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

Soylent Red, White and Blue

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

I: Republican Ratfucker Dead-Enders

“May you live in interesting times” goes the familiar and eerily relevant Chinese curse and America circa 2009 is an eerie example of what whomever came up with that one had in mind. The economic collapse is gaining in momentum with the fraudulent markets in freefall, the ripple effects of the implosion of the FIRE economy now spreading into the real economy and the system desperately trying to save itself even if it must destroy the country itself in order to do so. In a land gripped by growing madness the dead-enders of the fascist Republican party become more angry, irrational and outright seditious with each passing day. The latest outrage this week is the ugly public tantrums of several Republican governors who are shamelessly and publicly balking at accepting funds for some programs from the diluted economic stimulus package that was signed into law last week by President Barack Obama. It is once again political party before country for these miscreant thugs, the whores of the oligarchy and their religion of tax cuts for the wealthy, an endless fountain of corporate welfare and a dumbed-down and desperate populace that is more easily controlled.

A bitter and recalcitrant bunch led by a red state rat pack including career scoundrel and now the overly corpulent governor Mississippi Haley Barbour. The cornerstone of peckerwood nation that Barbour reigns over deserves recognition as the 2008 winner of the dubious honor of being the fattest state in America that is Mississippi, their third title in a row. Just think of the 1970’s Pittsburgh Steelers and Joe Montana era San Francisco 49ers in terms of NFL football dynasties and you get an idea at exactly where Mississippi (answer to the joke: what has four eyes and can’t see?) ranks in the obesity hall of fame. With leadership like Barbour, the Magnolia State may yet see a Bill Russell era Boston Celtics decade long stranglehold on the title were it not for the economic decay that threatens to bring widespread hunger to the Homeland. Along with Barber were Gov’s Mark Sanford of South Carolina (who did offer to pray for the people needing the aid), the oily Rick Perry of Texas and GOP rising star Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a glad-handing little twerp of a deceitful charlatan who looks like he could be a rug merchant in the Mumbai slums. After B.J.’s embarassing response to Obama’s rousing speech on Tueday night perhaps he should consider whether or not such a career change is in order, there is nothing like being butt-fucked live on national television that is the kiss of death for political aspirations, other than that there is always American Idol or Dancing With the Stars. He reminded me of a talking Pinocchio style puppet version of Bob Denver, only with a much better tan and without Gilligan’s trademark hat.

The raw cynicism of the fascist RNC in trotting out whatever minority mouthpiece of the week (before Jindal it was Michael Steele) as a counter to Obama is as transparent and ridiculous as them trying to put lipstick on the pig of the McCain campaign by seeking to tap into the bitter PUMA demographic by pimping that wolf murdering moron Sarah Palin. Jindal is just the latest in a long and storied line of Louisiana flam flam-men in the tradition of Edwin Edwards but the stench of desperation is as palpable as it is fetid. Personally I would have far more respect for the fascist rump party of dead enders had they rolled out another Louisianan of note, David Duke as their official spokesman. At least he actually believes in something and no matter how vile that it may be he is genuine and that makes him unlike the gravy train riding flea-market bargains like Bobby J. and Ichabod Cantor. Just peer beneath the surface of every one of these preening and preaching Republican ass-clowns and there is the leering visage of that philandering little fascist dwarf Newt Gingrich and his fellow anti-American right-wing jihadists.

Now goaded on by the oligarchs, the bankers and the blood barters, the paid shills and stooges are increasingly turning to some old bread and butter tactics like red baiting (so much of an anachronism in 2009 that it would be piss in your pants funny were so many of the knuckle dragging lumpen-Republikkkans not buying it) and an increasing virulent form of blatant racism as was evident with last week’s Ruppert Murdoch owned New York Post’s kill the monkey cartoon. How comical is it when a Wall Street subsidized punk like CNBC’s Rick Santelli can get up and demagogue about a ridiculous Chicago Tea Party protest over an Obama administration plan to help homeowners and not the criminal scum bankers that he works for. The Santelli’s of this world have a lot riding on continuing to carry water for the robbers and banksters – their fucking jobs! The hew and cry against the dreaded nationalization of the insolvent banks by the keening carnival barkers like Santelli and the insipid, screaming lunatic Jim Cramer (who more appropriately belongs outside the geek tent pimping a feces eating contest or better yet in a padded cell at his local insane asylum) and the legions of other paid shills is only guaranteed to grow louder and in some cases, as I am going to mention, much more dangerous as the grand scale financial crooks look to lock in their gains and escape with nary a consequence for their thievery.

The gumption of the reactionary fascist bloc is indicative of a savage and rabid cornered rat, still stinging over the massive public rejection of last November the red-ass party is now unified in opposing the impending nationalization of the failed banking system. I say impending because despite lobbyist pressure, a vast media propaganda apparatus, right-wing think tanks that pop up like incurable herpes genital warts and a frothing at the mouth underclass looking for scapegoats because the chain reaction has already been set off and nothing is going to stop the collapse of the Ponzi economy. Game’s up jack, it ain’t ever comin’ back and the planet killer asteroid that are the derivatives aren’t even on the radar screen yet. The derivatives are the doomsday machine coming home like the prodigal son of looter capitalism turned Hannibal Lecter and with Oedipal revenge on the mind to fuck mommy up the ass and whack daddy into McNugget sized snack treats for later on when watching The O’Reilly Factor on TIVO.

The derivatives are the insanely complicated hedges, side bets, grand scale financial chicanery that should be illegal so dangerous are they. The wizards and masters of the universe like their scientific madman geniuses who build machines that could create an Earth destroying black hole have in their greed, arrogance and the smugness that could only come from having the entire political and judicial system in their pockets along with the trump card of a bought and paid for media built what capitalist hero Warren Buffett once called financial weapons of mass destruction. We aren’t even hearing about these fuckers yet and that my friends should scare the shit out of everyone. As the muckraker Upton Sinclair once remarked “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”, and the derivatives monster albeit insanely complex and convoluted will no sooner be addressed by the “experts” and “many economists” that you regularly see mentioned in financial news than the fact that the house of cards of the Ponzi economy was in the crosshairs of a category five shitstorm. Always remember that these same “experts” and “economists” failed to acknowledge the problem in the first place, choosing to mock the experts like Nouriel Roubini who dared to call bullshit and earned the nickname Dr. Doom as a result of his heresy. It was as recently as nine or so months ago that the carnival barkers and shit salesmen were saying that the economy was still “fundamentally sound”.

There will of course always be distractions and the suckers in ample supply as always will continue to bite. In the great 1980’s Bruce Willis movie Die Hard an international group of thugs invade and take over Nakatomi Plaza, holding hostages and all under the pretense of terrorism. The real truth is that the terrorist ploy was designed to provide cover for a massive robbery and in the end all the hostages would be marched up to the roof of the building which mined with C4 explosives would be blown up, killing all of the hostages and allowing the perps to escape to their beaches of choice where they could bask in the sun collecting interest on their plundered loot. What is going on now with the terrified oligarchy and the manufactured distractions from their propaganda parrots is reminiscent of exactly that.

II: Games Without Frontiers, War Without Tears

The fascist controllers are in full recognition of the rising tide of anger that is the result of economic despair brought on by a rotted and failed system. I would suggest that any who may have some degree of doubt about the coming reaping of the whirlwind her in Der Homeland only take a look around them for signs. In a couple of recent articles that I personally find relevant, Michael Klare’s A Planet On The Brink and Chris Hedges’ Bad News From America’s Top Spy. The observation that the political unrest that is currently occurring outside our little flag draped cocoon of ignorance and denial will soon be coming to America. An additional reading assignment is this article from The Guardian entitled Summer of Rage.

Hedges’ piece is particularly disturbing in that he speaks of the Obama administration’s newly minted Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair. During testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Blair spoke gravely of the repercussions of the financial meltdown that could lead to domestic riots, mass protests and widespread civil disobedience. Blair, a man with a bit of a history of disregard for human rights (note his involvement in East Timor attrocities) as well as the monstrous, ever intrusive police state apparatus at his disposal. The latter surveillance and repression complex that still operates with total impunity and is not subject to any form of legitimate oversight or accountability despite the change in management at the Washington whorehouse.

Mr. Hedges in his aforementioned piece also links to a U.S. Army War College report entitled Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development that specifically recommends that the military be prepared to respond within U.S. borders against American citizens for the coming backlash as the economic deterioration quickens and the rising tide of anger reaches the boiling point. The big boys know that the cataclysm is coming and are ready to respond to it with extreme prejudice.

In layman’s terms, the state is soon going to be weaponized by the very parasites who have sucked the country dry and sold us all out for chump change and are going to make damned sure that the rabble is put down like rabid dogs when the time comes. Now that Posse Comitatus has been rendered irrelevant and the new programs that grew out of the shadow government’s prototype REX 84, Cable Splicer and Garden Plot martial law plans are ready to be implemented. The trap is about to slam shut just at the time that a growing number of the general public is finally starting to get the point that the late, great George Carlin articulated so greatly in his epic rant about who really owns America:

Forget the politicians. They’re irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. They own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls!

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. That’s right.

You know something? They don’t want people who are smart enough sitting around the kitchen table to figure out they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later. Because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club… and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.

By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long, beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue… these are people of modest means… continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. And nobody seems to care.

That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will remain wilfully ignorant about the big red, white and blue dick that is being shoved up their ass every day. Because the owners know the truth. It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Of course the ownership society always meant one thing and one thing only, they own our asses, the game is rigged alright and the oligarchy is going to ensure that it stays rigged even if they have to call in the jackbooted thug paramilitary types, the militarized police and even the fucking military itself to protect the looters. Anyone who has read Naomi Klein’s brilliant and seminal book The Shock Doctrine knows how the game works. The oligarchy could always count on massive public ignorance as long as the lemmings watched T.V. and went shopping, then there was the element of constant fear implemented post 9/11 by the Republican neo-Nazi thugs and their tool George W. Bush (himself the grandson of a Nazi enabler). Now though with the cataclysm still only in the early innings the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the pirates of plunder. This stunning ‘joke’ by comedian Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher series is as viciously audacious as it is dangerous to those who have presided over the biggest robbery in history:

Now I am saying…I don’t think we should put all the bankers to death, just two. I mean maybe it’s not technically legal but let’s look at the upside – if we killed two random greedy pigs…I mean KILLED – like blew them up at halftime of next year’s Super Bowl or left them hanging on the big board of the New York Stock Exchange with their balls in their mouths – I think it would really make everyone else sit up and take notice.

I can guarantee you that the ruling class is taking notice and is putting their protectors on notice, the horrifying little National Guard urban warfare training exercise in Arcadia, Iowa is an example of what is really going on, largely in a cone of media enforced silence, you don’t want the cattle to know that when they reach the end of the chute that the pneumatic air-hammer is going to smash their brains into jelly prior to the slaughter. The creation of NORTHCOM and the now infamous Army Times story about battle hardened troops being brought home from Iraq are puzzle pieces that are falling into place. Rob Kall, editor of the great website Op Ed News did a piece earlier this week called Coming Soon – Riots in America?, in which he speaks of many of the same things that I am addressing in this posting but this is the truly ominous piece from Mr. Kall:

I just spoke to a friend who knows someone who is trying to get out of the military because they are training returning troops for riot control to take over US cities and he doesn’t want to be a soldier dealing with US citizens. On top of that, these returning Iraq vets are burned out and “fried” with PTSD and exhaustion. And he doesn’t want to pick up arms against his own country.

This same source says the military is setting up a separate communication system. In the military, securing or taking out communications is one of the first steps. If you are an invader, you need to bring your own communication system because you have to assume that the existing system will be destroyed or compromised.

The future, as Leonard Cohen once put it, is murder. The Army War College study that I referenced earlier is reminiscent of a British Ministry of Defense report from back in 2007 that was written about in the London Article with the title: Revolution, Flash Mobs and Brain Chips and among many other extremely troubling predictions this one particularly seems to be of an increased degree of relevance given the current breakdown in the global social order:

Marxism

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

Pressures leading to social unrest

By 2010 more than 50% of the world’s population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and “new instability risks”, and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to “inter-communal conflict” – communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.

The article is subtitled A Grim Vision of the Future, that is the future for those who happen to be on the receiving end of the grand ass-fucking of globalization. Note that the MOD report ties the social upheaval due to the anger of those robbed by the globalists to that old devil Karl Marx whose writings have provide so much ideological cover in the past to those seeking to strip mine the planet. It is especially notable that any progressive or leftist attempts to take over the power structure are always painted up like the fake devil Marx when it comes to having to justify the systematic use of torture, murder and illegal internment that is the basis for fascist capitalism. We have seen this game before, we have seen it in Latin America, Africa, across Europe and the Asian continents, we have seen it in the Arab world and now it is being used to put down the citizens of the Anglo-American empire itself who are now victims of this corrupt system of institutionalized rape and thievery. Imperialism is nothing more than murder and slavery, it has always been that way.

III: The Summer of Rage – Hijacking the Revolution

Divide and conquer is the oldest tactic in the book. This strategy is playing out right now as the guardians of the oligarchy use their bought and paid for corporate media pulpits to propagandize and deceive. Notable is FOX News’ involvement in fomenting violence and seeking to splinter and confuse the victims of the grand Ponzi scheme into attacking each other rather than the real cause of their misery. Glenn Greenwald addressed this in his recent piece entitled Fox News “war games” the coming civil war.

In a flaming Fox News extravaganza, bursting at the seams with more than the usual fascist bullshit dime store demagogue Glenn Beck (the former local Tampa Bay hack who used to specialize in staging ‘big eater’ runs prior to being called up to the hatemongering big leagues) spoke of a coming civil war. The GOP Gladio (the reference is to a famous fascist WW II stay behind operation) will be led by get this – “bubba” militias aka the dregs of WASP society out to get some payback against that Commie, Muslim ‘nigger’ in the White House, armed to the teeth and jacked up on a mixture of Jesus juice, horny goat weed and home brewed methamphetamine. The really slick and Rovian shrewdness of this dastardly black propaganda operation is the intent to fragment the growing resistance movement by attempting to peel off the anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, anti-Federal Reserve types that have most recently found a haven in the Ron Paul libertarian camp. The same sort of folks that Herr Beck had previously decried as kooks, dangerous extremists, terrorist sympathizers and anarchists back when the Bushreich was still in power.

Now Beck, the cheapjack opportunist that he is sees a golden opportunity to appease his war-freak masters and catapult the already bloated, putrescent and rotting carcass of Rush Limbaugh into a primo position as field marshal of the angry white army. It’s like the copy machine salesman turned conqueror General Bethlehem in the movie The Postman only with the moon-faced one being the fucking lunatic in this one. Beck has designs on grabbing a ride on the gravy train of think tank subsidized fascism with his national cable soapbox being the perch from which he can deliver his strident and inflammatory rhetoric and seduce the ignorant fucking bastards who are too goddamned dumb to realize WHO has really fucked them over into joining his dead-ender, zombie remnants of the armies of 16, all that remains of Republican power after a three and a half year train wreck that began at Terri Schiavo’s hospice, spilled over into a seedy hotel where Pastor Ted was smoking dicks, took a turn for the worst in the horrendous national fuckup that was the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, stalled further when Satan finally had an opening spot to call Jerry Falwell’s fat ass home and was splattered across the deflector shields with the insane, paranoid babbling of Mr. 9/11 Rudy Giuliani, the somnolent Fred Thompson and the disastrously botched McCain-Palin campaign.

The opportunity is there for a new face, and the jackboots are a very good fit on Beck, Rush is about ready to pick up his golden briefcase and spend the rest of his years stalking child prostitutes in the Dominican Republic and feeding his Oxycontin jones – the facists have grabbed that big fucker by his man tits and milked him dry. Glenn Beck is the future.

FOX’s War Games project has in addition to Beck recruited a veritable rogues gallery of racists, operatives and military industrial complex information warriors like the ‘former’ CIA agent and Osama bin Laden groupie Michael ‘kill ‘em all’Scheuer, on call Pentagon pimp Tim Strong and a gaggle of other so-called ‘experts’ who wear their fascism on their sleeves. Fox also cannily offers airtime to Congressman Paul along with trends forecasting guru and self proclaimed “political atheist” Gerald Celente (who I happen to be a big fan of) in order to launder their disinfo through a cheesecloth thin guise of semi-legitimacy. Make no mistake though, these people are the modern day heirs to the same fascist traitors who once tried to overthrow Roosevelt by recruiting former Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler to lead a coup d’etat (known as the Business Plot) against the legitimately elected government of the United States. Butler, a loyal American played coy, gathered intel and then ratted those disloyal scum out as the enemies within that they were then and their legacy remains to this day.

Glenn Beck is nothing more than a descendant to the sort of fascist pocket propagandist of which the prototype was a vicious demagogue named Father Charles Coughlin who was bought off during an economic crisis to foment violence, support the system of exploitation and lead an angry army that in all likelihood included the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the modern day dittoheads. Now as history repeats itself in a slightly different manner as it is wont to do the economic royalists are using the same old methodology in the creation of a counter-progressive movement loyal to the oligarchy and the forces of American fascism. I excerpt the following from a 1939 pamphlet by Joseph Hansen –Father Coughlin: Fascist Demagogue:

Fascism is a combination of two things.

First, it is a wide mass movement of farmers and small businessmen who face bankruptcy, of youth denied a future under capitalism, of sections of the unemployed. All these layers of the oppressed who are seeking desperately to put their hands on the surrounding plenty become hypnotized by the silver-plated promises of a demagogue who regiments them into blindly obedient shock troops.

Secondly, it is financed and controlled by the very capitalists who above all are anxious to keep the revolutionary violence of the masses from turning against them. In America – the DuPonts, the Morgans, the Rockefellers – the Sixty Families.

To the rank and file followers of fascism, at first it seems a genuine revolutionary way out of their misery. They discover the truth too late.

The capitalists provide the money. The dictator provides the powerful slogans, the stirring names, the demagogic program, the organization, the lieutenants and the oratory.

That the fascist Republican rat-fuckers are unified in opposing the reforms of President Barack Obama, a man whose chief shortcoming is in failing to as yet realize the doomed naïve futility of a bi-partisan peace with those whose goal is the further destruction of the American working classes is likely to make him a one term wonder – if that long given the recent uptick in racism and violent threats coming from the extreme right. Charisma will only take a man so far as John F. Kennedy so brutally learned as a large chunk of his skull was blown off by the bullets of assassins, especially true when facing a relentless and driven enemy, a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy of fascist fifth columnists. The goal of the Republican neo-Nazis is nothing other than an aborted or otherwise botched Obama presidency which will then give way to a resurgence of their new dictator, this time they won’t choose a fool like George W. Bush and the full powers of a police state that the star-crossed Democrats are failing to dismantle at his or her disposal with which to utilize in a god-kissed, flag-wrapped version of a final solution. The deranged apple pie authoritarians are now plotting their resurrection, the failure to act now and with an iron will to destroy them will only result in a misery and suffering unheard of in this once great land of plenty.

The dupes who are recruited as shocktroops are always the last ones to get it and with these dopes it will be no different, they won’t realize that they have been played until they are broken and eventually targeted by those who had used them for being too dangerous – permanent revolution is not what the fascist pricks are looking for and these useful idiots will be expendable as history shows that they always have been. With reliable fascist tools like Beck and FOX revving up the shock troops, Admiral Blair openly musing about using the military in putting down the rabble and the job losses mounting could it be long before the four flushing looter capitalist oligarchs who run this shithouse put two and two together and realize that dissidents could be very easily converted into Sweeney Todd meat pies? Hell, the prototype for a pilot program already exists in China, the land of goons where greedy and amoral transnational corporations go to beta test their products for the day that they will be rolled out in Der Heimat. The gruesome and macabre Death Van story comes to mind, could it be long before these are painted up in red, white and blue, affixed with a big yellow smiley face and sent to pick YOU up?

IV: Revolutionary Moi

When the shit really doe shit the fan you can count me in with the folks who are smarter than the ones who are duped by the tinpot despots, their drooling demagogues and the ‘bubba’ militias who will be out there targeting libruls as the new Juden. Hell, bring the cocksuckers on, they will get a twelve-gauge enema form me and many others who are not too stupid to be suckered by the rulers of chumpland. Count me in with the people who pumped their fists in the air over Bill Maher’s ‘joke’ about killing two bankers. But as a sworn enemy of tyranny, fascist oppression and the looting bastard parasites that Thomas Jefferson warned of:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

And I might say…why only two?

Were George Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the revolutionary patriots who founded this country in casting off the yoke of slavery of the king and his paper merchants still around there wouldn’t be enough lampposts and trees to hang these fuckers from. Hell, let’s have a full-blown, storm the Bastille French style REVOLUTION!! Eat the rich, roll out the guillotines and let the fun begin. We can even ‘invite’ Glenn Beck, Rick Santelli and the other fascist stooges to help with the testing process. I mean, don’t we want to get the guillotine settings just right in regards to calibrating the blade drop for maximum efficiency before we get to the filthy looters themselves? Shit, why not ‘invite’ ALL of the mouthpieces for the four-flushing bastards who have destroyed this country and now are trying to implement their police state to ‘blow the roof’ while they slither off to Dubai or some other refuge with no extradition treaty? They hanged Julius Steicher at Nuremberg didn’t they? Did he really ever personally kill any Jews or did his propaganda rag Der Stürmer only make him an accomplice to the mass murders? Shit, Charles Manson killed fewer people than George W. Bush and one is on spending his fourth decade on death row while the other is already racking up future appearances on the speaking circuit.

What the fuck?

I will close now with this, I am not exactly sure of where exactly where it came from but I really like it:

There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:

1: SOAP
2: BALLOT
3: JURY
4: AMMO

Please Use in that order

(editor’s note, be sure to stockpile #4)

This is a revolution call, a call to arms and the scourging of the fascists, the conniving banksters and the oligarchy that has declared war on US, the American people. Heed this call and we can reclaim our legacy as a free people as well as our cherished birthright –

LIBERTY

By Ed Encho

Stick A Fork In Reagan’s Ass

The Bastard’s Dead

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

-Grand Prophet Ronald Reagan (mystically foreseeing TARP)

With the passage of the massive economic stimulus plan set to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday in Denver the dying squeals of Republican piggies grown fat on the failed policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan are becoming more shrill, psychotic and deafening. The stimulus plan, even as diluted as it is by the inclusion of all of those great tax cuts that have resulted only in proving that trickle down economics is nothing more than Gulliver pissing on the heads of the Lilliputians (translation: the working class) and doing so with sadistic mirth. What the stimulus package represents more than anything even including the ridiculous fucking tax cuts is that the end of an era is nigh and that the machinery of government is being slowly redirected to a previous form where it was not weaponized by overly wealthy pigs, Wall Street looter capitalists and avaricious corporations who only stand for, to borrow form the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson:

… the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

It is the entire American fascist system that has been so painstakingly and expensively constructed over the last half-century this is now at stake, the bullshit war on the American middle class that was cloaked in anti-communism, sanctified by Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts, cemented into place by the resentment politics of Richard M. Nixon and writ into religion by the cult or Reagan is in serious jeopardy. The withering attacks of the minority Republicans along with their ugly public tantrums promoted by a plethora of pocket media kingmakers and a propaganda machine still owned by the ruling classes are nothing more than a siege on the Alamo battle to preserve the false legacy of their false prophet Saint Ronnie of Pleasantville, USA.

I: The Cult of Reagan Idolatry

He was always a fraud! There wasn’t a legitimate bone in the man’s body, he was a failed movie star who hit the political jackpot when he slithered into the Republican party and onto the ultimate stage of national politics. From the beginning Ronald Reagan was a phony, a bad B movie actor who found his place as a pitchman for the conservative movement. Reagan was a rat bastard and a fink who sold out his Hollywood peers to the anti Communist rage of the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties and used his tenure as leader of the Screen Actors Guild as a springboard to launch his political career.

His presidency was the result of an America struggling against itself to come to terms with societal contradictions brought on as a result of the civil rights movement, the counterculture of the sixties, Vietnam and Watergate and none other than William F. Buckley himself put it best when he used the following description in a column regarding Saint Ronnie: .. “a bumpkin with oratorical gifts pandering to American self-esteem”. Reagan was a man who put forth a strong daddy image and was able to reduce complex issues to their simplest terms, the better for a populace slowly undergoing the chronic dumbing down perpetuated by the cable and satellite television explosion of the 1980s.

Nearly every one of the serious problems that America faces today and that newly crowned President Barack Obama faces had its roots during the Reagan era. The rich got richer and the rest, well let them go eat some fucking government surplus cheese, especially the goddamned welfare queens. The Reagan administration was a breeding ground for the delusional, non-reality based crony capitalists and Ayn Rand worshipping ‘free-market’ fanatics whose worship at the altar of laissez-faire economics still has them out prospecting for fool’s gold in Galt’s Gulch. It was Reagan appointee Alan Greenspan who actually hung out with Rand along with a gaggle of ghouls and assorted other weirdos in a group known as The Collective during the period that the holy tome Atlas Shrugged was being written. The canonization of Rand and the greedy and callous selfishness called objectivism and the absorption of the absurd crock of horseshit came to become dogma in America where monopoly and the destruction of economies are the end result of this sort of sociopathic behavior. When boiling all of this misbegotten and ultimately ruinous junk science down to its very essence it is an unwritten rule that for every fucker there are tenfold of fuckees, that is what capitalism is when it becomes cancerous and co-opted by the rentier class and the sleazy operators who rapaciously wring every last penny of profitability out even if it means offshoring millions of jobs and creating a permanent underclass who are born into this world without any shot at the mythical American Dream.

Now as the entire big con game becomes more apparent, we can all thank Ronald Reagan and the slavish devotees to the grand myth for the era of sloth, stupidity and scumbags that produced a generation of toxic shit that has set America back a century and set the nation on a course towards insolvency. The ugly lie of Reaganism must be exposed, stripped naked and laid out on an autopsy table, a bit of skillful use of a scalpel utilized to peel back the rotten flesh and expose the diseased organs. In less graphic terms, the legend itself needs to be debunked. The signs of desperation in the Republican ranks are encouraging as well as the books that are beginning to be written, books like Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth, the first of what I hope will be an attempt to strip away the revisionist history of the past three decades or so and allow for a national rejuvenation along to a return to true American values of economic fairness, equality and compassion that have been buried under a mountain of manure.

In order to roll back the creeping tide of fascism that has become so much a part of all that is American in early 2009 it is of utmost importance that Reaganism be recognized as the product of right-wing crackpots who in a mere quarter century have gutted this country in the name of voodoo economics and promoted an authoritarian dogma that served as a springboard for the rule of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil and the corruption of every relevant institution that has been staffed by fascism enabling cronies, zealots, crooks, grifters, con-artists, jack booted thugs and flim flam men. Such is the system as it exists today and as we now slowly begin to sift through the wreckage it is the mutated capitalist strain virus of Reaganism that infected the body, destroyed the immune system once known as checks and balances and then metastasized further into the global financial system which is now in freefall and widespread unrest threatens to bring down entire governments.

As with alcoholics and drug addicts, the recognition of a problem is the first step to recovery and the canonization of doddering Dutch as some sort of iconic national father figure needs to be exposed as the heretical think tank folderol that it always has been since its initial rollout as a product in the aftermath of one of the darkest and most tumultuous eras in our history. The Reagan administration went for the throat right out of the gates, organized labor was attacked with vigor with the firing of striking air traffic controllers and destruction of their union, the Sherman antitrust act became irrelevant and the fairness doctrine was eliminated to allow for the right-wing to use their limitless resources to propagandize the media. The return of the wealthy elite and robber barons to power and prominence was facilitated by the ability to distract and deceive. Karl Marx was only partially right when he stated that religion was the opiate of the masses, it is but that was prior to the advent of television and when the two are combined the potency is jacked up to the highest possible level. The power brokers knew this and with his Hollywood background Ronald Wilson Reagan was the perfect front man for the myriad of their ideological schemes that would wage war on progressive society and deal a staggering blow to economic fairness and equality in the land of plenty.

The 1980’s and the coming of Reagan’s cutthroat neoliberalism gave rise to the mantra of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” in a decade where corporate raiders became role models and unfettered Wall Street uber capitalism became the driving force of our social order. It was the great national regeneration decade and that fabulous and almighty leader was our champion, the iconic president who would make things right, who would deal harshly with those bastards in Iran unlike his milquetoast predecessor, who would restore the national glory and make us that shining city on the hill.

It was morning in America again.

A couple of ambitious young Republican gangsters Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff who would contribute largely to the decimation of America long after the hallowed Ronnie had left the building. The story of these two scumbags who would along with a cast of thousands turn the entire government into a spoils system with a ruthless cadre of fixers to ensure compliance is told very well by author Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?) in his latest book called The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. I excerpt the following from Frank’s lengthy piece in a recent issue of Harpers Magazine similarly entitled The wrecking crew: How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a killing:

The story begins in 1980, the year of the “Reagan Revolution,” when there appeared on the national scene a phenomenon that bewildered political observers: legions of politicized, energetic college students who were conservatives rather than liberals or radicals, as had been typical in the two decades previous. And not only were their politics deeply square but the idol of this unlikely youth craze was the oldest president ever. Reagan’s entire Pennsylvania campaign, for example, was run by a lad of twenty. In 1984, the aged actor won 60 percent of the college-student vote. The historical turnabout was irresistible, and Reagan Youth became one of the great journalistic clichés of the period, powering hundreds of newspaper columns and at least one beloved TV sitcom.

These sons of Reagan had a strong sense of generational self-awareness, and they loudly told the world how they had come by it. In the midst of the interminable Iran hostage crisis, a crowd of them at one college campus were supposedly so moved by a showing of Patton that they demonstrated spontaneously in favor of a nuclear attack on that country, shaking the ivory tower with chants of “First strike now!” Another well-known story of the era was how a bunch of privileged kids at Dartmouth College, a traditional fortress of privilege, decided that embracing the traditional politics of privilege and mimicking the traditional manners of the privileged were actually acts of great daring, exposing them to persecution by tyrannical liberals. Then there was Jack Abramoff, a College Republican leader in the Boston area who gained, according to the John Birch Society’s Review of the News, a “reputation as one of the most innovative of the national Conservative youth leaders” after he mounted such a massive grassroots push for Reagan in 1980 that he almost single-handedly shifted Massachusetts into the Republican column.

Abramoff, a burly fellow from Beverly Hills, came to Washington in 1981 to assume the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee. Back in the Vietnam days it had been leftists who fought the power, he explained to reporters. But “now we’re the campus radicals.” His newly energized College Republicans (CRs) fanned out across the nation, instructing clean-cut kids on how to use the tactics of the Sixties left for their own causes. A snapshot of Abramoff using a bullhorn to rally a conservative throng was proudly reproduced in the CRs’ Annual Report for 1983, just across the page from a photo of Ralph Reed, who was then Abramoff’s right-hand man, pumping his fist at the head of a swarm of angry, sign-waving conservatives. In both instances the young men had gone into action wearing neckties.

It was Abramoff’s friend Grover Norquist, then a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, who came up with a plan for changing the very nature of the College Republicans. Norquist made a study of the CRs, developing a scheme to transform them from “a resume-padding social club,” as one account puts it, into “an ideological, grassroots organization.” Abramoff made Nor-quist the College Republicans’ executive director, and the two put Norquist’s theory into action. They purged the “old guard.” They amended the group’s constitution, establishing a structure that made the Washington office more powerful, and rewarded proselytizing on campus.

What the rising conservative sensibility of those years treasured above all else was “confrontation” with the left. It called for a quasi-military victory over liberalism; it would have no truck with civility or fair play; and it made heroes out of outrage-courting lib-fighters like Reagan’s communications director Pat Buchanan, the organizer Howard Phillips, and the young Jack Abramoff.

The first and most noticeable characteristic of this new militancy was an air of swaggering truculence. There are, of course, bullies from every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two of the movement’s greatest heroes—Tom DeLay and Oliver North—had the same nickname: “the Hammer.”

Jack Abramoff filled this bill perfectly. He had reportedly been something of a bully in high school and had now grown into a “hard-charging” and “dynamic” leader, in the assessment of conservative magazines, an ass-kicking weight lifter who could quiet the commies with his fists if they got out of line. The gangster fetish of his later years is by now familiar to the whole world—his constant references to The Godfather, his black trench coat and fedora, his Meyer Lansky memorabilia, the murderer argot that will no doubt serve him and his friends well during their prison years.

Abramoff himself derided the moderates he had ousted from control of the CRs as “wishy-washy country-clubbers” and insisted that he had transformed the organization into an “ideological, well-trained, aggressive, conservative” outfit. “Fighting the Left with a goal of victory” became the official, stated purpose of his College Republican cadres, according to an essay Abramoff wrote for the group’s 1983 Annual Report. The CRs were “fighting America’s last stand,” he blustered; they would “defund the enemy wherever possible,” one of his lieutenants added. According to the journalist Nina Easton, CR officers had their underlings memorize the gory opening monologue from the movie Patton, only with the word “Demo crat” standing in for the word “Nazi.” Other young rightists of the period went a step further. J. Michael Waller, the editor of the Sequent, a student paper at George Washington University, actually took breaks from red-baiting professors in order to zip down to Central America and hang out with the Nicaraguan Contras and the death-squad faction in El Salvador.

War was the order of the day, from President Reagan’s fight with the air-traffic controllers right down to the college campus, where Abramoff became famous for his declaration: “It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently.” War plus revolution, actually. Abramoff liked to describe his CRs as “the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution,” and in 1984 the young firebrand used his moment at the rostrum of the G.O.P. convention in Dallas to lecture the assembled small-business types on revolutionary theory.

That notorious chickenshits like Abramoff and Norquist sought to cloak their assault on America in militarist terms while not serving themselves is basically a requirement for entry into the fascist Republican party. Hell, what could be more Republican than using whatever means possible to weasel out of actual military service and then send others to die for your smug arrogance and the freedom to shit on all that is American. The list is long, too long of those sort of neocons, the adult versions of the nerd pack who used to huddle in the high school library conquering the world by Avalon Hill board games and the always popular Risk. Sure there are some who actually have served such as George W. Bush who flew a desk in a reserve unit until his coke habit got out of hand and the media creation that is John McCain whose recklessness as a Make Believe Maverick ironically resulted in his being shot down in Vietnam and winning a stay in the infamous Hanoi Hilton that he would use as the launch pad for his national political career – but the list of those who have actually had the guts to serve and serve honorably is short and bereft. Of course there is General David Petraeus but that ass kissing little chickenshit is a story for another time and ties into a much deeper and more disturbing fixation with the culture of the glorification of militarism here in the Homeland.

II: Adrift in the Land of the Angry White Male

It was always absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against “elites” being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man – these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media “elitists” shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.

-Matt Taibbi

In their rise the brink of conquest the Republican party became masters at harnessing backlash politics or the politics of resentment as a basis for duping befuddled and angry Americans into voting against their own economic self-interests out of a need for revenge against minorities and the great liberal conspiarcy of the cultural elites. The dark master Richard Nixon was of course a criminal mastermind and practically wrote the book on the politics of divsion. Tricky Dick excelled in using red-baiting, race-baiting and whatever divisive tactic would allow him to rise to power. The best study of Nixonian tactics is in Rick Perlstein’s brilliant Nixonland where it is also noted that Ronald Reagan built his own political career on a similar strategy. It was during Reagan’s reign as Governor of California during the tumultuous period of societal unrest during the 1960s that Reagan became a right-wing hero. His denunciations of the hippies, “look like Tarzan, walk like Jane, and smell like Cheetah” and the hated University of Cal-Berkeley, “a hotbed of communism and homosexuality” made him into a rising star. When the now infamous Powell Memorandum laid the blueprint for the think tanks, the media takeover and the preservation of the status quo it was only a matter of time until the actor Reagan could be rolled out as the smooth talking frontman for the product of oligarchy and imperialism.

Of course the hippies would have to be demonized, turned into cartoon characters as would the effete snob liberals who would stand in the way of the new fascism and it’s avuncular face, that of the great communicator, the strident anti-communist warrior king. The failure of the Vietnam war would be blamed on the liberals and the media and the seeds of white populist resentment would be sown as the farm crisis decimated the American heartland and a porcine loser named Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was plucked from obscurity and transformed into a modern day Father Coughlin. Evangelical Christian churches would be subverted by well financed, politically connected fanatics to wage the culture wars and to become the foot soldiers of the Reagan (and later Bush) Revolution. The hostility level had to be cranked up in order for the Republicans to succeed in remaking America in the image of the same jokers who once glorified the uber fascist Benito Mussolini by featuring him on the cover of Fortune Magazine while singing the praises of the efficiency of his business model. There was the ugly and some might say outright treasonous takedown of Bill Clinton over his sexual dalliances which provided rocket fuel for the extremist reactionary right’s hate machine, and on the morning of September 11th 2001 that fuel became nuclear.

But I digress….

The conditions on the ground in early 2009, the beginning of the era of Barack Obama and the end of the lie of Reaganism are those of unmitigated fury as the right confronts the greatest threat to the supremacy of their cancerous capitalism since the days of the hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The battlefield is overrun by the defenders of failed dogma and by the well paid servants who stand to lose their meal tickets. Already, in the early weeks of the Obama administration the Republicans have squealed like stuck pigs, outraged at the massive jacking up of the debt to somehow staunch the bleeding and to create jobs for the jobless. Of course they never gave a rat’s asshole when Lord Bush was robbing from their grandchildren to build the police state infrastructure, wage illegal wars of aggression where trillions of dollars were sucked down a black hole inhabited by the slime creatures that are blood barters and war profiteers.

One would figure that the Republican fascist party would have been somewhat humbled after their mangy asses were taken to the woodshed by voters back in November but that would be naïve. Hitler never stopped after his failed beer hall putsch and neither will the devil-spawn of McCarthy, Nixon Reagan and the Bush family. Despite a silly and childish attempt at crafting some sort of bi-partisanship by the Obama administration they were shanked in the back by a dirty pack of double-dealing, jack-booted, America hating vermin who damn near succeeded in derailing the stimulus. Not that it won’t fall anyway after the king of capitulation Harry Reid and his fellow Democrat assclowns in the Senate allowed the poison pill of hundreds of billion dollars in those wonderful tax cuts that have worked so well at destabilizing the country by destroying the middle class to be inserted into the goddamned thing. The most unsurprising kick in the balls to Obama came from media darling and reputed ‘maverick’ John McCain (you may remember him as Sarah Palin’s running-mate) who spat on the new president’s outstretched hand. Of course McCain is also the self-admitted former war criminal who dropped napalm on civilians and then when his plane was shot down in Nam went on to make propaganda pieces for those dirty communists. But yet in this land of the dumb it is Jane Fonda who is still vilified decades after that filthy illegal murderous war ended with America slinking off after igniting the entire region, killing millions and allowing a rogue faction of the intelligence sector to establish a massive drug trafficking network, some of the profits of which would fund Reagan’s bloody little soirees into Central America to prop up despots and their vile torturing regimes.

The Republican party has long been a haven for reactionary thugs, neo-Nazis, out and out fascists, perverts, pederasts, braggarts, loudmouths, authority worshippers and the same sort of immoral degenerates, the dregs of society that Hitler used to much success in populating the ranks of his Sturmabteilung (SA). It worked out so well that Der Führer had to ultimately undertake an intervention to prevent them from turning on him that is famously known as the Night of the Long Knives. In any sort of normally functioning political system a similar purge would have occurred in a failed reactionary party after having their clocks cleaned but America post-9/11 is anything but a normally functioning society. If nothing else the remnants of the disciples of the false god Reagan have dug in even deeper, real dead enders, like the Japanese who had to be literally burned out of their caves and tunnels even after defeat was a certainty. One gets an idea of just how demented that this particular party is when one member, Pete Sessions of Texas proudly compared his party to the Taliban when being interview about strategy during the Obama era. What the fuck is up with that? Didn’t the Taliban become the enemy after that oh so glorious and politically serendipitous day of 9/11/01? Isn’t America at war with the Taliban for allegedly aiding and abetting the great bogeyman Osama bin Laden? Did Sessions really just come out and say that he and his party are studying the methods of terrorists? Such a thing would have been cause for an extraordinary rendition under the Bush-Cheney junta, perhaps closing Gitmo is premature because we have an admitted fifth column waging war against America from within and being far more successful than al-CIAda could have ever hoped to be in even their wildest of wet dreams.

And there is also opportunity in undermining Obama and allowing the economy to continue to deteriorate so that he can be blamed in 2010. A rising star is a guy named Eric Cantor, a bespectacled little snake whose role model is none other than Newt Gingrich is a rising power in the neo-Confederate rump that is still beholden to the preservation of the Reagan temple of greed and has emerged as a particularly virulent critic of President Obama’s attempts to save capitalism from itself. Hanoi John along with his loyal sidekick Lindsey ‘five rugs for five bucks’ Graham, the South Carolina Senator least likely to surprise anyone were he found in the men’s room of a rest area off of I-95 with a cock in his mouth ala Larry Craig.“If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country’s screwed” lisped Graham in his Gomer Pyle singsong, a longtime trademark of the three headed monster of McCain-Lieberman-Graham (although the wandering Jew has been somewhat chastened after his fall betrayal didn’t result in the loss of his Heimiat Security Committee chair). You have to love the way that the fascist Republican party is now crying like stuck pigs, wasn’t this the criminal syndicate that once boasted as a national leader a slimy little greaseball from Texas named Tom DeLay who once allegedly said on bi-partisanship “Fuck that, it’s time for all out war?”.

The losers of November’s election were out hitting the Sunday morning horseshit circuit in force decrying the lack of deference from Obama and the supine twits in Harry Reid’s Senate when it came to honoring the spirit of Reaganism, what’s next, they exhume the old bastard’s rotting corpse and haul it around like some ghoulish sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s? The house still sets the rules too, the media is still bought and paid for, this much is already evident with this beautiful little example: Obama’s use of fear card may backfire. So Obama is now a fear-monger despite not one fucking peep about the eight year reign of terror by the Bush regime during which Americans were conditioned to see swarthy Arab terrorists in every dark corner, under their beds and as a result turned into the world’s largest coward colony courtesy of apocalyptic conjecture about smoking mushroom clouds, manipulation of the infamous threat level matrix for political means and the canonization of Jack Bauer, a man who would rip the testicles off of a toddler with a pair of pliers in front of it’s mother for god and country. Obama is going to have a rough time taking on the consolidated fascist media colossus and the highly paid celebrity whores who pass themselves off as journalists. Operation Mockingbird is alive and well and even more dangerous now that the entire national media is owned by a handful of corporations with interlocking directorates. Now there has been talk about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine which might not be a bad idea in leveling the playing field against the sort of fascists that former Roosevelt Vice President Henry A. Wallace once so accurately pegged:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

But any reinstatement of such rules in the current era of systemic rot and deterioration would only be selectively enforced to keep out those who question the state and the system itself. You will never see the Fairness Doctrine used to offset Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and any number of other demagogic clones. While this is a popular idea with many liberals it is only going to be eventually turned on them and other alternative media voices including bloggers who dare to question the legitimacy of the oligarchic status quo. The guardians of big money and the oligarchy will suffer nary one bit – at least not until changes are made and the Bush criminals are prosecuted. But back to the fact the media is a huge problem and the onslaught of propaganda pumped out to prevent even a diluted bucket of horse piss of a stimulus package illustrates that any sort of return of the government from its current role of protector of corporate interests and the wealthy will be fought tooth, fang and claw in a destructive battle of attrition that will continue to transform families and friends into warring factions that can be exploited by the same ruthless scum who have rigged the tables so successfully, some could say too successfully.

How this is all going to end up is impossible to tell, the American eugenics project to create the perfect Idiocracy, a reverse master-race has any sort of reformer like Obama facing some seriously nasty odds, just think of the Detroit Lions hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after next year’s Super Bowl and you get the general idea. Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times wrote a piece this weekend entitled They Sure Showed That Obama that would tend to create some optimism in those readers less cynical than I. It was this line that killed me though and only further underlines the ongoing demographic problems facing Obama and anyone else who tries to change the system. Rich refers to: The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Herein lies the problem, despite what may have happened during the election this is a nightmare block of the population and not one to be trifled with because old prejudices die hard and as always liberals have shown a proclivity in overestimating their ability to reach those who within their thick, Neanderthal skulls have banned logic and reason. I’ll put in a plug for a big favorite of mine, the moral beacon in this sick land of denial and dumbness and that would be for the brilliant writer Joe Bageant and his book Deer Hunting With Jesus, trust me, it’s a must read.

Now I may not be a hunter (personally I think it’s fucking slaughter) but I am one hell of a beefy, beer-drinking white dude, a military veteran and have 11 tattoos as well if that is any sort of an added qualification to the shithack D.C. conventional wisdom. Despite that I am smart enough to not be hoodwinked by a bunch of pampered, elitist, chickenhawk charlatans trying to bait folks like American Me into voting against my own economic self interests. My grandfather was a Romanian immigrant who joined a union to go work at a meat packing house (but only after at 15 he filled his pockets full of ball bearings to qualify for the job required weight), fought in World War II in the Pacific in some of the most vicious of cleanup operations and as an FDR democrat hated the sleazy, fascist snake oil salesmen that were Republicans. Thank God that he died before that fraudulent piece of crap Ronald Reagan was President but my grandmother who survived him by nearly thirty years cursed the Gipper and that punk assed borderline retard George W. Bush until her dying breath. The point is that most people from that particular era (never mind the ‘greatest generation’ hogwash) weren’t so easily duped, and their ability to own a home, raise a family, take vacations on one income are a testament to they way that things used to be in this country before the rats and chiselers hijacked the system.

So as one of the manly men who are largely supposed to buy into the anti-elite propaganda peddled by the fifty-million dollar a year degenerate child fucking dope addict I have always taken great offense at just how fucking stupid that the average American beer swilling, swinging dick angry white male can be. Hell, I love drinking beer (and lots of it), shooting guns (although not at unarmed animals), watching football, driving fast, hating the insipid tyranny of political correctness and ogling nekkid women but I also don’t get suckered into that anti-intellectual horseshit that makes one of those clueless, testosterone and alcohol fueled dopes who are as mad as hell but too fucking dumb to realize that they should be really mad at the millionaire lardasses like Limbaugh who are very well paid to dupe these knuckle-draggers into consistently voting AGAINST their own economic well being. Listen dudes, there is nothing macho in being stupid and unless y’all get a clue your sex lives will continue to be comprised of drinking a twelve pack of cheap malt liquor and whacking off over the latest issue of Penthouse or whatever other fuckrag that you pick up at your local convenience store’s jack rack. Stop fantasizing about coming on Sarah Palin’s tits, stop reveling in the falsehood that everyman Joe the Plumber is a working class hero and pick up a book once in awhile, the mind that you save may be your own.

And maybe, just maybe the inhabitants of this land of shame, sin and sorrow can finally shrink the legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. In a time when even the maestro Greenspan openly admits that he fucked up big time then I suppose that anything is possible.

By Ed Encho

Even Their Dog Was Ugly

Panem et circenses XLIII

When fascism comes to America it will goosestep out to the fifty yard line in full dress regalia for the coin flip at the Super Bowl.


-Ed Encho


I strongly suspected that it was going to be trouble when they were cheering the flyover, an awesome display of a sky full of screaming state of the art weaponry (wasted tax dollars that could have been spent on schools, infrastructure or health care) that was brought large into the mecca of an American living room on a 64 inch high definition television with digitally enhanced sound that rattled the taco bar bowls and sent a chill up my spine, but I had no idea of the epic intensity of the three and a half hours of earthly hell that was to come.

Then when that ass-kissing little chickenshit General David Petraeus goose-stepped out to the giant red, white and blue NFL logo painted onto the midfield grass at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa for the ceremonial coin toss and they marveled at his greatness, patriotism and valor any doubt of a relaxing evening went right down the shitter. General Betray-us by the way is already barking at the President’s policies to withdraw from Iraq, according to this story by Gareth Porter, the great front man for the even greater bait and switch public relations campaign known as The Surge. Gen P, according to Porter, left the Oval Office meeting with Obama “visibly unhappy” and is said to be… get this, plotting to resist orders:

A network of senior military officers is also reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama’s decision.

What we seem to have here is a real life version to General James Mattoon Scott, a reference to the Burt Lancaster character in the classic 1962 movie Seven Days in May who led a cabal of renegade brass in an abortive coup against a president who was perceived to be weak on that great phantom menace and predecessor of current national dread terrorism that was the scourge of communism. Petraeus crony General Ray Odierno who is also bucking the president was said in a New York Times story to have a different plan than Obama’s in Iraq withdrawal. I would seriously consider this a firing offense and if B.O. had any balls he would bust both of those intransigent assholes down to buck private and send them both off to the nearest stockade. I seem to recall such disagreement being referred to as treason when the royal ass of King George W. Bush was still parked upon the throne.

But I digress…..

I had allowed myself to be coerced by the spouse into attending a Super Bowl party over the weekend at a home of a good friend of hers who also happened to be a (gasp) Republican and a true one at that. Hoping that the big game would at least be able to hypnotize the vipers for a few hours was futile, the pit was teeming with animosity from practically the minute we walked through the door. I had been under savage pressure for months to meet the extended family and finally caved figuring the attention would be on the Super Bowl and not the painfully obvious ideological differences. Myself, I have no qualms in saying that I would rather eat with a pig than with a Republican because the pig after all can’t help being what it is so I just avoid them as if they were lepers. It’s quite obvious that they feel the same way because I was about as out of place as Gaylord Focker in Meet the Parents.

The game might have been the ‘official’ reason for the gathering but the thing that really jazzed up the hosts and their troglodyte friends were the commercials, not that this is an uncommon phenomenon in Dumbmerica, there is a reason that NBC charged $3 million for 30 seconds of ad time this year. The added joy that a large amount of said commercials were of an animated variety for ridiculous infantile dross that passes for entertainment was even more enjoyable to the gathering assembled in a large circle around the monster TV with their chips, beer and drool buckets. At first it went reasonably well but as the alcohol kicked in the banter about Governor Palin started intruding during the rather dull first half (but they shut right the fuck up during the commercials like the good little murkans that they were) and the racist Obama jokes were making the rounds during the second quarter. Things began to deteriorate after that and when the dipshit lord of the manor was fiddling around with his high tech entertainment command center (he had more gadgets on that thing than fucking NORAD) trying to record the amazing halftime epic 3D preview of Monsters vs. Aliens (since it never occured to numbnuts to pick up an extra set of those silly glasses for his better half) and crashed the entire system, with only minutes left in the second quarter. Fortunately for everybody there for the game he was able to get the entertainment industrial complex wall of electronics back up and running just as James Harrison was 20 yards or so from the goal line on what would be the longest play in the history of the big game. Score a touchdown for the Steelers and another triumph for the forces of stupidity. Jesus Fucking Christ!!!!

The animosity in the room was palpable as Bruce Springsteen (you know, that goddamned New York librul who campaigned for the darkie) delivered a spirited but lame halftime show (lame because other than Born to Run the setlist sucked but as even the Rolling Stones learned a few years back noone is going to float a turd in punchbowl at the NFL’s showcase by being allowed to sing anything even remotely controversial. They were the typical American Republican family, clueless, overfed, boring, mean-spirited but nice in eerie way that must have horrified many Jews in 1930’s Germany as they witnessed what were once thought to be normal people into malignant, blood thirsty automatons with an internal override ready to be triggered by any piss reeking miscreant demagogue with a big enough soapbox. Even their dog was ugly, a wretchedly whiny little rat terrier that was named after a fucking athletic shoe – it was like I had been teleported into Idiocracy: The Reality Show.

The youngest brother was the real piece of work though. You know the type, a smack talking, penciled necked, dough-faced geek in his mid-twenties endlessly fuddling with his Blackberry like a jacked up on caffeine version of Steve Buscemi and spewing the anti-Obama talking points as though they were being texted to him from Rush fucking Limbaugh himself. He was a one-man show, a legend in his own mind and he took particular delight in targeting Mrs. Encho who had once come out and admitted to being a GASP – librul. Now that ‘Sonny’ had no idea that directly behind the spouse sat one of the most vitriolic leftist bloggers on the internet was especially amusing in that I could have in a matter of minutes verbally stripped him naked and sent him wandering off into the desert of shame riding a donkey and wearing a giant Glenn Beck head like Mad Max in Beyond Thunderdome. But though inwardly seething as I was, I just let her continue to catch the flak, after all, she was the one who dragged me into this menagerie of mentally challenged masturbating monkeys in the first place.

His mother sat beside this progeny of Reagan’s generation of shit, sipping wine in a rocking chair and chiding sonny to not talk politics during the Super Bowl, little did she know that in true Bizarro world Republican fashion that her little boy through his very existence was the strongest argument in favor of abortion that I had personally seen. She should long ago have been cited by the EPA for dumping toxic waste and here’s the kicker, the craven little punk has aspirations to one day be a member of the CIA. Ladies and gentlemen, we have our newest death squad commander, it made me want to bolt from my chair like a jack in the box from hell, physically drag the pigfucker outside and go to work on him with a tire iron like Jack Bauer would do.
Were I not an agnostic I would be thanking God for giving me the strength to restrain myself.

As for the Super Bowl itself, it was what it always is, an over-hyped football game wedged in between millions of dollars of advertising directed at chumps, I found the obligatory E-Trade spot to be especially revealing of the innate nature of modern American stupidity, the vampire scum on Wall Street is still trolling for suckers to keep their Ponzi scheme going for just that little bit longer. When taken as a whole the commercials were the same vile potful of swill of smutty juvenille sexual jokes, random acts of violence only in a funny sort of way, enticements to buy more shit that you don’t need, high dollar attempts by Hollywood studios to hype the miserable failures that typically get dumped out right about now before the summer blockbuster season and the inevitable plugs for even more dumbed down sitcoms and new series (a strange new focus on the police state has all too often been materializing so as to subliminally enforce the concept of servility and snitching) which the host network enjoys the biggest viewing audience of the year to peddle their garbage.

From watching the commercials alone it is apparent that high fructose corn syrup is good for you, that T.V. does not rot your mind and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise has just been tagged as a paranoid lunatic courtesy of Alec Baldwin’s great turn in the Hulu spot that comes right out and equates such a heresy with a belief in an alien takeover (who the fuck would even want us?), there are still jobs to be had (the CareerBuilder ad was actually quite amusing to a corporate slave like myself) and there is money to be made in the stock market (according to E-Trade)….welcome to chumpland!! Time to go back to sleep now.
Other than the company and the mind melting barrage of commercials the game actually turned out to be quite a thriller in the fourth quarter with the Steelers cutting through the tissue paper thin Cardinal defense as though it were the Republican minority marching on Harry Reid’s Senate to pull off a 27-23 victory in which Arizona managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortunately it was over and I was able to go home and away from those people and may I never darken their doorstep again. I always prefer my own digs where the distractions are at a minimum and despite my paltry 25 inch RCA I can actually relax, enjoy the game and make the best use of the multi-million dollars of commercial time to do the really important things, like go take a leak and grab another beer.