My American Hat

“Stand up to the tyrannosaurus appetite of government unions.” – Mitt Romney.

“Ronald Reagan saved America” GOP film on big teevees in St. Paul Exelon arena.

I cannot begin to delineate the fever dream madness of the GOP convention. To listen is to descend into the maelstrom of intellectual chaos, rube-baiting and snake oil.

I keep getting told to take off my Republican or Democratic hat, and put on my American hat.

Gots news for yas, McLame: I never took my American hat off. (Unlike your post-august self).

Here’s my American hat (see “Who Stole Our American Hat?” — Sept 5, 2008 — for details):

Here: Listen. Fred Thompson was a Republican counsel during Watergate, for the minority during the Senate hearings chaired by Sam Ervin. He has a side gig as an actor, and he was a senator from Tennessee for awhile.

Perhaps it’s the last portion that causes him to shamelessly pander to dumbasses, rednecks, rubes and the mentally-challenged:

She is from a small town, with small town values, but that’s not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family.

Some Washington pundits and media big shots are in a frenzy over the selection of a woman who has actually governed rather than just talked a good game on the Sunday talk shows and hit the Washington cocktail circuit. Well, give me a tough Alaskan Governor who has taken on the political establishment in the largest state in the Union — and won — over the beltway business-as-usual crowd any day of the week.

Alaska may be physically the biggest state, but unless Thompson believes that Palin’s political opponents were bears, moose, mosquitos and walruses, Alaska is ranked next-to-last or 49th in the nation in population. This is called … a slimy distortion, or, in the parlance,  a con.

Let’s be clear … the selection of Governor Palin has the other side and their friends in the media in a state of panic. She is a courageous, successful, reformer, who is not afraid to take on the establishment.

Sound like anyone else we know?

She has run a municipality and she has run a state.

And I can say without fear of contradiction that she is the only nominee in the history of either party who knows how to properly field dress a moose … with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt.

She and John McCain are not going to care how much the alligators get irritated when they get to Washington, they’re going to drain that swamp.

But tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the remarkable story of John McCain.

Well great horned toadies! Jethro, you and Ellie May get down by the CEE-ment pond, and granny’ll fix us up a mess o’ vittles.

Evidently, the GOP believes that their core viewership are illiterate imbeciles. (Who knows? They may well be right.)

Speeches this afternoon, as with the entire week, are filled with a Dadaist sense of the absurd. Consider this whopper from Mike Steele, the BLACK chair of GOPAC:

“Drill baby drill! And DRILL NOW!”

(Spontaneous chants from the delegates: Drill baby drill! Drill baby drill!)

Mere moments before, he said that “John McCain will stand up for hard-working families.”

OK? (You mean the ones not in tyrannosaurus rex unions?)

How? By freeing parents from the tyranny of bad schools (”school choice” = vouchers).

But that’s not enough. By lowering the “confiscation” of taxes so that these poor schmucks will be able to SAVE money for the first time in their miserable lives. And McCain will stop the erosion of civil liberties.

That hard working families are most concerned about? What? Guns? Religion? Speech?

Illegal wiretaps? Torture? Renditions? Military tribunals? The Patriot Act?

I don’t know. John McCain is a “maverick,” after all. And so — by the laying on of hands, no doubt — is now Sarah Palin.

I think we really ought to define our terms:

maverick

NOUN: 1. An unbranded range animal, especially a calf that has become separated from its mother, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it. 2. One that refuses to abide by the dictates of or resists adherence to a group; a dissenter.
ADJECTIVE: Being independent in thought and action or exhibiting such independence: maverick politicians; a maverick decision.
ETYMOLOGY: Possibly after Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803–1870), American cattleman who left the calves in his herd unbranded .

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000.

Well, considering that John McCain (who, if we are to believe Fred Thompson, is Jesus’ mildly rebellious and cute-as-a-button younger brother) voted with George W. Bush 95% of the time during the greatest erosion of civil liberties, and the greatest looting of the national treasury, and still believes in an illegal, immoral and criminal war that has ruined us and poisoned Iraq against us for probably the rest of our lives, I’m going to have to go with definition 1, “an unbranded range animal.”

George Bush branded him, and he forgot his opposition to torture. He forgot his deficit-hawk persona. He reversed himself over and over again to do exactly what the branding suggested. Now, Bushians rushed coaches and speechwriters in for Sarah Palin. Their machine, the RNC, is now McCain’s campaign machine (because our “maverick” didn’t bother to build an organization after firing his first, failed one.)

He takes his cues from Karl Rove, and a Rove acolyte runs his campaign. He talks about an honorable campaign and unleashes the most vicious smears imaginable (while not wearing a flag lapel pin, as Mitt Romney tonight wasn’t wearing one, etc. I guess it only matters when a Democrat doesn’t wear one?)

That part about “Being independent in thought and action” only says he won’t listen to anybody but himself, in the final analysis, and so we have to rely on his judgment in all matters.

Why? Because he’s a maverick. Listen to what they are TOUTING as one of his strengths, courtesy of Joe “Judas” Lieberman, the Quisling from Connecticut:

“Especially at a time of war, we need a president we can count on to fight for what’s right for our country – not only when it is easy, but when it is hard. When others were silent, John McCain had the judgment to sound the alarm about the mistakes we were making in Iraq. When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground, John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge and because of that, today, our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor!”

And in pine boxes, Joe. Don’t forget those.

Oh.

That’s EXACTLY what they want us to forget. McCain is still fighting Vietnam, and he still thinks that fighting there was the right thing to do, and we could have won.

Whopper after whopper piles up, like a hurricane surge of bullshit, feeding directly into the Reality Refugees inside the Corporate Arena. They cheer nonsense. They chant inappropriate mantras.

They — who have aided and abetted the longest running character assassin and slander in American history (Limbaugh, who just celebrated 20 years of national slander, et al) — are suddenly SHOCKED! SHOCKED that those “liberal hate merchants” are finding fault with Sarah Palin. Said a McCain spokesman with a straight face. It’s SEXIST.

They, who abandoned women and women’s issues at the 1980 RNC that coronated Our Nation’s Savior, St. Ronald of Reagan (and his arms-selling, cocaine smuggling band of Reaganistas) are suddenly concerned that Sarah Palin isn’t getting treated well by the media?

It is a reverse-chivalry of the most horrific order, ordure and odor.

Equality means that you don’t put anybody on a pedestal. You don’t put her down because she’s a woman, but you don’t cut her any slack, either. And what we now have the spectacle of, among these God-fearin’ holier-than-thou, know-it-alls (who speak like trailer trash, evidently, in their corn pone speechifying) of an unmarried, pregnant teenage high school girl, and her shotgun wedding bridegroom to be as the centerpiece in a feat of Dadaism that even Marcel Duchamp would gape in wonder at.

Spoken in French LHOOQ sounds like “she has a hot ass”

The metaphoric moment came when, after series of “passes” and boosterism speeches so that Arizona could put McCain over the top in the roll call vote (which was embarrassingly and ineptly handled, by the by: Republicans can’t even manage THAT small efficiency anymore), the real roll call came, with more rotten little speeches:

MADAME CHAIRPERSON, THE GREAT STATE OF PARANOIA, famed residence of Philip K. Dick and the John Birch Society, the state that brought you Paxil and thirty stitches the night that we forgot you were coming home and grabbed our macheté to repel the linoleum hordes, the state most associated with our brave troops, Madame Chairperson, The Great State of Paranoia proudly casts its thirty two votes for Senator Mephistopheles Scratch Luciferson. And one vote for Ron Paul.

Yes, the Great State of Tennessee, Birthplace of the office-chair caster, proud to have screwed their native son, Al Gore in 2000, and because the speaker thought he’d pull his little auctioneer gig for show & tell got through the auctioneer’s patois: who’ll bid who’ll bid all its votes for … George S. McCain.

There were a couple of other states past Tennessee who threw inadvertent “Georges” into the stew, but it did nothing to increase the surreality of the evening’s Medicine Show. Guaranteed to cure warts, win the war on Terror and in Iraq, stimulate the economy, lower taxes, balance the budget, raise the dead and show you where the card that you picked earlier and placed back in the deck is …

Blindfolded!

Duchamp’s dada “found art” entitled “Fountain”

Seriously: this whole disastrous John McCain “maverick” decision-making process has gone so far off the rails that they flew in Bristol “Knocked Up” Palin’s knocker-upper from Alaska, with McCain greeting him on the bloody TARMAC when his plane touched down.

Neither of the kids have “done the right thing,” by the by. Neither have “made wise choices.”

Nope: no knowledge of contraception, and now, because of the fundamentalist, fringe beliefs she was born into, she has no choice: the second the celebrated sperm entered her fertile vagina, the — according to the views of the Candidate and Vice-Candidate — young woman’s body was not her own. She is now a brood-mare for the State.

That’s civil liberties for you. She’s been drafted into the mommy corps by semen on leave. Period.

But we’re not supposed to talk about that.

Except, now the knocked up, unmarried teenager is front and center, forgiven by the holiness corps because her mother is  the poster child for the voters McCain desperately needs in order to win.

I guess they’re the dumbasses that these preternaturally WEIRD speeches are being aimed at.

For the first time, the “Vice” in “Vice-President” seems utterly apt. And into this Festival of Mendacity™ the false profits pave the way with tokenism, snake oil rhetoric and theatrics for the rubes and hicks.

THE UNWED FATHER OF AN UNWED TEENAGE MOTHER-TO-BE is the CENTERPIECE of tonight’s Vice Presidential “historic” acceptance speech.

A sea of da Vincian grotesques, as one watches the cutaways (controlled by the Convention, no doubt): White and unashamedly so, persons of color need not apply; again, as in 2000 in Philadelphia, the Republican National Convention resembles nothing so much as a minstrel show. This was the “female”s night, so they trotted out their females: the ex-CEO of e-Bay, and the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard. (Not being a Wall Street Journal reader, nor interested in securities trading, don’t expect me to know who they are.)

But how REPUBLICAN. Need tokens? Look for corporate officers.

The people who created the mess are now running against, in essence, themselves. Unselfconsciously hypocritical, by all appearances, they actually are acting like they’re there to SOLVE the problem, and not there because they were co-creators OF the problem. Still shilling for the same thing, only somehow, Mr. Maverick will magically turn shit into gold, and failed policies into shining examples of protean goodness and why going by your “gut” is more important than using your head.

Last night, Fred Thompson actually BRAGGED about McCain’s trouble-maker past:

In high school and the Naval Academy, he earned a reputation as a troublemaker. But as John points out, he wasn’t just a troublemaker. He was the leader of the troublemakers.  Although loaded with demerits like his father, John was principled even in rebellion.

He never violated the honor code.

However, in flight school in Pensacola, he did drive a Corvette and date a girl who worked in a bar as an exotic dancer under the name of Marie, the Flame of Florida.

Yeah, he rebelled from Bush 5 whole percent.*

[* Fact Check dot org:

Q: Is it true John McCain voted with George Bush 95 percent of the time?

The Obama campaign keeps claiming McCain has voted with President Bush 95 percent of the time. Is this true? Is this significant?

A: Yes, it's true, according to Congressional Quarterly's assessment of McCain's voting record. [but note that that was in 2007. HW]

They wave “spontaneous” signs saying “USA” and suchlike, but they aren’t spontaneous at all. They are prepared by graphic artists to look “home made” but they aren’t. And they wave the signs that the pageant directors (for political conventions are no longer anything but Esther Williams aquacades without the water in the pool anymore. The last real convention was the Democratic Convention in 1960 in Los Angeles) give them to wave, “spontaneously.”

Fred Thompson’s speech sounds like a regional sales director telling Ford dealers how to get out there and sell them Edsels:

This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of history have sought in their leaders.

Strength.

Courage.

Humility.

Wisdom.

Duty.

Honor.

It’s pretty clear there are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, “Who is this man?” and “Can we trust this man with the Presidency?”

That’s not how you sell presidents; that’s how you sell “slightly” used cars. Or farm equipment. Or satellite dishes. Or soap.

The phony signs* [* with McCain's logo and website emblazoned above or below the Pavlovian Signage. Few drool.] say “PROSPERITY” and “STRAIGHT TALK” and “COUNTRY FIRST.”

Well, I can help with that last one:

I was drunk the night my mom got out of prison
and I went down to meet her in the rain
but before I could get there in my pickup truck
she went got ran over by a damned old train

And I’ll hang around as long as you will let me.
And I never minded standin’ in the rain.
But you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’.
You never even called me by my name.

(by Steve Goodman, recorded by David Allen Coe)

I have never seen such a colliginous collection of flim-flam, bunco, bunkum, hokum, corn-pone, flap-doodle, horse feathers and sheer mendacity in all my born days. These crazy Republicans speak irrational buzzword slogans of sheerest demagoguery were it not simply clichés strung together without meaning. Working families are going to be relieved of the “corruption of our schools” and unions have the appetites of tyrannosauri. Tyrannosauri Rex, that is.

When I got to be a teenager, my dad’s lectures had devolved into twenty or thirty clichés that required merely the bobbing of the head in assent and the shaking of the head in denial. With my mom, I would occasionally purposely shake my head wrongly for the rhetorical cliché, just to see if she was paying any attention. But you couldn’t with dad. It was like trying to stop a bulldozer. And it got to the point where he would repeat the clichés in the same “lecture” or, sometimes, conflate the clichés.

And one time I “got” him.

He said something like: “Well, you didn’t take out the trash.”

And I said: “Actually, I DID take out the trash.”

He didn’t skip a beat: “Well make a mark on the wall,” quoth he, in full parental sarcasm modality. “But you didn’t load the dishwasher, did you?”

Nope. He had me.

“Well,” came the caustic response, “make HALF a mark on the wall.”

And I said: “Dad? How do you make ‘half a mark’?”

Well, the past couple of days, the Republicans have been making half a mark on the wall.

They’re not wearing EITHER their Republican hats OR their American hats.

They only seem to be wearing their crazy hats.

Courage.

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