Fascinoma

So, chickenshit asshole Nancy Pelosi hurt the wittle GOP's feewings so they couldn't vote for the bailout. Or at least that's the narrative that's being operationalized today. Now, if this canard helps flush the cowardly blinking idiot ("Impeachment is off the table") Speaker down the crapper, so much the better. Worst Democratic Speaker Ever. On the other hand, the bailout is, we can say with virtual 100 percent certainty, a similar piece of shit, quite possibly Rove & Grover's poison pill/Trojan Horse meant to deliver the tax & spend Vichycrats to the ash heap of history forever. So what's the rush to pass Prince Bunnypant's version of it?

I messed up a bit recently -- didn't properly calculate the dosage of the adrenochrome/ibogaine/Patron Silver cocktail with which I usually unwind after a hard day at the Ministry of Elegance. As a result my motor functions locked up for a few minutes and I couldn't quite reach the remote, even as, to my horror, Bill O'Reilly came on the TV in the throes of interviewing Obama. Fortunately, I was about "peaking" then so the intermittent, strobing global hallucinations distanced me from the nightmare effect. It was all kind of 'out of body', as if I were watching someone else's nightmare.

One of the few things I remember clearly was Bill-O's savage indignation over Social Security and Obma's proposal to raise taxes on the rich (like Bill himself) to shore up the program. Why --that just struck the Marquess O'Reilly as "socialism" pure and simple, "economic redistribution."

Well now the same crew of ass clowns who brought us the Iraq war, who pissed away a trillion dollars maximizing hatred and ridicule of America, want another trillion-point-one dollars to give away to the banks and other Republican contributors without any accountability whatsoever, as Paul Krugman explains:

It's enough to get one paranoid: voting machines that can be hacked in seconds; GOP schemes to suppress the vote, like this one calling for a massive, last-minute purge of the voter rolls, like this one to deny the vote to those who've been foreclosed, or just make them afraid to got to the polls (especially in largely black districts): the appointment Hans von Spakovsky, noted foe of voters, to the Civil Rights Commission, or the rigging of ballots so as to hide the closely contested Mississippi Senate race from the many black voters who will come out to support Obama, and of course the undeniable bias among all the news corporations towards the billionaire-friendly Republicans. Maybe this last accounts for the fact that though new Democrats are registering at record rates, the polls and news stories all have the Presidential race as a dead heat.

Now if I were really paranoid I'd say we have a harmonic convergence of people who want the race to be close, rather than the massive repudiation of Republicanism that logic and history would seem to dictate. The news people want it because it's good for ratings. Their bosses want it becuase Republicans are good for rich people. And the Republicans want it desperately because if the race seems close going in then people might again stand around passively as those among us who can be Fooled All The Time get their way again, with a little help from many friends at Diebold, "Justice," the Supreme Court et cetera.

But I'm not that paranoid. Stolen elections, that can't happen here. No way.

I saw the flags are at half mast over the Crapitol today and I thought, "Who died?" But then I remembered it was National Pet Goat Day and realized -- American democracy died on or about this day, some years ago. Sigh.

Now if only they'd quit desecrating the corpse. But enough about that. I think I may quit paying attention to politics for awhile, like.... say -- the rest of my natural life. It might just be time. The other night I tossed and turned with fervid nightmares about a McCain presidency. They were way worse than the usual ones about being naked in driver's ed, in an exam I haven't prepped for, watching the generic Love of My Life bone some Eurotrash git, or waiting on an entire dining room for which the kitchen has lost all the orders. Maybe I'll write a trashy novel or sumpn and just... let go.

In the meantime I prefer to remember this day as the birthday of my friend Mark S. in Santa Barbara, a truly great guy. He and I were at the College of Gnawlidge at the same time as Jon Stewart -- only he was John Liebowitz then, a soccer player with a mullet. Mark lived down the hall from him and used to say (irony worthy of Kierkegaard), "I can't stand that guy. He thinks he's funny."

Happy Birthday, brudda! Long may you wave.

Why don't the Dummocrats get it? There are plenty of simple narratives to hang on Sarah Palin and so show McCain up for the judgment-impaired, doddering curmudgeon he clearly is. Sarah Palin is unfit for any public office, unfit for the governorship and clearly not due for promotion.

Imelda: She lines her pockets with taxpayer money. Wouldn't you like to get paind to sleep in your own bed? To make props of your children at public events?

She loves rolling in the earmark trough and then claiming to disdain Washington's handouts.

She's too radical: before she was even sworn in she tried to have her town librarian ban books, and then fired her for refusing to do so.

She's psycho: went on a jihad against her ex-brother-in-law and fired a safety commisioner, and another trooper in the messy spillover of her personal life. She had to be warned by a judge to back off! This is Plamegate and the U.S. Attorney scandal waiting to happen again. Will she bring back Scooter Libby and Abu Gonzales?

She's is a serial liar: she can't open her mouth without telling an obvious and easily disproved lie: Bridge to Nowhere, plane sold on E-Bay, Barack never authored anything, etc. etc. etc.

She's as clueless and ready to spout whatever lies the speechwriters put in her mouth as Bush.

She dragged her knocked up teenage daughter into the national spotlight with utter disregard for the consequences to said daughter.

She wants to have Creationism taught in schools. She believes Adam and Eve disported with the dinosaurs 5000 years ago. She believes in abstinence only sex ed. (So did Bristol.)

Say these simple things often enough and then get back to things like -- Phil Gramm, McCain's chief economic adviser, is the architect of the current mortgage meltdown. It's no skin off Phil's nose - he's rich -- ditto McCain. But how's that working for you?

Finally: McCain is a very old 72. His service to our country has earned him a plush retirement with his heiress wife, rather than an early death from the strain of higher office. Let's give those pleasant years to him and spare ourselves the apocalyptic train-wreck of a Palin Presidency.

As I have long maintained, there is a definite place in even the most elevated discourse for the bluntest four-letter vocabulary. Indeed, often when we Bowdlerize the discourse we distort the meaning of our assertions unto falsity. It becomes like a bad translation. Thus, for instance, if we said that John McCain had called his wife Cindy "bitch" in public, we would wholly conceal the depth of his indiscretion and something very importantly telling about his character. Similarly, when we or our candidates or our journalists refrain from calling a candidate the liar he or she manifestly is, we abet their deceptions, and disserve our fellow citizens. Civility is then chief paving material in the road to Hell.

The news today is so horrific, so nauseating, that I can't bear to think about it much. Instead I'll report on the semi-current and classic cinema --or movies rather. I saw Vicky Christina Barcelona last night. It was quite amusing in the classic movie way -- that is, just enough plot, nice music and lots and lots of eye candy. Besides the delights of Spain it had Scarlett Johannsen, Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, and some pretty good jokes and set pieces. At times it reminded me of Bandidas which The Lobbyist was snickering at the other day as it played again on skCinemax. Both were essentially vehicles for delivering cheesecake. The fair Lobbyist gave up on Bandidas when Penelope and Salma somehow contrived to have a cat fight in the water that seemed straight out of a lite-beer commercial. At least VCB also delivered Javier Bardem, who is always weirdly captivating. Now if we could only get Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek and Naomi Watts and Keira Knightley, and maybe Javier and Benicio del Toro together in a rollicking McLintock! style mud-wrassle, we might really have something.

As I have said before, it doesn't perturb today's Republicans one bit to depart from the truth. Truth is quite literally not a value they recognize anymore. The language they speak, Advertese, does not express truth, any more than musical notation expresses mathematics. It's all about the pitch, the sort of Tastes Great/Less Filling! corporate fiction that lubes the ever-accelerating whirlygig of mass-market capitalism. In its idiom, a siren song like hatred, like heroin's "high thin whistle in the blood," the free market can indeed seem possible, wise and benign, that's why Advertese is the Latin of Fascist orthodoxy.

Karl Rove is the prophet of the GOP's Postmodern mystery religion. He holds, along with millions of his gullible adherents that there really is no such thing as truth. As Joesph Palermo observes, for Rove, ...the individual self (or subject) is an ideological construct, and that there is no "truth" aside from discursive myths society perpetuates and constructs through language and thought.... For Rove, like Foucault, there is no such thing as objective "truth," only assertions mediated through an ever-shifting discourse where the past and the future matter little and are infinitely malleable.

Given all this, it is not surprising that Sarah Palin should ascend to the pinnacle of the cult as Virgin-Mother. Judging from last night's performance she is a virtuoso of pitch, the sort of woman more usually and properly found on the Shopping Channel extolling the virtues of cubic zirconium or ever-keen cutlery. Her choice as VP candidate was apparently made in a nearly complete absence of fact or even rumor. But why bother with research if the apparent truth of fact is, in fact, a mirage in the discourse, a fast-decaying state among the shifting frames of reference? Contrary to her outsider pose, it's abundantly obvious that Palin has been an ardent Christo-fascist since her political infancy, winning her first election on the kind of sentimentalized non-issue distraction dictated by the Gingrich playbook: God, guns, abortion etc. In a way, she's the consummate Republican candidate now, turning the elections quite literally into a beauty pageant. She can't seem to string ten words together without falsehood, and yet apparently million ssee her only for the character she plays on TV. Because she is so slick, and because the discourse is so degraded it's often now nearly impossible to tell noise from signal, Sarah Palin is inmdeed dangerous. She may be the Banshee of Banality, come to take the soul of America off to the WalMart at the End of History, where it will be sold for pennies on the dollar. There are two kinds of people who don't fear and loath Sarah Palin, the ignorant and the Theocrats -- admittedly, these are overlapping subsets.

Of course the Republickers are fighting for their lives, so it's not surprising that they're willing to toss logic, proportion and dignity aside. They know that the Gang of Perjurers might easily be indicted and turned on each and every other should an actual Justice Department occur in the future, and so they have to believe with all their might that Sarah Palin is not an unmitigated disaster, proof positive of John McCain's decline from dolt to dotage. Never mind that every new hour reveals another of her lies, never mind that she's mighty cozy with America-hating secessionists, never mind that she's abused every office she ever held, and never mind that she doesn't believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, accountability for elected officials, the Constitution, evolution, physics, et cetera -- she's a fucking Christian, goddamnit!

I can't decide if it's amusing or appalling to watch the Reich Wingers turn themselves inside out to defend this creature. Don't they realize what complete assholes she's making them look like? It's like an opium dream of the Jerry Spring Show and a Klan convention all somehow mixed up.