That, of course, was Newt Gingrich at Wednesday’s Republican debate in Mesa, AZ., invoking the apocalyptic tone of the Bush administration just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What Gingrich either forgot, or never knew in the first place, is that the “madman” Ahmadinejad doesn’t hold much power in Iran, certainly not the power to launch imaginary nukes against Israel and the West. That power belongs to  ”Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei . But let’s not ruin all the saber rattling fun with facts. These jokers are on a roll.

Mitt Romney, last fall, before an AIPAC  convention, refered to Iran as “unalloyed evil” and at each presidential debate has lied about the Obama administration’s approach to Iran.

Obama “should have placed crippling sanctions against Iran. He did not,” Romney said during the CNN debate Wednesday night.

The Obama administration, of course, has already put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed on the Iranian government, including new measures  targeting, for the first time, Iran’s entire financial system. Obama on  New Year’s Eve also signed into law a raft of tough new sanctions that  would penalize any foreign financial institution that does  business with  the Central Bank of Iran. As part of broader U.S.-led efforts to exert pressure on  Iran, the  European Union has agreed to ban new contracts to buy,  transport or import Iranian crude oil.

And Rick Santorum carved out his evil empire scenario years ago during his failed senate re-election bid in 1996: “Ahmadinejad, like Hitler and Mussolini, intends to conquer the world,” Santorum said in an apocalyptic tone that suggested that Iran (population: 70 million) was size of China. “This is not a hidden agenda. His goal is to establish a caliphate. Like Khrushchev, he wants a nuclear arsenal, and he is building the same sort of frightening global alliances that enabled the Soviet Union to put missiles near us.”

And this from Santorum a couple years back at an address before students at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida: “This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country: the United States of America.” There you have it, Hitler, Mussolini, and Satan all vying for a piece of Ahmadinejad’s soul.

I guess one of the freakiest aspect to all this war mongering is that these kooks are really not that far to the right of Obama, who continues to remind us that all options are on the table, apparently including a military invasion, when it comes to Iran. The freakiest aspect is that, once again, Ron Paul appears to be the only adult in the room.

Sure, ex-senator Rick was fun for a while, the shithead next door who’s repressive social believes were so extreme that even the Italian Catholics of South Philly kicked him to the senatorial curb in 2006. A few months ago, Santorum was just another jester piling into the Republican clown wagon, elbowing for position against light-weight buffoons like Herman Cain and Donald Trump.

But then the unlikely happened: Ricky became the Repug front runner and the media cognoscenti were certain that the intensified scrutiny would bury Santorum under five tons of Pennsylvania slag. Whoops! What actually happened was that the more Santorum flung his verbal feces around, the higher he rose in the polls. Apparently, his brand of coercive bible-thumping and repressive misogynism has been deemed by the perpetually angry Republican primary voters as just the right antidote to the evil Obama.

Emboldened, Santorum ratcheted up the rhetoric. He oppurtunistically siezed upon the recently manufactured birth control controversy, declaring that Obama is waging a war against religion and suggesting that birth control wouldn’t even be neccesary if American women just kept their damn legs together. More recently, Santorum further burnished his dipshit credentials with some convoluted gibberish that Obama blasphemes the bible by putting “the earth above man”. In Ricky’s world,  land rendered barren by hydraulic fracturing is all part of God’s plan.

As more and more christo-fascists scuttled out from under the tea party woodpile to show their support, Santorum and his acolytes stepped up the attacks on Obama’s otherness by declaring that the president is pursuing a “radical Islamic policies“, then quickly playing the “misspoke” game. This kind of weasly chickenshit is endemic to Santorum’s campaign. He’s willing to say anything, no matter how extreme, repugnant, or ignorant,  but is never willing to own it. In his world, Santorum is constantly being misquoted and misinterpreted by the liberal media who are out to play “gotcha” journalism.

In a sane world, ticks like Santorum would be engorging themselves out in the far reaches of the political forest, not in your backyard. And whether or not he gets the nomination is largely irrelavent. Santorum is merely a vector. The disease of intolerance he is spreading will  linger long after after he has scurried back under his rock.

One of the more amusing things about the Occupy movement is  the fact that so many clever righties claim that they just don’t get it; what,after all,  do these people really want? Oh sure, conservative commentators and pols are completely up-to-speed on the amount of poop generated by the protesters, in fact they’re nearly obsessed by it. And clever righties are certainly not strangers to speculation. They’ve speculated wildly and absurdly about President Obama’s birth records, the imposition of Sharia law in South Carolina court rooms, the deleterious effect of increased taxes on the “job creators”, and the conspiratorial nature of climate change science. But they just can’t get their heads around what the Occupy protesters really want.

Part of the blame goes to the mainstream media and their penchant for seeking out the most exotic or disturbing characters at the various protests, usually the guy with the rainbow hair, pounding on conga drums, or the topless chick.

And the list of grievances by the protesters is pretty fluid, expanding by the day. But to suggest that the movement is vague or inchoate or incomprehensible about it’s demands is ridiculous. Occupy began as a protest against  out-of-control investment banks who’s fraudulent and reckless practices brought the economy to its knees in 2008. The protesters have also taken on the mortgage industry for the heartless, inflexible, dishonest, and possibly illegal way they have thrown millions of Americans out of their homes, in many cases while pretending to be re-negotiating delinquent loans..  And since the beginning, Occupy has been about the  corrupting influence of money in the political process, about joblessness, about the exorbitant cost of higher education, and about the exportation of jobs and capital overseas.

Don’t you love it when right wingers pretend to not  “get it”,  whether the no-brainer is global warming, evolution, or public schools’ attempts to provide nutritious alternatives to frozen pizza. It’s their default position when confronting something that makes sense to everyone else,  but doesn’t conform with their propaganda.

So imagine my surprise when I read this in the San Francisco Chronicle about this weeks’ attempt by Occupy Oakland’s  to shut down the port of Oakland:

“To the folks who argue that an action against the corporations hurts the  workers, what are they doing to help the workers?” Riley said. “We’re building  working-class unity. The only way you’re going to loosen that grip is by the 99  percent realizing that the collective withholding of labor is the only way to  change the wealth relationship.”

Huh?

Those would be the words of Boots Riley( not Dog House Riley), a spokesman for Occupy Oakland, explaining why it was important to make a statement at the port monday morning, even if it meant that a lot of guys, mostly non-union truckers,  would be fucked over financially if the protest succeeded. The International Longshoreman, or many of them, simply took the day off, with pay of course.

And sure enough the protest did succeed, especially if success is measured by hurting the people you’re purporting to help, while achieving no other discernible goals. The reaction among the port workers was more confusion than anger, and a lot of 99%-ers were perplexed by the provocation. Even some Occupy protesters didn’t see the point. “The 99 percent is nonconfrontational,” said Ellis Goldberg, a marketer who has  organized Occupy protests in Dublin and San Ramon. “You don’t use a bat to get  your point across, and this port action is a bat. It’s going to hurt innocents -  in this case, port workers and truckers.”

I believe the Occupy movement is at an historic juncture. It needs focus and direction more than ever, and a healthy dose of good p.r. wouldn’t hurt either. Confusion by the willfully ignorant is one thing, but more confusion by the 99%-ers as to Occupy’s ultimate goals could be something else entirely.

Meme:  ”an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”

Trope: “a word, phrase, expression, or image that is used in a
figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect”

With great reluctance, tinged with shame, do I admit to having watched each Republican presidential debate this fall. At first it was out of mere curiosity. ( Will any of these jokers say anything even slightly original or thoughtful?) Then it was for the comic effect. (999!) Then, ultimately, is was just morbid curiosity. (Jesus! “Lethal injection” is an applause line?)

The curiosity phase of my compulsion was satisfied within the first 15 minutes of the first debate; no, none of the jokers was going to say anything original or thoughtful. Obama-care, blah, blah, blah, Israel, blah, blah, blah, guns, blah, blah, blah, Job creators, blah, blah, blah, God, blah, blah, blah, etc.

The humor segment was short lived as well. “999″ stopped being funny the moment that I realized that the bombastic black dude really meant that shit, and that he would base his presidential campaign on some half-assed plan that would, if actually implemented, amount to the most massive shift of the federal tax burden from rich to poor in American history. Rick Perry was funny for a while, too, then he was merely pathetic. Too bad that  the one thing he said that made any sense and showed even a hint of humanity during the course of the debates, a rare sentiment that wasn’t a dog whistle or a rebel yell, a statement to the effect that it would be heartless to refuse to educate immigrant kids in the state of Texas, was what ultimately destroyed Perry’s campaign. But then again, that’s the Republican Party for you: cheer capital punishment, boo gay soldiers, applaud the idea that uninsured sick people should be left to die, and generally just act like a bunch of assholes.

Morbid curiosity set in around the 4th or 5th debate. The lame-o, jaw dropping questions, the inane responses, the petty arguments, the ghastly awkward moments, and the sheer stupidity of the candidate’s policy positions, all conspiring to create a train wreck atmosphere that was difficult to ignore. And the weird thing is that it wasn’t only sick fucks like me that were watching these horror shows; they were ratings winners! Lots of people were taking this stuff to heart, as if there was some serious intellectual debate as to whether the pizza guy, the cowboy, the bug-eyed lady, the hair cut, or the crazy uncle would make for good presidential timber.

But now to rescue the world from this circus comes the sanctimonious,  two-faced Newt Gingrich, the pseudo-intellectual “brains” of the tea party movement, as oily and unctuous a politician as to ever slither along the banks of the Potomac. The chattering class would have you believe that Gingrich is some kind of big thinker with personality issues, the reality is that Gingrich is a narrow-minded opportunist and a self-absorbed prick.

I’m no longer curious, morbidly or otherwise, about the perverse reality that would prevail should the likes of Newt Gingrich assume the presidency. (Or Cain, or Perry, or Romney, for that matter.) Curiosity, in fact, would likely be outlawed under their regime. It interferes with dogma. It questions authority. Curiosity goes hand-in-hand with science. Curiosity leads to understanding, then to empathy, then to sympathy, never good when the rats are racing, and the dogs are looking for their next meal.

Attentive citizens probably don’t need to be reminded that about 50% of Americans would love to have an American theocracy every bit as retrictive of individual liberties as in those hated Middle Eastern countries. The reason they can’t quite pull it off is because 1) The Constitution inconveniently gets in the way, and 2) the religious nuts are just too silly to be taken seriously. Latest example is the hullabaloo over President Obama’s Thanksgiving address, wherein the prez forgot to include the word “God”.

 First of all, somebody actually listens to Presidential holiday addresses? And when they do, do they listen with a critical ear, waiting to catch the slightest disconsonance so they can run to their blogs or tweets or Facebook page to get all pissy and moany about it? Sadly, the answer is ‘yes’.

I, for one, am friggin’ ELATED that Obama didn’t mention God, and furthermore I hope he did it intentionally just to get a reaction. (But that wouldn’t be Obama, who’s as much about God as any president in recent memory.) Obama did remind us to be thankful for this, grateful for that, and especially thankful  for all the troops overseas for protecting our freedom, meaning our oil supply. You’d think that would be good enough for the righties, but it wasn’t. And that’s because there is absolutely nothing to big or too small that this bunch won’t complain about if it originates with Obama.

I await the day when a president has the balls to entirely eliminate all the ceremonial falderal, gimcrack, and gew-gaw that traditionally goes with the office and that includes that stupid pardoning-the-turkey stunt. And why, really, do we need the President to remind us what we should be thankful for? Is there an assumption that many of us really want to celebrate Thanksgiving but need some imperial consultant to spin to show us how? And as far as the troops are concerned, I’ll be thankful when they’re all safely home and not until.

Also churning around out there in far cyberspace was another nutty religious Thanksgiving  trope, that Butterball turkeys were secretly helping to usher in sharia law. As it turns out, a handful of Muslim haters, led by Pamela “Ground Zero Mosque” Geller, poked around and discovered that Butterball turkeys were slaughtered according to the traditions of halal, the Muslim version of kosher. Actually, not a lot of intensive investigation was required for this blockbuster because it says “halal” right on the Butterball label. Do you think Geller and her ilk actually care by which method a turkey’s throat is slit, or do you think that they merely fly into a tizzy over anything Muslim? Talk about having too much time on your hands.

I hope next year Obama reminds us to be thankful that we ‘re not all idiots.

It’s about time, at least a month or more. But, ya know, thinking is so much easier than actually doing. So I’ve been mind-bloggin’ recently. And I have no particular expertise in hurricanes, other than non-chalanting a dozen or so in North Carolina and Florida over the past few decades. That said:

Let’s get down to cases. This Republican field of “presidential”  candidates is worth noting: they are blithering shit-heads, everyone of them. That the Media, including the old-guard media, takes these losers seriously is borderline criminal.

Rick Perry? Are you fucking kidding me? I warned, on this website, back in November, 2010, that this cracker was comin’. He reminds me of the truck drivin’ ”Edgar” (Vincent D’Onofrio) in “Men in Black”, a  cretinous “bug” dressed up like a cowboy. This guy is going buck-wild on the American people, and a non-surprising number of dumb-nuts are dropping their drawers for this bullshit artist. Let’s face it: this country routinely loves to get corn holed by some big talkin’ Texan, or some other variation on the farm boy image. Remember the Gipper? W? Bubba?

But this Republican cluster-fuck is way more creepy than anything those war-mongering , globalist whores could have ever imagined. The crude, paleolithic snorts emanating from the mouths of Perry, Bachmann, and Santorum rightfully should disqualify them from the human race, much less a presidential primary. And the tin horn phony Romney looks like he’s overdosed on adderall trying to out-bullshit the bullshitters.

But the one thing these dickweeds have in common is their fidelity to a fuck-the-middle-class agenda. It is true,  as Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once famously said,  that obscenity can’t be defined, but you’ll know it when when you see it. And, according to that standard,  the Repug’s deep-throating of tax-evading multi-national corporations is obscene. Equally obscene is the  plume of societal ignorance that allows the dark forces of discompassionate greed to be confused with the intent of the founding fathers or the Constitution. This country deserves a major slap in the face for even opening the door to this scandolous mob of trick-or-treater’s.

At this major crossroads in American history, I’d like to say that it’s high time for Obama and the Democratic party stand up to this villainous rape of the middle class, but unless The People show that they finally give a shit, I don’t hold out much hope.

The stock market, sucked downstream for the past week, finally plunged  over Vernal Falls today and the finance “experts” on CNBC are still searching for the body. Ya gotta love those guys. Their favorite phrase, when calamity strikes, is ”it was predictable” ,although none of them ever manage to predict it.

But in some ways, this shit storm was predictable. America’s GDP  is down, unemployment hovers around 10% (with another 5% of Americans simply having given up ever finding work again), Europe teeters on the brink of insolvency, and last month’s budget debacle made Washington the world’s laughing stock. And investors are a twitchy bunch with a herd mentality who react emotionally when things begin to slide.

But what was amazing about today’s market crash was how much it rapidly accelerated during this morning’s address by President Obama. Ostensibly the prez was attempting to assure the quivering masses that everything was gonna be just dandy, that Standard and Poors’ downgrade of the U.S. credit-worthiness was unfair, and, as Obama put it, “We are still a Triple A country!” That was about the point that traders began to bale big time and red barf covered the stock screen. It was probably not reassuring that Obama’s speech came 45 minutes after the announced time, but there’s a bit of history behind this: every time Obama (or Tim Geithner) speaks during business hours, the market begins to tank. Obama is like the William H. Macy character in the movie “The Cooler”,  the guy employed by the Vegas casino because he brings such bad luck to other gamblers. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how hard Obama attempts to appease them, the business community flat-out dislikes him, doesn’t trust him, and can’t wait for him to go away. 

Today’s speech was about as inspiring as plate full of  fermented trout, but it’s not to late. The tycoon community will never look to Obama for leadership, but the rest of the country is. Obama needs to double down, forget all about those phony “green jobs” he’s always braying about, come up with a grand plan to save the economy, and put it all on the line. I personally believe that at this point he has nothing to lose. The plan should include another stimulus of government spending, but this time the money goes to the people, not the banks. Remember all those “shovel-ready” projects that were going to provide opportunity for blue collar guys? They disappeared faster than Bush’s WMD’s. But with another infusion of fed cash, we could re-animate all those infrastructure projects the President talked about so many moons ago. This country’s collective transportation infrastructure is pure crap, with roads, streets, dams, harbors, and bridges in worse shape than most of us can remember. And it wouldn’t be just construction workers back on the tax rolls, it’s also engineers, and concrete men, and lumber men, and the guy who drives the taco truck to the construction site. And who knows, if these people had a little coin in their pockets, maybe even the aisles at Best Buy, or Gap, or Sears wouldn’t be so empty and desolate.

Now I know what you’re thinking, that a tea party controlled congress would never go along with another stimulus bill, especially one that would likely require new taxes. Well, fuck ‘em. With less than 60% of Americans under the age of 65 gainfully employed, with the stock market in free-fall, with the housing market in the toilet, and with Main Street in a state of disrepair, what the hell is Rand Paul gonna say, let’s not kick the can down the road? Well, the cans have all been scavenged from the dumpster and the road is so full of pot holes that the can wouldn’t get very far anyway.

Of course Congress would dig its heels in and fight Obama at every level. And it’s a fight he might likely lose. But, frankly, like the guy in “The Cooler”, it might be the President’s last chance at the craps table. And it might also be the last chance for the American middle class.

Anyone happen to catch this news blurb today, buried in the back of the newspaper? If not, here’s the gist of it: newly minted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is belly-aching about any possible defense cuts that might come from that bullshit “Super Congress Committee”.

“When you look at national security, I think you have to look at the broader context. It’s not just dependent on the defense budget. It is also dependent on the quality of life in this country.”

Wtf? I honestly have no idea what that means or why it’s relevant to potential defense budget cuts, but it’s clear that this administration is talking out of both sides of its mouth. In case you missed the details, the 8 (4 Repugs and 4 Dims) member “super congress” will attempt to reach a compromise as to where to trim another $trillion or so from the fed budget. If they can’t agree, and they won’t (this thing was set up to fail), then $500 billion will automatically be cut from defense. Panetta actually refers to this as the “doomsday mechanism”. Keep in mind, this is $500 billion over ten years, not next year. To put that number in perspective, our ill-conceived wars in the middle east have cost $3.7 trillion over the past decade. So in other words, if the U.S. were to continue its war mongering for another decade, and the defense cuts were automatically triggered, we’d have to do it on a mere $3.2 trillion.

I’ve long suspected that, for whatever reason, the President Obama is just as gung-ho on national security as that douchbag Bush, just without all the strutting  bravado. His perpetuation of Bush’s policies and priorities has been sickening. Gitmo is still open, we still practise “rendition” to more easily torture our captives, and drones are still dropping bombs on Afghan wedding parties. Same ol’ same old. What’s new is that Obama managed to recklessly open up a new front in the “war on terror”, Libya. There’s been some muttering from the left about this trend, but it hasn’t amounted to much. Case in point is the left’s selective myopia concerning David Petraeus, Obama’s selection to head the CIA. Under Bush, Patraeus was a war-mongering scourge, a pariah. Under Obama midas touch, he’s a hero and a statesman.

At the end of the proverbial day,  Panetta and the Joint Chiefs will get their way. The Administration, now allied with the chicken hawks on the right, will insure that the great sacred cow “national security” will continue to suck up our national treasure and the middle class will continue to suck hind tit.

The forces of ignorance, greed, and stupidity, long bubbling just below the surface of American politics, finally erupted this month in a viscous flume of bullshit so dense that it coated everything it touched. The stench will likely linger for years. I speak, of course, of the great budget debate of 2011.

For years, the American political dialogue has been littered with shabby cranks, kooks, know-nothings, and scam artists, shouting over one another on radio talk shows, in letters-to-the-editor, at the end of the bar, and now on internet blogs, each “opinion” more witless than the last, in a cacophonous dim of utter nonsense. The difference now is that the same kooks and know-nothings, admittedly with better haircuts and nicer suits,  have wormed their way into our government.

Much has been written and said in the past several days about “hostage taking” and “ransom”, about how President Obama “capitulated” to the teabaggers in Washington, about spineless Democrats and greed-mongering Republicans, and while mostly accurate, it misses the big picture: We the people put these shitheads in office. They are, whether we’d like to admit it or not, a reflection of us and it’s not a pretty image. Just when did the crazy uncle pry himself away from the primordial ooze, climb the basement stairs, and find himself in a position of power? When we voted for him, or worse yet, when we were too busy to vote for the other guy.

Our national dialogue has been reduced to imbicilic sloganeering, about returning to the gold standard, about “socialism” and “liberty”, about the free marketplace and the founding fathers, about international cabals and conspiracies and “elites” and things that go bump in the night, all annotated with misspelled words crayon-scrawled on a placard. And that placard is clutched in the hands of a man standing in front of a court house screaming his demand to remove Washington from the dollar bill and replace him with a picture of Jesus.

That the tea party is being manipulated by corporate interest is beside the point. That most of us were too busy amusing ourselves and did nothing to stop it before it was too late is the point.

The reality of American society is not our “exceptionalism”, it’s our ignorance, our laziness, and our obliviousness. We all saw this train wreck coming, and while some welcomed it in the name of some moronic ideology, the rest of us merely averted our eyes and hustled quickly from the accident scene for fear of being called as a witness. Shame on us for letting this happen.

Sarah Palin has pizza with Donald Trump. The savior of the Republican Party, some guy named John Huntsman, has secured one vote in Iowa. Mitt Romney sends a navy blazer and a pair of cordovans to a farm in New Hampshire to announce  his candidacy. Fat-assed “tough guy” Chris Christie of New Jersey takes a helicopter  to a high school baseball game. A photo of a congressman’s crotch appears on the nightly news. And the election is still 17 months away?