Victorious

Thank God we clipped another 78 and a half billion from college students and the poor.  What a victorious and happy day for the Democratic Party.  And forget what the Democrats could have done three weeks ago if they’d been on message, appeared shoulder to shoulder and stormed the media like they did yesterday…Hell, we probably wouldn’t be cutting 78 billion from the 12% of the budget that had a chance of creating a few jobs and taking care of the poor.  But, as the media keeps telling me, I like my politicians to run from truthful edges and hide in a smug center right, uttering absolutely vacuous things that I can easily predict so that I can shut off the TV without worrying about them.  I personally hate when my politicians defend what I believe and the reasons I voted for them in the first place.  I’d much rather have them saying nothing, behaving without honor, and declaring victory after miserable defeats.

I think Obama should go ahead and concede the reelection bid as part of our ceaseless capitulation program.  Hell, nobody in what is now the teabagging new conservative center wants him as a president anyway, and it’s only fair of him to begin the 2012 presidential negotiation with the American people by suggesting his own defeat.  And before he goes, (leaving before conceding any other major policy item would be extremely rude), he should sign into law Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher program…in total, without exception, and without disturbing policy riders or amendments.  It’s only right, and smart politics to boot. 

He could go ahead and name his likely successor during his State of the Union - maybe Trump, Palin, Buchanan, the Mittster, or my personal favorite, Haley Barbour.  (Isn’t it time we had a corrupt, self-professed, fat ‘ole redneck as a Boss Hog president?)  Then we could sit around discussing the differences between having an idiot and corporate shill as president as opposed to someone who would simply acquiesce to the corrupt idiot’s every policy whim.

We’re Only In It For The Money

So, I get my kids together and we talk media and crises management. 23 of us do it all…as fast as the googely machine will take us. We track major and minor companies since the height of the economic collapse…as many as we can think of…and every press release on the subject. We track initial press releases and statements, along with interim and final releases on each meltdown. We talk crises from the Japanese government and nukes, to Katrina (“you people have never had it so good”), to Chris Brown and bitten women. Yes, I admit I steered them to GOP politics and corporatism…but we had fair representation. When we get enough companies and politicians and celebrities together we order the press releases – just what was said when, and how it morphed after the third party managers got involved. (The press release, in the old days of column writing for newspapers, was a happy marriage of freebee advertising for corporate shills and rip and paste ease for hardcopy columnists. Everyone went home smiling.) But even back in the good old, bad old days of Bernaise and Freud, some lines weren’t crossed.

My 23 media fledglings and I discussed how apparent atrocities were countered (and atrocities they were) with massaged fact, arrogance, or out and out lies. And then I pull out the secret weapon. I took a page out of a chapter on propaganda and public relations. The text is about a six year old edition, but is standard issue for a majority of business schools around the country teaching a course on public relations. Eddie Bernaise coined the term public relations, since his area of expertise, propaganda during both world wars, had a resoundingly bad connotation – propaganda was what the enemy did, after all. But even then, and up until six years ago, there were things that were considered unethical. Remember ethics? I ripped the bullet points out of the text on unethical behavior in public relations and put them up on the overhead computerized thingie machine. Take a squinty-eyed gander.

Warning: May cause projectile vomiting.

• Do not use false, fabricated, misrepresented, distorted, or irrelevant evidence to support arguments or claims.
• Do not intentionally use specious, unsupported, or illogical reasoning. Do not represent yourself as informed or as an “expert” on a subject when you are not.
• Do not use irrelevant appeals to divert attention or scrutiny from the issue at hand. (Smearing)
• Do not ask your audience to link your idea or proposal to emotion-laden values, motives, or goals to which it actually is not related.
• Do not deceive your audience by concealing your real purpose, your self-interest, the group you represent, or your position as an advocate of a viewpoint.
• Do not distort, hide, or misrepresent the number, scope, intensity, or undesireable features of consequences.
• Do not use emotional appeals that lack a supporting basis of evidence or reasoning or that would not be accepted if the audience had time and opportunity to examine the subject itself.
• Do not oversimplify complex situations into simplistic, two-valued, either/or, polar views or choices.
• Do not pretend certainty when tentativeness and degrees of probability would be more accurate.
• Do not advocate something in which you do not believe yourself.

Please, pick an issue, a GOP politician or a media pundit, but is there a single person within reading distance who honestly doesn’t think this list was copied and the theme and meaning inverted by the present day Republican Party? It is now Opposite World 2011. What was considered highly unethical a mere six years ago is now SOP for the GOP.

We have nothing but Republican politicians using false and distorted evidence to further illogical reasoning, and who represent themselves as experts they are not, diverting attention from the issues, and using emotion laden appeals for unstated goals to deflect unstated self-interest in order to misrepresent every freakin consequence, produce untrue and simplistic choices that divide us, of which they assure us they are convinced, but in which none of them believe.

My 23 fledglings were gobsmacked…as am I.

I don’t blame the believers for believing lies, (unless they live in the south, and then they’re willing participants), but I do hold the liars responsible. How on earth did I become so fucking old as to be smacked in the face with this every time I turn on the TV or pick up a paper?

Numero Uno, Ya’ll

 

Great catch by Richard Clark of an article in Yes.  If the US leads the 20 wealthiest in the world in those categories, I can almost guarantee the American south leads the US in same.  We have every opportunity of being number one in the world…just think of it!

Lonely Nights….

SHAME!

Ah…the homeland.  Honestly and sincerely, not a day goes by when I don’t pick up the cheese, fondle the cheese, and wear the cheese on my head – when I don’t pat my number 4 and my number 12 bobbleheads equally and share my love evenly between them – but for God sakes, my little, curdling brothers and sisters, you voted for those hog fucking lunatics.  Don’t pretend your high school governor, (who you also voted in, by the way), just sprang this evil plot on you, my fellow cheese doodles.  They’ve been telling you this is what they wanted to do for 30 God Damn years!  You voted in favor of your own ass-kicking.  Now they’re busy in mid stroke and you get cold feet?  You better hope these 14 sacrificial lambs pull off a miracle and put this fire out, or this will spread across the country and any hope for our children will be all but snuffed out.  We may never have a middle class again anyway, but this will certainly hasten its demise.  What in Lombardi’s name were you thinking, my fellow cheeseheads?

Ground Zero: Charlotte, NC, DNC 2012

The view from ground zero.

Charlotte was built by the Bank of America.  The locals hate it because the interesting parts of the city were bulldozed.  The transplants give it whatever culture they brought with them from home, and then wish they were there.  It is boring.  It is beige.  It is your favorite quick service restaurant lobby in desperate need of interesting potted plants.  It goes nowhere.  It does nothing.  It has no nightlife.  It has no daylife.

Charlotte is Milwaukee without fat, drunken, cheeseheads carrying concertinas.  It is San Francisco moved inland and without a wharf.  It is Chicago without architecture, art, culture, a sense of history, the mob, or thousands of embittered Bears fans.

Charlotte is safe.  I can confirm that with the head hostage negotiator for Charlotte/Mecklenburg, it is indeed safe.  It has no crime.  Nor does it have food.  Nor does it have drink.  Nothing happens.  It is….(sigh)….beige.  Charlotte is a plate of grits…no garnish..no condiment…except that grits are far more entertaining.  If you’re going to have a convention that intends to not to offend, then this is the place.

Sometimes it’s hot.  Sometimes it’s really fucking hot.  Sometimes it’s so fucking hot you can’t fucking believe how fucking hot it fucking is.  Then, it gets cool.  It’s always beige.

I’ll be updating this as we move closer to the convention and the excitement builds.

The Horrific Animatronic Wolverine

Southern GOPs really like shrines.  They like shrines to the confederacy, shrines to modern, southern, Jesus…well, a shrine to just about anything….anything stupid.  One of their favorite shrines is the Billy Graham Shrine To Himself That He Reportedly Did Not Want But His Children Saw Some Money In It in the Carolinas.  It features a talking animatronic cow that tells the story of how he came to Jesus.  I’m all for that.  Isn’t that what we all want when we kick the bucket - buy the farm - ferry across that wondrous river?  Isn’t your first thought when filling out the simple will form at Legalzoom of erecting a shrine with your own animatronic robot to explain your various life changing decisions.  

So, that’s what I planned.  One half of my estate will be devoted to successfully waging an equal protection law suit on the shrine to the confederacy in Columbia, SC.  I want a plot of land next to and overlooking that august field.  My shrine will be twice the height, and have a small lookout tower in the top.  Because I no longer attempt to communicate with the redneck army, the other half of my estate will go toward developing an animatronic robot with something special.  I think the perfect choice is a horrific, animatronic wolverine.  Instead of a talking cow that explains a very narrow minded, fundamentalist view of Christianity, I want to sponsor a horrific animatronic wolverine that does not say a word…but instead leaves a legacy of redneck anguish.  My wolverine will have cored out injector teeth, filled with organic apple juice – enough to curdle the sugar water laced blood of a teabagger, and electronics galore…enough to sniff out the DNA structure of a GOP or a Blue Dog Dem at 50 feet. 

I can see the outlines of the Teabagging supplicants as they arrive with offerings some misty, Sunday morning.  The Grand Wizard addresses the crowd.  “Sons and Daughters of the confederacy, we are gath…”  At that moment, a rusty hidden trap door in my shrine swings open, and out rushes my animatronic wolverine, slavering and boiling foam spittle.  He creeps out onto the manacured lawn next door.

The first line of supplicants rise up in horror at his sight.  “Protect the troops!” they shriek (they always tend to yell that first.) 

“RAHR!” screams the horrific animatronic wolverine. Then, BLAM!  The animatronic wolverine bashes into their midst in an explosion of blood and boiled peanut shells.

The next line rises up, “We must pay down the deficit except when Ronald Reagan or some other dumb ass…” 

“RAHR!” screams the horrific animatronic wolverine. BOOM!  The horrific animatronic wolverine rushes down their number, nipping their heads off and spitting out the Moon Pie wrappers.

The remaining supplicants flee, but the horrific animatronic wolverine cuts off their escape.  “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns?” they seem to ask, puzzled as to why their first attempts at defense hadn’t worked.  No one in the media had ever before failed to kneel and give praise to the intellectual supremacy of their arguments. 

“RAHR!” says the horrific animatronic wolverine, as he dispatches the remainder.  The horrific animatronic wolverine then slinks back through the rusty trap door in my shrine, as the sun dries the blood on the gore bespattered battlefield.

Now, that would be a shrine worth having.