« Billmon: credit where it's due | Main | More of the same »

Billmon agonistes

By Owen Paine on Saturday August 5, 2006 03:44 PM

My friend Buffalo billmon hardly needs my bravo -- after all, to him, I'm the guy who likened him to the Baton Rouge clavern chief -- but this post has such noble promise written all through it that I can't resist. And besides, God love him, he has the chitter brigade scurrying to the highest limb handy, to throw twigs and small simian fistfuls of excrement at him.

For example, this soulful sour moan from Steve Gilliard, thanks to a link provided by stalwart Stan de Joizy. In response to Der Billhuffer's "fuck the wet dream of electing a donk congress this November," Stevey G sez:

You know, if you have a good job and a nice house you can think this way... It's easy to sit back and say nothing will happen to Bush because nothing will happen to you..
But steve reminds us
...nice, middle class progressives [that we] forget that the fight isn't for us...
... its for the little guys and gals, right now crushed under the war elephants' big flat Babbitoid feet. There follows a sub-Whitmanesque callout song to these po' folks, who might have a chance for tomorrow-ish relief from a democratic congress, Steve thinks. Specimen lines of such little guys and gals:
  • if you're making minimum wage,
  • if you want to be treated with stem cells,
  • if you want to get an abortion.
  • if you're fighting with the VA
  • f your kid is in Iraq ...
Who ya gonna call? Yup, the party of Clinton. Vote Dem and watch out, 'cause here come dah donkey, hooves a-flying every whichaway, gonna kick Wal-Mart, the VA, and the Pentagon into the middle of next week on the po' folks behalf.

Notice these little folks don't need to rise up and demand whats due 'em. Or go into the streets and fight for it. Nope. They just gotta join in a united front of decency and kindness made up of all of them po' types, plus all of us progs, and this fall vote in the donks. Then just sit back and wait for the relief wagon from Capitol Hill to arrive.

That's hs metaphor, not mine; the po' folks need to be "rescued," like the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Get a load of this:

When those Coast Guard pilots and rescue swimmers flew over New Orleans, they could have said, shit, too many wires, too many unknowns, let's get some boats for them. Instead, they jumped in the water and started saving people.
As if the billmon insight was about how its just too hard, too tough to help folks, so why try?

But in fact billymonk's reaction to the farce of the feckless but vain donkery team is precisely the reaction most of us had to the whole Katrina cock-up, including that telegenic icon stream of the damn rescue copters, like a few prehistoric dragonflies, hauling out folks trapped by the thousands with tie lines and lift chair by the oneses. Like bailing Noah's flood with a teaspoon.

Here's my choicest bit:

Those Wal-Mart workers need real health insurance, and the GOP isn't going to give it to them.
... But St Hill will? I seem to recall she had the chance once before.

Comments (3)

Harley D:

Note that Kerry could not promote health care reform because the political support was just not there - that is, 67% of the public wasn't enough for him - he needed pharmas and didn't get it.

Oh yeah! I'm just gonna hold my breath and wait for The Party of NAFTA to come across with that health care. Yep, any minute now...

Patrick Meighan:

This is one of my biggest beefs: when Dems hit third-party advocates with the critique, "you're playing politics and it's hurting the poor." Hell, the reason I *left* the Democratic Party was because of Clinton's Welfare "Reform" bill... which singlehandedly undid our nation's 30-year-old promise that noor poor child would be allowed to starve in our nation. And I might very well have voted for Gore in 2000 if he had distanced himself from that bill, but instead he came out and bragged that the whole thing was his idea!

But no, somehow, it's the Green Party that's throwing the poor under the bus.

Patrick Meighan
Venice, CA

Post a comment

Note also that comments with three or more links may be held for "moderation" -- a strange term to apply to the ghost in this blog's machine. Seems to be a hard-coded limitation of the blog software, unfortunately.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on Saturday August 5, 2006 03:44 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Billmon: credit where it's due.

The next post in this blog is More of the same.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.31