The Rude Pundit on Today's Stephanie Miller Show:
Today, the Rude Pundit offered that if the starving people of Haiti ate Rush Limbaugh for food, the oxycontin in his veins would offer some fine pain relief. However, the Rude Pundit is not a medical expert. That did not stop him from playing political doctor with Stephanie Miller:
If you prefer your radio rudeness in pod form, well, subscribe, motherfucker, 'cause it's free.
1/18/2010
Martin Luther King Would Still Fuck Your Shit Up (A Call to Democrats to Sack Up):
Here's one you might not have heard: Speaking to a small group of protesters outside Santa Rita prison in California, on January 14, 1968, where he had visited Joan Baez and other jailed anti-war activists and draft resisters, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in remarks that ought to resonate not just with President Obama, but with cowardly Democrats and everyone who thinks that moderation works:
"They have supported us in a very real way in our struggle for civil rights...I see these two struggles as one struggle. There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice. People ask me from time to time, 'Aren't you getting out of your field? Aren't you supposed to be working in civil rights?' They go on to say the two issues are not to be mixed. And my only answer is that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concerns. For I believe absolutely that justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I want to make it clear that I am going to continue with all of my might and all of my energy and with all of my action to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.
"Now let me say this: I see some very dangerous trends developing in our country, trends of oppression and repression and suppression, and I see a definite move on the part of the government to go out now and silence dissenters and to crush the draft resistance movement. Now we cannot allow this to happen...And let us continue to work passionately and unrelentingly to end this cruel and senseless war in Vietnam. I don't have to go through all of the things that this war is doing to corrode the values of our nation.
"Suffice it to say that the war in Vietnam has all but torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military industrial complex of our nation. It has exacerbated the tensions between continents and races. The war in Vietnam has...played havoc with our domestic destinies. And I can never forget the fact that we spend about $500,000 to kill every enemy soldier in Vietnam and we spend only about $53 a year for every individual who is categorized as poverty-stricken in our so-called 'war against poverty,' which isn't even a skirmish against poverty. And I say that there is a great need for a revolution of values.
"And I say to you in conclusion that we must continue to stand up and we must continue to follow the dictates of our conscience, even if that means breaking unjust laws. Henry David Thoreau said in his essay on civil disobedience that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And I do not plan to cooperate with evil at any point.
"Somebody said to me not too long ago, 'Dr. King, don't you think you're hurting your leadership by taking a stand against the war in Vietnam? Aren't people who once respected you gonna lose respect for you? And aren't you hurting the budget of your organization?'
"And I had to look at that person and say, 'I'm sorry, sir, but you don't know me. I am not a consensus leader. And I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Leadership Conference or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion.'
"Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but he's a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expedience asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?'
"But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'
"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. And that is where I stand today and that is where I hope you will continue to stand so that we can speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters all over the world and righteousness like a mighty stream. And we will speed up the day when men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations will not rise up against nations neither they will not start a war anymore and I close by saying as we sing in the old Negro spiritual, 'I Ain't Gonna Study War No More.'"
Pieces of this would appear in speeches he gave until he died. Afterward, asked by a reporter about "escalated non-violence," King answered that anger must have a "constructive and creative channel of expression, we've got to escalate non-violence to the point where we make it much more militant, much more demanding, much more insistent, even if it takes on the dimensions of civil disobedience. I feel that non-violence must now be strong enough to be an alternative to riots on the one hand but also an alternative to timid supplications for justice on the other."
We forget, amid all the deification, what a tough bastard King was. We admire him because he was uncompromising and principled, and also because he fought like lives depended on it. Because they did.
Later a man asked King if he should burn his draft card. King asked the man if he opposed the war. When the man said he did, King told the man to resist, even though it meant breaking the law.
Here's one you might not have heard: Speaking to a small group of protesters outside Santa Rita prison in California, on January 14, 1968, where he had visited Joan Baez and other jailed anti-war activists and draft resisters, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in remarks that ought to resonate not just with President Obama, but with cowardly Democrats and everyone who thinks that moderation works:
"They have supported us in a very real way in our struggle for civil rights...I see these two struggles as one struggle. There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice. People ask me from time to time, 'Aren't you getting out of your field? Aren't you supposed to be working in civil rights?' They go on to say the two issues are not to be mixed. And my only answer is that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concerns. For I believe absolutely that justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I want to make it clear that I am going to continue with all of my might and all of my energy and with all of my action to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.
"Now let me say this: I see some very dangerous trends developing in our country, trends of oppression and repression and suppression, and I see a definite move on the part of the government to go out now and silence dissenters and to crush the draft resistance movement. Now we cannot allow this to happen...And let us continue to work passionately and unrelentingly to end this cruel and senseless war in Vietnam. I don't have to go through all of the things that this war is doing to corrode the values of our nation.
"Suffice it to say that the war in Vietnam has all but torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military industrial complex of our nation. It has exacerbated the tensions between continents and races. The war in Vietnam has...played havoc with our domestic destinies. And I can never forget the fact that we spend about $500,000 to kill every enemy soldier in Vietnam and we spend only about $53 a year for every individual who is categorized as poverty-stricken in our so-called 'war against poverty,' which isn't even a skirmish against poverty. And I say that there is a great need for a revolution of values.
"And I say to you in conclusion that we must continue to stand up and we must continue to follow the dictates of our conscience, even if that means breaking unjust laws. Henry David Thoreau said in his essay on civil disobedience that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And I do not plan to cooperate with evil at any point.
"Somebody said to me not too long ago, 'Dr. King, don't you think you're hurting your leadership by taking a stand against the war in Vietnam? Aren't people who once respected you gonna lose respect for you? And aren't you hurting the budget of your organization?'
"And I had to look at that person and say, 'I'm sorry, sir, but you don't know me. I am not a consensus leader. And I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Leadership Conference or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion.'
"Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but he's a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expedience asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?'
"But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'
"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. And that is where I stand today and that is where I hope you will continue to stand so that we can speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters all over the world and righteousness like a mighty stream. And we will speed up the day when men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations will not rise up against nations neither they will not start a war anymore and I close by saying as we sing in the old Negro spiritual, 'I Ain't Gonna Study War No More.'"
Pieces of this would appear in speeches he gave until he died. Afterward, asked by a reporter about "escalated non-violence," King answered that anger must have a "constructive and creative channel of expression, we've got to escalate non-violence to the point where we make it much more militant, much more demanding, much more insistent, even if it takes on the dimensions of civil disobedience. I feel that non-violence must now be strong enough to be an alternative to riots on the one hand but also an alternative to timid supplications for justice on the other."
We forget, amid all the deification, what a tough bastard King was. We admire him because he was uncompromising and principled, and also because he fought like lives depended on it. Because they did.
Later a man asked King if he should burn his draft card. King asked the man if he opposed the war. When the man said he did, King told the man to resist, even though it meant breaking the law.
1/15/2010
Some Thoughts from a Rude Reader (Sent from the Dominican Republic):
DS writes to the Rude Pundit:
"I was actually about 20km from the Haitian border when the quake happened. Surreal experience....I think you're missing some key facts about Haiti. The bottom line is this has been a long time coming.
"The roads were un-driveable before the quake. There's no infrastructure. No electricity. There's no forest. Nothing to hold back mud and rocks. It's impossible to just show up in Haiti and get around...Aside from the roads, towns with over 100,000 people haven't had electricity in years.
"Look up Pedernales [in the Dominican Republican, where DS was during the quake] on the map. The fact that I was that close to the epicenter and was completely unaffected by the quake should explain how long Haiti has been fucked. I don't even think any nation has taken steps to absolve their debt. Haitians were slaves, and in many respects still are. Part of the reason you don't see many Dominicans talking about it is probably because of the tremendous overt racism Haitians face here. Unbelievable."
DS offers a link for more information from scientists who have worked in Haiti.
Clarification: Earlier this week, the Rude Pundit said that MSNBC went forward with the programs of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow instead of going to earthquake coverage. According to reader Derrick B., the 11 p.m. ET edition of The Rachel Maddow Show was not a rerun (as it usually is) and was instead "devoted to the earthquake."
DS writes to the Rude Pundit:
"I was actually about 20km from the Haitian border when the quake happened. Surreal experience....I think you're missing some key facts about Haiti. The bottom line is this has been a long time coming.
"The roads were un-driveable before the quake. There's no infrastructure. No electricity. There's no forest. Nothing to hold back mud and rocks. It's impossible to just show up in Haiti and get around...Aside from the roads, towns with over 100,000 people haven't had electricity in years.
"Look up Pedernales [in the Dominican Republican, where DS was during the quake] on the map. The fact that I was that close to the epicenter and was completely unaffected by the quake should explain how long Haiti has been fucked. I don't even think any nation has taken steps to absolve their debt. Haitians were slaves, and in many respects still are. Part of the reason you don't see many Dominicans talking about it is probably because of the tremendous overt racism Haitians face here. Unbelievable."
DS offers a link for more information from scientists who have worked in Haiti.
Clarification: Earlier this week, the Rude Pundit said that MSNBC went forward with the programs of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow instead of going to earthquake coverage. According to reader Derrick B., the 11 p.m. ET edition of The Rachel Maddow Show was not a rerun (as it usually is) and was instead "devoted to the earthquake."
Things Important and Unimportant:
Because, even with the glaring distraction of the ongoing catastrophe, the American political process lumbers on.
Things Important:
1. That the Senate race in Massachusetts is even close is clear evidence of the incompetence of the DNC without Howard Dean running it. And since it got so little attention from Obama before, there's no way the President can wander into the Martha Coakley/nude guy race now.
2. Because if they screw up this race, they've screwed whatever health care reform might possibly get passed. Or at least the piece of paper that claims "reform" on it.
3. Republicans are actively preventing the executive branch from operating at full steam by blocking Obama nominee after Obama nominee for reasons petty and ideological. Whether it's Dawn Johnsen for the Office of Legal Counsel or Craig Becker for the National Labor Relations Board, the GOP has decided that any time it can, it will simply throw itself in the way as a roadblock.
Which is an indelicate way to bring up that people are so frustrated in Haiti by a lack of aid getting to them that they have, in two cases, used corpses for roadblocks.
Things Unimportant:
1. Anyone remember that idiotic debate over some damn Washington insider book?
2. Anyone still care who Tiger Woods was banging?
3. Are we actually spending time on who gets to host The Tonight Show?
That right there is a community of shacks and trailers that was also destroyed by the earthquake in Haiti. The shantytown in Port-au-Prince was the shithole people called home. Haiti has one of the greatest income disparities between well-off and impoverished in the Western Hemisphere, with one percent of Haitians owning half the nation's wealth. The people who lived in the Carrefour slum are as homeless as many of the rich who lived up in Petionville.
Because, even with the glaring distraction of the ongoing catastrophe, the American political process lumbers on.
Things Important:
1. That the Senate race in Massachusetts is even close is clear evidence of the incompetence of the DNC without Howard Dean running it. And since it got so little attention from Obama before, there's no way the President can wander into the Martha Coakley/nude guy race now.
2. Because if they screw up this race, they've screwed whatever health care reform might possibly get passed. Or at least the piece of paper that claims "reform" on it.
3. Republicans are actively preventing the executive branch from operating at full steam by blocking Obama nominee after Obama nominee for reasons petty and ideological. Whether it's Dawn Johnsen for the Office of Legal Counsel or Craig Becker for the National Labor Relations Board, the GOP has decided that any time it can, it will simply throw itself in the way as a roadblock.
Which is an indelicate way to bring up that people are so frustrated in Haiti by a lack of aid getting to them that they have, in two cases, used corpses for roadblocks.
Things Unimportant:
1. Anyone remember that idiotic debate over some damn Washington insider book?
2. Anyone still care who Tiger Woods was banging?
3. Are we actually spending time on who gets to host The Tonight Show?
That right there is a community of shacks and trailers that was also destroyed by the earthquake in Haiti. The shantytown in Port-au-Prince was the shithole people called home. Haiti has one of the greatest income disparities between well-off and impoverished in the Western Hemisphere, with one percent of Haitians owning half the nation's wealth. The people who lived in the Carrefour slum are as homeless as many of the rich who lived up in Petionville.
1/14/2010
Why Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh Ought to Be Dropped Into Haiti as Food (Updated):
Seriously, did you think that Pat Robertson wasn't going to be a completely batshit insane fuckbag about Haiti? C'mon: natural disaster, scary black people, hoodoo-voodoo shit? It's the first Jesus boner Robertson's had in over four years, since he blamed New Orleans for being some kind of gay, sinning magnet for Hurricane Katrina. Robertson said that Haiti only overthrew colonial control because the slaves there made a pact with the devil. "True story," he assured us, despite the fact that it's false. (Sure, yeah, fine, Robertson's got relief organizations working in Haiti. Doesn't make him less of an asshole.)
By the way, if you wanna prove your God is so goddamn powerful, let him cause an earthquake somewhere that's not on a fault line, or let him whip up a hurricane in, say, the middle of the desert. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about how big and strong he is. In fact, Pat Robertson, you saggy, sick, senile fuck who needed to be ground up into soylent green about a decade ago or buried alive with Jerry Falwell's corpse, if your God is such a dick that he'd try to prove some bullshit point by flattening a country of poor, beaten down people, then fuck your God. Motherfucker oughta spend some time hanging with his son to learn how to treat the meek. (And as for Robertson's nodding sidekick there, Kristi Watts, others have put it quite nicely.)
Other ugliness will rear its ugly head, as is the wont of ugliness. And while writing about Rush Limbaugh twice in one week is like researching burn victim goatse (Note: don't), the man who sadly did not die a couple of weeks ago used the Haiti earthquake as a way to attack President Barack Obama in many bizarre ways.
- According to Limbaugh, there's some kind of equivalence between the deluded fucktard who sparked his balls aflame on an airplane on Christmas and a major catastrophe that has destroyed a country and probably killed tens of thousands of people: "Now, I want you to remember, it took him three days to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti." It's a little like saying, "How dare those bastards in the ER deal with a code blue heart attack while I'm sitting here with an ass pimple that needs popping."
- Limbaugh joins his callers in making raising suspicions about going to the White House website in order to find out where to donate:
CALLER: My question is, why did Obama in the sound bite you played earlier, when he's talking about if you wanted to donate some money, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov --
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: -- to direct you how to do so. If I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the WhiteHouse.gov page and --
RUSH: Exactly. Would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Would you trust that your name is going to end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Absolutely right.
So the President gives people an easy way to get information on where to donate and, for Limbaugh and his ball-lapping listeners, it's some kind of conspiracy where Obama will end up breaking the law in order to get campaign contributions.
- Because, ultimately, as Limbaugh says, Obama coming out to talk about Haiti the next day is just a cynical political ploy: "This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there." Does it even need to be said that Obama probably needs no help at all with the black vote in this country? That, at this point, he'd have to do something pretty fucking awful in order to lose it? It's not just a cruel statement by Limbaugh; it's dumb.
Oh, by the way, George W. Bush had a statement out about the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami within 24 hours of its occurrence. Guess that was just to burnish his credibility with Sri Lankans and Indonesians.
At this point, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson need to be bundled up with some canned goods and dropped into Port au Prince in packages marked, "Meat." Griot up those motherfuckers. It's about the only way they'd be useful.
Update: Just to demonstrate how very fucked Limbaugh's remarks are, even the Rude Pundit's designated punching Townhall.com bag, Kevin McCullough, who mentions that he has an adopted son from Haiti, is urging his readers/listeners to donate to earthquake relief without any sort of political agenda. (By the way, Kevster, this doesn't mean that the Rude Pundit loves you any more than he already does.)
Seriously, did you think that Pat Robertson wasn't going to be a completely batshit insane fuckbag about Haiti? C'mon: natural disaster, scary black people, hoodoo-voodoo shit? It's the first Jesus boner Robertson's had in over four years, since he blamed New Orleans for being some kind of gay, sinning magnet for Hurricane Katrina. Robertson said that Haiti only overthrew colonial control because the slaves there made a pact with the devil. "True story," he assured us, despite the fact that it's false. (Sure, yeah, fine, Robertson's got relief organizations working in Haiti. Doesn't make him less of an asshole.)
By the way, if you wanna prove your God is so goddamn powerful, let him cause an earthquake somewhere that's not on a fault line, or let him whip up a hurricane in, say, the middle of the desert. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about how big and strong he is. In fact, Pat Robertson, you saggy, sick, senile fuck who needed to be ground up into soylent green about a decade ago or buried alive with Jerry Falwell's corpse, if your God is such a dick that he'd try to prove some bullshit point by flattening a country of poor, beaten down people, then fuck your God. Motherfucker oughta spend some time hanging with his son to learn how to treat the meek. (And as for Robertson's nodding sidekick there, Kristi Watts, others have put it quite nicely.)
Other ugliness will rear its ugly head, as is the wont of ugliness. And while writing about Rush Limbaugh twice in one week is like researching burn victim goatse (Note: don't), the man who sadly did not die a couple of weeks ago used the Haiti earthquake as a way to attack President Barack Obama in many bizarre ways.
- According to Limbaugh, there's some kind of equivalence between the deluded fucktard who sparked his balls aflame on an airplane on Christmas and a major catastrophe that has destroyed a country and probably killed tens of thousands of people: "Now, I want you to remember, it took him three days to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti." It's a little like saying, "How dare those bastards in the ER deal with a code blue heart attack while I'm sitting here with an ass pimple that needs popping."
- Limbaugh joins his callers in making raising suspicions about going to the White House website in order to find out where to donate:
CALLER: My question is, why did Obama in the sound bite you played earlier, when he's talking about if you wanted to donate some money, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov --
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: -- to direct you how to do so. If I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the WhiteHouse.gov page and --
RUSH: Exactly. Would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Would you trust that your name is going to end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Absolutely right.
So the President gives people an easy way to get information on where to donate and, for Limbaugh and his ball-lapping listeners, it's some kind of conspiracy where Obama will end up breaking the law in order to get campaign contributions.
- Because, ultimately, as Limbaugh says, Obama coming out to talk about Haiti the next day is just a cynical political ploy: "This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there." Does it even need to be said that Obama probably needs no help at all with the black vote in this country? That, at this point, he'd have to do something pretty fucking awful in order to lose it? It's not just a cruel statement by Limbaugh; it's dumb.
Oh, by the way, George W. Bush had a statement out about the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami within 24 hours of its occurrence. Guess that was just to burnish his credibility with Sri Lankans and Indonesians.
At this point, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson need to be bundled up with some canned goods and dropped into Port au Prince in packages marked, "Meat." Griot up those motherfuckers. It's about the only way they'd be useful.
Update: Just to demonstrate how very fucked Limbaugh's remarks are, even the Rude Pundit's designated punching Townhall.com bag, Kevin McCullough, who mentions that he has an adopted son from Haiti, is urging his readers/listeners to donate to earthquake relief without any sort of political agenda. (By the way, Kevster, this doesn't mean that the Rude Pundit loves you any more than he already does.)
1/13/2010
The Degradation of the Media: Racism, Sexism, and Sarah Palin:
1. What If It Had Been Sweden?: Last night was proof that CNN is doing something noble in facing down the urge to turn its evening programming over to commentary. Yeah, there's a fuck of a lot to criticize the network for, but at least it wasn't playing a rerun of an interview about Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and NBC. That would be MSNBC at around 10:30 p.m. ET, when Countdown was on its second go-round of the night. And it wasn't showing whatever the fuck it is that Greta Van Scientologist does on Fox "news." Nope, other than about ten minutes of Larry King's corpse talking about NBC, the entire evening on CNN was all about trying to get information on the earthquake that wrecked a good chunk of Haiti. In other words, for two out of three of the supposed news networks, their prime-time personalities were more important than the actual news. As Lizz Winstead wrote last night, referring to MSNBC, "I wish a balloon was flying over Haiti. Maybe we would get some coverage on it then."
Now, the Rude Pundit doesn't wanna go all Katrina/Bush on this, but Haiti's a nation of nearly 10 million people. It shares an island with another nation, the Dominican Republic, that's got about 10 million people. But the Rude Pundit can't help but wonder what MSNBC or Fox would have done had this been an earthquake in Sweden, which has a similar number of citizens, or, hell, Ireland, which has less than half. So while we can certainly blame the pathetic degradation of international coverage and the craven ratings whoredom of GE or News Corp, there's something galling here about mostly ignoring a catastrophe in a nation of black people, as if Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are more important than a disaster that has leveled a capital city in a country in which quite a few immigrants have roots, as if MSNBC and Fox simply didn't give a shit about the help.
2. Why Do Mark Halperin and John Heilemann Hate Women?: The Rude Pundit wrote yesterday (and Salon's Joan Walsh said the same on The Ed Show) that the too-much talked about book Game Change is rife with misogyny, at least in what's been reported in the press about it (in a five-day circle jerk that's gonna require a battalion of grumpy janitors to clean up).
Now, having read the section on the implosion of the John Edwards campaign excerpted in New York magazine, the Rude Pundit wonders if the objective of the writers was to punish women for daring to get involved in the man's game of politics. What you get from the tale is that Edwards would have been just fine if these nutty bitches around him hadn't been either feeding his delusions (like mistress Rielle Hunter) or denigrating him (and staffers) in a pseudo-Medea rage (like cancer-having, son-losing Elizabeth Edwards). Yes, Edwards comes across as a pathetic, egotistical joke, but Hunter and Elizabeth Edwards come across as succubi.
So add to that the portraits of Sarah Palin as a dim, manic-depressive religious zealot and Hillary Clinton as an angry, embittered failure, and you have to wonder why the media people clawing at each other to get Heilemann and Halperin to dish more haven't called them out on either their use of sources seeking payback or their own deplorable sexism.
3. What They're Watching in Hell: Actual exchange from last night's Fox "news" debut of Sarah Palin on Bill O'Reilly's show regarding the one time Palin met House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi:
O'REILLY: But did you chat with her? Do you have any idea?
PALIN: Chatted with her a little bit, yes. She was leading a group of school children through on a tour. And I thought, well, that's nice that she has that time on her hands that she could do that.
O'REILLY: Yes, but the school children need to be led. You know that.
PALIN: Yes, that's what I'm saying. It was nice.
O'REILLY: Now, do you think that she's a kook?
PALIN: I think that she, too, is quite disconnected from what her constituents are telling her — and constituents all over the country.
O'REILLY: But she's a San Francisco liberal. But — but do you think she's actually crazy?
Yes, the woman who quit as governor of the state that elected her in order to, among other things, get paid to be a Fox "news" commentator said that she thought Nancy Pelosi was wasting her time in showing schoolkids around the Capitol. And Bill O'Reilly's only follow-up was whether or not Pelosi was crazy.
1. What If It Had Been Sweden?: Last night was proof that CNN is doing something noble in facing down the urge to turn its evening programming over to commentary. Yeah, there's a fuck of a lot to criticize the network for, but at least it wasn't playing a rerun of an interview about Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and NBC. That would be MSNBC at around 10:30 p.m. ET, when Countdown was on its second go-round of the night. And it wasn't showing whatever the fuck it is that Greta Van Scientologist does on Fox "news." Nope, other than about ten minutes of Larry King's corpse talking about NBC, the entire evening on CNN was all about trying to get information on the earthquake that wrecked a good chunk of Haiti. In other words, for two out of three of the supposed news networks, their prime-time personalities were more important than the actual news. As Lizz Winstead wrote last night, referring to MSNBC, "I wish a balloon was flying over Haiti. Maybe we would get some coverage on it then."
Now, the Rude Pundit doesn't wanna go all Katrina/Bush on this, but Haiti's a nation of nearly 10 million people. It shares an island with another nation, the Dominican Republic, that's got about 10 million people. But the Rude Pundit can't help but wonder what MSNBC or Fox would have done had this been an earthquake in Sweden, which has a similar number of citizens, or, hell, Ireland, which has less than half. So while we can certainly blame the pathetic degradation of international coverage and the craven ratings whoredom of GE or News Corp, there's something galling here about mostly ignoring a catastrophe in a nation of black people, as if Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are more important than a disaster that has leveled a capital city in a country in which quite a few immigrants have roots, as if MSNBC and Fox simply didn't give a shit about the help.
2. Why Do Mark Halperin and John Heilemann Hate Women?: The Rude Pundit wrote yesterday (and Salon's Joan Walsh said the same on The Ed Show) that the too-much talked about book Game Change is rife with misogyny, at least in what's been reported in the press about it (in a five-day circle jerk that's gonna require a battalion of grumpy janitors to clean up).
Now, having read the section on the implosion of the John Edwards campaign excerpted in New York magazine, the Rude Pundit wonders if the objective of the writers was to punish women for daring to get involved in the man's game of politics. What you get from the tale is that Edwards would have been just fine if these nutty bitches around him hadn't been either feeding his delusions (like mistress Rielle Hunter) or denigrating him (and staffers) in a pseudo-Medea rage (like cancer-having, son-losing Elizabeth Edwards). Yes, Edwards comes across as a pathetic, egotistical joke, but Hunter and Elizabeth Edwards come across as succubi.
So add to that the portraits of Sarah Palin as a dim, manic-depressive religious zealot and Hillary Clinton as an angry, embittered failure, and you have to wonder why the media people clawing at each other to get Heilemann and Halperin to dish more haven't called them out on either their use of sources seeking payback or their own deplorable sexism.
3. What They're Watching in Hell: Actual exchange from last night's Fox "news" debut of Sarah Palin on Bill O'Reilly's show regarding the one time Palin met House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi:
O'REILLY: But did you chat with her? Do you have any idea?
PALIN: Chatted with her a little bit, yes. She was leading a group of school children through on a tour. And I thought, well, that's nice that she has that time on her hands that she could do that.
O'REILLY: Yes, but the school children need to be led. You know that.
PALIN: Yes, that's what I'm saying. It was nice.
O'REILLY: Now, do you think that she's a kook?
PALIN: I think that she, too, is quite disconnected from what her constituents are telling her — and constituents all over the country.
O'REILLY: But she's a San Francisco liberal. But — but do you think she's actually crazy?
Yes, the woman who quit as governor of the state that elected her in order to, among other things, get paid to be a Fox "news" commentator said that she thought Nancy Pelosi was wasting her time in showing schoolkids around the Capitol. And Bill O'Reilly's only follow-up was whether or not Pelosi was crazy.
1/12/2010
The Rude Pundit on Yesterday's Stephanie Miller Show:
On Monday, the Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller talked in graphic detail about the taint bomber. Among other things, the Rude Pundit revealed the devastating flaw in the bomber's plan: he set himself up to be punched in the crotch repeatedly to put out his cock fire. Somehow, that related to Harry Reid.
As ever, you can subscribe to the Rude Pundit's podcast. You can listen while you workout and sweat drips down your thighs. Also available on iTunes.
Quick note: Forgot to give props this morning to rude buddy MHC for his post-inspiring question yesterday, "Doesn't it mean that Hannity has to believe the Sarah Palin shit?"
On Monday, the Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller talked in graphic detail about the taint bomber. Among other things, the Rude Pundit revealed the devastating flaw in the bomber's plan: he set himself up to be punched in the crotch repeatedly to put out his cock fire. Somehow, that related to Harry Reid.
As ever, you can subscribe to the Rude Pundit's podcast. You can listen while you workout and sweat drips down your thighs. Also available on iTunes.
Quick note: Forgot to give props this morning to rude buddy MHC for his post-inspiring question yesterday, "Doesn't it mean that Hannity has to believe the Sarah Palin shit?"
So Rush Limbaugh Must Believe That Sarah Palin Is a Dangerously Unstable Idiot:
Mostly, the Rude Pundit doesn't give a frantic ratfuck about the supposed "revelations" in the book Game Change because it won't change anything. It seems like Primary Colors, except it's pretending to be truth rather than fiction. It'll make a fine HBO movie, and more people will read the index than the full book.
But conservatives nutzoids are leaping around like dolphins whose Sea World tank is a meth dumping pond about the unsourced, paraphrased (or outright created) comments of Bill Clinton (wow, did you know he wanted Hillary to be president really, really badly and might have said some mean things? It's true). And, of course, Harry Reid's comments are like a velvet-lined pussy to right-wing commentators, who have jumped on Reid to fuck away madly.
Rush Limbaugh gleefully danced like a gelatinous circus bear on his show yesterday over the Reid and Clinton parts of Game Change. Man, he couldn't get enough of it, even laying out a buddy movie with Robert Byrd and Harry Reid, involving shoeshining: "The shoe shiners are dark-skinned Negroes, just to highlight the stars' tolerance here. In the background you'd have a light-skinned Negro serving a young Bill Clinton coffee." There's more, but who the fuck cares because it's just not funny. By the way, Limbaugh wasn't using "Negro" in quotation marks. He was just using it.
The point here is that Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in Game Change, also describe some pretty devastating scenes with Sarah Palin. Like that she was prone to wild mood swings and didn't know jackshit about anything: "She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001." And, of course, she kept calling the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate "Senator O'Biden." But that's just charming, you betcha.
Rush Limbaugh has called Sarah Palin "the most prominent and articulate voice" on the right, and he's defended her like a gelatinous bear might defend its brain-damaged cub. Yesterday, he dismissed the Palin sections: "There's nothing new in the book about Sarah Palin." Of course, he didn't mention any of those old things.
The parade of the usual conservatives are outraged, just outraged, over the Reid (and, to an extent, Clinton's) comments. But you can't have it both ways, motherfuckers. You can't embrace the book's supposed revelations about Reid, the Clintons, and the Edwardses without acknowledging that Sarah Palin is a fucking deranged, megalomaniacal retard, like Pinky without the Brain, yet still with an urge to take over the world. The book's either right or wrong, worth credit or discredited.
Oh, wait, that's right. You're conservatives. You can dismiss the stuff you don't like in order to fulfill your worldview and propagate a hypocritical path of self-preservation at all costs, even logic. Almost forgot that that's what you do.
A Note on the Sexism of Game Change: The Rude Pundit hasn't read the book yet, but it sure seems like the narrative of it is based around the idea that "bitches is crazy." We have Palin, the possibly post-partum depressed moron; Hillary Clinton, the bitter wife who can't control her rogue husband; and Elizabeth Edwards, the hysterical control freak who demeans her man and underlings. Oh, and Cindy McCain might have been fucking around. Who the fuck wrote this thing? Norman Mailer? There's a boys' club nod-and-wink aspect here that's awfully damn disturbing.
Mostly, the Rude Pundit doesn't give a frantic ratfuck about the supposed "revelations" in the book Game Change because it won't change anything. It seems like Primary Colors, except it's pretending to be truth rather than fiction. It'll make a fine HBO movie, and more people will read the index than the full book.
But conservatives nutzoids are leaping around like dolphins whose Sea World tank is a meth dumping pond about the unsourced, paraphrased (or outright created) comments of Bill Clinton (wow, did you know he wanted Hillary to be president really, really badly and might have said some mean things? It's true). And, of course, Harry Reid's comments are like a velvet-lined pussy to right-wing commentators, who have jumped on Reid to fuck away madly.
Rush Limbaugh gleefully danced like a gelatinous circus bear on his show yesterday over the Reid and Clinton parts of Game Change. Man, he couldn't get enough of it, even laying out a buddy movie with Robert Byrd and Harry Reid, involving shoeshining: "The shoe shiners are dark-skinned Negroes, just to highlight the stars' tolerance here. In the background you'd have a light-skinned Negro serving a young Bill Clinton coffee." There's more, but who the fuck cares because it's just not funny. By the way, Limbaugh wasn't using "Negro" in quotation marks. He was just using it.
The point here is that Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in Game Change, also describe some pretty devastating scenes with Sarah Palin. Like that she was prone to wild mood swings and didn't know jackshit about anything: "She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001." And, of course, she kept calling the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate "Senator O'Biden." But that's just charming, you betcha.
Rush Limbaugh has called Sarah Palin "the most prominent and articulate voice" on the right, and he's defended her like a gelatinous bear might defend its brain-damaged cub. Yesterday, he dismissed the Palin sections: "There's nothing new in the book about Sarah Palin." Of course, he didn't mention any of those old things.
The parade of the usual conservatives are outraged, just outraged, over the Reid (and, to an extent, Clinton's) comments. But you can't have it both ways, motherfuckers. You can't embrace the book's supposed revelations about Reid, the Clintons, and the Edwardses without acknowledging that Sarah Palin is a fucking deranged, megalomaniacal retard, like Pinky without the Brain, yet still with an urge to take over the world. The book's either right or wrong, worth credit or discredited.
Oh, wait, that's right. You're conservatives. You can dismiss the stuff you don't like in order to fulfill your worldview and propagate a hypocritical path of self-preservation at all costs, even logic. Almost forgot that that's what you do.
A Note on the Sexism of Game Change: The Rude Pundit hasn't read the book yet, but it sure seems like the narrative of it is based around the idea that "bitches is crazy." We have Palin, the possibly post-partum depressed moron; Hillary Clinton, the bitter wife who can't control her rogue husband; and Elizabeth Edwards, the hysterical control freak who demeans her man and underlings. Oh, and Cindy McCain might have been fucking around. Who the fuck wrote this thing? Norman Mailer? There's a boys' club nod-and-wink aspect here that's awfully damn disturbing.
1/11/2010
Talking About What Harry Reid Said Without Talking About What Harry Reid Said:
In a 1995 New Yorker interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colin Powell listed the reasons that he was more palatable a black candidate to white Americans than, say, Jesse Jackson: "One, I don't shove it in their face, you know? I don't bring any stereotypes or threatening visage to their presence. Some black people do. Two, I can overcome any stereotypes or reservations they have, because I perform well. Third thing is, I ain't that black." And he added, "I speak reasonably well, like a white person." He later clarified to another audience, "I am not that black as a physical matter."
Powell was stating the obvious: white Americans were more comfortable with Powell because of the shade of his skin. Now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the same obvious thing about the continuing pathetic state of race in America. The actual quote from the book is a broken up couple of phrases that may have been cobbled together, but here it is: Reid "was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,' as he said privately."
What in there is racist? It's okay to talk about race as a factor in the election. That's not racism. How many people used up gigabytes and ink to talk about the role race was playing in the 2008 election? In fact, Reid was actually more optimistic about Americans' ability to deal with voting for a black president than many on the left were. The Rude Pundit was told numerous times that Obama couldn't be elected because he was black. All Reid said was, more or less, that "Jay-Z couldn't get elected president, but Will Smith might," which, if you didn't realize that about America, you're an idiot or an opportunist, or you're in deep, deep denial.
Let's not be cute or coy about the phrase "Negro dialect," as Joe Scarborough was on Morning Starbucks on MSNBC today. Joey the Scar delighted in asking his guests what a "Negro dialect" was, as if we don't all know. Sure, sure, we can pretend and get huffy and defensive and say, "Why, all black people talk differently," but the second you read or heard the phrase, you knew exactly what Harry Reid was talking about. And that also says something about American racism, that we (whites, especially) can't get beyond the ingrained stereotypes that afflict our perceptions.
There's a fuck of a lot of great candidates who couldn't get elected because of their dialects, even if it doesn't seem to affect white males who run for office (although, elected as they were, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter still had to deal with hick stereotyping that placed them as outsiders). And as for any inability to use the English language, George W. Bush fucked up more sentences than Lil' Wayne on a pre-prison bender. So Reid was right to tie it to race. The word "Negro" is outdated and old-fashioned, sure, but Reid is 70, and, even if now they call themselves "UNCF," the United Negro College Fund still exists. And if Reid had said "black," it wouldn't have changed a goddamn thing about the reaction.
For this is manna from racial heaven for Republicans. They'll use it to whip up some kind of frenzy to demonstrate they care about black people, despite a century or so of demonstrating otherwise in action instead of words. Michael Steele will bark madly, and Newt Gingrich won't be called to task for also stating the obvious, too, when he said, "Michael Steele makes a number of old-time Republicans very nervous," specifically citing "he's African-American" as one of those nerve-wracking factors. They'll talk about Trent Lott until they realize it just reminds everyone of how much Republicans work against African Americans.
Eventually, we'll reach a critical mass of black people who have forgiven Reid. And Joey the Scar will realize he's spent enough time giving free publicity to a book by two of his regular morning guests. All of this will happen without any actual reflection on a nation that does still judge people by the shade of the color of their skin. There is a discussion to be had here. It is not whether or not Harry Reid is a racist.
Mostly, the Rude Pundit's sure, nearly ever American not invested in bloggery or media or Nevada politics is thinking, "Why is this a fucking story I should give a shit about?" And the sad answer is that they shouldn't, but they should.
In a 1995 New Yorker interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colin Powell listed the reasons that he was more palatable a black candidate to white Americans than, say, Jesse Jackson: "One, I don't shove it in their face, you know? I don't bring any stereotypes or threatening visage to their presence. Some black people do. Two, I can overcome any stereotypes or reservations they have, because I perform well. Third thing is, I ain't that black." And he added, "I speak reasonably well, like a white person." He later clarified to another audience, "I am not that black as a physical matter."
Powell was stating the obvious: white Americans were more comfortable with Powell because of the shade of his skin. Now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the same obvious thing about the continuing pathetic state of race in America. The actual quote from the book is a broken up couple of phrases that may have been cobbled together, but here it is: Reid "was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,' as he said privately."
What in there is racist? It's okay to talk about race as a factor in the election. That's not racism. How many people used up gigabytes and ink to talk about the role race was playing in the 2008 election? In fact, Reid was actually more optimistic about Americans' ability to deal with voting for a black president than many on the left were. The Rude Pundit was told numerous times that Obama couldn't be elected because he was black. All Reid said was, more or less, that "Jay-Z couldn't get elected president, but Will Smith might," which, if you didn't realize that about America, you're an idiot or an opportunist, or you're in deep, deep denial.
Let's not be cute or coy about the phrase "Negro dialect," as Joe Scarborough was on Morning Starbucks on MSNBC today. Joey the Scar delighted in asking his guests what a "Negro dialect" was, as if we don't all know. Sure, sure, we can pretend and get huffy and defensive and say, "Why, all black people talk differently," but the second you read or heard the phrase, you knew exactly what Harry Reid was talking about. And that also says something about American racism, that we (whites, especially) can't get beyond the ingrained stereotypes that afflict our perceptions.
There's a fuck of a lot of great candidates who couldn't get elected because of their dialects, even if it doesn't seem to affect white males who run for office (although, elected as they were, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter still had to deal with hick stereotyping that placed them as outsiders). And as for any inability to use the English language, George W. Bush fucked up more sentences than Lil' Wayne on a pre-prison bender. So Reid was right to tie it to race. The word "Negro" is outdated and old-fashioned, sure, but Reid is 70, and, even if now they call themselves "UNCF," the United Negro College Fund still exists. And if Reid had said "black," it wouldn't have changed a goddamn thing about the reaction.
For this is manna from racial heaven for Republicans. They'll use it to whip up some kind of frenzy to demonstrate they care about black people, despite a century or so of demonstrating otherwise in action instead of words. Michael Steele will bark madly, and Newt Gingrich won't be called to task for also stating the obvious, too, when he said, "Michael Steele makes a number of old-time Republicans very nervous," specifically citing "he's African-American" as one of those nerve-wracking factors. They'll talk about Trent Lott until they realize it just reminds everyone of how much Republicans work against African Americans.
Eventually, we'll reach a critical mass of black people who have forgiven Reid. And Joey the Scar will realize he's spent enough time giving free publicity to a book by two of his regular morning guests. All of this will happen without any actual reflection on a nation that does still judge people by the shade of the color of their skin. There is a discussion to be had here. It is not whether or not Harry Reid is a racist.
Mostly, the Rude Pundit's sure, nearly ever American not invested in bloggery or media or Nevada politics is thinking, "Why is this a fucking story I should give a shit about?" And the sad answer is that they shouldn't, but they should.
1/10/2010
Sunday Treats:
The Rude Pundit was on GRITtv with Laura Flanders this past week. It was a media panel with Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel (on Firedoglake), and Dan Gerstein, formerly of the Lieberman office. It was fun, but not nearly as rude as it could have been. Check it out.
And tomorrow's Monday, which means the Rude Pundit will be palavering about politics with Stephanie Miller on her fine radio programme. Listen to the love at 9:30 a.m. ET/ 6:30 PT.
The Rude Pundit was on GRITtv with Laura Flanders this past week. It was a media panel with Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel (on Firedoglake), and Dan Gerstein, formerly of the Lieberman office. It was fun, but not nearly as rude as it could have been. Check it out.
And tomorrow's Monday, which means the Rude Pundit will be palavering about politics with Stephanie Miller on her fine radio programme. Listen to the love at 9:30 a.m. ET/ 6:30 PT.
1/08/2010
Obama Does What Bush and Cheney Would Not:
Since the nutzoid right has used as a bizarro talking point the fact that President Barack Obama didn't speak to the public until three days after the taint bomber succeeded in making scrotum fritters, let's use another measure of time. Remember the moment when George W. Bush's former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke appeared before the 9/11 Commission and said, "Your government failed you"? Remember the catharsis of that act, of the simple acknowledgment of blame? That was on March 24, 2004, which by rough calculation and use of complex algorithms is a fuck of a lot longer after September 11, 2001 than January 7, 2010 is after December 25, 2009.
Let's give some credit here amid our constant dismay on the left with the President: Yesterday, Barack Obama did something quite extraordinary in these weaselly times when he stood up and took blame for the fuck-ups that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to publicly turn his balls into boiled jizz bags. The President actually looked like a pissed-off boss when he spoke, like a man who understood what might have happened had Abdulmutallab decided to try to blow up the toilet instead of the flotation device under his ass. As Joan Walsh in Salon says, you can't imagine George W. Bush ever treating the American public with such honesty; you can't imagine him thinking he could trust Americans to reveal what went wrong on 9/11. Barack Obama was more of a real man, a real leader, yesterday than the faux macho George W. Bush was in his entire presidency.
Obama's speech was fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which was his saying that "the buck stops with me." There was a subtle thread throughout of a repudiation of the way the Bush administration treated terrorism. "We are at war," he asserted, but then in a fuck-you to those who wanted him to say the word "war," he added, "We are at war with al-Qaeda." That's an easily apprehended specificity, a group (however diffuse and ill-defined it may be), and not a vague notion like a "war on terror" or, as Bush said, a "war with extremists." What Obama could have said that he did not is, "Man, Bush left me with a shitty, hole-filled security infrastructure that's built with Tinker Toys and tape." Instead, he said what's fucked and what he's gonna do.
Most bracingly, Obama told Dick Cheney, "Go fuck yourself," by saying, "Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am President, we will never hand them that victory. We will define the character of our country, not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children." In other words, don't go bugnuts just because one dude on one plane lit a fire.
(Let's put aside for the moment the administration's continuation of some of Bush's policies in the treatment of, say, detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan.)
The system screwed up. Security shouldn't come down to whether or not some poorly-paid airline worker types in a name correctly. Get some geeks from Google to fix that. But the President, not some rogue former administration member, admitted the screw-ups to us and said we're working on it. And he told us to not be children about security: "But even the best intelligence can't identify in advance every individual who would do us harm...there is, of course, no foolproof solution." One piece of advice to seal the openness and accountability deal: fire some people. Accept a resignation. That would make create a new paradigm.
As for Richard Clarke, you may remember that he was viciously denigrated by Republicans and smeared by the Bush administration as a glory hound trying to sell books. Yeah, he was trying to sell books. And he became a fucking hero for his honesty. It's possible to do both. And when he made his statement to the 9/11 families, he didn't know what would happen. That's a man with balls standing among the eunuchs. Disagree with Obama as you may, it's somewhat comforting in this cold landscape to know that this time around, that man is the one standing to talk to us all, that the leader is the grown-up in the room.
Since the nutzoid right has used as a bizarro talking point the fact that President Barack Obama didn't speak to the public until three days after the taint bomber succeeded in making scrotum fritters, let's use another measure of time. Remember the moment when George W. Bush's former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke appeared before the 9/11 Commission and said, "Your government failed you"? Remember the catharsis of that act, of the simple acknowledgment of blame? That was on March 24, 2004, which by rough calculation and use of complex algorithms is a fuck of a lot longer after September 11, 2001 than January 7, 2010 is after December 25, 2009.
Let's give some credit here amid our constant dismay on the left with the President: Yesterday, Barack Obama did something quite extraordinary in these weaselly times when he stood up and took blame for the fuck-ups that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to publicly turn his balls into boiled jizz bags. The President actually looked like a pissed-off boss when he spoke, like a man who understood what might have happened had Abdulmutallab decided to try to blow up the toilet instead of the flotation device under his ass. As Joan Walsh in Salon says, you can't imagine George W. Bush ever treating the American public with such honesty; you can't imagine him thinking he could trust Americans to reveal what went wrong on 9/11. Barack Obama was more of a real man, a real leader, yesterday than the faux macho George W. Bush was in his entire presidency.
Obama's speech was fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which was his saying that "the buck stops with me." There was a subtle thread throughout of a repudiation of the way the Bush administration treated terrorism. "We are at war," he asserted, but then in a fuck-you to those who wanted him to say the word "war," he added, "We are at war with al-Qaeda." That's an easily apprehended specificity, a group (however diffuse and ill-defined it may be), and not a vague notion like a "war on terror" or, as Bush said, a "war with extremists." What Obama could have said that he did not is, "Man, Bush left me with a shitty, hole-filled security infrastructure that's built with Tinker Toys and tape." Instead, he said what's fucked and what he's gonna do.
Most bracingly, Obama told Dick Cheney, "Go fuck yourself," by saying, "Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am President, we will never hand them that victory. We will define the character of our country, not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children." In other words, don't go bugnuts just because one dude on one plane lit a fire.
(Let's put aside for the moment the administration's continuation of some of Bush's policies in the treatment of, say, detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan.)
The system screwed up. Security shouldn't come down to whether or not some poorly-paid airline worker types in a name correctly. Get some geeks from Google to fix that. But the President, not some rogue former administration member, admitted the screw-ups to us and said we're working on it. And he told us to not be children about security: "But even the best intelligence can't identify in advance every individual who would do us harm...there is, of course, no foolproof solution." One piece of advice to seal the openness and accountability deal: fire some people. Accept a resignation. That would make create a new paradigm.
As for Richard Clarke, you may remember that he was viciously denigrated by Republicans and smeared by the Bush administration as a glory hound trying to sell books. Yeah, he was trying to sell books. And he became a fucking hero for his honesty. It's possible to do both. And when he made his statement to the 9/11 families, he didn't know what would happen. That's a man with balls standing among the eunuchs. Disagree with Obama as you may, it's somewhat comforting in this cold landscape to know that this time around, that man is the one standing to talk to us all, that the leader is the grown-up in the room.
1/07/2010
Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 102,025 (Christian Redemption Edition):
Little-known rumor: Ann Coulter has had the image of dead Jesus Christ from the Shroud of Turin printed onto a latex blow-up doll and given it a hard, rubber dildo. See, in the same moment, she can fuck herself with both the dead and resurrected Christian savior. She's been known to entertain guests by hanging the doll on a cross in her dining room, next to her chair, so that the cock is right at head level. That way, during wine and dinner conversation, she can turn, look lovingly up at the Lord's son, and then lap on his dick like Lolita with a lollipop. She says it's so Jesus knows he's always welcome. When she gets really drunk, she tells her guests that there's only one way to redeem herself for her sins, and she deep throats Christ's dildo. She doesn't care if Christ can't come. She believes that what she's doing is banking her sins and that when she gets to heaven, Jesus will be there, and she'll take his holy peter in her mouth so Jesus can jizz down her throat for every transgression she has asked him to forgive. Buckets of Christ cum: the price of entering the pearly gates.
The Rude Pundit believes the rumor to be true because he's read Coulter's latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "Sub-street corner Jesus ranting that'd make Jack Chick go atheist"), where she defends Brit Hume's Christ-can-save-Tigers-Woods remarks on Fox "news." Coulter agrees, like a whore whose pimp is God. In one of the great reductionist arguments in the history of arguments, the kind of thing that’d make Plato stop buggering a boy for a moment and say “What the fuck?” Coulter asserts, “God sent his only son to get the crap beaten out of him, die for our sins and rise from the dead. If you believe that, you're in. Your sins are washed away from you -- sins even worse than adultery! -- because of the cross.” Wow, Christianity sure seems like the McDonald’s of religions.
In fact, the entire "column" could be viewed as a sarcastic take on the bullshit version of redemption offered by some interpretations of Christianity. Rape a newborn and drink its blood? Just confess, and it's heaven for you. That's actually not much of an overstatement. Coulter quotes Romans 10:9 on confession and adds, "If you do that, every rotten, sinful thing you've ever done is gone from you. You're every bit as much a Christian as the pope or Billy Graham." Seriously, that looks like a sentence the Rude Pundit could have written facetiously.
It hardly needs to be said that if some broadcaster at a "news" network had said that Islam is the only path to redemption, he would be hounded out of his job. The second you say that your sky wizard is so very much bigger than other sky wizards, you have entered the realm of absurd. In fact, the only rational reaction one can have to Coulter or Hume is, "Hey, if Tiger Woods doesn't want to have to worry about anything, he should become an atheist and party on."
Little-known rumor: Ann Coulter has had the image of dead Jesus Christ from the Shroud of Turin printed onto a latex blow-up doll and given it a hard, rubber dildo. See, in the same moment, she can fuck herself with both the dead and resurrected Christian savior. She's been known to entertain guests by hanging the doll on a cross in her dining room, next to her chair, so that the cock is right at head level. That way, during wine and dinner conversation, she can turn, look lovingly up at the Lord's son, and then lap on his dick like Lolita with a lollipop. She says it's so Jesus knows he's always welcome. When she gets really drunk, she tells her guests that there's only one way to redeem herself for her sins, and she deep throats Christ's dildo. She doesn't care if Christ can't come. She believes that what she's doing is banking her sins and that when she gets to heaven, Jesus will be there, and she'll take his holy peter in her mouth so Jesus can jizz down her throat for every transgression she has asked him to forgive. Buckets of Christ cum: the price of entering the pearly gates.
The Rude Pundit believes the rumor to be true because he's read Coulter's latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "Sub-street corner Jesus ranting that'd make Jack Chick go atheist"), where she defends Brit Hume's Christ-can-save-Tigers-Woods remarks on Fox "news." Coulter agrees, like a whore whose pimp is God. In one of the great reductionist arguments in the history of arguments, the kind of thing that’d make Plato stop buggering a boy for a moment and say “What the fuck?” Coulter asserts, “God sent his only son to get the crap beaten out of him, die for our sins and rise from the dead. If you believe that, you're in. Your sins are washed away from you -- sins even worse than adultery! -- because of the cross.” Wow, Christianity sure seems like the McDonald’s of religions.
In fact, the entire "column" could be viewed as a sarcastic take on the bullshit version of redemption offered by some interpretations of Christianity. Rape a newborn and drink its blood? Just confess, and it's heaven for you. That's actually not much of an overstatement. Coulter quotes Romans 10:9 on confession and adds, "If you do that, every rotten, sinful thing you've ever done is gone from you. You're every bit as much a Christian as the pope or Billy Graham." Seriously, that looks like a sentence the Rude Pundit could have written facetiously.
It hardly needs to be said that if some broadcaster at a "news" network had said that Islam is the only path to redemption, he would be hounded out of his job. The second you say that your sky wizard is so very much bigger than other sky wizards, you have entered the realm of absurd. In fact, the only rational reaction one can have to Coulter or Hume is, "Hey, if Tiger Woods doesn't want to have to worry about anything, he should become an atheist and party on."
(Note: The link to Coulter's scribbles is from the Jewish World Review - motto: "Self-hating to oblivion.")
Late Post Today:
Because of the aforementioned appearance on GRITtv with Laura Flanders, the throbbing rudeness will be delayed until this afternoon.
By the way, appearing with the Rude Pundit will be Marcy Wheeler, the blogger's blogger of Emptywheel. And Dan Gerstein. He's one of the main reasons Joe Lieberman's in the Senate.
Because of the aforementioned appearance on GRITtv with Laura Flanders, the throbbing rudeness will be delayed until this afternoon.
By the way, appearing with the Rude Pundit will be Marcy Wheeler, the blogger's blogger of Emptywheel. And Dan Gerstein. He's one of the main reasons Joe Lieberman's in the Senate.
1/06/2010
The Rude Pundit on GRITtv with Laura Flanders:
In his continuing quest to conquer the airwaves, the Rude Pundit will appear on GRITtv with host Laura Flanders on Thursday at noon to talk media reaction to Yeman, terrorism, and more. He'll be boning up on his Fox "news" tonight. You can watch it live.
In his continuing quest to conquer the airwaves, the Rude Pundit will appear on GRITtv with host Laura Flanders on Thursday at noon to talk media reaction to Yeman, terrorism, and more. He'll be boning up on his Fox "news" tonight. You can watch it live.
A Few Questions Regarding Our Death Spiral of Anti-Terrorist Reactions:
The Rude Pundit's no counter-terrorism expert, and, unlike every other pusillanimous pundit puking forth, he ain't gonna pretend to be. But, you know, it doesn't take a degree from the war college to figure out that the same tactics, rinsed and repeated, are gonna get the same results.
1. Why is Barack Obama getting blamed for not dealing with Yemen? The USS Cole was attacked in October of 2000. That leaves a tiny bit of Clinton and eight years of Bush the Dumber to have, oh, who the fuck knows, actually done something about the collapsing state of Yemen. Bonus points: after 9/11, Bush sent 100 troops to Yemen for "training." It's a little like sending a mouse with a toothpick to face down a gang of cats. Of course, instead of doing anything about Yemen, other than the occasional Predator drone strike, we did something about Iraq, which...oh, fuck, never mind. Bonuser points: Obama was already sending drones to bomb Yemen weeks before the taint bomber ever lifted his nutsack to get the explosives. (That's not a statement on the legality of the drone attacks.)
2. Why does the United States have to lose its shit every time some blip occurs in our system? By the Rude Pundit's awesome mathematical abilities, he's figure out that, since 9/11, roughly 8 billion planes flights have occurred in America, carrying roughly 20 gajillion people, some of them repeatedly. And while you don't want a single plane to ever fall out of the sky or get its shit blown up, that's pretty good odds, and one Nigerian flame-broiling his balls out of so many gajillion fliers seems more a burp in security that needs to be corrected (with some firing and tightening of procedures) than a complete meltdown and holy-fuck-we're-all-gonna-die-let's-have-sex-quick. It just doesn't seem to warrant turning the crazy level up to "weasels fucking on meth." Naive? Sure. But the Rude Pundit's just sick of being told to be scared.
3. If we do lose our shit every time some Nigerian fries his junk, doesn't that mean that terrorists are winning? It barely needs to be said, no? That terrorism contains its purpose in its name. That the real result of 9/11 is that Osama bin Laden kicked our asses because we played his game, spending ourselves into domestic insecurity in order to deal with a ghost of a foreign threat. We've done practically everything the drama queens of al Qaeda could ask. Check out the goals of terrorism from a 2005 article by a real terrorism expert, Ernest Evans (who has been writing about this for three decades).
The Rude Pundit is not seeking to diminish the importance of screening at airports. He is not saying that it wouldn't have been terrifying to be on the plane with the smell of burnt cock in the cabin. But we're in an insane death spiral of tactics that have failed. All the idiots screaming for war forget that we've been doing war. In other words, even in the new administration, why are we damned to commit the same mistakes again and again?
The Rude Pundit's no counter-terrorism expert, and, unlike every other pusillanimous pundit puking forth, he ain't gonna pretend to be. But, you know, it doesn't take a degree from the war college to figure out that the same tactics, rinsed and repeated, are gonna get the same results.
1. Why is Barack Obama getting blamed for not dealing with Yemen? The USS Cole was attacked in October of 2000. That leaves a tiny bit of Clinton and eight years of Bush the Dumber to have, oh, who the fuck knows, actually done something about the collapsing state of Yemen. Bonus points: after 9/11, Bush sent 100 troops to Yemen for "training." It's a little like sending a mouse with a toothpick to face down a gang of cats. Of course, instead of doing anything about Yemen, other than the occasional Predator drone strike, we did something about Iraq, which...oh, fuck, never mind. Bonuser points: Obama was already sending drones to bomb Yemen weeks before the taint bomber ever lifted his nutsack to get the explosives. (That's not a statement on the legality of the drone attacks.)
2. Why does the United States have to lose its shit every time some blip occurs in our system? By the Rude Pundit's awesome mathematical abilities, he's figure out that, since 9/11, roughly 8 billion planes flights have occurred in America, carrying roughly 20 gajillion people, some of them repeatedly. And while you don't want a single plane to ever fall out of the sky or get its shit blown up, that's pretty good odds, and one Nigerian flame-broiling his balls out of so many gajillion fliers seems more a burp in security that needs to be corrected (with some firing and tightening of procedures) than a complete meltdown and holy-fuck-we're-all-gonna-die-let's-have-sex-quick. It just doesn't seem to warrant turning the crazy level up to "weasels fucking on meth." Naive? Sure. But the Rude Pundit's just sick of being told to be scared.
3. If we do lose our shit every time some Nigerian fries his junk, doesn't that mean that terrorists are winning? It barely needs to be said, no? That terrorism contains its purpose in its name. That the real result of 9/11 is that Osama bin Laden kicked our asses because we played his game, spending ourselves into domestic insecurity in order to deal with a ghost of a foreign threat. We've done practically everything the drama queens of al Qaeda could ask. Check out the goals of terrorism from a 2005 article by a real terrorism expert, Ernest Evans (who has been writing about this for three decades).
The Rude Pundit is not seeking to diminish the importance of screening at airports. He is not saying that it wouldn't have been terrifying to be on the plane with the smell of burnt cock in the cabin. But we're in an insane death spiral of tactics that have failed. All the idiots screaming for war forget that we've been doing war. In other words, even in the new administration, why are we damned to commit the same mistakes again and again?
1/05/2010
It Shouldn't Surprise Us that Some Ex-Gitmo Detainees Want to Fuck Us Up:
Let us say, and why not, that you were Hani Abdul Muslih al Shulan, late of Yemen. And let us say, and, indeed, why not, that in late 2001, the Pakistani military, to which you claim you turned yourself in back in August when you realized shit was going down on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, gave you to the United States, who then sent you down to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility because you were carrying an AK-47 and you were wearing a kind of watch that al-Qaeda has used in bombs and you stayed at some Taliban safehouses along your travels from Yemen to a town just north of Kabul. You say you were looking for a job and were offered one. You say you were a chef's assistant and, no shit, you had a gun. Everyone in the barbaric mountains around you had one.
Maybe this is too specific. Let's make this a bit more abstract. Instead, let's say that you were held without charge or ability to contact your family for six years in, oh, hell, Belgium. There, you were beaten and placed in solitary confinement and forced to endure interrogations that involved blaring music and extreme temperatures and fear-up techniques, and you knew about jackshit about anything your captors wanted to know. Six years of your life, man, and you didn't do a goddamn thing. And the only chance you had to challenge your detention was in a hearing where you couldn't see all the evidence against you. Then, after that six years, you're returned back to your home country, and the people who do want to blow up some Belgians (because their delicious waffles are too tempting) get in touch with you and say, "Hey, man, those Belgians fucked up your world. You wanna fight 'em? We'll call it a job and pay you." Well, what the hell else are you gonna do?
Shit, in our movies, we get off on the protagonist going back and killing the people who tortured them. It's pretty much the plot of every other American action flick. More poignantly, the visceral rush of the South Korean film Oldboy, where a man is kept confined for 15 years and never told why, is subverted by its last act, when the price of vengeance is revealed to be so much higher than simply going on. But when Oh Dae-Su is beating his former captors with a hammer? That's catharsis.
Hani al-Shulan seems like the classic case of a loser being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Repeatedly, it seems, since he was killed last month in an airstrike. There's others, like Ibrahim Sulayman Muhammad Arbaysh, who was sent to Saudi Arabia for anti-jihad re-education after five years at Gitmo. One imagines that it involved book work and electrodes on the balls. He escaped and went to Yemen to get his jihad on. This is not to pronounce guilt or innocence on any of the men. It is to say that guilt or innocence should have been pronounced.
The idea that some released Gitmo detainees might actually be pissed off at the United States, no matter how radical they were before their imprisonment without charge, has provoked huffy, self-righteous outrage from conservative commentators and politicians, especially in the wake of the Christmas taint bomber. David Limbaugh, Rush's vestigial tail, calls for Obama to stop sending detainees back to their homes. With its dying breaths, the Washington Times says the same thing, offering that "Obama sends reinforcements to al Qaeda."
We are incapable of dealing with the notion that whether you're the good guy or the bad guy is a matter of perception. And that sometimes the United States is the bad guy. Unless we're willing to confront that and do something about it (like, at minimum, apologize and offer compensation), then we shouldn't be surprised that Yemeni Mel Gibsons will seek to go all Lethal Weapon on us.
Let us say, and why not, that you were Hani Abdul Muslih al Shulan, late of Yemen. And let us say, and, indeed, why not, that in late 2001, the Pakistani military, to which you claim you turned yourself in back in August when you realized shit was going down on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, gave you to the United States, who then sent you down to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility because you were carrying an AK-47 and you were wearing a kind of watch that al-Qaeda has used in bombs and you stayed at some Taliban safehouses along your travels from Yemen to a town just north of Kabul. You say you were looking for a job and were offered one. You say you were a chef's assistant and, no shit, you had a gun. Everyone in the barbaric mountains around you had one.
Maybe this is too specific. Let's make this a bit more abstract. Instead, let's say that you were held without charge or ability to contact your family for six years in, oh, hell, Belgium. There, you were beaten and placed in solitary confinement and forced to endure interrogations that involved blaring music and extreme temperatures and fear-up techniques, and you knew about jackshit about anything your captors wanted to know. Six years of your life, man, and you didn't do a goddamn thing. And the only chance you had to challenge your detention was in a hearing where you couldn't see all the evidence against you. Then, after that six years, you're returned back to your home country, and the people who do want to blow up some Belgians (because their delicious waffles are too tempting) get in touch with you and say, "Hey, man, those Belgians fucked up your world. You wanna fight 'em? We'll call it a job and pay you." Well, what the hell else are you gonna do?
Shit, in our movies, we get off on the protagonist going back and killing the people who tortured them. It's pretty much the plot of every other American action flick. More poignantly, the visceral rush of the South Korean film Oldboy, where a man is kept confined for 15 years and never told why, is subverted by its last act, when the price of vengeance is revealed to be so much higher than simply going on. But when Oh Dae-Su is beating his former captors with a hammer? That's catharsis.
Hani al-Shulan seems like the classic case of a loser being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Repeatedly, it seems, since he was killed last month in an airstrike. There's others, like Ibrahim Sulayman Muhammad Arbaysh, who was sent to Saudi Arabia for anti-jihad re-education after five years at Gitmo. One imagines that it involved book work and electrodes on the balls. He escaped and went to Yemen to get his jihad on. This is not to pronounce guilt or innocence on any of the men. It is to say that guilt or innocence should have been pronounced.
The idea that some released Gitmo detainees might actually be pissed off at the United States, no matter how radical they were before their imprisonment without charge, has provoked huffy, self-righteous outrage from conservative commentators and politicians, especially in the wake of the Christmas taint bomber. David Limbaugh, Rush's vestigial tail, calls for Obama to stop sending detainees back to their homes. With its dying breaths, the Washington Times says the same thing, offering that "Obama sends reinforcements to al Qaeda."
We are incapable of dealing with the notion that whether you're the good guy or the bad guy is a matter of perception. And that sometimes the United States is the bad guy. Unless we're willing to confront that and do something about it (like, at minimum, apologize and offer compensation), then we shouldn't be surprised that Yemeni Mel Gibsons will seek to go all Lethal Weapon on us.
1/04/2010
The Rude Pundit on Today's Stephanie Miller Show:
This morning, after a two-week break, the Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller were back at it like a pair of lovers who know just how to pleasure one another. Or like Statler and Waldorf observing Republicans. Either way works.
Remember: the Rude Pundit podcast is good for your commute and your soul. Subscribe for free and learn to love again.
This morning, after a two-week break, the Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller were back at it like a pair of lovers who know just how to pleasure one another. Or like Statler and Waldorf observing Republicans. Either way works.
Remember: the Rude Pundit podcast is good for your commute and your soul. Subscribe for free and learn to love again.
Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Sodomize Some Dudes with Idi Amin's Femur:
Those protesting assholes up there, including one wearing what appears to be a Green Goblin mask, are marching in support of a bill in Uganda that would make being homosexual a crime punishable by death by hanging in some cases. That sign says, "Homosexuality is as ugly as the Devil". (It also seems to express a desire to see the musical Wicked. Could someone give Mary some tickets?)
That language sounds awfully familiar. The New York Times reports that, surprise, surprise, one of the things that stoked the anti-gay fervor in already repressive Uganda was a three-day seminar held by three American "missionaries" from groups trying to stop the "gay agenda," which seems to be an easy way for these men to deny they're thinking, "Hey, that dude's hot. I wish to suck his cock."
According to the Times, "The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how 'the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is 'to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.'"
One of the repressed cocksuckers is Scott Lively, who heads the group Defend the Family (motto: "Me and my laptop are an organization, right?") and who has "published" books on subjects like how the Nazis were really gay-loving and how to stop your child from being indoctrinated into homosexuality. Lively says that the Times is "twisting" the "facts" about the proposed Ugandan law and his possible influence, and he has said that he doesn't support the bill, even as he says it's being misrepresented.
Lively also writes this, a nominee for the most lie-filled, dickish thing said in 2010: "It should be no surprise, therefore, that modern Ugandans are very unhappy that homosexual political activists from Europe and the United States are working aggressively to re-homosexualize their nation. Ugandan citizens report a growing number of foreign homosexual men coming to their country to turn desperately poor young men from the slums into their personal houseboys, and that some girls in public schools have being paid to recruit others into lesbianism. Foreign interests have exerted intense pressure on Uganda’s government to compromise its laws regarding sexual morality, often using their control over foreign aid funding for leverage." The Rude Pundit loves the term "re-homosexualize" and thinks any time two people of the same sex are going for round 2 in the sack, they should refer to it as such.
The other two Americans, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, who think homosexuality can be "cured," are in "hominah-hominah" mode now. However, according to the Guardian back in November, "Both opponents and supporters agree that the impetus for the more hardline law came in March during a seminar in Kampala" held by the threesome.
Sorry, motherfuckers. Words have meaning. If you call gays "evil," well, as we know in these times o' terror, "evil" must be defeated. And, really, in this case, who are the terrorists?
Note: The post title is purely speculative. The Rude Pundit does not know where to find Idi Amin's femur.
Those protesting assholes up there, including one wearing what appears to be a Green Goblin mask, are marching in support of a bill in Uganda that would make being homosexual a crime punishable by death by hanging in some cases. That sign says, "Homosexuality is as ugly as the Devil". (It also seems to express a desire to see the musical Wicked. Could someone give Mary some tickets?)
That language sounds awfully familiar. The New York Times reports that, surprise, surprise, one of the things that stoked the anti-gay fervor in already repressive Uganda was a three-day seminar held by three American "missionaries" from groups trying to stop the "gay agenda," which seems to be an easy way for these men to deny they're thinking, "Hey, that dude's hot. I wish to suck his cock."
According to the Times, "The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how 'the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is 'to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.'"
One of the repressed cocksuckers is Scott Lively, who heads the group Defend the Family (motto: "Me and my laptop are an organization, right?") and who has "published" books on subjects like how the Nazis were really gay-loving and how to stop your child from being indoctrinated into homosexuality. Lively says that the Times is "twisting" the "facts" about the proposed Ugandan law and his possible influence, and he has said that he doesn't support the bill, even as he says it's being misrepresented.
Lively also writes this, a nominee for the most lie-filled, dickish thing said in 2010: "It should be no surprise, therefore, that modern Ugandans are very unhappy that homosexual political activists from Europe and the United States are working aggressively to re-homosexualize their nation. Ugandan citizens report a growing number of foreign homosexual men coming to their country to turn desperately poor young men from the slums into their personal houseboys, and that some girls in public schools have being paid to recruit others into lesbianism. Foreign interests have exerted intense pressure on Uganda’s government to compromise its laws regarding sexual morality, often using their control over foreign aid funding for leverage." The Rude Pundit loves the term "re-homosexualize" and thinks any time two people of the same sex are going for round 2 in the sack, they should refer to it as such.
The other two Americans, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, who think homosexuality can be "cured," are in "hominah-hominah" mode now. However, according to the Guardian back in November, "Both opponents and supporters agree that the impetus for the more hardline law came in March during a seminar in Kampala" held by the threesome.
Sorry, motherfuckers. Words have meaning. If you call gays "evil," well, as we know in these times o' terror, "evil" must be defeated. And, really, in this case, who are the terrorists?
Note: The post title is purely speculative. The Rude Pundit does not know where to find Idi Amin's femur.
1/01/2010
End of the Year Haiku 2009 (The End):
"We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end/We were fated to pretend"- An epitaph for the decade gone from MGMT.
And, last, but far from least, a few more 2009 haiku from rude readers (with minor edits, if needed). Thanks for the 100+ submissions, and for those who didn't get posted, well, hope you didn't spend too much time on it. And happy fucking blah blah blah:
From David K.:
A rotten decade
to start the millennium
seems an ill omen.
From DS:
Cries of the beached whale-
admission of a slow death.
Cheney on Fox News.
From Gummo:
Fuck Cheney and his
Evil loudmouth devil spawn
Fuck civility
From Voncile M.:
vp dick cheney
chokes on his own fetid bile
colons mourn the waste
From Schnoidl:
that was the noughties?
one big pile of rancid shit
flush the goddamn thing
From Joe C.:
Last Days
The blood of the rich
Flooding our dead nation's streets
May improve my mood
From Kevin T.:
Lieberman fuckstick
Ann Coulter penis holster
Diseased lotus blooms
From BB:
Rush Limbaugh's fat ass
Is kissed each day by the right
Yet Dems fear his farts
From Robert J.:
Pantswetting righties
turn a terrorist failure
to terrorist win
From dear Iris:
Pants bomber got us
In a tizzy; we landed.
Dickless wonder he
From Tony F.:
Midnight Mass takedown!
Barrier jumper ensures
best Christmas ever.
From Ashley A.:
Madame Secretary
Change I believed in
Campaign words don't make The Man
Hope: Sec. Clinton rocks!
From Lex A.:
Note to Barack fans:
"Better than worst prez ever"
is too low a bar.
From RBE:
Uncle Sam
fat cop staggering
sweating away down the street
swatting at jihad
From BlancheSplanchnik:
Decade of sociopaths,
The "godly" blame Democrats.
What short memories.
From Wagdog:
the shadows are gone
but the trauma still lingers
be strong and have hope
From Dave N.:
Our Dream?
Hope will not erase
the decade's nightmare of shame
we allowed ourselves.
"We'll choke on our vomit and that will be the end/We were fated to pretend"- An epitaph for the decade gone from MGMT.
And, last, but far from least, a few more 2009 haiku from rude readers (with minor edits, if needed). Thanks for the 100+ submissions, and for those who didn't get posted, well, hope you didn't spend too much time on it. And happy fucking blah blah blah:
From David K.:
A rotten decade
to start the millennium
seems an ill omen.
From DS:
Cries of the beached whale-
admission of a slow death.
Cheney on Fox News.
From Gummo:
Fuck Cheney and his
Evil loudmouth devil spawn
Fuck civility
From Voncile M.:
vp dick cheney
chokes on his own fetid bile
colons mourn the waste
From Schnoidl:
that was the noughties?
one big pile of rancid shit
flush the goddamn thing
From Joe C.:
Last Days
The blood of the rich
Flooding our dead nation's streets
May improve my mood
From Kevin T.:
Lieberman fuckstick
Ann Coulter penis holster
Diseased lotus blooms
From BB:
Rush Limbaugh's fat ass
Is kissed each day by the right
Yet Dems fear his farts
From Robert J.:
Pantswetting righties
turn a terrorist failure
to terrorist win
From dear Iris:
Pants bomber got us
In a tizzy; we landed.
Dickless wonder he
From Tony F.:
Midnight Mass takedown!
Barrier jumper ensures
best Christmas ever.
From Ashley A.:
Madame Secretary
Change I believed in
Campaign words don't make The Man
Hope: Sec. Clinton rocks!
From Lex A.:
Note to Barack fans:
"Better than worst prez ever"
is too low a bar.
From RBE:
Uncle Sam
fat cop staggering
sweating away down the street
swatting at jihad
From BlancheSplanchnik:
Decade of sociopaths,
The "godly" blame Democrats.
What short memories.
From Wagdog:
the shadows are gone
but the trauma still lingers
be strong and have hope
From Dave N.:
Our Dream?
Hope will not erase
the decade's nightmare of shame
we allowed ourselves.
12/31/2009
End of the Year Haiku 2009: The Readers Haiku, Too:
Poems to cap off the year from rude readers around the world (with minor edits, if needed). This first group seems obsessed with a certain figure:
From Daphne C. in Springfield, Illinois:
man, did the year stink
of right-wing intransigence
and Palin worship
From Andy C.:
Sarah going rogue.
What is the world coming to?
McCain gnashes teeth.
From Kelly W.:
Sarah Palin quits,
Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack,
Ducks speak for us all.
From Brad A.:
Sarah Palin loves
to teabag Todd’s big ball sack.
McCain’s dick goes limp.
From Jim L.:
Tea Baggers demand
Give us birth certificate.
Ranting red-faced sheep
From Jan T.:
I am not a dwarf
Nor an Atlanta housewife.
No reality show for me!
From Mona P.:
Redemption
Oh, How this year blew.
If Limbaugh kicks the bucket
It will have blown less.
From Mari L.:
A decade of fear
Cannot be washed away with
One bucket of hope.
Drinks a-waitin'. More tomorrow.
Poems to cap off the year from rude readers around the world (with minor edits, if needed). This first group seems obsessed with a certain figure:
From Daphne C. in Springfield, Illinois:
man, did the year stink
of right-wing intransigence
and Palin worship
From Andy C.:
Sarah going rogue.
What is the world coming to?
McCain gnashes teeth.
From Kelly W.:
Sarah Palin quits,
Quack quack quack quack quack quack quack,
Ducks speak for us all.
From Brad A.:
Sarah Palin loves
to teabag Todd’s big ball sack.
McCain’s dick goes limp.
From Jim L.:
Tea Baggers demand
Give us birth certificate.
Ranting red-faced sheep
From Jan T.:
I am not a dwarf
Nor an Atlanta housewife.
No reality show for me!
From Mona P.:
Redemption
Oh, How this year blew.
If Limbaugh kicks the bucket
It will have blown less.
From Mari L.:
A decade of fear
Cannot be washed away with
One bucket of hope.
Drinks a-waitin'. More tomorrow.
End of the Year Haiku 2009:
Like a night out alone at a titty bar, what began with hope ended with sticky sadness and an overwhelming sense of failure. And what better way to express it than with a haiku or two.
Inauguration
Chilled glee on the Mall,
One more chance for redemption;
America froze
As If You Didn't Know
Did it surprise you?
Republicans are assholes
Clenched like babies' fists.
The Loss
Barack Obama
Needed Ted Kennedy like
A fish needs the sea
New Justice
A strong Latina
Will kick your ass even if
you're named "Scalia."
The Cult
Glenn Beck's dervish whirl
Mesmerized maniac minds
To scream at phantoms
Bailout
Wall Street execs said,
"Thanks for the cash of the poor.
Now suck our bonus"
Circuses Without Bread
No job, no health care,
We click the TV to see
Who thinks they can dance.
More later, including rude reader submissions. Send yours to "rudepundit[at]yahoo.com" and the bestest ones will be posted today and tomorrow.
Like a night out alone at a titty bar, what began with hope ended with sticky sadness and an overwhelming sense of failure. And what better way to express it than with a haiku or two.
Inauguration
Chilled glee on the Mall,
One more chance for redemption;
America froze
As If You Didn't Know
Did it surprise you?
Republicans are assholes
Clenched like babies' fists.
The Loss
Barack Obama
Needed Ted Kennedy like
A fish needs the sea
New Justice
A strong Latina
Will kick your ass even if
you're named "Scalia."
The Cult
Glenn Beck's dervish whirl
Mesmerized maniac minds
To scream at phantoms
Bailout
Wall Street execs said,
"Thanks for the cash of the poor.
Now suck our bonus"
Circuses Without Bread
No job, no health care,
We click the TV to see
Who thinks they can dance.
More later, including rude reader submissions. Send yours to "rudepundit[at]yahoo.com" and the bestest ones will be posted today and tomorrow.
12/30/2009
Haiku Time, Motherfuckers:
The Rude Pundit ends each year with the delicate restraint of haiku, the little 5/7/5 syllable poems that we were forced to write in high school and usually ended up being about farts.
And he opens it up for rude readers 'round the world to send in haiku about the dozen months past, putting the best up for all to enjoy.
Send your creations, along with how you want your name to be listed, to "rudepundit[at]yahoo.com" and vent, briefly.
The Rude Pundit ends each year with the delicate restraint of haiku, the little 5/7/5 syllable poems that we were forced to write in high school and usually ended up being about farts.
And he opens it up for rude readers 'round the world to send in haiku about the dozen months past, putting the best up for all to enjoy.
Send your creations, along with how you want your name to be listed, to "rudepundit[at]yahoo.com" and vent, briefly.
Our Destruction Seeds Sown: A Final "Fuck-Off" to This Awful Decade (Part 3):
Shit, we got a lot of ground to cover here. And the Rude Pundit's running out of steam as quickly as the Aughts are ending. Let's make these fast. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2.)
Part 3: The Extent of the Awfulness Is Clear:
1. Fuck off, Roger Ailes. After allowing George W. Bush's cousin to call the 2000 election for his relative on Fox "news," after destroying television news as we used to know it, after infecting the airwaves with the herpes sores known as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, not to mention E.D. Hill (remember her?) and her increasingly less-evolved blonde clones, the tumor-shaped Ailes capped the decade by foisting on us all Glenn Beck, a man who will one day lead a group of brain dead followers down to Guyana.
2. Fuck off, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The man with the smallest penis in the non-Western world, a Holocaust denier who cavalierly kills his own people, refuses to allow inspections of his nuclear facilities, and keeps his wife entombed in a head-to-toe veil. And this pussy's not even really in charge of Iran. (Note: Why not Osama bin Laden? Too obvious, but, sure, he can fuck off, too.)
3. Fuck off, Bernie Madoff. The Rude Pundit is against capital punishment, but Madoff should have been set on fire on the steps of New York Stock Exchange. (Concomitant fuck-off: Alan Greenspan, et al.)
4. Fuck off, Republicans in Congress. You spent most of the decade sucking the syphilitic cocks of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, turning yourselves into accessories to the crimes that have wrecked the country, and now you actually have the balls to think you're right in roadblocking even minor corrections in our self-destructive course? (Concomitant fuck-off: every pundit who supported the Iraq "war" and who mocked the idea that the housing bubble would burst.)
5. Fuck off, God, Allah, Death, or whoever or nobody. In the last ten years, you took out out just about every single living writer who influenced the Rude Pundit: Arthur Miller, Molly Ivins, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Pryor, Hunter S. Thompson, Spaulding Gray. And then you wasted his favorite city with a combination of Hurricane Katrina and a refusal to smite the incompetent assholes who helped wreck it. Yeah, fuck you hard.
Jesus, this has gotten too depressing. There's more to say, always, about just how greedy and stupid and selfish a people we Americans are under the guise of "liberty," a word so few of us understand. But let's end on a positive note, eh?
Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unrestrained Joy in 2009:
1. The film Fantastic Mr. Fox, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a world where every animal is a clever talker. And the HBO show Bored to Death, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a New York City where every human is a clever talker.
2. The fried chicken at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, Tennessee. In an ugly strip mall in a shitty area of town, the Rude Pundit asked the woman behind the counter if she thought he should order "medium" heat, not just "mild" (it goes up to "super hot"). She looked at him and said, "You can handle it." It was like biting electricity, juicy electricity.
3. Lady Gaga's performances at the MTV Video Music Awards and at the American Music Awards. Bleeding and hanging like a corpse at the end of a song? Singing in a nude unitard while sitting at a flaming piano and smashing champagne bottles on the edge? That shit's art, Madonna crossed with Diamanda Galas.
4. The book Wanting by Richard Flanagan. Cathartic sorrow in a novel about Charles Dickens, Sir John Franklin, and the way desire engulfs us.
5. Public Enemy performing the entire It Takes a Nation of Millions... album live at midnight in a crowded tent at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. Sure, at Bonnaroo, Bruce Springsteen turning the E Street Band into a jam band was amazing, and Dirty Projectors were a blast. But the Rude Pundit just didn't expect PE to be so goddamn tight and for the songs, from the end of the Reagan presidency, to be so goddamn relevant.
There. Now breathe the end of this decade. And get ready for the next one.
Shit, we got a lot of ground to cover here. And the Rude Pundit's running out of steam as quickly as the Aughts are ending. Let's make these fast. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2.)
Part 3: The Extent of the Awfulness Is Clear:
1. Fuck off, Roger Ailes. After allowing George W. Bush's cousin to call the 2000 election for his relative on Fox "news," after destroying television news as we used to know it, after infecting the airwaves with the herpes sores known as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, not to mention E.D. Hill (remember her?) and her increasingly less-evolved blonde clones, the tumor-shaped Ailes capped the decade by foisting on us all Glenn Beck, a man who will one day lead a group of brain dead followers down to Guyana.
2. Fuck off, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The man with the smallest penis in the non-Western world, a Holocaust denier who cavalierly kills his own people, refuses to allow inspections of his nuclear facilities, and keeps his wife entombed in a head-to-toe veil. And this pussy's not even really in charge of Iran. (Note: Why not Osama bin Laden? Too obvious, but, sure, he can fuck off, too.)
3. Fuck off, Bernie Madoff. The Rude Pundit is against capital punishment, but Madoff should have been set on fire on the steps of New York Stock Exchange. (Concomitant fuck-off: Alan Greenspan, et al.)
4. Fuck off, Republicans in Congress. You spent most of the decade sucking the syphilitic cocks of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, turning yourselves into accessories to the crimes that have wrecked the country, and now you actually have the balls to think you're right in roadblocking even minor corrections in our self-destructive course? (Concomitant fuck-off: every pundit who supported the Iraq "war" and who mocked the idea that the housing bubble would burst.)
5. Fuck off, God, Allah, Death, or whoever or nobody. In the last ten years, you took out out just about every single living writer who influenced the Rude Pundit: Arthur Miller, Molly Ivins, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Pryor, Hunter S. Thompson, Spaulding Gray. And then you wasted his favorite city with a combination of Hurricane Katrina and a refusal to smite the incompetent assholes who helped wreck it. Yeah, fuck you hard.
Jesus, this has gotten too depressing. There's more to say, always, about just how greedy and stupid and selfish a people we Americans are under the guise of "liberty," a word so few of us understand. But let's end on a positive note, eh?
Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unrestrained Joy in 2009:
1. The film Fantastic Mr. Fox, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a world where every animal is a clever talker. And the HBO show Bored to Death, a mostly plot-free wandering about in a New York City where every human is a clever talker.
2. The fried chicken at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, Tennessee. In an ugly strip mall in a shitty area of town, the Rude Pundit asked the woman behind the counter if she thought he should order "medium" heat, not just "mild" (it goes up to "super hot"). She looked at him and said, "You can handle it." It was like biting electricity, juicy electricity.
3. Lady Gaga's performances at the MTV Video Music Awards and at the American Music Awards. Bleeding and hanging like a corpse at the end of a song? Singing in a nude unitard while sitting at a flaming piano and smashing champagne bottles on the edge? That shit's art, Madonna crossed with Diamanda Galas.
4. The book Wanting by Richard Flanagan. Cathartic sorrow in a novel about Charles Dickens, Sir John Franklin, and the way desire engulfs us.
5. Public Enemy performing the entire It Takes a Nation of Millions... album live at midnight in a crowded tent at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. Sure, at Bonnaroo, Bruce Springsteen turning the E Street Band into a jam band was amazing, and Dirty Projectors were a blast. But the Rude Pundit just didn't expect PE to be so goddamn tight and for the songs, from the end of the Reagan presidency, to be so goddamn relevant.
There. Now breathe the end of this decade. And get ready for the next one.
12/29/2009
Our Destruction Seeds Sown: A Final "Fuck Off" to This Awful Decade (Part 2):
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit specifically cited unfeeling machines that are sucking the lifeforce out of human beings as one of the primary reasons we leave the first decade of the millenium as isolated, soulless zombies clinging Gollum-like to our precious material goods while hawking ourselves in public like each of us is publicist, pimp, and whore rolled into one.
Today, the Rude Pundit gives fuck-off's to a few of the people who have done the heavy lifting in creating an America (and, in some cases, a world) that is stuck in a speeding semi with its brakes out, heading for that lake up ahead.
(Note: These must be people who have or had real power to affect our daily lives whether we pay attention or not. So there will be no cutesy "Simon Cowell" or "Kanye West" references. Also, today the Rude Pundit's concentrating on American politics.)
Part 2: These White Men Are Gonna Get Us All Killed:
1. Fuck off, Al Gore. If you wanted to pinpoint a single reason that this decade has sucked the hair off monkey balls, you would have to pick the moment that Al Gore decided to be a pussy and give up on the 2000 election. In what should have been a slamdunk of an election, Gore ran away from the Clinton legacy and into a tight race with an inbred Mongoloid. It's not just his stupid-ass decision to want a recount in isolated places in Florida instead of the whole state or his legal team's stupid-ass argument before an already-tilted Supreme Court. It's that if he had wanted and asked, the power was within a single Senator to stop the certification of an election he knew was fucked. It was as if Gore didn't want to inconvenience anyone at that moment, thus maintaining a Democratic pattern that exists to this day. Sure, he's done a great deal of good in "raising awareness" as a glorified spokesmodel for global warming. But do you see any major action occurring to, shit, stop global warming? You know how you could have actually accomplished some of those green goals, Al? By being fucking president.
2. Fuck off, Joe Lieberman. Thanks, Joe Lieberman, for elevating Ingrate to a level of consciousness on the way to Dick Nirvana. You were a shitty running mate, a presidential candidate whose only qualifications were a nation-sized ego and a desire to bomb the shit out of any place that winked at Israel, and a backstabbing motherfucker to the party that got you in office in the first place. You lost a legitimately fought primary challenge in 2006 and you decided it would be better to tell Democratic voters to go fuck themselves. And then, even though Barack Obama campaigned for you in that 2006 primary, you supported John McCain for President, even speaking at the Republican convention. And after Obama made sure you retained your Homeland Security chair, you decided the best way to repay him would be to fuck up his agenda and give Republicans more power than you would dare to give Democrats. The most aggravating part? You seem blissfully unaware of what a scabby cocksucker you really are.
3. Fuck off, George H. W. Bush. Goofy and disconnected a motherfucker though he may be, as shitty a president as he was, no one ever thought Bush, Sr. was stupid. But his failure to publicly call out his son for essentially wrecking the meager legacy he had left behind assured the Iraq "war" would happen. Sound harsh, expecting a father to turn on a son? Bullshit. He was the fucking president once. And he decided to put family over country. He has blood on his hands without even being in office.
4. Fuck off, Rudy Giuliani. A ghoulish, greedy bastard who should have been whipped into the streets like a rabid cur after 9/11. Instead, in the greatest non-Bush manipulation of the event, Giuliani parlayed the attack on his city into a fucking bonanza. And it seemed like every mainstream pundit went along with it: why wouldn't you want the man who presided over the degradation of his fire and police communication systems, thus leading to hundreds of potentially avoidable deaths, to be your president? Why wouldn't you trust the judgment of the man who put his emergency command center in the very building attacked once before and who recommended a sub-bouncer thug like Bernard Kerik to head up the federal department charged with securing the homeland? The final insult is that he profits mightily off the security consulting firm he runs, which is a little like John Wayne Gacy running a daycare center.
5-500ish. Fuck-off, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and every member of his administration. If you don't know why, then fuck off yourself.
Tomorrow: A few more people who can kiss our asses at the end of the Aughts.
Correction: Stupid fuck-up earlier calling Gore "a Senator." That's been changed because it was a stupid fuck-up. (Hat tip for Steve L.)
Yesterday, the Rude Pundit specifically cited unfeeling machines that are sucking the lifeforce out of human beings as one of the primary reasons we leave the first decade of the millenium as isolated, soulless zombies clinging Gollum-like to our precious material goods while hawking ourselves in public like each of us is publicist, pimp, and whore rolled into one.
Today, the Rude Pundit gives fuck-off's to a few of the people who have done the heavy lifting in creating an America (and, in some cases, a world) that is stuck in a speeding semi with its brakes out, heading for that lake up ahead.
(Note: These must be people who have or had real power to affect our daily lives whether we pay attention or not. So there will be no cutesy "Simon Cowell" or "Kanye West" references. Also, today the Rude Pundit's concentrating on American politics.)
Part 2: These White Men Are Gonna Get Us All Killed:
1. Fuck off, Al Gore. If you wanted to pinpoint a single reason that this decade has sucked the hair off monkey balls, you would have to pick the moment that Al Gore decided to be a pussy and give up on the 2000 election. In what should have been a slamdunk of an election, Gore ran away from the Clinton legacy and into a tight race with an inbred Mongoloid. It's not just his stupid-ass decision to want a recount in isolated places in Florida instead of the whole state or his legal team's stupid-ass argument before an already-tilted Supreme Court. It's that if he had wanted and asked, the power was within a single Senator to stop the certification of an election he knew was fucked. It was as if Gore didn't want to inconvenience anyone at that moment, thus maintaining a Democratic pattern that exists to this day. Sure, he's done a great deal of good in "raising awareness" as a glorified spokesmodel for global warming. But do you see any major action occurring to, shit, stop global warming? You know how you could have actually accomplished some of those green goals, Al? By being fucking president.
2. Fuck off, Joe Lieberman. Thanks, Joe Lieberman, for elevating Ingrate to a level of consciousness on the way to Dick Nirvana. You were a shitty running mate, a presidential candidate whose only qualifications were a nation-sized ego and a desire to bomb the shit out of any place that winked at Israel, and a backstabbing motherfucker to the party that got you in office in the first place. You lost a legitimately fought primary challenge in 2006 and you decided it would be better to tell Democratic voters to go fuck themselves. And then, even though Barack Obama campaigned for you in that 2006 primary, you supported John McCain for President, even speaking at the Republican convention. And after Obama made sure you retained your Homeland Security chair, you decided the best way to repay him would be to fuck up his agenda and give Republicans more power than you would dare to give Democrats. The most aggravating part? You seem blissfully unaware of what a scabby cocksucker you really are.
3. Fuck off, George H. W. Bush. Goofy and disconnected a motherfucker though he may be, as shitty a president as he was, no one ever thought Bush, Sr. was stupid. But his failure to publicly call out his son for essentially wrecking the meager legacy he had left behind assured the Iraq "war" would happen. Sound harsh, expecting a father to turn on a son? Bullshit. He was the fucking president once. And he decided to put family over country. He has blood on his hands without even being in office.
4. Fuck off, Rudy Giuliani. A ghoulish, greedy bastard who should have been whipped into the streets like a rabid cur after 9/11. Instead, in the greatest non-Bush manipulation of the event, Giuliani parlayed the attack on his city into a fucking bonanza. And it seemed like every mainstream pundit went along with it: why wouldn't you want the man who presided over the degradation of his fire and police communication systems, thus leading to hundreds of potentially avoidable deaths, to be your president? Why wouldn't you trust the judgment of the man who put his emergency command center in the very building attacked once before and who recommended a sub-bouncer thug like Bernard Kerik to head up the federal department charged with securing the homeland? The final insult is that he profits mightily off the security consulting firm he runs, which is a little like John Wayne Gacy running a daycare center.
5-500ish. Fuck-off, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and every member of his administration. If you don't know why, then fuck off yourself.
Tomorrow: A few more people who can kiss our asses at the end of the Aughts.
Correction: Stupid fuck-up earlier calling Gore "a Senator." That's been changed because it was a stupid fuck-up. (Hat tip for Steve L.)
12/28/2009
Our Destruction Seeds Sown: A Final "Fuck Off" to This Awful Decade (Part 1):
Wearing a natty suit with a purple shirt, the Rude Pundit spent New Year's Eve 1999 in a fading Masonic temple in downtown New Orleans among thousands of people, most of them on ecstasy, writhing to Galactic's mad funk, dancing like an ancient tribe at the edge of a cliff that they never thought would crumble. Yes, we had the potential Y2K apocalypse imprinted on our cultural consciousness, but only the paranoid took that seriously, and if the world was going to end, well, a Masonic temple wasn't a bad place to be. But, Christ, however anxiety-ridden we might have been, we were hopeful and tweaking on joy.
This year, the Rude Pundit will ring out the decade in a dilapidated blues shack in the middle of nowhere. He will be wearing a torn Obama shirt and black jeans and boots. There will be liquor-fueled, desperate dancing, like we're escaping from tumbling rocks destroying our village. We have fallen so far in ten years. Maybe it's the nature of getting older: because every decade past is one closer to death, it seems worse than the ones before.
No. Fuck that. The 2000s sucked so hard that it's created a vacuum that will end up ripping us to shreds if we don't reverse course. Today, tomorrow, and maybe Wednesday, the Rude Pundit will offer his final fuck-off's to the Aughts, a bullshit decade where, in almost every instance, we collectively allowed ourselves to become idiots. Let's start light...
Part 1: The Machines Own Us:
For every good use of the technology that now controls every aspect of our lives, there's thousands of ways it is destroying us.
1. Fuck off, cell phones. Sure, sure, in case of an emergency, blah, blah, blah. And if you are waiting on an emergency phone call, don't go to the fucking movies. You are not important enough to need to get your phone calls immediately. Here's how you know if you're important enough: Are you a doctor? Are you the President? If you answered "no" to both of those questions, you are not so important. Mostly, though, cell phones guarantee that you never have to communicate with someone you don't know. As connected as you think you are, it is actually isolating, alienating, and limiting.
2. Fuck off, texting and instant messaging. Congratulations. You're a product of a shitty education system that failed to make you understand how to put together a rational sentence or even use a comma, and now you're going to completely abandon all pretext of being able to spell, punctuate, or have a thought that can't be expressed in a series of random letters. ROFLMAO, motherfuckers. It's the destruction of language as we know it.
3. Fuck off, iPods (and their ilk). To ride on public transportation or walk city streets is to venture among soulless beings who stare at nothing with dead eyes as they listen to an unending stream of music on something that is soon going to be small enough to just be injected under your skin. One day, when the disconnect of the population is complete, we will pinpoint the invention of the iPod as the moment that we killed public engagement with the cudgel of constant entertainment.
4. Fuck off, Twitter and Facebook. Hey, who needs the government setting up all kinds of surveillance when so many people are willing to announce where the fuck they are and what they fuck they're doing at any given moment. Twitter, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, MySpace have created a world of exhibitionists who are willing to let strangers look at pictures of their children and where people attempt to be profound in less words than it takes to order a meal at McDonald's. They've created the illusion of "friendship" where none actually exists, thus devaluing what real friendship is. If a click is all it takes to "defriend" people, they weren't friends. It led to this moment for the Rude Pundit: "Oh, really, person I haven't seen since third grade, your cat brought you a dead mouse and gave it to you as a gift? How fascinating." He wanted to write, "Fuck you and your cat. May the zombie mouse eat your brains" and then he realized how pathetic it was to even be tempted to comment on a status update about a goddamn cat owned by a virtual version of someone he hadn't seen in 25 years. And then he just felt sad.
5. Fuck off, internet porn. It mainstreamed porn and somehow made it more degrading than it actually was. It wrecked relationships and jobs. And it fucked up porn. Like overused CGI in films, you can see anything you want. If anyone with a webcam can film two legless Russian women fucking each other with their wooden legs while getting shit on by a donkey that's getting blown by an albino tranny, well...wait, what are we talking about?
Yes, yes, we are ever-evolving creatures, and technology transforms us. This past decade, as isolated as television made us once, the promise of technology has amped that up and simply made us selfish, self-involved pricks who demand immediate responses. It's affected us in profound ways, the full extent of which are only becoming clearer as it becomes ubiquitous in every aspect of our daily lives. The Rude Pundit doesn't say there's no good. There's good uses for everything we've created that will one day kill us all.
Tomorrow: Fuck-off people of the decade.
(Note: The Rude Pundit uses all of the above. You either join the collective or you will be eliminated.)
Wearing a natty suit with a purple shirt, the Rude Pundit spent New Year's Eve 1999 in a fading Masonic temple in downtown New Orleans among thousands of people, most of them on ecstasy, writhing to Galactic's mad funk, dancing like an ancient tribe at the edge of a cliff that they never thought would crumble. Yes, we had the potential Y2K apocalypse imprinted on our cultural consciousness, but only the paranoid took that seriously, and if the world was going to end, well, a Masonic temple wasn't a bad place to be. But, Christ, however anxiety-ridden we might have been, we were hopeful and tweaking on joy.
This year, the Rude Pundit will ring out the decade in a dilapidated blues shack in the middle of nowhere. He will be wearing a torn Obama shirt and black jeans and boots. There will be liquor-fueled, desperate dancing, like we're escaping from tumbling rocks destroying our village. We have fallen so far in ten years. Maybe it's the nature of getting older: because every decade past is one closer to death, it seems worse than the ones before.
No. Fuck that. The 2000s sucked so hard that it's created a vacuum that will end up ripping us to shreds if we don't reverse course. Today, tomorrow, and maybe Wednesday, the Rude Pundit will offer his final fuck-off's to the Aughts, a bullshit decade where, in almost every instance, we collectively allowed ourselves to become idiots. Let's start light...
Part 1: The Machines Own Us:
For every good use of the technology that now controls every aspect of our lives, there's thousands of ways it is destroying us.
1. Fuck off, cell phones. Sure, sure, in case of an emergency, blah, blah, blah. And if you are waiting on an emergency phone call, don't go to the fucking movies. You are not important enough to need to get your phone calls immediately. Here's how you know if you're important enough: Are you a doctor? Are you the President? If you answered "no" to both of those questions, you are not so important. Mostly, though, cell phones guarantee that you never have to communicate with someone you don't know. As connected as you think you are, it is actually isolating, alienating, and limiting.
2. Fuck off, texting and instant messaging. Congratulations. You're a product of a shitty education system that failed to make you understand how to put together a rational sentence or even use a comma, and now you're going to completely abandon all pretext of being able to spell, punctuate, or have a thought that can't be expressed in a series of random letters. ROFLMAO, motherfuckers. It's the destruction of language as we know it.
3. Fuck off, iPods (and their ilk). To ride on public transportation or walk city streets is to venture among soulless beings who stare at nothing with dead eyes as they listen to an unending stream of music on something that is soon going to be small enough to just be injected under your skin. One day, when the disconnect of the population is complete, we will pinpoint the invention of the iPod as the moment that we killed public engagement with the cudgel of constant entertainment.
4. Fuck off, Twitter and Facebook. Hey, who needs the government setting up all kinds of surveillance when so many people are willing to announce where the fuck they are and what they fuck they're doing at any given moment. Twitter, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, MySpace have created a world of exhibitionists who are willing to let strangers look at pictures of their children and where people attempt to be profound in less words than it takes to order a meal at McDonald's. They've created the illusion of "friendship" where none actually exists, thus devaluing what real friendship is. If a click is all it takes to "defriend" people, they weren't friends. It led to this moment for the Rude Pundit: "Oh, really, person I haven't seen since third grade, your cat brought you a dead mouse and gave it to you as a gift? How fascinating." He wanted to write, "Fuck you and your cat. May the zombie mouse eat your brains" and then he realized how pathetic it was to even be tempted to comment on a status update about a goddamn cat owned by a virtual version of someone he hadn't seen in 25 years. And then he just felt sad.
5. Fuck off, internet porn. It mainstreamed porn and somehow made it more degrading than it actually was. It wrecked relationships and jobs. And it fucked up porn. Like overused CGI in films, you can see anything you want. If anyone with a webcam can film two legless Russian women fucking each other with their wooden legs while getting shit on by a donkey that's getting blown by an albino tranny, well...wait, what are we talking about?
Yes, yes, we are ever-evolving creatures, and technology transforms us. This past decade, as isolated as television made us once, the promise of technology has amped that up and simply made us selfish, self-involved pricks who demand immediate responses. It's affected us in profound ways, the full extent of which are only becoming clearer as it becomes ubiquitous in every aspect of our daily lives. The Rude Pundit doesn't say there's no good. There's good uses for everything we've created that will one day kill us all.
Tomorrow: Fuck-off people of the decade.
(Note: The Rude Pundit uses all of the above. You either join the collective or you will be eliminated.)
12/25/2009
Does Three Years Make It a Christmas Tradition?:
The Rude Pundit doesn't know what the hell you're doing here. But, like Charlie Brown, the Grinch, and shirtless Grandma shocking the neighbors, some things are a tradition around the rude house. Reruns are good for the soul. Like this blast from 2004, updated last year:
Xmas - And, lo, a small teddy bear will lead them:
In the days before Christmas, the Rude Pundit roamed his neighborhood, looking at the displays in the charming stores and corner markets. There he saw the agony of so many dichotomous feelings about this holiday. One window had a kneeling, praying Santa next to a baby Jesus in the manger. Santa's hat was off. He was balding. Another display had the jolly old fat man landing his sleigh and reindeer on the roof of the manger. Surprisingly, neither Mary nor Joseph seemed rattled by the noise, although a camel was looking upward, as if asking, "What the fuck?" The Rude Pundit loved that camel.
Ah, sweet camel, what the fuck, indeed. Christ and commerce, Alleluia. The Savior has been born and he thanks you for your presents. Santa showing that he'll even honor the king of the Jews in the land of Islam. There's no telling what it means (and don't get all up in the Rude Pundit's face about St. Nicholas). Except this: we want to embrace both things, good deconstructionists that we are: Santa, who soothes our greed,and Jesus, who promises us peace. Either way, we want them both to tell us we're good people, nice people. And, of course, guilt-ridden Christians want to make sure that Santa toes the party line, you know.
For the holiday, here's a few of the Rude Pundit's favorite Nativity sets:
The Moosetivity (there better be a lot of damn hay in that manger)
The Boyd's Bears Nativity (because baby Jesus isn't cute enough as a human)
The Native American Nativity (complete with real feathers, 'cause, you know, the Indians benefited so much from the birth of Christ)
This is not to mention the Cativity, the Dogtivity, the Barntivity, and the various Beartivities, all available unironically for your Christmas consumption.
The Rude Pundit doesn't know what the hell you're doing here. But, like Charlie Brown, the Grinch, and shirtless Grandma shocking the neighbors, some things are a tradition around the rude house. Reruns are good for the soul. Like this blast from 2004, updated last year:
Xmas - And, lo, a small teddy bear will lead them:
In the days before Christmas, the Rude Pundit roamed his neighborhood, looking at the displays in the charming stores and corner markets. There he saw the agony of so many dichotomous feelings about this holiday. One window had a kneeling, praying Santa next to a baby Jesus in the manger. Santa's hat was off. He was balding. Another display had the jolly old fat man landing his sleigh and reindeer on the roof of the manger. Surprisingly, neither Mary nor Joseph seemed rattled by the noise, although a camel was looking upward, as if asking, "What the fuck?" The Rude Pundit loved that camel.
Ah, sweet camel, what the fuck, indeed. Christ and commerce, Alleluia. The Savior has been born and he thanks you for your presents. Santa showing that he'll even honor the king of the Jews in the land of Islam. There's no telling what it means (and don't get all up in the Rude Pundit's face about St. Nicholas). Except this: we want to embrace both things, good deconstructionists that we are: Santa, who soothes our greed,and Jesus, who promises us peace. Either way, we want them both to tell us we're good people, nice people. And, of course, guilt-ridden Christians want to make sure that Santa toes the party line, you know.
For the holiday, here's a few of the Rude Pundit's favorite Nativity sets:
The Moosetivity (there better be a lot of damn hay in that manger)
The Boyd's Bears Nativity (because baby Jesus isn't cute enough as a human)
The Native American Nativity (complete with real feathers, 'cause, you know, the Indians benefited so much from the birth of Christ)
This is not to mention the Cativity, the Dogtivity, the Barntivity, and the various Beartivities, all available unironically for your Christmas consumption.
12/24/2009
Christmas Cards That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Yell, "Ho, Ho, Ho, Motherfucker" as He Cock Punches Glenn Beck:
So that's a Christmas card you can buy from Glenn Beck's online store o' Beckiness. The description reads, "Don't even think about sending your friends Christmas cards. Or Hanukkah cards. Or cards for any one of your other intolerant, hate-filled holidays. The only option this holiday season is RamaHanuKwanzMas cards."
See, it's funny because it lumps every seasonal holiday together. By giving it, you're saying, "Oh, look how absurd people are with their bizarre, wacky beliefs that are different from my religion's celebration of an invisible sky wizard knocking up some virgin teenager." Or you could just give your friends a head butt. It's about the same thing.
Note: Also available on t-shirts, so you can publicly announce, "Yes, Glenn Beck's ballsack does taste like eggnog and shame."
So that's a Christmas card you can buy from Glenn Beck's online store o' Beckiness. The description reads, "Don't even think about sending your friends Christmas cards. Or Hanukkah cards. Or cards for any one of your other intolerant, hate-filled holidays. The only option this holiday season is RamaHanuKwanzMas cards."
See, it's funny because it lumps every seasonal holiday together. By giving it, you're saying, "Oh, look how absurd people are with their bizarre, wacky beliefs that are different from my religion's celebration of an invisible sky wizard knocking up some virgin teenager." Or you could just give your friends a head butt. It's about the same thing.
Note: Also available on t-shirts, so you can publicly announce, "Yes, Glenn Beck's ballsack does taste like eggnog and shame."
12/23/2009
A Few Random Thoughts Regarding the Tone of Debate in the Senate:
1. Mostly, whenever Mika Brzezinski starts scolding people on Morning Starbucks with Joe, the Rude Pundit just thinks, "Oh, you need a spanking." (Note: it's the same thought he has whenever he sees a raging Shepherd Smith.) But in the last few days, Brzezinksi and the rest of the baristas have been tut-tutting their clicking tongues at the behavior of Senators while debating health care reform, lamenting the "tone" and the lack of comity, as if debating life and death ought to involve gentle caresses and well-timed reacharounds.
Fuck that. It's actually during this Republican-forced march to the inevitable passage of the Senate bill that the members of that body have taken off their civilized masks and gotten into some shit, which is what should have been happening all along. The jolly air of Victorian politesse has stymied the very real passions at play here.
2. Drunk Max Baucus is kind of awesome. Check out the video of Montana's Max Baucus losing his shit at Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi over the destructive obstructionism of Republicans. Baucus is a man who spent way too much fucking time in a small room, smelling Chuck Grassley's corn farts, and while the Rude Pundit has absolutely no proof that Baucus is drunk while making this speech, Baucus is drunk while making this speech. Watch it and see the self-loathing of the corrupted soul on display, the lashing out of someone compromised and debased by the very forces he encouraged, the desire for some kind of redemption, all from inside a bottle of Scotch.
It's like one of those family moments when a guy slugs back whiskey at a wake until he's wobbly and then tells everyone how dead Uncle Irving repeatedly fondled neighborhood children and then threatened to kill them if they said anything. You just think, "Hey, that's great, dude. Too bad you didn't say anything when Irving was alive. Maybe we could have done something about it."
3. Whoremongers and adulterers on the Republican side are drama queens. Diapered hooker patron David Vitter and mistress briber John Ensign got their balls in knot during debate last night. Vitter, as befits a man who gets off on infantilization, was endlessly in awe of the size of the bill, repeating that it is now 2,733 pages. Instead of one big one, Vitter wants five little ones, each only 1/100th the length and girth of the Democrats' bill. Of course he does.
And John Ensign went all constitutional, in an argument dismissed a long time ago, but pressing forward, he said, "What happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I guess Americans can only have them if they comply with this new bill and buy a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum health insurance program. America's Founders and subsequent generations fought dearly for the freedoms we have today.
"I question the appropriateness of this bill and specifically the constitutionality of this individual mandate. Is it really constitutional for this body to tell all Americans they must buy health insurance coverage? If so, what is next? What personal liberty or property will Congress seek to take away from Americans next? Will we consider legislation in the future requiring every American to buy a car, to buy a house, or to do something else the Federal Government wants?"
By the way, beyond the obvious jokes about a member of Congress taking another man's wife, John Ensign was a huge supporter of a flag burning amendment in 2006, which would have enshrined in the Constitution what private citizens can do with their personal property.
And the Sisyphean struggle to achieve mediocrity continues.
4. To return to Morning Joe, Bernie Sanders continues to kick ass.
1. Mostly, whenever Mika Brzezinski starts scolding people on Morning Starbucks with Joe, the Rude Pundit just thinks, "Oh, you need a spanking." (Note: it's the same thought he has whenever he sees a raging Shepherd Smith.) But in the last few days, Brzezinksi and the rest of the baristas have been tut-tutting their clicking tongues at the behavior of Senators while debating health care reform, lamenting the "tone" and the lack of comity, as if debating life and death ought to involve gentle caresses and well-timed reacharounds.
Fuck that. It's actually during this Republican-forced march to the inevitable passage of the Senate bill that the members of that body have taken off their civilized masks and gotten into some shit, which is what should have been happening all along. The jolly air of Victorian politesse has stymied the very real passions at play here.
2. Drunk Max Baucus is kind of awesome. Check out the video of Montana's Max Baucus losing his shit at Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi over the destructive obstructionism of Republicans. Baucus is a man who spent way too much fucking time in a small room, smelling Chuck Grassley's corn farts, and while the Rude Pundit has absolutely no proof that Baucus is drunk while making this speech, Baucus is drunk while making this speech. Watch it and see the self-loathing of the corrupted soul on display, the lashing out of someone compromised and debased by the very forces he encouraged, the desire for some kind of redemption, all from inside a bottle of Scotch.
It's like one of those family moments when a guy slugs back whiskey at a wake until he's wobbly and then tells everyone how dead Uncle Irving repeatedly fondled neighborhood children and then threatened to kill them if they said anything. You just think, "Hey, that's great, dude. Too bad you didn't say anything when Irving was alive. Maybe we could have done something about it."
3. Whoremongers and adulterers on the Republican side are drama queens. Diapered hooker patron David Vitter and mistress briber John Ensign got their balls in knot during debate last night. Vitter, as befits a man who gets off on infantilization, was endlessly in awe of the size of the bill, repeating that it is now 2,733 pages. Instead of one big one, Vitter wants five little ones, each only 1/100th the length and girth of the Democrats' bill. Of course he does.
And John Ensign went all constitutional, in an argument dismissed a long time ago, but pressing forward, he said, "What happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I guess Americans can only have them if they comply with this new bill and buy a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum health insurance program. America's Founders and subsequent generations fought dearly for the freedoms we have today.
"I question the appropriateness of this bill and specifically the constitutionality of this individual mandate. Is it really constitutional for this body to tell all Americans they must buy health insurance coverage? If so, what is next? What personal liberty or property will Congress seek to take away from Americans next? Will we consider legislation in the future requiring every American to buy a car, to buy a house, or to do something else the Federal Government wants?"
By the way, beyond the obvious jokes about a member of Congress taking another man's wife, John Ensign was a huge supporter of a flag burning amendment in 2006, which would have enshrined in the Constitution what private citizens can do with their personal property.
And the Sisyphean struggle to achieve mediocrity continues.
4. To return to Morning Joe, Bernie Sanders continues to kick ass.
12/22/2009
Harry Reid and the Sad Facts of American Compromises:
For two minutes, the Rude Pundit listened to Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas talk about the "back room deals" and "pay-offs" that got the straggling members of the Democratic caucus to go along with the compromise of the compromise of the compromise of the already-compromised-from-the-start health care reform bill. And then within another minute, he found this on Cornyn's Senate website, which says that Cornyn "Helped create a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors: Senator Cornyn was a strong supporter of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act, which, for the first time, provided Medicare beneficiaries with a prescription drug benefit and expanded health plan options."
And then it took less than another minute to find out some of what it cost to get that 2003 bill passed, with the vote of Cornyn, the proud conservative with a voice that sounds like he's been kicked in the taint by a nervous mule he was standing behind.
To pass the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, there was the $25 billion "rural package," which profited hospitals in southern and western states, with "rural" meaning cities like Corpus Christi, Texas, with a quarter million people. Hell, Chuck Grassley got $151 million for hospitals in Iowa. That's $151 million just for the hospitals, not for, say, a natural disaster fucking up the state's infrastructure. So compare that with the uproar over the $300 million that Democrat Mary Landrieu secured for Katrina-buggered Louisiana in exchange for her vote on 2009's health care reform.
The Bush administration also got $900 million put into the bill essentially so that the White House could reward the districts of loyal Republicans with hospital funds. You wanna talk about bribes? Here's some motherfucking bribes: "Among them were two hospitals in the Texas district of Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a member of the conference committee on the Medicare bill. Ten hospitals in Connecticut, home of US Representative Nancy Johnson, another Republican member of the conference committee, also benefited. Pennsylvania, represented by Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who had crusaded for health care money, had 13 institutions in the victory column."
By the way, Democrats got their states paid, too. Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of South Dakota got funds for their states' hospitals, as did Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Harry Reid of Nevada. What did Republicans get for these (to put it politely) fund allocations? All of those Democrats voted for cloture on the conference report. All but Reid voted for the bill.
Let's not forget America's great wilderness welfare state. As an aide to Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski said, "They were counting votes, and the Alaska delegation was pretty set on it." Which meant that Alaska got $53 million over two years for that state's doctors. Goddamn, they must miss Ted Stevens.
While giving money to rural hospitals generally ought to be a good thing, you can be sure that what the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act did, beyond rewarding pharmaceutical companies for being total dickheads, was enrich corporate, for-profit hospital chains. Bitches gots to get paid. And John Cornyn had no problem with it then.
So, now, with the current Senate Health Care Reform bill, where, for instance, Michelle Malkin is screeching about bribes in that brain-damaged ferret way she has, Harry Reid is absolutely right when he says, dismissively, "There are a hundred senators here, and I don’t know if there is a senator who doesn’t have something in this bill that is important to them, and if they don’t have something in it important to them, then that doesn’t speak well of them." Or, in other words, "Suck my balls."
Sure, sure, this is a ludicrous system, where one nutzoid's "bribe" is another Congress member's bread and butter, where every compromise comes down to dollars (or abortion, but that's for another discussion), where compromise in DC simply seems like the art of sacrificing on the left until almost nothing we hold dear remains. Yet it behooves us to remember that we are a nation founded on the most heartbreaking compromise in our history. The Constitution almost didn't come into being, and therefore the United States itself, until abolition of slavery was compromised away, until the horror was actually put into the document.
Why bring this up? For one of those hyperbolic comparisons that blogs are mocked for (even if the breathless rhetoric coming from the GOP and Michael Steele puts bloggery to shame)? No. It's that every compromise, even the most vicious, must leave the lingering question, which will not be answered here: is it better than the alternative, which is failure?
For two minutes, the Rude Pundit listened to Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas talk about the "back room deals" and "pay-offs" that got the straggling members of the Democratic caucus to go along with the compromise of the compromise of the compromise of the already-compromised-from-the-start health care reform bill. And then within another minute, he found this on Cornyn's Senate website, which says that Cornyn "Helped create a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors: Senator Cornyn was a strong supporter of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act, which, for the first time, provided Medicare beneficiaries with a prescription drug benefit and expanded health plan options."
And then it took less than another minute to find out some of what it cost to get that 2003 bill passed, with the vote of Cornyn, the proud conservative with a voice that sounds like he's been kicked in the taint by a nervous mule he was standing behind.
To pass the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, there was the $25 billion "rural package," which profited hospitals in southern and western states, with "rural" meaning cities like Corpus Christi, Texas, with a quarter million people. Hell, Chuck Grassley got $151 million for hospitals in Iowa. That's $151 million just for the hospitals, not for, say, a natural disaster fucking up the state's infrastructure. So compare that with the uproar over the $300 million that Democrat Mary Landrieu secured for Katrina-buggered Louisiana in exchange for her vote on 2009's health care reform.
The Bush administration also got $900 million put into the bill essentially so that the White House could reward the districts of loyal Republicans with hospital funds. You wanna talk about bribes? Here's some motherfucking bribes: "Among them were two hospitals in the Texas district of Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a member of the conference committee on the Medicare bill. Ten hospitals in Connecticut, home of US Representative Nancy Johnson, another Republican member of the conference committee, also benefited. Pennsylvania, represented by Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who had crusaded for health care money, had 13 institutions in the victory column."
By the way, Democrats got their states paid, too. Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of South Dakota got funds for their states' hospitals, as did Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Harry Reid of Nevada. What did Republicans get for these (to put it politely) fund allocations? All of those Democrats voted for cloture on the conference report. All but Reid voted for the bill.
Let's not forget America's great wilderness welfare state. As an aide to Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski said, "They were counting votes, and the Alaska delegation was pretty set on it." Which meant that Alaska got $53 million over two years for that state's doctors. Goddamn, they must miss Ted Stevens.
While giving money to rural hospitals generally ought to be a good thing, you can be sure that what the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act did, beyond rewarding pharmaceutical companies for being total dickheads, was enrich corporate, for-profit hospital chains. Bitches gots to get paid. And John Cornyn had no problem with it then.
So, now, with the current Senate Health Care Reform bill, where, for instance, Michelle Malkin is screeching about bribes in that brain-damaged ferret way she has, Harry Reid is absolutely right when he says, dismissively, "There are a hundred senators here, and I don’t know if there is a senator who doesn’t have something in this bill that is important to them, and if they don’t have something in it important to them, then that doesn’t speak well of them." Or, in other words, "Suck my balls."
Sure, sure, this is a ludicrous system, where one nutzoid's "bribe" is another Congress member's bread and butter, where every compromise comes down to dollars (or abortion, but that's for another discussion), where compromise in DC simply seems like the art of sacrificing on the left until almost nothing we hold dear remains. Yet it behooves us to remember that we are a nation founded on the most heartbreaking compromise in our history. The Constitution almost didn't come into being, and therefore the United States itself, until abolition of slavery was compromised away, until the horror was actually put into the document.
Why bring this up? For one of those hyperbolic comparisons that blogs are mocked for (even if the breathless rhetoric coming from the GOP and Michael Steele puts bloggery to shame)? No. It's that every compromise, even the most vicious, must leave the lingering question, which will not be answered here: is it better than the alternative, which is failure?
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