LT Saloon

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’ Petraeus 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.

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.

The Tattlesnake – Potent Political Potables Edition

The Sharron Angle
Combine equal parts chunky peanut butter, gunpowder and sacramental wine in an unclear empty vessel. Using an old blender in a narrow, dimly-lit room, mix until the consistency of baby poop. Serve in cracked teacups. Refrain from sharing the recipe with the media.

The Michele Bachmann
Mix together grapeshot-flavored Kool-Aid, sexual abstinence, Biblical nonsense, Nutty Buddy candy bars and wormwood alcohol with a thousand teabags and let ferment in a fevered brain. Serve to anyone who’ll pay attention until you’re hired by the Family Research Council after you lose your Congressional seat.

The Glenn Beck
Combine chopped nuts, saccharine, VapoRub, Victory gin, Goldschlager, white lightning, horse pucky and turpentine in a large vat lined with hundred-dollar bills. Drink until you drown.

The John Boehner
Mix equal parts Tang and cheap vodka.
Serve warm in a crockpot, after heating under a sun lamp.

The Andrew Breitbart
Mix equal parts caustic lye, near beer, used tea bags, hair of Rove, pus from a dog bite, aged McCarthyite bile and edited videotape in an Internet website. Whine until someone drinks it, but don’t attend the funeral after they do. When it eventually kills you, refuse to admit you’re dead.

The Jan Brewer
Prepare a standard pitcher of Margaritas and then add a cup of raw sewage and a cup of flop-sweat political desperation. Stir until the stench drives you away. Serve hot to morons with J. D. Hayworth crackers, Joe Arpaio pink prisoners and Tom Tancredo dip and hope for the best next election.

The Jeb Bush
Combine Southern Comfort, Rebel Yell, light tequila, orange juice, your father’s tears, family money and bought-off media contacts in a no-paper-trail electronic voting machine. Strain lightly through an old Klan robe and stir well while pretending to be affable and moderate until you’ve seized the GOP nomination for president. Just smile confidently when your drunken friends in the media write you’re nothing like you’re dumber older brother, really.

The Sean Hannity
Stir together equal parts Brylcreem, moonshine, sleaze and Preparation H, and force through a fox’s alimentary canal. Drink through a fire hose until belly is distended, then retire proudly on all of that money you stole that was supposed to go to the families of the military.

The Sarah Palin
Mix equal parts cold duck, Russian vodka, old Navy grog, Christian Bros. brandy, Slim Fast, baby formula, iced tea, mashed lipstick, grizzly bear fat, a diced dictionary, steaming bullshit and chopped currency in a Facebook-approved container. Half bake and serve cold to the media and your adoring fans while striking a pose.

The Rand Paul
Tilt your head back at a steep right angle, pour gallons of Kentucky sour mash bourbon and searing hot tea on your face, swallowing what you can of it, while furiously masturbating to a photo of Ayn Rand holding hands with Bull O’Connor. Do this until you are defeated in November.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake – Palin’s Muddle Tongue Edition

So Sen. Crash Pilot’s erstwhile 2008 VP candidate and half-baked Alaska Governor has decided to invent her own words like ‘refudiate’ – just like that Limey fella Shakespeare, by golly!

Well, since Mama Grizzly Palin wasn’t doing too swell with the dialect most Americans speak, perhaps she had no choice but to become the ‘Mutter Curage’ of the English language.

Back here at the Tattlesnake hovel, I’ve decided to conjure up a few words the newly self-anointed wordsmith can add to what Stephanie Miller aptly described as her ‘Fictionary.’ You’re welcome, Sarah.

Historectumy: 1. Pulling inaccurate historical ‘facts’ from your rear end to make your erroneous opinion seem less idiotic. (See also: ‘Fox News’ and ‘Beck University.’)

Stuperior: 1. Superiority in your utter stupidity. 2. The backassward side of something so stupendously dumb that when viewed at multiple angles, every side is backassward. (See also: ‘Willful Ignorance,’ ‘Religious Insanity’ and ‘Unwarranted Arrogance.’)

Taxicology: 1. The uniquely Republican economic psychosis, a colossal failure since its inception, that you can cut taxes and maintain the same level of revenue that you had before you cut taxes by way of the magic fairy dust of the ‘free market,’ which no one has ever actually witnessed in action. 2. Ignoring the rotten condition of the schools, roads, bridges, parks and other public projects that serve the common good in order to avoid making the wealthy unhappy by having to pay taxes. (See also: ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’ and ‘This is Your Brain on Milton Friedman.’)

Teabaggy: 1. The feeling of exhaustion from living in a perpetual state of ignorant outrage and bilious hatred. (See also: ‘Damp Dittoheads’ and ‘Michael the Savage Weiner’)

Teabuggery: 1. Having your organization sodomized by Republican money, operatives and influence. (See also: ‘Dick Armey, Lobbyist’ and ‘FreedomWorks.’)

Wasillingus: 1. Using one’s mouth to spread the pernicious political virus of far-right Christopublicanism. 2. A perky rural Alaskan’s foot-in-mouth syndrome. (See also: ‘Diseases of the Crack Pipe’ and ‘Polar Meth Lab Sickness.’)

That was fun; I may add some more in the future.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

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.

The Tattlesnake – Is Gore Gay? GOP Barton Smartin’ and the NV Angle Tangle Edition

– Al Gore sexually assault a woman? I don’t buy it, but this is the tale some Oregon masseuse was trying to sell to the National Enquirer for a cool million, according to Col. Howie Kurtz at the WaHoPo. As a mantra of fact, my friend who has very advanced ‘gaydar’ – she called out Ted Haggard months before it was revealed he was regularly visiting a male prostitute and snorting meth – has long thought Al was a closeted gay man, something like Kevin Spacey’s character Jim Williams in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” She thinks the marital break-up of the Gores probably has more to do with Tipper catching Al with a man than a woman. (And leave us not forget that weird groping public kiss at the Dem Convention in 2000. Awkward? You bet.) Ah, Tipper – apparently playing the beard to the last.

– If it were any organization other than the current Dem Party collection of timid halfwits, I’d say Texas Oil Republican Rep. Joe Barton just sunk the GOP in the 2010 elections, but then we’ve seen how often these Washington Jackasses have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, so let’s not get our hopes up.

In case you’ve been meditating in a cave for the past week (and who could blame you?), here’s what Barton publicly said to BP CEO Tony Hayward during a Congressional hearing:

“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) during a hearing on Thursday morning with BP’s CEO Tony Hayward.” I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case a $20 billion shakedown — with the attorney general of the United States, who is legitimately conducting a criminal investigation and has every right to do so to protect the American people, participating in what amounts to a $20 billion slush fund that’s unprecedented in our nation’s history, which has no legal standing, which I think sets a terrible precedent for our nation’s future.

“I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize,” Barton added. “I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.”
– Sam Stein at Huffington Post, as quoted by Ben Dimiero at Media Matters.

BP and Tony Hayward are less popular than O.J. Simpson and here’s Strokin’ Joe embarrassing himself and his party by apologizing to them. Imagine if the tables were turned and some bubblehead Dem said this – the GOP would have it on a tape loop with wall-to-wall negative ads running all over the country and every Republican who popped up on a news show would find a way to mention it ten times. True, the Dems do have an ad up, but they haven’t gone all in yet on linking Barton with the Republicans and particularly pointing out the fact that Joe has yet to be relieved of his position as ranking minority member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. After initially renouncing Barton’s goofy apologia, some Republicans are now actually coming to his defense! Gee, that wouldn’t make a bad basis for an ad, either, especially in the Gulf States. But, then, the ‘bipartisan’ Democrats apparently find chasing their tails more attractive than hunting the predator that’s trying to kill them.

– The Angle of Attack on Sharron: You’d think someone who wants to dump Social Security and Medicare (but thus far not in favor of bartering for medical care with chickens, thank God), eliminate the IRS without any plan to replace it (how do we pay off the deficit without collecting taxes, Sharron?), still wants to ‘drill, baby, drill’ even after the BP Gulf disaster, and has ‘shifting’ positions on the prohibition of alcohol and fluoridation of water (among other wacky notions), would be pretty easy to beat in a statewide election. Well, she probably will be as even doddering old bumbler Sen. Harry Reid has finally seen fit to call her “crazy” and run a TV ad showing what a hallucinatory teabag of unfounded WorldNetDaily opinions is his Republican opponent. Reid’s no FDR, but he’s George Burns compared to Sharron Angle’s crazy-crap Christopublican Gracie Allen. Sure, the GOP rinse-and-spin machine is busy trying to make her ready for prime time, but this woman’s a political Lady Gaga at the ballpark who can barely hold her own in Fox-friendly interviews and irritatingly insists on calling any legitimate query regarding what she would actually do as senator a “Gotcha” question. In open debate with Reid, she’d be Sarah Palin without the wink; Dan Quayle without the hairdo; Ronald Reagan without the acting experience. But, since Reid’s a twenty-first century milquetoast Democrat, the election will be closer than it should. Still, I think he’ll pull it out.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

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 Tattlesnake – Hayward Ho, Joe Blows It, Michele’s Glow Dims and All That Glitters Edition

– Why Ask Me? Thanks to Tony Hayward’s appearance before Congress, we now know the qualifications for a CEO of British Petroleum apparently are to be completely uninformed about your business and the details of the greatest man-made oil disaster in US history that your company caused. For maintaining this extraordinary level of blissful ignorance, Hayward was paid $4.7 million in salary last year. Note to BP: Seems like you could find someone just as empty above the neck for considerably less – I know several people looking for a job who know nothing about the oil business and would gladly accept $50K per annum to stay just as dumb as Tony.

– Speaking of Tony’s eye-rolling Congressional performance, crackpot Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, coincidentally the recipient of at least $27,000 in campaign cash from Big Oil, took the occasion to dump on Obama for making sure BP paid for its disaster with a $20 billion escrow fund (which Joe hilariously called a ‘shakedown’) and then apologized to BP for any inconvenience the people of the US might have caused the oil giant by holding them responsible for destroying the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 Americans and ruining the lives of millions of others. President Obama may not have had his finest moment in his speech last Tuesday, but with the opposition spearheaded by half-baked corporate cheerleaders like Barton; Mississippi Gov. Haley “You Sure These Here Tar Balls Are From BP?” Barbour; Louisiana Gov. Bobby “I’m Against All Federal Bail-Outs Except When My State Needs One” Jindal; Alabama Gov. Bob “The Oil Will Never Reach Our Beaches” Riley and other GOP space cadets echoing the same forehead-slapping “Let’s not be so hard on BP” line, Obama looks like FDR in high-gear in comparison. The delusional, pop-eyed, tongue-lolling crazy GOP is committing suicide in the Gulf States; seems like the political opposition could take advantage of that by running ads simply showing what the various Republican pols have said in defense of the hated BP, especially Barton. (Just imagine the spittle-flecked furor on the right if a Democrat apologized to BP.) But, then, these are today’s Democrats who have made ‘bipartisanship’ with the lunatic Republicans their religion. FDR would not have approved. (Incidentally, GOP House Minority Leader John Boehner forced Barton to apologize for his BP apology; even the Ohio SunTanMan knew what a stench of electoral defeat Strokin’ Joe’s words left in their wake.)

– Speaking of losers, I think it’s a cinch that dipsy-doodle Republican wingnut Michele Bachmann will lose her bid for reelection in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. Given a strong Democratic challenger (for a change) and the embarrassment she’s caused to her constituents by her public bouts of delusional babbling, paranoid hysteria, and defense of BP’s unethical and destructive practices, she may very well be retired to a Fox News berth, or a sinecure as a lobbyist for the Focus on the Family’s Anti-Woman League.

– Gold Rush and Bust: For those who think buying gold will be a hedge against disaster if the economy melts down even further, keep in mind it is just a tradable commodity like corn, and actually worse than corn because at least corn is edible. Gold is a soft metal not good for much except jewelry and spacecraft and the price is high only because, for now, there are more buyers than sellers. However, if in the future the number of sellers exceeds the number of buyers, the price will plunge, which is exactly what I think will happen as things worsen. Although most economists think there’s no chance the price of gold will drop precipitously, these are some of the same seers who thought real estate values would perpetually increase. Unless you can find a way to eat it or wear it for warmth, investing in gold is just another junk bond scheme where the little guy will end up holding the bag. (Gold purveyors are now Glenn Beck’s primary sponsors – what does that tell you?) As John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “In economics, the majority is always wrong,” and Galbraith has been proven right, again and again.

BTW, those who favor a return to the gold standard for US currency don’t seem to realize that the price of gold is unstable and fluctuates daily and, therefore, so would the value of the dollar. Besides, the US doesn’t own enough gold to make this a viable notion.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake — The Alvin Greene Fraud (and More) Edition

Just How Stupid Are South Carolina Republicans?

“I’m the Democratic Party nominee. I mean, I mean, the people have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina.”
– Alvin Greene, apparently accepting the Dem nomination for US Senate from South Carolina, as quoted by CommonDreams.org.

Did the South Carolina GOP really think they could sneak this poor hapless vet through without anyone noticing? Regardless of what the Bias-Belted Insider Punditocracy says, I think the SC GOP, including cynical rump-pimple Sen. Jim DeMint, are a lot more vulnerable than the Big Media Babblelonians realize. It’s the only reason the GOP dirty tricksters would try a lame stunt like this – what with the aftermath of the Mark Sanford scandal and the Republican-run state cratering economically mired in record unemployment, they’re getting desperate.

Sadly, 13-year military veteran Greene resembles an advanced PTSD case in the way he speaks and acts. He may also have a drinking or drug problem that needs servicing. Such people are easy to hornswoggle for money into buffoonish charades such as this. If the SC Republicans abused a brain-damaged vet this way, they should be boiled in BP’s Gulf oil. (They should anyway, but that’s another story.)

It shouldn’t be too hard to find out how an unemployed man who had declared himself indigent a couple of months ago came up with $10,400 to put his name on the ballot, didn’t spend a dime for anything else in his ‘campaign’ (even his t-shirt reads ‘Greene Family Reunion,’ although he wears it as if it had something to do with his senate run), and somehow won against an experienced former judge and state legislator, Vic Rawls, who actually went out and campaigned across the state. (Maybe it has to do with the fact that in SC Republicans can vote for Dem primary candidates, or the state’s easily-hacked, no-paper-trail touch screen voting equipment manufactured and installed by GOP-friendly companies.) This stinks of blatant election fraud and it would seem easy to prosecute the seamy GOP lowlife that is surely behind it.

Not only that, but SC Rep. Jim Clyburn’s Democratic primary opponent, a shit-grinning ‘bidnessman’ named Gregory Brown, supposedly spent $70K to challenge incumbent Clyburn. Curiously, more than a third of that money was paid for ‘marketing strategies’ to a firm owned by Preston Grisham, who worked as a special assistant and campaign manager for Republican Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson up until November of 2009, and was flacking for two SC Republican candidates at the same time he was being paid by Brown. Move along, nothing to see here, stop connecting those dots.

Perhaps this is to be expected in a state that spawned the late Lee Atwater and his nasty and devious approach to political campaigning, but certainly Eric Holder’s DOJ can take action to charge those responsible for such obvious, and stupid, attempts at defrauding South Carolina voters – these were elections for federal office, after all.

Read more:

“Clyburn’s Dem Challenger Denies He’s A ‘Plant’ — But Hired GOP Rep.’s Aide”
– Christina Bellatoni and Justin Elliot, TPMMuckraker, June 11, 2010.

“Clyburn Alleges Conspiracy To Plant Candidates In Three Dem Primaries In S.C.”
– Christina Bellatoni, TPMMuckraker, June 10, 2010.

“The Alvin Greene Interviews; a TPMtv Original Video”

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

The Tattlesnake – Primary Post-Mortem Edition

“Dear Lord Jesus, I do not often speak with you and ask for things, but now, I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it and Paul Metzler doesn’t, as you well know. … I’m asking that you go that one last mile and make sure to put me in office where I belong so that I may carry out your will on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.”
– Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) from the film classic “Election” (1999).

A quick rundown of the five most prominent primaries last Tuesday:

The DOA GOP

California:

US Senate: Creepy Republican Carly Fiorina is such a dimwit that Dem Sen. Barbara Boxer shouldn’t have much problem with her. All Barb has to do is run ads revealing that Carly’s idea of improving the American economy is shipping 13,000 jobs overseas, her record as one of the 20 worst CEOs in the country when she ran Hewlett-Packard, her flip-flop on cap and trade, and that squirrelly flub she made when supporting McCain for president in 2008 by saying (truthfully) that neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin were qualified to run a US corporation. Meanwhile, word is Carly’s gearing up ads to brand Boxer as a – gasp! – liberal Democrat, as if California voters didn’t already know that. Ms. Fiorina can be counted on to make at least one thoroughly ridiculous, out-of-touch, mind-numbingly dumb statement at some time during the campaign – she can’t help herself – and that will seal her fate. (She’s already fired some opening shots in that direction by carping about Barbara Boxer’s hairstyle as if she were in a high school catfight, and dumping on fellow CA Republican Meg Whitman for appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News laugh-a-thon.) Prediction: Bet on Boxer by a KO.

“There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs as a nation.”
– Carly Fiorina in 2004, telling American workers they should work for less, except herself, of course – she got a $20 million pay-off for resigning from HP after reducing the worth of their stock by half.

Governor: Speaking of Ms. Whitman, here’s what I know about eBay – three separate people I’ve met, unconnected to one another, have all had very bad experiences selling or buying items on eBay and will never use them again, and they were all enraged at the negligent treatment they received from the company in settling their complaints. That doesn’t augur well for any business and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman was in charge when these events happened. Meg just spent a record $80+ million to seize the Republican nomination for governor in the Golden State, which seems like an egregious waste of money since she’s bound to be the GOP sacrifice to Dem Jerry Brown. After years of the Republican Guffernator, whose poll numbers are now lower than Gray Davis’ when he was recalled, it seems Kalifornyuns are plumb tuckered out from the big business-small government-low taxes hoohah that has been Ahnuld Schwarzenfluffer’s theme song and that Whitman is now peddling. It’s worked so well that CA is an economic basket case, suffocating in massive debt and cutting needed services. Time for a change from the regressive buncombe. Prediction: Easy victory for Brown.

“We can’t impede progress in the name of environmental action that yields little for the environment and even less for our people … and we should look at the environment as an economic opportunity.”
– Meg Whitman. Yes, what an ‘economic opportunity’ the Gulf of Mexico has become thanks to lax ‘environmental action.’

(Side Note: What is it about these Republican women politicians? They all talk and act like none-too-bright Century 21 reps at a sales seminar. Could it be that all of the smart, accomplished women become Dems and the shiny-eyed Tracy Flicks go GOP? Certainly seems that way.)

Nevada:

US Senate: Okay, there’s no denying Dem Sen. Harry Reid is a horse’s ass, but he’s at least a generally rational horse’s ass, which cannot be said of his newly-minted Republican opponent and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Angle has hit all the Stations of the Cross in Wingnut Wackadelphia: She wants to get rid of Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare; advocated for more offshore oil drilling and further deregulation even after the BP Gulf disaster; drools to eliminate the EPA, the Dept. of Education, and get out of the U.N.; and she’s even revisited the reactionary-fringe past by opining that booze be banned along with the fluoridation of water. Angle is now desperately trying to play down how many nuts are in her fruitcake, but Reid should have a field day letting her own dopey words drag her to defeat. As lame as Reid may be, Nevadans are sick of Republican shenanigans and corruption – Gov. Jim Gibbons and Sen. John Ensign come to mind, to name just two – and they don’t need another glaring embarrassment like Angle in Washington, competing with Michele Bachmann for the Goofball of the Week prize. Prediction: Reid will coast to victory next November.

“We have oil reserves and petroleum reserves that we should tap into. And that’s a policy that we really need to look at as a nation. How do we deregulate enough to invite our industries to come back into the United States and quit outsourcing their business?”
– Sharron Angle on May 26, 2010, more than a month after the BP Gulf oil disaster began, as quoted by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line.

The DOA Dems

Arkansas:

US Senate: Your Tattlesnake called Bill Halter in the runoff by 5 points and was, obviously, wrong. Of course, I didn’t count on most of the polling places in districts friendly to Halter being closed by election officials with ties to his opponent — such as only 2 open out of 36 in Garland County – so that may have affected the final tally. Be that as it may, sitting Blue Dog Dem Sen. Blanche Lincoln is headed for doom in November – her campaign and an anonymous senior idiot at the White House who sounds suspiciously like Rahm Emanuel managed to gratuitously insult unions sufficiently that they will sit out the Arkansas vote. With no massive GOTV ground game, few moderate Dems enthusiastic about her reelection, and unions and progressives turning their backs on her in droves, Blanche is fixing to be blanched by a boiling landslide. No great loss – the Democrats need to shed backstabbers like Lincoln.

“Voters must have faith in the electoral process for our democracy to succeed.”
– Sen. Blanche Lincoln, apparently unconcerned about the AR primary runoff chicanery.

South Carolina:

Governor: Unless the lurid charges of hetero extramarital affairs and a lesbian tryst with, say, Wanda Sykes, turn out to be true, Republican Nikki Haley will be the next governor of SC. Maybe by the election cycle after that, the white-bread troglodytes who inhabit much of the state will learn how to read a calendar and realize it’s 2012 and not 1912. Still, a female governor of Sikh Indian ancestry, albeit one endorsed by McCain’s half-term wonder-thinker from Wasilla, is a slight improvement over most of the testicled louts that usually hold civic office in the steaming heap just south of the Tar Heel State, which may soon be known as the Tar Ball State, depending on the strength of the Loop Current from the Gulf.

No quote from Nikki Haley except to say that she agrees with her predecessor and endorser Gov. Mark Sanford’s neocon policies that have brought SC to the brink of ruin. Just guessing, but she probably doesn’t agree with him in the realm of personal conduct or trail hiking in the Appalachians.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.