Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I ask myself, how long, oh Lord, how long can the little folks stifle their outcry over all this majestic wet rot? What part of 30 years of going nowhere don't we geefs and geefettes understand? Just take a look at this latest "lame duck" job-class report card, drawn up by the perenially indignant double-dome strivers down there at the beltway's "for the greater googoo" policy institute.

No, on second thought, don't read it. You'll just be told what you already know. But for a few twists, any one of us could have written it umpteen times in the last few decades.

The gist: the vast middle reaches of the American wage class are taking the slow boat to shitsville. There's some interest in a few details -- for example, for months now our corporate tower trolls have seen fit to compact more small-potato opportunities then they've creating. And no, we haven't been in a jobs recession or for that matter gone through a full economic cycle and ended up worse off than before it started. Gotta go back pre-dustbowl to top that stat.

So us poor buggers aren't marching on Washington or up late nights burning silk hatters in their pajamas.

Look at it this way: thirty years of class war takes its toll -- at least on the losers, and their confidence in themselves.

I've been goin' down so long now, junior -- it's startin' to feel like I ain't exactly destiny's child....

"Putin's mince-krieging of Georgia was just the beginning, Painsie m'boy -- just the preamble, the portico teaser. The big enchilada is yet to be served. The great ice bear in a jagged series of brutish gulps will swallow Ukraine -- not bit by bit like an artichoke, not leaf by leaf -- no the Rusky revanche will mean an impotent world standing by as Mother Rus slides great hunks of that rich, rough, but soft-hearted land down her throat!

"A generation of strife on the black earth of the steppes will end in a full and final devouring of a free and unequal people!

"Inevitable? Yes, eventually, what with thirty million ethnic Russians under alien yoke just outside the rim of the federation, and thirty million non-Russians similarly yoked inside. Such un-national borders can't last for ever. But for Chrissake -- the Clinton-Bush fan dance brought all this on maybe two decades ahead of itself!"

Hmmmm.

Note here a fairly accurate appraisal of uncle's sinister role in the post-Soviet revival of the Victorian great game, since Jimmy the Clip Baker faked out Senor Gorby:

[I]n 1989... the administration of the first President George Bush... convinced his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, that a free Eastern Europe and a united Germany would benefit the long-term interests of Russia.

Gorbachev accepted Germany’s unification when he was assured that NATO would not be extended to the east. “Not one inch!” were the exact words of the reply made by Secretary of State James Baker.

That promise was then broken, first by the Clinton administration, and then by the son of the senior Bush, George W. Bush. Today, the American-led military alliance has been built up to the entire western frontier of Russia, from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Black Sea.

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Democrats on Capitol Hill fear Obama fallout

Democratic jitters about the US presidential race have spread to Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress are worried that Barack Obama’s faltering campaign could hurt their chances of re-election.

Am I absolutely, totally twisted to be happy at the choice of Sarah Palin as Senator Manchurian's running mate? Am I totally wrong to be so gleeful at the GOP coming up with their own Political American Idol winner to start sucking hype away from Senator Timberlake just as his campaign seems about to do a re-enactment of the tragic STS-107?

Shirley, the Donkeycrats can't be serious pointing fingers at Governor Cutie Pie's lack of experience in government, as their Presidential nominee is a Political American Idol winner himself.

Remember the original film "Bedazzled" -- not the crappy remake, but the original, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, with Cook as the Devil, and Dudley as some poor hash-slinging shlub who can't get his dream girl to notice him, and makes a deal with the Devil to help him hatch these plots that always go south at the last moment? Well, one of these scenarios involves Dudley being a big-time pop star -- surely, Dream Girl will notice him then -- and he's on Top Of The Pops and chicks are going wild over him and right when Dream Girl's about to fall for him, and suddenly, at the other end of the stage, there's the Devil, as an even bigger, über-pop-star who immediately sucks away all the attention and screaming chicks? Well, kinda' like that.

Seriously, this thing's gone from bad comedy to really, really wretched comedy, comedy so horrific that it's become the bloody car wreck that you can't look away from. How silly I was to think that the Presidential "Election" Circus had put its majorly stupid days behind it and had settled into the final stretch of sheer bloody tedium -- when, in fact, the best was yet to come, as Senator Manchurian pulled the wraps off of his secret weapon, Governor Barbie.

Seriously, Senator Manchuria's no goddamn' fool; he's learned the value of cheap sex appeal from the Donkeycrats. B'wahh ha ha ha ha hah.

Obama, you are go at throttle-up. Gaahhhd, why am I loving this so much? Right now, my DW is having some good old-fashioned, old-school, glass-ceiling banging, feminist-liberal conniptions -- while I really do have to fight to conceal my delight, glee and entertainment.

[T]his country's "radical" activist contingents [are] making a big mistake by not openly, actively attacking corporate media personnel and equipment at major protest-attracting events such as [the Republicrat conventions].

I agree.

We rads need to change targets -- stop attacking the hams up front on the podiums and start attacking the actual culprits, the giant media congloms that provide us with all our degenerate political theatre; these elite mass media production companies, these studios of news-fic. Let's knock over their remote teams, trash their reporters while on camera live, bust up their megadollar griffs, festoon their broadcast towers with sacks of cowshit, storm their studios, get the Kiev boys to lance their web site's software: proclaim nonviolent but total war. Threaten to "virtually" bring down the beast, the giant red white and blue corporate news hydra, and by using only the miracles of voodoo agitprop, sizzle the beast's zillion heads right off at the stump, one by one.

I feel like a combination of the Ancient Mariner and Rip van Winkle. Spent most of the last three weeks inching a small sailboat from Maine to New York against adverse winds and the odd hurricane. But it was a great deal of fun, all in all, and, better yet, I missed a big chunk of the Presidential campaign, certainly an undiluted blessing.

Unfortunately I was unable to miss the "debate" last night. A sad spectacle.

The personal contrast between the two candidates couldn't be sharper, of course. The plodding, incoherent, dully perseverative McCain, and the quick, articulate, obviously intelligent Obama -- day and night, right?

Wrong. The trouble is that smart though Obama may be, he's imprisoned himself in the same mental Gulag as his dimwit opponent. McCain is stupid by nature, but Obama is stupid by choice.

So the two of them tangoed tediously round all the tired talking points of the last thirty years -- tax cuts, "earmarks", waste, supporting the troops, where exactly the war-du-jour should take place, the dire Iranian threat, and the dire Russian threat -- re-heating for the seventh or eighth time the rancid intellectual leftovers of the Reagan days.

It got me thinking. I'm not all that crazy about hicks. I grew up in a hick town, and left as soon as I could. I don't have any romantic illusions about the world of daytime television and Budweiser.

But maybe because I know that world so well, I also don't have any particular fear of it. To Benedick hicks are scary dangerous alien people, and Obama at least looks to him like somebody who wouldn't do or say anything creepy and embarrassing if you asked him to dinner. And for Benedick, though he understands Obama's limitations quite well intellectually, that is reason enough to prefer him: he's People Like Us, or PLU for short.

Benedick, in other words, is doing precisely what the rest of the electorate does in our content-free political process: he is going with the person he identifies with. He will cast his vote in November for a man he knows will hand out boundless largesse to busted Wall Street speculators; who will jump through any hoop the Israel lobby holds up for him; who will continue to wage war in Iraq and wage more war in Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, too; who will continue to provoke and goad Russia and try to regain dominance over Iran; who will solve the health care mess by making people buy private insurance. And Benedick will sign off on all this because Obama is -- as FDR said about the elder Somaza -- a son of a bitch; but he's our son of a bitch.

I really wouldn't have thought that anything could make me proud of the US House of Representatives, but yesterday's stunning rejection of the bailout bill certainly did -- no thanks to the Democrats, who voted for it 140-95.

All the experts and wise men were for it -- the Waxmans, the Franks, the Rangels. In fact anybody with a safe seat was apparently for it. The people who bolted were the people who don't take their re-election this fall for granted -- in other words, the people who had to listen, however unwillingly, to what the public was saying.

For the experts, deeply invested in their knowledge of the arcane institutions of finance, a threat to those institutions is a threat to civilization itself. Apparently the public, however, doesn't grasp just how indispensable these institutions are. I'm with the public on this one.

Comrade Owen understands these matters better than I do, so I asked him about it. His take:

The returning mariner immediately chivy-ed me with "meltdown" questions:

"Just what would be so terrible if we let all these bankrupt institutions evaporate? -- Nobody to lend to solvent businesses any more? But surely that's nonsense -- the Fed could do it directly if need be, no?"

Yes indeed, if Uncle stands ready to put the whole corporate economy (globally) on a new "artificial" gubmint hi-fi vascular system. The chaos would be temporary and the damage to organizational momentum among our production outfits minimal. Boldness to the max of course would be de rigueur. Damn the glitches and full speed ahead -- anything less would yield unnecessary losses of real output.

Warning, Will Robinson! Warning!

Yes the commanding heights are right there within Uncle's grasp. he has all he needs to get on with it. But need I notice a jilted Wall Street gathering herself on her Manhattan Laputa, ever ready across the Rhine -- like any deposed ancien regime, preparing her vicious pounce at even the slightest wobble or uncertainty on Sam's part.

Obama got the fire in his belly for the likes of that? I mean do he look like this guy to you?

The black man who straight-armed Wall Street. Hmmmmm.

Mike comments:

Ugh. Fucking Hitler Youth.