Palin On The Fuel

Smart or dumb you have to admit the the Sarah Palin choice of VP nominee shows the cranky old duffer really wants to win BAD! It's an incredible risk, after all. Even though Obama picked a notorious idiot with a head full of chia-pet-looking hair plugs who has an unbroken thirty-six year record of left-wing votes, moronic miscues and tooth-filled grimaces when he is crossed at some committee hearing we're all used to Joe Biden's ineffective irrelevance. One look at Barak Obama tells you that he's not about the keel over any time soon so Biden can just spend the next four years dedicating bridges and going to funerals.
Palin is another story. She is an unabashed Social Conservative, something that has literally never been seen in a national campaign. Even hunters like Dick Cheney are usually seen in Elmer Fudd-looking twee country outfits responsibly holding their shotgun at the safe angle as they quietly stalk mallards in the canebreaks not dressed in cammo intensely aiming an M-16 at some out-of-frame menace. In my neck of the woods horrible rural rednecks who drive snowmobiles real fast through Gaia's peaceful forest spewing Global Warming-causing carbon emissions as they head home for a bowl of moose chili made from the carcass of some poor innocent critter they wasted with their laser-sighted, high-muzzle-velocity state-of-the-art rifle are the dreaded enemy. Having five, FIVE!, children is an act of appalling gaucherie, another rural affectation that shows how extreme Sarah Palin is to us urbanites. She's not Health Club healthy she's Outdoors healthy. She says a lot to NASCAR people but my youngest daughter, a true swing voter going back and forth between her default Dem leanings and her dislike of Obama and his socialism, Palin's social conservative views are a shock. But she certainly will have the same effect on born-again Christians that Obama has on blacks. She will spur a massive and enthusiastic turnout among people who were talking about staying home this time. She helps down-ticket Republican candidates in tight races.
Another thing about Palin is that, unlike the apparently healthful Obama, the Wrinkly Old White Dude (thanks Paris!) has a history of cancer and sometimes turns a bright shade of purple when he's crossed. He could go any day in a cinniption fit or be eaten by a raging melanoma. You have to seriously consider whether Palin has the grit to take on the Presidency; it's a real possibility. That is something she's going to have to prove by getting out on the stump. The enraged libs, furious that McLame has smacked them and knocked them off the stupid 'we're just like you' message that Barak's weak closing speech didn't sell, are going to hit this chick with everything but the kitchen sink. She's everything they really hate. Dickless Cheney.
To add to her list of deviltry in lib eyes is her unabashed association with and advocacy of Big Oil. Drilling gets you pregnant and solves energy crisises and Sarah Palin is obviously a drilling enthusiast. The cause of increasing our nation's production of hydrocarbons will have a sexy and effective spokesperson and that is the issue that will determine this election. Nothing else. The swing group, blue-collar working class types, love their carbon car culture. This weekend, in Southern California, there's a three hundred mile line of Winnebagos, SUVs and pick ups leaving the burbs and heading out to the desert and The River (the Colorado River) towing trailers with dirt bikes, ATVs, Jet-skis and dune buggies filled with the swing voters that McLame and the boys want to get. The kind of people who want to see some ballsy babe take on a pack of sneering elitist Ivy League educated smart boys and whip their butts while she defends every American's God-Given right to internal combustion. Now all she has to do is whip their butts. I'll be watching.

Dah-ling! We're Not A-Low-wone!

Its nice to hear that no matter what happens in my sad little life I'm going to have Barak Obama and the community that is the American Government there to pick me up any time I fall flat on my stupid face. Its a nice feeling to know that every aspect of risk will soon be removed from my shaky (up to now) existence. At least thats the story.
Before BO came onto the podium he was introduced by Little Dick Durban; the Senator who compared our troops in Iraq to the Gestapo, Pol Pot and Stalin's thugs. And what did this New Age Patriot have to say about The Nominee? He compared Barak Obama's lack of experience to that of Abraham Lincoln. I've read a few books about Lincoln. Some of the most enduring and notable things about Lincoln were his incomparable mastery of the English language, his ironic wit, his incredible depth of feeling and empathy. To compare that whiny, jug-eared, self-obsessed, vapid, radical shrimp and his strung together pile of shopworn cliches to Lincoln was to invite a comparison that can only make Obama's admirers blush with shame. I myself was blushing with shame that a large group of my fellow citizens found this errant hogwash compelling.
We're going to eliminate our use of petroleum in ten years sez Obama. Really? Just exactly how is that going to happen? He quoted Thomas Edison to show that technical innovation was just a matter of will power. You see, Edison had gone to the local pols and gave them huge campaign contributions which caused them to go on a crusade against 'big kerosene'. Edison then got a law passed that mandated that everyone had to replace their kerosene lanterns with incandescent light bulbs in ten years. Congress gave Edison a gigantic subsidy to build a light bulb factory. It turned out, however, that the power plants and electrical transmission lines to implement this policy didn't exist but of course the 'jobs created' at the light bulb factory couldn't be ended so the enterprise continued as a dead loss for decades. Just like ethanol!
Just like medical care will be under Obama. But to get back to this gasoline business. Didn't Obama basically announce that he's going to take my car away? I dont see any alternative, unless its a moped that runs on ethanol. In ten years I'll be retired and I doubt I'll be able to afford a high-end, all electric vehicle like the ones the state will provide to its upper echelon employees.
Another thing mysteriously missing from Obama's speech was Climate Crap. I think he mentioned it once in a list of things that W had neglected but the sweeping, radical change in everyone's lifestyle that this phony 'crisis' will cause the government to enact wasn't trumpeted in this speech or any other one at this convention, except the pathetically, and increasingly obviously cracked Algore, of course. Too many factories are being shut down by the enviro-crazies for a party that is chasing blue-collar votes to play on too strongly.
The speech meandered on and on, far too long for something so blurry and undefined, in the style of Fidel or Hugo Chavez. Attempts by the crowd to chant 'Yes We Can' were noticeably scotched by Obama, whose advisers had read the Peggy Noonan column comparing this event with the 'Triumph Of The Will' Nuremburg rallies in 1936. 'Yes We Can' rhymes with 'Seig Hiel' if you chant it long enough; an image the Obamanoids really don't want to deal with.
The curious lack of a climax; the progressive falling off of energy levels that was noticeable in almost every speech at this dreary mess of a convention was noticeable again in this capper, headline speech. It went nowhere. There was no rousing clarion call that ended the speech in a hot wave of emotion. They wanted to invoke Martin Luther King with the cheesy set (which didn't work in any medium shots or close-ups. The set was only a recognizable image when the people on it were too small to be individuals.) but again Obama suffered mightily by the comparison. King always started slow and intimate, worked through his ideas clearly, with power and purpose, and then ended in a swelling crescendo that brought the speech to a point and drove it home, bringing the listener to tears. The squalid mish-mash of Obama's speech might have been stolen from Hillary Clinton; a laundry list of Bad Bushisms, phony personal tales of woe, and vague promises that all wounds would be healed and all wrongs righted. No final moment of truth, no calls to the angels.
And no calls for justice to 'immigrants'! In a speech filled with implied protectionism and filled with threats against greedy businessmen who export jobs the usual tender concerns for the rights of the 'undocumented' were missing; replaced with an angry threat to employers who lower American wages by hiring 'illegal aliens'!
So it seems the swing group in this election are blue-collar, working class types who have so far avoided Obama like the plague. That's why they've dropped the environmentalist claptrap, thats why Obama used the PC taboo term 'illegal alien' in his speech, that's why not one single black politician got any prime-time face time during the whole four days. The curious lack of energy is because the Dems are trying to sell a lie; we're Patriotic Americans who care about you. What nonsense.

So You Want to Be A SuperLiar?

"I feel sorry for my TV, having to show all this crap," said Butt-head and as I watched last night's episode of the Democratic Convention I also felt sorry for a formerly great nation that is now cursed with this pack of worthless, lying parasites who are dragging it down to ruin and destruction. The lies came on so fast and thick that I thought my head was going to explode. The tinkling piano music was trotted out to underlay the heart-wrenching tale of the soldiers, told that they were going to a sunny two-week vacation in Iraq, who arrived to find themselves in a desert version of Stalingrad, cooked up by the Evil BushLied regime; and who then returned to a nation filled with unsympathetic Right-Wingers and the always Troop-Friendly peaceniks to find that the BushLied government isn't spending enough money on the broken-down Veteran's Administration.
But the Dems are going to fix that. Not only will the VA fix wounds acquired in battle but vets will have life-long Cadillac coverage for themselves, their families and assorted relatives and friends. In fact, what the heck! They're gonna give free, unlimited access to everything medical to everybody who wants it. Costs? The Federal Government in charge of the entire medical industry will LOWER costs! We'll just get the money from the selfish jerks that are rolling in cash from the BushLied tax-cut giveaway! All this was said with certainty and aplomb, we'll snap our fingers and it will happen!
The Dishonesty-Fest was kicked off by the lovely and talented BJ. The Irrumator In Chief basked in the howls and applause of the crowd of ecstatic Fellatores on the floor, on their knees one more time to the Big Bent Enchilada! It was so nice to hear him, yet again, taking credit for the balanced Budget he vetoed three times. "That's what you'll get if you put a Democrat in the White house again!" Don't bet on it, you chumps! Before Newt and the Boys took over in '94 there wasn't any talk of anything being balanced anywhere.
BJ started off strong but he ran out of gas quickly. By the time he finished his high-speed, non-stop string of self-serving lies, half-truths, twisted sophistries and political fables it seemed that the strange lassitude that has dogged this sorry convention like the Ghost of Hamlet's Father stole over the delegates. The applause become tepid and even feeble. The shots of the idiotically grinning Chelsea became more frequent as the cameras searched in vain for enthusiasm amongst the delegates. This pack of aging time-servers are probably so used to being totally inert in their regular jobs as bureaucrats and ward-healers that they can't be roused out of their governmental torpor for more than a few seconds before the overweaning institutional lassitude reasserts itself.
But let's not mince words here. BJ was as good as it got last night and the next Big Name took the level of the show way down. The Foon-faced loser, the holder of three purple hearts who never saw the inside of a medic station or a hospital, the holder of a Bronze Star for a battle with no casualties on either side, the veteran of a Nixon-inspired secret mission to Cambodia which occurred while LBJ was president, the military Big Gun of the Democratic Party, the Marxist gigolo John Francois Kerry stepped up to the microphone and explained how six long tiresome years of the Democrats lying, accusing our troops of torture and wanton murder and attempting at every turn to defund or withdraw them, vilifying George W Bush as a Hitler-like predator, opposing and exposing every intelligence effort against the Islamonazi terrorists and sucking up to their front men in foreign governments or the faculties of formerly great universities; in short the total betrayal of our country and support for its sworn enemies, was a species of patriotism. Better than that, it turns out that this curious form of Americanism is totally responsible for all of our successes, including the victory in Iraq that a year ago the Dems were unanimously declaring to be impossible!
But Kerry, again, ran out of gas long before he was finished broadcasting this embarrassing platter of mendacity. As the political temperature inside the hall continued to drop his throaty, stumbling monotone failed to stir the slumbering torpid reptiles on the floor into even a vestige of enthusiasm for this 24-carat phony and his donkey-like braying about the War On Terror the Dems have just won in spite of the awful Bush-Cheney Cabal. What could be worse?
Biden could be worse; he could be and he was. Like an aging racehorse there probably was a team of doctors that attacked him before he went on, deftly using their needles to botox his eyes wide open and freeze his mouth into a corpse-like toothy grimace and the ultimate race-track vet with the three-inch-long needle filled with Go-juice, so this aging old nag can make it around the track before he collapses into a burned-out heap off camera. It's a tribute to Biden that he can follow BJ and Kerry and still come across as a supreme egotist. Me, me, me!
Biden assured us that the crazy drilling campaign the Evil Republicans have embarked on at the behest of their equally evil Oil Company masters is an unnecessary assault on the planet about to be saved by a wave of clean, renewable energy sources that will magically spring from the trillion or so dollars the Dems have spent on Green Research in the last thirty years. He explained to us how Bush's limited, low-level, strictly-focused talks with Iranian officials (a mistake in my mind) was the complete vindication of Barak Obama's promise that the President of the United States would meet, without preconditions, with the murderous lunatics who are running Iran. Well, Pelosi put on a hijab and crawled on her knees to Bashir Assad, didn't she? Jimmy The Jerk French-kissed the head of Hamas, didn't he? We all know the Dems are going to defund the military and turn the world over to a pack of lawless, nuclear-armed savages so why belabor the issue? Biden, in a voice that droned on endlessly, ran through the evasions and talking points ad nauseum. He went on too long making the end a dangerous letdown...until...surprise, surprise...the Messiah walked among us! Barak emerged and brought down the house by not saying anything, a merciful relief after that evening's avalanche of Bull Pucky.
They tried to get Tyra banks to MC this reality show but it turns out that she spends her time wearing a tinfoil hat to reflect Martian Z-beams and writing laudatory letters to Ron Paul, but she would have fit right in. You wanted to hear a voice saying harshly, "Leave the runway!" Maybe America's overtaxed, oppressed, newly-poor masses, yearning to breathe free will turn on this crowd of liars and send them packing this November. We can only hope. Meanwhile I've been reassuring my skittish TV set that after Algore and the Messiah tonight it can sleep a well- deserved sleep until next week when I'll be sure to be screaming at it again.

Smack My Bishop

"Under fire from U.S. Catholic bishops, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not backing off contentious comments about abortion she made during a weekend television talk show appearance."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7754772

You bishops better wise up muy pronto! You've been calling Our Nancy a liar and she's starting to get POed. The government so far has let the religion industry go unregulated but Our Nancy might be forced to consider a Fairness Doctrine for religion if you old celibate freaks don't stop questioning the doctrine of Speakeral Infallibility. I don't think that an excessive reliance on so-called 'rights' that you think are in our Living Constitution (when does a Constitution have a life of it's own? When does it start?) is going to protect your insolent insistence that two thousand years of pretty consistent Catholic opposition to abortion adds up to an established Church Doctrine. Our Nancy is not amused by a group of people who use that 2000 year-old-policy shtick to justify barring women from top slots in the Holy Catholic Corporation. The Stained Glass Ceiling. Your 'church' has been making massive windfall profits by pretending that St. Augustine, Jesus, Pope Gregory VI, John The Baptist and St. Paul have some kind of quibble with a woman exercising her Right To Choose. Just as the Founding Fathers...ooops, the Founding Persons, wrote a Constitution that included rights to sodomy, gay marriage, abortion, pornography and government management of all aspects of human existence are we to think that the founders of Christianity were any less Progressive?
Of course they endorsed abortion, and they wanted the state to pay for it. The Pharisees were just a group of angry Right-Wing sexists as was Constantine when he got the Bible rewritten to reflect his brutal Pro-life views. In the Roman Empire babies were regularly abandoned to die just after birth, a practice in keeping with the views of Barak Obama and the idea that the early Christians (including You-Know-Who) had some kind of problem with it is just a canard that Our Nancy refuses to play along with. You GO girl! There is irrefutable evidence that babies, (carbon-based life forms) cause Global Warming and some of us, including Our Nancy, are trying to save the planet! Its laughable to listen to people talking about some kind of cheapening of human life that supposedly has occurred since the Wise Justices (there's some Black Robed guys Our Nancy can get behind) revealed that Our Living Constitution doesn't allow any democratic debate on the subject of abortion. So now they want to debate it again! What are these zany right-Wingers going to come up with next? Maybe something about the Pride of our first woman Speaker going before some kind of 'fall' or some kind of treasonous talk like that.
It's not like Our Nancy doesn't have some options here. Henry Waxman is putting together a committee right now to haul those black-robed troublemakers in front of the cameras and work them over. He'll make those sanctimonious buzzards sweat! They better start thinking about the carbon emissions that occur when their misguided congregants drive their SUVs to 'worship' in church. Churches filled with power-guzzling incandescent light bulbs, heated in many cases by oil-burning furnaces and cooled by electricity-gobbling air conditioners. What a waste of non-renewable fossil fuel resources! The EPA could get involved in this and strictly apply our new Global Warming criteria to this egregious use of fossil fuel to push Right-Wing climate-debauching bigotry. They want to talk about the 'sanctity' of human life or the 'sanctity' of marriage or even the 'sanctity' religious belief but they're pretty danged silent when the 'sanctity' of the Planet is brought into the picture.
They think some 'God' controls the weather instead of the Wise Policies put into place by Our Nancy; what superstitious arrogance! After the election we'll be funding some Climate Sensitivity Training Camps so these reactionaries can get their minds right. Waterboarding is wrong when you do it to Muslims but its a useful tool for eliminating error in the confused minds of these so-called Christians. These Counterrevolutionary Climate Criminals will be happily stamping on the antiquated 'cross' and learning to pray to the three-pronged renewable-energy-generating windmill by the time Commissar Of Theology Wright and his team of Liberation Theologians apply a little Revolutionary Persuasion to update the cosmologies of these reprobates so they can learn to appreciate the Wisdom of Our Nancy!

Is It Possible?

Can the Democrats be this stupid? I just listened to HRC's swan song of last night on the internet. Even with the pumped-up pacing, aided by the fact that she was rested and had time to work on her delivery it was still just the same old stuff said in the same old way. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. It was my wife in a bad mood nagging me that I still have to fix the washer in the bathroom sink, mow the lawn and change the water in the cat's bowl. There were no quotes that had any resonance. These Dems are okay at bashing Bush, these are hard times, people aren't happy with what's going on, there's a sense of crisis in the air but what did she have to offer as a concrete solution to anyone's problems?
Universal Health Care? Even people who aren't fully aware of the complete and total failure of government-run health care in other countries are not on board with having a government that has completely screwed up the education system take over another giant sector of the economy and put them in the same line as welfare cases and illegal aliens. I like my doctor and the medical facilities I go to; can I Believe that Change is going to make them better?
So we got the bald-headed cancer victim with two autistic children thrown in our faces; another mythological socialist chimera that is supposed to make us feel guilty that we're not paying enough taxes. I'm sick of that crap and I'll tell you something else, so is EVERYBODY. If fifty percent of what I earn isn't enough for you people to take care of the cancer victims with autistic children then where does it stop? Sixty percent? Seventy? Eighty?
She wants to unionize America; that'll make us competitive in the world market. The Dems want to take away secret ballots in union elections so they can expand the pool of dues that flow right into their campaign coffers. A sweet deal for the Dems and a way to extend ever more government control into formerly Free Enterprise. When the government and the unions are basically the same political entity, like they are in Zimbabwe or China, the alleged 'owners' of a business are helpless. The unions will reduce every business to the basket-case level of GM or US Steel very quickly.
And it seems we're not going to be 'rewarding energy speculators with windfall profits' any more. That's nice. Does that mean effective government price controls on energy? No more commodity markets? Do they ever think about what they're saying? No drilling, no new fossil fuel power plants, no nuclear, just a pack of bureaucrats levying stiff new taxes and enforcing a raft of new government mandates. Did you notice HRC only mentioned Glow-Bull Warming once and blew through it really fast? Now we're going to 'create' green-collar jobs by subsidizing some pie-in-the-sky alternative energy hoaxes. We've been working on that crap for decades and very little has come of it. These clowns are living in a dream world.
She also took pains to remind the AARP-tards that McLame might, at some point, try to stave off the coming bankruptcy of Social Security but that the Democrats are committed to a full-on meltdown.
Everything HRC said pointed to another sector of the economy and of society falling into the tender clutches of the government. But these are new times. People don't care about the convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, they don't respond to some made-up story about some hard-luck broad and her autistic children, they're not looking for more intrusive labor unions and they sure as HELL don't want to pay more taxes to do any of this stuff.
They want to drill for oil. They want their property taxes to go down, not up. They want America to assert itself on its own behalf in the world and stop truckling to left-wing internationalist groups. They see that we WON in Iraq, that it is a very good thing and that the Dems were with the enemy in every way, every day. They are sick of the whole PC mantra of being charged ever higher tax rates to soothe some poor helpless victims who never seem to get cured of their ills no matter how bloated the government budgets get. They're sick of tax hikes coupled with cuts in government services. How does that work? You pay more and get less at the same time.
The Dems are not talking about people's concerns and problems, they're talking about their own political pathology. Its worked for nearly eighty years but it is going to be severely tested this year. I'm a die-hard pessimist and I am angry and disappointed by the Republicans but if the Dems don't do something to give people an idea to vote for that isn't total government then they are going to lose Big Time. And on that day in January when Nancy Pelosi hands the Speaker's Gavel to John Boehner and Harry Reid yields the floor to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell we can all join hands, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics and sing the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free At Last, Free At Last! Thank God Almighty I'm Free At Last!"

Yo, Michelle!

See, like I'm totally down with that Brady Bunch stuff that you guys are pushing tonight, like I dig it baby, dont get me wrong. And I also have just GOT to say, you know, in a very non-sexist totally respectful way, that you are one hot-looking chick, I'm not kidding, you are awesome! The kids? Totally cute. And that message about you being just like me and all thats just one hundred percent heart-warming, I mean it makes me tingle harder than those touching stories about the hard times the Olympic athletes have had with the syrupy, tinkling piano music that they use as filler in between games. Really, I'm just a sucker for Family Values, I just go all goooshy!
But a couple of things just completely stick in my mind about your performance tonight. One is how utterly and totally flat and lifeless the whole enterprise was. I havent seen a crowd sleep through so many applause lines since Barak's speech in Berlin. You had a shot at rousing the floor of the convention and the country with your political passion; burning the cause into our hearts with flashing eyes and a James Brown drop of sweat digging a Martian canal through your foundation as you lead us to the Socialist Nirvana with your eyes blazing and your voice rising to a hot passionate ROAR! I didnt believe your performance on the maudlin codswallop script the boys in the campaign office wrote out for you. You werent living that speech! The body language was not there. If you were auditioning for June Cleaver you blew it, you choked, we'll phone you if anything comes up, NEXT! Because you're NOT June Cleaver, you're La Passionaria, Lady MacBeth, Joan Of Arc, Bella Abzug, Maxine Waters, Eva Peron; we wanted Coltraine and we got Kenny G! And if you cant be convincing in a June Cleaver role, what does that say? That you're not a MOM like everyone else: you're a hard-boiled, committed left-wing ideologue with a definite agenda that might be a bit too salty for the Great Unwashed. Thats when you work, when you are great TV; because tonight, delivering a speech that could have leapt from the lips of Pat Nixon or Rosalind Carter, you ate a giant Donkey Burrito. Politically speaking. See, the goal of every person who courts fame is to be one of the royalty who are referred to in common parlance with one name; Madonna, W, Hillary, Angelina, etc. and to do that you have to go on stage in drag as yourself, every minute! Flamboyant, Blow Out the Stops, Kick Out The Jams!
It wasnt there tonight, not even a little bit. If Mike Deaver were alive today he'd roll over in his grave. You got outshined by a washed-up drunk with a brain tumor.
Now for my other problem, Shelly, Darling, Sweetheart. You see I have this totally far-out pickup truck that I drive twenty miles to my job except that now that gas is four bucks a gallon its costing me most of my disposable income to get to work, which might not be a problem that much longer because the Air Quality Management District is threatening to close my job down because of Global Warming. What I didnt hear in your speech was what you're going to do to get gas prices down and what your ideas are about easing up on the restrictions so my boss doesnt move my job down to Mexico. Or anything about anything; that speech was as content-empty as a political speech at a political convention could possibly be. Is this going to be it? Instead of Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters we get a bloated Fat Teddy eager for the cameras one last time and the annoying, slurping idiocy of Claire McCaskill. Are we really counting on THE CLINTONS to liven things up? How pathetic is that? At least Ma and Pa Kettle arent going to hit us with any of that nauseating 'Leave It To Beaver' crap. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more. Yeah! Hey, but what do you want to bet that Hillary bumped into somebody with a terrible hard luck story who wants her to keep on fighting and never give up? Any takers? No. Dang, I was sure I'd pick up at least twenty with that one.
So I'll be glued to the tube tomorrow but they better lace the Obama Bon Bons with a healthy dollop of benzedrine to get that gaggle of professional government do-gooders, aging union hacks, corrupt ward-healers and over-the-hill eco hippies on their feet and yelling real loud or Barak will never sell to the suburbs.

Old King Log

The frog-pool wanted a king,
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been deaf and blind and wooden as a log.

By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.
By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.
Violent disorders call for violent remedies.

Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

Robert Graves
'Claudius The God'

What poisons are there that lurk in our Modern Mud? The poison that the government is the insurer of last resort; that when there is a problem the government is the solution. The poison of a thousand selfish special interests competing like greedy piglets for the unending surge of taxpayer slop being ladled into the trough. The poison of a history smeared with hateful propaganda and now nearly forgotten. The poison of an electorate that cant even determine its real long-term best interests. The poison of a people who think that they can 'save the planet' by changing their light bulbs. The problem of a nation that has exchanged its 'rendezvous with destiny' for a fat pension and a vacation home at the lake.
There are two political parties in this country. Is one the party of the Mega-State Cancer and the other the party of Fiscal and Social Sanity? No, they are both Mega-State parties with a slight nuance separating them. In the 'Budget Showdown' between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in the nineties the big issue was Clinton wanting a Medicare increase of 7.5% and Gingrich holding out for an increase of a mere 7.2% in an economy with a 2% inflation rate and a 4% GDP growth rate. And that was when the two parties were at each other's throats.
But now we see bad policy after bad policy pushed through Congress by Democrats and given bi-partisan approval by coalitions with a few liberal Republicans. When these liberal disasters cause a catastrophe they become Republican catastrophes! No Child Left Behind, anyone? A bill written by the Washington Educrats and the NEA, pushed through the Senate by nearly-Dead Kennedy and hung around the neck of the hapless Bush, who climbed on board in the name of Bi-Partisan Unity and who now is vilified by every educator in the country for this horrible piece of legislation. Just as him and McLame are vilified for 'comprehensive immigration reform' which was written by left-wing radical Reconquista groups and pushed through the Senate by Guess Who! People werent screaming at the Dems for that, they hated BUSH!
Now we have 'The Gang Of Ten' giving the Dems cover on their anti-energy policies as we had the 'Gang Of Fourteen' helping the Dems radicalize the judiciary. Guess who's going to get the blame when people are standing beside their inert autos cursing the lack of gasoline?
And while this stupid game plays itself out the government just continues to bloat, sopping up resources from the private sector like a giant sponge. Local, State, and Federal governments continue to grow three or four times faster than the economy. Government workers are promised pensions that will, through indexing, pay them more than they ever earned when they were pretending to 'work' at their jobs. The Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, Food Stamps, Medicare and a raft of other giveaway programs expand exponentially with COLA rises and now are faced with tens of millions of new recipients made eligible by 'comprehensive immigration reform'. And the people clamor for ever more and more 'solutions' to our pressing problems. But we have only one problem right now. We have turned our destiny over to a pack of bureaucrats with a 100% track record of failure. This trend started in the thirties with FDR's ham-handed attempt to 'fix' the economy, whose disastrous state was conveniently blamed on Liberal Republican Herbert Hoover. The trend accelerated in the sixties and seventies as LBJ expanded the Welfare State and Liberal Republicans Nixon and Ford acquiesced. Carter took the train off the rails and brought the country close to the edge and Reagan managed to slow the rate of growth for a while, but not by much. His tax cuts brought in a surge of revenue which actually spurred the expansion of government. An expansion which has continued unabated to the present day throughout the terms of the three feckless liberals who followed Reagan until now it has reached critical mass. A meltdown is certain, the beginnings are happening already.
So now I'm told that however bad McLame is, he's certainly better than Obama; a dangerous radical. I'm not so sure. The numbers tell us that the government is about to outrun its resources, that the parasite is about to kill the host. Do we want the ultimate Schlemiel, the Patsy , the Fall Guy, the Herbert Hoover of the coming hyper-inflationary imploding economy to be a Republican, destroying the party for ever and leaving us in a one-party Socialist Third-world state for ever? Will McLame stand in front of the giant-government juggernaut and command the ocean to recede like some Modern-Day King Canute? Dont bet on it.
Let's think about letting the Dems put their smug platitudes into law and then letting them get 100% of the CREDIT for the results. Lets dream of an America where the desperate citizens of San Francisco run Nancy Pelosi out of town on a rail and install a Fiscal Conservative in her place to go to Washington and make the cuts in expenditures and regulations that everyone will demand. Just as Stalin told the German Communists to lend their votes in the Reichstag to Hitler to further the destruction of bourgeois Capitalism so should we now ponder helping the Dems and their pestiferous fellow parasites to GO TOO FAR and bring themselves to ruin.
The thought of a McLame /Republican brand on the oncoming Argentina-like crisis should make us all at least stop and think. Obama is right; can WE (as conservatives) afford four more years of Republican Liberalism?

Moe Bama

Great men have interesting ways of solving problems when they're under stress. One time at Reagan's ranch in the hills near Santa Barbara Ronnie had gotten on his favorite horse and ridden into the chaparral above the house. He had a speech to make in Germany and it just wasn't coming to him. He chanced upon his foreman and some workers building a retaining wall to protect the ranch house from mudslides but they were making a mess of it; it was obvious it wouldn't hold under the slightest pressure. Reagan sat bolt upright and yelled, "Mister Gonzales, tear down that wall!"
With Barak Obama inspiration also comes in strange ways. His European Victory Tour had bombed and even his press sycophants were starting to report his bigger and bigger gaffes. Instead of the public wanting Mo' Bama his numbers went up when he vacationed in Hawaii, signaling that the public wanted Less-bama. What to do?
Pick a Vice President! That should be easy with the deep bench the Dems have. Kook-sin-itch is probably the closest in terms of the issues but he's not a super-credible candidate with the large number of people who dont want to commit national suicide just yet. There's always the lovable Hillary; but she's been pretending to gag every time she says Obama, with the gag on the middle syllable, so she's not really a good pick. There's Evan Bayh, but the thought of the Obama Bayh Bayh jokes was just too much. Also the guy is terminally boring. People used to faint at Obama speeches; they pass out in droves at Bayh events. He's been sited for violating the Sleeping Gas Protocol of the Geneva Convention. There's that sawed-off little runt in New Mexico; his mother's a Mexican, thats a plus. But that would just antagonize the Clints more and they dont want to totally stiff them. Plus he's obviously smarter than BHO and the Abbot and Costello thing would start to happen because of the size. No Way.
What to do? What to do? Barak went up to the den and put on one of his favorite DVDs to relax and just have a laugh. The phone was ringing off the hook with advisors and press people all eager to be the first to know. Who will it be?
He hits play. Its the Three Stooges, the one where they're plumbers. Obama laughs along until a scene comes on where Curly is proud of some job he's completely screwed up and turns to Moe and states' "This is so easy a moron could do it!"
Moe replies, "Well why dont you get one to help ya?" And then hits him on the head with a wrench.
Obama sat bolt upright! Why don't I get a moron to help me? The idea hit him on the head like a wrench. It stayed with him as he interviewed the potential rivals. Bayh read him a position paper, Clinton threatened him with oblivion, Richardson burbled on about some 'border' somewhere we were supposed to be 'enforcing' or something like that.
Only one candidate had properly prepared. He also went to the DVD player, the only move for a completely facile candidate in a nation whose brains have been reduced to Jello after decades of TV watching and now internet-surfing. But he got it all wrong. He wanted to watch some 'black-themed' movies so he could 'get down' with brother Obama in that way the white people use to ingratiate themselves with black people by trying to act hip that always wins them over in a flash once they realize how groovy and multi-cultural you are. He watched a collection of Stepin' Fetchit movies that he had found lying around his empty cavern of a campaign office after his 'presidential campaign' collapsed from sheer embarrassment. This guy paid illegal aliens ten bucks to vote for him and they put the money in their pockets and voted for Hillary Clinton who was offering them counterfeit Green Cards.
So armed to the teeeth, and I do mean teeeth, this dude is all about teeeth, with hip black culture he went to the interview. He considered wearing a dashiki but some adviser saved him just in the nick of time. If he had bumped into Al Sharpton in the hallway...
It was frosty at first. But then Obama asked him a question about policy, giving Our Hero a chance to put some of the Ebonics he'd picked up watching those videos into play.
"I dont know boss, I's as ignorant as you is..."
He had found him! A twenty-four-carat, Real McCoy Moron with teeeth! Yes Biden is a total zero; he's boring, he's stupid, he's enthusiastic about every bad idea anyone has had in the last thirty years, he screwed up the Clarence Thomas Borking, his presidential campaign was the absolute worst each of the eight or nine times he's run, he has a tendency to shoot his mouth off and say offensive and stupid things; he's PERFECT!
You just can't go wrong when you're a Democrat and Moe Howard is your guru.

The Belly Of the Beast

I was going to write this last night but I was too exhausted so I put it off. Since then Obama has picked Biden as his running mate and I guess every sincere blogger should be talking about that but that fish will keep until tomorrow.
This last week I was taking a 'teaching artist' training course that was put together by The Actor's Fund, an entertainment industry social service group, and funded by Sony Pictures. The purpose is to train working artists to teach art courses in Title One schools. The course took place in the same building that houses SAG and AFTRA down on Wilshire Blvd. right next to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum Row. The Writers Guild and the Director's Guild are right down the street. If the oft-reviled 'Hollywood Film Community' has a center of gravity its right there.
Getting there and back was a pleasant plus. Most people dread driving 25 miles each way across a large city at rush hour. But when is a city not a city? When its LA! A low chain of mountains, called the Santa Monica Mountains, runs through the city. I live in the northern foothills of those mountains; the side known contemptuously to those on the opposite slopes as 'The Valley'. Valleyites, suffering from a huge inferiority complex, refer to the city side of the mountains as 'over the hill'. Getting over the hill can be accomplished on the freeways, through the two passes between the Valley and the LA Basin or by taking one of the winding, narrow roads that climb up through the canyons on the sides of the mountains. I chose the mountain route. It didn't take less time and probably added some distance but the route took me up a canyon in Encino (past Michael Jackson's house. I used to work for him in the late eighties and once or twice dropped things off there on my way home) that runs through a neighborhood overgrown with trees which contains some modern mansions and then climbs steeply up to Mulholland Drive, named for the hydraulic engineer who designed the first aqueduct that brought water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, making the city possible in its present form (the eco-lawyers have since shut it down, of course). Mulholland winds along the top of the ridge line, sometimes on one side sometimes the other, offering panoramic views of the city as you negotiate the winding curves. The mansions on the tops of the hills are truly magnificent. In LA altitude is a function of success; the higher up the slope you are the more prominent. The plants are insane. Native oaks crowd a thousand species of imported trees like Lebanon Cedars and ash; eucalyptus trees on the south-facing slope but not on the Valley side. Rioting Bouganvillia and Plumbago. Stunning patches of roses, roses cresting high walls.Luxurious tended gardens and large patches of wild native plants. A couple of times I saw coyotes dart across the street through gaps in the traffic.
Mulholland is a notorious haunt for people who love to drive. Porsches, Beamers, Honda S2000's all come up there in the hopes of taking a hairpin turn at 50 or 60 mph on the way to the office. The stretch between Bel Air Presbyterian (Ronald Reagan's old church) and the light at Beverly Glen is like Road-Race 2000. Dropping below forty will get you tailgated by a cursing executive in a Mercedes 560sl. But who goes that slow? With the top off and all the windows down and Jimi Hendrix or James Brown loud on the sound system even my puny old Del Sol is up to the challenge! What joy! Then a leisurely drop down into Beverly Hills down the lovely Benedict Canyon. The rest is a drive through Beverly Hills or up the Sunset Strip, always interesting, always fun. One time I played Zappa as I drove down the Strip in memory of the Old Days; Plastic People. The weather, cool for August, was the kind of weather that makes people never want to ever leave LA. In the early morning a couple of days the marine layer of clouds hadn't burned off as I started and the light grew progressively stronger as I approached my goal as the sun burned the clouds off.
And what a goal! If you like to gaze at extremely beautiful women who dont wear very much clothing in the summer Wilshire Blvd, Sunset and Doheny (and tromping in and out of the SAG offices) are about as good as you can get.
So I'm in this class with all these high-powered film industry production types, performers and dancers (only a few don't have bios on IMDB). We've all had a terrible year but as the screenwriter among us (X-Files, Beverly Hills 90210, etc.) was wearing his WGA 'STRIKE!' T-shirt and on our breaks we were hob-knobbing with a bunch of the SAG bigshots no one mentioned why we all had such a shitty year. In fact that was the group ethic. No one talked about politics, generally a social no-no in any studio or film crew, but here it was because it was assumed you were suitably left-wing; could any rational person be otherwise? The teacher had a long history in the Arts and then in the Non-Profit Arts Community. The visiting experts were all from the Education Establishment. All amazingly intelligent, educated, sophisticated people; people who couldn't understand how anyone could be against raising taxes. There's so much good work to be done. The other thing that the educators had in common was a visceral hatred of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was written by the Washington Education bureaucrats and the NEA, shepherded through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and then, in the name of bi-partisan comity, the new era of Good Feeling after the Clinton food-fight the hapless George Bush signed this bill which effectively put the Federal Government in charge of education. It has been an unmitigated disaster. My wife runs an elementary school library so I know teachers and on-site administrators and I have never met anyone involved in education that has anything but anger and contempt for this disaster of a law. And as they curse this horrible nightmare that has destroyed education they get to practice saying George W Bush's name, BUSH, with the ultimate hatred and contempt. Just to utter the word BUSH is all you need to do as it involves the whole panoply of invective which we all know by heart. I feel sorry for them that this wonderful Newspeak word that encompasses every evil and makes any further discussion unnecessary will be stolen from the Left come January. Its a word which makes any criticism of the cancerous education bureaucracy and their penchant for top-down control (the true culprits in the destruction of American education) completely unthinkable. Its all BUSH'S fault. He lied, you know. This should certainly be a warning to accommodation-minded Republicans to stay away from the disasterous left-wing social recipes lest the inevitable catastrophic results be squarely pinned on them as in the case of No Child Left Behind.
Even though California has the highest taxes in the nation, only NY, NJ and RI are higher, there was a constant lament about the lack of funding for education. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) people who came in to speak with us, constantly refered to the twelve-story district offices a few miles away as 'The Death Star' but never questioned whether this giant structure, stuffed with overpaid parasites, where the idiotic memos and the sweetheart contracts originated might be why education in the city is in such dire straights.
So that you dont mistake me, these are sincere, dedicated people trying wholeheartly to do their best. They are bright and motivated. I liked and was impressed by them. But anyone who can look at the state of California's crumbling economy and doesn't realize that raising taxes will make it worse, much worse, is blind. Just like the WGA and SAG striking, or threatening to strike for more money, has undermined the economic basis of the film industry here. There is complete tunnel-vision on the Left, their little patch of trees is all they see. Who cares about the forest, that's all theoretical; we're dealing with reality baby!
So, I had a wonderful time. I love hanging out with bright, intelligent, interesting people. The film conversations, for someone obsessed with film and who always found that even in animation studios most people cant discuss film with any passion, this was a rare treat! To be able to talk about Orson Welles' lighting and cinematography techniques!
The course was difficult but I think I did well and I'm looking forward to an internship and to exploring East LA's barrios and going down to South Central, terra incognita to us Valleyites, and seeing if I have what it takes to entertain and enlighten a group of bored nine-year-olds with my drawing and preaching skills. I'll still work free-lance in animation, of course (I have a show starting in a couple of weeks where I'll be working at home), but I'm looking forward to developing a pleasant, fulfilling part-time career so that as I retire I can phase out the Rat Race and work at something less high-pressure.
I've got to go mow the lawn and climb up the hillside and cut back the shrubs that are blocking the sprinklers. Have a nice Saturday!

Bye Bye Afghanistan!

Every time something really, truly disastrous happens you can be sure that just as things are looking absolutely black Condi Rice will appear pretending that its just some diplomatic frisson thats going to require everyone to roll up their sleeves and do some diligent negotiating. In just the past year she has presented a Palestinian peace proposal which utterly ignored the homicidal nature of the Palestinian 'bargaining position'; she has flapped her gums very softly at the Burmese government's refusal of aid to its destitute citizens and noiselessly watched tens of thousands of them die. Now she is applauding the 'Democrats' who have taken over Pakistan. Our troops in Afghanistan are supplied through Pakistan. There is no sign of recognition that the people who are taking over are very hostile to America and the West and are much more sympathetic to China, who gave or sold Pakistan nuclear weapons when this crew was in power before Musharraf. In 1963, when the incompetent Kennedys connived to have Diem bumped off in South Vietnam LBJ was said to have remarked,"Sheet, he's the only boy we got!" Well Musharaff was the 'only boy we got' in Pakistan. This is more momentous than the fall of the Shah of Iran. We might be lucky to get our people out of Afghanistan without a fight; a fight against fanatics with nuclear weapons. Did that get your attention?
And what about the people we 'rescued' in Afghanistan, left to the tender mercies of a returned Taliban and Al Qaida? Yet another bloodbath no doubt. So we're going to have an anarchic Pakistan-Afghanistan run by Sunni Islamic fanatics possessing nuclear weapons and aligned with China next door to a Shi'ite Islamic Republic long past it's prime run by a fanatical and murderous death-cult clique of Mullahs trembling in fear of revolution but possessed very shortly of nuclear weapons of its own. A situation that Condi might describe as rich with diplomatic potential; just like two two-year-olds playing with loaded automatic pistols with the safeties off is rich with hilarity waiting to happen. Thats where 'cultural sensitivity' has led us; primitive savages with a track record of murdering their own people with gay abandon are now armed with nuclear weapons and looked on as legitimate governments whose psychotic demands have to be accommodated. What choice do we have as long as we're dependent on them for energy? I wonder if the Russians and the Chinese are having any second thoughts about handing nukes over to these unstable towelheads. Actually the Islamic proportion of the population of Russia will reach fifty percent within the next fifteen years or so, creating another Islamic nation with nukes. If I could buy real estate on the Moon right now I'd be on the next flight out. In the next few years the US's budget crisis, which is just beginning, will cause us to abandon the Eastern hemisphere; it will be like the lights going out in a tough waterfront bar.

Murderer On The Roof

Behind them, according to people fleeing those villages, came a militia army of Chechen and Ossetian volunteers who had joined up with the regular Russian army. The volunteers embarked on an orgy of looting, burning, murdering and rape, witnesses claimed, adding that the irregulars had carried off young girls and men.

"They killed my neighbour's 15-year-old son. Everyone was fleeing in panic," Larisa Lazarashvili, 45, said. "The Russian tanks arrived at our village at 11.20am. We ran away. We left everything - our cattle, our house, and our possessions."

Achiko Khitarishvili, 39, from Berbuki, added: "They were killing, burning and stealing. My village isn't in a conflict zone. It's pure Georgia."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/14/georgia.russia

Not one German in this village escaped. not one woman escaped and not one girl- the seventy-year-old ones no more than those of twelve. If they had hidden in the barn, flames drove them out. The local farm leader's wife died under the rapings. But other women died too, after they had been taken by twenty men or more. The men died- all but four who escaped by mere chance. They died because they were fascists or had firearms or wanted to shield their women and children, or because with all the violence and drunkenness it just happened. Their dead bodies lay around in the ravaged houses, in the yards, on the street. The local farm leader dangled from the frame of his own barn door, hanged feet up, because he had been a fascist. By his side hung a boy of fourteen-- no one knew why.

'The Defeat In the East' by Juergen Thorwald

From the time of the Russian Civil War up until the present day the soul of a once great nation has been brutalized and burned out by evil men serving an evil purpose. The descriptions above could have applied equally to the Ukraine in 1933 or Afghanistan in 1987 or Chechnya in 1997. People in Russia turned in their neighbors to the secret police to get their apartments or sleep with their wives and were rewarded with medals for their Socialist vigilance. The Russians have been committing brutal atrocities without heart or mercy for nearly a century now. A society which once was at the forefront of the arts and sciences is now a burned-out, amoral hulk with a declining birthrate and an accelerating death-rate brought on by its severe and chronic alcoholism. Medical care is primitive and doctors have to be bribed to even look at their patients who are systematically robbed as they lay unconscious in their beds. The same rural exploitation that existed in the Collective Farm era exists today in the almost-depopulated hinterlands which produce a tenth of the food that they did in Tsarist times long before the Green Revolution increased yields on private farms everywhere else in the world. The only thing that that formerly mighty society produces of any value is crude petroleum and natural gas and exports are falling because the theft, oh excuse me, nationalization of the oilfields by Putin has brought them under the control of the same band of corrupt, incompetent thugs who wiped out Russia's entire class of intellectuals in the 1930s.
Now that sawed-off criminal Putin has decided to end the independence of Georgia and has sent in the squads of drunken animals which are his country's only real cultural export. Proud Russians like Mikhail Gorbachev, the guy who happily sponsored similar depredations in Afghanistan, are loudly averring that Russia was attacked by this tiny former province. Putin is restoring their national pride! Putin is restoring the national shame of a nation that killed the best members of its own people and then spread the murderous disease of communism to Eastern Europe and burned out the souls of each of those countries for half a century until the whole enterprise went bankrupt from sheer mismanagement.
The craven cowardice of the West is now on full display. The true emptiness of NATO has been unmasked by this sanguine misadventure. The NATO troops who cover cravenly in the secure areas of Afghanistan while the American and Afghan troops take the war to the Taliban are not likely to scare a brutal degenerate like Putin.
Hey, I know! Lets have a big rock concert and hold hands and sing songs about peace and raise some money so we can give the destitute survivors of the Russian onslaught in Georgia a bowl of mush once a week, providing the Russians will let us, of course.
If we don't get some kind of sense of urgency and start drilling for oil and building nuclear power plants NOW this is what the future is going to be like. Vile, heartless neo-communist regimes will complete the conquest of the world envisioned by Lenin and a new Dark Age will descend upon mankind, one where the thugs will be unrestrained in their power to torture and murder. It will be a world with a crashing population because the medical system will have been gutted by incompetence and greed and epidemics will run freely through the masses of cowering serfs.
We can get a handle on this. We are stronger than them because morality is strength. It is the only strength. That is why democracies defeat thugs almost every time. But our own democracy is in danger. If Barak Obama and the Democratic Party win this election any hope that we can survive the coming storm as a free nation is over. I know that many people despise and hate that inferior McLame, I do myself; but even if he has betrayed us again and again; even if you can't stand him on a whole panoply of core issues; even if he won't turn the direction this country is going in around, stopping Barak Obama and the Pelosi-ites is too important to waste our time casting protest votes for Bob Barr or some other comedy candidate or staying home nursing our grudges. We have to win this. This is the Big One! ANY Republican, no matter how retarded or liberal, is better than ANY Democrat, no matter how 'moderate' or sensible they seem to be. Our survival is in jeopardy, we have to act to save ourselves.

Ancient History

Sometimes, when the cares of the world weigh down on us as a nation, it's nice to take a little breather from the alarming present and ease our troubled minds by wandering back into the past. You know, get out the old history books and just do a little escapist reading. Now, I'm not talking about the important facts of US History as our schools teach it; we all know that stuff about Indian Genocide, the KKK, the McCarthy Years, how we're all responsible for slavery and JFK being shot, the stolen election of 2000, the growth of that vile monopoly capitalism that's killing the planet-- our malignant nation's "Tragic Past" as one presidential candidate calls it. No, I want to get away from all that and lose myself in a far distant past, one with nothing to do with our frightening present. Oh sure, people used to think that many of our traditions and most of our laws originated in the Roman Empire until we discovered that the US Constitution is really based on a mixture of Iroquois Law and the Ujamaa traditions of the African Slaves which were ripped off by the fiendish 'Founding Fathers' and credited to the Romans by the White Chauvinist Pigs who conspired to create a capitalist hell on Earth right here in our tragic nation.
Around the same time as those Founding Fathers there lived in England a historian named Edward Gibbon. He was considered, until the publication of Barak Obama's first book, the finest prose writer in the English language. Sometimes, just to take my mind off my troubles, I'll leaf through 'Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire' and muse over some random quotes.
Let's do it together, shall we?
Those were troubled times, the old Fifth Century. Here's how Gibbon describes the scene (all Gibbon quotes will be in Italics):

...every species of corruption polluted the course of public and private life; and that the feeble restraints of order and decency were insufficient to resist the progress of that degenerate spirit which sacrifices, without a blush, the consideration of duty and interest to the base indulgence of sloth and appetite.

Just imagine living in a place like that! There's more:

...and the mad prodigality which prevails in the confusion of a shipwreck or a siege may serve to explain the progress of luxury amidst the misfortunes and terrors of a sinking nation.

Phew, what a bunch of morons! But the regular people were pretty down to earth it seems:

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the insubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

One warmonger actually tried to get the Romans to abandon paying off their enemies and to encourage the people to defend themselves against the rising menace:

He exhorts the Emperor to revive the courage of his subjects by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute in place of the barbarian mercenaries an army of men interested in the defense of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure; and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll bet this loser wants me to miss my favorite TV shows, too! At least we have that dunce W to blame our problems on. I guess the ancients did too:

...and the people imputed to the mischievous policy of the minister the public misfortunes, which were the natural consequence of their own degeneracy.

Well, we can see how out-to-lunch this Gibbon dude really is. But it gets worse. You see they didn't understand 'soft diplomacy' or cultural sensitivity in Gibbon's day so his chauvinistic mind allowed him to make the following statement:

The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the Council Of Ravenna he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.

Geeesh! Picky, picky, picky! Why can't we just Give Peace A Chance? but no, Gibbon continues with the insults:

They disdained either to negotiate a treaty or to assemble an army; and with a rash confidence, derived only from their ignorance of the extreme danger, irretrievably wasted the decisive moments of peace and war.

But, in the end, the Romans sat down at the table for a respectful round of negotiations that only can be achieved by good-hearted people getting together to resolve their problems in a civilized manner:

...the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets and prepare to give battle to an innumerable people, exercised in arms and animated by despair. "The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed," was the concise reply of the barbarian; and this rustic metaphor was accompanied by a loud and insulting laugh, expressive of his contempt for the menaces of an unwarlike populace, enervated by luxury...

But, what the heck. Dale Carnegie once said that 'No' is the first step toward 'Yes'. They just should have explained everything to him more clearly. I think that 'rustic metaphor' shows that they weren't dealing with a guy with any higher education or knowledge of the Rules Of Diplomacy. But Gibbon lets us off the hook a little:

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to deprecate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

So don't sweat it, baby! Its just these Evil Times. And if a tiny ally is overrun by a swarm of bloodthirsty barbarians just relax. These are local problems as Gibbon so correctly notes:

The Britons, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarchy.

So chill out, relax. Catch the Olympics on TV or go down to the health club and get a massage. You deserve it! All this worrying that the people who, by their superior merit, have managed to obtain positions of leadership are blindly leading us to destruction is just idle paranoia. After all, Rome's still there, isn't it?

The New Munich

The Russians have invaded Georgia! Aunt Pittypat has refugeed to Macon and Rhett and Scarlett are loading Miss Melly into the buckboard as a wave of clanking T-34s lead lines of screaming infantry forward across the landscape. The scream of Stalin Organs and the earthquake-rumble of massed artillery echoes through the peach orchards. Have they gotten to Atlanta or Savannah yet? Well, no, they've gotten as far as Abkhazia and South Ossetia...wait a second, I can't find those places in my 'Georgia' triple A travel guide. What? Oh, that Georgia! Who cares about that Georgia? What's it got to do with me?
The answer is PLENTY! Why are the retread KGB agents running Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin engaged in a piece of bloody and vicious aggression against it's tiny neighbor?
It's not like they want a few million more angry Muslims to plant bombs in apartment buildings and movie theaters. Georgia isn't exactly a juicy plum holding out the prospect of rich loot and economic advantage so what's the deal?
The oil price has dropped. For dictators like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez that's really bad news. They can't compete with the advanced economies when it comes to producing heavy machinery or computer systems, they can't compete with and are even dependent on food grown by the three agri-business giants (The US, Canada, and Australia), they can't compete with Asia and especially China when it comes to consumer goods production and exporting; their moribund economies rise and fall in the price of one commodity, OIL! In the last couple of weeks the price of that commodity has fallen precipitously from $148 a barrel to around $116, with speculators still selling short and analysts talking about $60-80 being the support level.
Do you expect thugs like Putin to sit around and just let that happen while the economies of their countries sag like one of Obama's underinflated tires? Not in this universe. All of a sudden Russian airplanes are bombing civilians and Russian tanks are pouring across the border in an area which is crossed by a pipeline that carries 1% of the total world production of oil. Russian planes bombed the pipeline but 'missed'. In the age of JDAMs its impossible to imagine a relatively modern air force attacking an undefended target that they had plenty of time to assess and missing it completely. This isn't the Zimbabwean Air Force here. The Russians have had plenty of practice bombing apartment buildings in Chechnya to get any problems with their aiming technology worked out.
It's obvious what's going on. This is a blatant attempt to raise oil prices. It will work, too; just like the provocative actions by the Iranians in the Gulf raised the spot market price every time it started to slide. The Iranians are a bit inhibited because they don't want to provoke the cowardly democracies into pressing for a strike against their nuclear facilities so its the Russkies' turn. And when it gets right down to it, what do they have to lose? Nobody's going to do anything. Europe gets most of it's natural gas from Russia. Russia provides millions of barrels of oil to the world market every day. Their production has sagged since they expropriated the privately owned and foreign companies but they are still a major player.
The Demo-Obama solution, of course, is diplomacy. They think that talking to this bloodthirsty dictator, who has a veto in the UN, is going to make him betray the economic and political interests of his country. 'Persuasion is the tactic of the weak, but the weak are rarely persuasive,' said Gibbon in the ultimate refutation of the Power diplomacy of the degenerate socialists.
What would constitute strength in this case. Beyond a bit of sword-rattling it might be instructive to these dictators to know that the United States had just gone into high gear looking for oil and building nuclear power plants. A superpower that was exploiting it's vast energy sources would be a threat to the high prices these creeps have become hooked on and would have leverage in any negotiations that took place. With Putin and the boys threatening Georgia and the Ukraine the result of not stopping them now will create a monster that will certainly threaten the weak, degenerate, unarmed bunnies in the aging states of Europe. Our inability to act will compromise all sources of oil from the Eastern hemisphere; another pressing reason to start drilling NOW!
I've been hanging out at these supposedly right-wing blog sites where the policies of the Democrats are regularly castigated as unAmerican and serving to weaken our country. In many ways the people who are saying those things are right. But it's now becoming increasingly clear that every day, every hour, every minute we delay trying to become as petroleum-independent as we can threatens our national existence. The anti-drilling policies of the Democratic party have now become a threat to that continued existence. These tiny incidents are just a harbinger of the final showdown, the day the oil stops flowing. If we haven't done anything to stop this trainwreck from happening in the next few years we are going to be overwhelmed by a disaster unprecedented in our history.

Snakes On The Plane!

We've become used to metaphors where Marxist leaders are linked to pathfinding professions. Stalin was the Great Navigator, Mao the Great Helmsman, Castro The Maximum Leader and now we have Obama The Pilot Of Change! But it seems that the sputtering political bi-plane that Obama is in control of has hit a bit of turbulence. McLame has hit him hard, drawing a picture of an out-of-touch elitist who embraces a no-growth whacko agenda in league with a pack of Anti-American ideologues and his responses have played into that image. So the Candidate Of Hope is struggling with the controls as the Republicans scream for drilling and nuclear power and are starting to turn the agenda of the election around to their advantage. This would be a tough situation for any Pilot and as our Intrepid Hero grasps the stick tightly beads of sweat start to drip down his face, stinging his eyes.
But that's not his only problem, by far! He's got Snakes On The Plane! Snakes named Clinton, the most venomous kind. The female thinks she should be flying the plane and is stirring up her lesser snake buddies to go in the front seat and start to entwine themselves around the legs of the embattled pilot as he struggles to keep control of the plane. Hillary operatives, will-less zombies who never make a peep without a word from headquarters, are now loudly and publically demanding a floor vote at the convention. Those thirty point shellackings that Snake Woman gave our Intrepid Pilot after he supposedly clinched the nomination are being remembered as it becomes obvious that the same people that voted for the loathsome Hillary out of dismay over the leftism and anti-white racism of the Obama team have not warmed to him in the meantime and are almost certain to go with Paris Hilton's 'Wrinkly Old White Dude'-- McLame.
Meanwhile, on an African babe-sampling tour, the lovely and reptilian BJ gave an impromptu interview to some ABC info-babe that was dripping with barely-concealed venom towards Obama and The Big O's tactic of branding BJ and The Little Woman as closet racists. He very pointedly equivocated when asked if Obama was qualified to be President. One time in the 1960 campaign when reporters asked Dwight Eisenhower why Nixon should be president he responded, "Give me a week to think about it."
What Clinton did was worse than that gaffe because it was an intentional slight aimed directly at Obama, intending to do him damage. The most amazing thing about the whole encounter was the seething anger that was just under the surface of BJ's terse delivery. He couldn't bring himself to say anything positive about Obama. He gave a generic endorsement of Democrats in general but nothing specific about their standard-bearer.
So with his poll numbers tanking, the Clintons and their minions stirring trouble at the convention and McLame landing video punches that are having an effect the high-flying Obama campaign is struggling to stay on an even keel and move forward. But to where? What's his goal? Where is the theme of his campaign? The old Hope and Change baloney has burned itself completely out; it was a hit on the 'old' candidate Hillary-Snake anyway. So what does he have to offer, tire gauges? Higher taxes? That's inspiring.
Meanwhile the flight over at McLame Airlines was lost in the clouds but finally the sputtering, confused, liberal old duffer has straightened the plane out and started on a steady course touting an end to drilling restrictions and an end of the de facto ban on building nuclear power plants, an issue with traction that has been pumping up his poll numbers and those of the Republican Senatorial and Congressional candidates when all of a sudden the cry was heard, "Snakes On The Plane!" Five alleged 'Republican' Senators, lead by that drooling moronic idiot Lindsey Grahamnesty are working with five Democrats to develop a 'bi-partisan energy plan' that gives the anti-drilling Democrats a de facto drilling ban to replace the de jure one and then gives $85 billion taxpayer dollars to fund more 'alternative energy' boondoggles. When are these jerks going to stop stabbing the Republican Party in the back in the name of bi-partisanship? Just more Snakes On The Plane!
So now it's become like a disaster movie. Two planes are in the air, both filled with out-of-control packs of reptilian troublemakers, both in the hands of pilots who are less than qualified to be in the pilot's seat. The atmosphere is alive with invisible downdrafts and wind shear that adds an element of unpredictability to the flight. An Israeli attack on Iran's nukes could change the dynamics of the election in one day, for instance. A fractious and riotous Dem convention or one where the Obamanoids were stupid enough to give Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any of the other of the myriad of black psychotic politicians prime-time facetime (and they are that stupid. They think that those guys make sense!) could bring the plane crashing into the mountain. The slimy, sabatoging Clintons will not benefit from the resulting crash, even though they would bring it on in the hopes of running against a Republican Newbie in 2012 as the feeble McLame retires. They are finished as a political force in this country. But that won't stop them from trying to grab as much power and get as much revenge on all the people they see as having betrayed them as they can. They are making themselves completely hated in the Democratic Party, even a total wipeout of the Obamanoids will not put them in a better light or make them emerge as an alternative power-center in the party.
The only hope that the Snake-Infested Dems have is the phenominal stupidity of Reptile Republicans like Graham and Co. who are working with fiendish diligence to destroy what is left of the Republican Party. It's exciting! As the planes wander aimlessly in the fog, altering course with no rhyme or reason we ground-bound spectators can only hold our breath and hope for the best.

A Major Gaffe

The Obamanator has stepped in it again. More amazing is that nobody in the media or the Democratic Party can see it. He's sure no Bill Clinton. Making the argument that having fully inflated tires is the same as drilling for oil is completely idiotic. We import 10 million barrels of foreign oil a day, if we cut that to 9.5 million we still have the same problem. We have to pursue every option. Anyone with any sense can see that. Nuclear, drilling, ethanol and the other alternative sources. Our economy can't expand if our energy supply is shrinking. Our economy can't expand if our currency loses it's value. The mask is now slipping as it becomes more and more clear how committed the Democrats are to contracting the economy.
"I'm saving the Planet!" Announced our horrible nightmare of a Speaker Of The House when a reporter dared to ask her about her stubborn refusal to schedule a vote on a bill to lift the drilling ban. Now we have the stark mental image of Barak waving a tire pressure gauge in our faces. The message is as clear as if it was his stiffened middle finger! Get out of your car and onto the bus you Plebeians, WE'RE saving the planet!
Now with the Republicans openly protesting Pelosi's arrogance and Obama getting ridicule heaped on him by talk radio even a party that appeared defunct even a month ago is showing signs of life. This election isn't going to be about Ted Stevens or John Murtha or Iraq or Medical Care or any of those issues; its going to be about energy, and in a larger sense it will be about whether we are going to take actions, in the name of Global Warming, that will severely hamper our economy. The Dems are on the wrongest of wrong sides of that issue. It worked for them when it was just something people saw on some corporate commercial about our Beautiful Green Future but now that it's come down to spiraling prices and real hardship the very group whose votes the Dems have counted on as theirs, the working class, are becoming alarmed and worried about the nation's and their own futures. All of a sudden the policy of forbidding drilling and putting a de facto moratorium on nuclear plants is seen in a different light. It also should be noted that the environmental groups give heavily to Democratic candidates and generally give nothing to the Republicans. A Democratic defeat at the hands of anti-enviro Republicans would be a disaster for those groups. Every sacred project they've worked on for the last thirty years could be overturned in a rush to grant leases, issue pipeline permits, and get to work on nuke power plants. This wouldn't be the placid atmosphere of the Bushie Years, there is panic in the air. The stampede will bring the fences down in a rush.
Can the Dems still win? It's possible but not likely. They have a complete dearth of leaders. The only one who can speak in public is Obama and he's been off his feed lately and is out of his depth on the energy issue. Handing the Republicans the Tire Guage image shows what a complete muppet he is. A nice clear visual image that an eighty-IQ retard can grasp perfectly clearly--WE"RE NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT HIGH RISING ENERGY PRICES!!! There isn't anyone who can put the Democratic message across because they can't put their message across; shrinking the economy and putting the government in effective control of it isn't something you really want to shout too loud about in times like these. The Republicans now have a clear, positive issue that people understand and genuinely agree with them on. Paris Hilton's 'Wrinkly Old White Guy' is starting to play to huge, enthusiastic crowds. States like Michigan are ripe for the taking. Even states like Pennsylvania. Ohio is not going to jump on the Depression Train with Mr. Tire-Gauge and the Red Army Chorus in Congress. If the Dems are going to pull this out they're going to have to come up with a reason why you don't want gas for your car. It's as easy as putting air in a tire, isn't it boys?

A Giant Dies

"When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."
Shakespeare 'Julius Ceasar' Act 2 Scene 2


On August first there was a solar eclipse in the far arctic North. The deep night moved across the Earth. The ancient Romans believed in portents that pointed to every important event or death and if we were to take Plutarch or Livy as a guide, as Shakespeare did, this omen presaged the death of one of the great geniuses of world literature. The media is misreporting this story hideously because as important as 'Gulag Archipelago' was in the course of the Cold War it is shunned by the glitteratti and ignored by the prestigious universities, which are far more likely to offer a course deconstructing 'Batman' than one exploring the 'Gulag Archipelago'.
'Gulag Archipelago' is not a book about the Stalinist prison system. There are plenty of fine books that explore the brutality of the Stalinist years. "I Chose Freedom' by Victor Kravchenko is one. 'Soviet Gold' by Vladimir Petrov is another. More penetrating looks into the true nature of the regime and the way that it thought were given in Malcolm Muggeridge's 'Winter In Moscow' or Eugene Lyon's 'Assignment In Utopia'. The stark, murderous cruelty of the Soviet regime was graphically portrayed by Nicoli Tolstoy in 'Stalin's Secret War' and 'The Great Betrayal'. Robert Conquest wrote several books on the subject well worth reading. So what makes 'Gulag Archipelago' different than all of these books? Why is Solzhenitsyn a genius who will live forever?
Solzhenitsyn explores the effect of utopian Marxism on the human spirit; both that of the obvious victims and on the perpetrators as well. He makes no bones about the absolute moral superiority of the Christians who were steadfast in their faith to their fellow prisoners and their guards. He describes, at one point, the effect of sincere belief acting on the brutal and bloodthirsty guards like a cross on a vampire. One old woman laughs at her interrogator, "You're afraid of your boss and all the people who work around you. You're terrified of failure but I know that I'm going to heaven and I'm not afraid." And the oaf backed off!
The first two books don't deal with the Gulag camp system at all. The first one is about arrest, interrogation and trial. Solzhenitsyn holds the Soviet penal code up to a scathing analysis, showing how abandoning the basic concepts of common law lead to complete, unrestrained brutality in the name of The Collective. The second is about transportation into the world of the camps.
The third book is about life in the camps broken down by subject; work, informing, food , children, women, all the various 'waves' of prisoners, life in the Gulag during The War and then the surge of inmates as the war ended and the secret police moved into Eastern Europe.
The fourth book, 'Soul And Barbed Wire', is about redemption. It tells how the camps were, in a way, the most free places in the Soviet Empire. A person could use their complete lack of material possessions and the freedom from the endless lies of a horrifyingly brutal and stupid ideology to become a wise, reverent and good person with a spiritual strength that stands in contrast to the moral squalor around him.
The last three books describe the road out of the Gulag and the death of Stalin.
I read the eight-page obituary in the New York Times. It was completely worthless. The writer didn't speak of Marxism or Socialism or Christianity or anything to do with the philosophical questions Solzhenitsyn raises in all his books about the evils of socialist ideology and in his later years the corrosive evil of modern consumerism; "our mass-living habits" as he described them in 'A World Torn Apart'. The obit-writer didn't go into the cataclysmic effect the books had in the intellectual life of Europe of the 1970's, where Marxist apologists for Soviet aggression and brutality were isolated and the satellite communist parties of the West began to decline. 'Gulag Archipeligo' explained why Marxism is wrong in the moral sense and wrong because it's a failure as a workable system. It's a part of history the Eastern Establishment was and is on the wrong side of. Also, because it questions the sense of the direction our elitists want to take us, Solzhenitsyn's works are very disturbing to the Modern Reader. You can't help but notice that the people who write for the New York Times had their equivalents in Tsarist Russia. The ruling class and the intellectual and artistic elites dabbled in a fashionable neo-Socialism, eventually discrediting and bringing down the corrupt and feeble ancien regime. The happy parlor revolutionaries then became the first victims of a New Order that labeled them as 'class enemies' , scooped them up like rats and herded them into brutal interrogations to break their spirits after which they were dispatched to lives as starving slaves in filthy, freezing prison camps living on the edge of survival. The thread that holds civilization together is called morality and the works produced by Solzhenitsyn are about what happens to a nation which removes that thread. Like the socialists are doing in this country now.
This is a giant. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the greatest writers in human history. Because the theme of good and evil in the human heart is a universal one his work will be read in a thousand years, if books are read at all. Only Orwell, in the Twentieth Century, can be compared to him. The shadow of the moon that ripped across the empty ruins of the Siberian death camps was a omen that one of the titans of human history was about to leave this world.