“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 action was 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?

There's more...

Baby Daddy Trauma—Vito Power-less

“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.

A now-dead campaign because of this little story you may have heard about:

Rep. Vito J. Fossella (R-N.Y.) was arrested overnight in Alexandria and charged with driving while intoxicated, court records showed today.

Fossella is scheduled to appear in Alexandria General District Court on May 12 for an advisement hearing, the records said.

Which the details of, got hoarier...

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.

And hoarier, as they leaked out like shit from an overstuffed diaper...

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!

And then...oh, my...

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 you knew from the jump that it would end with this...

“I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three-year-old daughter,“ Fossella, 43, said in a statement.

Fay, 45, is a retired Air Force intelligence officer who may have met Fossella when she served as a congressional liaison from the Pentagon.

“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry.”

Cue The Temptations, ya'll:

“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...

...of crickets.

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?

Why bother, indeed?. I'm not the only one who's noticed this trend. Take a trip over to Kos' place and use the search function and watch the assembled carnage arise from your browser window. It's an avalanche of apathy, a dirge of despair, and an ode to overweening oh-shitty-ness.

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...

There's more...

Convention Corruption

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 more

There's more...

Of Parting Seas, Chariot Races, Buried America, and Guns That Shall Not be Pried.

Charlton Heston—1923-2008

We saw the passing of legendary Hollywood actor Charlton Heston this past weekend at the age of 84. He was one of the very last of the remaining mega-stars of Tinseltown's studio-era with a career spanning 53 years, from his initial film appearance in 1950's Dark City all the way through to his 2003 voice work for an animated “Ben Hur”.

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”

and of course...

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn, dirty ape!”

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.

There's more...

No, You Can't -- No, Se Puede.

From Billionaires for Bush.

There's more...

Teech...Yur Chilldrun Wel

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap...

I feel like some sort of silver-suited, NASA-helmeted character at the end of a black-and-white “Twilight Zone” episode, walking a band of similarly garbed “survivors” through the rubble of a bombed-out world many years in the future and describing in deep, grave tones “the moment we doomed ourselves” when I even think to write on the seemingly far-fetched theme rolling around in my mind in recent days. But what makes the theme truly frightening is that it's not some dystopian future I find myself analyzing. The time is now. A scary, “Twilight Zone”-ish now that we've brought upon ourselves...

...A now where intelligence, a high-functioning, critically-thinking brain and all that a powerful intellect can bring—well-reasoned solutions to world problems, challenging art and culture, and...the resulting desire of more and more people to aspire to said brilliance—in frowned upon. No—not just frowned upon, but openly discouraged and disparaged. Mental acuity and the thirst for knowledge is not to be rewarded—rank stupidity...willful, rank stupidity is rewarded. The time when not being afraid to be a buffoon in public was a piece of performance art, relegated to comedians and pratfalling actors going for cheap laughs is gone, and the pool for naked displays of idiocy has deepened and widened to now include politicians, analysts and news reporters—virtually anyone who in the past one could have looked to in the hopes that you could actually learn something from them.

It turns out that ironically, you can actually learn something from them—but that something is just how low the standards for knowledge are these days.

I suppose I could take the nutbar, philosopher view of things and chalk this celebration of stoopid up to “our overly P.C. society”, where we dare not offend or project shame on those who come to the table with the “less-than-optimal”. That tortured line of reasoning would almost pass muster as an interesting, albeit kind of twisted logic. But its inherent flaw is the simple fact that most of the knuckleheads that would argue such a point are the very celebrated dolts in question. How's that for elliptical? I said here last week:

“It's all you ever need to know about these people. Idiots. And proud of it. A badge of fucking honor, this glittering stupidity, and the utter lack of a thirst for knowledge.”

Bartcopfan noted in comments: “Idiots. And proud of it. Thank you for capturing the Bush misadministration in five simple words.”

God, but I wish it were just his administration, but that's just the power structure's manifestation of the bold, new stupid. The movement's effects go far deeper and with more effect than you know.

What is the hereditary legacy of this embrace of willful idiocy? Suffer the little children. (Via Sullivan)

A teacher laments:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

Somewhere a creaking sound is heard, with the faint ruffle of dry skin peeling back against bone, and Dick Cheney smiles his best “gotcha” smile. Big time.

When one is left to one's own devices, and simply learns from the rough curriculum of whatever the hard world tosses at you from day to day—that level of ignorance can be forgiven. You really can't fault a person for working with just what they have, even if just what they have is less than the best. Spinning straw into gold has as of this writing not yet worked.

But the fool who is happily mis-educated and mis-informed, and spreads that mis-education and mis-information when he or she has what is correct, and true, and obvious right before him...when that person opts to run against the grain of fact and proof and not only crow about 2 + 2's equalling 5—but will then toss away every sane bit of reasoning to try and convince you why 2 + 2 equals 5—that fool is not to be forgiven.

He is to be fought—thrice as hard as he fights against truth.

The sneering at knowledge and logic as an undesirable attribute has long been with us. It's a bedrock principle of faux populism. The clearest and perhaps best dog-whistle of that theme that I can immediately recall is the late Alabama Governor George Wallace's squalling against “outsiders and interlopers” in the South's illegal segregationist doings. He practically spat the phrase “pointy-headed intellectuals” as if it were a poison-dipped dart at his more thoughtful critics. The smarts-hating mantle was handed down to the Bryllcreemed buffoon Reagan who pushed charm over cerebral cortex with a wink and a Beverly Hills swagger. There was a bit of an executive branch break with the crafty Bush 41 and the wonky Clinton/Gore administrations, but what was happening at the congressional level was a mountain's thrust from the ocean floor, causing a stunning sea change. It took years, but the culmination was in 1994 when the GOP's “revolution” hit. The political “children” of Wallace and Reagan stood there, signing off on their “Contract With America”, starry-eyed and all a' quiver with anticipation over the undoing of every helpful law save for gravity. And they would use their fact-free anti-knowledge—so proud and confident in their coordinated, blast-faxed exhortations—against common sense.

“Global warming isn't real”, the reason-rapers will shake their fingers at you and hiss, as the massive polar ice shelves come apart and melt away like so many ice cubes in a tall glass of thirst-and-debate-quenching grape Kool-Aid. And they want as many people as possible to drink up, and refill—drink up and refill on that Kool-Aid, to the point where they only feel the icy, drugged liquid going down, numbing the body's feeling heat blister the skin, and blinding the eyes from seeing fields scorch and the oceans boil.

“Gay marriage will lead to the end of marriage as we know it! Blasphemy! Bestiality! Box turtles!”, those same reason-rapers rail, all a tremble over the sanctity of unions between men and women, wild-eyed and pointing at a fire in the sky as allowing anything else would compromise what goes on in heterosexual folks' bedrooms. It could bring on those dreaded “youthful indiscretions”, and cause otherwise stable husbands to ditch their wives on recovery beds as they reel from chemotherapy! Make 'em sport diapers and engage in odd baby-play with marriage-smashing interlopers, or “gasp!”—dress up like prostitutes in vinyl skirts, fishnets, heels and fake breasts and offer themselves up for money. We should thank our holy, Jebus-kissed stars that it hasn't happened yet. “Whew!”

“Man and dinosaurs co-existed! The planet's 6,000 years old! Fossils? Schmossils! All is as God made it in his amazing six-day Shrinky-Dink™ machine, and the only evolution there has ever been is our developing tough bottoms of our feet from propelling and stopping carved stone vehicles!” Oh yes, the the reason-rapers'll moan that too. Moan it in the face of ancient ice cores, ruins of ancient cities, and prima facie scientific evidence that the age of things unearthed flies in the face of religio-“science” and wooly-mammoth-fur fuzzy-math claims otherwise.

Why do they fight so vigorously, and so maniacally against facts?

Because the desire has always been to open that “crack in the door”, small as it might be—allowing for false and forced “objectivity” to hopefully create that glimmer of doubt in truths, especially inconvenient ones, and turn truth itself into a thing that can actually be commodified. A thing you can barter away. And once you can barter away truth—don't think for a second that what comes next is not the unintended result—you can freely substitute emotion, “truthiness”, and fact-esque positions that can be changed at the whim and to the benefit of who's presenting them. Get enough people to swallow those shiny lures and you've got an “army” to do battle with. They will move to the polls when you want them and how you want them. Your shock troops. Your pawns.

The GOP “elites” that these people look to as demi-gods then laughed up their fucking sleeves at their truth-swapped minions, all the while ignorant of the whirlwind they were about to reap.

You see, when you celebrate stupid, promote stupid, and then superficially reward stupid by placing it at the tiller (while the real powers dictate the course below decks), those proud, dewy-eyed supporters get it in their crazy heads that there's no shame in being “bag of hammers” dumb. You create an atmosphere where it's hip to be a dip.

It begets the likes of a proud, dim-witted, but still somehow-promoted Sherri Shepherd in your face every day with her half-cerebrumed idiocy. All flat earths, and nothing's having existed before Christ.

It begets a Dana Perino—a vain, easily-agitated twit whose job is apparently to smile and flutter hands gracefully over Bush policy like a QVC studio model, when her job is to articulate and explain presidential positions, while having not a goddamned clue about what makes the world around her tick.

It begets a grunting shallowbrow like a Sean Hannity, an ill-educated Play-Doh Fun Factory™ of a pundit who will read any talking point placed before him—a “Ron Burgundy” minus the irony and mustache, who the day he has an original thought based on mulling over facts and actual reason will probably suffer an aneurysm loud enough that Joe McCarthy'll hear the ‘pop”.

And ultimately it begets the chilling rise of a Mike Huckabee in the GOP power structure. A man who doesn't believe in evolution, wants a servile female populace, and holds 1950's-era hygiene film views on AIDS doesn't find himself elevated by sheer magic. The idiot army craves a regent, a leader who really believes in teh stoopid...fervently.

It all started with the steady snowfall at the top of a steep, slippery hill—Wallace's and Reagan's dusting the ground with their sneering, divisive anti-intellectualism. And the snowball was formed from the dusting with the ascent of a idiocy-celebrating congress in '94. The fatal roll down the hill? 2000's elevation of the smirkingly dim George W. Bush to the presidency, gathering momentum and size, bounding and crushing sense and sensibility in it's path.

“It's hip to be a dip.”

Paris Hilton's “continuing celebrity in spite of a giggling admission of brainlessness, Jessica Simpson's chicka-tuna, and Sherri Shepherd's sharp-edged, hopelessly young world. John Cornyn's hard-shell horniness, and Sean Hannity's daily paean to the wordless-without-his-master's stupid-words, Mortimer Snerd. All hail The Flavor of Love and The Kardashians! Clink your glasses to beating “teh ghey” out of you, rambling, vacuous beauty contestants, family dogs gleefully tied to car roofs, pud-pulling pundits who accuse U.S. soldiers of atrocities against the Nazis at Malmedy, and by God—the fever-dream re-imagining of right-wing fascism into some sort of cloaked forerrunner of modern progressivism.

Clink your glasses to all of that, and then wonder no more why we should actually gag a little bit when we mock so-called “backward” cultures beyond us.

When we celebrate dumb-assery from the top down, (as shown in the post's graphic) we reap what we sow as a nation. The willfully dumb politicos, dumb pundits, dumb news and dumb pop culture creates a critical mass of ill-informed-ness, spewing a cloud of foolishness the powers-that-be can no longer contain to manipulate their sheeple to blindly do their bidding. No, it's beyond that now. It spreads to where we see the recent history-dumb kids Sullivan ruefully noted.

The kids. The future...wrecked at the dock before it can even get under way.

At today's press conference, Bush warned against weakening his precious, paper-tiger “No Child Left Behind” act.

I laughed for a second at his fervor in its continuing...and then a parsing of the language itself hit me cold.

Do you leave no child behind by moving everyone forward together?

Or do you actually leave no child behind by holding them all back as a group?

He never really does elaborate on the slogan's true meaning.

But why bother...when actions speak so much louder than any words.

There's more...

A Carcass Picked Clean, Then Boiled For Broth

No Leftovers...thanks to Bob Herbert, Driftglass and Paul (Soup Man) Krugman

The most vicious ring beating I ever saw was in the Spring of 1977. Ken Norton vs. Duane Bobick. One of the last nationally televised, free TV fights ever shown—with good reason. The bell sounded for the first round and the two fighters felt each other out—oh, for about seven seconds or so when Norton flung a clubbing right from somewhere near his hip and over his shoulder, that blasted Bobick like a wrecking ball hitting a bag of stale fortune cookies. Bobick's back hit the corner and for the next thirty-six seconds Norton's right hand hit Bobick's jaw, ears, temples, nose and forehead. Midway through the fusillade of about twenty-three unanswered punches, (Duane never got a punch off) something flew from the area where Bobick was pinned and wincing in the corner.

It was his mouthpiece flying several rows into the arena darkness. Norton wasn't so much punching as he was using his right hand as a medieval mace—loop, swing, BAM! Loop, swing, BAM! Ref stopped it at 43 seconds in. NBC had built a two-hour package around the fight, and the sudden end ruined it. So they showed the damn thing about 10 times in a row to fill time. And that fight was one of the key reasons why free TV stopped showing fights. When a massacre like that goes down, it wrecks everything. Again, It was the most singularly brutal “fight” I've ever seen.

But the intellectual dismantling of the New York Times' David Brooks over the last ten days gets right up there near it.

Brooks, in a fit of neo-con desperation in the wake of nothing but bad news since the '04 elections, found it necessary to play Dr. Frankenstein with the corpse of Ronald Reagan via dumb-fuck revisionist lightning. He tried to spin Ol' Ronnie Raygun's 1980 election kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi—a reknowned dog-whistle call to a new wave of fresh, white-sheeted bigots as something other than what the world knew it to be.

Krugman killed that turkey right there in the middle of the newsroom in a follow-up piece. Bob Herbert then built a fire in the same spot, plucked the dumb flightless pundit boid clean and roasted it alive. After a few squawks and “gobble-gobbles” it quieted down...until Driftglass happened by.

He stuffed it. Basted it. Flash-finished it, and then carved the meat into lots of thick, well-done slices. Damn, it was delicious!

But then...Krugman, ever the economist, decided to get the maximum use out of the well-picked carcass, coming back earlier this week to boil what was left of poor Brooksie down to a savory broth:

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

I can only imagine what fun talk there must be in the stairwells and behind stacks of copy paper at Times HQ over this intramural stomp-out. Shit, I wonder if Brooks is pulling the old “get here before everybody—leave here long after they've left” routine so he doesn't have to show his sugar glider-ish face.

But for those who have any doubt after Krugman's boil-down as to what Reagan was about with that visit...let's go back to a section of what he unearthed:

in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

What was a “George Wallace” voter, and why would he be desirable?

In 1958, he was defeated by John Patterson in Alabama's Democratic gubernatorial primary election, which at the time was the decisive election, the general election still almost always being a mere formality in Alabama. This was a political crossroads for Wallace. Patterson had run with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Wallace had spoken against, while Wallace had been endorsed by the NAACP. After the election, aide Seymore Trammell recalled Wallace saying, "Seymore, you know why I lost that governor's race?... I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again."

In the wake of his defeat, Wallace adopted a hard-line segregationist style, and used this stand to court the white vote in the next gubernatorial election. In 1962 he was elected governor on a pro-segregation, pro-states' rights platform in a landslide victory. He took the oath of office standing on the gold star where, 102 years prior, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America. In his inaugural speech, he used the line for which he is best known:

“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

The lines were written by Wallace's new speechwriter, Asa Carter, a Klansman and longtime anti-semite. Wallace later stated that he had not read this part of the speech prior to delivering it, and that he had regretted it almost immediately. However, he did not hesitate to repeat it.

And Ronnie ran down there like it was the Warners' backlot in 1949, with the studio dick on vacation, and the bungalows full of boy-starved starlets. He answered the call for someone to appeal to “George Wallace” voters, and the grinning, Bryllcreemed jerk went down there and played the hell out of the role offered to him.

Unfortunately for Reagan's legacy, and Brooks' abused psyche. Krugman got his hands on the old “Playbill” for it.

And wrapped that boiled-clean carcass up in it, and tossed it out in the trash...albeit a few days before Thanksgiving.

“Sigh!” The holidays seem to start earlier every damn year. :)

There's more...

T Bone Pickens Liar and Bet Welsher

So this guy who funded the Swift Boat Liars, T Bone Pickens a couple of days ago at a American Spectator Dinner. Attendance to which must be one of the painful things imaginable. Lets face it any dinner where Krauthammer gets the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence & Independence in Journalism has to be excruciating (I'm not joking.) Don't these people know that irony is dead?

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, a major contributor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, apparently offered $1 million to anyone who could disprove any of the Swifties' claims about John Kerry's service in Vietnam. -- salon.com

This was confirmed by fellow liar Ben Domenench who was there handing out dinner rolls or something.

But here is the good part, Kerry sends a letter to Pickens stating, I'll take that bet. Being a typical right wing gasbag lying big mouth he immediately welshed on the bet. Bailing on his own bet faster than a college republican can avoid a recruiter.

Dear Senator Kerry:
...
In order to disprove the accuracy of the Swift Boat ads, I will
ultimately need you to provide the following:

1) The journal you maintained during your service in Vietnam.
2) Your military record, specifically your service records for the
years 1971-1978, and copies of all movies and tapes made during your
service.

Oh, please, either you and your right wing friends told the truth or you didn't. If you have the truth you don't need Kerry to prove anything. Unless you can't prove your allegations, in which case you are lying and smearing a decorated veteran. Lets face it you rich elitist prick, your actions with the other Swift Boat Liars caused one of the most egregious anti-veteran things I have ever seen. The purple band-aid that your friend Morton Blackwell printed up hundreds of and asinine people wore at the GOP convention. You dis-respected every winner of the Purple Heart. So, I am really not surprised that you won't keep your word. You never had an integrity to begin with. Just another wrinkly old white guy for the irrelevant and soon to be dead pile.

There's more...

Daddy Dearest

Because they're suckers for punishment...

Oh, there's been much talk here recently about Where The Boys Are—or rather, Where The Boys MINDS Are. Jesse gives the compendium, as Sara, Hubris and I “stabbed at at it with our steely knives” and managed to at the very least, seriously wound the beast.

It's a funny thing how we all seemed to coalesce around this issue of men and their (our) well...insecurities. We didn't plan it out that way—it's just the way river bent and we simply sent the water from way, way upstream. But it is interesting, and maybe ironic/telling that this series of posts dealing with masculinity and how men pose and place themselves in society bracketed Jesse's post about the heinous treatment of the young lady from Howard University following her reporting of being raped.

“Effect without cause. Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause. Syn-chro-ni-city.”

Thing is, I've been a little—okay, rather pre-occupied with work stuff lately, so I couldn't comment as I would have liked on the above posts, particularly Sara's post about poseurs and people's susceptibility to them...but after I read it, it set me thinking for quite a bit. Things are not good at my nine-to-five job right now. Lots of turmoil and turnover (Why they do this stuff in October so often I'll never know...), lots of insecurity and self-serving allegiance-forging. Sara's words about the culture we live in now—consumerist, no long-term planning, with the premium on hard work going the way of the muscle-car and green, bubbly Dippity-Doo™ rung so damned true that it hurt.

At work, I'm seeing people who really should know better, in a moment of corporate crisis, lining up behind a flash-in-the-pan glad-hander and no-talent—whoops! Correction: the man does have a talent, and that talent is for appearing to have talent where in fact there is none. That talent, and an amazing propensity for positioning himself perfectly near the flame-spouts of power—near enough to be seen as close, but set just so he himself does not burn. And the fearful underlings who have survived are cagily positioning themselves under his wing for self-protection from those flames. You can hardly blame them, and yet—there is an unseemliness, and actual stupidity in chucking their common sense and pride in allying themselves with one of the guys who fucked things up so badly in the first place.

But...he does have a certain “charm” if you will—a tough guy swagger and cockiness, which plays to his “just handle it” superiors (the VPs), and the “Save me! Save me! Sa-a-a-a-aave ME!” subordinates. Both groups of people seem to be members of the masochistic, “You-may-be-a-fuckup, but-you're-a-tough-talkin'-macho-alpha-male-fuckup-and-we're-willing-to-give-you-another-chance-to-save-us-slash-screw-us-over” club.

It harkened back to Sara's post, and the larger reality in general. It was the “half-of-the-country-elected” Bush candidacies and presidencies writ large. The silent accommodation by too many of the blustery, confident idiocy of a Rumsfeld. And so on and so forth.

Why? Why as Sara asked do we (“we”, meaning too many of the people in a position to vote these clowns in) continually “honor” mediocrity of late—specifically braggadocious male mediocrity? I'm tempted to think it's part of the shucking off of the so-called “age of sensitivity” exemplified in the late eighties and early nineties by the likes of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. There was an entire media campaign against thoughtfulness and empathy in our male leadership. Almost as soon as Clinton and Gore came into office, we saw the birth of the “Iron John” movement—designed to re-“red-meat” that chunk of the male populace that chafed under the new sensitivity. The return of cigars, the celebration of caddishness towards women—the very forced throwback to “the good old days”, with serious, serious over-amplification—the elevation to role model-status of the “Swingers” man, who in the end of the film is shown to be a childish, un-ready for the real world asshole.

But my God, what a charming, and fun-loving asshole he was, eh?

Which is all that seems to matter. Clinton and Gore weren't that. They were wonks. Liberal wonks. And what flipped the right off so badly against Clinton was that in spite of his empathetic persona and wonky hyper-competence, he still dared to have that bad-boy streak in him, and for that bit of “hypocrisy” (a hypocrisy they felt acutely), he had to be punished severely. “You can't be a wonk and a cool, devil-may-care mack—we're the man's man party!”

Newt. Livingston. Hyde. You remember the exposés of their peccadilloes, post-Clinton. The anti-Clinton/sensitivity/competence backlash was well cultivated. Brilliantly seeded, and bloomed to full flower in the mid-nineties in a haze of cigar smoke (“How dare Bill Clinton appropriate our blessed, phallic cigar as a symbol of his happy indulgence? HE MUST PAY!”) and a snarl of belligerence.

Enter George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani—the poster children for the “Fuck you, I'm the man!” school of testosterone-fueled politics. Bush was the hard-drinking former frat-boy you could have a beer with—if he could drink, that is. Sporting a hinky, Texas faux-swagger, a drawl of convenience, and a patently anti-social attitude towards people society and he deemed not worth a damn—like death-row inmates, he rode the anti-competency/wonk wave in—via the talking point-burial of Al Gore under the wet blankets of perceived over-thoughfulness and concern over detail and the minutiae of governance, Bush rode into (okay, was driven in—he hates horses) the presidency. His ascent was aided by media folk who wanted another tasty bite at the superficial, Reaganesque apple of charismatic, fist-in-your-face (as opposed to brainy) leadership with a rough hand at the actual tiller of power. Too many pundits and opinion makers served us from that poisoned well—on Bush's way up, and then after his placement. One of the most egregious water-carriers for him was NBC's braying, pan-faced Chris Matthews. Here you have an opinion-pusher whose addiction is to the very idea of political power and its application. And he truly showed his colors in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad and the end of “major combat operations” as announced on the deck of the U.S.S Lincoln in May of '03, with these gleeful chin-bumps into presidential nads:

“What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?”

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“He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? ”

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“Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?”

-----------------------------------------

“The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown —He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.”

Now since those er...I think “heady” may be too loaded a word (Shit! So's “loaded”, now that I've typed it!) days, Matthews has had to embarrassingly admit to the folly of his creepy brand of man-love towards the idiot-in-chief. It pains him—obviously. But he does it, in between searching for those occasional moments when he can justify the original, discredited lust. And make no mistake—the bed-shit that is the Bush presidency is undeniable—even to a power-as-aphrodisiac-addicted tool like Matthews.

So, you would think that maybe he and his ilk would take a lesson from that ill-advised, and flat-out deadly to the families of nearly 3900 soldiers families, choice, right?

Cue Chappelle Show's Charlie Murphy on Rick James' no longer fucking up: “Wrong! Wrong!”

Many wingnut pundits have gone to circus contortionist lengths to hypocritically pump up Giuliani in the face of their previous stated views that would disqualify him for their support. But Matthews in particular has gone way beyond the pale of his peers. In spite of the diarrhea-blast of a presidency of the man he so brainlessly auded on May 1st 2003, he is actively and directly championing a guy HE KNOWS WOULD ACTUALLY BE WORSE—Giuliani, every damned day on his shows, be they Hardball or his little weekend bit of throw-up in the mouth, The Chris Matthews Show. On both of these shows, he goes well out of his way to pimp for the belligerent, egomaniacal, war-mongering Rudy who made his bones chucking discourse and reason in favor of billies and bulets in his times as New York's Mayor. If there's bad news for Rudy, Matthews'll either ignore it or spin it along the lines of “But hey, this other guy's troubles are worse!”. If there's a story that doesn't involve Rudy, he'll find a way to twist it to where it can be seen as a boon to Giuliani. And if someone on his show goes after Giuliani or points out a potential fatal flaw, he basically comes out directly as a shill for the “man”, touting him as the everyfella's choice, and how right he (Matthews) is gonna be when Rudy kicks everybody else's asses.

Giuliani can do no wrong in this marble-mouthed, dim-wittted blonde's eyes...ever. Witness these examples of naked Rudy shilling on Hardball in recent weeks:

MATTHEWS: I am saying conventional wisdom that you're speaking now is wrong. The issue in the country today is security. Who's going to protect this country against the bad guys? Everybody agrees that's the number one concern in the country today, and everyone agrees that Rudy has street cred on that issue. He can protect us. That's the image he conveys. Certainly we can argue about those other issues, and in other times they might be the paramount issues, but in -- in what passes for wartime right now in the minds of many Americans, it's time to pick a commander in chief. That's the premier hat he has to put on. Not health care expert. Not economic czar. Not moral czar. Commander in chief. That's the hat I think he fits the best, and it's the one we're looking to fill. Look at [Sen.] Hillary [Rodham Clinton (D-NY)]. She's trying her darnedest to look like a commander in chief, to look like the armed services expert, to be a bit of a [former British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher. She would love to have the street cred that Rudy Giuliani brings to this election. Just think about it. He has what the others want. And so I'm not -- I know how easy it is to parrot the conventional wisdom. I hear it all the time on television. Tell that to the voters who keep saying he's their favorite candidate. So, I think he's one of the three or four people who has a real good shot at being the next president, and I think he's going to get out there and fight for it. He's going to have to go to those conservative parts of the country and fight for it, but let me tell you where he is popular. The suburbs of Philadelphia, the suburbs of New York City, the suburbs of Chicago.

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“He is a front-runner because the voters like this guy because during 9-11, he was the one guy there on the street corner, answering questions, not hiding like all the other pols did.”

---------------------------------

MATTHEWS: Who would win a street fight? Rudy Giuliani -- just think of a street fight now over in Queens somewhere. It's a dark night, it's about 2 in the morning. Two guys are out behind the building, right? On a vacant lot. Rudy Giuliani or President Ahmadinejad, who would win that fight?

---------------------------------

MATTHEWS: -- but picks the person that makes us feel the safest. And I know this guy is not perfect. I've not had a good relationship with him like lot of people. He's tough. I think the next president of the United States will be Rudy Giuliani...

...Because I think that they want -- we want a guy who'll be tougher than the president we have now, quicker to tell us what's going on. He won't have a ranch. I know. I am tired of presidents with ranches. I want a guy that's working in town, you know. He's nearby. He tells us what's going on. It ain't three days later, they show him a movie of what's been happening. I just want a president who's there. Is that asking too much?

And this classic gem of shill-speak for his bald-pated butt-buddy...

MATTHEWS: Breaking news right now. According to a group that monitors radical Islamic websites, a new video message from Osama bin Laden is expected to be released in the next 72 hours to address the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks on us. It will be the first time bin Laden has been seen, at least on videotapes, in three years.

Let me go -- what is the significance of that? Does that sort of -- I hate -- it's more important, I guess, politically, since it's just a message. It's not an attack. Does it have a help to Rudy there? Does it help the Republicans generally?

Now...why do I point this out in terms of the discussions we've been having about “masculinity” per se?

Welllll....this is going to ruffle some feathers here, but hey—I figure, out with it, right?

There is a term that right-wingers, particularly right-wing men like to toss around about the Left, and Dems in general, referring to us as “The Nanny Party”—a pejorative intended to feminize the idea of caring and empathy, using “nyah-nyah” sexism and chauvinism to denigrate those humanistic traits. Allow me then, to counter that with an analysis about our obviously machismo hung-up buddies on the right. The odd lust for a brusque, iron-handed, emotionally remote and psychologically and sometimes physically abusive “father” figure on their part is undeniable. The projection of infallibility of those figures is well-documented, particularly in the case of the knee-jerk defense of the most heinous actors on that red-lit stage—namely the sexually abusive Catholic priests involved in the vile church sex-abuse scandals. The Catholic League's odious William Donohue has been known to spin that evil on its ear by asking questions of victims like, “Why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?”

This fealty to the rough daddy figure manifests itself again and again in the above-shown and easily Googled additional shilling for Rudy by Matthews, via his constantly going on and on about Rudy's appeal to those who share in his and Giuliani's hyper-paternalistic religious beliefs—those “northeastern ethnic suburb-dwellers” he keeps citing as key to the Rudester's taking a couple of big states electorally. Note the references to manly-man, tough guy stuff like “Who'd win in a street fight?” The almighty, two-fisted “Father Infallible.” We saw it in Giuliani's vile defense of his post-death abuse of police-murder victim Patrick Dorismond, where he fell back on those old, “Big-Man-o-centric”, good vs. evil tropes when he said of the dead Dorismond that “he was no altar boy”. It doesn't take a Freud to note the quasi-religious fervor these nitwits have for the brute-as-father/leader trope. Matthews however, is a brilliant example of the right's addiction to these in the end, empty size-48 suits full of angry hot air. He and many of his co-horts in their eternal idiocy go right back for more “punishment”, even after “moving away from home” and leaving Papa Bush behind, only to shack up with another blustering, over-compensating, mean daddy in their backing of Rudy.

It goes again to that feminization of “feeling” again. Bill Clinton was mercilessly ridiculed for saying “I feel your pain”—evidencing empathy and care. And that was so anathema to the activist right that rose up against him that they opted for the evil, root opposite of Clinton's phrase.

Not “I don't feel your pain”, but rather, “I shall cause the pain you feel.”

It's why the hatred for Clinton and Gore is so virulent and never far from the surface for them. Thought has never been a selling point for wingnuts. Anti-intellectualism is the coin of their realm. Bush's down-home stupid, and Rudy's thoughtless yammering on this and that plays better for them than thoughfulness. It's a undigestible mouthful they cannot process while maintaining their narrow world-view—so it must be ridiculed, alá the recent rancor over Gore's Nobel. A Clinton or a Gore or anyone like them can look down their nose at the right's intellectual lightweights—which offends said right to no end. So as a defense mechanism against that, the right impulsively gravitates to the unthinking, all-powerful boss/daddy figure as its champion. Clinton would never kick their asses—he'd smile, pat em' the back and then like Otter in Animal House, just devilishly con 'em right out of their homecoming queen girlfriends. It's pretty damned childish, but their angle seems to be opposition to anyone smart who challenges them to think and grow, and an attraction to the strongman who'll kick the living shit out of everything in sight—including them—as that means that they're at the very least...actually being noticed.

How ultimately pathetic.

Take the worst “daddy” examples known to us generally—a Papa Joe Jackson, a Bing Crosby, A Murry Wilson (Brian, Carl & Dennis dad from The Beach Boys), the fictional “Great Santini” Bull Meechum—roll 'em all together, and you get the prototypical GOP daddy/leader that too many of these power-addicted fools lust for attention/abuse from. Even Fred Thompson's folksy “I don't really give a fuck about you” mien falls into this sick and contrived “Papa Bear” rubric.

This siding with “the brute” is a pathological sickness. It reminded me of how many on the right defended Rush Limbaugh's craven mockery of Michael J. Fox last year. He was the abrasive, scornful bully to Fox's empathetic, all-too-imperfect person appealing to empathy.

And then it hit me. It was Biff Tannen and Marty McFly all over again. The gruff, spoiled, loudmouth bully versus the humanist, noticeably imperfect “little guy”. Guess who those two archetypes represent? And remember how Biff always rolled with an ineffectual group of sycophants who hung with him-ostensibly just to be close to blunt force “power”.

Why...hello to you too, Chris Matthews...and the rest of the wingnut pundit class.

So they side with the bully. The thug. The Authoritarian. Because it's the cheap, quick route to power. These boys hearts belong to “daddy”—especially if he's a mean son-of-a-bitch. Gotta love him. Gotta love him! And maybe he'll love meeeeeeeeee! The “Iron John” cry for unrequited daddy-love. Fuck if he doesn't think or problem solve. “Daddy's” specialty is good 'ol, red-blooded “percussive therapy”—even if it means he goes upside their heads from time to time.

Matthews and his abuse-addicted ilk are little more than Biff's faceless gang. Punk-ass propper-uppers. The F.O.B.s

Friends...Of...Biff.

And remember...in the end, after all the bastardry...Biff and his buddies found themselves smack at the business end...



...of karma's ever-lovin' dumptruck.

Smells like...uh...victory. Or something.

There's more...

WORLD PREMIERE—“Sigh!” Get Yer Tuxes and Sheath Dresses Out—It's Another New Group News Blog Video Production!

As I work in graphic design, I'm highly sensitized to...oh, how do you say...gaffes of the graphic sort. I was on vacation once, and wasn't able to supervise a promotional brochure my company was sending out. It was a book promotion featuring the Judy Blume series of “Fudge” books. (Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Superfudge, Fudge-a-Mania, and Double Fudge—all about a kid named Peter Hatcher whose little brother was nicknamed “Fudge”) It was bad enough that the marketing division had myopically given my department copy—that no one caught—calling the asssortment of books a “Fudge Pack”, but then, the designer for the ad depicted the books on a brown “splash” field with the words “Fudge Pack” on what appeared to be a dark hole. Ostensibly done to pop the letters out, but you can imagine what it looked like.

I thought abou