On Life in a Growing Police State

posted by Armadillo Joe

Been busy the last few weeks, so not holding up my end of the blogging bargain very well at this'n here site, but I wanted to check-in real quick with something that has stuck in my craw all week.

Henry Louis Gates should sue the shit out of the Cambridge PD and Obama should not have apologized for saying they behaved stupidly. Since the days of Goldwater and Nixon, "law and order" has been a crypto-fascist cudgel (along with "strong national defense" and "family values") the GOP has used to bash the licentious girly men of the Democratic Party into meek apology, not to mention the dog-whistle language of veiled racism that specific phrase has thanks to Tricky Dick and his evil minions. Officer Crowley was wrong. Further, I would posit that he acted wrongly knowingly and with malice-aforethought. What did he do?

From Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community blog (bold-faced sections are mine):

No one who is familiar with law enforcement can miss the significance of Crowley's report. As so often happens with documentary evidence, a person seeking to create a false impression spends lots of time nailing down the elements he thinks will establish his goal, but forgets about the larger picture. Under color of law, Crowley entered a residence to investigate a possible break-in, and after his probable cause had evaporated, he continued to act under color of law, but without any justifiable purpose. And he covered it up with false charges. Figuring that his best defense was a criminal charge, Crowley did what bad cops do. He decided he would look better if Gates looked worse.

...[snip]...

Sgt. Crowley's report almost certainly contains intentional falsehoods, but even accepting his account at face value, the report tells us all we need to conclude that Crowley was in the wrong here, and by a large factor.

The crime of disorderly conduct, beloved by cops who get into arguments with citizens, requires that the public be involved. Here's the relevant law from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, with citations and quotations omitted:

The statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct, G.L. c. 272, § 53, has been saved from constitutional infirmity by incorporating the definition of "disorderly" contained in § 250.2(1)(a) and (c) of the Model Penal Code. The resulting definition of "disorderly" includes only those individuals who, "with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof ... (a) engage in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior; or ... (c) create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor.' "Public" is defined as affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.

The lesson most cops understand (apart from the importance of using the word "tumultuous," which features prominently in Crowley's report) is that a person cannot violate 272/53 by yelling in his own home.

Read Crowley's report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates's Harvard photo ID. I don't care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates' right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates' home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.

But for the sake of education, let's watch while Crowley makes it worse. Read on. He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it. What? Crowley may be forgiven for the initial approach and questioning, but surely he should understand that a citizen will be miffed at being questioned about his right to be in his own home. Perhaps Crowley could commit the following sentences to memory: "I'm sorry for disturbing you," and "I'm glad you're all right."

Spoiling for a fight, Crowley refuses to repeat his name and badge number. Most of us would hand over a business card or write the information on a scrap of paper. No, Crowley is upset and he's mad at Gates. He's been accused of racism. Nobody likes that, but if a cop can't take an insult without retaliating, he's in the wrong job. When a person is given a gun and a badge, we better make sure he's got a firm grasp on his temper. If Crowley had called Gates a name, I'd be disappointed in him, but Crowley did something much worse. He set Gates up for a criminal charge to punish Gates for his own embarrassment.

By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53. He gets Gates out onto the porch because a crowd has gathered providing onlookers who could experience alarm. Note his careful recitation (tumultuous behavior outside the residence in view of the public). And please do not overlook Crowley's final act of provocation. He tells an angry citizen to calm down while producing handcuffs. The only plausible question for the chief to ask about that little detail is: "Are you stupid, or do you think I'm stupid?" Crowley produced those handcuffs to provoke Gates and then arrested him. The decision to arrest is telling. If Crowley believed the charge was valid, he could have issued a summons. An arrest under these circumstances shows his true intent: to humiliate Gates.

Obama, by walking back from the word "stupid", has legitimized the poo-flinging monkeys of the GOP who leap on the faintest quiver of "disloyalty" to supposed attacks on 'murrican hee-roze not from a genuine sense of offense, but from a sleazy desire to drum up votes via political theater performed within the carefully-constructed narrative (a narrative our nation's media buys and sells hook, line and sinker) of the Republicans as the Daddy Party -- the strong disciplinarian, the hard-hearted, steely-eyed protector of the nation's honor -- and the Democrats as the Mommy Party -- the profligate coddler, too soft-hearted and full of "love" to make the hard choices that keep us safe, both from threats foreign and domestic. Of course, the narrative is bullshit, but it still frames our national discourse and the true measure of raw GOP power, even after the godawful nightmare of eight years of Bush-as-GOP-apotheosis, even after the drubbing they've taken in two consecutive elections, even after every buck-fuck nuts, crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat, hare-brained scheme for reinforcing our calcifying corporatocracy for the sake of Amerikkka Inc.'s bottom-line and old-money's trust funds (with the added side-benefit of protecting white privilege generally, no matter the social status) which all got passed off as a fresh, new "ideas" has finally, fully been utterly discredited and flushed down the historical toilet, even after These United States finally elected a man to the most powerful office in the land who within the living memory of over half the electorate would have been killed for even attempting to exercise his right to vote in vast swaths of this country (most of which represent the GOP's current base of power, BTW)... even after all of that the true measure of the GOP's latent, pervasive raw power is that Barack Hussein Obama has to apologize for calling "stupid" the actions of a thin-skinned white cop who can't take being righfully challenged on over-stepping his authority by a understandably upset black man.

Evidently, in America today, it's a crime to disrespect a police officer, even after he's disrespected you. Gates is lucky he wasn't tasered, in which case being disrespectful could be a death-sentence.

Watch what you say to the po-leese.

Nooners feels the shock of recognition

posted by Armadillo Joe

...and fires a parting shot as she just walks on by.

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain — to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take.

[...]

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

[...]

...she is... a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

Fear The State, Fear It

posted by Armadillo Joe

Conservatives are authoritarians to the core. They worship state power when it is wielded by the right kind of people for purposes they endorse, like any good fascist, and their views have no place in a free and democratic society. They certainly should be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.

And they most certainly shouldn't be allowed anywhere near something like a Supreme Court for so much as being in the audience to hear cases, much less in charge of it:

In 5-4 Decision, Conservative Supreme Court Denies DNA Evidence To Potentially Innocent Man

Because, it seems, it is more important to the greater public good and the integrity of our justice system for the machinery of law-enforcement to maintain an aire of infallibility (just like, oh say, a pope), rather than, um, justice. So, instead of reinforcing a general faith in the fairness of the system, our country's highest court has decided that a general fear of the power of the state to fuck-you-up-real-good-with-no-recourse is more important. Tasers and indefinite detention also help.

Thus, Chief Justice John "Hang 'Em High" Roberts and Samuel "Strip-Search Sammy" Alito both performed to the exact specifications their corporatist sponsors ordered up when they told the Cheney Administration who they wanted installed in the highest court in the land. And, as per usual, Justice Anthony "I'm the Joe Lieberman of the Supreme Court" Kennedy provided the crucial swing vote while the two-votes-for-the-price-of-one-brain duo of Antonin "I Never Met A Police State Tactic I Didn't Like" Scalia and Clarence "Pubic Hair" Thomas reliably brought up the rear.

What a collection of mentally-diseased reprobates and mean-spirited degenerates. We call this our "Supreme" Court?

We are well and truly fucked. Get ready for a whole lot of 5-4 votes in the next several years, even with Sotomayor (who may give us some 6-3 votes, frankly), because the empathy-free, iron-hard, coal-black and shriveled ugly heart of the Supreme court -- those four dependably authoritarian boneheads -- are an average age of 61, with Roberts clocking in at 54. The liberal wing is an average age of 76 and swapping Souter for Sotomayor will only bring it down to 72. The Court's right wing is generally younger and healthier and Obama will likely only be replacing liberal justices for the next few years, treading water until a member of The Court's Rethugli-bot goon squad either croaks or retires.

We don't live in a free country anymore, folks. In truth, unless you happened to be born rich, white, male, not openly homosexual and otherwise able to convincingly proclaim outwardly to be a good Protestant, this never has been a free country, but my point here is that we aren't even pretending anymore. This is the lasting damage of not only the Bush/Cheney era, but of the "conservative" revolution of the last 40+ years. The Supreme Court has always been The Prize to these people, ever since Brown v Board of Ed meant all the pretty little blonde girls would have to go to school with all those scary little black boys. The backlash from that decision gave rise to the upsurge which almost put Goldwater in the Oval Office, then led to Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes. Roberts and Alito during the second Bush term were the culmination of that decades-long march to hegemony. Bush may be gone, but The Movement got what it wanted in Roberts and Alito, and they are young, healthy guys able to make mischief for decades to come.

The Movement has spent decades and decades packing the lower courts with authoritarians and corporatists for the exact purpose of thwarting the public will on behalf of this country's true owners. We can win all the presidencies and take-over all the Congresses we want, but it will take a generation or two or even more to clean all that Rethugli-goon filth out of our judicial system, if we ever do.

In the meantime, just try not to get convicted of anything.

This is exactly right

posted by Armadillo Joe

I knew I'd find something to post. David Sirota gets this exactly right:

When [Demomcrats] temporarily took back the Senate in 2001 after Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords' party switch, they said the Republican House would stymie their priorities -- a logical argument that came true. When they won both houses of Congress in 2006, they said George W. Bush would veto their agenda -- again, a fair assertion that proved correct. When they won both Congress and the White House in 2008, they insisted they still couldn't do very much because their 58 Senate votes couldn't overcome a filibuster -- a less believable claim considering Obama's bully pulpit, but nonetheless at least mathematically valid.

It has been like watching a 15-year version of an Indiana Jones film -- every time we think the quest to find the ark will be completed, there's been another twist, putting off the promised conclusion just a little bit more.

I think there was a little quid pro quo here with regards to the timing of the Souter and Specter announcements, though I can't say for certain. Tristero over at Digby's Hullbaloo certainly thinks there are more things in the Washingtonian heaven and earth than are contained the mass media's philosophy:

Any questions now why Democrats are paying good money to run Specter as a Democrat?

I didn't think so.

Special note: Of course, I don't like Specter. Of course, I'm disgusted that the Democratic party has moved so far to the right that a conservative pinhead like Specter would even consider joining. Of course, I'm appalled at the manipulation and cynicism involved in purchasing Specter's votes for Obama's Supreme Court nominations.

But that is exactly what is going down. To ignore it, or to deny it, is not merely silly. It's naive. Dangerously naive: after all, there is a vicious, malicious, extreme-right Republican party that, given half a chance, will rear its ugly head up again and create even more havoc than they already have.

Now, it's time to get Franken seated. And fast.

Bye-bye, Mayberry Machiavellis. Welcome to politics, Chicago-style

I think the changes in the years since the GOP's heights of victory in 2002 have been epochal. Remember that Al Gore and John Kerry both almost won. Had either of them, we wouldn't now know the name of Barack Obama as anyone other than a slightly left-of-center senator from Illinois who coulda-shoulda-woulda make a run at the White House at some future date, maybe 2016. As it is, Bush's Rethugli-goons were in a multi-generational downward prior to 9/11 and they only really got one and a half election's worth of juice out of that melon. Rove's doubling-down of Nixon's Southern Strategy only made the GOP's long-term prospects more bleak in the face of large-scale demographic trends which anyone could foresee, as long as this country continued to have a functioning democracy (arguably, we don't) which is why he and his minions could crow about a Permanent Republican Majority -- which lasted about as long (proportionately speaking) as Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

Nevertheless, after Reagan and his goon squad took this country over an ethical cliff, we finally hit bottom during the four-year stretch from 2002 and 2006, bumping and scraping along the seething, blood-caked boneyard on the floor of hell. I read somewhere on the interwebs these last few years (probably on Billmon before he went off the air) that though the GOP had truly taken over all three branches of government, two were relatively easily reversible, because the long-term damage done by these goons in our four-year march through perdition was actually in the judiciary. We could band together and fight to get the president we wanted, if we fought hard enough. We could fight our smaller local battles and get the legislatures we wanted both state and federal. We could fight for city councils and school boards and mayors, but the lasting damage, the Reich-wing moles planted throughout our government, the ringing echo of the Nixonland waking nightmare we've lived in since the late 60's will quietly march on in the form of appointed judges with secret agendas.

Which is why the GOP will go to the mat for Souter's seat. They will use every ounce of strength they have left, pull every trick, use every parlimentary sleight-of-hand, tell any lie, clutch their pearls and faint on any couch, bribe any official, level any threat, throw any tantrum. They may be (as Mr. C sez in his return post) the 21st Century Whig Party -- bound for oblivion -- but they all know that, collectively, this will be their last stand as a cohesive political entity. We have not yet even begun to see them bring Teh Crazy, no matter who Obama nominates, because they are so disorganized right now and their porcine, drug-addled sex-tourist demagogue of a leader is so convinced of his own potency, that no coordinated effort to keep their powder dry and regroup so as to live to fight another day is in the offing for this scattered mob on the run. They will go berserk on any name put forth by our president, because loading the judiciary with lifetime appointments has been the real goal of their reign of terror all long.

So this fight for Souter's seat, I think, is the looming Cosmic, Epic Battle Royale for the Ages for which the GOP has been itching. I wish it wasn't so early in Obama's term, but I think he has with this appointment and Specter's defection the power now, right now, to destroy utterly the last dregs of political power of the disorganized remnants of that corportized, violent, racist hard-right we've battled since the days of Nixon. They will never disppear completely, but their ability to regroup will be smashed beyond repair for two generations.

Thus, the fight right now is to prevent them from doing any further harm and that fight starts with Souter's seat. Damage would include a compromise candidate, by the way, because they will demand such. Then our fight will be to undo the deep, deep harm they've inflicted over the last 25 years, from Clarence Thomas forward, at all levels of the federal judiciary. On that score, if Souter's seat is the first step, impeaching Jay Bybee is the second step in a long, long chain of dispatching all those wicked, morally compromised men and women who are appointed for life and bringing our scales of justice back into some kind of balance.

The fact that Alito and Roberts are young terrifies me for exactly the same reason.

Outstripped by Reality

posted by Armadillo Joe

I have been struggling to compose a post about the oncoming implosion of the Rethugli-twit Party and the self-induced death spiral they just can't seem to pull out of, but the Specter defection yesterday seems to me to be that threatened implosion made extant. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair quotes from a very glum David Frum:

The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a “wake-up call.” His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against

About which Wolcott opines:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter's defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of "good riddance/get lost/don't let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out" and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

But Lance Mannion is pretty sure that Specter switching labels is something of a collapse (caused by the inhabitants) of the last pole holding up the GOP's decaying tent:

Everything the Republicans and their paid propagandists in the Media have been doing and saying since November 5 has had one goal.

Holding the Party together.

It's always fun to remind them who won the last election, but they really don't need the reminding. They know the results. And they know what the results suggest about what's in store for them. They can read the polls. Barack Obama is wildly popular. Independents have abandoned them. The demographic trends are against them. If things continue this way in less than a generation it will be easier to find a person under forty who identifies as Zoroastrian or philatelist than one who identifies as Republican.

Under these circumstances, the sensible thing to do is fall back and re-group. Gather the most loyal and reliable and determined troops together and do everything you can to keep up their morale and ready to fight back when the time to fight back arrives.

The smart thing to do, then, would seem to rally the base, keep them happy and energized, and donating, and get them out there working for the next election.

The trouble with this for the Republicans is that their base is their problem.

The base is insane.

And Maha sez that such a spin out of control and off into Kukoo-Land is too long a trip from which to walk back:

the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives.

Frankly, I say it couldn't happen to a finer bunch of assholes. They and their fellow travellers have spent the better part of fifty years (to say nothing of kicking it into high gear over the last ten or so) calling me and all my friends traitors and ni**er-lovers and slutty wimmins and faggoty perverts and terrorist-pal-around-ers and otherwise generally spewing eliminationist rhetoric directed at us, yet only thinly disguised as "satire" to avoid being arrested for incitement. They have been inviting this circular feeding frenzy for decades.

But we need to be cautious. The end of the GOP as an effective political party is not the end of the fight. Not hardly.

The Rethugli-puke Party does not circumscribe The Reich Wing or conservatism in toto or the Ruling Class or any other group of those self-identified classes of toxic political actors who are collectively and as individuals all a deep, mortal and existenstial threat to the free and just America that those tending-toward-blueishness among us revere. The GOP has merely been the political wing of that movement since all those dirty fucking hippies and promiscuous wimmin-folk and uppity negroes scared the bejebus out of Ma and Pa Goober back in the 1960's and they decided that war-mongering plutocratic corporate overlords were better political allies than anything to be found in the ranks of LBJ's ni**er-lovin' party. Ever since, the GOP has been acting as the political expression of a particularly nasty, fearful, racist, violent, authoritarian strain of American nativism. The Rethugli-goon Party has been their political wing just as Sinn Fein acts as the political organ of the IRA.

No, the deranged GOP clown car of liars, degenerates and reprobates, with their socially corrosive tax codes and hostility to the public sphere, with their racism, sexism, authoritarianism and bigotry, with their love of War and Jesus as the Answer for Everything and their brittle, tinny jingoism, with their haughty sanctimony and sadistic, mean-spirited glee at the sight or even the thought of others suffering in pursuit of their petty aims have all been begging to be blasted into oblivion for decades. Any chance we have now to chase these cockroaches, to pursue these scurrying, slithering hordes as they disguise themselves in women's clothing and shove onto the lifeboats or change into civilian clothes, burn their uniforms and try to blend into the general population ahead of the advancing army, any chance we have at all to chase them relentlessly, to shine a light on their true identities and expose them as liars and thieves, to ruin their chances of making a living anywhere but anonymously shoveling manure out of a barn in southern Patagonia, we must take and take without mercy. Because we didn't clear decks after W's grand-pappy tried to overthrow FDR and we didn't clear the decks after McCarthy and we didn't clear the decks after Watergate and we didn't clear the decks after Iran-Contra, because we failed to track down and destroy the bad actors back then we are at war in Iraq today, cheerlead the whole way by survivors and descendants of all those previous scandals.

The time to end this cycle is now.

Even as Specter's departure marks the likely historical end of the 20th Century Republican Party, the American political landscape left in its wake remains ravaged by the war they've waged, as de-forested as an Agent Orange'd jungle, as pock-marked and cratered as a World War One no-man's land, a smoldering remnant of one political party's scorched-earth march to hegemony, littered with political landmines and unexploded human ordnance, hiding and poised to maim and bedevil our peace-loving descendants for generations, no matter how many swords Obama inspires us convert into plowshares in the coming decades.

A Few Basic Rules

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, you Blog-O-Maniacs! B'way Carl has again asked me to mind the store in his absence, but told me no SUPERTRAINS! so I'll have to find something else to write about.

How about social justice?

Or just basic vengeance?

Because when we evolve out of our natural state, when we build institutions and organize ourselves into entities that coerce or persuade through incentives or through the naked threat of violence (or the actual use of violence) the lone caveman to stop bashing other cavemen on the head and taking their cavegirls, we have formed a government.

No one ever signed on for such an enterprise, mind you, because we don't choose the time and location of our births. Besides, someone has to be in charge and who was that first caveman to tell all the other cavemen to stop bashing heads? Well, he was the baddest MF of them all and what he says goes. Until some bigger and badder MF comes along and does the same to him. And that leads us to all sorts of questions about lines of succession and who gets to be in charge, because if its a simple matter of just bashing heads until no one is left to say you can't have the throne, anyone can eventually become king, right? Its still true to this day for dictatorships throughout South America and Africa. Thus, the folks at the top of the food chain eventually declared that god himself put them there and everyone else should just accept that fact and go about their business of growing food and otherwise fighting and dying for the king's ambitions.

What could go wrong with a system like that?

Which is why, by the 17th & 18th Centuries A.D., a bunch of idle rich hanging out in the salons of the European continent who had grown weary of hearing this whole "divine right of kings" crap to justify every cockamamie idea that ever popped into a monarch's head -- ideas which usually resulted in the deaths of hundred or thousands of their countrymen, too boot -- and who were young and idealistic (as youth are wont to be) finally cooked up a bunch of alternate ideas about social contracts and "consent of the governed" to explain how and why we got here, with all those kings and bureacracies and gendarmes and all that sort of thing. For a few decades, all their lofty rhetoric and fancy words remained just the college newspaper Op-Ed screeds of their day, laying fallow and unheeded, until a bunch of yeoman farmers in a far-flung British colony over on the American continent (and the wealthy transplants who owned the land those farmers worked and saw a way to keep even more of their money) got a hold of those ideas as a way of giving the finger to that clown King George who thought he could do whatever he wanted because, well, he was king.

A couple of years and one semi-hot revolution later, we had ourselves a king-free government, though not for lack of trying on the part of a great number of our so-called Founding Fathers. Luckily, our own George (Washington, that is) had read enough of all that coffee house prattle from Yurp to actually believe some of it and, to our everlasting relief, declined every attempt to put a crown on his head.

But other mischief was afoot back on the Continent and enough peasants got tired enough of starving and dying for Marie Antoinette's pearls that they had a little revolution of their own. You might recall it had something to do with guillotines and some cat named Robespierre. From that blood-soaked chaos, some time later (like almost 30 years later), the dictator who rose up from humble origins on a small island off the French coast to have royalty bow down before him was ultimately defeated on a battlefield in Belgium, but not before reshaping the way government ruled over the people who resided on the land it controlled. Consent of the governed became our notion of the Rule of Law and the people were assured a voice in their own government. OK, only if they were white and male, but at least divinity was no longer a pre-requisite for governing and that put us on the road to the expansion of suffrage, battles which are being fought -- even in this country -- to this very day.

All of which brings me to this quote:

“No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?” e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.

I think you guys can predict my response to this Marie Antoinette from Citigroup:



Because when I use the phrase "Ruling Class" to refer to a certain group of people in this country, I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. They are a direct line from the aristocracy of a former day -- not always by blood, mind you, but always by disposition -- and they really and truly think this country, all the people in it and its institutions and all of its natural resources, belong to them. The purpose of this country and all the people in it is to support them in the oppulent lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed and to do whatever they require to maintain the economic and political structures (domestic and foreign) that enable that lifestyle, which is why they have no qualms about soaking up our tax dollars when they try so hard to avoid paying any taxes at all and then sending the poor and brown-skinned among us either to prison or off to a war they themselves are too precious to fight. Like Vietnam, Iraq is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

The previous president is from the Ruling Class and he sure as shit acted like the military was his personal revenge and ego-boosting tool, which Cardinal Richelieu Dick Cheney was more than happy to exploit for his own nefarious ends.

Whether AIG bonuses or torture to justify a ginned-up war, the impulse is the same for these people, the logical waters they drink are drawn from the same poisoned well, and the natural political home for their functionaries is the GOP. But these people and their pet political party didn't come out of nowhere. They have deep roots in human history and this country is no exception, no matter what our glorious mythologies may tell us about what a free and noble people we are, about what an exception to history our story represents.

For more on that, go read driftglass.

Plus, some SUPERTRAINS! --

Choo-choo trains RAWK!

Off The Rez

posted by Armadillo Joe

Looks like some of the help forgot who actually runs the plantation. Wonder how long til he's taken out behind the woodshed and reminded who actually runs the Rethugli-goon party (h/t WTF Is It Now?!?):

“Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he’s a cancer to the Republican Party and he should be excised,” [Republican Senate candidate Larry] Murphy said recently.

[...]

“My opponents are afraid to say that,” Murphy, told pa2010.com recently.

[...]

“People like Rush and [radio host] Laura Ingraham, they’re really destroying our party, and we need to wake up and see that,” Murphy said, adding that his would be a “different kind of Republican candidacy.”

I give it until the end of next week before his family never hears from him again.

My Home, My People

by Armadillo Joe

I left Texas for New York City a long time ago. Here's one reason why I don't really regret it:

[Glenn] Beck asked, 'Governor [Rick Perry - Texas], you're regretting being on this program at this point, are you not, sir?' Perry responded, 'Not at all, Glenn Beck. I'm proud to be with you.'"

And here's another:

UPDATE [by Broadway Carl]:

New York City Councilman John Liu posted a public letter to Brown on his campaign website.

"...It's outrageous and insulting for you to suggest it would 'behoove' us to adopt another name, to give up our birthright and a part of our own identity, in order to exercise our right to vote...

...Your disappointing comments today were not only offensive and out-of touch, but indeed “un-American” by contradicting everything our country stands for. Perhaps it would indeed behoove the great State of Texas to boast of a legislature with honorable elected officials who are not obstacles toward equal opportunity and democratic participation. I urge you to either issue a formal apology for your misguided comments or resign immediately."

Disillusionment

by Armadillo Joe

Atrios is a master of the infectious catch-phrase which, in just a few choice words, can circumscribe a whole larger issue and create a useful shorthand for people who are tuned-in to the discussion over the long haul, basically an internal slang or jargon. My latest favorite is, as many of you know, SUPERTRAINS!, but he has others that also become more humorous by repetition. "Document the Atrocities" as a heading for his weekly run-down of the lineups of each Sunday morning's bobblehead shoutfests is funny by (slight) overstatement and "Deep Thought" -- while obviously lifted from the old 90's era SNL skit -- is still funny in that what he posts under it is almost never very deep at first glance, but is always revealing of a darker reality in that snarky way that makes one reconsider their own underlying assumptions and also sneer at the foolish who made the mistake of adopting such assumptions in the first place. Which is what good political (and polemical) humor should do.

The most recent phrase of his that is catching on with all the wannabe Kewl Kidz -- or with me, at least, and soon with others I have no doubt -- is "Hopey, Changey", a riff on Colbert's "Truthiness" and a direct attack on the image of Obama that we all voted for versus the grim reality becoming clearer with every centrist, capitulating, accomodationist move he makes. Whether the banks, the Pentagon or the recent Justice Department decision, just to name a few, he has not yet taken any of the really bold steps we progressives hoped he would when we came to support him, but he has certainly made some very clear moves to make us question who's side he's really on. Some of his defenders will chalk up his concessions to The Reich-Wing as yet another stealthy move in an orante clash of political gamesmanship, a chess-match, his Kung-Fu being unorthodox, but effective. They will argue that he is a victim of Bismark's old saw about politics being the art of the possible, and that he is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances with mighty forces of epic greed and entrenched power ranged against him and that at the end of the day he is just one man and one man can only do so much.

I cannot abide such excuses, though. So far, this is not what I voted for.

However, I cannot align myself with the Washington chattering classes who seem so quick to condemn his presidency as already having failed because he hasn't cured cancer, solved the riddle of the sphinx and brought about world peace forever and ever within his first 100 Days, amen. Those clucking tongues on the Sunday morning talk shows are little more than historical blips, mere gossips hardly consequential to present day much less humankind or The Ages, and history will soon forget them as completely as it forgets the poison tongues of the scolds in the king's court at Versailles, who -- when they are remembered at all -- are recalled only as the height of daft frivolity.

No, despite their carping, I think Obama still has promise simply because, well, I have to. The crystal ball is cloudy, though, and I do think Obama guilty of willfully allowing a mis-perception of his commitment to our lefty vision of America to aid his rise to prominence. I have had a gnawing fear from the time he became the anti-war candidate of choice that he was playing us, "us" being the dyed-in-the-wool lefties and assorted DFH's who hated George W. Bush with the searing passion of a thousand suns because Dubya symbolized everything we hated about our country: the gleeful and willful ignorance, the faux-cowboy "common-man" swagger disguising a true East Coast blue-blood's contempt for "The People", the frat-boy bravado marketed as "charm", the mean-spirited jingoistic stupidity passed off as the One True God of Patriotism, the haughty assumption of American exceptionalism used to sell to the rubes the idea of a protected status for a Ruling Class accustomed to inherited wealth and privilege and the abuses of power that flourish in that rancid culture, the inbred and self-absorbed obtuseness of that privileged class, the brittle Christopathic sanctimony parading as moral superiority...

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Barack Hussein Obama was supposed to be the opposite of all that, the antidote to all that ugliness in the American soul, a one-man redemption tale for a vast and powerful nation both sacred and profane from her humble, violent origins to her highest, most sublime ambitions. He was walking, talking proof to the world -- non-white, urbane, educated and eloquent proof -- that we are not all those people (and you know what I mean) that we are not all those gun-toting, Bible-thumping, inbred, hairy-knuckled, toothless, Dixie flag-waving NASCAR goobers stupid enough to vote for an alcoholic chimpanzee who thinks he talks to god and his Evil Uncle Dick(head)...

...on purpose.

TWICE.

...and yet...

...and yet...

And yet, it is hard not to have that gnawing fear bubble up to the surface of having been suckered by a charming chameleon, the sense that all that Hope and Change stuff was really more Hopey and Changey because he looked so different and sounded so different (straight out of Liberal Central Casting), that maybe, just maybe (I can't believe I'm even typing this) over here on the left side of the dial, our popular image of Barack Obama is as much a projection of our own bleeding heart dreams, our own collective moon-bat aspirations for the country we live in, as unrooted in the reality of the man as were the drooling jebus-freaks' collective washing of the sins of George W. Bush.

If Barack Obama were white and named Barney Oswalt from Illinois and running for office twenty years ago, espousing the exact same positions he does now, he would have been a nameless, vaguely right-of-center Republican with a smattering of liberal positions to assuage his urban constituency and otherwise mired in the anonymous middle of the Reagan coalition.

His casting as a Left Wing Matinee Idol reveals both just how far to the right our nation has devolved since the dark days of Saint Ronnie's Reign of Terror and just how obsessed we have been and remain to this very day with pigmentation vis a vis ancestry. He's black with a funny name, therefore -- in our popularly defined bounds of public discourse -- any pronounced position by Mr. Obama to the left of Attila the Hun makes him a DFH, or sympathetic to the DFH's, which is worse because it means he's willing to turn Jesus' America over to the queers and the uppity wimmin-folk and the nigras and the mooz-luhms and all those scary hippies. Which is why anybody in the GOP with skin slightly darker than week-old milk has to take social and political positions that make Marie Antoinette look like a bleeding-heart.

This DFH can't truck with all of that, though. I like Barack Obama, sometimes I truly love him in a teary-eyed, almost worshipful way -- for instance this past week as he and Michelle represented my country, MY country on the global stage -- because he is the image I want to project to the world; he is a living, breathing symbol of that miscengenating, multi-culti, caramel-colored America I believe in, that American ideal I believe we should and could achieve, or I wouldn't be a liberal. Except that I also see that Obama is frail and human and as much as I hope we are witnessing Obama Kung-Fu with his bank bailout end-runs on behalf of the banksters, his expansion of the Pentagon budget (not the reduction that got sold to the press) and -- worst of all -- his reluctance (and, frankly, I predict his eventual failure) to not only not pursue the Bush Administration for its crimes, but his Justice Department's continuation of the crimes themselves makes me realize that we have in him not only an eloquent, handsome and charming symbol of the promise of America, but of her essential corruption, too.

I'll get over it, I'm sure. Today, however, I am sad.

Ratcheting Up Teh Crazy

by Armadillo Joe

Following up on my last post "The Mighty Wurlitzer," I'd like to highlight something I read today from David Neiwert (who has made a career the last decade or more tracking right-wing militia insanity at Orcinus and other sites -- he also wrote a book titled 'The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right') over at C&L, a post entitled "As their power spirals downward, the Right's rhetoric gets nuttier and nastier":

[...]

Deja vu from 1994, when I was regularly attending militia meetings, all over again: The president-bashing. The gun fetishizing. The paranoia. The unstated old bigotry. And sometimes, all of them would come together at once.

[...]

This time, they're not just getting whipped into a paranoid frenzy by their fellow paranoids, which was generally the case in the 1990s, with a few exceptions -- namely Rush Limbaugh. In their latest immanation, the old Patriot movement is getting stoked by a whole slew of ostensibly mainstream conservatives broadcasting daily and constantly on mainstream news media.

He also quotes Eric Boehlert, as he dismantles the hapless but frighteningly popular Glenn Beck and other rabblerousers as they spew hatred and sow seeds of popular disorder on FOX News:

Beck's sure "[d]epression and revolution" are what await America under Obama, and fears moving "towards a totalitarian state." The country today sometimes reminds Beck of "the early days of Adolf Hitler." Beck thinks that Obama, who has "surrounded himself by Marxists his whole life," is now "addicting this country to heroin -- the heroin that is government slavery."

And it's not just Beck. Appearing on Fox News, Dick Morris recently made a wildly irresponsible comment that looks even worse in light of the Pittsburgh law-enforcement slayings: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case."

And it's not just Fox News. Radio nut Michael Savage recently claimed that "we have a naked Marxist for president." And high-profile conservative blogger Erick Erickson contemplated the beating of politicians: "At what point do [people] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?"

Of course, the right-wingers at Free Republic are way ahead of Erickson as they fantasize about Obama's assassination: "And let's face it: all the speculation about Obama being the actual Antichrist will either be confirmed or denied if someone gets off a lucky shot at the SOB."

Again, all of this shit scares me mostly because these people have been steeped in violent eliminationist rhetoric for decades, they are armed and their ancestors are the original domestic terrorist group, the KKK, proving they have quite a record of doing as they say. Now that America is led by a black president with a mooz-luhm' sounding name, all their worst nightmares have come true and we not yet even begun to feel the Wrath of Teh Crazy.

The Mighty Wurlitzer

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Earth Hour

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

I've often said before that being a Rethugli-tard (or a conserva-doofus, generally) is the manifestation of some kind of personality disorder, likely of the sociopathic variety. Something about subscribing to a political philosophy that tells people that they don't have to give a shit about the well-being of other people, especially people who look different or talk different than you -- those people you can actively root for harm to befall them -- but also that you can be as selfish an asshole as you want, drive like a dickhead, act like a glutton and a waste and otherwise simply never, ever sign on for anything that requires group action, because cooperation is wimpy. Hollywood has provided a raft of action flicks to naturally prove this point, because Chuck Norris and Rambo can provide oh so many helpful hints about how to deal with neighbors and co-workers for these arrested adolescents.

You know the type, right? He was that dickhead at the back of the class who, when the poor, beleagured English teacher finally got the class to see past the arcane words into some of the beauty in the poetry of Shakespeare, would rip a fart. He was that piece of shit who, in science class when the teacher finally got some students to understand the basics of reproductive theory, would snicker about penis' and vaginas. He's the douchebag who, when a bunch of people within earshot express how much they liked a particular - say - talky European film, loudly declares that it didn't have enough gun fights in it.

You know the type.

Well, those assholes behave this way when the rest of us try to do something about our global energy predicament (via Bob Cesca):

Last night at 8:30 was Earth Hour when everyone around the world was supposed to turn out their lights for one hour in order to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

But throughout the wingnut blogotubes, they decided to turn on all of their lights as a too-clever way of canceling out Earth Hour. Here's another wingnut who's offering a list of suggestions for how to go about doing this. Utterly brilliant suggestions like:

8. Burn tires

Smart! Your neighbors will enjoy the fumes and odor coming from your hillbilly bonfire.

24. Leave your oven open

And maybe climb in.

34. Turn on your air purifier

Breaking News...

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

...Harry Reid discovers that water is wet:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took a moment Friday to lament Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert's tenure on the court so far, which in Reid's opinion has been far more conservative than expected. "He didn't tell us the truth," Reid's said

We bloggers out here in Left-Wing-Hippie-stan all tried to tell you fucking people that Roberts was a lying conservatard sack of shit who would smile as he slid the ideological knife between your ribs, tried to get you smug SOB's to stand and fight, fight, fight when that asshole came up for confirmation, tried to get you to do your fucking jobs as representatives of voters who believe that Rethugli-goon ideas about representative democracy amount to undermining it at every opportunity and oppose a guy who was young enough to distort court decisions to more nefarious ends for possibly two generations, tried to tell you. We tried to tell you, but then we're all just a bunch of bitter partisans with no real political power besides being able to vote in large numbers, which ain't nothin' unless some dollars are attached, I guess. We tried, but you people took the scorpions at their word, that they wouldn't sting you.

Jokes on you, eh? Or all of us.

The G-rift... uh, Gipper

Yesterday, Annette said in comments (regarding Saint Ronnie's #10 position on C-SPAN's All-Time Muthuh-Fuckin'ist Prez-nits list):

I still haven't figured out Reagan.. What the heck did he do that was so great?? I just wish someone would tell me that. Cause I sure don't remember anything.

To which I replied:

I've often wondered the same thing. I've never been able to point to one tangible good to have emerged from that snake-oil salesman's tenure, and much bad, so it has been a continuing source of annoyance tinged with rage to always see Reagan and his legacy treated as some manner of axiomatic good in our national discourse. Naturally, this situation has been by design, but the mandarins of our national media would never acknowledge that.

I once asked my Texas Rethugli-bot, FOX News zombie dad why he had such a glowing love for Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun and he told me that it was because he made Americans feel good about their country again. Of course my dad gets teary-eyed to the treacly strains of Lee Greenwood screeching out "Proud To Be An American", so I have always thought his analysis suspect. Since all those dirty fucking hippies (DFH's), queers, uppity wimmin-folk and assorted scary brown people had spent the better part of 20 years making the corrupt, racist, hypocritical white guys running the country for the previous two centuries feel bad about themselves, I guess we should have expected some blowback for demanding, you know, some fealty to the spirit if not the letter of our founding principles -- bad as such things had proven to be for white, male privilege.

At the end of the day, I suspect, it was really all about what it has always been about since Reagan sold his particular brand of toxin as an elixir to a coalition I have deemed "The Stupid, The Deluded and The Corrupt" (h/t to Atrios) -- Good is whatever pisses-off liberals.

And then today Fred Kaplan at Slate.com (unknowingly) gives me an assist by unqivering a few arrows of his own into the Reagan mono-myth:

[Reagan] was, in fact, a babbling nut job who was lucky that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a genuine reformer desperate for Western assistance, was on the receiving end

[...]

At their first one-on-one talk, Gorbachev tried to talk substance, but Reagan kept telling interminable anecdotes and anti-Soviet jokes, leading Gorbachev at one point to mutter, "On boltayet yeshchyo" ("He's babbling again")

[...]

And yet the real dirty secret about Reagan — the one that Republicans would rather not remember or, in many cases, never knew — is that, at heart, he had no stomach for war and detested nuclear weapons.

[...]

In his first term, from 1981-85, Reagan escalated East-West tensions, spoke in bellicose rhetoric, and jacked up military spending to 30-year highs. This is the Reagan whom Republican chieftains worship and insist that all subsequent presidents emulate. But in his second term, which coincided with Gorbachev's rise to power, Reagan flipped, making dramatic diplomatic overtures to Moscow and accepting equally dramatic proposals in turn.

Few remember, but many of the Republicans who now tout Reagan's accomplishments pummeled him at the time for "betraying" his followers and their Cold War ideology.

Funny how the arm-chair warriors and draft-dodging He-Men of the Rethugli-goon Party have all chosen to ignore the mediocre and frequently embarrassing truth about Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun and instead create the hero myth of their dreams, a patron saint of sanctimony, criminal greed and profitable war-mongering, a noble ideological warrior to challenge the Democrats' most-hallowed FDR and neutralize that lefty legacy, to sweep away the bitter after-taste of the long string of crooks, degenerates and losers they'd fronted since, well, since they ceased to be the Party of Lincoln somewhere towards the end of the 19th century.

Well, they got their man and we've never been the same.

They all look alike...

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

So, once again the Rethugli-goons in America's modern Nixonized GOP prove just how little distance they've actually been able to put between the Southern Strategy Dixiecrats of forty years ago and the tattered remnants of today's post-W imploding regional party with little influence beyond a collection of states guilty of treason a century and a half ago, a treason committed in defense of an ugly "peculiar institution" our nation had to fight a bloody civil war to repudiate.

Because Michael Steele is now the GOP chair.

They are so myopic about what is wrong with their party, about how little they've evolved from their Dixiecrat mid-wifing in the violence and turmoil of Nixon's America, that they actually believe all the toxic drum-up-the-base "affirmative action" rhetoric their reactionary hate-radio mouthpieces spew onto the nation's airwaves. They promoted a black guy for the head job in their country club because the other team got one to run the whole damned country.

I guess they figured they oughta get themselves a Negro, too.

Which lays bare the embarrasing fact that, as hard as they try to hide and obfuscate their readily apparent obsession with race, racism and racial issues, they still (forty-five years after MLK so eloquently bid us not to) only evaluate people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. They are such a pathetic collection of fuddy-duddies bound for history's dustbin that even though they are able to dimly recognize that the Big O is, yes, an extraordinary black man, to the bulk of the people who voted for him he is merely (merely!) an extraordinary man. Only those very same fuddy-duddies bound for history's dustbin would add the once-obligatory "who happens to be black" to that declaration, such a phrase revealing the biases of its utterer simply by being uttered.

No, the sad sacks in the imploding GOP simply have absolutely no idea why the Democrats rolled over them in the last two elections and, more to the point, what is that je ne sais quoi about Barack Obama that helped drive 2008's massive victory. They look at Barack Obama and see a black man first, so they assume everyone else does too and voted accordingly. They assume everyone else's soul must be as disfigured as their own. What they fail to realize and, judging from their behavior the last week and a half since BHO took the oath of office, probably won't ever realize even as they fade into the mists of antiquity, is that it wasn't Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats who rolled over them.

It was history.