Uhm... Cannon Fail

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“Funny 'Round The Mouth”

“Dude, My Party Sucked...Mind If I Crash Yours?”
(Photo of Bob Barr at Netroots Nation—Sat. July 19, 2008 by LowerManhattanite)

While hustling back from a run across the street to the hotel for a left-behind power cable, I was jogging through the Austin Convention center, where I noticed a man being interviewed by several people with mics and cameras.

The gentleman was dapped out in that crisp, bad-ass, Southern style. Blue and white striped shirt, creases starched hard enough to peel carrots, a light-weight blue blazer with brass buttons, perfect dry-cleaned jeans, also creased with diamond hardness, and a pair of chestnut colored leather boots, buffed to a high shine—no scuffs—and a nifty cuban heel.

Homeboy was dap as hell. But as I motored past...I noted how familiar he looked.

And when I suddenly realized who he was, I of course caught a sneaker tread on the carpet and nearly fell on my ass in shock.

It was former Georgia GOP Rep. Bob Barr, one of former President Clinton's most memorable beté noirs of “MonicaGate”—at Netroots Nation. What...in the Wide World of Sports was going on here?

So, I now sprinted over to where I'd left Doc Wendel and my laptop and grabbed my camera, hoping to capture the dap little pimp before he “bamfed” away in a cloud of ash and brimstone. Luckily, he was still holding court and I managed to get a few shots of him—the one running here being the best one. The reason for that is that every time I tried to hold the camera still, I started to chuckle to myself and shake the damned thing.

You see, Bob Barr has long been the butt of many jokes in my family since the ugly winter of 1998. He was such a annoying, little pit bull against Clinton, you just wanted to smack him...but...

There was something odd about him. Something that was “off”.

Media people have noted that “offness” of late, but I will tell you that this has been long discussed in other more insular circles.

Bob Barr, um...well...as my mother said it “Looks a little 'funny' 'round the mouth”.

If he doesn't have some immediate African American lineage somewhere in his blood, then I'm the first cousin of Edgar-fucking-Winter.

Many have picked up on his uncanny resemblance to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (!)

My brothers and sisters...take a peek below, and as they used to say in that old commercial during NFL games “You...make the call...



Dig the lips, folks...That ain't collagen...that's collards and Coltrane.

Funny-ass hair texture too—particularly on the 'stache. “Rev. Al's shit is straighter than Barr's is.” one friend loves to note frequently.

But there Barr was, in all his dap-tastic glory, in the lobby of the Convention Center hosting a gathering of people absolutely four-square against the party he's identified with for the last forever. Why was he here? To be the fly in the ointment for us progresives? That stray “chip” in the sugar cookie? (Kind of a butterscotch chip, if not an all-chocolate accident)

Nah. He just wanted to be where the action was. Because across town where he gangsta-leaned over from is where it clearly wasn't.

AUSTIN — Conservative bloggers are holding their own mini-conference across town in the northern part of this city. And while some have bashed the left and the liberal blogosphere, several are taking cues from the successes of the online left and building out from them.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation decided to concentrate part of its Texas conference on new media here, (RightOnline.com) and while planning this event, decided to hold it at the same time as the much larger Netroots Nation convention.

That apparently worried a few of the more powerful bloggers on the right, writers who didn’t want comparisons to be made in terms of size and scope, we’re told. And it is much smaller in attendance and even in focus, (with a decidedly libertarian bent to some degree). But the organizers said they never wanted to go “toe-to-toe” – or, perhaps, we’d say from down here, it would be “boot-to-boot” with the Netroots conference.

On the left, the netroots sessions are chock-full of heavy online hitters and the chairman of the Democratic party as well as the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives are among its keynote guest speakers.

For the right, tonight’s main speakers are columnist Bob Novak and Barry Goldwater Jr.

Um. Yeah. And their heaviest hitters of all were such superstars as RedState's Erick (“Der Banhammer”) Erickson and keynote screecher speaker Michelle Malkin, whose stirring speechifying probably caused the majestic bronze Barbara Jordan statue at the Austin airport to slowly close its eyes and go to sleep.

So, instead of hanging around the coffee urn in the hotel lounge a little ways north where all 19 of the GOP gathering's attendees caucused such issues as the depth of the anti-immigrant wall at the border (“Five inches! No! Seven! They have claws and can rip through five, easy!”), Barr instead came where the party was poppin' on the day of his big speech before that other “throng”.

Sad, really.

But there Barr was, in all of his decidedly questionable ethnicity glory. Cameras a' clickin'—including mine, and recorders a' rollin' away as he held court where somebody actually gave a rat's ass about him.

Oh wait...there is someplace else where people give a big, fat, hairy rat's ass about him—John McCain campaign headquarters:

Poll finds Barr siphoning votes from McCain

Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 09:39 AM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

While a poll released late Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg showed Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr drawing only 3 percent support, the data show that much of that is coming at the expense of Republican candidate John McCain.

The new national poll shows McCain trailing Democrat Barack Obama 37 percent to 49 percent when the race is just between the two major party candidates. But when Barr, a former Georgia congressman, and independent candidate Ralph Nader are added to the mix, Obama’s margin jumps to 15 percentage points, 48 percent to 33 percent.

Seems there's a good chance my dear ol' Uncle Bobbeh (That's what us folks call him at the family reunions, you know...) has a pretty good chance of Perot/Nader-izing John McCain's odds of being President that much deeper into the sticky muck of impossibility, based on polling in states where the would-be jet demolisher-in-chief needs every damned vote. Oooops!

I suppose the lone saving grace for McCain is that he can probably save campaign money by not having to come up with a separate series of attack ads against Barr.

I mean...he could just simply recycle the subliminally racist ones he's going to be trotting out against Obama, right?

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Campaign '08: Republicans' Law

If It Can Go Wrong...It Absolutely Will. Yikes!

From the Department of “From Bad To Worse”, you may remember this piece of news from the recent GOP bed-shit post dealing with the potential loss of New York's one Republican Congressional seat —“Baby Daddy Trauma: Vito Power-less

NY's wingnuts finally found a sap to run for Fossella's abandoned seat, Todt Hill resident Frank Powers, but not without having several candidates they asked say 'Are you out of your fucking minds? I got belly-button lint to pick, man!, and keep on steppin'. Thus with one fell swoop, or actually several rather unfortunate boudoir up-swoops and down-swoops, yet another Empire State Republican not only screwed up his political career and for extra measure, very possibly chucked a sure seat the party desperately needed to hold against an elephant-drowning sea-change on the way...

Well, even having chosen Vito's replacement candidate, that seat was going to be a tough one to hold, especially with the rampant apathy towards Republican candidates in New York City. But hey, there was a chance to hold serve at least with a fill-in firmly in place, right?

I mean, what could happen next? Powers ending up as the old saying goes “caught with a live girl or a dead boy”?

Er...I guess there's no delicate way to say this...Um...how about just ending up dead.?

Yes...D-E-A-D, dead.

Francis H. Powers, a retired Wall Street executive who was recently selected by Republican leaders on Staten Island as their candidate for the Congressional seat being vacated by Representative Vito J. Fossella, died on Saturday at his home on Staten Island.

Mr. Powers, who was 67, died in his sleep of a heart attack, family members and friends said. His death came less than a month after he became the Republican candidate after other potential candidates decided not to run.

Mr. Powers’s death leaves Republicans in the Congressional district, which also includes part of Brooklyn, with a new set of political challenges. The decision to endorse Mr. Powers came after a long and dispiriting process for party leaders, who had initially hoped to get one of the island’s Republican elected officials to run for the seat.

But one by one, each of them declined to run, citing a variety of reasons.

You can not make this stuff up...

So now, the party is back at square minus eleven or something like that, scratching about yet again for someone...Goddammit, ANYBODY! Please!, to run in Fossella's stead—a seeming herculean task to begin with as the initial approach-ees as noted above upon Vito's fade-out ran from the opportunity like it had a big, runny boil on its lip and was movin' in close, whispering “Kissy-kissy!”

New York State's GOP isn't just imploding, people—it is imploding on a freaky karmic level that mere coincidence can't explain. Now, I'm not reveling in any way in Powers' death, but my God, just looking at the situation electorally you just have to shake your head and say “Wow. Right about now, it truly sucks to be a wingnut in New York”.

Well, suck might be too light a word for what's going on for them in New York State. Vacuums like a space-station airlock gone awry is more like it. Enter, or rather...exit...stage right, the state's highest ranking GOP pol—State Senator Joe Bruno...

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader and New York State's highest-ranking Republican, said Monday evening that he would not seek re-election in November, after a 32-year career in the Senate.

His announcement startled people in the Capitol, many of whom have come to view Mr. Bruno, a former Army regimental boxing champion who still spars for the cameras, as almost indestructible at the age of 79.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Daily News reported this morning that when Bruno made his decision to leave, he had his lawyer call the FBI to ask if his stepping down might influence their investigation.

According to the paper, the FBI never got back to Bruno's lawyer, and no deal was ever offered.

But Bruno has denied that the FBI investigation had anything to do with his decision. For the time being, Bruno will continue in his Senate seat, but he says he has not decided if he will carry out the remainder of his term.

Meanwhile, CBS 6 political analyst Fred Dicker is also reporting in today's New York Post that federal agents removed some 30 boxes of papers -- some dating back more than a decade -- from Bruno's office just before he made the decision to step down as Senate Majority Leader.

Bruno if you don't remember was the beté noir of disgraced former NY Governor Eliot (“Black Sox”) Spitzer. Those two went at each other hammer and tong, macheté to hatchet for years, going back to Spitzer's Attorney General days upstate, and Spitzer's ignominious exit should have cemented Bruno's power cornerstone-hard. He was at the point of his retirement/booking the hell up, the state's second-most powerful politico, and not to put too macabre an edge on it, the next in line of succession to the Governorship under the state's arcane rules. Were anything to happen to the present governor David Paterson, (and the way the NY press has swarmed him seemingly every week since his swearing-in for term-ending dirt, the possibility wasn't a terribly distant one) Bruno stood the most to gain.

But inexplicably to outsiders, and painfully clear to even casually-acquanited NYers, Bruno's stepping down and away was very much related to the increasingly intense federal investigation around his years of upstate skullduggery and feather-bedding for himself and a northern state GOP that ripped off the more populous and higher revenue-generating downstate to the tune of billions of dollars.

It was the nerdy, bean-counting, pasty-faced and sock garter-wearing ghost of Eliot Spitzer's investigations coming a' calling. That, and a punk-ass's fear of a couple of other things too...

One: The state senate's going Dem majority for the first time in thirty-odd years, (on the verge of and with a Dem wave, a near certainty) relegating the high-flying, egomaniac Bruno to the low-down bust-down to minority back-bencher—which in the New York State Senate is to be powerless to the N'th anti-power. That is a bruising insult he could not stand, and his beloved senate district of Muttontown (NY's a big state people, and that's a tame name for an upstate hamlet—trust me...) bearing the brunt of Democrats retribution for his own punishment of opposition party cities was probably too much to take.

And Two: Fear of being held responsible in any way for the state's GOP strengths melting away like a bodybuilder's physique when the he can't get the 'roids any more. The coming Republican debacle is going to spawn one lovely schadenfreude-ic thing for a lot of people—namely the Republican Party's calling out of scapegoats for the disaster. When the party bosses tally up the carnage, especially the utter defoliation of elected Republican pols in the northeast, they're gonna look to blame people. And while Bruno doesn't run the state party per sé, he is its most powerful member in New York, and his upstate fiefdom was the incubator for the party's congressional talent. They're all gone now though. GOP Reps Sue Kelly, John Sweeney and Sherwood Boehlert all lost their seats in the House during the last disastrous “The Math”-filled go-round. All of 'em. And when the man comes around lookin' to “git somebody”, 'cause somebody's always got to be 'got' when the shit goes down, I don't think Joe Bruno wanted his name in that unholy number.

We see this in spades (insert obligatory wingnut racist Obama joke du hour here) all over the country as Republican fortunes become as popular as buy orders for Countrywide stock and candidates run from the party's damaged brand like light-struck roaches. The only wingnut stupid enough to proudly run on typical GOP talking points and the ValuJet-like Bush legacy is the odious Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and that saggy, nad-faced viper isn't even up for re-election this year. Not that you'd know that from his seemingly twice-weekly TV appearances from his office in Outer Idiotville—Population: Him. It's comical really, watching him run with stale-ass talking points that barely carried the day post September 11th, today in 2008.. This so-called former “democrat” (small “d” in-fucking-tentional, thank you) mind you, embarrassingly waving the standard like an extra in a dinner theater “Les Miz” for his fucked-to-all-hell masters, singing “One Sellout More”—and not realizing that the damned thing is ablaze in his hands, and there is no “crusade” to join. Just him. Woefully out of step with the reality his “new” friends are running from.

But perhaps a better visual for the folly of Lieberman's dim-witted pimping all of that old, laughable folderol is one that actually involves...a pimp. Picture a goofy, over-the-top, one-time “playa” who's been “away” from the game for too long—and decides to make the public scene again.

Except he's out of step with everything going on and looks like a Goddamned fool sporting the hopelessly dated trappings of his one-time heyday.

Joe...you are so, sooooooooo not a “fly guy”...



The words that breaks the poor pimp's spirit—and his glass-bottomed, fishy-filled platform shoes are the guffawed “This brotha is an endangered species!”, and “You look like a clown!”

“Endangered species”, indeed. It's the plight of elected Northeastern Republicans like Joe Bruno, Vito Fossella, and the Connecticut Dodo-to-be himself, ol' “Short Ride Joe” Lieberman himself. It's an almost sad spectacle to see. Like seeing old faded photos of slow-moving Bison being picked off by blunderbusses from the caboose of a hunting train. And it's not just northeastern GOP'ers fearing the electoral shotgun's blast. Embattled Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon doesn't want anybody in the Beaver State to think for a second during this election season that he even knows the letters G-O-and-P are in the Goddamned alphabet. His grasping little campaign ad makes him out to be a first-class “P.O.O.” (“Pal Of Obama”) and doesn't dare ever mention the Republican party that got him in there any-fucking-where.

God! Either they don't wanna run for office at all, or those that are pressured into it, have the worst of luck befall them. And the ones fighting to remain in office don't seem to even wanna identify with the party proper.

Oh yes...the GOP's fortunes this year certainly are shaping up to be what we on the internets like to call a “fail”.

An “epic fail” in fact. Where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, Like the ironic fire truck fire shown at the top of this post.

But confidentially...I think the picture below just might sum up the nature of things GOP that...much...better...

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Bush Begs Saudi's

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