When I learn of the appalling and pervasive corruption that has overtaken our state and U.S. government, not to mention our society, I have to admit that I feel as if I've been punched in the gut and kicked really hard in the butt.
Just when we think we've heard the absolute worst of the very worst, inevitably something even more awful will emerge.
The recent exposure of the Bush Administration's pervasive corruption, the Bush Administration's lies, the ginned up war in Iraq, Halliburton's criminal overcharges, Blackwater that prides itself on offing innocent Iraqis, and its bribes to the Iraqi government to buy silence, the deregulated banks, sub prime loans, Wall. St. and its U.S. government enabled reckless gambling casinos, at taxpayer peril, thank you, the discovery of FOX News as the undeniable propaganda arm for the GOP, the self-serving teabagging front groups that pretend to be grassroots movements that use and abuse well-meaning and misled teabaggers, and on and on...It is enough to suck all of the breath out of my lungs.
What would St. Ronnie say if he knew? Gee whiz, what happened!? Or, I know it all sounds terrible and really scary, but in the end, all of the above will be really good for the American people. Trust me folks, there will be 25 chickens in every pot next year and a pony in every back yard. Be patient. Work harder. You don't have a job? You are not working hard enough, you lazy, shiftless bum! Go to the mall. Buy a house full of garbage you don't need. Just be happy and all of of our troubles will disappear.
But the grand old actor wizard and the master of deep deception has long since departed. And there is no St. Ronnie today who can sugar coat the awful and the scary.
What truly sends chills down my spine this time is the discovery that a group of Christian Republicans and Democratic U.S. lawmakers, thank you, seem to be on a crusade to turn our U.S. government into one that is "led by God."
Why does this imperative remind me somehow of the Taliban and the so-called God run governments Iran and Saudi Arabia?
It all starts with pro-slavery driven and unfettered corporate imperatives.
The right wing hypocrites who nailed Bill Clinton to a cross for having a consensual cigar sex affair must have been projecting their own long repressed evil doing sinning at the time. S.C. Governor Mark Sanford, as I recall, was right in there with his right wing soul mates, hammering in the nails.
In fact, this is what Mark Sanford said about Bill Clinton's affair.
The issue of lying is probably the biggest harm, if you will, to the system of Democratic government, representatives government, because it undermines trust. And if you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.
In the future, holier-than-thou Republicans might want to be careful before throwing stones.
Somehow, someway, the right wing hypocrites find ways in which to grant themselves forgiveness for their well-meaning, the-devil-made-me-do-it sins.
Oh so now the laughable hypocrites want bygones to be bygones because this is about the "heart." Joe Scarborough is so angry about Sanford's outing that he actually accused one of his own colleagues of having an affair. Joe is one very angry guy who has been having on the air altercations with his more liberal colleagues on MSNBC lately. It must be hell to belong to a Party that no one takes seriously anymore.
Jon Stewart pretty much nailed Sanford last night when he said.
"Oh, marital infidelity, you're just another run of the mill human being whose simple moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is only marred by the complexities of their own life. Well just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis.
So, we've been hearing a lot of chatter on cable TV this week about a Fox News/GOP Tea Party Revolution. Fox News and the right wing fringe of the GOP have obviously gone completely bat bleep crazy over something. They are screaming day in and day about something. I am not sure what it is at this point. I've heard rants like "taxation without representation."
Huh? As I've mentioned before, we had an election recently that did not require lawsuits or recounts. This week President Obama has a 66% approval rating. The Democratic Party is at 51% while the Republican Party has a 26% approval rating. A majority of Independents and some moderate Republicans support President Obama's agenda.
So why is there so noise spewing from the right? Is this tea party thing merely a childish tantrum thrown by a bunch of sore losers and clowns?
Let's explore a few events of this past week to try to find an answer.
Oh what a stunning surprise. The architects of trickle down baloney and black magic misery give the President a failing grade. The liars ignored the fact that their grading is based on a discredited Wall Street Journal Survey.
These very same go-to bitches for the sound, solid and endless profit spewing machines of Enron, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG and the Bank of America actually believe they can credibly weigh in on President Obama.
That alternative universe of theirs must have become an insane asylum during the W. years.
And the gates of the asylum swung open this week when the looney tunes marched out in full lock step support of its collective whackonomics.
Check out the right wing looney tunes shows over at Daily Kos.
These morons unashamedly got it wrong for over a decade. Why on earth would they get it right today? The same twisted and failed ideologies continue to underpin their whackonomic make believe.
Well, folks, another one of our Republican leaders in Washington has mortified the living daylights out of us. Again. This time John Culberson wins the Pendejos of the Day Award for mind numbing stupidity and childishness.
Yesterday Culberson threw a temper tantrum on national TV calling Nancy Pelosi a "Marie Antoinette" who had insisted upon riding through the poverty stricken streets of Paris in the finest and most expensive carriages while people starved.
For the record, the Pentagon approved military, private aircraft for House Speakers after 9/11.
Culberson, by the way, inserted $63.6 million for pork spending in the stimulus budget he vehmently rails against.
A photo-blogger over at DK posted a series of stunning photos of a recently erected tent city near his hometown of Sacramento California. Those residing in the tent city had lost their homes to foreclosure. The diarist, "Marc in CA" also included photos from the "Hoovervilles" of the Great Depression era of the 1930' and entitled his piece Bushvilles: The New Hoovervilles, rapidly expanding.
It's a special kind of stupid for a multinational corporation to be so stung by a comedian's commentary that they devote multiple platforms to deriding him.
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
Robert Pallitto, a professor of political science at the University of Texas - El Paso, will be a guest Tuesday night on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."
Pallitto co-wrote "Presidential Secrecy and the Law," with Bill Weaver, another UTEP professor. Pallitto, a trial lawyer, joined the UTEP faculty in 2002.
And if you think that was just a bad joke, this guy was also caught with literature calling for ?Death to Demagogues? and making references to Alan Berg, a Jewish talk radio host murdered by white supremacists.
Castagana also sent similar threats to Nancy Pelosi, Jon Stewart, and David Letterman among many others. Because after all, truthful reports, comedians and the first woman Speaker are the real source of problems underming America.
There will always be nutcases like Castagana but what empowers them is the hateful and divisive policies and speech of the GOP and reichtwing personalities like Michelle Malkin, Coulter, Hannity, O'Lielly, and Rush Limbaugh.
These people hiss and encourage the insanity and paranoia in America - all for their own greed. When they incite their listeners to hate Americans, they break the social fabric and sense of deceny that binds Americans together.
And creates a prosperous, hopeful America.
If convicted, it will be the Castaganas of the world doing time, but the Limbaughs and Coulters inciting them should be held accountable as well.
Any one with any sense of shame would just basically hide after screwing up as bad as Bush did during Katrina. Of course, we know that Bush doesn't have any shame.
His incometent and callous initial reaction to Katrina & the NOLA levee break notwithstanding, it was Bush's treatment of Katrina as a publicity opportunity during the cleanup that really give people an idea of just how heartless he is.
In case you forgot how Bush grounded firefighters who were ready to rescue endangered NOLA residents just so that he could have his photo op, then please remind yourself with A Bush Photo Essay of 9/11 and Katrina.
You know who else has no shame? This guy.
No. Not Jon Stewart.
The other guy - a Mr. Rockey Vaccarella, a supposed Katrina "survivor", who bravely travelled to the White House in a Cindy Sheehan type form of protest to demand an audience with Bush.
Yes! Bush is going to get his butt handed to him by a man who was there and saw just how badly Bush & the Feds performed! Yeah - go get him, Rockey!
Rockey! Rockey! Rock--eeeeeeeeeeeee?
Um, not quite.
Turns out Rockey is a hardline Republican and former GOP candidate! And in a carefully scripted press conference, Rockey told a gushing, giggling George Bush that NOLA would be great if Bush had 4 more years!
God. It wasn't enough that you guys completely screwed up with Katrina (& Rita btw), but now you want to re-write history and make it some pep rally? Like I said, these guys have no shame.
Carlson Tucker criticized Stewart on not grilling candidates more on his show The Daily Show - because apparantly we must now rely on The Comedy Network for tough political analysis.
Jon had the classic comeback:
Um, dude, my show is preceded by talking puppets.
The audience - Tucker's audience - burst out laughing & it shut Tucker up. Stewart went on to remind Tucker (& Paul Begula who stayed quiet to avoid the crossfire) that it was CNN & Faux & other "real" news channels whose job and mission statement it was to hold our public officials accountable.
I really enjoy the "phony news shows" on Comedy Central. I've been watching John Stewart for a couple years and when Stephen Colbert spun off with his Colbert report I really appreciated the nightly bitch slap he represented to the "Wing Nut News" broadcasts and the Unfair and Unbalanced Nitwits like O'Reilly and Hannity.
