Denigrating the Venerated

It looks like I am not the only blogger willing to risk the backlash of an angry mob by going against custom and speaking ill of the dead. The subject of today’s tirade is the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, who is certainly a much more prominent target for scorn than the lowly Tea Party fundamentalist I took aim at just the other day,

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

A Bullet Dodged

Whew. With the election finally behind me, I can start to breath a little easier now. Had Romney managed to beg, borrow or steal the thing, my time as a free soldier of army of truth would have been in serious jeopardy. There is no doubt in my mind that my name would have raced to the top of the list of American citizens targeted for drone attacks because of suspected terrorist activity. How’s that you ask?

I was copy and pasting JZ lyrics and placing them where they would most likely be seen by my old racist neighbors back in Mississippi, as well as Tea Party Patriots everywhere!

Those people would have put their hand on a Bible (Even the Mormon one!) and honestly sworn an oath to the almighty that what I was doing by posting those lyrics was terrorizing them in far worse ways than anything Osama Bin Laden ever imagined.

Good thing for me that JZ won the election!

Enjoy.

GOP Irrelevancy

Good morning all,

First off. housekeeping. Woke up 55 years old this morning. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just old enough to remember when all the “lazy blacks” in Detroit were so busy making cars that that moniker didn’t work so well.   A lot of people I remember fondly from my youth had good union jobs and lived well. Then Reagan came along and garrotted the unions in 1980.  Many believe Reagan also killed Disco, but Disco never died. Reagan stuffed it in a duffel bag and sent it to Guantanamo.

In any event, the country has been on a Republican built road-to-Hell since then.  Republican greed totally destroyed any chance for those of my generation to implement the dreams and ideals we all grew up cherishing.  Our fathers had just landed on the moon and we were poised for Mars just about the time the crazy old man got hold of the wheel and steered us off into the direction of Star Wars instead.

There’s still a ray of hope for our children and grandchildren, if we don’t allow them to drown in the slime pit of oil dependency and warmongering the Republicans have built into our system.  We’ll see.

Big shout out to all the Walmart workers who stood against the corporate tyrants.  Walmart can’t compete in an environment where civility and fair play are honored above institutional profits.  They fizzled here in Germany after pissing a billion dollars away, and at the end of the day, they weren’t even able to offer lower prices than their competitors!!

How Can the Republicans Regain Relevance?

Having graduated from high school in Fort Dodge Iowa (1976 – State of Iowa Scholar), I can say with some authority that what the Republicans need to do to become relevant again. I expect my suggestions to be received by the GOP with all the enthusiasm and applause as pre-election Nate Silver polls, but it might help if somebody from the great plains, who isn’t a highly paid (bought off) beltway insider adds a main-street view. I am pretty sure I have mentioned these things before, but the Republicans weren’t listening to me then and they likely won’t listen to me now, but if ever there was a time when Googling “mainstream viewpoints” and “U.S. voters” might interest a Republican, this seems a likely moment in time for that occurrence.

Republicans need to drop their crazy ideas on reproductive freedoms. This last election cycle saw things spin so far into crazy town that there were candidates actually advancing the cause of rapist’s rights in having their unholy offspring borne by our mothers, wives and daughters. I have a memory of Mississippi trying to outlaw condoms, but that might have been spin from their “rights of the zygote” legislation that failed, even in the bastion of the Baptist holy land. At the end of the day, the Republican adoption of the Christian Bible as a handbook for political and scientific guidance is as ill-advised, un-American and disgusting. Relying on faith over facts is not a road to success into the future.

Modern Republicanism is now 20 percent politics and 80 percent fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism. This is something they used to know enough to hide because they knew it was a losing minority position. I remember noting the TRUE percent of “lunatic fringe” Christians when Pat Robertson ran for president. IIRC, it was about five percent, and I doubt the actual numbers are higher today (40% of US now “non-religious”).

What the Relignicans lack in numbers they try to make up for in astroturf and echo chambers. Fox (Faux) News is HELPING elect Democrats now that everybody isn’t afraid to laugh at the Naked Emperor.

I have an iPad mini to unwrap.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Enjoy.

Election Roundup 2012

I have a Facebook and Twitter feed to prove I was up REAL late here in Germany, watching the election and putting my bony fingers of contention to good use. In fact, the night of the election my fingertips were bouncing off my keyboard faster and harder than a midget cowboy riding a Dutch hooker.   For the record, I am only willing to shell out for food for the hungry, universal healthcare for the masses and a nickel more for a pizza so the delivery guy can afford $4 gas AND a dentist.  If any of you oversexed Democrats high on legalized hippy lettuce wants to see that rodeo in Amsterdam, you’ll have to pony up for your own ticket.  I promise you’ll get a far more graphic demonstration of the metaphors applied in the aforementioned simile.

Election Tweets

I have some Tweets from the evening that are more precious to me than my kids.  I’ll pull more screen shots out later and mix them in with my old vacation photos, either on a future blog post, or over at my house when we’re finished with sanctifying Christmas by stuffing our faces with cranberry sauce, before the start of the sacred NFL Xmas game extravaganza.   Just in case you think my football analogy as sui generis:

It’s times like these that are made to reminisce on things that happened back in the “good old days”.  If you can’t wait to see my full set of tweets, they are out there in the wild, but take caution.  Think of my tweets as “highly concentrated snark”.  Reading a couple of them is equivalent to chugging two large Red Bulls.  Do not read them while driving or operating heavy machinery.

The Setup

Things weren’t looking good for Romney even before the sun came up on election day.  His commie-loving son had just been caught trading arms for hostages with Putin in Russia, and only days after his Dad was on TV trying to scare everybody in America about the missing Czarist WMD’s in his foreign policy debate with Obama.

The Main Event

The spectacle of visible human suffering on election night 2012 was one I shall never forget.  A shot heard round the world.  The carnage was so total, and the chaos so complete, that at least one news anchor sprang from her perch running wildly about, on a frantic search to find somebody, anybody, who would confirm Karl Rove’s theory of a flat Earth.  This theory, bolstered by more than a quarter billion dollars of the most sophisticated research the Creation Science Institute could muster, added that extra touch of schadenfreude we’ve all come to expect in reality TV shows (or Slasher movies) produced over the last decade, so we at home were all thoroughly prepped for a big twist.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That is, if we TOTALLY ignore this guy who had been repeated phoning, texting and emailing the Romney/Fox campaign extolling them NOT to volunteer to go down into that dark basement, but the promo trailers had been blasting America for months and it was clear from seeing those, that the Republican party was married to a stale plot device with the same loving ferocity Mitt has expressed towards the dim-bulb blonde he chose as his wife.  What a conundrum!!

Republican Reaction (Aftermath)

Dixie hadn’t experienced a November event anything nearly this tragic since Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864.  Obama, like Sherman had “destroyed much of the South’s physical and psychological capacity to wage war”.

Just like Lincoln in the aftermath of the Great Northern War of Aggression, Obama still has a bit of mopping up in order to ensure a proper southern reconstruction.  This task is particularly difficult considering the unrepentant and thoroughly unreconstructed “Sons of the Confederacy” pictured above in Oxford Mississippi.  This strapping band of Brooks Brothers racists were busy going Johnny Reb, burning Obama campaign material in pseudo effigy, just on the off chance they could re-inspire the spirit of nineteenth century racism.  The only thing missing were the white robes and official seal of the KKK, though to be honest, I think at least half of those folks had some type of cross dangling from a gold chain around their necks.  They try to keep their racism tucked under their tshirts, but sometimes there’s an accidental “nipple slip” that makes it past the seven second delay.

Insane US politics is only one of the many minor perturbations that I have been dealing with lately, though to be fair, the 2012 election seems to have consumed the entirety of the last four years.  The megaphones on Bullshit Mountain began blaring immediately after Obama was overwhelmingly swept into office back in 2008 (in lieu of the old soldier & his organ grinder monkey sideshow act).  Good times?  You Betcha’).

Just to give the Republicans a port in the very stormy seas of their defeat, I finally found an EXCUSE for them to pass around that doesn’t rely on Karl Rove under-counting the Black kids crowding the candy aisle at Walmart.  They can thank me later:

I’m out.

Enjoy.

Stupidity in Real Time

Filed under: “If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle” folder.

Enjoy.