The Tattlesnake – Clueless Wall Street Indulges in the Self-Delusion of the Wealthy Edition

… and it's nothing new.

As 2011 settles in, some things haven't changed, such as the investment bank aristocracy of Wall Street, already wallowing in obscenely large salaries, apparently believing they deserve bonuses for continuing to peddle worthless paper and hoodwinking their own customers. This addled belief, however, is nothing new.

Having misspent a part of my youth as an advertising director for a publishing company, I once had an opportunity to encounter some wealthy people at business lunches and dinners, and noticed a few habits of hypocritical thinking they had in common:

-- To a man -- and they were all men -- they believed, even the silver-spoon-born trust fund scions and coddled bosses sons, that they were 'self-made' and everything they had was attained by their own hard work, even if their wealth was derived mostly from dividend income, the result of a long-dead relative picking the right investments or starting a successful business.

-- Speaking of hard work, when these VIPs came in at 10:am to check the mail and sign a few letters, left for a two-hour lunch at 12:30, and then went golfing for the rest of the afternoon, leaving their overworked and underpaid secretaries to run the place, they would still insist that they had 'worked hard' that day.

-- Whatever their educational institution, Yale or Harvard or a state university, they all thought they graduated because they 'studied hard' and 'put their noses to the grindstone' even though some would laughingly brag, after a few too many martinis, about how they had hired poor 'scholarship brainiacs' or 'eggheads' to teach them how to cheat on their tests.

-- While every one of them abhorred any publicly-funded program that enabled poor kids to get a higher education, and especially affirmative action, they were blind to their own advantages, beyond just being born white. If Uncle Joe picked up the phone to make sure they got into the 'right' college, or Daddy was once a student and fast-tracked their 'legacy' acceptance into a university, that was fine -- just the way the world worked. Of course, left unsaid was how they would have been able to make their way through college if such financially-strapped 'scholarship brainiacs' were not there to help them cheat, just one of many mental cul-de-sacs that these sons of privilege passed by quickly, lest they get hung on their own conundrum.

-- Although all of them supported the war in Vietnam, none of them came close to serving in it. They either received school draft deferments like Dick Cheney; or, like Rush Limbaugh, had a note from the family doctor describing some dread condition that made them militarily unfit, but somehow didn't interfere with their golf game; or had a family-friend Congressman intervene to keep them out; or, like Junior Bush, had Daddy pull a few strings to get them easy 'Weekend Warrior' duty in the National Guard. Privately, they had little regard or compassion for the troops in the field; in fact, they believed them stupid and that the grunts should show gratitude for the opportunity that military service provided to raise their lowly selves out of the ghetto or trailer park. Should they die or be maimed for life during this process of elevation – well, that's just the price they pay for not having the foresight to be born in better circumstances.

-- They all hated paying taxes, the hatred much more intense than that of those lower on the income ladder. Like Leona Helmsley, they thought taxes were fine -- for the 'little people.' A couple of them were said to spend more money on lawyers and accountants to avoid paying taxes than the amount they owed in taxes. But they didn't mind one bit freeloading off poorer folks by using roads, highways, airports, parks, and other public facilities paid for by the taxes of the non-rich; and they took it for granted their class would receive preferential treatment from cops and firefighters they didn't want to pay taxes to support. I won't even get into the courts, prosecutors, and military all arrayed to protect their precious property that they also didn't want to pay for -- suffice it to say that they didn't believe in any taxes for themselves, even for those things that benefited them greatly. It would be a mistake to take this as any sort of reasonable consideration on the subject of taxes; it is not – it's a nearly-hysterical emotional reaction born of mindless greed.

That's all I can recall at the moment, but the one thread running through all of it is the massive degree of self-delusion practiced by those with wealth. It's scary enough when they know they're lying to make a buck; it's pathologically dangerous when they buy into their own fantasies about themselves as have, it seems, the current crop of Wall Street scoundrels. In this particular case, it won't end until Richie Rich, ensconced in an office at Goldman Sachs, dreaming up the next fraudulent financial instrument for his firm to foist on the gullible public, hits bottom – an inevitability since they refuse to learn from their mistakes -- and seeks another 'loan' from the contemptible 'little people' taxpayers via the federal Big Daddy and, to mix metaphors, the cupboard is bare.

Then these Masters of the Universe will learn the tough lesson the cosseted Junior Bush as president had to endure: there are times when even Big Daddy can't save you from the hard consequences of acting like a spoiled brat.

© 2011 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

Alternative Titles for Bush's Book – Part Two

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The Tattlesnake – Dick Cheney Doesn't Have a Pulse Edition

Rachel Maddow reported July 14th that five-heart-attacks-since-he-was-37 Dick Cheney is hanging on by a thread following complete heart failure, kept alive only by a machine called a LVAD resting externally on his belly that keeps his blood moving. Ironically, because an external machine is circulating his blood rather than his damaged heart, Cheney apparently has no pulse, not that I would have sworn he had one before. Although I wouldn't wish death on any human being (leave that to the kill-crazy wingnuts; I'd rather see him in jail), and Deadeye Dick marginally qualifies in that category, this would seem to be close to the end of the line for the Torture Boy – the doctors can do no more except a full heart transplant and he's physically in such bad shape he likely couldn't survive the operation. (Although the sci-fi plot possibilities of Cheney receiving the heart of, say, a peaceful Buddhist monk and publicly renouncing his past self is nearly irresistible. "I've done wrong and now I must pay the price! President Obama, put me in prison for war crimes – waterboard me, I insist! And I'm donating all of my millions in wealth to Green Peace! Liz, stop crying like that!")

If he goes, are we going to be subjected to the full-pomp, days-long state funeral, or will every news outlet but Fox let him pass with just a brief mention and obit? I also wonder if, in his final moments in this realm, a fearful-of-judgment Cheney will pull a Lee Atwater and ask forgiveness for his past crimes and deceptions?

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

GOP is Still Dick Cheney's Doomed Grand Oil Party

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The Tattlesnake – It's McChrystal Clear: The General is Running for President Edition

By publicly making derogatory comments about his superiors in the chain of command – President Obama, VP Biden, Defense Secretary Gates, White House National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones -- US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal has committed an act of rank insubordination, and I think he did it intentionally.

Subsequent apologies for his loose-lipped Rolling Stone interview notwithstanding, McChrystal knows Obama must, in order to maintain what little credibility he has with the military as commander-in-chief, relieve McChrystal of his command and he should break him in rank down to a Colonel or, at least, Brigadier General, but, considering Obama's reticence in such matters, he likely won't do the latter.

McChrystal well knows that if he wants to criticize his superiors there is a legitimate and honorable way to do so – resign his commission and fire away as a civilian. Instead, the wily general has manufactured a situation wherein Obama must relieve him or lose all respect with the military establishment and a good portion of the public, as well.

Why would McChrystal set up such a situation? The easiest answer is that he's planning on running for president as a Republican in 2012 and he can use it to a) play the aggrieved victim of a president and administration that doesn't know what it's doing in the Middle East; and b) insulate himself from charges of incompetence when we are forced out of Afghanistan. "I told the president the strategy he was pursuing to defeat the Taliban was naïve and wrong and that I had a better plan. This so angered him he found a flimsy reason to dismiss me."

This is the line I believe McChrystal will employ following his resignation after Obama has relieved him of his command. Such criticism dovetails nicely with the GOP's probable angle of attack on Obama in 2012 – arrogant, incompetent, headstrong, vengeful, naïve – and McChrystal will go to the head of the class of potential presidential candidates in a so far thin field for the Republicans -- Romney's no barn-burner; Palin's a sour joke; Gingrich is stuck in the mud of 1994; Pawlenty's a calamitous bore, and no one else is really on the radar.

Of course, the GOP establishment would welcome McChrystal with open arms as the second coming of Dwight Eisenhower, but even the various Teabaggers, quasi-Libertarians and Christian zealots who are now the party's foundation would most likely not much contest nominating a 'military hero' such as the general. His campaign would also provide some lengthy (and stable) coattails for other Republicans to ride, a surcease from the almost daily factional friction of a minority party in turmoil.

The question: Will former Pentagon black-ops chief McChrystal's new strategy to gain the White House work any better than did his plans to tame Afghanistan?

The answer: For a man as arrogant, incompetent, headstrong, vengeful, and naïve on public matters as Stanley McChrystal -- who also, according to Rolling Stone, thinks Bud Light Lime is a great beer – is a resounding no.

Read more:

"The Runaway General"
-- Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone, June 8-22, 2010.

Stanley A. McChrystal's Wikipedia bio.

"New Afghanistan Commander Ran Secret 'Executive Assassination Ring' Under Cheney"
-- Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch.com, May 21, 2009, by way of The Huffington Post.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The End of Oilzilla?

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BeePeeMan Tony Hayward Reveals His True Identity!

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It's Tony Hayward – AKA The Beepeeman!

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BP's Captain Tarball to the Rescue!

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Scenes We'll Never See: Dick Cheney's Confessions

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The Impossible Cheney Dream?

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The Party of Hell, No?

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What Should Have Happened to Cheney in 2002

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The Tattlesnake – CPAC Proof GOP is Still Doomed Edition

CPAC's Corporate Mythmakers and True Believers Headed for a Hard Fall

"Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the 'True Believer Syndrome.'"
-- Matt Taibbi, "Wall Street's Bailout Hustle," Rolling Stone, Feb. 21, 2010.

You know you're in trouble when your keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the current Dancing Bear of the Fox Evening Zoo and promulgator of preposterous pompous carnival-clown revisionism of everything from the political thinking of progressive Tom Paine to the nature of Marxism. (Well, at least he left the cry-eye Vick's VapoRub in the dressing room for this event.) Beck, like the rest of the Fox News team, seems to delight in unapologetically getting it wrong, time after time, and he knows his fans never read such authors as Paine or Karl Marx so, with skillful editing, ventriloquist Glenn can plant whatever Bizarro World ideas he desires in the mouths of the departed and defenseless. The most dedicated inhabitants of TV's Beckistan no doubt reject the proof of their own eyes and ears when confronted with any reality that veers from the Ringmaster's teachings, as any mind-locked True Believer does. It's a matter of faith -- in a Republican Jesus, or Roger Ailes' political ads disguised as news, or Frank Luntz's fright-laden euphemisms, or a former beauty queen turned half-term governor from Alaska. It's amazing that they wave the flag of freedom so strenuously – they apparently only want the freedom to follow a leader, and down the narrowest of ideological paths, at that.

Speaking of Gov. Mrs. Palin, she was not in appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference; not only could the organizers not meet her hefty price for speechifying, but she perhaps discerned, with the dumb canniness sometimes given to the vapid, that she wouldn't be welcome in a crowd that voted Mitt Romney first in their last three presidential straw polls.

And then there's the bright-eyed Romney himself; like most of his party, the former Massachusetts governor stopped making any consistent and coherent sense long ago; his speeches are now grab-bags of memorized GOP Talking Points and anti-Obama crowd-pleasers, but he has mostly refrained from the cringe-inducing personal vignettes such as tying incontinent pets to the roof of the family ride for a jaunt on the open highway or his Milquetoast macho-man exploits of gunning down small rodents with a hunting rifle. The things most people would be embarrassed to admit, Mitt banters about airily with a male model's manly grin, which I guess proves he is a Republican to his core.

And speaking of core Republicans, we have Mr. Cheney, Richard the Lyin'-Hearted, a man with no intelligence or military experience (an appointment as Secretary of Defense does not make one an expert on interrogation or confinement), who openly boasts that his unconstitutional torture program worked, believes he competently handled his role as White House counter-terrorism chief prior to 9/11, and has a long, clanking string of wrongheaded predictions following him like a trail of empty cans tied to a cat's tail. Cheney is arguably the most disliked politician in America, but in the upside-down world of CPAC, he is a national champion and was greeted with the garlands of approbation by the assembled worshippers in Washington that he once erroneously said would be thrown at our troops in Iraq. Perhaps as a sign of how far out in the ozone the gathered Republicans and their neoconservative cohorts orbit, many lustily cheered a Cheney run for president in 2012; Bush's superordinate vice president had enough sense to tease and then quickly squelch that notion and spare himself the humiliation of a 50-state landslide victory for President Obama.

Cheney, on cue, availed himself of the opportunity to produce another of his wacky spells of side-splitting clairvoyance – the Republicans would be resurgent in 2010 and Obama would be a one-term president. With his shot-in-the-face record of the exact opposite happening, you'd think he'd bury his cloudy crystal ball and stop making an ass of himself in this way but, then, you don't know Dick – he seems to thrive on being wrong and then denying it. Regardless of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom, three races where the Republican won against miserable Dem candidates does not make a trend and, as the overworked Cocktail Party Punditocracy cliché goes, "in politics, a month is like a year." With Cheney's smug regurgitation of this trite BCW on the glowing prospects for Republicans this year, it's bankable that it won't be quite as bad a year for the Democrats as the GOP would like it to be. And defeating Obama in 2012? Perhaps Dick should have a candidate in mind first to complete that task – none of the current GOP front-runners would come anywhere near to pushing Obama out of the presidency except Ron Paul, and Cheney and the GOP elite loathe him.

There was plenty of other entertainment at CPAC to those with a sardonic sense of humor, including mass booing for 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate and former GOP congressman Bob Barr for denouncing torture, and against some obnoxious knucklehead who was ironically jeered for going after a gay group. Said knucklehead's crime was that the gay group was Republican and the Grand Old Pious party needs every adherent they can get these days as the number of registered voters willing to confess they support the Republican brand continues to dwindle and age, along with the audience for the Right-Wing Disinfotainment Industry. The world turned upside-down indeed.

Of course, our Big Corporate Media that disguises itself as pure and objective did another habitual public disservice in its coverage of CPAC by not pointing out that most of the attendees were not average Conservo-Americans by any stretch – instead they were mostly lobbyists, party hacks, media dipsticks, the big money bags, Republican politicians and staffers, and those who earn their livelihoods by peddling products to this rarified bunch. In other words, these were the high-flying DC insiders who can afford to take off work, or who make their money by bowing and scraping to the GOP elite, which is why Cheney was greeted as a conquering hero, and lightweights such as Mitt Romney were taken seriously – they are both high-flying DC insiders as well.

Perhaps most indicative of the insider bent of the CPAC house of wax was the final results of the presidential straw poll – Ron Paul won it going away with 31 percent of the vote. Distant number two was Mitt Romney at 22 percent, and 'Joan of Dark' Palin wasn't even in double-digits. It was surreally amusing, if predictable, to watch a large portion of the assemblage howl down its own presidential pick: Paul represents the old-line libertarian/conservative Republican who wants to drastically cut the Pentagon's inflated budget, get us out of foreign wars, dissolve the dreams of empire, end the privatization of our military, shut down the ludicrous drug war, and enforce the terms of the Constitution, all items not popular with the DC insiders who reap billions of taxpayer dollars from supporting and advancing that list of misery. Worst of all, to the GOP elite, Paul is sincere – they hate that.

But another alarm bell auguring an unrosy Republican future was sounded by none other than recently elected hero-turned-zero Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who had the temerity to part with the break-Obama GOP leadership and vote for a Dem jobs bill that he thought would be beneficial to the residents of his state. In all the excitement over winning Ted Kennedy's old seat, some of the Republicans apparently forgot to check Brown's record in Mass. state government – he was ranked more liberal than three-fourths of the statehouse Republicans in a state that has the most liberal Republicans in the country. Today he is being condemned by the right for being a 'traitor' and a 'RINO' simply because he thought the government should act in the interest of the people rather than the GOP. In a sweet twist, he may turn out to be a great asset to Obama, and fix the doom of the current Limbaugh-loving fringe-right neocon Republican Party. When scared GOP incumbents begin buying pick-up trucks and start campaigning as independents who will cooperate with Obama to make government work for the citizenry, the nasty Talking Points Choir of the Rove-Luntz Axis of Evil that has dominated the party for over a decade will finally be at an end.

Yes, there's no denying the Democrats have been lame since Obama's election but, compared to the fire-breathing maniacs and corrupt corporatists presently running the GOP, the voters might very well prefer reasonable and lame to racist and insane.

Quoting the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Tattlesnake reiterates his prediction that for the GOP Elite of the DC Insiders, "the doom comes soon," with an irresolvable spilt between the rational Colin Powell/Ron Paul Libertarian Realists and the babbling-idiot Glenn Beck Regressive Christopublicans, and likely before the 2012 election -- maybe even in 2010, if the Democrats pass real health care reform.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

CPAC's Big Idea -- Dick Cheney in 2012?

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The Last of Sarah?

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Waterboard Dick Cheney in 2011?

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To see a video clip of Jesse Ventura on the Larry King show, May 11, 2009, click here.

The Tattlesnake – Odd Quotes at Year's End Edition

Random blips on the mental radar selected randomly, with commentary in brackets:

"One of the very difficult parts of the decision I made on the financial crisis was to use hardworking people's money to help prevent there to be a crisis."
-- George W. Bush, Jan. 12, 2009. [Translation to English from Bushspeak: 'I used your money to bailout my family and wealthy friends on Wall Street and in banking because my administration didn't do its job of properly regulating them.']

"Um, you guys said that we, um, did this for the show."
-- Falcon "Balloon Boy" Heene, to his parents during a TV interview, Oct. 15, 2009. [This should be the motto of the Republican Party.]

"I think we all have a screw loose in this business."
-- Kyra Phillips, inadvertently speaking the truth on CNN, Oct. 9, 2009. [This should be the motto of the US national media.]

"Give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."
-- Jesse Ventura, former MN Gov. and Navy SEAL, on CNN, May 11, 2009.
[This line should be emblazoned across the bottom of the screen every time a clip of Cheney speaking is shown.]

"I don't know anything about cars."
-- Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., when he took over as CEO of GM, June 9, 2009. ['Gee, how could we be going bankrupt?']

"You can't convince me that the founding fathers wouldn't allow you to secede."
-- Glenn Beck, April 14, 2009. [They might make an exception in Beck's case.]

"So you need to get deep into why he is what he is, instead of just saying, 'Well, he's a homosexual so how do I handle him, and how do I be Christian?' Well, I think you ought to tell him, 'Listen, son, you know, here's what the Bible says about this, and it's called an abomination before God, so I've got to tell you the truth because I love you.' That's what I think."
-- Pat Robertson's advice to the parents of a gay son, on CBN's "The 700 Club" June 9, 2009. [Right after this broadcast, Pat ordered out for a BLT.]

"An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Inuit earnestly, 'did you tell me?'"
-- Annie Dillard

"Ted Kennedy's dad, by the way, Joe Kennedy, sympathetic to Hitler, sympathetic to the Nazis."
-- Rush Limbaugh, as quoted by Simon Maloy at Media Matters' LimbaughWire, Aug. 8, 2009. [George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazis even after WWII began, and was forced by the US government to stop. Whatever Joe Kennedy's sympathies, he never contributed financial backing to Hitler's Third Reich.]

"The Army, the Marines do not have uniforms that fit that big an ass."
--The always classy Limbaugh again, commenting on Hillary Clinton, Sept. 22, 2009, also via Media Matters. [This from the manly Lard Lad whose 'anal cyst' was too big to allow him to wear the uniform.]

"Nearly half of all US children, including an overwhelming majority of black children, will eat meals at some point during their childhood paid for by food stamps, an indicator of poverty, a study showed Monday."
-- AFP, "Half of US kids depend on food stamps during childhood: study," Nov. 2, 2009. The study was done by the American Medical Association's Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. [Out of a population of about 300 million, 66 million Americans now collect food stamps, a record high number. Nearly 50 percent of US children need food stamps to eat regularly.]

"The urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."
-- David Broder's sage advice to Obama on Afghanistan, proving once again why Uncle Fudd is the dean of doomed Washington punditry, from the Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2009. [Say, Dave, if your life were on the line, would you be this cavalier about whether Obama's decision was wrong or right?]

"The white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America!"
-- Michael Savage, from his radio show June 17, 2009, as quoted by Media Matters. [Okay, so when does the former Michael Alan Weiner come out of the closet?]

"Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he's a citizen. All he'd have to do is show a birth certificate."
-- Limbaugh once more, from his July 20, 2009, radio show. [All Rush would have to do is use the Google in that laptop he has in front of him at the EIB studios and in under a minute he could find a copy.]

"Who calls a shot like that? Who makes a decision like that? It's a disturbing trend."
-- Sarah Palin in West Allis, WI, Nov. 6, 2009, in a tizzy about Obama supposedly moving the legend "In God We Trust" to the edge of US coinage, a change made by the Bushites and reversed by Congress before Obama took office. [That's leadership you can trust – imagining 'disturbing trends' in inconsequential matters.]

"I basically don't."
-- Dick Cheney, when asked if he believed the Bush Administration bore any responsibility for the situation in Afghanistan, Dec. 1, 2009, from Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog. [Sure, because we didn't invade Afghanistan in October of 2001, we invaded two minutes after Obama was sworn in last January. Republicans believe people should accept responsibility for their actions, as long as they are Democrats or liberals. See Dana Perino quote below.]

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
-- Former Bush WH Press Secretary Dana Perino on Sean Hannity's gabfest, Nov. 24, 2009. [Insert disk in slot in back of head underneath hair flap. Press 'play' behind right earlobe to activate voice.]

"You are being shagged by a rare parrot!"
-- Comment from a man watching another man with a large parrot attempting to mate with the back of his head, as shown on The Rachel Maddow Show, Dec. 30, 2009. [This could be America's motto for the entire first decade of 'Century 21.']

Michael Palin (as the shopkeeper): "There, he moved!"
John Cleese (as the customer): "No, he didn't, that was you hitting the cage!"
-- From Monty Python's "The Dead Parrot Sketch," wherein John Cleese tries to return a clearly dead bird to the pet shop where he bought it. [So far, the majority of the American public hasn't caught on that most of the fearmongering of the past decade has been the result of vested domestic interests profiting from 'hitting the cage' rather than the actions of a ubiquitous, terrifying external enemy.]

Have a Happy New Year and catch you on the flip side, cousin.

H/T to Media Matters for America, Bob Cesca's blog, MSNBC, and other sources for the quotes.

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

GOP Freaks of 2009

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Chickenhawks (Not) at War

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