Sunday, September 30, 2012

'Both Sides,' My Royal American Eyeball


By Dan Hagen
I am so tired of hearing about these remarkably silent “reasonable conservatives” from the head-in-the-sand “both-sides-are-always-at-fault” crowd.
Show me. Produce even one.
The “reasonable conservative” is a species as dead as the dodo. What we have left are what we saw at the GOP presidential debates — audiences that cheered wildly for poor people to die in agony without health care, for child labor and for executions.
American conservatism is dead. It’s fascism that’s fashionable now.
“If the Tea Partiers say the earth is flat — and they do — and the Democrats say the earth is a sphere, then the media would report that the earth has a ‘shape crisis,’” noted Brian Moench. Furthermore, both sides would be portrayed as equally intransigent, equally at fault and which shape was actually correct would be irrelevant to the media.
“Next, when the Tea Partiers announce that unless we all agree that not only is the earth flat, but the Democrats are allowing it to hurtle into the sun, the media will ignore whether that is indeed happening and ask the Democrats if they are going to do what's necessary to prevent it. Finally, when the Tea Partiers hold their breath and turn blue and the Democrats concede that the earth is flat and offer the Tea Party our lunch money if they promise not to let it hurtle into the sun, the media reports an historic, bipartisan and ‘balanced’ agreement that, thank God, averts disaster.”
Driftglass summed things up well: “Sit down with the average, ‘independent’ voter and, once you cut through all the snuffling over how aw-aw-awful everyone is, you will get down to their real, core problem. They're terrified.
“They're terrified that they might actually be forced to take a side.  Might actually have to tell a neighbor they're full of shit.  Might actually have to tell Grandpa to shut the fuck up already about scary Negroes and uppity women and ‘illegals’ and all the rest of the bogeymen that Hate Radio and Fox News and wingnut email pumps into his skull around the clock.
“And since Grandpa is obviously never going to shut the fuck up, the only way Mr. and Mrs. Independent Voter can reconcile the awful realities that besiege them on every side with their deep desire to never get involved or take a side on any subject of any importance is to believe with all their heart... 
“They need to believe both sides are equally wrong in equal amounts about everything because if this is not so, then history will not record their continued, obsessive neutrality as wise or thoughtful, but instead mark them forever as dupes and cowards: lazy, gutless AWOLers who stood by and did nothing but bitch about Both Sides while their country was torn to bits by fascists and maniacs.”
No, my dear friends, both sides DO NOT ask who is going to shoot the president of the United States. Both sides DO NOT have public officials call for gunning down American citizens in the streets. Both sides DO NOT show up at public meetings about health care armed with guns and carrying signs about refreshing the tree of liberty with somebody else’s blood. Both sides DO NOT murder doctors at abortion clinics. Both sides DO NOT go to Unitarian churches to hunt some political opponents to slaughter. Both sides DO NOT have TV news pundits who broadcast their hatred of political opponents by laughing at the idea of their assassination. Both sides DO NOT say blacks were better off as slaves, and women were better off without the vote.
The right wing side alone does those things, and they need to ask themselves why they’re the ones huddled in that smelly corner with all those murderous lunatics.

If So, You're Wrong

This should be pretty damn obvious, but it so often isn't.

Don't Try Not to Smile

You'll crack your face.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

How Mittens Learned His Lesson at Last


By Dan Hagen
Once, long ago, a boy named Willard Mitt Romney was raised in an insular, dogma-bound church that worshipped rich, white, male privilege. That made him think he was special.
That boy grew up to make a killing in the insular, greed-bound field of private equity capital — an industry that manufactured nothing, but congratulated itself for butchering the jobs of Americans and then feasting upon them. Yum, yum. And that made him think he was very special indeed.
He knew other people didn’t count, not really. He knew he could do whatever he wanted to other people, with no consequence to himself. He knew he was born to rule those other people, and was surprised that they could fail to see something so glaringly obvious. Those people must be awfully stupid and weak, he thought.
Then he ran for president of the United States, and learned he wasn’t special at all. Just a mean prick.

Friday, September 28, 2012

A Splash of Serotonin

Just looking at this photo makes me breathe easier. And it's better than prayer, by the way.

What's Wrong With Fox News: Everybody Else Is Lying Edition

Fox News recoils from the truth the way Dracula hisses when he's exposed to holy water.
‎"What they don't say is that the Fox News polls are showing almost exactly the same thing," Wolf Blitzer said. "You don't hear them complaining about the Fox News polls. They're complaining about the others. So there's an imbalance there." 

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Immortals in the Rain

This photo was taken on January 28, 2012, in New Springville, New York, NY, by clyde7995

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

These Days, Freedom Is In Fact Just a Word


The drone-flying, spy-camming, internet-bugged American police state can know when you have a bowel movement, but the voters can't know what a presidential candidate pays — or doesn't pay — in income taxes. What the hell is wrong with this country?
For example, see this, this, and this.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Apparently Mitt Fell Asleep Before the End of "Goldfinger'

As Driftglass says: "I cannot imagine he missed a movie about a man who plans to increase his personal wealth by a factor of at least 10 by nuking Fort Knox.  In fact, in Willard's circles they have technical term for people who think like Goldfinger.  They call them "Fucking awesome!" 
An airhead who doesn't understand airplanes

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

What's Wrong With Fox News: Prankster Edition

The audience for Fox News doesn't want news, or even facts. They want only to be told that what they and their dim-witted great-grandparents believed is true, and nothing else. Fox News lies about facts to promote its propaganda, a practice that instills a general contempt for facts in the whole organization. They are not only dishonest. They are ridiculously sloppy.
And here's an excellent example.

The Dancing Horse Meets the Dog on the Roof


By Dan Hagen
Say, Mormonism isn't one of those religions where they set themselves on fire, is it?
Romney’s self-immolating comments about the contempt he has for half the country merely confirm what we all already know — that Republicans regard all non-billionaire Americans as parasites and trash who deserve nothing. It’s part of the unconscious self-loathing that now afflicts and deranges the party.
Even though Romney apparently believes what he said this time — quite a rarity there — it’s still false. Nurses, teachers and firefighters actually pay a higher tax rate than some billionaires. Republicans never mention the fact that many Americans — including students, the elderly or the unemployed — do not pay income taxes BECAUSE THEY HAVE ALMOST NO INCOME, but that they nevertheless PAY MANY OTHER TAXES. They cough it up out of their meager incomes through payroll, state and sales taxes. The richest Americans are paying FAR less than they were a generation ago, leaving the United States with one of the largest and most obscene income gaps in the entire industrialized world.
Actually, the real irresponsible parasite in the crowd is the guy who sticks taxpayers with the bill for his dancing horse.
As the ever-excellent Charles Pierce put it: "To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is.
"There is himself, Willard Romney, and his perfect family, and his perfect life, and there is The Help, and The Help gets drunk on the job, and prunes the shrubbery badly, and pockets the silverware, and makes off with the 
odd can of salmon out of the pantry.
"He is who he is today because his breeding and his genes and his god have arranged him to be through a serious of immutable laws against which only a fool or The Help would presume to argue. He is what his golden life has made him to be, and his golden life was only the bare minimum of that to which god and nature entitled him. To ask him to doubt any of this is to ask him to doubt gravity or the movement of the tides...."
In order to repair their rapidly deteriorating images, I think it might help if Mitt and Ann Romney wrote a nice children’s book together. They could call it “Wee Little Willard and his 101 Grandmas.”
Their second children's book could be, "The Dancing Horse Meets the Dog on the Roof."