“We Have Waited Thirty Years To Spring Our Afro-tastic Trap...UNGOWAH!”
Apparently so, brothers and sisters. The latest from Rush's Bat-Shit™ Cave, (via Crooks and Liars)
LIMBAUGH: “We know that technological advancement is going along at light speed. And yet during this period of time, whether it be the last 57 years or be it the last 20 years, it seems that a majority of the black population has remained angry, frustrated, and behind. They've been left behind. They are acting like they've been left behind, and of course we've heard that this is because of racism, natural systemic institutional racism in America, that we are unfair, that this country is just horrible and rotten.”
“...The federal government became the father. The father didn't have to hang around in order for the kids to be okay, depending on ow you define okay. But as you study more and more of this ACORN stuff, you find that it has been part of an entire movement that has been going on for two, maybe three decades, right under our noses.”
“We thought that it was just liberal welfare policies and all that that kept blacks from progressing while other minorities grew and prospered, but no, it is these wackos from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright to other anti-American Afrocentric black liberation theologists with ACORN, and Barack Obama is smack dab in the middle of it, they have been training young black kids to hate, hate, hate this country, and they trained their parents before that to hate, hate, hate this country. It was a movement. It was a Bill Ayers, anti-capitalist, anti-American educational movement. ACORN is how it was implemented, right under our noses. It has been a movement, it has been a religion, and Obama and Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers were all up to their big ears in it.”
As the days grow shorter til' the election, and McCain's odds of winning grow ever longer, the din from the crazed dissonance from the whackdoodley-est of the whackdoodle right will be so Goddamned loud, you won't be able to hear yourselves think—or in Black folks' cases, hear our Publlic Enemy / NWA mash-ups on our freshly riot-liberated stereo consoles perched atop our shoulders.
There's a panic goin' on. A quiet riot in the minds of folks like Limbaugh and his drooling drones with their AM talk-radio i.v.'s on wide drip. Should things go the way they appear headed election-wise, you will hear talk of secession of this place and that from the United States, like NewYork's wingnut haven Staten Island wanted to do when the city dared elect a Black mayor. We already know Sarah and the rest of the “Whiter Shades of Palins” up north are down with that sort of lunacy. But most laughably, you will hear these poor, twisted souls cross up the talking points something fucking awful as their hate-fried synapses sputter and crackle wildly, like downed power lines on a wet street.
Rush's crazy from yesterday is one such example of the combination of fear and a lifelong ingestion of mad-cow bigot burgers messing up and already fragile mind.
'Cause your talking points Rushie? Well...Papa just don''t know what to make of 'em any more.
Are Black folks the biologically, bell-curve addled child-people you generally make us out to be in your daily three-hour hate, or are we now these crafty geniuses with the long-term planning chops of NASA imagineers and the strategic vision of a Sun Tzu?
Which is it, o' sex-touring, dope fiending, posteriorly pilonidally pustuled one? Iz us Black folkz dum...b, or iz we smart? Your precious Bell Curve says we can't be both, so which is it? If we're still dumb, it means you've spent years frantically sphincter-ing out a talking point you just denied, and Obama's ascendance has more to do with him (Horrors!), and not the grand conspiracy your swollen heart craves believing.
If we be all smart and crafty and Machiavelllian, and stuff, well, what the fuck does that do to your whole “We are born preternaturally stupid” argument.
You make the call, Tiny.
But seeing as how this is all conflicting and whatnot for you, howsabout I, as the spokesman for all Black people (because you know we all know each other and stuff...) propose this solution...
That things be “the way they ought to be” and we be as you have wished for years, more like you.
Which apparently, is stupid...all...The. Fucking. Time.
Hey Rush...Is That Riot Still Goin' On In Your Head?
At that point of the presidential campaign we all dreaded, yet probably secretly waited for—like shamed spectators at an auto race. Ostensibly here for the thrill of the speed, but really there to see the end-over-end somersaulting of a race car into a pulsing fireball of “What the fucking fuck?”
We dreaded it, because of the ugliness we knew we'd see, this point in the election season. And yet, we waited for it with bated breath because we knew when it came it would mean that the earth had opened up and hell itself had licked its flames out and put a carbonizing third-degree burn on John McCain's and the GOP's pasty posteriors.
Here it is. Damn.
And what we've got in the last few days is the hard-core gridiron tackle (as opposed to the comparative primary-period scrimmage push) of the 'He's a Black Panther-y terr-a-rist!' meme against the front-runner, Barack Obama.
I'd create a Huey Newton in the wicker chair / Obama Photoshop mash-up to accompany this, but it'd probably fall into misuse...and besides, the words themselves should be read / heard unfettered...to let their naked fear-mongering be experienced raw and sticky, like the bad sushi it is.
SEDONA, Ariz., Oct. 4 --GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin opened a new assault on Barack Obama on Saturday, accusing the Democratic presidential nominee of being “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”
Seizing on a New York Times account Saturday of the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, who has confessed to domestic bombings as a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, Palin told Republican donors in Colorado that Obama “is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world.”
Palin's comments came as Sen. John McCain's campaign signaled a new effort to go after Obama and were a distortion of what the Times story concluded: that the two men are not close but that Obama has played down his contacts with Ayers, who remains unrepentant about his actions but has been rehabilitated in the eyes of many Chicago political and civic leaders.
The comments underscored a new determination by the McCain campaign to try to regain momentum by painting Obama as a radical out of touch with Main Street.
The problem with this smear job is its very messiness. This is as tepid as tepid as old bucketwater, and is being slopped about carelessly with a raggedy mop by McCain and his dimwitted running mate, Governor Real Doll™ of Frostbite Fucking Falls.
There's a bitter venom in McCain's words about this on the stump these last couple of days. A bitterness born of frustration and what must surely be some gut-wrenching news on the internal polling front. The way he's spitting these barely-coded words:“Who Is The Real Barack Obama?”, a.k.a. “This man is not the Cliff Huxtable you think you see...it is Cinque, Plunderer of Pink-Fleshed Pulchritude!”, you can almost see the ghost-image of him standing next to himself, flailing about in sheer electoral-disaster panic.
And as for his attack chihuahua Palin, leave us just to say that her sad rhetoric and ironically pedantic style (as she is in NO position to even think she's smarter than anyone else on God's green earth, really), doesn't so much energize the base, so much as it repackages grainy, old Postum™ in a nifty Starbucks cup. And her mannered, incomprehensible condenscension has moved even my non-political 14-year old daughter to remark about her:
“She sounds like a second grade teacher subbing for a fifth grade class explaining stuff the kids already know. And she doesn't get that these aren't second graders she''s talking to. We get bored with teachers like that. I mean, you doodle. Or pass notes. Whatever. She's so annoying.”
When big “mean girl” / drama queen loses the little “mean girls / drama queens my friends, she has lost America. At least the America not spoon-fed to her at tightly-controlled rallies lest she ever, ever be exposed to people who might actually ask a hard question of her.
But the enfeebled McCain sent her out there, all smirks and snarls, while he works the other side of the street, stinking of Poli-Grip™ and stale cocktail franks as he harrumphs along, shaking his fist at the sky and cursing the clouds that offend him with displeasing shapes.
The GOP's externals (polls) are bad. We know this. And the internals are clearly dismal. We know this because of McCain and company's clumsy “going to the mattresses” as the situation has gotten dire. All the signs were there. Wingnut mouthpieces had gotten quietly depressed and when they weren't that, became self-reflectively pissy. So all pretenses of high-minded collegiality faded away. In its place? Random rhetorical rubouts—replete with the ritualistic, gangland “messaging” in the verbally violent attacks.
My natural impulse here is to pour myself a libation and extend a hand to that Marlene Dietrich-doppelganger named Schadenfreude, so we can dance the next twenty-sometrhing days away, giggling and a' canoodling.
But fun's fun, and what these attacks by the dangerously flawed McCain and his stultifyingly stupid hate-moll VP is stirring up most decidedly isn't fun. I've said before, “Politics ain't beanbag...but it doesn't have to be the 'ear scene' in Reservoir Dogs either.”
I'll amend that by adding “It also shouldn't be a crazed hog-holler to the unbalanced among us, to step in and mete out the rough justice of lynch mobs gone by.”
And that's just what the increasingly desperate Republican candidates are doing right now. Not so much igniting their base as they are putting jumper cables to their nads and cranking the juice to eleven. And those supremely sickest fucks in said base who get off on those zaps and the spastic jumps they make them do are now effectively a menace to be watched closely. Because the level of dealing with them if we don't watch them closely is one that'll set this whole country ablaze. (Via TPM)
After John McCain delivered the central question of his speech today -- “Who is the real Barack Obama?” -- the first, and loudest, supporter seems to yell:
“Terrorist!”
--------------------------------------
McCain seemed to pause, and didn't denounce the epithet. I'd argue that there's no way to arrive at a conclusive answer as to whether he heard it or not, short of asking him and getting a frank answer. McCain could have been pausing to admire the pith and artfulness of his smear, or to bask in the adulation it brought. And McCain is not responsible for what some whackjob yells at his rally.
That said, the moment is uncomfortably revealing: McCain is now dabbling in the tactics employed in the most viral smears of Obama, if not to the same degree. No honest observer would dispute that McCain's speech today was about sowing fears of Obama as a risky, unknown, and vaguely sinister "other," and this supporter, at least, read the subtext, intended or not, loud and clear.
The “Monty Python and The Holy Grail” 'She's a Witch, burn her, burn her!' bit this reminds me of was quite funny. 'Cause John Cleese and Eric Idle were in it and are a couple of the funniest son-of-a-bitches on the planet. John McCain's as funny as an impacted bowel. And the lunatic he whipped up into yelling “Terrorist!” while smiling that Gila Monster smile of his was not funny in the least. That's a “watch list” motherfucker for sure, and McCain knows exactly what he's doing with this hate-hollering to the half-wits.
He's inciting shit. Plain and simple. But hey, he was in a POW camp for five years...let him have his nativist, lynch-mobby fun, eh? Then, it was critter-killin' Sarah Mae, The Barely Competent Snowbilly's turn at the Reichstag mic:
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
As I noted below, in his piece today about the abuse that Palin supporters heaped on reporters at a Florida rally yesterday, WaPo's Dana Milbank wrote that one supporter had hurled an unspecified racial epithet at an African American sound man before saying, "sit down, boy."
A reporter who was there tells me what that unspecified epithet was: “Uppity negro.”
Color me cynical...and brown, but for some reason, I do not think that “negro” was the stilted pejorative actually used in this bit of rabble-rousing-cum-torch party. Just a hunch, there. And Sarah's donning of the white for these appearances was also a nice touch. It plays off the blood from the red meat the idiot's tossing out there, as well as contrasting nicely with the sooty hands from the previous night's cross-light dontchaknow?
Palin, again, told the lie that some of Obama's best friends are terrorists: ”Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.
“Boooo!” said the crowd.
“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.
“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Palin went on to say that “Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago.”
(JOHN ARAVOSIS) “Palin went on?”
Kill him!
Kill him?
Who exactly?
Oh, they'll play it off and say “Why, Ayers of course!”, as if that makes it all okay. But I think we all know who that little non-countenanced call to extermination was for. Palin and McCain are directing their fire at the opposing candidate. The Cracker Barrel-sitting whackjobs who are taking their cues here don't know Bill Ayers from an Air Rifle. But there's a guy they do know and have no problem showing a comfortable, natural hate for. A hate so strong they wear it on their sleeves. And their chests.
“Supporters” at a Sarah Palin Rally Carson, CA —October 4, 2008. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.—Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Kill him?
Here we are, folks.
And as high-minded as we may aspire to be, to think the best of our fellow man, giving the benefit of the doubt because, “Hey, it's not really fair to make the blanket judgement—and let not caricature become the sitting portrait, right?”—when you look at McCain's and Palin's call to the rabid wild here, the words of former Minnesota Vikings / Arizona Cardinals coach Dennis Green ring so loud and true that they almost hurt.
Do not ever assume good intentions with these people. They have no class to speak of. No scruples. Nor a heart that “feels” or beats or a brain that weighs and thinks. Just that vestigial brain stem with four simple tasks encoded within it. Breathe. Eat. Sleep. And hate.
And the hate “my friends” is just as essential as the other three imprinted there.
“Sit down, boy”. “Uppity N*gger.” “Terrorist!”
KILL HIM!
This is not the comparatively benign conjuring we saw during the primary season evidenced by Senator Hillary Clinton's flailing endgame words. No. These are twisted hemp and torchlight fantasies these people are playing with. Down and desperate and dirty and dangerous because it's all they have left.
It's “fuck reason...get the rifles” time.
The passive / aggressive shitstorm McCain and Palin are whipping up here, knowingly playing to the absolute worst in the worst of their supporters should give us pause even as his electoral chances have begun cratering. There's nothing to celebrate. here. On paper? Perhaps. But the rough, cautionary words of Pulp Fiction's “Mr. Wolf” to Jules and Vincent instantly come to mind (Alert—NSFW!). I don't know precisely if they are trying to incite actual violence against Barack Obama. As the ultimate “game-changer”, if you will, by stoking crazed, interested parties into eliminating him from the contest, thus paving a clear path for them.
I'm not that good of a mind reader.
But I can tell you that the GOP and by extension, its standard bearers were that to happen, wouldn't shed so much as a fucking tear over it. They wouldn't have a problem with it privately—while playing all concerned and somber for the cameras. On the campaign bus, and in the back rooms, these sooty-handed shitbirds would high-five and say Obama brought it on himself...fully aware that they are in effect handing out a ton of free “Knife-of-the-Month Club” subscriptions at a picnic for patients at a Hospital For The Criminally Insane with this game they're playing.
“We didn't do anything!” Oh yes...yes you fucking did.
And it's twenty-six more days of this stuff ahead. The call-outs of “otherness”. Stamping “terrorist” on his forehead, or simpler yet—pictures of the collapsing WTC towers, as the crowd they're playing to can't read for shit anyways. They will savage Senator Obama's wife and kids. They (fearful wingnuts) will stage things to make themselves appear the victim of uppity n*ggers feeling their oats over a change in D.C., and get all breathless and “Don't let this happen!” about it. They will trot out all manner of paid-off charlatans, axe-grinding gadflies, and miffed White folks who will talk of how the Obamas dissed them and sniffed at them, and didn't know their station in the order of things. There will be things done and said to inject and inflate the little “Bull Connor” in just enough flabbergasted crypto-racists to cause some truly awful shit to go down in this country should the present trend away from McCain's being elected continue, you can make book on that.
So be prepared. Let nothing shock you. Call them on their shit when it goes down. Mock the hell out of them. They hate that, and it confuses them. Disabuse yourself of any thoughts of appealing to their better natures, or hoping for a consideration of collegiality amongst rivals or any such lunacy. Assume NO “good intentions” here.
McCain has gone to the mattresses, and if doing so means inciting physical menace against his opponent—so be it. That's cool...for him.
I've written about that “physical menace” before and its historical baggage. I'm ready to let go of some of its soul-bending weight. I've got a son and a daughter I don't want it crippling either. So the fight is on. Not just for ourselves, but for our future. America's future.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to let some delusional, avaricious, war-mongering, soulless hypocrite and his moon-eyed simpleton of a partner in retrogression seal us in the amber of the ugly America they so desperately want to preserve. Neither should you.
“Here's The Pitch—It'll Be A Combination Of 'Northern Exposure', 'Peyton Place', and 'The Dukes Of Hazzard'! Pretty Good, Huh? Hello? Hell-oooooo?”
There was a consideration before this past week that some of us here at GNB go to Mary Tyler Moore-opolis to cover the Republican Convention. I'm so glad we didn't as it would have not only been a waste, but it would have screwed the correct context for experiencing the whole thing all to hell.
This “thing” was meant to be watched on TV. A shitty, pre-cable-ready TV with rabbit ears and a remote with a wheel that goes “click” when you switch channels.
Coming off the Democrats' Shubert Alley level of stagecraft last week, the GOP opted to swiftly counter-program with the surprise (a.k.a. “What the fuck?”) pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as “Senator McGollum's” running mate for their sub- “Waiting For Guffmann”-grade show this week. I was still recovering from Denver when I heard about the Palin choice Friday afternoon / evening, and I realized that in spite of its oddness, there really weren't many other avenues to pursue for the plane-trashing Arizona legislator.
Romney was out of the question, in spite of a smile that would blind you from a satellite and a bunny-trail smooth coif to die for. That bugaboo ‘Mormon Thing” would rear its head again with the American people. They are decent folk, but have a severe liability in the actual words of their religious texts and certain...well, offensive belief structures that were in place up until just a couple of decades ago. Things that soundbite-wise would have been killers, even with so-called “explanations” and after-the-fact context added...
“And the Lord had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.”
“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttt! Next!”
Giuliani, for all of his fear-mongering / hate-channeling ability was even further out of the question. His “Noo-Yawkiness” was going to be bad enough with the flyover voters, but his bottomless satchel o' scandals—as yet un-mined directly by the wife he openly cheated on if you can imagine that—was a non-starter as we noted here early and often. Add in his old wingman Bernard Kerik—who leave us not forget, Rudy pushed as Homeland Security Boss (!) is still about to go on trial for everything except for killing a man in Reno just to watch him die. Nope. Wasn't gonna happen.
Mike Huckabee. Were those dark-pooled eyes of his not prone to reflect the fearsome pit of super-religio-crazitude, he coulda maybe been a “contendah”. He'd have helped carry a south pretty much promised to McCain, padding the margins of victory only. But Huck's whole “fried possum” and cornpone ways would probably cost McCain valuable northern votes he'd need to steal to nab a surprise state or two. Huckabee's known gift of gab and affability would have been easily countered with a not-too-deep probe or two into his shadiness while at the Governor's mansion in Little Rock, right down to him and his wife's filching everything that wasn't Krazy Glued™ the fuck down when they left the place. And dare we mention Huck's lying about his odd handling of the parole of a rapist who struck again, and how that hamstrung his primary campaign for weeks? Shitty, shifty and shady. Can I get an “Amen”?
Fred Thompson? When my brother was six years old, I got him to believe a famous TV pitchman had six fingers on each hand—just as a goof through constantly saying, “See? Did you see it? Right there! Six fingers!” Eventually, he believed it, based on my timing when to tell him to look and through my convincing tone. Someone sadly pulled the same stunt on Fred Thompson late in life, getting him to believe that a good thing like “Gravitas” was the equal of being a ponderous, boring, wrinkle-faced lump of a man, and being thus he somehow had “Gravitas” in spades. A slug crawling across a patio stone holds more excitement than this man, and the only state he'd have helped McCain carry is the state of unconsciousness. When you leave “Law & Order” and viewers don't even notice you're gone, it means you not only bring nothing to the table personality-wise, but should you sit down at it, you will be asked to leave because you put people off their meals. Sam Waterston probably remembers you as that big guy who frowned during the half-hour you worked every week. No name. Just 'Ol' frowny-puss'. Dianne Wiest however, I'll bet he he has on speed-dial. Ooops.
Joe Lieberman. What to say about this saggy, nad-faced scold that hasn't already been muttered under the breath of progressives since the ought-sixes? “Short Ride” Joe has all the currency of a Brian Keith bon mot from an episode of Hardcastle & McCormick—but with less integrity. He's the guy who when the big snowstorm hit, sadly saw his lawn alone nearly bare because of how he positioned his house. So, because he couldn't build a fucking snowman, he must, must, must go from yard to yard in his “neighborhood” kicking over and then pissing on all of his neighbors' lawn-standing snowmen. Classy stuff. The lame-ducked twerp so wanted to matter again...but even a “Mad Cow” addled John McCain would have retained the common sense to consider only, then pick elsewhere with Joe's name in the mix. A three-alarm kennel fire sports more popularity than a Joe Lieberman vice-presidency. “Joe-mentum?” No. “Joe-Rect-um”. And I mean that in every sense of the word.
So, what about Texas' Kay Bailey Hutchison? Ehhhhhh...too Betty Crocker-cookbook circa “Mad Men”, and unable to move the female vote outside of Lubbock, Plano, and Texarkana—if she were lucky. Lindsey Graham? Too Huckleberry Hound, and frankly, a vetting cluster bomb that would set fire to the GOP platform and any Log Cabin situated near it. Charlie Crist? See “vetting cluster bomb that would set fire to the GOP platform yada-yada-yada...” Bobby Jindal? There's brown people to the GOP, and then there's FUCKING-BROWN PEOPLE to the GOP. Jindal is the latter. He's also so batshit crazy a fundie that Mike Huckabee probably looks at him and says, “Mister...you are in-tense!” His support of and actual involvement in...exorcisms (!) probably also would have hurt him...oh, just a little bit. Tom Ridge? Too closely linked to the idiotic color-code scares of Bush's halcyon fear-mongering years of 2001-2005, and so on and so forth with the remaining “contenders” as it were.
Leaving us with our Lip-Smacker™-ed pit bull, Sarah Palin.
Why her?
There's the distinct possibility that she was chosen because no one left wanted to be hooked to this boat anchor of a ticket. That I can see. But I think there's a bit more...or rather, less to it than that.
An empty vessel with superficial charms was pretty much the one thing that could help McCain. Everything else would tie him either back to Bush or deeper into the beltway he despises so much he's collected seven different homes to run away from it to. And Palin's being a woman—and a youngish one while not tipping the scales in McGollum's favor, at least slows their tipping away from him a bit, as the shiny, bespectacled newness—“Now fortified with that second “X” chromosome, because folks, that's all it takes to get silly, wimminzes to rush out and vote for a party that hates them, right? You see, It was never going to be McCain flack and fluffer Carly Fiorina, as the business press was set to break the bones left over from their chewing the meat off her over her HP tenure debacle and then gnawing at her marrow of incompetence. And Fiorina for all of her fuck-ups comes with an administrative / big-job pedigree of sorts. She's the kind of person who could without even thinking about it, talk rings around the increasingly stupefied McCain on economics, business, health care and the like, diminishing him all the more.
Sarah Palin is NOT that person. She spent the last three days before Wednesday night's hissfest cramming on the difference between Iraq and a souped-up IROC, and learning that the federal safety net was NOT something deployed to save dolphins while wrecking the fishing industry. As she showed Wednesday night, smarts ain't her bag. What she is is a 'crystal cudgel'. Willing to be used to beat the shit out of an opponent, but designed to shatter delicately at just the moment you note the “violence” she's involved in. The five kids...the bullshit-teous “aw shucks” personal story, and her willingness to play the victim card the second the heat starts melting her ice-princess evil shell are components of that breakaway “crystal” we're all supposed to stand around and “tut-tut” about as it lay there on the floor in all of its beautiful jaggedness whenever she tears her ass publicly.
And let's be real here. Palin's whole story as it unspools before us all is a mess. A pretty mess. But Goddamnit, a mess nonetheless. And a throw a scoop of sordid on top.
If you took that old TV you have in the basement, put on a combat boot and kicked the shit out of the picture tube so it split three ways and then turned it on, you'd see “The Sarah Palin Story” play out before your eyes. In one of the cracked sections you'd see an old episode of “Northern Exposure” playing. Small town drama against a backdrop of the western sun and weird shit galore, with the moose droppings filling in for her ham-fisted GOP poltico bullshit, of course. On the second section you'd see a washed-out kinescope of of the turgid soaper “Peyton Place”, with all manner of backstabbing, shocking affairs, mystery babies and melodramatic lies and cover-ups. And oh, the gossip! The big-chord, sudden turn and hand-to-mouth gossip! “Brought to you by Ivory Snow...it cleans dirt.” And in that final panel of the busted triptych you'd see a dirt-flecked episode of “The Dukes Of Hazzard”, another mess of faux-Americana gone amok, with “proud rednecks” and wild livin' and of course, the hyper-influential “Boss Hogg”, running the town and pulling every lever available to him—never mind legality to git whut he wants done, done.
Now quick, turn that sucker off before it shorts out and bursts into flames!
Q:Why in the “Wide, World Of Sports” would John McCain choose someone with more baggage than a JetBlue cargo hold on Christmas Eve? Did he know?
A: Why not her? Everybody else had baggage too, and frankly, time was getting short. He had to pick somebody, so he went with someone he figured maybe had some issues, but not the overly familiar ones of everybody else who was being bandied about. That said—note I use the pronoun “he” in describing whose pick this was. McCain's overweening ego is all over this pick—a brazen compulsive gambler's pick. “All the fuck in, Johnny.” There wasn't much deep thought in this, as seen in the eye-popping after-the-fact vetting. I think he knew there were issues, but he figured “How bad can they be for a mom of five who's a little bit ''MILF-y” and will pretty much say anything a senior GOP leader will tell her?
Pretty damned bad, as we're discovering. Beyond the “Hazzard County-esque” arm-twisting on her part in the “TrooperGate” scandal and her ties to Ted “Bridge Over Troubled Water” Stevens' boondoggle, there is “BabyGate”. And let me make one thing clear here. This isn't about ragging on her daughter Bristol and her situation. (Although I am tempted to cast kindness to the wind when it comes to Bristol's “man” Levi and his proud “F'n Redneck-ness”...but for now...) Unexpected and oftentimes disappointing things can happen with teens and sex. A teen pregnancy and a teen mother is nothing and no one to mock. However, the way Bristol's mom, ol' “Caribou Barbie” handled the matter is something else ugly and creepy entirely.
When it became apparent that Bristol was in the family way back in the spring, Mommie Dearest pulled a “Handmaid's Tale” and yanked her daughter out of school—under the threadbare blanket of a lie about Bristol having super-communicable mononucleosis. It appears that ol' tough-as-nails Sarah couldn't bear the shame of being an anti-choice spouting, abstinence-only screeching, family-values bullshitting, wingnut Governor while having her parenting maybe appear something less than the pious conservative ideal. She basically locked her daughter away out of sheer personal and political mortification while keeping up with her spewing of talking points that defied her own reality.
In other words...she's a Goddamned hypocrite. End of story.
And she kept this little Grand Guignol secret until the small-town rumor mill spilled over into the MSM and it could no longer be finessed away. Which doesn't mean she didn't try, by having Bristol show up at an early running mate event strategically cradling her younger brother Trig over a perfectly placed large blanket meant to lamely obscure her pregnant belly. But it was too late, as every Wasilla native with eyes and a willingness to talk dropped dime about the charade.
And a disorganized GOP leadership (listen here for some off-the-cuff / accidentally on-the-mic revelations about the party's real situation) led by it's by-default standard bearer had already made its choice as time was perilously short to get someone, anyone in the spot. Again, a brazen compulsive gambler's pick, but let's be real—if Karl Rove's ass is colllecting check the first for supposedly helping out the GOP this year strategy-wise with stuff like this, the next one he gets should come in an envelope stuffed with toxic white powder in it for all the good he's done and for basically stealing money from the party. We've got the National Enquirer on Palin's ass now with tales of not just Bristol's baby issues, but Sarah herself possibly caught up in some schtuppin' that shouldn't have been happening. And if you think Enquirer probes are a joke, ask John Edwards, who was less welcome in Denver than the Dallas Cowboys' Roger Staubach last week.
But, as I got a haircut on Tuesday, when the talk at the barber shop turned to politics a well-knowledged fellow patron summed it up nicely. He described McCain's choosing Palin in terms that maybe explained the senator's rationale.
“Imagine you're being held hostage, and your captors say, 'The only way you get out of here alive is to let us take a finger from you. You've got a choice—a thumb or a pinky. You make the call.' It's like 'Shit...I wanna live, but I gotta give up a finger? Which one? Which one? I need my thumb so I can pick up stuff...but man, that means I gotta let em chop off my pinky. That's my finger! Fuck. I wanna get outta here. I can maybe live without the pinky. But I gotta have my thumb. I gotta have my thumb.' So, you give up the pinky. Picking Palin was giving up 'the pinky' for McCain, and pickin' Rudy or Romney would have been sayin' 'Bye-bye thumb.' So he's cut loose. He lives. Fuckin' 'yay!' But then he sees the cut was done with a dirty-ass knife, and the spot where he lost the pinky is all infected, and that shit is spreading. Now he's probably gonna lose the 'nothin' finger next to the infected pinky stump too. S' not an important finger, but all of 'em mean something extra when you've already lost one. Know what I mean? I mean...you're alive an' all that. But yo', don't front...losing a finger's always gonna be a bitch. And then 'cause of the first one being done all grimy, you might lose two? When does it stop? You make a shitty bargain to save your ass and look what happens.”
You end up with pig-fucks like Palin's venomous “Rudy with a better drag-stylist” speech. (And whoever signed off on that “Community Organizer” diss line needs to be fired, their car keyed, and then have their house burned down.) You get McCain's awful, “Green Jello Mold 2.0” address last night where he did everything but read the parentheses-ed “Nexts” and “Continueds”. And an A/V gaffe so bad during the speech that it should earn its perpetrator a slot in the witness protection program. You wind up with a republican convention so dishwater-tepid that it would make the National Gathering of High-Colonic Facilitators in Sandusky look like “Freaknik '88”. And then, The National Enquirer chasing your people down, lurking behind hotel hallway ice machines looking for scandal, scandal, scandal!—to where it's so bad that your VP choice has to be spirited away to basically hide back home for ten days, and probably to have the motherfuckers who are diming her out back there dropped into ice-fishing holes to shut 'em up about her numerous and burgeoning scandals.
As I said before:
“Palin's whole story as it unspools before us all is a mess. A pretty mess. But Goddamnit, a mess nonetheless.”
“We Have Waited Thirty Years To Spring Our Afro-tastic Trap...UNGOWAH!”
There's more...
