"In Colorado, a state where Palin campaigned hard last year on behalf of the Republican ticket but which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) eventually lost to Barack Obama, Arapahoe County Republican Party Chairman David Kerber said that Palin was a good fit with Western sensibilities.
“She comes across as someone who’s going to say what she says and if you don’t like it, that’s just too bad,” Kerber said. “She’s not going to lie, she’s not going to sugarcoat it — she’s just going to let it rip. I think that’s what Westerners want.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26236.html#ixzz0SY0dLlQ4
While that's certainly unPC and ubermacho of Ms. Palin, Mr. Kerber, the career success of a politician is specifically determined by how much people like what he/she has to say. If they don't like it then it's too bad for the politician, not for the people, especially when it comes to keeping power out of the hands of Tracy Flick. So if you were wondering why the McCain/Palin ticket lost Colorado, and Nevada, and Virginia, and North Carolina...
By the way, however much you may imagine the thoroughly suburbanized deniziens of Arapahoe County to be self-reliant frontiersmen, the fact remains that the American West has a higher percentage of its people living in cities than any other part of the country. So if you want to know where "Western sensibilities" lie try looking at the bus-riding collectivists of Denver and Alburqurque. Feel free to hold your nose if you must.
Dé Máirt, Meán Fómhair 29, 2009
Dé Luain, Meán Fómhair 21, 2009
Life Is Good.
Dallas Cowboys, Nazis of the American sporting world, playing in front of an all-time NFL record crowd, pregame celebration of all things football and Texas and alpha male, George W. Bush in attendance, 33-31 losers. This coming after the Italian Fascist of American sport, the New England Patriots, get torn to pieces by a Jets team they had come to consider a slave race. To be alive in this age is to see humanity in the full glory of all that is free and good.
I think the Bears won this weekend as well, and I might have had sex at some point in the past two days, but I don't remember unimportant things.
I think the Bears won this weekend as well, and I might have had sex at some point in the past two days, but I don't remember unimportant things.
Dé Céadaoin, Meán Fómhair 16, 2009
The Breeze Here is Starting to Get A Little Cooler at Night
I think I'll wonder south for awhile. Maybe hit up the Northeast in the spring, and maybe I'll stick around in a place where I can get paid to be a psuedobohemian bore. I'm not 30 yet and I can still taste the new for what it is. So yeah. I do believe I will.
Dé Máirt, Meán Fómhair 15, 2009
So...
That Joe Wilson post I did a few days ago, about right-wingers penchant for inventing truth in order to maintain their delusion of being normal folk. Well, a much better example of that has just come up.
"In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.
So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.
But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally." politifact.com
This is easily the most pathetic thing I have come across in my life. The lengths that rednecks will go to in order to avoid accepting that they are the unamerican radicals. Disgusting.
"In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.
So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.
But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally." politifact.com
This is easily the most pathetic thing I have come across in my life. The lengths that rednecks will go to in order to avoid accepting that they are the unamerican radicals. Disgusting.
Dé Luain, Meán Fómhair 14, 2009
You Dumb Motherfuckers
So, God told you that this was worth killing and dying for huh? Hell of a joker that guy. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/world/middleeast/14settlers.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Forgive the Internet Speak: But This!!!
This!!, with a dash of no shit Sherlock.
"A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.
Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the Obama-joker contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.
The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know."
Poster on "The Daily Dish, 09/14/09:
When I was very small my very conservative father told me that he though my grandmother's Thanksgiving dinner was the best in the world because it was my grandmother's and that my mother's breakfast was the best in the world because it was my mother's, and furthermore this is what it meant to love something. He is on record then in his belief that to love a person or thing is necessarily to consider her or it to be the best in all things. The thought of love and pride being independent of each other is inconceivable. (Remember the flap over Mdm. Obama's 'proud of my country for the first time' comment.) Rather it is love and scrutiny that can not possibly exist in the same mind. (Just try to forget the mountain of 'why do you hate America' crap after 9/11)
In the absence of a quasi-divine monarch on which to project everything we like about ourselves we have instead deified the lifestyle of the White small-towners and suburbanites who have historically been our ruling class. Consider now what social conditions pose the biggest threat to the regal myth of "Real America"...
1. Inequities in education,income, and health care caused largely by historical racial oppression.
2. Wasted resources and environmental degradation caused by suburban sprawl,
... and you go a long way towards explaining why American hostility towards liberals is so intense. The Right's hatred of 'big government', its often paranoid suspicion of state-directed reform, is based largely on the fact that to acknowledge that the state has a legitimate role to play in society is to acknowledge that society is human, requires conscious direction, does not maintain equilibrium by itself as does an atomic clock.
* Of course, there is one famous exception to the right's belief that government has no legitimate role to play in society. It is perfectly eager to use the State as a totem of patriarchal authority. This is why many right-wingers who proclaim the fiercest hatred of 'big government' will tolerate no criticism of military of police power, which are indisputably the twin engines of tyranny for any state that chooses to be tyrannical.
If you wonder how reasonably intelligent people can believe patent nonsense; such as Al Gore leading the entire scientific world in a Marxo/environmental scam, it is for the same reason that reasonably intelligent people pray to a sadomasochistic zombie. They do not consider their obligation to American society to be based on voluntary agreement to a social contract. America, and the White middle-class rural/suburban lifestyle that is supposedly the essence of America, is a thing beyond scrutiny, it is a thing they must believe in. Their worthiness as persons, as well as yours and mine, is utterly dependent on adhering to this belief through all storms.
"A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.
Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the Obama-joker contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.
The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know."
Poster on "The Daily Dish, 09/14/09:
When I was very small my very conservative father told me that he though my grandmother's Thanksgiving dinner was the best in the world because it was my grandmother's and that my mother's breakfast was the best in the world because it was my mother's, and furthermore this is what it meant to love something. He is on record then in his belief that to love a person or thing is necessarily to consider her or it to be the best in all things. The thought of love and pride being independent of each other is inconceivable. (Remember the flap over Mdm. Obama's 'proud of my country for the first time' comment.) Rather it is love and scrutiny that can not possibly exist in the same mind. (Just try to forget the mountain of 'why do you hate America' crap after 9/11)
In the absence of a quasi-divine monarch on which to project everything we like about ourselves we have instead deified the lifestyle of the White small-towners and suburbanites who have historically been our ruling class. Consider now what social conditions pose the biggest threat to the regal myth of "Real America"...
1. Inequities in education,income, and health care caused largely by historical racial oppression.
2. Wasted resources and environmental degradation caused by suburban sprawl,
... and you go a long way towards explaining why American hostility towards liberals is so intense. The Right's hatred of 'big government', its often paranoid suspicion of state-directed reform, is based largely on the fact that to acknowledge that the state has a legitimate role to play in society is to acknowledge that society is human, requires conscious direction, does not maintain equilibrium by itself as does an atomic clock.
* Of course, there is one famous exception to the right's belief that government has no legitimate role to play in society. It is perfectly eager to use the State as a totem of patriarchal authority. This is why many right-wingers who proclaim the fiercest hatred of 'big government' will tolerate no criticism of military of police power, which are indisputably the twin engines of tyranny for any state that chooses to be tyrannical.
If you wonder how reasonably intelligent people can believe patent nonsense; such as Al Gore leading the entire scientific world in a Marxo/environmental scam, it is for the same reason that reasonably intelligent people pray to a sadomasochistic zombie. They do not consider their obligation to American society to be based on voluntary agreement to a social contract. America, and the White middle-class rural/suburban lifestyle that is supposedly the essence of America, is a thing beyond scrutiny, it is a thing they must believe in. Their worthiness as persons, as well as yours and mine, is utterly dependent on adhering to this belief through all storms.
Déardaoin, Meán Fómhair 10, 2009
You Lie Because I Say So Is Why
"He voted for that bill without even reading it!!" is a line that's been used by both parties when in the Congressional minority, and it is a canard. Congresspeople are busy, and the bills they vote on are fucking long. If you were in their position, I can assure you that you wouldn't read any more than was neccesary to get the jist.
Or maybe not. Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, has become instantly famous by apparantly ubermenshing controversial tenants of health care reform into being by sheer will. Wilson publically called President Obama a liar during the joint-session speech last night when Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be receiving government health care under any proposal. The always quick-witted president managed to avoid an awkward situation by using his backwards Communazimuslim Lizardman language to sieze control of Wilson's mind and illicit an apology within an hour.
I'm not terribly concerned about proper decorum in the halls of government, in fact I lust for the day when Congress busts out into a Japanese-Diet style brawl. And like I said before, Congresspeople do not have the time to read entire bills cover-to-cover and should not be expected to do so. Still there is nothing stopping Joe Wilson from perusing the health care bills himself if he's afraid that there's anything in them that is insufficient in regards to keeping out the spi..../ upholding immigration law.
I've mentioned before that Orwell's fear that a authoritarian regime with "memory hole" power would have the ability to maintain its tyranny forever turned out to be blessedly backwards. What happens is that dictorial systems gradually fall under the delusion that they can invent truth, and in so doing they become unable to respond to threats they imagine themselves able to wish away. The Rupublican Party was never quite tyrannical during the Bush years, which makes the fact that very obvious fact that they fell very hard to this delusion all the more pathetic.
In 2005 it was deeply irritating to hear a hair's breadth majority party chastise us liberals for being "out of the mainstream". To hear a party now firmly in the minority lecture us in precisely the same way in 2009 is baffling and sad. Staid suburbanites and post-modern hipsters are now united in viewing the American right wing as the batshit uncle emberassing us before the world, yet the right-winger still considers the other ninety nne percent of Planet Earth to be the weirdos.
What we are seeing within the American Right today is not the sort of imperial God complex that brought down Moscow and the Third Reich, but rather the populist God complex chronicled in Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians." Altemeyer observed that one of the biggest motivators of the 'right-wing authoritarian' mindset is a fierce desire to beleive that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. (In philisophical jargon, the right-wing authoritarian considers himself 'subject.')
When the right-winger combines this adolescent need to be normal with good old- fashioned chauvanism,(the worship of power and force, purely masculine of course, as the solution to all ills) he becomes endowed with the ability to bend reality as much as is neccesary to maintain his sense of being subject, center of and rightful master of the universe. The old buggaboo of 'liberal media bias' is the tool by which he bends reality. If the authoritarian's sense of being normal is upset by hearing the liberal media say that black is black, than black is white, the president is a secret Muslim terrorist, Naziism is a form of Socialism, and the State will force you to feed your grandparents to illegal immigrants.
So finally, if President Other dares to deny something that provides the right-wing authoritarian with moral license to hate him, such as making the objectively falsifiable claim that there is nothing benifitting illegal immigrqants in his health care proposals, than the shout of "you lie" delivered with certainty, passion, and perfect thoughtlessness, is enough to make this inconveinent fact disapear, and the world again rotates on the axis of the self where it belongs.
Or maybe not. Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, has become instantly famous by apparantly ubermenshing controversial tenants of health care reform into being by sheer will. Wilson publically called President Obama a liar during the joint-session speech last night when Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be receiving government health care under any proposal. The always quick-witted president managed to avoid an awkward situation by using his backwards Communazimuslim Lizardman language to sieze control of Wilson's mind and illicit an apology within an hour.
I'm not terribly concerned about proper decorum in the halls of government, in fact I lust for the day when Congress busts out into a Japanese-Diet style brawl. And like I said before, Congresspeople do not have the time to read entire bills cover-to-cover and should not be expected to do so. Still there is nothing stopping Joe Wilson from perusing the health care bills himself if he's afraid that there's anything in them that is insufficient in regards to keeping out the spi..../ upholding immigration law.
I've mentioned before that Orwell's fear that a authoritarian regime with "memory hole" power would have the ability to maintain its tyranny forever turned out to be blessedly backwards. What happens is that dictorial systems gradually fall under the delusion that they can invent truth, and in so doing they become unable to respond to threats they imagine themselves able to wish away. The Rupublican Party was never quite tyrannical during the Bush years, which makes the fact that very obvious fact that they fell very hard to this delusion all the more pathetic.
In 2005 it was deeply irritating to hear a hair's breadth majority party chastise us liberals for being "out of the mainstream". To hear a party now firmly in the minority lecture us in precisely the same way in 2009 is baffling and sad. Staid suburbanites and post-modern hipsters are now united in viewing the American right wing as the batshit uncle emberassing us before the world, yet the right-winger still considers the other ninety nne percent of Planet Earth to be the weirdos.
What we are seeing within the American Right today is not the sort of imperial God complex that brought down Moscow and the Third Reich, but rather the populist God complex chronicled in Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians." Altemeyer observed that one of the biggest motivators of the 'right-wing authoritarian' mindset is a fierce desire to beleive that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. (In philisophical jargon, the right-wing authoritarian considers himself 'subject.')
When the right-winger combines this adolescent need to be normal with good old- fashioned chauvanism,(the worship of power and force, purely masculine of course, as the solution to all ills) he becomes endowed with the ability to bend reality as much as is neccesary to maintain his sense of being subject, center of and rightful master of the universe. The old buggaboo of 'liberal media bias' is the tool by which he bends reality. If the authoritarian's sense of being normal is upset by hearing the liberal media say that black is black, than black is white, the president is a secret Muslim terrorist, Naziism is a form of Socialism, and the State will force you to feed your grandparents to illegal immigrants.
So finally, if President Other dares to deny something that provides the right-wing authoritarian with moral license to hate him, such as making the objectively falsifiable claim that there is nothing benifitting illegal immigrqants in his health care proposals, than the shout of "you lie" delivered with certainty, passion, and perfect thoughtlessness, is enough to make this inconveinent fact disapear, and the world again rotates on the axis of the self where it belongs.
Dé Céadaoin, Meán Fómhair 09, 2009
Riley is Doing Well
I saw the hobbled ex-ultimate fighter at 2:00 AM on Monday night, driving the new Saturn that his new sugar mama lets him borrow. Or at least he says she lets him borrow it, he gets very defensive when pressed for details. The woman in question is apperantly a 49-year old lawyer from Schaumburg who he met at an Einstien Bros. Bagel shop downtown, a middle-aged woman who found herself single and alone before she knew it. Riley mocks her apperence and attempts to give "bootleg cab rides" to twentysomething women in her car. Truely a rat fuck excuse for a man, so naturally I got in the car when he asked me to.
He asked me if I had any money and I said know. He had completely blown the two hundred dollars the woman gave him burning gasoline accross the city and snorting cocaine off of the counsol. Now he didn't have enough gas to get back to the lovenest in the suburbs. He was completely broke until he sold the Lakeview neighborhood crackhead a baggie full of spat sunflower seeds for five dollars. He called her a stupid bitch when he found that she had given him only three dollars and change.
"That bitch is a crackhead. I mean, I do it every now and then, but there's getting high recreationally and there's being a fucking crackhead. That bitch is a fucking crackhead you know what I'm saying?"
A gay admirer of his on the Halstead strip gave him three dollars and a joint for both of us in return for the info that the police were planning to raid his favorite club. (Hydrate, if you must know, and you shouldn't bring your pharmacy with you if you're going out anyway. Watch yourselves out there fellas.) The look on Riley's face as he held up his six dollar bills before me was the most sincerely prideful countenance I had seen since my preschool graduation.
"I come up quick don't I?" It was impressive in its own way, the way he badgered the gay man into handing over that second joint, the way he held up traffic to hit on a girl walking down Halstead in the hope she would be impressed by somebody else's car, the way he used my phone to call a stolen-goods fencer at three in the morning after picking up a friend named Baeu with a Boliva watch. (The fencer tried to call me back at eight that morning as I was sleeping.) In pop culture the mythical man without a soul is usually some sort of ultra-theatric serial killer. The reality of living without a sould is much more banal than that. Terribly pathetic and yet, somehow grander than any Hannibal Lector nonsense. Godspeed you shameless asshole.
He asked me if I had any money and I said know. He had completely blown the two hundred dollars the woman gave him burning gasoline accross the city and snorting cocaine off of the counsol. Now he didn't have enough gas to get back to the lovenest in the suburbs. He was completely broke until he sold the Lakeview neighborhood crackhead a baggie full of spat sunflower seeds for five dollars. He called her a stupid bitch when he found that she had given him only three dollars and change.
"That bitch is a crackhead. I mean, I do it every now and then, but there's getting high recreationally and there's being a fucking crackhead. That bitch is a fucking crackhead you know what I'm saying?"
A gay admirer of his on the Halstead strip gave him three dollars and a joint for both of us in return for the info that the police were planning to raid his favorite club. (Hydrate, if you must know, and you shouldn't bring your pharmacy with you if you're going out anyway. Watch yourselves out there fellas.) The look on Riley's face as he held up his six dollar bills before me was the most sincerely prideful countenance I had seen since my preschool graduation.
"I come up quick don't I?" It was impressive in its own way, the way he badgered the gay man into handing over that second joint, the way he held up traffic to hit on a girl walking down Halstead in the hope she would be impressed by somebody else's car, the way he used my phone to call a stolen-goods fencer at three in the morning after picking up a friend named Baeu with a Boliva watch. (The fencer tried to call me back at eight that morning as I was sleeping.) In pop culture the mythical man without a soul is usually some sort of ultra-theatric serial killer. The reality of living without a sould is much more banal than that. Terribly pathetic and yet, somehow grander than any Hannibal Lector nonsense. Godspeed you shameless asshole.
Déardaoin, Meán Fómhair 03, 2009
There's This Neighbor Girl
She still lives with her parents at the opposite end of my mom and dad's block. 25 now, has a boyfriend with a husker ballcap and a trimmed goatee. She's already carrying a paunch, already keeps her hair in a ponytail and wearing t-shirts with the name of car companies on them with grey sweatpants. She seems confident in keeping the boy.
I've been eating a lot here, naturally enough. I said something to my mom about being nearly thirty and not having a gut yet. Dad said yeah but there was such a thing as starving to death to.
That's lovely. My father thinks that having a gut hang out over ther rest of the body is not only perfectly healthy but the standard norm for male health.
Every man to a man with the Husker cap (sometimes red, sometimes camo)oakley sunglasses, and the closely shaved beard/goat combo.
I've been eating a lot here, naturally enough. I said something to my mom about being nearly thirty and not having a gut yet. Dad said yeah but there was such a thing as starving to death to.
That's lovely. My father thinks that having a gut hang out over ther rest of the body is not only perfectly healthy but the standard norm for male health.
Every man to a man with the Husker cap (sometimes red, sometimes camo)oakley sunglasses, and the closely shaved beard/goat combo.
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