow citizens. They knew that the religion would get there one way or another. No, their genius was to ensure that when it did arrive a the public square it would be gutted of its "theological rigor". That it could not test Americans on their knowledge of the doctrine of transubstantiation, of the traditions of a seder, of the Five Pillars as a price of citizenship, couldn't demand fealty to any theology as a cost of entry into public business, or privilege one over another, either in public or private.

Regardless of how vile this belief is to that one, regardless of how many lives of one faith the other has taken.

This country is founded on the notion that you in the name of your religion WILL NOT be allowed to take public action against me for mine. And if you take private action that traduces my public rights you will be prosecuted for it.

This has gone a long, long way to producing the secular character of U.S. public life - despite the very public presence of religion, a presence nearly absent in Europe, a continent much more familiar with the evils of "theologically rigorous" religions and their public feuds - and the large number of U.S. believers who leave the outward trappings of their faiths in church, synagogue, and mosque.

But Bobo, and his GOP counterparts, seem to think this is a mistake. They think all this warm fuzzy ecumenism is a dodge, a cunning scheme to defile our vital bodily fluids. And what should we do to avoid this weakening, this flaccidity, this impotence of the American soul?

Well, "changes in behavior change the mind," Bobo reminds us, "...so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most."

And y'know what? If you started on young Americans with those "regular acts of (theologic) discipline" early enough you could probably lay the foundation for a cruel unflinching youth, a youth as hard as steel.

I wonder.

What could you do with people like that..?

.......

Note: On Mormonism

I observe that Bobo's observations were made posteriori to viewing something called the "Book of Mormon", a play by the guys who do "South Park".

Whilst I tend to be fairly tolerant of other people's personal beliefs if you wanted a religion to mock Mormonism is one of the fattest slow targets outside of genuinely fucking out-there religious goofologies of the Scientology breed.

I mean, read the Joesph Smith story. Guy is a "gold witcher" in Palmyra, NY, back in the 1820s, claiming that he can find gold with "magic stones". He claims that in 1823 an angel tells him where to find two golden plates written by Ether, Mormon, Lehi and Nephi, who are Native Americans circa 1AD, a brass plate with Hebrew scripture quotations and genealogies written by one Laban, oh, yeah, and "Urim and Thummim," magical translating stones.

Magical translating stones.

Okay. Now he doesn't head out, snatch this boodle and run, mind you. Nope. Instead, in 1825, he and his dad head to Pennsylvania to look for buried treasure at three bucks a day. Nothing turns up and Smith offers the suggestion that the treasure had sunk deeper due to...to...ummm...err...enchantment! That's it; enchantment! Seriously! Enchantment!

Yeah, okay Joe, sure.

He loses the job but finds a wife, Emma, the local schoolmarm. They elope in New York in 1827. Which is, you'll remember, when Joe trudges back to Palmyra to get all that golden loot and the Indian-Jesus stuff, remember?

So between 1827 and 1829 Joe Smith "dictates" the "translation" of these supposed golden plates (which no one but he has seen, remember) to his new wife and a couple of pals. The entire business is odd; sometimes he's hidden behind a screen, when he's not the tablets aren't in view. He puts the "magical stones" in his hat...and puts his hat over his face.

He finishes the "Book of Lehi", lends it to his pal Marty Harris, who takes it home and "loses" it (supposedly Lucy, who hated Smith and thought he was a fraud, tossed it).

That sucked, and Smith now says that God has taken away the "special stones" because Joe's buddies stepped on their poncho, and he starts on the "Book of Nephi" which, he says, tells the same story as Lehi only, you know, sort of, different.

Anyway. The Book of Nephi, if you've ever bothered to skim it, reads like one of those Fifties sword-and-sandal movies, with lots of thud and blunder, prophets, visions, a "ball of curious workmanship", and how Jews became the native Americans.

Really, no shit.

If you put the whole thing in a movie and got McG to direct it nobody would believe a word of it, although I would pay good money to see Adam Sandler play Smith, the old Sandler back when he was funny.

Tina Fey could play Lucy.

Either way, it seems to have become a religion because people who want to believe stuff will believe it regardless of how goofy it's backstory is. And you can say this for Mormonism as you pass up your morning coffee.

It sure as hell is "theologically rigorous."

I'm just sayin': he'll do to the country what he does to Callista

The Man Who Would Be King, Newt Gingrich, has decided that the REAL problem in the Middle East is that we just aren't warry> enough.So he wants to

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. It’s also an ideological problem. The United States doesn’t need anybody’s permission. We don’t need to have NATO, who frankly, won’t bring much to the fight. We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. And we don’t have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes."

All of which is true, and all of which means less than a zero in the calculus of national interests of which Mister Gingrich seems to care not a whit.

Does this idiot recall that, craptacular little Third World shithole that it is, Libya is still a Wesphalian state? That the very definition of national existence is the ability to prevent other people from flying around over your territory "without anyone's permission"?

Right now the Libyans are in the middle of a civil war. The opposing sides in civil wars are notoriously touchy about foreign meddling.We would have gone crackers if the British had openly intervened in ours, as was the Confederate intent (see "Trent Affair, The") or even attempted to "mediate" between the Federal government and the rebels. Why does Gingrich believe that the Libyans, rebel or government, would behave any differently?

This gormless wretch Gingrich is only one of the several right-flank characters who seem to be all excited about killin' them - no, wait, getting OTHER Americans to kill - some Libyans, and you know who these people are; the usual suspects - Hitchens, Krauthammer, and no, I won't link to those dopes. And the biggest single commonality between them is that they none of them suggest the simple expedient of asking the friggin' Libyans if they want help.

I'm all in favor of slotting some dictators. Ask my pals; I practically had to be sedated when the Ceauşescus got their 7.39mm pink slip. Gadaffi would look great dangling tastefully a la Benito, or in the dock alongside Charles Taylor.

But if I want to do that I'll have to wait until this knucklehead Gingrich siezes power; a Libyan dictator is a Libyan problem...until the Libyans ask for my help. So Gadaffi is still a Libyan problem, and if we expect and demand the rights of a soveriegn state we owe it to the rest of the world to behave like one. Even before we were a formally a nation we expected the French to go through channels and sign a treaty of alliance before taking a slap at the Brits on our soil; WTF, Newt? You're supposed to be all historical n' shit (at least you and your ghostwriters seem to pick American history to make up stories about); you don't remember this? Has Callista's botox done something to your brain?So, yes, dummy, we DO "need anyone's permission". We need the permission of the very fucking people you're so anxious to "help", if that's really what this is about and knowing you I doubt very much that it is. To even suggest that we just fly around over someone else's country uninvited reminds the rest of us why your skeevy ass only lasted two terms in the House; because you showed that you had no compunction about bullshitting, lying, shuckin' and jiving if it helped you or your political party.

So if you have something sensible to say about Libya I'd love to hear it.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Okay, fine. You now have my permission to put on your little hat and tool off to do something useful. Like shoving a sock in your pie-hole before you say more dumb stuff like this.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled landscapers yearning to trim hedges...

Texas state representative Debbie Riddle has a great idea.You remember those scary, dangerous Mexicans sneaking into our country to speak Spanish, collect welfare, and generally de-caucasianize our great land? And remember how Real Americans (like Republicans) want to make sure we Defend our Borders and other valuable things, like our precious bodily fluids?

Well, Debbie wants to make sure that those Meskins don't sneak in here flouridating our water n' stuff, so she's proposing that hiring one of these sneaky invaders is a "state jail felony" under Title 8 of the Texas Penal Code.

Unless...unless...

...the "actor" (person) hiring said beaner did so "for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence in which the actor resides..."

Texans, rejoice!Your lawns, babies, clean floors, and cooked meals will remain free - and cheap!

Is there a fucking brain cell left in the Republican Party?

Why Newt Gingrich Should Have Been Clubbed Like a Baby Harp Seal Back in 1995

He married the Joker.Did you "eeep!" a little when you saw the grin-rictus of Death on the mug of Callista "I screwed another woman’s husband for six years until he dumped her and made an Honest Woman of me" Gingrich? I sure did. Talk about the mirror of the soul. I hope she makes this face when the Newtster exercises his marital rights; maybe it'll remind the bastard of his dead first wife, his high school geometry teacher who he screwed in a little different way, handing her his divorce papers while she was recovering from uterine cancer.

This adulterous, skeevy, lying douchebag (Newt, that is, not the Receptacle of Newt-chowder) is still a respected senior figure in the Republican Party, published "author", a serial guest on the D.C. talk-show and lecture circuit.

And Elizabeth Edwards is still dead.

There is no fucking justice in the world.