LT Saloon

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.

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The Tattlesnake – In Defense of Tiger Woods (Sort of) Edition

The Abridged Tiger Woods Apology Speech, After a Quick Spray with the Truth Ray

TIGER WOODS: “Hello to you all. I am here to publicly apologize for cheating on my wife Elin with other women. (Why am I apologizing to the public? I didn’t cheat on them. Oh, right, kids look up to me as a role model. Kids are watching golf now? Jeez, can’t they look up to someone besides a golfer as a role model? Basketball players, baseball players, football players … okay, never mind.)

“While my publicist and marketing people actually wrote these words, I can assure you they come straight from my heart. (And a billion dollars a year in endorsements.)

“In a sane world, I could just be respected as a great golfer and my private life would be my own business, but you self-righteous hypocrites in the media and you sex-starved moralists in the celebrity-obsessed public need some cheesy scandal to drool over, and right now it’s me. (Why don’t you all get a life?) You know, you don’t make rock stars and movie idols apologize like this – at least I haven’t seen Mick Jagger or Warren Beatty pestered endlessly for cheating on their wives, but then I guess you can’t play golf and then pose with a car or disposable razor unless you have a spotless personal life. Hey, why don’t you ask the CEOs of the corporations that pay me for endorsements to publicly apologize for their marital infidelities? Oh, right, they aren’t celebrities. Besides, many of you in the media pull a paycheck from one of those corporations. What amazing courage.

“Okay, sorry, I was told by my handlers not to go off script. So, here, I’m just apologizing all over myself for being a kid and young man who never had much of a life outside golf, with a Domineering Stage Father who forced me to practice all the time so that I could fulfill all of his unrealized dreams, and once I was out from under his influence I went nuts and took advantage of my fame and got laid as often as I could. Every honest man listening to me, if they had grown up the way I did, would have done the same thing. Most of you men would do the same thing even without having a Domineering Stage Father, if you had the chance, especially you sportswriters.

“You know who really owes the public an apology: The media vultures covering this story by obsessing on every minute detail of my personal life. Maybe you should try spending the same amount of time on explaining things to the public that really affects their lives – like health care reform, and the growing power of corporations over our lives, and the reality of war, and who’s lying about what in Washington. Oh, but that’s too controversial; instead you pick the safe route – go after the golfer. You know, it’s not going to put a penny in the public’s pocket, or make their lives one bit better if I apologize, but here it is, for what it’s worth:

“I apologize completely for anything in my private life that might have ever offended anyone. But I know this mea culpa won’t be the end — my bones haven’t been picked entirely clean yet.

“Just to sum up, my adulterous dalliances outside of my marriage, and any apologies I make for them, as I’ve said, really aren’t and shouldn’t be important except to those close to me. The only important thing about this story is how much valuable airtime and empty words of fake outrage the mainstream media are willing to waste to pursue the sordid details of my private life. Let me reiterate: For that, I don’t owe you an apology – they do.”

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake – Once Again, Jon Stewart Shows the BM How It’s Done Edition

Good on Jon Stewart for showing the ‘political infotainment’ arm of the Big Media, once again, how to do their jobs. Last night on The Daily Show, Stewart’s guest was Newt “Like The Reptile” Gingrich and they were discussing trying terrorist suspects under American criminal law. Newt claimed that the ‘Christmas Underwear Bomber,’ Umar Abdulmutallab, shouldn’t be tried in a U.S. court and had no rights since he wasn’t an American citizen. (Not true, incidentally — even foreign nationals have rights when charged with a crime in our country, but a topic for another time.)

At any rate, Stewart sensibly countered that the ‘Shoe Bomber’ Richard Reid was tried and convicted by the Bush Administration in an American courtroom and then Newtie, as usual, blatantly lied to make his point – he said Reid was a U.S. citizen and Abdulmutallab was not. Stewart let it pass as I yelled in futility at the TV, “Bullshit, Reid was a British subject!”

Following the commercial break, however, after the interview had ended, Stewart came back on to say his staff had checked and Reid was not an American citizen but a British national. This was a simple, unbiased fact, and it made Gingrich look like the horse’s ass he is and laid bare his lame argument to the light of day. If every ‘real’ news show adopted this practice of fact-checking guests and informing the audience where they lied during the show, not only would it better serve the news consumer and the country, but it would have the side benefit of keeping politicians honest – if pols knew that at the end of the show (ideally accompanied by a crawl across the bottom of the screen), their falsehoods would be exposed they might become more circumspect in their habitual dishonesty. BTW, I also think would be good for ratings.

Of course, this will never happen on Fox News, if only because 45-minutes of each hour would be taken up correcting the lies of the first fifteen minutes, and most of the other networks would shy away since it would cost them ‘access’ to prominent politicians, not to mention discomfit their corporate bosses, but just think – no more Republicans spreading fraud on national TV and fewer quisling Democrats trying to justify their cowardice! No doubt this measure would pass by a massive majority if subjected to a national referendum.

Since that’s not going to happen, all you can do is write or call your favorite media outlet and refer them to Jon Stewart’s interview with Newt Gingrich on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010, but don’t expect miracles – the BM will likely change the same day Newtie the Lizard bangs the drum for universal single-payer health care.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/newt-gingrich-lies-jon-stewart-claim

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake — His Majesty O’Keefe: Karma Chameleon Edition

There are just some stories that warm the cockles and whatever else is in the Tattler’s heart — this is one of them.

Remember this phony Republican ‘Simp Pimp’ that I wrote about in December 2009 in “Why the GOP Hates ACORN and the Poor”?

Well, now he’s in the pokey for committing a federal felony in attempting to bug the offices of Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. I can’t wait to read the right-wing blogs reaction to their ACORN Golden Boy turned latter-day Watergate Twit, and it would also be interesting to read the reaction of real pimps in the Graybar Academy when presented with this pathetic dweeb. When they’re finished laughing, that is. Don’t drop the soap, Little Jimmy!

Here’s an excerpt from the MSNBC story today:

Activist filmmaker arrested in senator’s office

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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?]

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The Tattlesnake – Why the GOP Hates ACORN and the Poor Edition

Remember those ACORN-office videos that a right-wing ringer named James O’Keefe, posing as a pimp, surreptitiously taped with Hannah Giles, a young woman pretending to be his prostitute, that were a media kerfluffle a few months back?

Watching them gave me a familiar feeling – it was the same feeling I had back in 2003 when glowering TV Doctor Colin Powell, performing at the U.N. Club in New York, shook a vial of white powder in front of the camera and claimed it was Saddam’s Very Own Anthrax. The feeling only increased when ‘Dr.’ Powell produced artist’s renderings of super-secret Iraqi chemical-labs-on-wheels, views that we apparently couldn’t catch photographically from sophisticated spy satellites or aerial reconnaisance overflights because – well, he never actually said why.

This feeling, as close as I can come to describing it, is akin to doing Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture trick, wherein the master magician was suspended upside-down in a glass-paneled cabinet filled to the top with water — only instead of water, imagine horse manure.

The Tattler was wincing with disgust while laughing as I watched geeky white boy O’Keefe, dressed for all the world like Sonny Bono when he had Cher, babe, trying to pass himself off as Mr. Bad Ass Pimp to a collection of black women from the ‘Hood who had doubtless seen the real thing at sometime in their lives – it was like casting Wally Cox as Don Vito Corleone: “Gee whillikers, we’ll make ‘em an offer they won’t get mad at and refuse!”

Hannah didn’t play her role much better – she was dumb enough, but a little too clean and preppy – but hers wasn’t the important role.

The college-educated ofay voice of O’Keefe, in the same tone as a census-taker, earnestly asking for help to avoid paying his pimp taxes and advice in running a brothel with underage girls rightfully had the ACORN women stifling grins. This was a surreal spectacle that only a teabagger could swallow whole without gagging on the absurdity.

Well, a teabagger, our vacuous illiberal media, and the growing crop of space cadets in our Congress.

It was expected that the GOP would indulge in their usual over-popped level of fake moral outrage – they paid for the video, after all — and the pundits live off their crumbs, but couldn’t we have had at least one Democrat call ‘bullshit’ on this silly nonsense? No one but a halfwit would believe this skinny white boy wearing his mother’s old chinchilla coat is actually a pimp, and anybody who’s been around a city block more than once knows it. But the risible sight of O’Keefe in his cartoon pimp outfit is instructive, both as to the contempt with which the corporate Republican elite hold the public, and to their knee-shaking fear of the extension of democracy and equality to people without money.

The Republican Party’s fringe-right wingnuts, excuse me for repeating myself, have long had a bitter grudge against ACORN, the community service group that registers voters and helps poor people. Why? Because, to put it simply, the GOP hates the poor, even though they work diligently to produce more of them to reward their corporate backers with a large pool of ever-cheaper labor. This is filtered through several levels of the corporate Republican psyche:

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The Tattlesnake – The Political Good, Bad and Ugly Edition

Good: Your husband has decided to get more involved in
local politics.
Bad: He’s running for congress as a conservative Republican.
Ugly: He’s Karl Rove.

Good: Your wife just got a great-paying job.
Bad: She’s on Fox News.
Ugly: After fifteen years of marriage, you never knew she was a wingnut.

Good: Your 22-year-old daughter just announced she’s marrying the man of her dreams.
Bad: He’s old enough to be her grandfather.
Ugly: He’s Mitch McConnell.

Good: Your 21-year-old son’s new book is about to be published.
Bad: It’s a biography of George W. Bush.
Ugly: He’s started talking like him.

Good: Your wife buys a new hat for her birthday.
Bad: It has teabags hanging off the brim.
Ugly: They’ve all been used.

Good: The recently discovered Bush emails prove conclusively that Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al, committed high crimes while in office.
Bad: Holder’s Justice Department refuses to prosecute them.
Ugly: Obama excuses them by saying, “Anyone could make a mistake.”

Good: You laugh at an Andy Borowitz satire about Glenn Beck ‘editing’ and releasing an ‘abridged’ version of “1984″ wherein Big Brother’s name is replaced by Obama’s.
Bad: Turns out it’s not an Andy Borowitz satire.
Ugly: The MSM quote from the book as if it were George Orwell’s original version.

Good: Your daughter just got a new job.
Bad: She’s working for Bill O’Reilly.
Ugly: She just bought a case of loofahs.

Good: Your son just got a new job.
Bad: He’s working for FreedomWorks.
Ugly: He’s Dick Armey’s ‘butt boy.’

Good: You just got a tenured job at a university.
Bad: You’re teaching ‘Creation Science.’
Ugly: At Messiah College.

Good: The ideas of Tom Paine are being discussed on TV.
Bad: By Glenn Beck on Fox News.
Ugly: Beck has made liberal agnostic Paine into a far-right Christian fanatic just like himself.

Good: Your son has been signed to star in a major motion picture.
Bad: It’s “The Life of Rush Limbaugh.”
Ugly: He was hired due to his strong resemblance to the subject.

Good: You’ve accepted a $50,000 speaking gig.
Bad: At the next CPAC convention.
Ugly: Your topic is “The Incredible Genius of Sarah Palin.”

Good: You’re not feeling well and your friend says he will find you a good doctor.
Bad: You’re flat broke.
Ugly: Your friend is Joe Lieberman.

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake – A Stake Deep in the Heart of GOP Texas Edition

Judging by this, Lone Star state Republicans may have much to fear in the future.

I’ve made plenty of fun of Texas and that breed of Texan that keeps electing crooks and nitwits like Tom DeLay and Junior-clone Rick Perry against their own best interests, but it seems things have gotten bad enough down there that even Houston, the nexus of Bush Oil Country, has elected a lesbian Democrat, former City Controller Annise Parker, as Mayor rather than face a corrupt and/or dumb Republican. (Albeit that Houston has been trending Dem for some years and the last mayor was a Democrat.) Although Parker has some past ties to the energy industry, her most recent non-political gig was running a bookstore and she is regarded as fairly liberal, at least by Texas standards.

It’s no secret the GOP has raped the state from one end to the other, giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while cutting social safety-net programs to the bone, eviscerating the educational system, and putting workers at the mercy of employers – it was the neocon corporatist blueprint for what King Junior tried to do in Washington, but didn’t quite succeed at entirely. Now that the economy has gone all to hell, fed-up Texans are worse off than most of the nation, and they have no one to blame but the laissez-faire policies of the Republican Party.

Sure, the voting machines have been rigged and districts redrawn to keep the GOP in perpetual power, but even that may not be enough to underwrite the Republican Party’s future in Texas.

The Tattler’s prediction: Within ten years all the major state offices will be held by Democrats, as well as the two US Senate seats. Texas was, at one time, a populist state; I think it will be returning to those roots – who knows, maybe the great Jim Hightower will end up in office again, if he can stomach campaigning again.

Houston biggest US city to elect openly gay mayor

Monica Rhor, AP Writer
December 13, 2009

HOUSTON – Houston became the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay mayor, with voters handing a solid victory to City Controller Annise Parker after a hotly contested runoff. [...]

Parker, 53, has never made a secret or an issue of her sexual orientation. But it became the focus of the race after anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups endorsed Locke and sent out mailers condemning Parker’s “homosexual behavior.”

Read the rest here.

“Anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups” couldn’t defeat an openly gay woman in TEXAS?! Oh, yes, the doom come soon for the GOP.

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org

The Tattlesnake — The Reason Sarah Palin Should Never Be President in One Answer Edition

Read her last answer again and reflect…

Bill O’Reilly: “Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?”

Sarah Palin: “I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the um, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.”

All that’s missing is the ’such as’…

Palin Poster © 2009 Dan Piraro, Bizarro.com

The Irrefutable Stupidity of Sarah Palin
– Cenk Uygur, The Huffington Post, Dec. 7, 2009.

A h/t to Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks for his article and video.

The Tattlesnake – GOP Nuts ‘n’ Money Edition

“The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.”
– Paul Krugman, “The Politics of Spite,” NY Times, Oct. 5, 2009.

“… [T]he 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
– Alex Carey

Now Alaska’s Hockey Momster has had her ‘Birther’ moment, alternately encouraging the Orly Taitz Bizarros to pursue their vain quest to besmirch Obama’s presidency by endlessly questioning his birth certificate, and then backing away from that stance on her Facebook ramblings. This madness has reached its limit – every sane member of Congress should condemn this insanity and then demand that Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, Jerome Corsi, random Republican politicians, and any other right-winger who has questioned Obama’s American citizenship post their own birth certificate publicly and, in keeping with the Birther’s rules, it can’t be a stamped copy. Of course, they won’t be able to do this – every US state keeps the original document and issues a photocopy or duplicate certificate when legal proof of birth is required – and perhaps that will finally shut these fringe-freak nitwits up.

Speaking of Wasilla’s Gift to the Democrats, word is her book tour is something of a bust, leaving a trail of disappointed Palinites in its wake, and not just in Indianapolis where she left a crowd of cranky book-buyers standing out in the rain. Not only is her speaking bureau allegedly regretting signing her on after her Hong Kong fiasco, but now her publishing company may be thinking twice about that $1.4 million they paid her in advance. Sure, they’ll probably make it back in book sales, but Palin’s unstable personality, and her unpopular insistence on selling photos of herself posing with her fans, have driven her bus tour handlers eye-rolling, hair-pulling crazy.

But Palin is just the most prominent peak of a small molehill of the American public — ignorant, peevish, narrow-minded, misinformed, angry, intolerant — they are an army of everything that’s wrong with America, denizens of a weird trickster God who speaks to them through words they don’t completely understand, or tint with their interior wrath, rendered and interpreted by preachers, politicians and other charlatans either crass or confused or both, but they’re all making a quick buck from peddling hatred-on-a-cross to this crowd.

They wouldn’t matter much except they are whipped into a frenzy and ‘played’ by cynical manipulators like Frank Luntz, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who, in turn, wouldn’t have much impact without the billions of dollars spent to spread their message from right-wing corporatists like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.

If Sarah continues to implode, even Fox News and Limbaugh may not be able to save her presidential chances in 2012 – at some point, we may have to form a Progressives for Palin coalition to make sure she’s the GOP nominee in three years, assuring Obama’s reelection and the ultimate crack-up of the radical GOP.

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org