538.com has been posting up some good stuff on the state of the health care debate, the tactics being used, and how these tactics are being reflected in the polls. Today this caught my eye...
allow me to suggest that what we are also witnessing here is an asymmetrical battle in which conservatives, Republicans, trade associations and other assorted opponents are adapting campaign strategies--and smear tactics in particular--to a policy debate. And, if you think about it, it's a pretty shrewd strategy to muddy the waters, provide disinformation, and in general try to scare people away from an idea--just as one might try to deter them from voting for a candidate in an election campaign. (read the rest)
We should have seen this coming, and been ready sooner. The GOP knows only one strategy that they have perfected in the last 10 years, deceit and misinformation- waged always like a political campaign. This approach to the very real and urgent need for policy and legislation is so cynical and uncaring as to stagger me. But there it is. We should expect it. All the time. Prepare for it. And push back hard.
They are the party of lies and of saying no to the American people and yes to big corporations and their rich friends. We are still being swiftboated at every turn. Time to sink some boats.
The Tax day Tea-bagging circus promoted and fomented by Fox and Rush and the RWNM (right wing noise machine) are not about taxes, the are about losing. These folks lost the election and they don't know what to do about it. And since there are no reasonable people leading or uniting the republican party-- the vacuum is being filled by the fringe elements and the greedy news media.
Unfortunately the tea bag party has clearly become the happy home of racist, angry, and yes crazy people and they are more than willing to be the literal poster children for the GOP. (like this lovely young racist above)
(he was proud out in line when he thought it was just a regular person filming him)
During the election the racists were happy to share their propaganda with each other but were not displaying it so opening in the news. The media was downplaying it all back then-- calling the left hysterical when we pointed out the hatemongers that the GOP was whipping to a frenzy. But things are different now.
In their minority status-- the GOP and Fox have decided to encourage their followers to lead the charge and so the crazy racist slogans and hate speech are suddenly all over the news-- not just the blogs. FOX has put hate speech front and center-- and given the racists and crazies a national microphone.
I'm hopeful that this will turn out to be a huge mistake. I think be so out front with your racist hate and bile will turn off more and more people, shrinking the gop like a pair of tea bags in the icy cold ocean on an early summer swimming day in the northeast. (sorry couldn't resist-- too much Rachel Maddow this week)
Yet again, a conservative politician has stepped on his reproductive tackle by sending out a blatantly racist image drawing a connection between Barack Obama and watermelons.
Los Alamitos, CA (Orange County) Mayor Dean Grose sent the email to African-American city volunteer and businesswomen Keyanus Price:
"I have had plenty of my share of chicken and watermelon and all those kinds of jokes," Price told The Associated Press. "I honestly don't even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city-freakin'-mayor - come on."
The Orange County Register first reported the e-mail on its Web site Tuesday night.
Grose confirmed to the AP that he sent the e-mail to Price and said he didn't mean to offend her. He said he was unaware of the racial stereotype that black people like watermelons.
He said he and Price are friends and serve together on a community youth board.
"Bottom line is, we laugh at things and I didn't see this in the same light that she did," Grose told the AP. "I'm sorry. It wasn't sent to offend her personally - or anyone - from the standpoint of the African-American race."
Grose, who became mayor in December, said he sent an apology e-mail to Price and her boss and also left her a voicemail apology.
Regardless, Price said it will be difficult for the two to work together.
"Now I am like - wow, is this really how he feels?" Price said.
Ronald Reagan, because of his ability to bring people together to resolve issues, his ability to accomplish things at an international level, and his conservative, fiscally sound management style
which certainly suggests (as does his residence in OC) a Republican leaning, at least.
Grose issued a written apology to the City Council, Keyanus Price, and her boss:
I am deeply embarrassed in receiving your email, and for any harm or hurt that it may have caused. It was poor judgement on my part and was never intended to be offensive to Ms. Price, your company or anyone in the African American Community. I have exchanged emails with Ms. Price in the past.
I can fully understand your concerns and comments. Please be advised that I have left a voice mail for Ms. Price and will also be sending her a separate email with my apology. You can be assured that I will not allow this to happen again. I in no way was representing the City of Los Alamitos, or my role as a council member in sending this out and it went via my private business email. That doesn't justify the fact that it was sent, however, we gratefully appreciate the contributions that your company makes to our community and I wish to publically apologize to anyone within the firm or organization that may have been offended.
I am truly sorry.
Dean Grose
This is better than most racist GOP apologies. It doesn't include the phrase "anyone who may have been offended" or "if you were offended", but it does assure us that the image "was never intended to be offensive to Ms. Price, your company or anyone in the African American Community". That may just be that Grose (or his handlers) has taken a lesson from earlier racist GOP screwups (or maybe Rupert Murdoch).
If you want to contact Mayor Grose, here's his Facebook page. The Los Alamitos city page is here, with phone numbers and address at the bottom. And to save you the trouble of poking around the website, here's the email address they list:dgrose@ci.los-alamitos.ca.us.
My Conservative Republican friends: you have GOT to speak up about this, or lose your party. Right now, if is looking like your Big Tent is made out of a white sheet.
If you watched the Republican National Convention a week and a half ago—and by cracky, it was entertaining, in that “There's an oil slick on the racetrack...wonder if the drivers'll see it in time?” kind of way—there were things you could not help but notice.
There was the utter non-discussion of any specifics insofar as policy. Venom only...no curing medicine to speak of.
There was something under “State Property / Troma Studio”-level staging and production values.
But on that latter note, this year's deficiency of darkitude was especially pronounced. Unlike previous years, there were virtually NO congressional representatives or elected officials of merit to even consider using as obvious “chips in the cookie”. We are a LONG way from the halcyon days of the mid 90's where there were gobs (meaning like...three or four, max) of woefully misguided, self-haterific embarrassments prominent Black Republicans all too happy to smile and gleefully reflect video lights from their shiny brows as they showed and proved for the party. Time was, you couldn't go six hundred feet at a gathering like last week's convention without running into some silly, misguided Negro—there were the likes of a J.C. Watts, or a Gary Franks proudly cake-walking about. If you got lucky, you'd see a Larry Elder and a Ken Hamblin shooting “Who can debase thyself more?” darts at one another.
But those days are gone, as John McCain would say, “My friends”.
Every election cycle for the last 25 years, we have been told / threatened / hyped to all holy hell about how that year was going to be the “Year of the Black Republican”, and how seemingly only through that prism could a Black person possibly eke a path to high elective office.
The 2006 mid-term elections was to have been the breakthrough moment for all this afro-ed aspiration come-to-fruition. You may remember that as the year the GOP's Ken Mehlman was put in charge of leading a trio of naifs through the rocky shoals of the election season where they would emerge as the victorious Neo-Negro-Cons who would change everything for the GOP after their decades of outright hatred and then benign neglect of Black folk and their issues. That trio consisted of Ohio's Republican gubernatorial candidate, and king of ballot chucking and fucking, the odious Secretary of State Kenny Blackwell, the barely opaque, glad-handing goof of a Pennsylvania Senate candidate, and former Steeler great Lynn Swann, and lastly...Maryland's Lt. Governor Michael Steele—he of the oleaginous personality and hyper-willingness to badly buck-dance to any tune his racist party masters played.
This trio—“Three The Soft Way” were championed by a grasping Mehlman and a semi-clairvoyant GOP. I don't doubt for a second that with their predilection for focus-grouping everything under the fucking sun that their marketing guru Frank Luntz didn't come across the factoid that people were more willing than they'd ever been to vote Blacks into high office than ever before, and that knowing that, it would be the ultimate coup if the next batch were Republicans.
If you close your eyes, you can almost see the GOP rubbing their hands together with glee and malevolent hubris alá “The Simpsons'” Monty Burns over this grand plan's potential success.
But then, as it always does...reality intrudes. That trio—“The NO-Jays” had absolutely no pull in the Black community, finding themselves so reviled by “folks” that were they set upon by cops “Rodney King”-style and then spotted by passing Black folk, said people'd look at who was catching hell—and think for a minute or two before maybe saying “Hey...that ain't right.” And with nary a scintilla of “soul” to them to even pique the interest of the grasping “guilty” or the open-minded O-something amongst White folks, their respective campaigns were D.O.A.
We could have told them it would go that way. In fact—we did. Or rather, Steve Gilliard did. Steve was relentless in his pillorying of 'The Three Bourgies' (and was not alone in doing so Heh-heh...)and rightly predicted that they would be as popular as a second half-season of the UPN's infamous “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer”. What Steve pointed out repeatedly was the simple fact that these charlatans' willingness to suck up to a party that utterly hates people who look like them would read to even a half-witted voting public as a major disconnect with reality, and thus—“color” these clowns as laughably out of touch. And as far as the opinion of African American voters went, “Negroes” (to use the dated Stanley Crouch-ism” ironically) who would play along with the self-hating perfidy these three did are to be shunned, mocked, and given the same level of respect as their racist string-pullers.
It's why Steve went there with the allegedly “brutal” Michael Steele blackface image he ran. You'll note that the loudest cry of “foul” over that came from many of the wingnut blogosphere's biggest known racists and xenophobes—and that's not surprising. Racism is rooted in many things—self-esteem issues, fear, and stupidity paramount among them, and that's something the right has, if you'll pardon the pun..“in spades”. I don't suppose people that stupid would understand much about the history of blackface and its context in terms of Black folks. How it started out with White performers “blacking up” to condescendingly diss while copping the exuberant performance styles in Black culture at the time. And then, seeing their culture being mined for gold in this harsh way, Black performers cannily took the style back, by blacking up themsleves, doubling the effect by slyly mocking those who'd mocked them (while gettin' p-p-p-p-p-paid!) while simply out-performing their one-generation removed burnt-cork brethren as the original targets held the keys to “the style”. Then, as many post-reconstruction White performers gave up the ghost on the practice (it was harder to do than it looked), a few Black artists—some of them quite gifted (like Bert Williams), continued to play the roles, but for mostly affluent White audiences, in effect ceding control back to those who so mercilessly mocked Blacks in the first place. And how Blacks took that sort of “shining” for the man very personally, as those portrayals of docile and dopey Black simpletons / victims before laughing White crowds scanned as something macabre when viewed against the backdrop of the rise of lynchings in early 20th century America—also accompanied many times by laughing White crowds. Black America would eventually savage those who continued these stilted routines, and come to re-define the image of “our own” blacking up to depict those who have betrayed us in the worst way. No. Those so-called “pundits” weren't smart enough to get that. Let me amend that. Some indeed were. And most of them played dumb and shocked and appalled to score cheap “You're a racist, too! Nyah-nyah!” points.
So Steele whined. And bitched. And moaned. Ducking holograms of Oreo™ cookies filling the air like Ack-ack fire while grinning beatifically like the wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay-too-happy-to-serve brother on the “Cream Of Wheat™” box.
The “offensive” pic was pulled. Right Blogistan's nature got as hard as times in '29 in excitement, but as usual “petered” out prematurely. Why? Because in the end, fuck a crude Photoshop they pressured the yanking of—that image of Steele, and by extension, Blackwell and Swann was something Black America was seeing in them long before anything Steve altered a single pixel on. Every bigot-enabling speech they made as they campaigned was underscored with sub-sonic and all-too-familiar lame shuffle-taps, and subliminally shot through with befuddled Stepin Fetchit-ed head-scratches every ten frames. You had to be “attuned” a certain way to experience all the “extras”, but yeah...they were there.
Black folks have been attuned to that silly-ass wavelength for-Goddamed-ever.
Let me re-iterate a key point here:
'Racism is rooted in many things—self-esteem issues, fear, and stupidity paramount among them, and that's something the right has, if you'll pardon the pun..“in spades”.
The Steele / Swann / Blackwell “play” as stated, was not the first attempt to rope the richly “melanated” in for the okey-doke. It was merely the latest in a series of attempts. But the attempts fail damn near every time because the perpetrators of the folly—Soft-serve racists—in their hatred of Black people routinely feel that they are so much smarter, and Blacks that much dumber that said Blacks will never see through the obvious chicanery in their trojan-horsing of these sad-assed candidates.
It started in the days of black and white television, in the dawn of the modern propaganda age, but long before elected office was the avenue of deception. In the early 60's you had the supremely talented, but politically deficient stalking horses of a post-baseball Jackie Robinson and a recent heavyweight champion in Floyd Patterson being trumpeted by the powers-that-be as the “sober Negroes” the race should follow behind. Now, this is not to say that Jackie and Floyd were dupes or phonies who didn't believe what they were saying (as you can always find a few in any bunch who will be contrarians, and Jackie would eventually disavow the more bigoted bigwigs in his party), but they were given an especially loud megaphone to pontificate from and thus counter the seismic attitudinal shift that was taking place among Blacks (who were eschewing the moniker “Negro”) in America. Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell and many of sports' leading lights were taking stands against the corrupt and bigoted power structure, and thus Jackie and Floyd were touted as the beachhead against that.
Attempts to push like “models” waned a bit during the fierier times of the mid-sixties, but would re-surface in the Reagan era with his lame touting of cabinet member Samuel Pierce as the new iteration of “Approved Negro Du Jour”.
...One of the early, operational versions of the transistorized Negro conserva-bot. His immediate forebear was the spark-sputtering prototype rolled out during the Reagan administration, Samuel Pierce. When his bigoted patrons tried to sell him as the sober-minded Black leader the “community” needed, said community clowned him so hard that the air filled with “Ha-has” like a Peanuts cartoon.
That too would fail, as Pierce had all the charm of a cinder-block, and his championing by Reagan—who was hated by Blacks over his cavalier callousness towards them—would render him further the “tan joke” to those he was pitched to. (Condoleezza Rice was being nurtured at this time for later “use” by the same intelligence-insulting cabal)
Moving to the Bush “41” years, we saw the sad and costly for decades spectacle of the Clarence Thomas appointment to the Supreme Court. I said this about Clarence's installation.
But for the conservative movement, Clarence's ascension was a watershed moment. He was the vanguard, the herald of the coming of the next evolutionary step in “Negrodom”. He was the ‘Professor Anti-Malcolm X” that would lead the new race of Black neo-con mutants into the future—“The Anti-Malcolm X-Men”, if you will. Gifted with special powers, they were—they fairly leaped at you, or rather, were thrown into our laps for us to figure out.
__________________________________
These ballyhooed “Ages of the Black Conservatives!” are the demographic equivalent of the “Age of the Jet Pack!” It's comin! It's comin! It's gonna be all the rage! And then, just like those haughty promises of the jet-pack—(we were all supposed to have 'em, right?) it never came. The dream fizzled. When you do see one—be it a jet-pack or an ascendant Black conservative, it's a rare thing indeed. But it's a show. A singular performance for a gathered few. It takes off, flies for a short distance, lands and then is done—with no practical application in the real world.
Clarence Thomas was the Republicans Black conservative “Jet-Pack”—a freaky contraption that seemed cool in practice, but in the end, led to nothing worth a damn.
It was a half-failure. There was no wave of like-minded (read no-minded) Negroes rushing in on his sluggish draft—but his retrograde ass will be on the court until he can no longer continue. Too long a time for too many.
With the “Contract With America” anomaly, there would be a cascade of two elected Black GOP Reps—the “so lame that it hurts” Watts and Franks mentioned up-post, but Franks couldn't get more than two terms out of his duplicity, and Watts would realize “What the fuck am I doing?” and bail from the House when it became clear he was just a a joke to his GOP colleagues on “The Hill”.
Scoot on ahead to Bush “43” and Sweet God, the wheels come off, the oil pan is ripped loose and the shower of sparks hits the gas tank and blows Black conservatism up like an action movie villain's car. Bush would try desperately to foist a fistful of fools upon us, but...well...there's no good way to say this...
George W. Bush was the equivalent of political sickle-cell anemia to every Black person he championed, shook the hand of, or rubbed the head of “for good luck”.
Every one of them dis-credited, dis-carded and ultimately, just plain diss-ed by the audience they played to, and mainly through their own incompetence, avarice and exposure of soul-selling.
The list is brutal.
There was Education Secretary Rod Paige—Dubya's homey from Houston, who was touted as the shepherd of “The Texas Miracle” of No Child Left Behind 1.0. Bush brought Rod along to spread his book-cooking continue his Midas Touch of pulling schools from the abyss performance wise. Until that is ol' Rod's number-massaging skullduggery was exposed and he had to Jesse Owens his ass out of D.C. to save what little face remained.
Then there was Bush Domestic Policy Adviser Claude Allen—who was sailing along until he got his ass busted for boosting merchandise from a Maryland Target store and then stupidly doubling the scam by trying to return them for illegal refunds. Apparently, the ducats from Wingnut Welfare was just not enough to keep Claude flush with plasma screens and Big n' Rich CDs, so he just had to supplement his lifestyle somehow. Oops.
And my man Alphonso Jackson—Bush's HUD Secretary who stupidly decided he should shoot off his loud-ass mouth about the preferential treatment he was giving to entities who professed love for his “Massa Bush”, and how he would truck no consideration of those who did not slobber at the mention of the president. Which according to federal law was pretty much a violation of long-standing policy insofar as partisan politics should not influence who gets money or consideration from HUD? Well, once Fonzie's fuck-up became public, he too decided to spend some mo' time with his family. Funny how when the shit gets to flying everybody goes from the Harry Chapin dad in “Cat's In The Cradle” to Bob Saget in “Full House”, ain't it?
You almost have to pity poor Lurita Doan—former head of Bush's General Services Administration. She didn't get to pull the “time with my family” act, as this poor wretch screwed up in openly violating the Hatch Act and then maybe performing worse than Alberto Gonzales in mounting a defense for herself. And to show what an embarrassment she was, she actually got fired by Bush, something our “Little Lord Fucked-up-leroy” of a president almost never does. But because her inability to lie even a little bit convincingly jeopardized Karl Rove, homegirl had to go. Immediately. Fuck packing a box from the office. “We'll send you your shit. And by the way...can we have the brick of Post-Its™ you have in your pocket-thankyouverymuch.”
Leaving us with the big two...Colin and Condi.
Colin was perhaps Bush's most capable and in the end, least willing to shuck and jive of his dusky seedlings. Trouble is, the worst example of his playing along helped move this country down the path of throwing 4150 American lives down the toilet of dim-witted presidential hubris. Powell knew he was doing wrong, but “did his job” and then unlike all the others, lost sleep over his choice and apparently couldn't live with himself. But his fuck-up is so awful in what it enabled—a vicious, economy and prestige diminishing war that'll forever be remembered for its fevered selling that he took part in, that he wears a huge, tattooed “F.U.” on his head to this very day and will for many years beyond.
Condi's still here however...moved into an “I fucked up—and I'm outta here” Colin's spot after royally screwing up in her own appointed position. A clear, last-ditch effort by the Republicans to get that vaunted “transistorized Negro conserva-bot” up and running at last.
MASSIVE. GODDAMNED. FAIL
From her diplomatic embarrassments with Russia, to her gaffe-tastic dealings with Venezuela, then her inability to command respect (Her sitting back and simply eating Ariel Sharon's sexist bullshit where he demeaned her by commenting inappropriately about her legs, and her never checking him on that garbage spoke volumes about the kind of diplomatic toughness she'd show), to every silly-assed, mealy-mouthed musing she stuffed to bursting with Rove-fed talking points, she's been a disaster of “Showgirls” proportions. And even as she was blindfolded-ly pináta-ing every vase in the international relations china shop, there were still some in her party trying to push her as some sort of possible candidate or at the very least, a running mate up until mid 2007. Again, hoping to catch the undersea wave that people like Frank Luntz evidently noticed. But she of course was not up to the task, as all the rest were not. When people began to look at her “record”, it was apparent that her Zelig-like nature of invariably being nearest to the heat in almost every historical wildfire of Bush fuck-uppery in the last eight years, was not just a deal-breaker, but a deal wood-chipper / acid-bath / atom smasher.
Her lacing up cement running shoes for a “run” was it for Black Republican chances. Swann, Blackwell and Steele's hilarious flame-outs were just the pre-coda fanfare. It was a fizzle. Fo' shizzle.
And then, irony would rear its Aunt Esther-beautiful head.
In the wake of the utter devastation of the hopes for Republicans to make cynical inroads into a key bloc of the Democrats' base via the running and hoped-for success of those candidates, we would see Senator Barack Obama begin his run for The presidency and effectively flip the GOP's script, re-energizing the Democratic party—while making...well, cynical inroads into key Republican voter blocs himself.
You have to wonder what that troika from the '06 mid-terms must say when they meet at “The No-Name Bar” they hang out in these days. (as they have effectively become political “No-Names” today) How a mere eighteen months later, for all their ballyhoo and countless millions invested in foisting them on the public...they're on the sidelines, while a Black Democrat does the very thing they were intended to—charm America while pulling in votes across the spectrum, and upsetting the electoral applecart...albeit sideways.
How? How? How?
Well...it goes back to the tricky part about American racism. It's so rooted in hate and de-humanization that when its practitioners really start messing with the works via Rube Goldberg-ian / Mission: Impossible-complex plots, and playing super-cynical head games with it, their inability to help themselves from insulting people's—most importantly Black people's intelligence is the self-inflicted ass-kick that wrecks the plan. Mehlman, and Rove and the rest of the Republicans' brain-trust haughtily figured they could just run a slate of vanilla-valued ice-milk (not even ice cream ) candidates and somehow think everyone would see them as the new triple-fudge-ripple—but with one-quarter of the soul, and none of the messy allegiance to progressive ideals.
New-Coke-Negroes. And of course, nobody wanted 'em. Bring back the “Old” Coke...but put it in a new can, and “Mmmmmm-mmmmmmmm!” Goes down smooth.
There may be a debt Barack Obama owes this collection of idiots, tools and charlatans. Much the way President Bush's head-shaking incompetence may have opened the door for America to consider someone so radically different from him as Chief Executive, so too may have “The Three Bourgies” (and Condi's) political bed-shits (as front folks for Bush and his “people”) have greased the skids for more dynamic and super-competent examples of Blacks in high-office. I do admit to laughing my ass off at the likes of MSNBC's Joe Watkins. his pitiful, wall-eyed buddy Ron Christie, and CNN's sad, thrashing Niger Innis wanly spin against history's tide and their own creeping obsolescence...like tar-trapped dinosaurs braying as the meteors and ice-showers rain down upon them. Steve'd be laughing too. Long. Loud. And hard. Even though he knew the joke better than just about everybody else and had the Goddamned punch line tattooed on the back of his hand. Obama's ascendancy into the void they so tenously held space in just makes the laughter that much heartier.
I mean...a year and a half ago, these clowns just knew...knew they were the cutting edge. And now?
Let “The Godfather of Soul's” first three sentences here complete the thought.
“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.”
I have just about had enough, and yet I know we are far from through the disgusting swamp of nastiness, racism, and hatred that is going to mark this election and mar my political psyche for decades. Not that this hasn't all been done before-- but we seem headed for the extreme sports version this year.
Bob Herbert has it pegged in his NYT Op Ed; Running While Black
Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.
Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
It is my considered opinion that McSame and the GOP are going to use literally every racial slur or stereotype in the coming weeks. Every one. And so I propose a good old game of bingo.
Lay out your grid card not with numbers but we every pathetic and hate filled racial slur you can think of. We've already seen a bunch. Oreo you say? Got that one. How about jungle fever? Yup. done that. Uppity? We got that one in spades.
If I had LM's bad-ass photoshop skills I would seriously whip up these cards complete with great racially charged images, print them and give them to all my friends and say-- just watch for these and cross them off your card. More importantly cross them out of the discourse. Call them like you see them. AND make sure to call them stupid, predictable, and beneath the American people. Feel free to use the blank card above and fill in the squares!
What do you win for surviving this game? Maybe the White House. Hopefully we also can win back the political discourse.
Let's face it, economy in the toilet, home foreclosures and restaurant closings at record highs, infrastructure failing, pointless war still being waged-- we really don't have time for this crap. And therefore we don't have time for McSame and the Republican party and their tired old games.
“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.
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.
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?
There's more...
“Papa Was A Rolling Stone...Well, Well, Well, Well, We-e-e-e-e-e-ell...”
To live your life as a prominent New York Republican is to drive a rickety, shock absoirber-less jalopy full of nitroglycerin “Wages of Fear” style down a pitted, boulder-filled road. It's a hell of an achievement bouncing along for those years one manages to avoid destruction—until they come to the inevitable, explosive, “Oh-my-God-did-you-see-that?” ending.
It's a Dem city, and as far as the major population centers, a Dem state. But Republicans do get elected to offices of prominence here. They may flourish in the hothouses crafted to keep them alive if you will, but as is the case when anything particularly rare self-destructs, it is a wonder to behold, baby.
Some of you may be old enough yo remember the state's last, real GOP colossus, former governor Nelson Rockefeller. “Rocky” was of that Rockefeller stock. Wealthy, haughty, but with just a touch of the old school noblesse oblige the rich of his generation couldn't really shake. He was sort of Bloomberg-esque in his core policy stances as a Republican, meaning he was for the most part a moderate. But he could switch into hard-core “Law n' Order” Nixonian darky-hating in a fucking heartbeat, which he often did as he got older, enacting the infamously draconian “Rockefeller” drug laws that brutally over-punished a generation, and his creepy cheering on of the massacre at Attica Prison in 1971. Rockefeller would run three times, unsuccessfully for president, but would years later nab the next best prize—the office of vice president when Gerald Ford needed someone to fill his stumble-prone shoes after he unexpectedly ascended to the presidency in 1974 (Thanks, Tricky Dick.). Rocky would finish out the Veep term and semi-retire to private life with his extensive African art collection, his doting wife Happy Rockefeller...and his 26-year old assistant and mistress, one Megan Marshak.
Now, as a born, bred and buttered New Yorker who came of age in the so-called “disco” era, it was hard not to know how the ballers and shot-callers rolled. Famous folk were messily indiscreet with their attempts at being discreet, and Rocky was no exception. He liked 'em young, but he couldn't afford to mess about with the debutante daughters and granddaughters of the people of his rarefied set. That was unseemly. No, his type rolled up to a club like Studio 54 or Xenon and never got their asses out of the limo. When you don't sweat working, why sweat shaking your ass unnecessarily? An advance man would simply enter the place, scoop up a handful of clean-ish-looking lovelies and out the door they would go into a super-stretch hog from Dick Gidron Cadillac and cads like Rocky's sweaty, uncouth arms. He was a reknowned ass-hound with a libido unbound. He also didn't exactly take the best care of himself, living life out loud as an unrepentant voluptuary. He ate to excess. He drank to excess...and in the end, fucked to excess. Rocky keeled over from a massive heart attack in his 54th Street fuckpad office/apartment ass-naked and on top of a terrified Marshak, pinning her under his bacchanalian bulk. She called another young friend on the phone for help, the then fresh-faced journalist Ponchitta Pierce instead of an ambulance and Pierce upon arriving realized the gravity of the situation (quite literally—she had to pull the massive, dead-weighted Rocky off her friend) and called for medical help—too late. The garrulous Rockefeller scion was gone. And the embarrassment over the sordidness of his death only multiplied in town when the after-the-fact cover story—placing him at his office desk high atop his family's namesake building complex Rockefeller Center—got torpedoed by eyewitnesses and later reports from the responding EMTs.
A classic case of “Comin' while goin'”. Farewell, sweet horndog prince.
We move on to New Yorks' next GOP would-be royalty, one Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose meteoric rise to power and subsequent ignominious fall has been well chronicled here. But let's key in on the abortive attempt to resuscitate his moribund political career this past primary season, where his creepy, underhanded peccadilloes were unearthed anew, revealing heretofore untold tales of ass-grabbery and dirt-doing. Giuliani was touted as the “golden boy” early on this year in the GOP sweepstakes by the myopic pundit class who'd been tossing Rudy's arugula since September 11th—totally either forgetting or willfully ignoring the real ugliness of his local past.
It didn't take long, really. As predicted here, New York's press exhumed the corpse of Giuliani's lifeless political career here and ran “new” tests on it the way scientists do with ancient Egyptian mummies to discover new things about an old death. And in so doing, the world—but more importantly—GOP primary voters would hear anew about his callousness toward his second wife Donna Hanover, and new revelations about his diversion of and misuse of city monies and personnel to hide his Viagra™-fueled chickie-chasing. In no time flat, thanks to said intrepid investigative reporting and people finally starting to look at the previously reported stuff, he was done-er than he was after his first political death in 2000. Not only did the re-animation not take, but the freshly-turned sordidness seemed to bond to Rudy's very DNA like a virus he can't shake. It's with him forever now. Incurable. Always laying there ready to “outbreak” whenever he shows his face in a poliitical setting. Oh, did I mention the impending trial of his trusted “wingman” Bernard Kerik and how the exposure of his power-crazed hubris cast a bright light on the rapid, downward moral spiral of Giuliani's second mayoral term in NY? Didn't have to, did I.
And now, here in the summer of 2008 we have the latest New York Republican hot-house flower to wilt and then burn in the sunlight of the national stage, poor GOP Congressman Vito Fossella.
Fossella is, (and probably soon will be, was) the lone downstate Republican congressional representative from New York State. Why does that matter? “Downstate” New York and it's immediate “exurbs” while counting for about 10% of the state's land mass actually holds close to 65% of its population. It's where the bulk of the congressional power lies, and as the party demographics break down at a 5:1 Dem to GOP ratio there, any Republican who can get elected there is in essence a rare beast. A winged, golden-maned, diamond-shitting unicorn in terms of political rarity.
Fossella's district? The overwhelmingly White (80%—unheard of anyplace else in Downstate NY) and decidedly xenophobic tip of Southern Brooklyn and ALL of Staten Island—a borough that put forth secession plans as soon as the city's first and only Black mayor was elected. Needless to say, they dropped the whole secession idea once Rudy was elected, but hey—that's Fossella's base, people. “The Fighting 400,000” or so who hate progressives and anything remotely so with a white-hot passion. They voted Vito into the legacy GOP seat (previously held by Susan Molinari of the odious Molinari family that effectively rules the borough) and he's held it for a decade. Nowhere near a star on his own, nor much of an intellect or bill-writer, Fossella's been little more than a guaranteed rubber stamp for Beltway D.C. policies, ruling his little fiefdom not so much with an iron hand, but with a sure vote. As an NY GOP “star”, he's that dog at the circus that walks / hops gimpily on its hind legs—and is cheered for, not because he's doing it particularly well, but mainly because he's even doing it at all. A big, swollen whale in a two-gallon fish-tank Vito was.
And when wingnut bigwigs came to town, Vito was a man to see, as he sort of validated their presence in the otherwise largely Democratic city. In fact, this past April when Vice President Cheney parked his Star Destroyer near town, he made a special local appearance with Vito to raise funds for Fossella's now-dead campaign for another term.
The arrest capped a long and seemingly upbeat day. In the morning, he attended an address to a joint session of Congress by Ireland’s prime minister, Bertie Ahern, six days before Mr. Ahern’s resignation. Then he went to the White House for the ceremony for the Giants.
The details on where Mr. Fossella went after that are sketchy. The Daily News reported that the evening ended at a Washington pub and that Mr. Fossella and a friend were so drunk they had to be asked to leave.
To get his very own gold star, the officers asked Vito to complete a very hard big-boy task: recite the alphabet, starting from D. “Mr. Fossella started: ‘D, E, F, H, G, H, I, J, L,’”. Ohhhh, so close! While the alphabet on Staten Island does have 2 H’s (see local dictionary, yes = “Huh” and no = “uh-uh”), he missed the K!
When cops stopped Rep. Vito Fossella for drunken driving, the married congressman said he was rushing to see his sick daughter on nearby Grimm St. - the home of the mystery woman who later plucked him from jail. Fossella's spokeswoman has insisted the single mom, Air Force Col. Laura Fay, 45, was only a "good friend," but the Staten Island Republican implied to suburban D.C. cops that Fay's 3-year-old was his.
“The subject stated that he was driving down from Washington D.C., to Grimm St. because his daughter was sick and needed to go to the hospital,” a police report obtained by the Daily News reveals.
The report describes how Fossella, who has a wife and three children in New York, failed a sobriety test by reciting the alphabet wrong, swaying while standing on one leg and stumbling while trying to walk a straight line.
“When I looked at his lips, I noticed they were stained red,” the Alexandria, VA cop wrote. “He stated that he had about two or three glasses of wine...”
Cops said Fossella had a blood-alcohol level of 0.17, more than twice the legal limit of 0.08.
Seven hours after his arrest, Fossella was released to Fay, who lives 3 miles from thespot where cops stopped him for running a red light.
Susan Del Percio, a crisis management consultant hired after the arrest, refused to answer “yes” or "no" when asked if Fossella fathered Fay's daughter.
“This is a demeaning and highly inappropriate question,” she said yesterday. She gave the same answer when asked the question the previous day.
“And Mama, some bad talk going around town saying that Papa had three outside children and another wife.
And that ain't right.”
Vito fought the scandal-caused, inevitable loss of his seat for about...oh, ten days or so once it got out that he'd been playing “Johnny Applesperm” up and down the eastern seaboard, but the die was cast. The GOP bosses in D.C. told “V”, 'See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya', and set out to find a replacement to run in Fossella's stead in November. Which was greeted not with the rumble of a multitude of footsteps of would-be candidates, but rather, the plaintive trill...
Woefully few wanted the job it seemed, and that's a “tell” and a half about the state of things in a severely wounded Republican party. It was a mere 18 months ago when there was braggadocious talk among the Beltway set—and in wildly hyped books even—about “A Permanent Republican Majority”. (I swear, I don't know what's funnier—Hugh Hewitt's nutrageous pronouncements or the thought of him karaoke-ing Kelis' “Milkshake”) The 2006 congressional mid-terms began to show the folly of that ill-founded hubris when Democrats overcame Karl Rove's trusty diamond-encrusted abacus and whomped the wingnuts royally. And then, in the several congressional special elections since then, it has been loss after loss after loss. Throw in the poll trending since '06 where the GOP is across the board, apparently in for a further drubbing on Capitol Hill and in dire straits in the presidential race, and the writing appears not merely on the wall for the Grand Olde Party, but it is laser-etched into the inner eyelids of anyone who can read...
The Republican brand is right down there with Valu-Jet, The Yugo, and fast-food tomatoes right about now. Fossella was one of the last of Congress' northeastern Republicans, having seen most of the last ones picked off like fat, wooden carny ducks a year and a half ago, so you would think he'd at the very least be a bit careful with his shit. But he decided to blithely open and star in a crappy, road-tour of “Big Love: The Musical”, thinking he'd get away with it. Didn't go down that way, br'uh. But the fact that the party hierarchy had so much trouble finding a sucker-ass replacement to run in his place shouldn't be too big a surprise.
It takes time to run a campaign. And time is fucking money if you haven't forgotten, kids. When the internal polling party-wide comes up with orphanage fires and kitten-punting testing better among voters than the GOP, potential candidates are going to be piss-poor few and far between. Why bother?
NY's wingnuts finally found a sap to run for Fossella's 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.
It's Vito power-less, and unfortunately for the Republicans—his party even moreso. And double-fuck the idea of McCain electoral coattails, folks. He doesn't even have a jacket on...and his party's much more in need of something along the lines of a dress with a fifty-foot train attached..
And I think we all know how ridiculous that would look...
Typical, can't even feign shock or surprise anymore-- McCain Convention Chief Tied to Burma's Junta Quits;
John McCain's choice to manage the GOP convention this summer is lobbyist Doug Goodyear, whose firm once represented Burma's repressive regime.
And the guy is an energy lobbyist for Exon Mobile. I really think that Johnny Freeride is beneath contempt. My grandma told me,"you can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep." She would NOT have had anything to good say about John McCain. read moreThere's more...
He was by all accounts a true professional in his craft—insisting on performing much of his Moses role in 1956's “The Ten Commandments” barefoot even though his feet would not be seen and he risked injury for the rugged exterior work, and spending four weeks learning how to drive a chariot (from the legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt) so that at least 80% of what you saw of him in the chariot races in “Ben-Hur” was actually him being whipped about the custom-built arena at Italy's Cinécitta Studios.
There were few actors of his time—a long time at that, who participated in as many landmark films as Heston. From the blockbusters like the eye-popping “Commandments” and “Hur” and the four-sequel spawning “Planet Of The Apes”, to his unlikely turn as a Welles-ian hero in the Hollywood giant's last great exposing of celluloid—1958's closing of the book on Film Noir, “Touch Of Evil” (Playing a Mexican policeman!). Heston's specialty was playing motivationally uncomplicated leads on single-minded quests. His job was NOT to do depth, but rather, to convey strength while searching. His imposing physicality helped with this. An almost comic-bookishly square jaw and a strapping six-foot-three of swimmerly sinew, Heston boasted the easy athleticism of his peers Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas—albeit without their same ability to switch from scenery-chewing to delicately subtle actorly shadings.
The Heston performance range was not wide. But deployed properly, playing piousness, blunt-force heroism and overweening anguish, he could be magnetic onscreen with his easy physical attractiveness holding the eye while his stentorian voice anchored the ear.
There was a certain vainness to his onscreen presentation. Look at the way he seems to consciously flex his bare arms in the in-cabin master shots in 1959's “The Wreck Of The Mary Deere”. It borders on an upstaging his co-star, the God-like leading man of the previous three decades, Gary Cooper. But it comes off as harmless fun because it was Heston—an actor so damned comfortable in his well-toned body that you forgave him for his preening excesses and his occasional over-willingness to share it with the viewer.
He was not subtle. He couldn't be and filmgoers in turn didn't ask of it from him. Broad, rough strokes was how he painted his characters on-screen. Save for his measured take in the post-modern western, 1968's Will Penny, a subtle character shading rarely seen from Heston. Unglamorous and just a touch a-moral, it was in my mind perhaps his finest, most actorly performance on film.
He was bankable. A strong-jawed pro who wouldn't “muck up” things with high-falutin' emotional shadings, and while he wasn't a subtle craftsman, he was a workman—filling out a career with gobs of work when called, from the aspiring “Agony And The Ecstasy” and El Cid” to the gummy, plain popcorn of “Earthquake” and “Airport '75”.
He simply entertained. And in his later years, as that easy physicality faded, he played stern-eyed patriarchs onscreen and lent his still powerful voice to voice work in narrations.
Of course, Heston's being an unsubtle man would manifest itself in his life outside his performance persona. In the sixties, he was an open and proud Hollywood Liberal, marching in Dr. King's 1963 March on Washington and espousing many of the feel-good liberal ideals of the time. And like folks like Frank Sinatra and Dennis Hopper, Heston would shift radically from Liberal to Right Wing supporter and apologist as exidenced by his over-the-top (Hey, to thyself be true...) vocal backing and presidency of the National Rifle Association from 1998 o 2003. It was at the 2000 NRA national convention where he famously waved a blunderbuss overhead and fairly growled while nearly spitting bits of curtain and set materials that the Clinton administration would have to take away his Second Amendment rights “From his cold, dead hands”.
Sadly, it is that last, unfortunate, broad play to the audience and cameras that many will remember him for—a man rushing backwards as the world pushed ahead. He would utter a variety of retrograde statements as the roles grew thin and the star began to wane in brightness. Bitter remarks about affirmative action, gun-nuttery, the first Gulf War and an embrace of the worst elements of the wingnut religious right would follow, hopelessly skewing the perception of the man as a whole.
A debilitating bout with Alzheiemer's Disease would ironically be the thing that claimed the uncomplicated Heston's life this past Saturday evening.
Film buffs will remember his booming line readings of such classic bits of scriptwork:
“You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
Soylent Green is made of PEOPLE!”
“You gave me this staff to rule over scorpions and serpants. God has made it a staff to rule over kings”
As I said...he was entertaining. An annoying political changeling, but still in that classic popcorn-y way, an entertaining performer.
Let us look to his work for what it was—fun—and understand his politics for what it was too. Retrograde yes, but in the end as much a goofy show as his most excessive performances.
Bid adieu to a star and offer condolences to his family and loved ones.
