State of the Outrage
Because Barbara Bush taught him to "use your words, George," her son the president, rather than actually mooning some Senate Democrats at the joint session of Congress on Monday night as he would like to do, will instead call them terrorist-lovers for refusing to give retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms in the FISA bill, and he will call them partisan obstructionists for wanting to extend unemployment benefits in the economic stimulus bill now pending.
Because the political media's machismo depends on admiring cynicism as realpolitik, when the Clintons claim victory in the Florida primary this Tuesday, the mandarins will pronounce it a brilliant chess move, rather than revealing it as a desperation-borne contempt for the rules of the nomination game they had previously agreed to, and as condescension toward those who still naively care about playing by them.
Because there is no accountability in punditry -- outside, that is, of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann -- Rudy Giuliani's flameout in Florida, like Fred Thompson's before him in South Carolina, will occasion no reminders and no regrets for the jock-sniffing musk-addled crushes once harbored toward them by the Chris Matthewses and Bill Kristols of the political locker room.
Because there is nothing like necrophilia and hagiography to prolong our national addiction to historical amnesia, this week's Republican debate at the Reagan Library will prompt no admission that the sub-prime meltdown now dragging Americans into a painful recession, except for the nouveau gazillionaires insulated from it, is the godchild of the Reagan religion of faith-based deregulation, fundamentalist market worship, and a massive government-engineered transfer of wealth from the middle to the top.
Because "the surge is working" -- because, that is, of the indefinitely long presence of more than 150,000 American troops in Iraq, paid for by trillions of dollars that even the Bush administration no longer has the nerve to put in its budget, combined with the absence of any meaningful progress toward the administration's own benchmarks for political success, coupled with the media's inability to cover the war as anything except the kind of occasional traffic fatality story found on local TV news -- a presidential campaign that might have been a referendum on Republican deceit and incompetence, and a frank conversation about America's real security interests in the world, will instead be a moronic barrage of empty slogans about change.
And because the Framers were unable to anticipate the genius at gaming the Constitution possessed by the power-mad viceroys of a future King George named Cheney and Rove, nor could the Founders conceive of a corporate press hooked on revenue-generating junk and intimidated into abandoning its role as Fourth Estate, the year of onanistic Legacy coverage and good-poodle bipartisanship that will be kicked off this week by the State of the Union address will be left unspoiled by erased emails, unmarred by unenforced contempt citations, unsullied by unacknowledged high crimes and demeanors, and unblemished by disgraces that cannot be rectified by pardons for the past and pay packages for the future.
But hey, it's gonna be a great Super Bowl, Romney sure is good-looking, I wonder what kind of cake Jenna and Henry pick, Joe Lieberman really understands how to reach across the aisle, and did you know Obama's middle name is Saddam?
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
I've got nothing.
I think this State of the Union Address will be one for the ages. I will record it, because it will be so memorable. Georgie wil come up with some real lollapaloozers for his last one. I just hope my TV survives. Oh, I forgot, we're getting some economic stimulus, so I can always buy a new one, probably from some country that uses slave labor to make it or owns a large chunk of our economy...
"Because "the surge is working" -"
The reality is that violence is down because we're doing business with the militia - like Sadr - another in a long series of pacts with devils.
The reduction in violence has nothing to do with the escalation. We'll pay for it later, as we do with everything.
Wow,
Amazing, you can hit right handed or left handed pitching with equal facility.
I'm glad I don't have to shag balls when you're at the plate.
Thanks Marty
Bob Higgins
http://worldwide-sawdust.com
Y'all have missed the obvious solution:
---
NewJeeZus (tm) will appear at the State of the Union address. He'll moon the Democrats HimSelf, then non-partisanly pass out $100,000,000 to each Congressperson present, allowing the money to trickle down to those who need it. Afterwards, He'll appoint JeeZusJournalists (tm) to spread the New Word about how we're all going to be A-OK as long as we stay in Iraq and don't go green. He'll Personally ensure passage of a new FISA bill that encourages telecoms to install wiretaps with every telephone, and He'll send out a mass e-mail telling people that they are now part of an e-mail reading / tracking program, and all they have to do to stay in it is vote Republican.
=The surge is working because Al Sadar is being paid off with more of our tax dollars. ...after Time Magazine put him on the cover as public enemy #1.
==They NEVER put the war in the budget in the first place. Every year it's been Enron Style off ballance sheet accounting (Mr. Bush and the Republicans' largest contributor).
We've come a long way from the waste and fraud of the $1,800 Reagan/Bush Toilet seats. Now we have 180,000 vendors in Iraq, while money is siphoned from public education, and 800 research labs have moved to China.
As for deceptive advertising about a defective product: We have Obama avoiding to critisize Republicans at all cost (some of them have come up and whispered to him(?) while he claims that unlike President Clinton, Reagan and his party "defied the conventional wisdom...because the country was ready for it"
The AUDACITY to equate Hillary with Bush. And while claiming that we "need a different kind of politics" uses Republican Talking Point and Frank Lunz's book to run his campaign.
And since every tragedy we endure has been predictable and a torure to watch unforld, at the hands of Republican ideology, one wonders which conventional wisdom Obama believes Republicans defied.
In the last week every station overwhelmingly taught us that Bill and Hillary Clinton are racists.
And as he obsessed on this for hours while South Carolina was voting, Tim Russert
proved this saying the Clinton Campaign called Obama a "Young eloquent leader with a Base in South Carolina" How racist can you get!
Romney had a Cuban shirts on today.
Think Florida Democratic voters understand why they are dissed? Many of the Dems in Michigan, who did not vote for Romney, were pissed and claimed to be leaving the party
Just cause someone's a Democrat doesn't mean they're not brainwashed of have amnesia about the 90s.
And think John Kerry minds that McCain is using his theme song?
The Republicans are campaigning on promises to "fix" that which they screwed up. Why is it that anytime a Republican gets elected President three things follow: economic recession, war, corruption. So the four clowns will get up in their circle-jerk, otherwise known as a debate, and claim to have the remedy for the mess we're in, except the fine print says it's just more of the same steps that led us to the mess we're in. It's like the Mad Hatter's tea party: "Have some tea, there isn't any tea!" Would be incredibly funny if not so tragic.
I have a quote that I would like to share that seems to sum up the past 7 years and if we are not careful, it just might sum up the next 5 years...be it a Democrat or (Lord forbid!) a Republican that gets elected.
"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
unfortunately, this was no exaggeration.
There was a teeny-weeney article in my AZ paper reporting how Mississippi's plan to divert $600 million in hurricane housing-relief funds to a port expansion project won federal approval, despite tht fact that needs of THOUSANDS of people displaced by
Katrina have not been met.
The port expansion plan will use the LAST of the money. Meanwhile, 30,000 still live in
FEMA trailers. Their rational for the diversion is that expansion may fuel the economy and create 1,300 jobs in the next 10 yrs. Please let me know why, if the port needs expanding and be good for business why won't it be
paid for by businesses and not on the backs of American Citizens who have suffered so much for the past 2 1/2 yrs!?
There is so much corruption and thievery its breathtaking. I'm hoping Olbermann will shed some light on the subject.
Marty,
Remember what Jack Nicholson said. "The truth? You can't stand the truth!" Or, near enough. If anyone in Washington, D.C. had the nerve to tell the truth about the perfidy of George W. Bush and the people with which he surrounds himself--the major media wouldn't cover it, and Jon Stewart and Keith Olberman would just say, "That's what we've been telling you all along." But none of that's going to happen, because as a people... we can't STAND the truth!
Dear Professor Kaplan,
Darn, you sure took me on a roller-coaster ride, I did not know to laugh at your prose or cry over the poignancy of what you pointed out.
Excellent and quite colorful essay/post as is usual. Thanks, Agape.
Right on, Marty.
The State of the Union...
A sad state, indeed.
Let's see how McReagan they can spin it.
"Former Indonesian President Suharto, the U.S. Cold War ally who led one of the 20th century's most brutal dictatorships over 32 years that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86."
This comment is straight out of Yahoo News today. Need I say more about the disconnects of the American electorate and our nation's foreign policy? A million browns here, a million yellows there. It just doesn't mean anything when your sitting in McDonald's, having your Egg McMuffin and a "start your day right" cup of coffee.
The republican press is doing exactly what it wants to do..control the message. They have produced out of thin air that Clinton is a racist although he has ALWAYS been for minorities his entire life.They have chosen our nominees and we sadly think we live in a Democracy...WAKE UP AMERICA.please
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
