“A house divided against itself cannot stand” said Lincoln, presciently. We are now a house divided. With infinitely better weapons.
I was watching Bill Maher last night, as I ignored his true contrarian spiel that Clint Eastwood really did a “GREAT” job — a base canard at Reality leveled by the howling monkeys throwing feces of the Rightie Blogosmear™ all day yesterday, in contradiction to real reality, but in conformity with Republican Reality (“Just like Reality only BETTER!®).
And I kept hearing Lincoln’s warning in my ears.
The Ecclesiastical spin* on this one is that this is fast becoming the dark side of all those dualities. When you reach a complete disconnect on reality, negotiated solutions become impossible and the outcome is written in blood. If you saw Bill Maher last night, it was, on that level, the single most depressing reflection of this I’ve seen. You might as well have been arguing athiesm with a Jehovah’s Witness at your door.
We have passed the point where compromise is possible, and the point that we can conveniently ignore it. I am, as someone who’s fought this complete schism between those who believe in reality and those who prefer their own for at least 20 years and I’m stopping now. There’s no going back. And what lies ahead is something I’d prefer not to contemplate.
Dead Americans at Antietam
* As in Ecclesiastes:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. ~ Ecclesiastes 3, KJV
But either I contemplate it, else shut down this blog and start working on my target practice.
The Republican National Convention
has just concluded in Tampa, Florida.
Whenever they don’t like the facts they manufacture their own facts. And this is deadly. First, Rasmussen (who is accurate on actual elections but very “creative” inasmuch as they always manage to come up with polls that say EXACTLY what the Right Wing wants to hear) which is, today, a case in point:
click for a larger view
Number of Republicans in America Reaches Record High
Rasmussen ReportsAfter falling for two straight months, the number of Americans who consider themselves Republicans jumped nearly three points in August. — During August, 37.6% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.9% in July and 35.4% in June.
Note how all the blogs linking are hard right — if not to say Reicht — blogs. This reinforces the false meme into “fact” which will show up on tomorrow’s Faux Nooz and be imprinted into a zillion brains with Pavlovian precision and technique. And, by Monday morning it will be a “fact” like Saddam Hussein’s complicity in Nine ‘Lebbin or Weapons of Spongy Yellowcake Destruction (a/k/a Twinkies®).
Now, can this created “poll” fact and “story” be trusted?
Of course not. But with the biggest bloggers in the Rightie Blogosmear chiming in, it WILL be a “fact” by Monday, whether there is reality to it or not. And, after chasing down so many lies, I now take anything these weasels say with a truckload of rock salt. The burden of proof is on them, but the track record is too poor for me to give it no nevermind.
And that is the toxic nature of our Divided America, as was hammered home yesterday.
The Clint Eastwood incident was an embarrassment — so much so that the Romney campaign instantly distanced themselves from it, ginning up a story that Clint went overtime, was “ad libbing” and the Secretary Disavowed All Knowledge of his Actions.
Oh ye of little faith.
In less than 24 hours, the Right Wing Echo Machine set out to recreate “reality” — foolishly aided and abetted by Bill Maher, by the by — and voilà! it suddenly becomes a conspiracy of the Evil Leftist Media to disparage this Great And Noble American Patriot and his Incredible Speech.
It’s not so funny to me anymore. The cancer of our Divided America has metastasized and floods the lymph nodes of our media. The clear, unmistakable “reality” of Thursday is in question by Saturday morning, and by the end of the week, it will turn out that OF COURSE PIGS FLY! You stoopid libs and your vicious attack on us!
The fascists jackboot into their Krystol-nacht without the need (yet) to inflict actual beatings on the minority who still believe in factual and rational interpretation of reality.
Little Billy Kristol’s “magazine”
Bill Maher had two “Colored” Republicans on, as must all media spokeserpents have “dark” skin to belie the fundamental racism of the lily-white RepubliKKKlan party.
Dinesh D’Sousa, who has created that invisible Obama that Clint Eastwood chastised on stage at the Black Mass in Tampa — “The One” who, according to Clint’s steely gaze, was exactly the same height as Charlie McCarthy, or any other ventriloquist’s dummy — was there to pimp the “documentary” based on his poisonous psycho-babble that President Barack Obama is actually filled with rage and carries on the anti-colonialist rage of his father (who he only saw once or twice in his life).
Bill called him on it, and D’Sousa, true to form, simply refused to budge from his fantasy world, even when confronted with facts.
Or, should I say, “fracts” — which are facts that shatter the underlying bedrock of bullshit assumptions and false narratives, producing earthquakes in the brain and extracting literal gas from the substrate.
Ditto MSNBC bullshit “Republican” Spokeserpent Ron Christie, who was so blithely immune to reason, argument, facts or the opinions of others that Maher literally banged his head on the desk in sheer, helpless exasperation.
The same sense of helplessness when I heard a Republican delegate, stupid and southern, old and female say, as an absolute fact: “If Obama’s reelected there’s going to be another Civil War” — the way you and I would say “It’s overcast this morning, ” or, “It’s really hot outside today.”
the current incarnation of
the “Party of Lincoln”
And I realized: it isn’t funny anymore. They create their own reality, seamless and hermetically sealed. And that reality will, sooner or later, inevitably cause them to take up arms against us who are not members of their cult, in the name of “States’ Rights” (that Number One Golden Oldie from Satan’s Billboard Top 20 of all-time American bloodsheds) and “Abortion,” which is based on a belief in imaginary babies that supercedes the rights and health of actual, factual, living, breathing, flesh and blood women.
No one pays any attention to the clear implication that, were the GOP platform’s plank on abortion enacted, the living mother would be, by law, sacrificed to the unborn fetus. You know “threatens the life of the mother”?
Catholic hospitals have engaged in this “religious freedom” for a very long time (actually, since Cocaine Pope Leo XIII decided to overturn a millennia of Catholic doctrine that is eerily similar to Roe v. Wade in the Gilded Age of the post-Civil War Nineteenth Century).
Mariani Wine was laced with cocaine and
publicly endorsed by Pope Leo XIII
Because we “tolerate” any madness in the name of “religious freedom,” at least until we started throwing Christian Science parents in prison for refusing to pr0vide medical attention to living children who might not HAVE DIED had Christian Science admitted that s0metimes a doctor is needed.
The RepubliKKKlan party is now a party of an unholy religious “faith” in a reality at odds with … well, REALITY.
Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech is said to have changed the course of history, delivered at the Illinois State Republican convention of 1858. It is rational, lucid and far-seeing. The exact same virtues now cast as vices by a party whose only resemblance to Lincoln’s ideals and party is an accident of spelling.
Ronnie Reagan sold out the GOP to win in 1980, and this is the logical result. He invited the crazies in, and now they run the asylum.
And, while logic is not their forté, neither is addition of new information, subtraction of bad ideas …
… thus the GIGO nature of neurolinguistic programming that allows insanity like this to be brazenly broadcast without the slightest memory that it was GEORGE W. BUSH who sold our economic security to China to put two wars on the credit card and cut taxes for millionaires — US News and World Report:
“Does the America we want borrow a trillion dollars from China?” Romney asked rhetorically, while ticking off ways he feels American prestige has suffered under President Obama.
Romney probably knows this, but there’s nothing wrong with the U.S. government borrowing from China, or from any other foreigner with money. “It’s a pretty good deal for the United States,” says Donald Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University* and author of the book Hypocrites and Half-Wits, which calls out dozens of popular myths about how the economy works. “Borrowing from China keeps interest rates lower than they would otherwise be and lowers the tax burden on Americans.”
[* George Mason University's "economics" department is funded by the Koch Brothers and is staffed with Koch Loyalists like Dr. Walter Williams, also a black spokesmodel for the tube's talking heads ...]
Our Chinese … pals?
They chide Mitt not for his outrageous lie, but because his premise that SELLING DEBT TO CHINA IS BAD. No: it’s GREAT! Keeps our interest rates down, even though China can now collapse our economy at any time of their choosing, simply by calling our debts due or dumping US treasury securities on the world market and accomplishing the same end. No one seems to have any outrage that Bush sold us out to the Chinese in the name of “national security” and “a president’s job is keeping the American people safe.”
And this they multiply, even as the number of free media outlets and independent banks and gas stations dwindle to monopolistic levels. As has silently happened across our entire economy as “competition” becomes a joke, and “small business” means “owned by a small number of people,” as in “Koch Industries is a small business because it is entirely owned by Charles and David Koch.”
All of which leaves only the final intention and solution for the shadowy plutocrats who threaten our very way of life:
Long division, at which they’re demonstrably very good. Very, VERY good.
Courage.
After a couple of days of hearing the jokes, My wife watched the Clint Eastwood routine from the convention (which I have not seen, I remain somewhat convinced I will be too embarrassed for him). It was quirky, she agreed, but the thing that got her was she knows that Eastwood is a sharp man, she remembers this year’s Super Bowl ad which caused a bit of a deal with Republicans, Clint Eastwood is not senile and he is a skilled actor. Seeing the skit with those givens, she felt that Eastwood was skilfully playing the audience and in the end delivered an essentially Libertarian speech. He had the Republicans cheering closing Gitmo (which they don’t want to close); cheering ending the war in Afghanistan (which they don’t want to end) laughing at how the war started without asking the Russians how their adventure there turned out (which was Bush’s decision) and he even got them to show their callousness by laughing at 27 million unemployed.
“Instead of ‘Old man yells at chair’” My wife said “The headline should have been ‘Old man out-foxes smug convention goers’”. or, Rather than the tweet I read that Eastwood was following Obama’s instructions, it was more like he was avenging Ron Paul.
I’ve heard a lot of tortuous explanations that pretzel in all directions.
Occam’s Razor still applies for me.
I think Eastwood was only ever a reactionary and superficial in his politics and he doesn’t perform as well live as in front of a camera with an editor eventually forming a performance with the director etc.
both issues amplified by age. I don’t take this as advanced dementia but just tendencies made more evident by the manifestation of age.
Agreed. I take it as a bad performance. I think he didn’t prepare properly, which is epidemic in politics. We only notice because modern conventions are pageants, and it’s sadly ironic that the only bad performance given in the prime time spectacle came from the only professional performer.
It’ was, also, the only authentic thing that happened during the entire convention, leaving me mourning the death of whatever decent human society they had over on that side.
Not that they had all that much, of course, It’s just that it’s still appalling that, in the last year or so they kept it on life support only to wheel it on stage to publicly smother it like a defenseless senior citizen suffocated by a callous youth armed with a pillow.
The great untold story is that they pissed off the Ron Paul delegates, just like Nixon did to the Goldwater people in 1960. They walked out and Kennedy won. Four years later, they controlled the GOP (until the Goldwater flameout, at which point, Nixon slithered back in.) Reagan’s GOP cred at that convention sent him to the White House.
Whether Clints performance was to discredit the policies of Pres,Obama or to slide those tremedious failure’s of 8yrs of republican rule by those Republicans at the Conv,does’nt matter.In truth it backfired,for i hope to believe the american people could see throught that foney attack,and the best part is when Presdent Obama was ask about clints preformance,all he said was”clint eastwood is a fine actor”not one negitive word toward him or the skit.Hart has made a good point about oweing china(i believe nixon started the sell out long ago).And i believe a civil war is possible,thats
why i stay well armed,i think i need to make a trip to cabela’s for more ammo,and i spent time friday at the range.The best is yet to come this week DNC,I think the presdent will knock it out of the park!
I was hoping they were going to self destruct and they did’nt disapoint.
and your right Hart there was a big ground swell for Ron Paul at the conv,and he didn’t speak because they wanted to censor his speech.
And, politically, that’s just stupid. You’re trying to get as many votes as possible. Hell, they even let Newt speak. Just incredibly dumbass arrogance that had them leaving the convention hall with LESS delegate support than they’d had going in. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
A little late I know, but I don’t see anybody on the progressive side (much less the “mainstream”) pointing out that Clint implied the same profanity from the fictional Obama in the empty chair that the REAL Cheney uttered in REAL flesh and blood on the REAL Senate floor. A phrase that is completely out of character for the REAL Obama was perfectly in character for the REAL Dick Cheney, but everyone conveniently forgets that… Everyone.
We don’t forget it: the GOP campaign is the old “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit.” Most decent people tend to be stunned at the sheer quantity and volume of all the BS that flew through the air last week. How about Mitt and Ryan committing a Wisconsin felony during the primary, caught on tape? Was that included on “World’s Dumbest Criminals”? Nope. Vanished. Unbelievable.