Interview With An Iconoclast: Part One

Recently I agreed to participate in sociological study on the progressive blogosphere being conducted by a representative from a University of higher learning. I appreciate the interest in my input and just for the hell of it all I am going to post it here in segments so that readers can get an idea on where I personally am coming from.

Question: Tell me a little about yourself and how/why you got involved with blogging?

Ed Encho: Sure here we go, I am a forty something year old white male with a college degree in business and a meaningless and ultimately futile job in the soul sucking sea of despair and ennui that is America’s corporate gulag system. I would say that I am lower middle class for what that’s worth now that that particular group has been on the losing end of Reagan’s war on America for so long now and any illusions that I ever had of getting ahead have now just become a certain desperation to hold onto what I do have and to keep from losing it all, a distinct possibility that could occur with a sudden job loss, accident or illness. There are millions of people just like me out there in America today at least in reference to demographics. Now with the country having been totally fucked up by nearly eight years of the insane and incompetent Bush regime and not much in the way of help on the way due to the thorough corruption of every institution in this land I am just trying to keep my head above water in what is increasingly becoming something similar to a third world country, a poverty ridden police state only with a much more ignorant and I mean willfully ignorant population.

I don’t have a good feeling on what is yet to come which is why I am blogging, it is a way to not only keep my sanity but to in my own little way rage against the machine. I am also a military veteran who finds both the ubiquitous and alarming worship of the military that is now present in our society very troubling and I am utterly nauseated at the cynical “support the troops” bullshit that is being practiced by both political parties in order to prolong the military industrial monster that has made death our number one export.

As for the blogging thing it really came about as an outlet for my anger, frustration and a general sense of powerlessness over the creeping fascism that was all being implemented by the extreme right wing Republican party using 9/11 as justification much like a cult like leader used the Reichstag fire in that certain European country back in the 20th century. Those were very scary times because the right had pretty much achieved full spectrum dominance in regards to the media, they were having organized rallies to destroy Dixie Chicks cds aat the time for God’s sake.

In the beginning right after 9/11 I was pretty much like most others in that I had bought into all of that bullshit hook, line and sinker. Slowly though I began to realize that something was terribly wrong, my sister turned me on to NPR which in our local area has Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now and some other great programs on it and it was at that point that my education into just how much of the real news was being turned into nothing more than propaganda to further the interests of a power mad extremist element that had manifested itself in the Republican party.

Those were very scary days, down here in Florida there were suddenly billboards everywhere with the face of George W. Bush emblazoned upon them, every SUV had one of those silly assed yellow ribbon “support the troops” magnets on it, any dissenting views were labeled as treasonous and it was very horrifying to someone like me who had only recently become aware that something was amiss. All the flying flags, the shrieking nationalism, the cheerleading for war were all like Weimar era Germany and I am far from the only one who has made that comparison, I recommend a great book that I picked up during the early period of my reeducation entitled Homeland by Dale Maharidge that goes into a lot of what was going on at the time. Now keep in mind that criticism of any of this was really a big taboo and it took Hurricane Katrina to finally pull back the curtain on the myth of George W. Bush as the great warrior in the flight suit with the big codpiece to the mentally troubled, petulant, incompetent naked emperor that he truly always had been.

The one thing that really pushed me over the edge though was that hideous period when the Republicans were using poor brain dead Terri Schiavo as a political football and everybody from the Christian fascists on the Religious right to the Catholic church to Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and George W. Bush were running amok to essentially rape this poor shell of a woman for their own vile political ends.

I had this little mini cassette tape recorder that I had purchased several years back and I just took it with me every morning to work and ranted into it on the way to and from my place of employment. I had like a 45 minute commute each and since I have satellite radio (I was going insane listening to the Clear Channel crap) I would put on CSPAN’s Washington Journal and you know kind of make my comments into that little tape recorder. It was my intention to do something of an experiment and then try to do some transcripts on it all after a month or so and kind of build upon them and get some stuff down in actual writing. Well after a month of the circus with Schiavo (which incidentally was going on not very far from where I live) and all of it I actually sat down with these like 25 or 30 hours of taped commentary and my raging at anything that came to my mind on the way to work. There was some pretty wild stuff on those tapes as you might imagine.

When I tried to transcribe that first tape I wound up with something like 20,000 words and I was off to the races – I had the basis for most of my first several months off of that tape alone and I have never even gotten to the rest of them. It was total insanity man because I had never done anything like that other than posting stuff on sports websites largely inspired by sardonic humor along the lines of the Jim Rome Show or now the great sports blog that takes no prisoners, Deadspin. So I started writing the political stuff and I started educating myself. I have read hundreds of books over the last five years that I never would have been inclined to read before and I have a pretty good idea of just how much that we as a society have been lied to about nearly everything. I think that really the transformation of the mainstream media into nothing more than a propaganda arm of the government, big business and the military industrial (and now surveillance) complex in many ways has backfired in that millions of people have now truly begun to educate themselves and if there is ever going to be a course correction for this country back into something resembling a free country it will be those people who will be instrumental in bringing it about.

As for the actual blogging somebody that I had met online in a discussion encouraged me to do it although I was a bit shy and lacked self confidence but I started Station Charon in the summer of 2005. I started slowly and over a period of time I gradually built up the confidence to post on other larger blogs and websites. I had a brief fling with the Daily Kos which ended badly because while it was one of the first new weapons in the info war it soon was seduced by a Democratic party that is if not as outwardly fascist as their Republican counterparts it is certainly corrupt and complicit in America’s fall from grace and my blogging has now become more critical of the system itself rather than any political party as you can see if you take a look.

I had a regular gig over on Taylor Marsh’s blog which is very popular with establishment Democrats and she was a great help in assisting me with developing my writing and confidence but after the betrayal of the Democratic majority in 2006 in ending the wars and holding the criminals in the Bush administration accountable it just didn’t feel right to be putting my voice behind a party that had failed so miserably and continues to do so for political purposes so I stopped posting there although I will always be grateful for the forum that she gave me, it’s just a matter of conscience to me to play political games when we need to stop fascism first and foremost or nothing else is going to matter. I pretty much confine myself to my own blog and My Left Wing which is a great place for all those who truly value free speech and a free exchange of ideas and at Rob Kall’s Op Ed News.

I feel that bloggers are really the pamphleteers and essayists of the modern era and were it not for the blogosphere we as a society would be in far worse trouble than we already are. The exiting thing though is the future and the coming realignment that transcends the traditional right/left paradigm and the two party sham democracy. There is going to be a peeling away of the antiwar base from the Democratic party and a merging of sorts with antiwar libertarians and paleoconservatives into a pro Constitution, non interventionist coalition that will shake the system to its very foundations. I honestly believe that and whoever is out there right now trying to push this is on the cutting edge.

Question: You bring up what I see as a very interesting an important topic in your comments on Daily Kos. When a lot of progressive blogs speak they refer to the progressive blogosphere (PB) as a unified force for good, but before your comments I have seen obvious splits and internal debate (often aimed at Kos). With that in mind, my next question is really 2 parts.

1) Do you see the PB as a social movement into itself? or is it just a publicity arm for a social movement?

Ed Encho: That is really a difficult question to answer because in my opinion it is both right now and it needs to move from public relations functions to a real results driven movement that can actually accomplish real social change. In the early days I thought that the PB was really scaring the hell out of the establishment because it leveled the playing field somewhat with the corporatists and their pocket media. The whole Howard Dean thing where he just blew the living shit out of everybody with his ability to raise money and appeal to a massive amount of support online served to send a serious message to the establishment which is exactly why he had to be destroyed by that farcical over sampled scream thing that was played 24/7 and still to this day is invoked by his enemies. You see in modern America assassinations are no longer done with bullets but through the media, it’s a lot more sophisticated and ultimately serves the purpose of propping up the system as there are no martyrs. Dean has always been an enemy of the status quo since he harnessed the power of the internet and the Clintonistas and the corporate hacks of the DLC are already sharpening their knives over the Florida and Michigan fiascos. He is certainly to be skinned alive and scapegoated for the whole sordid primary mess when it was actually the Clinton’s bagman Terry McAuliffe that had tried to frontload it all to favor Hillary Clinton. Dean has always been about reforming the system and he should receive more credit for the 2006 Democratic wins and I must say the margin would have been even larger were it not for Rahm Emanuel deliberately keeping funding from more progressive candidates. Dean’s is the scalp that will be taken when the time comes though which is a shame.

The internet model of organizing, activism and information gathering is already very successful though and you can see it in the large amount of individual donors that Barack Obama is receiving that has him in the heretofore unthinkable position of halting the Hillary Clinton express. This is a truly amazing thing because Obama is much better at using the blogosphere and internet than either the Clinton machine or the Republicans. The Ron Paul movement is also a great example of the raw power of the blogosphere and if it can stay together after Paul has been formally run out of the race there will be an immense and historical opportunity to siphon some of the ideas and energy. This is where progressives should really be looking because after the Vichy Democrats betraying the antiwar movement there is much common ground there that could create a synergy that could be the establishment’s worst nightmare if egos and differences can be set aside.

Regarding my comments on Daily Kos I can speak from personal experience that it is not exactly a forum where free speech is welcomed although it is often seized on by the lazy and unimaginative in the mainstream media as some sort of liberal cyber Mecca. It is however the most well known blog and has gotten to the point where prospective Democratic candidates feel that they must line up to kiss the ring of Markos-Moulitsas Zuniga but truthfully it is all a lot of hype. Sure Daily Kos is the biggest and most mentioned of the so-called progressive blogs but McDonalds is the largest restaurant chain in America it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good for you to eat there.

First and foremost you have to realize that Daily Kos is about Kos himself and his ability to ingratiate himself with the establishment. Note that he has been frequently quoted in Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes column in the Washington Post and Kurtz is a notorious lackey for the status quo. He was instrumental in the destruction of Gary Webb who was the guy that wrote those stories for the San Jose Mercury News on the Dark Alliance and the Contra/CIA links to the explosion of crack cocaine into the Los Angeles area back in the 1990’s and any serious activist or progressive would know this and consort with the likes of Kurtz. You can do the research on the whole sordid tale of Gary Webb who ultimately ended up killing himself after his life was destroyed for what was a very accurate and hugely embarrassing story on how the intelligence apparatus in this country links up with the most reprehensible of types in carrying out their covert operations. That alone shows that Kos is not very principled and his work with Kurtz is far from the only thing that makes him a problematic figure in the progressive blogosphere. What it all comes down to is that you cannot really be an agent of real change if you are eager to be welcomed into the establishment and Mr. Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga has obviously found that crashing the gates is really not necessary to gain access to the master’s castle, it is just far easier in the end to have them install a doggy door. Kos doesn’t run an honest game and that is why you find so many bloggers who are critical of both him and his megablog.

When you do some research you will find a lot of negativity out there regarding Daily Kos which I feel is mainly attributable to the admins and hive mentality of the assorted sycophants who have been given free reign to police the forums, hide comments and to engage in some of the most vicious flaming that I have ever seen outside of the right-wing. It is really very juvenile and sophomoric and just plain mean spirited, total swarming, smearing, hiding of comments, troll ratings etc. I have personally been banned twice under completely different names and no longer bother even visiting, why drive up the hit count? Very important issues are totally taboo over there especially anything that questions the official story of 9/11, attempts to address the evidence that there was massive voter fraud in 2000 and 2004 that allowed the Republicans and George W. Bush to steal both elections and any sort of criticism of the actions of Israel that may tend to portray the Palestinians in a sympathetic light at the expense of millions of dollars spent by the Israel Lobby for public relations and perception management here in America.

But I digress….

I noticed the other day that Larry Johnson the outspoken former intelligence agent who is given a lot of play in the alternative media largely for the Valerie Plame outing ran afoul of the front pagers over at DK who labeled him a racist over some comments that he had made in a diary. Johnson of course has some clout and cred and didn’t take kindly to being treated like just another cyber schmuck by the smarmy little pricks at DK:

Okay Mr. Kos. Here’s a word for you: GO FUCK YOURSELF. (Actually, that’s three words. My bad.)

This wannabee poseur and his gang of Animal Farm pig imitators have lost touch with reality.
…
Well Markos and crowd. Orwell was right. Fuck you people. I won’t post and I won’t read. But most of all, I won’t apologize. I have nothing to apologize for other than making the false assumption that you clowns gave a shit about freedom of expression or liberty. You guys are John Bolton and Dick Cheney in drag. You are welcome to kiss my ass.

I found that rather amusing given my experiences there, the link to it all is on Brad Blog which is a site that I happen to like that is more interested in breaking news, focusing on election fraud and investigating mischief than in assimilating into the establishment.

Another internet based activist organization MoveOn was great when it came to organizing a counterforce to the right-wing think tank infrastructure but has since also become less of a change oriented organization outside of playing electoral politics. Now I belong to MoveOn and I just feel that in becoming less oriented on building local groups, real issues and the like has really damaged them and they are painted by the right-wing slime machine as though they are the second coming of Karl Marx when they really aren’t left at all but center left. The real left in this country was pretty much eradicated during the McCarthy years and the subsequent war on labor unions that really kicked into high gear with the Reagan administration after he fired the air traffic controllers. But not to wander too far from MoveOn I recently found out that they are part of this faux antiwar coalition that really exists for political reasons rather in stopping the flow of dead and mangled bodies that we import from Iraq cynically called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq that I first heard about through a Matt Taibbi piece in the latest Rolling Stone called The Chicken Doves and then in a response to a post I did last week from John Bruhns who actually worked with the group and wrote an op ed piece in the Philadelphia Daily News canned The anti-war phonies. Now to me this is morally repugnant that the Democrats play the same type of politics with this lousy war and it shows just how badly that the antiwar movement needs to break free from the politics as usual system altogether.

We also see just how much that antiwar messages from MoveOn really mean after the Vichy Congress shanked them in the back over the “General Betrayus” ad campaign by basically calling them out as traitors on the Senate floor back when “the surge” product rollout was in full swing. The surge has always been total bullshit and is nothing more than slick marketing but the Dems of the Pelosi,Reid,Hoyer triad allowed this to even come to a vote is unconscionable. This really shows that the blogosphere is really resented by the war party (Justin Raimondo’s term for the entire ruling political establishment) and while they are all too eager to harvest the votes are only going to do the usual and stab them in the back when it comes down to it.

And when you really think about the Democrats as an antiwar party, what sort of horseshit is that? Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson had the four bloodiest wars of the 20th century during their terms in office so it is really the system itself that needs to be changed and just changing management of the Washington whorehouse isn’t going to cut it. As Randolph Bourne once wrote “war is the health of the state” and if we are unable to control the war making powers of what is now rapidly becoming a police state by taking all of that money spent on munitions and spending it here at home were we really need it then we have a very, very bleak future. The necessary change is only going to come about by working to inform and work on changing perceptions of more people who are outside the party and who then can work to bring the rogue politicians to heel because they aren’t going to change just by being put into office, there has to be an external threat to their ability to exploit the system and stay there indefinitely.

Question: 2) How unified is the PB as a movement?

Ed Encho: Probably this was put best by Maryscott O’Connor of My Left Wing (where I am a regular contributor and a front pager) in a long article from Mother Jones magazine entitled Meet The New Bosses in which she talked about the “schism” in the blogosphere and that:

“I think that certain bloggers, the big ones, think politics is sexy,” she said. “They want in, and they’re getting in. They’ll do anything to get in, almost. They want a seat at the table. They want to be in the inner circle of the Democratic Party.”

Maryscott who is very talented and passionate and who respects free speech has also run afoul of Cyber Stalin and has been banned unceremoniously from Daily Kos for her outspoken posts and refusal to just fall in line with the other lemmings.

In my opinion the PB is much more impressive as a sum of its parts rather than as a whole and to a large degree has been subverted for political purposes rather than a force for real social and economic change. Take Daily Kos for example, at one time it was a legitimate counterforce against the right wing machine but has now been turned into a website that is all about electoral politics and landing the consulting gigs for the best shills in an upcoming Democratic administration and that is not where the change is going to come from. It is going to be the netroots working with on the ground grassroots forces that have no party loyalty but are loyal to American ideals and fresh ideas on how to once again become the proverbial shining city on the hill. Look at history with any large group that has been successful, it is infiltrated, key individuals are seduced with promises of more influence and perhaps positions as shills or consultants or in the worst case if they don’t play ball are destroyed from with, this is activism 101.

You need to look no farther than COINTELPRO to see the usefulness of this sort of thing to those who have power and influence and want to retain it. There has been in my opinion a good deal of this going on in the last few years with mainstream media forums, cocktail parties, television appearances etc but when you really think about the real results all that Daily Kos has done is make that duplicitous little rat Joe Lieberman far more powerful after the much touted support of tomato can Ned Lamont in 2006 went up like a flaming bag of dogshit when Lieberman ran as an independent and cleaned Ned’s clock. Another potential fiasco was the great idea to have Democrats vote for Mitt Romney in Michigan instead of throwing support behind someone like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards, this is not going to look very good if it plays any part in overturning the will of the voters and helping to throw the nomination to Clinton.

I feel that at one time there was a lot more unity especially in the earlier days but the territorial squabbles and pissing contests that are especially evident now with the split between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that has become so acrimonious regarding the Clinton diehards is causing more fragmentation into opposing camps. This is something that is going to have to just work itself out and it mirrors what is going on in society itself and the battle between the establishment and more progressive elements.

The wild card though is the Ron Paul movement because I have had some contact with these people and they are very energized, this would seem to be an unprecedented chance to unify in a broad based social movement that transcends the traditional left-right paradigm and with a rallying cause of restoring the Constitution after it was shredded by the Bush administration, ending the wars and holding the corporate and Wall Street looters accountable could unite millions in an organized movement with serious clout in that it is not a part of either of our dueling national political cults of the elephant and the jackass.

Now my disdain for electoral politics is obvious, the system as it currently exists has rotted and been corrupted to the point where nothing less than a total flushing of the toilet is going to be sufficient. This is a bipartisan thing because the money spigots from lobbyists, big pharma, defense contractors and now all those seeking to grab a ride on the global warming cash cow are the ones who really control this country. We sadly are a democracy in name only, we are really an oligarchy and an empire and one that if you pay attention to the real financial news is going broke very quickly.

It is really my hope that cooler heads in the progressive and antiwar movements can merge into a true social movement in the very near future and abandon electoral politics altogether. From many polls nearly three quarters of Americans are against this fucking war and no matter how much lipstick is slathered on the pig in the way of spin that ‘things are getting better’ removes it from the public consciousness the sad fact is that Iraq is still a charnel house and the empire is going bankrupt. Ending the illegal wars should be the top priority of all activists, bloggers and other Americans concerned about our future and the future of the coming generations because it must be stopped and the keys to the war machine need to be taken away from the two-party sham democracy and their pocket media kingmakers.

To Be Continued

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Pirranha in a Pantsuit

Tuesday night’s hundredth (or it just fucking seems like it) Democratic Party debate was the gunfight at the OK Corral for Hillary Rodham-Clinton, time to take down that uppity new sheriff who was threatening the cattle barons and she rode into town with an icy glare, a lust for the kill regaled in full Machiavellian power bitch black. She sleazed, she slimed, she used innuendo, she bitched and she moaned and she tried to link Barack Obama to the dreaded Louis Farrakhan the fake devil who is the leader of the Nation of Islam who endorsed him which also allowed for the dealing from the bottom of the deck the balls nastiest of all weapons: the Anti-Semite card. Farrakhan, the dude with that nifty bowtie just like the one that Tucker Carlson likes to prance around in may have endorsed Obama but he is far from the only national figure to do so, Chris Dodd came out for the B Man yesterday as well and we sure as hell aren’t allowed to scrutinize the high rolling Big Apple Jews (the “New York money people” as Clinton supporter Wesley Clark used to refer to them) who funnel money into the Hillary machine despite their loathsome support of human rights abuses and war crimes against the Palestinians but that is another rant for another time, and besides it is just damned un-American to criticize such an important ally.

The real heavy artillery though was rolled out by some fuckwad little dipshit Clinton operatives over at the Drudge Report (now an outlet for Clinton slime)of Mr. Obama in Somali garb that “jist makes him look like al-Qaeda” and besides, he don’t swear on the bible, won’t wear one of them thar ‘murkan flag lapel pin thingies and his wife ain’t proud of her country so he must be a terrist…get used to that because you are going to be hearing a lot of it, especially if you happen to live in peckerwood nation. When all else fails, go negative and the Clintons are masters at such dark arts having practically fornicated in the gutter with some of the lowest sleazeballs in American politics, think James Carville and Dick Morris and now of course the grossly overpaid Karl Rove wannabe Mark Penn. She did all but give America’s shining new prince a running dropkick in the balls the several days and with the Lone Star state showdown less than a week away and the spin-meisters having somehow flim-flammed Americans into thinking that an overhyped loser of 11 straight primaries is starting the game with a tied score this next six days are going to be extremely ugly for Barack Hussein Obama.

The Clintons have in addition to using Drudge as a cut out to circulate the already infamous picture that has the moronic fuckheads in this blooming Idiocracy screaming ‘Manchurian candidate’ at what they have been sold to be one of those madrassa bred Islamofascists set to take over the United States by stealth proudly launched a kitchen sink campaign of scorched earth demagoguery and smears that will assuredly light up the sky and only strengthen the resurgent John McCain another traveler who successfully managed to turn a story about his business as usual graft mongering with lobbyists into an all out frontal attack at American Pravda aka the damned liberal New York Times. There is also the recently floated link to the radical Weather Underground, fear mongering about needing experience because people are going to kill us otherwise and the ultimate indignity a comparison to George W. Bush himself.

The Clintons are going to have their restoration or they are going to hunker down like Adolf Hitler during those desperate final days in the bunker right before the Goebbels children were poisoned and Der Fuhrer decided to go on and perform fellatio on a luger right before loyalists would soak the bodies with gasoline and torch the whole fucking mess while the Russians were laying seige to Berlin. It seems that Der Führer just had this bug up his ass that led to him declaring war against the German people themselves for failing to see that thousand year Reich thing through because, Goddamnit he was entitled to be the ruler of the world.

Gotterdammerung or Bust! Bad analogy? Maybe, maybe not but you get the point.

Mrs. Clinton has become increasingly unhinged over the last few days as the true sting of the mass rejection of her by Americans becomes more apparent. Hillary Rodham-Clinton is like a foreign object, a toxin force fed down the throats of the so-called opposition and the body is reacting as it naturally would – it is in the process of vomiting it up. The sheer rage of Clinton is a wonder to behold and much is being written about it by the more astute while the apologists, aspiring lackeys and assorted other hillemmings eat Dunkin Donuts and lash out while the bunker itself if being overrun. I especially liked this one by p m carpenter very appropriately entitled Thorazine Time For Hillary and her manufactured outrage over some Obama mailings in Ohio that provided the excuse for this latest PMS bitch fit:

No candidate at this hopeless, pointless stage in what you might call his or her right mind would launch such a party-splitting, nerve-shattering attack. It was “wrong.” It was “shameful.” It was “destructive.” It played right into the GOP’s hands, and every Democrat should indeed be outraged.

But about every Democrat, Hillary is thinking not one minute. She is thinking about only one. She has lost all human perspective, engulfed as she is in a narcissistic, entitled rage. If Democrats won’t have her, then the country — which earlier this week she still mawkishly prayed would “be fine … no matter what happens” — won’t have any Democrat in the White House come 2009. So she’d be primed for an earlier run in 2012, not 2016.

Hillary Clinton is now less a tragic figure right out of Karl Rove’s playbook than straight out of Shakespeare. She’s willing to sell the fate of an entire nation down the road, so that someday, sooner, she may be queen.

And if you reject the Shakespeare metaphor, perhaps Ann Rice? Please, somebody grab a wooden stake.

Now that’s some fucking great commentary, absolutely brilliant and spot on and as for those mailings you know I could care less if the Obama campaign were circulating pamphlets stating that the Clintons were participating in Illuminati Satanic child sacrifices at the Bohemian Grove, this is all more of the ridiculous bullshit and pissing and moaning from a woman scorned who is still in denial that she has triangulated herself into a trap from which there is no escape. In the end it is all about the war and that cynical vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to pander to the neocons and Zionazis was just a bridge too far. Whether before Denver or after bringing the party down so that she can get her ass kicked by McCain in the general election it always will be about Iraq, and the betrayal of every quisling Democrat who enabled the bitch while burying a dagger in the backs of Americans.

Frank Rich also did another piece on Clinton in the NYT on Sunday continuing his hitting streak with his latest entitled The Audacity Of Hopelessness:

When people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

And –

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

And –

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

What wonderful irony, the Clinton campaign is now ripping off the infamous Harry and Louise ads but to anyone who understands Hillary Rodham-Clinton and her fake liberalism this should be no surprise that the former Goldwater Girl would draw so heavily on the Republican playbook. But this seething and seemingly irrational hatred of Obama is personal for a very different reason than is widely acknowledged. Hillary is so pissy because she is getting her clock cleaned by a guy who actually worked under the legendary Saul Alinsky who she did a famous thesis on and then turned down an actual gig, she was already a serial triangulator way back then. What a hoot. This is a great excerpt that I ran across from from the conservative website called American Thinker (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) called Obama’s Alinsky Jujitsu:

These personal qualities are not the sole reason he is where he is, and I suspect the wily Mrs. Clinton knows this full well. I suspect it must bother her that Obama also appears to have mastered the playbook used by her own political teacher, the legendary amoral guru of left wing activism, Saul Alinksy.

Hillary has met not only her match in Alinsky tactics, she has met the master of bloodless socialist revolution, in my opinion.

Obama’s Alinsky Lessons

Barack Obama had just graduated from Columbia and was looking for a job. Some white leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago.

Obama answered a help-wanted ad for a position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” in Alinsky’s words.

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who had this to say to an Ryan Lizza of The New Republic, about Obama:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”
The agitator’s job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the “realization” that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent “self-interest” in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

In these methods, euphemistically labeled “community organizing,” Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere.

Is it any wonder, then, that Obama’s Alinsky Jujitsu is making mincemeat of the woman who merely interviewed Alinsky, wrote about him, and spent the next 30 years in corporate law and in the lap of taxpayer-funded luxury in government mansions?

While she has obviously been outflanked by the far more savvy Obama who is ready to checkmate the bitch in a move right out of Alinsky’s playbook, the irony of the whole thing is fucking delicious. While Obama is playing multi-level chess to her checkers games for the rubes it will be ultimately be her lack of any sort of a principled stand on any of the truly important matters of the Bush years when we as a nation were stripped of our civil liberties, spied upon, made subject to torture, were looted and saw illegal wars launched that have turned the United States into a global pariah.

Then there is that voice, I can’t possibly think of anything more grating than that voice, it is worse than Edith Bunker on helium. That nagging, mean spirited and accusatory tone is something that just makes the hair on the back of the necks of every married man in America stand up. Hillary Rodham-Clinton may be talking about perpetual warfare, the need for experience, pimping the security state, engaging in slime and destroy rhetoric or talking about the need for a healthcare reform system that keeps in place the very same for profit system that has sucked us dry like leeches on our backs but there is that voice. It is the same sort of hectoring and haranguing that brays at the fucked over American male to get his lazy ass out of the barcalounger and take out the trash. It is like nails on a chalkboard – believe me, I live through that personal hell on a daily basis and when she has lost the football watching, beer bellied, limp dick demographic she truly has lost America.

John McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

“I am a war criminal; I bombed innocent women and children”

-John McCain

So in what should be no surprise to anybody it turns out that John McCain is really no different than say Rudy Giuliani outside of military service of course but I’ll get to that in awhile. He is a charlatan, a philanderer, a hypocrite, a panderer and a man whose judgment and hair trigger temper should not allow him to occupy the oval office, that is if anything resembling a change is really to occur. McCain has always portrayed himself as this great incorruptible figure who would stand up against the special interests, reign in the torture state and work in something resembling bipartisanship that would somehow defuse the festering hatred that has transcended the ‘my team vs. your team’, win at all costs corrosiveness that has created factions in America that could one day equal the kind of generational hatred that is passed down in Europe and far less exceptional places that God’s other chosen land. He was a maverick, he was different and even Mr. Republican himself the great Rush Hudson Limbaugh III who is the personification of every single element of the GOP hates his guts but then the story broke.

The damned liberal New York Times in typical style as the propaganda arm of the great commie liberal conspiracy that has been doing it’s damned best to over throw this great and mighty country had the audacity to launch a dastardly smear campaign against McCain with a story of a potential affair with a telecommunications lobbyist that was really so much more than the lurid sort of lemming food sex scandal that the American idiots regularly wallow in. It really isn’t about sex at all but about corruption, about the great John McCain wallowing in the slop with lobbyists, lying to cover it up, bringing pressure on the Times to withhold the story until after Super Tuesday and then there is that ugly little thing about playing games with the campaign finance laws. So despite the frenzied attempts by the neocons to change the subject to the damned liberal New York times over Manchurian Mac’s alleged sexual dalliances the far bigger bombshell in the story is that the ‘straight talk express’ is nothing more than another corrupt business as normal whore house shuttle. There undoubtedly will be more on this story of corruption, lies and the public relations spin that has allowed for the canonization of yet another of the scoundrels who have so thoroughly contributed to the moral rot of the empire, you can count on that.

What the Times story does to a larger extent is to catapult the propaganda and allow for a look at McCain’s serial dishonesty, his fervor for war and his veracity as a ‘war hero’. Put quite simply, any man who comes out in favor of preserving the Bush-Cheney junta’s dictatorial right to use water boarding, a torture method so foul that it was used by the masters of the Spanish Inquisition while trying to parlay his own past as one who was tortured into political power while playing up his victim status as a POW who was also reportedly tortured is amoral, cynical and exploitative. A portrait of a career charlatan is only slowly emerging although the signs have always been there back to his involvement with the Keating Five scandal and running up to his hijacking of the Iraq war and occupation as his hallmark issue stating that despite the obvious facts that ‘stuff was getting better’ when the carnage raged and the bodies stank in the streets, rotting and being eaten by packs of starving dogs outside of the Green Zone. There was that ridiculous stroll through that market with Lindsay ‘five rugs for five bucks’ Graham with nearly half the fucking army in tow that was exposed as so much stagecraft during that now famous 60 Minutes segment last spring and McCain’s political aspirations appeared to be on life support. But that was before the Surge and the Vichy Democrat’s surrender on efforts to stop the war that they lied about in order to be given control over Congress in November 2006. McCain was suddenly off the ropes and back in business again.

And like Flintstone with “Gazoo” every time that McCain found himself in trouble on Iraq he just invoked “General Petraeus” and was out of any jam and his symbiotic relationship with Joe Lieberman which went over well with the same high rolling Jews that fund the campaigns of those of both parties who are acceptable to the neocons as well as his shilling for the American Enterprise Institute put Insane McCain back in the game again. He used the wizardry of a master in getting out in front with the game plan to incinerate everything that moves within 1000 miles of Israel which of course makes the Raptureheads pee in their undergarments in anticipation of their teleportation while the world immolates. But the “Surge” isn’t working, it has all been one gigantic bait and switch in which taxpayer money is buying time by paying off Sunni insurgents not to fight Americans. That dirty little deal along with the ethnic cleansing have more to do with the reduction of violence along with the hermetically sealed media than any real political success. It’s all to buy time so that dirty little fuck up in Mesopotamia doesn’t play havoc with the election or any of the two chosen neocons who would be warmonger in chief, McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And if McCain is so brazenly lying about his holier than thou bullshit about being different and above corruption you really have to wonder how much else of his tailor made for mass consumption by the moronic, television addicted lemmings is also more of the same bullshit. Could he also be lying about Vietnam?

Let’s talk about Nam, that nasty little quagmire in the American subconscious always waiting to be sprung like a bouncing betty whenever it is politically opportunistic, we are still fighting that fucking war and will continue to fight that fucking war until we as a nation are ready to collectively acknowledge the accumulated weight of all of our military interventionist sins and to seek atonement. That John McCain can continue to trade on his Vietnam record as he runs his campaign on the promise of more war for the rest of all of our lives even if it bankrupts us and rapes the futures of those who have yet to even be fucking born. Now I have a lot of problems with this great narrative that McCain has constructed for himself about being this great war hero, first let me say that there is absolutely nothing fucking heroic in dropping bombs on civilians and McCain himself has come out and admitted this when questioned during interviews, he correctly called himself “a war criminal” during another 60 Minutes interview back in 1997.

The Democrats and the more flaccid spined liberals out there with their pet issues snap to attention when it comes time to bestow their platitudes on the great and almighty war hero John McCain who will happily continue to send young men and women to their deaths if and when he snags the keys to the war machine. I have always found this sort of deferential treatment to be not only pathetic but self-defeating as well, the quisling Dems to use a sports analogy are all too happy to spot their opponent a two touchdown lead before they even take to the field for the opening kickoff. This is an area where I am flummoxed especially after the treatment that was given to John Kerry (a foofy haired elitist doofus who actually was something of a war hero) when he was savagely swiftboated by a Karl Rove operation back in 2004. Of course Kerry also came out against the war in his now legendary winter soldier hearings that peeled back the flags from the faces of the armchair patriots and the deniers which was and to this day is still a big taboo in a country that bathes in the blood of the innocent that are murdered by the war machine that has made death out top national export. It is far easier to decry Kerry for statements such as:

“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

Glorifying a man like McCain for whistling Dixie and then bombing the fuck out of people who he didn’t even have the guts to look at when they were sucking in jellied fire with their dying breath while vilifying Kerry is so typically Amerikan. McCain saluted the flag, did time in the Hanoi Hilton where according to who you believe received favorable treatment and then he made anti American propaganda videos of the same sort have carved a scarlet letter of “treason” onto the forehead of Jane Fonda for the last three and a half fucking decades not to mention every person who speaks out against our great wars of conquest rather than to just be a God kissed patriotic American who is content to watch television, go shopping and be a productive little cog in the murderous machine of industrialized murder that is our grand stinking capitalist empire of rot and death.

John McCain is no war hero, he is a war criminal that is plain and simple and in addition to being a war criminal he is also by definition a terrorist for committing terrorist acts against unarmed civilians and no amount of hand wringing fake moralizing is ever going to overturn that ugly and rancid little fact. War IS terrorism and no man who praises war as a way of life as does McCain is nothing other than a terrorist himself. Consider the irony of that particular statement for a minute and the now institutionalized phony war on terror that has brought the war, eternal war home to America as our way of life. None other than that flaming leftist Patrick J. Buchanan acknowledges that war is terror in relation to the bombings of Japan that would bring about an end to World War II and spawn the post war era of as Gore Vidal calls it “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. Buchanan despite the blanket discrediting he receives both by the pathetic mess that passed for the left these days and the neocon right is actually spot on about many things in these horrible days of a rotting empire and he asks the question: “But if terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?”

The dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy and whether it was ultimately necessary against a broken enemy or was merely an opening gambit in the Cold War will be debated until the end of our days but the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be interpreted by most as necessary steps to end a long, cruel and far too bloody war and to spare even more American casualties. I can even see the validity of this argument although I am not a convert but these were only two events, albeit massive in the systematic destruction and the breaking of the will of the Land of the Rising Sun. Regarding the bombing of Japan an excellent resource would be Errol Morris’s excellent documentary the Fog of War during which he interviews at length former Secretary of Defense and Viet Nam war architect Robert McNamara who was Rumsfeld before Rumsfield in his arrogance. The film while not depicting the slaughter on the ground offered a glimpse into the methodology of industrialized mass murder. General Curtis LeMay, McNamara’s superior and the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command that devastated the Japanese Home Islands in the late days of the war plays a prominent part. In the film McNamara explains his role in the incendiary attack by chillingly reducing it to the banality of number crunching as to the potential casualty tally. LeMay, who was savagely lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as General Jack D. Ripper who kicks off nuclear Armageddon is featured in actual film clips that are among the most interesting parts of the movie.

In a precursor to modern corporate number crunching the bombing run efficiency was maximized to the point where stripped B-29s were sent in flying so low that they literally reeked of burning flesh, a good and short although militaristic account on LeMay and the bombing has been written by Victor Davis Hanson and entitled The Right Man, this piece is featured in the World War II compilation called No End Save Victory, a pretty good book of essays that you could likely pick up cheap online. The ruthless efficiency of the incendiary bombings even had LeMay himself to comment that “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”.

On the nights of March 9 & 10 in 1945 Tokyo was subjected to an incredible incendiary bombardment that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, boiling asphalt and cooking flesh. Although the true number will never be known it is estimated that nearly 100,000 were killed, most incinerated and most civilians including women and children and the helpless elderly. The fire consumed the city structures that were mainly built out of wood and the heat according to Nicholas Von Hoffman as referenced in Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters” But this is always the way that it is in war isn’t it? General LeMay was correct, the victors are never the war criminals and never the terrorists, the infamy as well as the true costs of aggression are not ultimately paid by the warmongers but suffered by the poor bastards who just happen to live under the rule of rogue governments or those that otherwise fall into disfavor with the most powerful of nations. The truth is that America has a long history of employing and glorifying war criminals, Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes were the pros but John McCain is a rising star who with his star-crossed past and maniacal zeal to wage war could yet challenge every one of them when it comes to racking up the body count, and he already has kills on his personal ledger.

Considering how McCain has been right up there with putting his seal of approval on George W. Bush’s torture state despite the alleged hell that he endured while a POW not only makes the story itself suspect but any man who has undergone that sort of torture and who comes out in defense of torture is a goddamned hypocrite and is unfit for any sort of high political office let alone that of Commander in Chief.

John McCain’s free pass as a strait shooting war hero needs to be revoked for it is now apparent that he is neither.

Planet Shit Dispatch: Pimping Chelsea Edition

The New Nixon?

No Fucking Sense of Humor: The overall shrillness of tone and the incredibly harsh and disproportionate response to MSNBC shithack David Shuster’s perfectly in bounds (in my opinion anyway) critical comment: “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” is just another one of those examples how the media has so abysmally failed America – you never see potential child fucking degenerate and drug addicted gasbag Rush Limbaugh being castigated but then again he is shilling for Clinton too along with the shrieking skank Ann Coulter. The outrage along the left front of the blogosphere over this is over the top and disingenuous as well as a show of strength of a ruthless Clinton machine that is not to be trifled with. That MSNBC would yank Shuster over something as relatively mild as this is a knee jerk response and more proof that the Clinton restoration is nigh as if Rupert Murdoch’s sucking up to the Queen wasn’t enough.

The Clintons consistently work the refs with all the calculating bullying of any veteran Republican operative ever has with their damned lies about the ‘liberal media’ and now with Rodham-Clinton within sniffing distance of King Bush’s throne the CEO’s don’t want to risk offending the ultimate Machiavellian power bitch and then being cut off of the dole by a vicious political machine that will give Karl Rove a run for his money when it comes to running the spoils system. Rolling Stone magazine writer Matt Taibbi’s great new piece on Queen Hitlery that is entitled The New Nixon is required reading not only for his spot on description of the bitch as a paranoid, easily angered manipulator whose relentlessness and pure cold blooded political instinct is right up there with the dark master himself. I just love this part, especially the comparison of the amoral hired gun Mark Penn (he also has had luminaries like Blackwater’s Erik Prince on his client list) as some sort of a combination of Karl Rove and Jabba the Hutt:

Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he’s fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm’s length missing from the picture.

After Obama’s win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp’s inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.

Taibbi is absolutely fucking great (while he and I part ways on 9/11), a true heir apparent to Hunter S. Thompson at the Rolling Stone which has also returned to the days of great political writing and he has also landed a gig on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher and seriously pissed off Hillary advocate and NOW president Kim Gandy with his hilarious commentary like this one from the show transcript:

TAIBBI: Yeah, I mean, I think Hillary Clinton’s whole thing about, you know how – “Well, I voted for the war; I voted for the authorization, but I didn’t know he was actually going to go in there.”

MAHER: Right.

TAIBBI: I mean, what a load of horseshit. [laughter] I mean, really. I mean, back in November, I mean, Bush and Cheney were practically already modeling their desert fatigues back then. [laughter] We all knew they were going into Iraq. I mean, the idea – I mean, the Democrats basically – they were afraid the war was going to be over in two weeks, that gas was going to be 50 cents a gallon and that Bush was going to be doing parades all summer. And they were going to be left out of it, looking weak.

What is missing though was Taibbi’s emphasis on the word HORSESHIT as well as the clearly audible sound of Ms. Gandy’s puckering asshole. At least somebody has a sense of humor to go along with a keen eye for the truth.

Super Tuesday Musings: Stick a fork in Willard Mitt Romney’s ultra slick ass because he is fucking done, it was too hard to sell the knuckle dragging Raptureheads a flip flopper from Massachusetts no matter how hard that the Wall Street greedheads wanted one of their own to keep shoveling the slop into the feeding trough. Romney officially ‘suspended’ his campaign on Thursday after getting little return on his personal $35 million dollar investment outside of the bastions of those who are rumored to believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers which at least theoretically if true would mean that they would be Republicans. Elmer Gantry Huckabee held his own south of the Mason-Dixon in peckerwood nation and Manchurian McCain has completed his miraculous comeback from being scorned, ridiculed and mocked as a shameless opportunist and clearly out of touch septuagenarian war junkie but thanks to a convergence of the perfect storm of the great General Petraeus bait and switch, the stumping of the vile fucking turncoat Joe Lieberman and the chronic ineptitude of the Pelosi-Reid leadersheep has risen like the proverbial Phoenix. The reincarnation of McCain ironically may be the best thing to ever happen to the Democratic party because if he is able to win the White House over the much loathed Clintons then it will likely mean the death of the parasitical DLC as well and clear the way for a progressive/liberal resurgence. Then again he just may be the man crazy enough to actually launch the nukes on Tehran and even worse than the prospects of global thermonuclear war are the prospects that he may choose Jeb Bush as his running mate.

Hillary Clinton may have lost the overall count in states but won the big ones in New York, California and Massachusetts (despite the endorsement of the Kennedys) and while having to dig into her own pocket for five million bucks she knows damned well that she has the super delegates in her pocket as well and if she can just keep the campaign solvent until the DemocRATS roll into Denver for what appears to be a brokered convention the fix is indeed in. Rest assured that up to this point the big winners are the establishment and the elimination of voices that don’t parrot the party line of the glories of rapacious neoliberal capitalism or join in the madhouse choir for perpetual war like Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards, Mike Gravel and Ron Paul have been easily stifled so that the two-party con game can go on for perpetuity and the war on the American people can continue unabated.

On Any Given Sunday: Ok, now we know why I will never be able to make a living betting on football games. Final score: Giants 17 Patriots 14. So much for that 4 td ass stomping that I had predicted in my Super Bowl preview post but that I am cool with it because it was one hell of a football game and ranks right up there with my personal favorite when a Denver Broncos team that was given absolutely no chance by the media dorks went into San Diego and upset the heavily favored Green Bay Packers 31-24 and the score would have been much more lopsided had stud running back Terrell Davis not missed the second quarter with a migraine. But I have a reason for this, I grew up in Denver and the worship of the Broncos was akin to a local religion and let’s face it, after suffering through four of those rotten Super Bowl ass kickings with my team on the receiving end it was fucking great to see. I am quite up front in my bias on this.

Super Bowl XLII however was an awesome game, hats off to the Giants for shocking the idiots in the media by playing David to New England’s Goliath. They played one hell of a game and that defense rolled over the hapless Pats offensive more easily than the Bush-Cheney junta does over the perennially feckless Democratic Congress. At least I was half right about the game when I said:

A Patriots loss may be phenomenal and the story of the century to the media but to even the casual, serious NFL fan it really wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Hell, it’s not like New England has been playing dominant ball the last month or so and were given all that they could handle by a hobbled San Diego Charger team coached by Norv fucking Turner for Christ’s sake to even get to the Super Bowl this year. The 2007 version of the “Greatest Show on Turf” has been downright ordinary since rolling the hapless Buffalo Bills by 46 points back in November. The unbeaten streak may be nice (and I am actually hoping that they cap it off just for the sake of shutting up all of those classless motherfuckers on the 72 Dolphins once and for all) but it is only intact because A.J. Feely finally remembered who he was and the Baltimore Ravens punk mentality combined with the refs for an assisted suicide that was worthy of Dr. Jack Kervorkian so all of that bullshit about the 18-0 juggernaut is just that – bullshit. As the maxim goes in regards to the NFL on any given Sunday…

The Patriots are definitely beatable what remains to be seen is whether the New York Giants are the team to finally put the spear through the dream season.

Well the 1972 Miami Dolphins are still perfect assholes, there is no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to sports and Bill Belichick is still a classless douchebag; I mean what the fuck was that with walking off the field before the final gun had sounded? If you look up sore loser in the dictionary it should now have a picture of the scowling Belichick in his Unabomber style hoodie next to it. I don’t know what puts the giant bug up Belichick’s ass, after all he already has five rings and his three wins without the vastly overrated media creation that is Bill Parcells and the legend of the Big Tuna as the second coming of Vince Fucking Lombardi has pretty much been debunked no matter how hard that the jackasses in the corporate sports punditry try to peddle their storylines. I guess that he is just a total fucking prick when it really comes down to it.

Often maligned Giants QB Eli Manning looked more like his record setting older brother in picking apart the swiss cheese New England defense in the fourth quarter and that play where he barely escaped a sack to throw that amazing ball to David Tyree who made an equally amazing catch was the dagger in the Pats back, the rest was only a formality. They were beaten like cringing, whipped dogs and 18-1 will now be a figure that will live in infamy right up there with that absurd 537 votes that George Bush allegedly bested Al Gore by in Florida when the 2000 election was stolen. Peyton’s little brother was clutch when it came down to it and consistently delivered throughout the playoffs to complete the family sweep of the last two year’s title games. In an interesting side note that I am sure will not be lost on Giants management Eli was unbeaten after notorious team cancer tight end Jeremy Shockey was knocked out for the year in week sixteen so look for the prima donna to be sent packing in the offseason, he sure seems like he has Oakland Raider written all over him.

While the game was great the commercials represented yet another nadir for western society with many of them pimping E Trade and other financial snake oil outlets in order to draw in just enough suckers to the rapidly collapsing stock market for the big boys to cash out and leave the amateurs holding bags of flaming dogshit. The worst commercial though has to go to Coke for that ridiculous James Carville-Bill Frist feat of mental masturbation designed to appeal to the political awareness of the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of the planet and it wreaked havoc with my digestive system that even surpassed the ravages of the nacho cheese dip with habanero peppers.

I think I’ll stick with Pepsi.

By Ed Encho

American Bacchanal XLII

In the early evening spilling over into prime time of the first Sunday in February tens of millions of Americans will be glued to their beloved televisions for the annual celebration of the crowning achievement of the post-industrial age of unfettered capitalism run amok that is the forty second edition of the Super Bowl. A more often than not bad football game will be stuffed, chunked and wedged in between million dollar commercials that in a sad indictment of our gross consumerist culture are often discussed more enthusiastically at water coolers and over coffee than the game itself. The hype goes on for two solid weeks over the run up to this American bacchanal and the Super Bowl is normally the most watched program of the year therefore making it the premier vehicle to reach the largest marketing audience. The commercials have come to have a hallucinogenic quality with the advent of computer generated special affects. They are like the most garish imagery of nightmares or the distorted visions of bad acid trips. Imagine a hookah smoking caterpillar hawking beer, soft drinks loaded with high fructose corn syrup or snack chips with enough trans fatty acids to juice the sales of the latest cholesterol drugs that are also pimped to the masses of asses.

Far more attention will be paid to this game and the ridiculous reality television shows that the host network mentally bludgeons viewers with than such trivialities as the ongoing and increasing bloody and immoral war ostensibly being waged for Americans to enjoy their precious freedoms to prostate themselves in front of their beloved high definition, big screen televisions and gorge themselves on the very foods and beverages to which they are a captive audience. While Iraq continues to burn, the blood of our young soldiers running in the streets the indolent and blissfully ignorant serfs in the kingdom of Bush will sit upon their plush sofas and drag tortilla chips through bowls of salsa dip even as the charred, limbless remains of bombing victims are dragged off of Baghdad streets, screaming in agony and probably cursing General Petraeus, the nation’s homeless and uninsured children are freezing and starving in our own streets and the looming CDO catastrophe threatens to make the subprime crises losses look like chump change. So just fuck it all, praise Jesus and pass the chips and the remote, it’s time for the Super Bowl!

I too will be among the millions prostrating myself in front of the TV on Sunday because even an iconoclast needs diversions and besides, my one serious vice is that I am a diehard professional football junkie and despite the sordid state of today’s NFL and the knowledge of the marketing goliath that it has sold it’s soul to become I still have my jones for it all. I have seen the hyperbole like “Pats Loss Would Stagger Our Sports Fandom”, yep sure it would and if there is any doubt that the sports media is just as fucking lazy and clueless as the real mainstream media it is always evident during the week leading up to the Super Bowl. What was once a real live championship football game mutated into some monstrous orgy of all of the excesses of American capitalism on steroids. The national media is always riding the bandwagon of whatever the latest greatest of the all time great teams that will be the team of the ages. And if I have to hear one more time the fucking word “Spygate” in regards to Bill Belichick videotaping the calls from a shitwad New York Jets team that was so feckless and pathetic that they wouldn’t suspect that such a thing would actually be going on I am going to puke up my Tostitos and guacamole dip before the opening fucking kickoff.

What is it with the goofballs in the media who are so goddamned fucking lazy that they have to attach “GATE” to the end of anything where there is even a remote controversy? If there is one thing that keeps me blogging other than my burning hatred for hypocrisy, dumbness and corruption then it is the hope that one day even I may be able to collect a consistent paycheck from writing on a regular basis if the competition for gigs is that unimaginative, lazy, trite and inept. And in a sure sign that the Super Bowl is upon us official joining in milking the entire goddamned incident is none other than Senator Arlen Specter who has taken a break from his normal gig as a foot stool for the Bush administration to haughtily hector the the NFL about why the infamous Belichick tapes were destroyed. I mean give me a motherfucking break! What about the CIA destroying the Gitmo torture tapes, or those millions of missing archived emails from the White House that were allegedly ‘accidentally’ taped over? Specter is notorious as a stooge for the system and is invaluable as a reliable drama queen whenever mock outrage and no follow up is required to put up a smokescreen for the latest travesty of a tyrannical regime running up the score against the American people.

Anyway, back to that hype thing now…

Think of the Kurt Warner era St. Louis Rams, “The Greatest Show On Turf” and the near masturbatory frenzy over that team that was in the end as soft as your average Freeper or Dittohead when it came to playing defense. Sure the Warner story was made for television canonization with a rabid Jesus freak gone from chucking cans of creamed corn at his local supermarket to heaving touchdowns to an ultra speedy corps of fleet footed receivers that nobody could figure out how to stop until it became clear that they developed serious cases of alligator arms when faced with a physical defense but the Rams were largely a creation of the media. They won exactly one Super Bowl with that sensationalized and prolific offense and that one was only by the grace of God as time ran out with the Titans inches away from the goal line and Eddie George and Steve McNair having worn down the Ram ‘D’. Of course they only got to the big game after a mysterious review call from the replay booth overruled a Tampa Bay Buccaneer catch by the lamentable Bert Emanuel that would have given Tony Dungy’s team a first down on the way to a game winning score that would have had network and league execs flooding their local suicide hot lines and even had iconic football diety John Madden practically screaming “What the FUCK?” but I am rambling.

The point that I am making is that the national establishment sports media can always be counted on to ride whatever bandwagon offers the most luxurious ride and is the easiest to drive, they sell us our sports champions the same way that they sell us our politicians, our junk food, our investment plans and our boner pills.

But I digress….

A Patriots loss may be phenomenal and the story of the century to the media but to even the casual, serious NFL fan it really wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Hell, it’s not like New England has been playing dominant ball the last month or so and were given all that they could handle by a hobbled San Diego Charger team coached by Norv fucking Turner for Christ’s sake to even get to the Super Bowl this year. The 2007 version of the “Greatest Show on Turf” has been downright ordinary since rolling the hapless Buffalo Bills by 46 points back in November. The unbeaten streak may be nice (and I am actually hoping that they cap it off just for the sake of shutting up all of those classless motherfuckers on the 72 Dolphins once and for all) but it is only intact because A.J. Feely finally remembered who he was and the Baltimore Ravens punk mentality combined with the refs for an assisted suicide that was worthy of Dr. Jack Kervorkian so all of that bullshit about the 18-0 juggernaut is just that – bullshit. As the maxim goes in regards to the NFL on any given Sunday…

The Patriots are definitely beatable what remains to be seen is whether the New York Giants are the team to finally put the spear through the dream season. The Giants DID manage to nearly upset the Pats back in week 17 and appear to match up well in addition to being on a king hell roll after having overcome the elements, a kicker who will never be confused with Adam Vinatieri (let alone Scott Norwood) when it comes to making the clutch kicks, the foaming at the mouth Colonel Nathan Jessup style dictatorial tyranny of coach Tom Couglin and the odds to even be in this game. Practically the entire country was pulling for the Green Bay Packers and a fairy tale end to the Brett Favre story until the clock struck twelve and Favre was once again transformed into an inconsistent, interception chucking geriatric in the NFC title game.

Truthfully though the Giants tenacious play against the Pats in week 17 is an illusion and in all likelihood they are going to be rolled in McCain country come Sunday evening. I watched that game too and the one thing that I really came away with was that the Pats were utterly bewildered that New York played what should for all intents and purposes been a meaningless game as though it were the fucking Super Bowl. It was 28-13 before New England actually started playing as though it were a real game and in the end they prevailed 38-35 in what was one of the season’s best games despite looking like one of those typical week 17 dogs where teams choose to rest their starters. The Giants then used the momentum of the game, trumpeting a loss like I have never really quite seen a team do to knock off the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their megalomaniac leader Jon Gruden who had the best rested team to get knocked out of the playoffs in round one and a Dallas Cowboy squad embarrassed by their pussy whipped quarterback’s Mexico fuck safari with Jessica Simpson before feasting on Favre to get to Phoenix.

I wouldn’t count on the Pats taking the Giants lightly again and coming off of an easier than what logic would dictate path to the big one given the regular post-season Peyton Manning choke job they are healthy and motivated this time. I wouldn’t count on a repeat of week 17 and given the additional fuel provided by loudmouthed Giant’s receiver Plaxico Burress’ prediction I would definitely take the over on this one if I were a betting man. Despite my wishes to see a competitive game this one has the smell of one of those big time ass whippings of yore. I may be going out on a limb here but I say that Patriots put up at least 17 points in the first quarter on the way to a huge margin of victory along the lines of the stompings administered by those great 49er teams led by Joe Montana. I would predict somewhere along the lines of 48-17 or so although I really hope I’m wrong because I just want so see a good game so I can tune out the fucking commercials.

Now that I have done my sports analysis I need to at least comment on the societal aspects of sports in modern day society. Americans are totally fucking obsessed with games, trivialities and minutiae which serve the purpose of the system by acting as necessary distractions in much the same manner as the Roman empire’s panem et circenses or bread and circuses to those unfamiliar with the Latin tongue. While the American empire continues the long, slow slouch towards mass dumbness, despotism, bankruptcy and historical infamy it is imperatives that the frogs sitting in the pot are kept largely oblivious until dinnertime and our degraded celebrity saturated culture is only going to be able to suck in so many so therefore there is a need for games, contests and other amazing feats to enthrall the others. We have fighting contests, shows were people eat worms, talent shows for the talent deprived, fuckover fests that encourage the same deviant psychopathic behavior that is conducive to climbing the corporate ladder like Survivor and culinary contests like Iron Chef and the more peasant oriented eating contests that are occasionally featured on ESPN2 where consumption, gluttony and the vein bulging trench match collision of gastro goliaths are the freak shows that pass for competitive exhibitions are a sure sign of a rotting empire.

I may yet live to be 100 and will undoubtedly have seen a shitload of truly abominable things by then but I am reasonably certain that nothing will ever surpass the Philly Wing Bowl for a sheer and unpolished look at the spirit of America circa The Clinton-Bush years. You can take this one and seal it in a fucking time capsule! One night quite awhile back while channel surfing through the tsunami of cable television bullshit that is routinely foisted off as filler to the public I happened to stumble upon a show on some third rate network such as Food TV and was transfixed by the utterly unbelievable festival that was unfolding on the screen of my 27 inch Zenith. The show contained footage from something called the Philly Wing Bowl that was a surreal melding of arena football, heavy metal rock and roll, pop culture, sleazy sexuality and good ole all American gluttony. The purely primal competition that was on display was an exhibition of endurance and sexual bravado that was utterly oozing with raw prehistoric male machismo unseen since the days of Neanderthal fertility rituals or at least since the unstoppable duo of Flintstone and Rubble were still urling the rock around.

It was an astounding thing to behold. I was of course mesmerized by this glimpse into the strange netherworld of Philly fan distilled down to his purest form and unleashed in the circus maximus setting of a drunken mob of hooligans and borderline degenerates. This hoodlum swarm had gathered en masse at the Wachovia Center for a freak festival extraordinaire that had been sponsored by a local sports radio station and were likely strict adherents to the normal pattern of binge drinking that occurs prior to any Eagles home game where hooligans gather the day before to get liquored up and spend the time getting liquored up and rowdy on the eve of the great battle of the week. Of course it has never been quite the same in Philly since the days when Veteran’s Memorial Stadium was still standing.

The rodent infested house of steel and concrete hell known simply as The Vet was best known for the actual jail that was present in the bowels of the stadium and on game days was open for business as a judge conducted business on whatever member of the inebriated and ill mannered herd happened to be swept up by police who roamed the stands seeking to set examples to quell disorder. The Vet was a dank, stinking old remant of those cookie cutter stadiums where the defective plumbing pipes leaked beer and urine on the heads of passers by and where only the most evil of rodent vermin lurked like street gangstas defending their turf against that were the mortal enemy stray cats who also called the stadium home with the same vigor that possessed gangs of rowdy, drunken Philly Phanatics who prowled the 700 level during blowouts looking for hapless Cowboy, Giant and Redskin fans to mercilessly bludgeon or mirthfully sodomize just for the sheer hell of it.

In kind of a perverse way it was sad to see The Vet go, it was a time honored local tradition seeing pick up teams of rowdy, uncouth drunks playing ‘hockey’ on a rink of ice and frozen urine by using their feet as sticks to kick a frozen egg mcmuffin that someone had found in the trunk of their car along as a puck at 7:15 on the Sunday morning before a late winter Iggles game. Cheap thrills for the masses that went by the wayside after most of the contestants were forced out due to the increased costs of a new state of the art stadium, where seat licenses are peddled like Bolivian flake cocaine to those who can afford it. For the others, there was the cheap crack high of continuing to gather sans tickets in order to watch the home team’s contests on mini TVs in the parking lots and still participating in their tailgate parties on a frozen blacktop tundra where their unique little tribe cedes more of it’s former territory as the price of football goes up, being continually pushed farther and farther out towards the outskirts of the RV parking lots. But always they are loyalists and always faithful to their chronically underachieving but beloved Iggles.

But again I digress…

The Wing Bowl bacchanalia featured horrifying scenes of intense, pagan festivity that should never be seen by women or children or any other member of a civilized society the vignettes of this horror included a man who was wearing a studded black leather jacket and an actual pig’s head that was hollowed out to fit on his face like a mask strutted his stuff. Another contestant was wheeled in strapped to an upright gurney wearing a straitjacket and mask ala Hannibal Lecter. It is a searing indictment of the declining quality of American culture as well as symptomatic of an incurably sick society when a diabolical serial killer who also happens to a cannibal is glorified and elevated to heroic status but this is a topic for another time. The pre-contest ‘entertainment’ featured an amazing individual whose apparent greatest talent in life was bashing cans of beer open against his bloody forehead and then spraying the contents into the roaring crowd. Nice but this type of etiquette is fairly commonplace at Eagles tailgate parties. His demonstration was accompanied by 80’s hair metal band Quiet Riot’s teen angst anthem Bang Your Head over the arena loud speakers and which was met by thunderous applause.

If I personally was horrified after only ten minutes or so of such graphic imagery on Food TV it is damned near impossible to conceive of the outrage of actually having to attend this pagan ritual of gluttony in person or to imagine the stench. The air had to have been thick with the musky aroma of testosterone, stale tobacco, rotgut alcohol, congealed grease, rancid sweat and the spicy vinegar based red pepper sauce that the chicken wings had been dipped in prior to being laid out (in plates of 20) upon the altar of gluttony that was the bunting and banner draped banquet table row in front of the chosen fearless gladiators who would be vying for the dubious honor of being named KING WING!

Sluttishly garbed hoochie mamas called Wingettes strutted their stuff, parading around in G-strings, their shaved pubic areas and silicone enhanced breasts attracted and aroused the males in their immediate vicinity like pieces of raw meat thrown down in front of a horde of starving wild animals. The very presence of these women and their imitators only served to further crank up the testosterone level among the miscreant hordes that at best were a parade of utterly abominable, knuckle dragging, hairy fatsos who looked like they had collectively crawled out of the sensory deprivation tank in Altered States. They were mankind reduced to its knuckle dragging primal basic instincts, carnivores seeking to feed on the prized meat and then return to the cave to slobber over subservient female flesh in the aftermath of the hunt. A morbidly obese bare chested, bearded dude who looked a bit like Jerry Garcia only fatter, was wearing an Eagles baseball cap backwards and who had bigger tits than Pamela Anderson only much hairier grasped his set of gobdobblers and squeezed them together to further enhance their enormity…then he wiggled that hot sauce spattered pair of pink nosed puppies directly into the camera eye and straight into the living rooms of America!

You could practically hear the sound of hot rendered deep fryer fat sluicing through arteries as the arena horn sounded and the contestants dived into their plates discarding drummette bones as they ravenously pillaged. When the plates were clear of all but bits of coating swimming in hot sauce a wingette would shake her booty to the fore in order to replace it with another platter. The gallantry and gluttony were as unrelenting they were intense and the ten minutes or so of actual competition was heated indeed, ambulances circled the arena hoping to cash in on chokers or heart attack victims. By the time that the champion was crowned the floors were slick with vomited remnants of undigested, half chewed bits of fowl meat, grease, fried coating and hot sauce, it resembled an abattoir or the scene of some bloody atrocity. The real atrocity however is the fact that most of these losers were proud of themselves, they actually enjoy being grimy, inebriated, belligerent, miscreants who couldn’t get laid in a women’s prison if they had a pocketful of pardons. The definition of a hot date for the majority of them consists of a twelve pack of cheap swill and a copy of the latest issue of Penthouse.

In the aftermath of the carnage, the triumphant victor was borne forth on a wheeled cart pulled by four scantily clad ‘Wingettes’ to the lusty, full throated cheers of the crowd who paid homage to their victorious gladiator, the winner of this great contest of olympic proportions threw his head back and loosed a horrifying belch that not only rose above the din but rattled the plexi-glass boards that encircled the ice on which the mighty hometown Flyers soundly defeated their hated rivals the New York Rangers only two nights prior. The decibel level of that great discharge of pent up gastric fumes was so loud that it was as if King Kong himself had roared in primal, chest thumping rage. The champion was El Wingador whose triumphant and epic display of gluttony for the ages was immortalized by his ravenous consumption of 154 wings! 77 chickens paid the ultimate price so that this fat, drooling, slob could be anointed with the deified title of KING WING. The runners up, men with the nicknames of Kid Meatball, Winga the Hut, Kid Diesel, Doughboy, Lord of the Wings, Sir Wingalot, The Inhaleionator, Kid Knish, Massive Mike and yes, even Jesus himself were left to seek refuge from their disappointment in gallons of beer and then to slowly gather it back together for another run at the hallowed title next year, kind of like a white trash version of the Buffalo Bills. Maybe they can even line up Arlen Specter as a judge since it is his turf and he has so much fucking time on his hands.

I guess that I just had to get that off of my chest, so severe the nightmares have been over the years as does the Wing Bowl and if we have anything to truly be grateful for this weekend it is that el fascisto Americano Rudolph Giuliani has officially dropped out of the race for the White House. Now we can take some solace in knowing that the parallel reality of what Giuliani presidency would have meant for the first Super Bowl to be held in New York City with Il Duce himself crooning the national anthem in a Tony Bennett falsetto and the references to 9/11 would dominate the weeks of hype. There would have been the inevitable 9/11 tie ins including a state of the art reenactment of the devastation of the twin towers during a halftime show that will feature ‘patriotic’ music by country western stars like Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood among others. There would have been military marching bands, honor guards, flyovers, gospel choirs and the new mass reality television sensation of summary executions of several prominent liberals and other enemies of the state ad midfield. It would have been our very own Nuremburg rally only swaddled in stars and stripes instead of swastikas.

So Happy Fucking Super Bowl weekend! Fuck the wars, fuck the stock market, fuck the repression, fuck the futility and just fuck it all for four hours or so – let’s all just relish in that one hallowed thing that makes us all proud to be Americans.

By Ed Encho