Fascinoma

The GOP is above all the party of the White Whiners. We have now reached a state where white Americans are so spoiled, so thoroughly convinced of their own entitlement to absolutely everything that (as I've said before) they think they're entitled to victim status too, despite the many ways the system values them over all others.

Indicative is the case of Joe Stack, a guy with a house, a pilot's license and a private plane who became murderously obsessed with the raw deal life and the evil Government had given him. So he staged his own little 9/11, Texas-style, which is to say, in miniature. He did manage to kill one innocent soul and injure some others and do millions of dollars worth of damage. But don't call him a terrorist. No siree. There are no white terrorists apparently.

Steve King, a brownshirt from Iowa (Whatever happend to Iowa which used to be civilized?) seems to think that Stack's actions were completely understandable. After all, King whines, being audited tantamount to torture:

KING: I don’t know if his grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. …

So much for land of the brave.

If Jonathan Swift were to be reincarnated as an evolutionary psychologist he might have written something like this astonishing, mordantly funny novella-in-PowerPoint.

Dealing in tropes already covered by Alien, Blade Runner, and a few other classics, it dovetails quite nicely with my own dim view of the contemporary corporation as Golem, as conscienceless predatory entity.

Back before I came to the Ministry of Elegance, I worked the other side of the street, the Industry of Dreck, living hand to mouth and working in various capacities in Hollywood. There, during the 2004 election I volunteered to work for Howard Dean's ill-starred campaign when it was young and hopeful and full of possibilities. I soon found out that far too many of his people were veteran, mainstream Democratic operatives --- which is to say they were featherbedding whiners far more interested in impressing you with how busy and important they were than in, say, actually winning elections. So, I didn't get to do too much work, but I did get to sip some chablis and nibble some brie among the fabled West Coast effete and elite. Very fun. I can report that Laura Dern is very nice and ethererally beautiful close-up. Ed Begley Junior, not so beautiful, but nice. Ditto Rob Reiner.

Anyway, this fellow over at Firedoglake is trying to get Howard dean to run again, in a primary against Obama. I am all down with it. I will write checks to it and ring doorbells for it.

Some people will say that this will ensure a Republican victory, to which I say, A. that is all but assured now, and /or B. not if done correctly.

At this point it may help to remember, with respect to a second term for the First Jellyfish: Chamberlain may have been better than Hitler, that didn't make him the man for the job.

I stole this image from Harper's, the best magazine in America, with a slightly less-best website.

Now, back in the golden days of my youth in Dixie, I well remember seeing "Whites Only" signs and blacks-only schools (always the most dilapadated in the district). Once when I myself was in "high" school, my friends and I decided to go out to the big Klan rally and and toke up on the little hill overlooking the festivites. It's hard to recall what we felt as we watched the big cross go up in orange flames. Certainly we knew that, even by the benighted standards of Newport News, the folks down there at the rally were pathetic assholes and losers, but dangerous in a group. This I can say however: when I see the Tea Partiers I get the exact same vibe. Not surprisingly, the GOP is on its knees for these people -- a logical extension of the Southern Plan.

Photo courtesy Mother Jones: there's a whole photo-essay. I recommend.

It certainly has been a fun time here in the Snow Capitol of America this winter. Our record snow totals have been hailed by assholes everywhere as proof that Global Warming is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore. Meanwhile they completely ignore the fact that the winter wonderlands of British Columbia, normally snowy in the extreme, haven’t had enough snow for the upcoming Olympics. This illustrates perfectly the idiot’s capacity for ignoring facts that conflict with his bigotry.

I was locked out of the Ministry for about a week and forced to watch more cable TV than is good for one and, as antidote do a lot of writing and go to Irish bars in my ‘hood. One thing that occurred to me, in passing, while listening to Newt and Mitch and Boehner and Palin on the MSM Vomitoscope was this: in the early 20th Century a lot of basically decent, if not especially free or freethinking people, belonged to the KKK, and to the extent that they were decent, later came to be ashamed of that affiliation. Something similar should be afoot with the GOP, which basically resurrected the Klan’s zombie worldview when Ron Reagan went down to Philadelphia Mississippi and intoned “states’ rights” three times over the graves of the civil-rights workers buried there. He continued giving said zombie mouth to mouth (or perhaps fellatio) with his Welfare Queen bullshit until Poppy Bush took over with the Willie Horton ads and of course the nomination of Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, perhaps the happiest day of the 80’s for Satan.

Of course, the racism is just a small fraction of the GOP’s overall despicability, there is also the unseemly eagerness to punish, torture, attack, disenfranchise and divide people for fun and profit – and much, much more. Not least among their offenses is their hatred of any health care reform and their torpedoing it with the coded claimes that its benefits will go disproportianelty to brown people. Alas, this works very wel in the Home of the Brave. Anyway, it just happens to be on my mind right now, thanks to all this whiteness going on lately.

Illustration: snowflake among the Lilliputian climate-change deniers.

Let's see now: the wave of cash thrown at Wall Street by the government las year has been paid out, pissed away or otherwise absconded with, so all boats are sinking with the receding time (at least some Cassandras say so). And yet millionaire TV-douchebag John Stossel offers this brainfart on the economy:

Q: How has the Wall Street crash affected you?

JS: Its biggest effect is to cause me to spend more time defending free markets. Financially, not so much. I had hedged by investing in a gold fund.

Free markets: I submit to thinking human beings this proposition: the free market is an article of faith rather like the Holy Trinity, the Transubstantiation of the Host or the Infallibilityof the Holy Father. It doesn't mean anything -- which makes it ever so much more useful as pretext, rallying cry and alibi.

As the noted philosopher S. Wonder says: When you believe in things that you don't understand, people suffer. Superstition's not the way.