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Monday, August 09, 2010
The Tattlesnake – Drunk or Stupid Edition
It's time to play the popular home game 'Drunk or Stupid?' wherein contestants watch TV and decide from the public statements and general demeanor of various politicians and pundits if they are such persistent imbibers it has softened their corrupt little minds to the point of retardation, or if they are just naturally dumb as a result of ignorance and flea-bitten ideology. Of course these terms are not mutually exclusive; some of these miscreants are both drunk and stupid, but here we are gauging which mode predominates in their media appearances and what passes for journalistic efforts.
Names were picked at random from a tricorn hat while I was nursing a hangover and appear in no particular order; the obvious idiots – Beck, Limbaugh, et al – were ignored:
Joe Lieberman
Drunk. On MSNBC recently, he kept calling Gen. David Petraeus 'Darren' Petreaus and mispronounced, or Freudian slipped, Rolling Stone as 'Ruling Stain.' Of course, if you're as crooked and backstabbing as Joe, you have to go heavy on the MD-20/20 just to stand shaving every morning.
Sarah Palin
Stupid, in the unique way only ex-beauty pageant contestants can manage. (Google Carrie Prejean and Miss Beverly Hills.) Hubby Todd is likely the drunk in the family, along with all the little Palin photo-ops, and who can blame them?
John Boehner
Drunk, with bells on. Catch the GOP Bonehead late enough in the afternoon and he's liable to gush all sorts of hilarious head-slapping crapola while he stares bewildered and baggy-eyed at the camera, like a dripping-wet old Lothario who's trying to think up a reasonable excuse on the spot for why he was caught skinny-dipping with the neighbor's wife at dawn. No doubt he pours them down as he rests in his coff – uh -- tanning bed every morning. There are suspicions he was born with the face he has now and had to be hidden in the attic until his body caught up to his weathered mug, but that's just the loosest of rumors, no doubt spread by one of his many detractors.
Mitch McConnell
Drunk, on waning power. Yet another failure of modern plastic surgery, at least that form practiced in the hills of Kentucky. McConnell found the recipe for making lemons out of lemonade, and then, obviously, ate them all in one sitting. His wrinkles are embarrassed to be seen with his archaic ideas these days. Rand Paul, Mitch, Rand Paul…
Chris Matthews
Drunk, with an attractive excess of saliva and a penchant for spitting when he's excited – and he's usually excited about something. (Guests who sit across the table from him on his show are rumored to be armed with ample supplies of Kleenex and zinc cough drops.) He also has the drunk's penchant for mispronouncing a word and then insisting his mistake is the correct pronunciation. ('Chee-knee' for Cheney, for instance.) After embarrassingly blubbering over the greatness of Junior Bush in the early part of the twenty-first century ("Americans just love this guy!"), and verbally ass-grabbing various young women on his show, as well as showing a streak of mean for Hillary Clinton that is inexplicable, he's now steered to the left in order to boost his ratings, aping the success of Keith Olbermann, but his past follows him like the iron shackles that should be encircling the legs of the now literally heartless Dick Chee-knee.
David Gregory
Stupid. He's an affable, ambitious yuppie who walks around with a permanently moistened index finger stuck in the air, or somewhere. 'Dave' thinks he's posing a tough question when he asks John McCain to give his 'real' opinion of Sarah Palin. He's perfect for NBC's Sunday morning nod to subtle parody, 'Meet the Press,' but I detect a certain jealously of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert since they are allowed to present actual news segments more often than Gregory, and they don't have to smooch pampered Washington posteriors to keep their jobs.
Candy Crowley
Stupid, but just barely, as it's rumored she can put a double shot of 100-proof Georgia moonshine between her ample breasts and drink it without spilling a drop while doing a nude hula dance. Unfortunately, she has failed to display this prodigious talent in front of CNN's cameras, preferring to bore her audience to tears with her tedious 'Republican-pretending-to-be-liberal' act. Candy is the Judy "What will we – I mean the Republicans -- do to win New Hampshire?" Woodruff of her generation.
George 'Eff' Will
Drunk as a lord. Take him out to the ball game but make sure you have enough sturdy lifters to carry him home. Even stupidity couldn't possibly explain some of his well-worded but gaseous and error-laden opinion pieces. The Doric columns of the Capitol building could be crumbling to dust before his eyes and 'Mr. Will' (as his friends call him) would write a column the next day praising the lasting architecture of Washington. A devoted acolyte of Ronald Reagan, George Eff never let 'The Gipper's' sunny geriatric optimism infect him; he did, however, apparently contract Conservative Alzheimer's from his late friend, a disease that has spread like a plague throughout the Republican Party. The symptoms are an inability to admit mistakes, a total disregard for historical fact, a whooshing sound in the ears from air continually filling a vacuum, and the necrophiliac's tendency to romantically embrace ideological corpses.
Sharron Angle
Drunk, on 'Situational Lemonade' and the Lawd. It's tempting to dismiss her as merely dumb, but that discounts the self-righteous zeal with which she has pursued her particular form of delusional right-wing fringe insanity. For that kind of breath-taking goofiness, you need more than just stupidity, you need God working with you in one of his many ethereal jokes. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses; in that regard, Sharron is a bust-out junkie without a hope of redemption.
David Broder
Not merely drunk, but embalmed. The Rufus T. Firefly 'Dean' of the Washington Press Gang hasn't had an opinion that makes any sense in years, but he forges on, wallowing hog-like in alcohol-induced dementia while his snide colleagues cheer him on. The Old Fudd not only sees pink elephants, he celebrates them in print and tries to inveigle his readers into stumbling with him down Wet Brain Lane. Apparently the Washington Post has been afraid to tell him he's been dead for a generation, at least as far as any political or cultural relevance is concerned.
Rand Paul
A board-certified drunk, but nearly as stupid. Only a dedicated souse could have this many half-baked opinions and his single-minded dedication to terrible ideas of the past that have proved unworkable. Besides, he hangs out at a plush Kentucky country club and apparently doesn't play much golf. There is only one other thing white people who frequent country clubs do, and it's usually shaken not stirred with a hint of vermouth and consumed by the pitcher. Remember, Rand, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Wolf Blitzer
So drunk you could get snockered sucking on his beard. The Blitzkrieg's premier contribution to modern journalism – that is to say, advertising the Empire -- is knowing from US intelligence sources, prior to the Iraq invasion, that Saddam Hussein had no WMD (he admitted it on a small public radio station in D.C.), yet withholding that little nugget from his CNN audience and obediently flogging WMD fear on behalf his pals in the Bush-Cheney War Room. His other offenses against reason and veracity are too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say that he's now probably in the Susan Powter range of daily consumption, necessary to rinse the bitter taste of corporate swill out of one's mouth, and the image of the elephant feces-spattered circus clown from one's mind.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Names were picked at random from a tricorn hat while I was nursing a hangover and appear in no particular order; the obvious idiots – Beck, Limbaugh, et al – were ignored:
Joe Lieberman
Drunk. On MSNBC recently, he kept calling Gen. David Petraeus 'Darren' Petreaus and mispronounced, or Freudian slipped, Rolling Stone as 'Ruling Stain.' Of course, if you're as crooked and backstabbing as Joe, you have to go heavy on the MD-20/20 just to stand shaving every morning.
Sarah Palin
Stupid, in the unique way only ex-beauty pageant contestants can manage. (Google Carrie Prejean and Miss Beverly Hills.) Hubby Todd is likely the drunk in the family, along with all the little Palin photo-ops, and who can blame them?
John Boehner
Drunk, with bells on. Catch the GOP Bonehead late enough in the afternoon and he's liable to gush all sorts of hilarious head-slapping crapola while he stares bewildered and baggy-eyed at the camera, like a dripping-wet old Lothario who's trying to think up a reasonable excuse on the spot for why he was caught skinny-dipping with the neighbor's wife at dawn. No doubt he pours them down as he rests in his coff – uh -- tanning bed every morning. There are suspicions he was born with the face he has now and had to be hidden in the attic until his body caught up to his weathered mug, but that's just the loosest of rumors, no doubt spread by one of his many detractors.
Mitch McConnell
Drunk, on waning power. Yet another failure of modern plastic surgery, at least that form practiced in the hills of Kentucky. McConnell found the recipe for making lemons out of lemonade, and then, obviously, ate them all in one sitting. His wrinkles are embarrassed to be seen with his archaic ideas these days. Rand Paul, Mitch, Rand Paul…
Chris Matthews
Drunk, with an attractive excess of saliva and a penchant for spitting when he's excited – and he's usually excited about something. (Guests who sit across the table from him on his show are rumored to be armed with ample supplies of Kleenex and zinc cough drops.) He also has the drunk's penchant for mispronouncing a word and then insisting his mistake is the correct pronunciation. ('Chee-knee' for Cheney, for instance.) After embarrassingly blubbering over the greatness of Junior Bush in the early part of the twenty-first century ("Americans just love this guy!"), and verbally ass-grabbing various young women on his show, as well as showing a streak of mean for Hillary Clinton that is inexplicable, he's now steered to the left in order to boost his ratings, aping the success of Keith Olbermann, but his past follows him like the iron shackles that should be encircling the legs of the now literally heartless Dick Chee-knee.
David Gregory
Stupid. He's an affable, ambitious yuppie who walks around with a permanently moistened index finger stuck in the air, or somewhere. 'Dave' thinks he's posing a tough question when he asks John McCain to give his 'real' opinion of Sarah Palin. He's perfect for NBC's Sunday morning nod to subtle parody, 'Meet the Press,' but I detect a certain jealously of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert since they are allowed to present actual news segments more often than Gregory, and they don't have to smooch pampered Washington posteriors to keep their jobs.
Candy Crowley
Stupid, but just barely, as it's rumored she can put a double shot of 100-proof Georgia moonshine between her ample breasts and drink it without spilling a drop while doing a nude hula dance. Unfortunately, she has failed to display this prodigious talent in front of CNN's cameras, preferring to bore her audience to tears with her tedious 'Republican-pretending-to-be-liberal' act. Candy is the Judy "What will we – I mean the Republicans -- do to win New Hampshire?" Woodruff of her generation.
George 'Eff' Will
Drunk as a lord. Take him out to the ball game but make sure you have enough sturdy lifters to carry him home. Even stupidity couldn't possibly explain some of his well-worded but gaseous and error-laden opinion pieces. The Doric columns of the Capitol building could be crumbling to dust before his eyes and 'Mr. Will' (as his friends call him) would write a column the next day praising the lasting architecture of Washington. A devoted acolyte of Ronald Reagan, George Eff never let 'The Gipper's' sunny geriatric optimism infect him; he did, however, apparently contract Conservative Alzheimer's from his late friend, a disease that has spread like a plague throughout the Republican Party. The symptoms are an inability to admit mistakes, a total disregard for historical fact, a whooshing sound in the ears from air continually filling a vacuum, and the necrophiliac's tendency to romantically embrace ideological corpses.
Sharron Angle
Drunk, on 'Situational Lemonade' and the Lawd. It's tempting to dismiss her as merely dumb, but that discounts the self-righteous zeal with which she has pursued her particular form of delusional right-wing fringe insanity. For that kind of breath-taking goofiness, you need more than just stupidity, you need God working with you in one of his many ethereal jokes. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses; in that regard, Sharron is a bust-out junkie without a hope of redemption.
David Broder
Not merely drunk, but embalmed. The Rufus T. Firefly 'Dean' of the Washington Press Gang hasn't had an opinion that makes any sense in years, but he forges on, wallowing hog-like in alcohol-induced dementia while his snide colleagues cheer him on. The Old Fudd not only sees pink elephants, he celebrates them in print and tries to inveigle his readers into stumbling with him down Wet Brain Lane. Apparently the Washington Post has been afraid to tell him he's been dead for a generation, at least as far as any political or cultural relevance is concerned.
Rand Paul
A board-certified drunk, but nearly as stupid. Only a dedicated souse could have this many half-baked opinions and his single-minded dedication to terrible ideas of the past that have proved unworkable. Besides, he hangs out at a plush Kentucky country club and apparently doesn't play much golf. There is only one other thing white people who frequent country clubs do, and it's usually shaken not stirred with a hint of vermouth and consumed by the pitcher. Remember, Rand, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Wolf Blitzer
So drunk you could get snockered sucking on his beard. The Blitzkrieg's premier contribution to modern journalism – that is to say, advertising the Empire -- is knowing from US intelligence sources, prior to the Iraq invasion, that Saddam Hussein had no WMD (he admitted it on a small public radio station in D.C.), yet withholding that little nugget from his CNN audience and obediently flogging WMD fear on behalf his pals in the Bush-Cheney War Room. His other offenses against reason and veracity are too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say that he's now probably in the Susan Powter range of daily consumption, necessary to rinse the bitter taste of corporate swill out of one's mouth, and the image of the elephant feces-spattered circus clown from one's mind.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
The Tattlesnake – Who's Watching the Watchers? Edition
Or, in the Maxine Waters case, investigating the investigators.
Rep. Maxine Waters' (D-CA) three ethics charges, so far as I've read, involved talking to Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in 2008, asking him to try and make sure a bank that helps poor people and women, OneUnited, got its fair share of the bailout money. True, her husband was previously on the bank's board, and he retained stock at the time, but she didn't threaten or in any way coerce Paulson improperly – she just asked. If this is the hoary ethics violations the Big Media is getting so hot-and-bothered about, then they'd better start charging nearly every member of Congress with a similar lapse of ethics, because a whole passel of Republicans and Dems did the same thing. Waters herself has stated: "The record will clearly show that in advocating on behalf of minority banks, neither my office nor I benefited in any way, engaged in improper action or influenced anyone."
It's worth noting that progressive Democrat Waters sits on the House Financial Services Committee that drafted get-tough legislation on banks and pushed for strong consumer protection from these miscreants. At least we know the Big Banksters would definitely not be sorry to see her go.
It's interesting that of eight investigations or charges made by the House 'independent' ethics committee, all of them are against members of the Democratic Black Caucus. As Eugene Robinson said the other night, the notion that only black Democrats would be involved in unethical conduct is statistically astronomical.
It's also interesting that one of the senior members of this 'independent' House ethics committee is co-chair Porter J. Goss, former rabid in-the-tank Bushite Congressman and, in Congress and as head of the CIA, a man who had considerable ethics problems himself.
Some of Porter Goss' 'greatest hits':
-- As head of the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA employee Goss said he could find no wrongdoing in leaking covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media that warranted a Congressional investigation. He 'joked' if you could find him a "blue dress with some DNA" he'd open an investigation into who in the Bush Administration leaked her name; short of that, he apparently didn't care.
-- On illegal torture: "March 18, 2005, Reuters reported that Porter Goss 'defended his spy agency's current interrogation practices but could not say all methods used as recently as last December conformed to U.S. law.'" And then did nothing to ensure future conduct conformed to U.S. law.
-- When Bush-appointee Goss took over the CIA in September 2004, bringing with him his partisan Bush team from Congress, veteran CIA employees with a combined 300 years of intelligence experience resigned or were forced out after his installation. The weakened CIA under Goss then went into "free fall" according to senior House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jane Harman. In other words, Goss was willing to sacrifice the CIA's mission of non-partisan collection and processing of intelligence to protect America to serve his Republican political agenda.
-- On May 5, 2006, Goss resigned under a cloud as Director of the CIA after his handpicked man Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's Hookergate scandal came to light. Through Foggo, Goss was also connected to disgraced Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham who admitted to and apologized for taking bribes from defense contractors.
"'Something happened,' neo-conservative magazine editor William Kristol said on Fox News this afternoon. 'It's going to be a bad few days. We're going to discover something ... It will be something not good for the Bush Administration.' Fox News actually got a phone call from a 'top White House official' during Kristol's damning comments, and Kristol was cut off so Bush mouthpiece Chris Wallace could say the Goss resignation is just a harmless part of the 'White House shakeup.'"
-- Sploid, by way of MediaCynic.com, commenting the day Goss resigned.
Also let's keep in mind that Goss' honesty was vouchsafed by no less than Bush confabulator and White House flack Dan Bartlett: "This man has impeccable integrity." If Bartlett says it, we can pretty much conclude the exact opposite is true – it's like having one's veracity on the Iraq invasion endorsed by Dick Cheney.
Gee, I wonder if Maxine Waters had refused to investigate evidence of treason in the White House, turned a blind eye to illegal torture, degraded the CIA's intelligence-gathering capabilities due to political partisanship, and was connected to a major bribery scandal which caused a Congressman to quit in disgrace along with senior CIA officials she'd hired, if she would be eligible to sit on any future House ethics committees?
As Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic DC delegate to Congress, told Ed Schultz on Tuesday, these are allegations, not convictions, and Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and anyone else charged with ethics violations have the right to defend themselves in a public hearing rather than resign and appear guilty.
In the meantime, the questions remain: Who would appoint a flagrant Bush hack like Goss to a supposedly independent ethics panel and, most importantly, who's watching the watchers here?
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Rep. Maxine Waters' (D-CA) three ethics charges, so far as I've read, involved talking to Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in 2008, asking him to try and make sure a bank that helps poor people and women, OneUnited, got its fair share of the bailout money. True, her husband was previously on the bank's board, and he retained stock at the time, but she didn't threaten or in any way coerce Paulson improperly – she just asked. If this is the hoary ethics violations the Big Media is getting so hot-and-bothered about, then they'd better start charging nearly every member of Congress with a similar lapse of ethics, because a whole passel of Republicans and Dems did the same thing. Waters herself has stated: "The record will clearly show that in advocating on behalf of minority banks, neither my office nor I benefited in any way, engaged in improper action or influenced anyone."
It's worth noting that progressive Democrat Waters sits on the House Financial Services Committee that drafted get-tough legislation on banks and pushed for strong consumer protection from these miscreants. At least we know the Big Banksters would definitely not be sorry to see her go.
It's interesting that of eight investigations or charges made by the House 'independent' ethics committee, all of them are against members of the Democratic Black Caucus. As Eugene Robinson said the other night, the notion that only black Democrats would be involved in unethical conduct is statistically astronomical.
It's also interesting that one of the senior members of this 'independent' House ethics committee is co-chair Porter J. Goss, former rabid in-the-tank Bushite Congressman and, in Congress and as head of the CIA, a man who had considerable ethics problems himself.
Some of Porter Goss' 'greatest hits':
-- As head of the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA employee Goss said he could find no wrongdoing in leaking covert CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media that warranted a Congressional investigation. He 'joked' if you could find him a "blue dress with some DNA" he'd open an investigation into who in the Bush Administration leaked her name; short of that, he apparently didn't care.
-- On illegal torture: "March 18, 2005, Reuters reported that Porter Goss 'defended his spy agency's current interrogation practices but could not say all methods used as recently as last December conformed to U.S. law.'" And then did nothing to ensure future conduct conformed to U.S. law.
-- When Bush-appointee Goss took over the CIA in September 2004, bringing with him his partisan Bush team from Congress, veteran CIA employees with a combined 300 years of intelligence experience resigned or were forced out after his installation. The weakened CIA under Goss then went into "free fall" according to senior House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jane Harman. In other words, Goss was willing to sacrifice the CIA's mission of non-partisan collection and processing of intelligence to protect America to serve his Republican political agenda.
-- On May 5, 2006, Goss resigned under a cloud as Director of the CIA after his handpicked man Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's Hookergate scandal came to light. Through Foggo, Goss was also connected to disgraced Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham who admitted to and apologized for taking bribes from defense contractors.
"'Something happened,' neo-conservative magazine editor William Kristol said on Fox News this afternoon. 'It's going to be a bad few days. We're going to discover something ... It will be something not good for the Bush Administration.' Fox News actually got a phone call from a 'top White House official' during Kristol's damning comments, and Kristol was cut off so Bush mouthpiece Chris Wallace could say the Goss resignation is just a harmless part of the 'White House shakeup.'"
-- Sploid, by way of MediaCynic.com, commenting the day Goss resigned.
Also let's keep in mind that Goss' honesty was vouchsafed by no less than Bush confabulator and White House flack Dan Bartlett: "This man has impeccable integrity." If Bartlett says it, we can pretty much conclude the exact opposite is true – it's like having one's veracity on the Iraq invasion endorsed by Dick Cheney.
Gee, I wonder if Maxine Waters had refused to investigate evidence of treason in the White House, turned a blind eye to illegal torture, degraded the CIA's intelligence-gathering capabilities due to political partisanship, and was connected to a major bribery scandal which caused a Congressman to quit in disgrace along with senior CIA officials she'd hired, if she would be eligible to sit on any future House ethics committees?
As Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic DC delegate to Congress, told Ed Schultz on Tuesday, these are allegations, not convictions, and Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and anyone else charged with ethics violations have the right to defend themselves in a public hearing rather than resign and appear guilty.
In the meantime, the questions remain: Who would appoint a flagrant Bush hack like Goss to a supposedly independent ethics panel and, most importantly, who's watching the watchers here?
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
The National Enflatulator – With Immigration, the GOP Flogs Another Election-Year Distraction
Left click on image to enlarge.Sunday, August 01, 2010
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