Party of Assholes
Filed Under Bullshit, Media, Politics | 1 Comment
Last night, long-time CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer waxed hot on modern US politics:
This is just another sign of the incivility and really the vulgarity of modern American campaigns. These campaigns have gotten so ugly and so nasty, that they’re now tarnishing the whole system.
I think it also underlines the coarseness of our culture in this age of social media when it is so easy to say anything about anybody and get no penalty for saying it.
…
I’ve watched a lot of presidents over the years but I can never recall a president stepping off Air Force One, which is itself a symbol of the presidency and American democracy, and being subject to such rudeness.
(Illustration found here).
Of course, Schieffer was discussing the incident between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama on the tarmac involved in what seemed an intense conversation, with Brewer at one point pointing her finger in Obama’s face.
No audio, but the video/picture painted a scene not very cordial.
Brewer said later: “I respect the office of the president,” she said. “I was there to welcome him.”
Also later, Brewer reversed the action, putting a lie on top of a lie, claiming Obama treated her like an asshole: “It is what it is. I proceeded to say that to him, and he chose to walk away from me,” she said Thursday. Asked whether she regarded that as disrespectful, she replied: “Well, I would never have walked away from anybody having a conversation. And, of course, that is what it is. It is disrespectful for me.”
Such total bullshit.
A lie within a falsehood, from real-time to book time:
The argument stemmed from Obama’s feelings about Brewer’s 2011 book, “Scorpions for Breakfast.”
In it, she refers to the president as “patronizing” and claims he lectured to her as if she were a child during a 2010 meeting in the White House.
At the time of the meeting, the White House described their encounter as a “good meeting,” and even Brewer said it was “very cordial.”
But, later, in her book, she accused Obama of being extremely “condescending.”
“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” Brewer said.
Back to Schieffer’s view on political rudeness — he still played the MSM line and didn’t tell the entire truth about the ugly rudeness now apparent in US politics : This vulgar, shithead activity stems from one, and only one, nasty corner of the room — Republicans.
The GOP is the party of the rude, of the sneering asshole remark, of the racist, of the zilch compassion for the ordinary US person, and the absolute rude behavior in all workings in things political.
Since becoming aware of politics via the 1960 election between Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, I’ve never seen such total bullshit spewing from the lips of one group of assholes — and the big, massive problem is that the MSM will not point it out.
Just like John King of CNN and Newt Gingrich’s rebuttal of an opening question about Newt’s tangled martial operations — instead of slapping back at Newt’s lying hypocrisy, King MSMed himself, back stepping.
The GOP has been on this nasty forum awhile.
From Time magazine in September 2009 and the “You lie” incident:
So when Representative Joe Wilson, a little-known Republican and Army Reserve veteran from South Carolina shouted them at the nation’s Commander in Chief on the night of Sept. 9, heads snapped.
The House chamber took a collective gasp.
Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind Obama, tensed and scowled as if she had just witnessed a crime, her disgust unhidden.
Even President Obama, who had just dismissed conservative claims that illegal immigrants would be able to take advantage of health-care reform, was taken aback.
He looked to his left, adjusted his arm, part nervous twitch, part macho posturing, and shot back at Wilson, “That’s not true.”
And there, for a moment, the nation watched two men, elected to lead, call each other the worst thing in politics — dishonorable deceivers.
At the moment Wilson exploded, the outburst seemed like an assault on the President.
Soon afterward, it was clear that it had been a gift.
Wilson had, in an emotional expression, proven Obama’s point: the summer of town halls had been less a discussion than a circus, a forum where misinformation was vindicated by passion, where disrespect was elevated to a virtue.
Now the circus had come inside Congress.
Where it has mutated into a living, breathing creature eating at the US.
The problem is the MSM doesn’t call it out — the GOP gets away with it — even taking the circus out onto an Arizona tarmac.
Action Jackson
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Politics | Leave a Comment
Using Osama bin Laden as a kind of verbal bookends, President Obama jumped on reality with a touch of a man-up pose in his state-of-the-union speech last night, calling on the US to “restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
The 65-minute speech was called “feisty,” and “combative,” and in true political reality, was indeed a well-heeded campaign start-up — Obama’s leaves this morning to start the November ball a-rolling.
(Illustration found here).
Obama even had the flag carried by the US Navy SEAL team that assassinated Osama last year: “Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation room…All that mattered that day was the mission. No-one thought about politics…”
And he pounded it home:
“Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes.
No-one built this country on their own,” Obama said.
“This nation is great because we built it together.
This nation is great because we worked as a team.
This nation is great because we get each others’ backs.
And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great, no mission too hard.”
In this he laid the groundwork for the next eleven months — the real man-up ruler of the US can only be the guy that got Osama bin Laden, and it will surely not work if anyone else takes the reins of power, so vote for me!
And boxed in between the warmongering, Obama slapped at income inequality and the Republicans who have produced the situation — the president proposed big shifts with the US tax system, like for instance, a minimum 30 per cent effective rate on millionaires.
Which prompted Mitch Daniels in response to whine: “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favour with some Americans by castigating others,” Daniels said, according to excerpts of his speech.
In other words — leave the rich alone.
And this tweet via Aljazeera English: “RT @theonlyadult: Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. #obama2012 #sotu”
And as if on cue, early this morning U.S. Navy SEALs popped into Somalia to grab two kidnapped aid workers — an American and a Dane — in a daring helicopter raid reminiscent of the Osama attack.
Before news broke of the rescue, Obama told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “Leon, good job tonight. Good job tonight,” at the State of the Union address.
Election 2012 is gonna be a dandy, action-packed pile of hollerin’ bullshit.
Ugly Is As Ugly Does
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Nowadays, don’t US politics — and politics in general — make you sick to your bowels?
In the midst of most-likely the biggest, nastiest, piece-of-shit economic condition since I-don’t-know-when (common term, ‘not since the Great Depression‘), the political systems on this entire, whacked-out planet has gone way-bonkers.
This morning, for instance, there’s a general strike beginning in Greece, a suck-hole of all things financial, in protest to the latest round of government austerity measures that’s already known to be creating higher taxes, pay cuts and job losses.
The sight to behold:
One striker, university lecturer Yannis Zabetakis, told the BBC: “We are now living in a taxation Armageddon and the economy is dying.
Along with the economy, we are dying.
The austerity measures are not working and our best people are being forced to go abroad.”
The words, ‘austerity measures,’ has become the catch-phrase, linchpin for how Europe is handling the spreading financial crisis, an approach scorned by almost all economists worth their salt — from a couple of Nobel-prize winners.
Paul Krugman echoes the sensibility: Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Austerity is an experiment that has been tried before with the same results,” Stiglitz said today in a speech in Copenhagen. Cutting budgets in low-growth cycles leads to higher unemployment and hampers recovery, he said.
Thus, Europe is f*cked.
So far, in the US the cuts haven’t reached European size, but it’s not that the GOP ain’t trying.
Last night, another Republican blow-hard debate, and once again, these clowns showcased the cruel reality they really don’t have a portent of a clue about how to handle the American economy.
Hot Herman Cain’s infamous ’999′ tax program would make it that 84% of U.S. households would pay more than they do under current tax policies, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonpartisan research group. And the impact would be felt most heavily by the lowest income groups.
And Mitt Romney’s proposal to increase US Navy ships would would add $35 to $40 million to an already dangerous national bottom line, plus Romney doesn’t explain where he’d get the money.
Out of the ass of we-the-people, that’s where.
And if I hear these frackin’ assholes call the rich/wealthy/the 1 percent “job creators” I might just holler, slobber, pound the floor and rend my garments — makes one go crazy.
The horrible part is that President Obama ain’t much better.
From the Washington Post:
By mid-2011, it was clear that Obama had done little to address the nation’s fundamental economic problems.
As had not been the case during previous recoveries, America’s major corporations and banks were investing abroad rather than at home.
Unemployment still exceeded 9 percent.
Almost all the growth the nation had experienced since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009 had gone to profits; wages during that time actually declined.
Their incomes diminished and mired in debt, Americans were unable to purchase enough to get the economy going.
Even if their purchases had increased, a lot of their funds would simply have flowed to the nations that made the things they purchased.
No wonder the US economy is floating down the financial river.
And no wonder the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained so much traction in the last few weeks — US peoples really know what is happening, despite what’s coming out of Obama’s White House.
He’s off campaigning, but it won’t do much good, for him, or this country.
Once again, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture pretty much summed it:
Today’s NYT notes the gloom that has descended over consumers, and they suggest it may be home prices.
I think they are wrong — in my experience, the sort of generalized rage and frustration comes about when people realize the institutions they have trusted have betrayed them.
Humans deal with financial losses in a very specific way — and its not fury.
This is about a fundamental breakdown of the role of government, courts, and leadership in the nation.
And it all traces back to the bailouts of reckless bankers, and the refusal to hold then in any way accountable.
There will not be a fundamental economic recovery until that is recognized.
Hence, it might get even more ugly.
Rage Against The Assholes
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Finance, history | Leave a Comment
Such a great graph — and a great h/t The Big Picture.
(Illustration found here).
I hope the graph is readable — if not, it originates from Spiegel Online at the link just above.
One can readily see George Jr. did more than his fair share, but to all those big-yapped GOPers, the real shit didn’t start until Saint Ronnie opened the floodgates — compared to the nowadays, the debt before Ronnie was pocket change.
Barry Ritholtz rightfully adds: Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.
Maybe…you’d be a lying asshole.
And the mass-popular appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement is reflected in all that debt that no one but the guys/gals marching in the streets will end up paying — US peoples live in a financial climate that’s worse than Ghana.
To make it worse, income in the last few years has become even more way-one-sided.
The bottom 99 percent income level registered a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, but then those incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007.
However, in those same boom years, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.
Pissed off a lot of peoples, huh?
Not only that, the housing bubble bust struck the average American way-more than it did the wealthy: In 2007, the bottom 60 percent of Americans had 65 percent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 percent, in contrast, had just 10 percent.
And home ownership, the bedrock of the Great American Dream (Fantasy) is busted bad — home ownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year, and measured by race, the homeownership gap between whites and blacks is now at its widest since 1960, wiping out more than 40 years of gains.
And this from War in Context and the last near-60 years:
Wall Street has cannibalized itself.
Still hungry, feeling the pangs of their greed, they’ve now come to the government for their daily meal.
And still, without a hint of irony, a spokesman for this ravenous tribe, mounts a soapbox and has the temerity to rail against the evils of socialism.
Turns out, the socialism is for them, the capitalism is for us.
Abbie Hoffman once baited these banksters by throwing cash onto the floor of the NYSE.
To no one’s astonishment, they demonstrated their insatiable greed.
The gluttons couldn’t help themselves, they stopped trading and got on their knees and swept up the free loot.
Title of the post?
“The Dirty Fucking Hippies…Were Right!”
Oh yeah!
Twisted Tales
Filed Under Bullshit, Media, War & Politics | 1 Comment
Another version of an international tall tale popped up this week with the initially alarming news of an official Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant via Mexican drug cartel gunmen.
A tale so convoluted it turns out that David Mamet would have a hard time trying to decipher the plot.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton spoke some double-speak: “The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador? Nobody could make that up, right?” Clinton said shortly after U.S. prosecutors accused two suspected Iranian agents of trying to murder Saudi envoy Adel Al-Jubeir.
Hey, a shitload of people could easily make that up, or at least, orchestrate the proceedings.
(Illustration found here).
One of the best reporters in the field, Patrick Cockburn, says the whole scheme stinks of political bullshit.
In the UK’s Independent:
The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.
The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
…
Could the accusations be true?
The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed.
A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks.
A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
None of this makes sense.
The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran.
It usually operates through proxies.
Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico.
The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident.
There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world.
Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington.
There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.
Holder, of course, is himself under fire for the mega-dumb-ass “Fast and Furious” operation — a supposedly ‘sting’ stunt on Mexican drug cartels with all kinds of weapons, but it went south and the guns ended up at all kinds of bad killings and other deadly, nefarious events.
Darrell Issa, one of the great GOP pricks in Congress and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is after Holder and his justice department for the “Fast and Furious” bullshit and has issued subpoenas for all kinds of documents relating to the operation, and even the AG himself.
Holder responded at the press conference for the Iranian/Mexican drug cartel plot — of course, using Iran to deflect Issa: “[W]hat I want the American people to understand is that in complying with those subpoenas and dealing with that inquiry, that will not detract us from the important business that we here to do at the Justice Department, including matters like the one that we have announced today.”
Yeah, right.
Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com pretty much sums up this crocked Iranian/drug killers story:
This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with.
This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning – because finding and catching real terrorists is much too hard, at least for our Keystone Kops.
Instead of going out and actually, you know, looking for the Bad Guys, and then apprehending them, they lure some unsuspecting Muslim immigrant into a trap, and spring it when the time is right.
Bullshit is the easy route.
And another pile from Afghanistan — officials there have been manipulating stats and any kind of “success” in the Afghan mess has been stretched pretty thin
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:
A new report from the Kandahar-based Afghanistan Analysts Network examines NATO claims of “success” in Afghanistan and massive numbers of slain Taliban “leaders” and finds, as usual, the claims are greatly exaggerated.
The report determined that NATO’s broad definition of “leader” was “so broad as to be meaningless,” noting that they used to word to describe people whose houses were suspected to have been used by insurgents, and that many of the captured “leaders” were ultimately released from detention.
The so-called night raids were the focus of the study, which found that for every “leader” NATO killed, they also killed eight others, including a large number of innocent bystanders.
No wonder US peoples are sick of the US government.
Last month, a CNN/ORC international poll revealed: Only 15 percent of Americans surveyed trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. A year ago — that number was at 25 percent.
So 85 percent think government can’t be trusted, and the odds are growing it might end up at 100 percent.
Not good.
Ex-CIA don’t trust ‘em either.
Robert Baer spent 21 years working as a CIA case officer in the Middle East, and in an interview at The World Today, acknowledge the whole Iranian thing could be bullshit:
Oh absolutely. I mean right now is not the time for Iran to provoke the United States.
We’re on edge already vis-à-vis Iran and it came as a total surprise to me.
I don’t think it’s credible, not the central government, there may be a rogue element behind it.
This doesn’t fit their modus operandi at all.
It’s completely out of character, they’re much better than this.
They wouldn’t be sending money through an American bank, they wouldn’t be going to the cartels in Mexico to do this.
It’s just not the way they work.
I’ve followed them for 30 years and they’re much more careful.
And they always use a proxy between them and the operation, and in this case they didn’t.
I mean it’s the, either they’re shooting themselves in the foot or there’s pieces of the story, I don’t know what they are.
When the whole twisted tale comes out, it’s going to be a zinger.