Teabaggery

I’m torn between thinking that the teabaggers are helpful because they will drain energy from the Repub party, or dangerous because they could be the basis for a Palin/fascist party.

@Dodgerblue:
You have a point. However, they lack a charismatic leader who can organize them into a cohesive force, plus all that rugged individualism, disorganization, lack of focus and resources (apparently) means they’re more like the Code Pink of the Right.

I suspect that this is more of the US American version of what happened to the Progressive Conservatives of Canada City in 1993. Major differences is that Reform is much smarter than the Teabaggers (not much more capable though.) I don’t see any intelligence running the Teabaggers. Plus the various liberation groups for Judea from Life of Brian were better coordinated.

@Dodgerblue: You pose those as alternatives?

Until we have proportional representation (which I don’t think wise), all any third party will do is drain energy from the major party it’s forking from. We have Ross Perot to thank for Bubba.

@nojo: I think that Nixon started, and Reagan completed, the process of expanding the reliable base of the Repub party from the Wall Street / country club world to include the racist pigfuckers. The energy of that process, in the sense of legitimizing the public discussion of violent fascist/populist/anti-elitist ideology, may now break the Repubs into two or more pieces. I think that probably a good thing, but I could be wrong.

On a related note, I was at a talk last week given by new AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka. He said that if the job situation doesn’t turn around by November, the Demos in Congress are toast.

@nojo: Those were the days … remember? He’d start every sentence with “Now see here!”

@Dodgerblue: Trumka’s right — something similar crossed my mind the other day. Ideological arguments don’t mean shit — it’s still the economy, stupid.

@blogenfreude: Actually, what I remember best is Phil Hartman as the Admiral.

@nojo: Just got an email announcing that Cal teabaggers are rallying to oppose implementation of our state global warming law. This would be an amusing candidate for the Darwin Awards except that they will take the rest of us down with them.

@Dodgerblue: The RNC and the American intelligence services made the same mistake overseas and domestically at almost the same time, which fortifies the thesis that the RNC in a very real way became an extension of the intelligence complex.

Under Reagan they poured all kinds of money into the Mujahideen in Afghanistan which minted one Osama Bin Laden who got his chops directing attacks on the infidel Soviets. Old timers in the intelligence agencies raged at the madness of the USA funding fundamentalist extremists and a number left because of it – and the politicization of intelligence during the Reagan Admnistration. Anyone covering Central Asia desks had the same conclusion: You feed this monster, one day you will see something that will make the Iranian revolution look like a maypole dance.

Meanwhile, the southern strategy was, in part, engaged in cultivating Southern states’ fundamentalists in the RNC war on American Democrats. By 1988, the US had elected a former fucking DCI whose history and credentials for being placed by Nixon as DCI was completely unknown by voters. Both Reagan campaigns and the Bush I campaign leaned heavily on the Southern Strategy to get out the fundamentalist vote for the GOP and many old time GOP campaign stalwarts remarked at the time at how weird it was to have so many campaign staffers with intelligence backgrounds, guys who no doubt regarded the piguckers as useful pigfuckers.

At both frontiers the fucking geniuses assumed that the assets could be employed and discarded without consequence. We’ve seen what happened in Afghanistan. Now the geniuses have raised a domestic militia of McVeighs.

Ike, hear our prayers.

@Dodgerblue: It’s only a matter of time before an articulate psycho shows up who can distill their rage into a shared narrative. My sense is that it will devolve into a white power party finally casting off the birther pretense and just announce the constitution has been abused to the point of de facto abrogation and they are entitled to attack an occupying menace led by a non-human, by constitutional definition. Really, it’s kindling waiting to ignite and all it takes is one psycho to recognize a moment when a crowd is milling around waiting to be made into a people. Likely, someone who’s gone to some kind of university, maybe a year or two of law school, seen his extended family decimated by Wall Street gaming of the manufacturing base in his home town to total destruction, had to watch parents drink themselves to death, maybe on a city council somewhere, finally kneels before the altar of apocalyptic despair and decides a nation that so fucked him is in need of a good fucking back and buys a ticket to a teabagger convention to see if he can recruit some fellow travelers, buttonholes Talibunny and asks her if she believes in white power and pulls out a megaphone when she stutters and howls, ‘the truth fails those without the courage to utter it. And the truth is ladies and gentlemen, what made America great and will pull it back from the gates of hell is WHITE POWER!!!!!!!’.’ Audience kneels. They are delivered.

Or something like that.

All of the McCain campaign stops and subsequent teabagger parties have been veiled festivals of hate directed against the achievement of a sharp guy who knew how to play Chicago-style politics because he was mocha latte. Again the RNC will play the enemy-of-my-enemy card to their own destruction. They’ll be babbling their disbelief as the Take Back America Party (or whatever the teabaggers, neonazis and kkk devolve into) brigadiers are dragging them out of their homes in New Canaan and executing them on their own lawns.

@FlyingChainSaw: Well, yes. The GOP is completely fucked, right now, because of the southern strategy and the reliance on courting the religious fundamentalists with fundamentalist social policies, while selling out the working people, those same southerns and fundamentalists, with their economic policies. The teabaggers have figured out that the working people are being screwed, but thus far, they are blaming it on the wrong party.

There are a couple of things that are clear; one is that traditional country club republicans are not in control, and are not comfortable with the yahoos who are in control. Another very interesting development is that the christian fundamentalist wing has lost much of its power, the last 10 years. Voting patterns the last few cycles have seen increasing numbers of people who call themselves evangelicals voting democratic.

The GOP social, religious, christian strategy has now reached its end, its not working anymore.

The only base the GOP has anymore are the addicted followers of the GOP media hate-merchants, the Limbaugh and Beck followers. The Fox News base. Blame Gingrich, who took a $4 million bribe from Murdoch to change the media ownership rules to allow this to happen. But its still only maybe 25% of the pigfucking element of society who follows this.

Paultard and Randtardism, this seems to be the base of teabaggerism, and they are all united only by their psychological dysfunctions, they are simply fascists, and all the German fascists were fucking sociopaths, as was Rand, as are most Paultard and Randtard libertarians.

To put it bluntly, only racists, and psycopaths, support the teabagger movement, and the GOP has little left of its traditional base. Palin will never be a real leader, she does not have it in her, once she gets herself a pile of money, she will have no interest in politics.

On the most basic level, we are back to the civil war, the southern states, and their racist pigfuckers, and the coasts, even the mountain states are swinging back to dem.

@Promnight: ” . . . the mountain states are swinging back to dem.” The Game is calling me back. I need to do my part in this struggle.

@FlyingChainSaw: That’s what @Dodgerblue: made me think of.

Going to a talk later this week by a former GOP strategist whose topic is how liberalspeak sounds to US America.

@redmanlaw: RML, I want to meet you, get together for a fishing weekend, so bad. We are brothers, I have always known it.

@Promnight: Put the drank on sum martinis, too.

@redmanlaw: And jam to some tunes, bra.

@redmanlaw: God that was the most brazen attempt I have ever made to use “hip” lingo that I really don’t even understand. What I meant to say was listen to music that we both love and get into it. I don’t even know what “bra” means, except I hear surfers saying it. But we do have to do all this around a campfire, under a clear southwestern sky, so clear we can see the milky way like a river across the sky, and before we crawl into our sleeping bags, we share some old Islay single malt by the dying fire, and we talk about the meaning of existence, or the existence of meaning, or whatever we imagine, and I somehow learn from you how to be a better dad, wow, and I think I could learn that from you, but I am afraid I can’t teach you anything. And I don’t think I have any wisdom to offer anyone, the only wisdom I have attained at this point in life is to recognize I need to seek and learn wisdom. But then I can at least reciprocate with that, I would be an appreciative and mindful student to you.

@redmanlaw: Yesterday I had to repair a toilet, a simple thing, the flush lever had broken, had to replace it, reconnect the chain that connects from the new flush lever to the flushing mechanism.

I bought the new part needed, then gathered all the tools needed, then summoned my 9-year old son. It was his bathroom toilet that we were repairing, so it was especially appropriate. I explained to him that I needed him t0 assist me in a very important matter.

I told my son that we were going to repair the toilet. And I explained to him, that this was his ritual transition to manhood. I explained to him,that it was one of the most sacred rites of manhood, learning to fix the toilet, I explained that jews have the Bar Mitztvah, and Catholics have Confirmation, we have “Toilet Fixing.”

I explained that, no matter how close we attain to the perfect gender-neutral society we all yearn for, it will always be the man’s task to fix the toilet, and learning to do this task, marks the transition from being a boy to being a man. I made him raise up and remove the toilet tank cover, wherein all the workings we were concerned with are contained.

I had to explain that the water in the tank was safe, it was “pre-dooty” water, that this was clean water, not yet to be flushed into the bowl.

So, he lost his fear of the water in the tank, he held a wrench for me as we installed the new flush lever, and after we finished, we stood before the toilet and tested it one last time, my boy pushed down on that new flush lever we had installed, and watched this test-flush, and we saw that it was good, and then, my 9 year-old son and I, we marched down the stairs to tell mom that we had fixed the toilet.

That was so cool.

@Promnight: I put my raton to work one time when he was eight demolishing a wall and ripping out ceramic tile. He wore goggles, gloves, a bandana and loved wielding wrecking bars and all that. Now 13, he cuts kindling and splits wood and gets the fire going. I think I’m an OK dad. I could probably do better.

I sometimes wish we had more work for him to do like when I was a kid (feed and water horses, haul water from the river, make adobes, build house, haul hay bales, irrigate, etc) because doing that shit all the time teaches you to work hard and go the distance, and that there are deferred awards so that even if you’re not the smartest guy in the room, you can out work them, out wait them, dig in and get stuff done. Of course, my dad probably thought I was too much of a bookworm and that I should have worked harder and known some of his privation that led him to drive us so hard. Now certain forms of work – cutting wood, painting, tiling, building shit – are like recreation and even a creative outlet for me.

@Promnight: That’s like my high school talk. Just substitute “ese” for “bra”.

@redmanlaw: How liberalspeak sounds to the US? What’s that mean? Like, how a fact-based interpretation of reality is offensive to toothless methhead pickfucking psychopath GOP voters?

The Limbaughs and Becks and Savages of the world don’t have it in them to rally the teabaggers into an insurgency. They know their audience is constituted of armed unemployables and skinheads, people they’d rather not meet. Talibunny is deeply stupid and hungry for adulation and just may step up and catalyze the mob into a fascist cult. She of course will wake up only after it is too late, likely during a rally when the skinheads start drinking and kicking people to death for entertainment.

@Promnight: Fucked is the word. Can’t wait to see the likes of Pawlenty and Romney try to pull together a 2010 ticket with a room filled with skinheads in combat boots and endtimers speaking in tongues. The ones that read will associate Romney with the Wall Street gangsters whose idea of creative capitalism was busting up companies and shipping all the work offshore to totalitarian slave states and shipping the proceeds from the increased margin into the executive suite. At some point a facebiting neonazi will get impatient with the double speak and eat Romey’s face.

@Promnight: The ritual transition to manhood is paying someone else to fix the toilet.

@nojo:

yes. and that reminds me of another rite of passage.
a bar mitzvah is the moment a young man realizes he is more likely to own a professional sports team than play for one.

quote of the day for prommie:

“live every day as if it’s your last, learn every day like you’re going to live forever”