President

The Republican clown car full of damaged, twisted and vicious freaks all clamouring for a job none of them deserve or are remotely competent to perform continues.

Billionaire Romney, a wooden, wind-up caricature of a human being that will say any damn thing it thinks will please whomever it can see, is trying to appear a “Real American” who has walked the streets and feared losing his job. With $20 million stashed in his retirement account and offshore investments in Luxemburg, the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank accounts, it’s not an easy sell. The man’s total inability to deliver a single line with anything approaching sincerity (read: There goes Mitt lying his ass off again; if he says his fucking NAME I want to check his ID!) only makes the sham more laughable.
Newt Gingrich, who everyone hates immediately because it saves time; thrice married scumbag who leaves wives the moment they get sick (or he deems them sufficiently ugly to hinder his Machiavellian grasp at the oval office) has promised America a manned moon base after two terms. Not content to ignore the fact that he stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever pulling together an electoral victory, or outrunning the laundry list of shitty, unethical, back-stabbing, hateful things he’s racked up in his political career, and thus unable to run on what shamefully passes for his record, Newt has gone full bore into fantasy land: A MOON BASE, complete by the end of his SECOND term.

Ron Paul, a senile acolyte of Ayn Rand, continues to hang in there yammering his unworkable nonsense to the delight of stupid, juvenile libertarian fan boys, while Rick Santorum persists in injecting his brand of frothy faith in Jesus as the absolute panacea for all that ails the new American century. Neither are getting anywhere near the convention or the white house or even a cabinet post.

And after 435,767 debates where are we? The establishment Republicans seem to have resigned themselves to Romney, who no one ever wanted but, according to the sages of the GOP, stands the best chance in the general election…and Gingrich who everyone hates and that’s fine because Newt hates them back with double intensity.

Even that stalwart political cocktease Sarah Palin can’t resist jamming her three cents worth of muddled imbecility into the mix. Blathering in her own inimitable style on Fox News, Sarah objected to an article by Peggy Noonan:

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it. But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of ‘angry attack muffin’ verbiage to one and not the other.”

See, in Sarah’s stunned conception of how things ought to work, if the media is going to call out one candidate for being a petulant dick, they must then call out the others for…something. It would be unfair to report the nature, content and tone of a vicious, unhinged hate bomb like Newt Gingrich unless they also go after Mitt.
Of course, having been exposed as an illiterate, unread, poorly educated, completely ignorant buffoon, Sarah tends to view the media with some suspicion. After all, how dare they tell the truth? In the Palinverse, anyone who doesn’t kiss her ass and agree that she’s right is a commie fifth columnist out to destroy America and hate on Jesus. Stupidity of this unqualified degree should be in the race.

The GOP grew tired long ago of the media telling the truth. They set up their own media wing – Fox News – which incessantly and unrelentingly attacks everything the president attempts as un-American; the work of a secret Muslim socialist intent on destroying their imaginary way of life. Any media presence that actually does its job by reporting the truth (or, god forbid, challenging the litany of outright lies spewed by Republicans) is simply distorting the record because they’re obviously in the bag for the left. For an audience of three million equally ignorant, deeply brainwashed, reflexively racist voters, these assumptions are never questioned. Fair and balanced has come to mean something else entirely.

Aside from the amusement this show offers, fettered only by the fear that one of these backward idiots might actually become president, what is one to make of it all? The conclusion that America is in terminal decline; that the principles upon which it was founded ( despite what the prevaricating Republican candidates wrongly assert were those principles) have been ground into the dust, seems inescapable.
When half the population is blinded by lies and seeks a leader from a pack of angry fools, each vying to tell yet bigger lies plucked from the utter fantasy in which their presidential aspirations slowly drown; when that band of blithering buttplugs is more deeply devoted to hindering and defeating their political opponent than committed to enacting policies that will actually serve the people, one can no longer pretend optimism.

Moon Base Alpha, out.

Pretty Enough for America

The debate over where to draw the line between fair political commentary and contemptible, hateful sniping rages on. If a candidate’s actions reveal him to be a hypocritical scum bucket of stunning depth and breadth, that deserves attention. If that candidate’s wife has an ass the size of Manhattan, that’s probably off limits. But what to do when the two intersect?
What happens when the candidate’s actions smack head-on into the physical appearance of his wife?

Leonard H. “Kip” Carter, a former close Gingrich friend, backed the contention that it was Newt Gingrich who wanted the divorce.

“He (Gingrich) said, ‘You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president,’ ” Carter, who now lives in South Carolina, told CNN recently, relating the conversation he had with Gingrich the day Gingrich revealed he was filing for divorce. Carter served as treasurer of Gingrich’s first congressional campaigns.

Leaving aside that Newt apparently had early designs on the oval office, he has said on numerous occasions that it was his wife who wanted the divorce. The CNN story calls that claim into question, and raises rather uglier ones about the ethically challenged Gingrich. Leaving one’s children and divorcing one’s spouse because she’s not pretty enough for a campaign ad is the mark of a sociopath.

Gingrich himself placed his numerous marriages, divorces and affairs into the arena of character assessment by virtue of his many claims to have learned his lesson; to be a new man; to explain and/or mitigate the circumstances surrounding his apparent lack of respect for the bonds of holy matrimony. Recall, if you will, the assertion that it was his great patriotism that caused him to commit adultery. Country before faith, indeed.
Now, in addition to various of his claims being starkly contradicted by the court filings, comes word that he dumped his first wife because she wasn’t pretty enough.

And this raises another question: If Newt Gingrich has such a fine conception of what is not pretty enough, who does he think WOULD be pretty enough? Certainly he’s not saying wife #1 wasn’t pretty enough for him. She wasn’t pretty enough to be the First Lady – the wife of the president. She wasn’t pretty enough for America. And what is Newt’s idea of “Pretty Enough for America”?

Perhaps I ought to reiterate my contempt for those who attack a political candidate based on their physical appearance. Some people draw a sharp line between things one can do something about and things one cannot – Chris Christie could lose a few pounds, Barack Obama can’t be less black – but I don’t. Slagging someone because they can’t see their toes is as reprehensible as racism. But if you ditch your wife for not being slim enough and then marry Queen Latifah, don’t get pissy with me because I point it out.

And to hell with Newt’s character. The dark stain that remains of whatever passed for Newt Gingrich’s character is unworthy of attention. He’s a sneaky, lying, racist, Machiavellian reptile trying to weasel his way into the top spot among a class of yammering buffoons and everyone knows it. One more spot of guilty blood on Newt’s hands will pass unnoticed. Yes, to hell with Newt’s character.
This is a question of judgement. Pretty enough for America? Newt Gingrich is the sort of vacuous douche who would walk out of the Hermitage insisting it needs a velvet painting of dogs playing poker.

Happy New Year

As folks may be well aware, I hate the baby Jesus. I hate the bullshit story, and most of all I hate the hypocritical, condescending crap those who claim to walk with Christ get up to. Thus, and despite an abiding appreciation for all things Santa (and that mostly because it presents an opportunity to drag out, “You can’t prove a negative,” using a giant pile of murdered reindeer that seemingly don’t want to fly), there were no holiday wishes posted here. I have holiday wishes, but there’s no point in being nasty.
Still though, the completely arbitrary decision to flip the calendar on the 31st now looms. I will, as always, completely avoid the festivities. Why people want to get dressed up, suffer line-ups, crowds, inflated prices and drunken assholes to jam themselves into a restaurant or club where it’s so fucking crowded the bartenders can’t sell beer only to get jammed up later at a roadside sobriety checkpoint is beyond me. But at least it doesn’t come with an attached mythology involving celestial signals, virgin births and unmitigated blithering imbecility. And so, in the spirit of the times, happy new year.

Frum on Hitch

David Frum reflects on the passing of Hitchens:

Hitchens was not one of those romantics who fetishized “dialogue.” Far from suffering fools gladly, he delighted in making fools suffer. When he heard that another friend, a professor, had a habit of seducing female students in his writing seminars, he shook his head pityingly. “It’s not worth it. Afterward, you have to read their short stories.”

Hitch

It began with one drink, alone in a favourite bar, raised to the memory of Hitchens. Dawn is now well past. I will, when time and sobriety permit, reflect on the loss of one of the truly sweet intellectual puritans. Resquiat in pace, Christopher.

Arctic Cougar

‘Scuse me while I find my schadenfreude face…

Sarah Palin is pitching a new reality show about her husband’s career as a snowmobile racer but, so it is claimed, the million dollar per episode price tag she’s demanding is too steep to spark interest.
Piffle, I say.
First, Palin’s last reality show, which featured Caribou Barbie pretending to hunt and hanging out with Kate Plus Eight, while setting audience records for its premiere, plummeted in the ratings like a skydiver without a parachute. People were almost immediately sickened by the vapid blather, contrived bullshit and phony populism of this gang of grifters from Wasilla.
Second, Sarah Palin absent the lingering question of will she or won’t she completely fuck up American electoral politics by inserting her particular brand of vacuous, brainless, uneducated, semi-literate stupidity is about as interesting as a lost sock.
Third, who the fuck wants to tune in weekly to watch a snowmobile race? A bunch of people standing around in parkas at the Start/Finish line with occasional shots of the machines zipping past some conveniently accessible spot to mount a camera? Every once in awhile on some sports channel, usually during an NFL strike or an NBA lockout, you can see what looks like snowmobile motocross races – jumps, bumps, sharp corners. The only thing that make me change the channel faster is a televangelist (which, it occurs, shares some overlap with the god walloping Sarah Palin).
But, of course, the best part of this story is that Sarah Palin, after months of teasing her slack-jawed tea party mouth-breathers and promising that she doesn’t need an office or a title to bring her awesome powers to bear on restoring America is now off flogging another Palin-based media spectacular. Working for America from the sidelines of a snowmobile based reality show. With special guest appearances by Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain (one can hope).
Poor Caribou Barbie. She thinks America isn’t fickle. She thinks America is still obsessed with her; will adore her always as it once did. She thinks she was something other than a circumstantial freak show; that she deserved the attention; that it was something other than rubber-necking at a traveling train wreck.
Soon, she’ll be conducting book signings of the remaindered copies of Going Rogue at the matinee show in Juno’s only strip club just so the peeler bar can put “TONIGHT SARAH PALIN” on the marquee. And, as with everything else connected with the Palin brand, it’ll be a disappointment for all involved whether she winds up on the pole or not.