Save The Last Elephant Ear For Me

Peckerwood Nation’s Last Stand

Salvaging something after the general election debacle the fascist Republican armies threw everything that they had left into defending the Georgia Senate seat of one Saxby Chambliss, a man so despicable that he became a party legend for running campaign commercials comparing his opponent, a Vietnam war triple-amputee to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. While Max Cleland lost both legs and an arm at Khe Sahn, good ole back-slapping Saxby Chambliss was taking five deferments to keep his chickenshit ass out of the action and to begin his career as a credentialed armchair patriot and water carrier for big bidness and the dead enders of the Religious Right. Chambliss decisively won Tuesday’s runoff election against feisty challenge of one Jim Martin making that coveted 60 seat Senate majority (hype as it may be) wet dream now statistically impossible – sort of like the Detroit Lions or Cincinnati Bengals making the NFL playoffs but more on that malodorous crock of malarkey in a little bit.

To hear the talking points of the right-wing extremists and their highly paid propaganda pimps like millionaire thrice divorced drug addict Rush Limbaugh tell it he was the last man to halt the agenda of the “far left” which would supposedly allow the flipping of the country into one of those damned hated European socialist countries, the ones with free education, health care, public transportation systems that are the envy of the world and god forbid, an educated populace. So the GOP threw everything that they had into defending the Chambliss seat, kind of like Stalin marching thousands directly into the meatgrinder of Stalingrad, a sort of cornered animal type of desperation drove the rally of the knuckle-dragging, Confederate flag waving aggrieved lumpen Republicans who were already chafing from having that burr of a ‘darkie’ president rammed up their asses. The Jesus juicers were out in force and there was no fucking way in heaven or hell that they were going to run up the white flag of surrender on this one. They would let John McCain go down in flames but the cracker Saxby was one of theirs, and Sarah Palin (who Saxby praised to high heaven), new darling of the REAL Republicans as well as the hoochie mama who has induced as a record amount of monkey-spanking and meat-yanking mania amongst the angry white dittoheads that has left that haggard, horse-faced, crack whore Ann Coulter in the dust (you have to admit, at least Palin has a set of tits to come on) . Now I personally don’t think that Jesus would approve of such ‘mass-treebatin’, but shitfire Jim Bob, if he dared to show up at either a Klan picnic or a Palin rally (what’s the difference when you really get down to it?) he’d find his meddlesome, long-haired librul ass crucified on a piece of plywood by a nail gun faster than you can say Oh God Sarah baby by the ignoble savages that are our southern brethren and you gotta admit, at least Palin HAS a set of tits to come on.

The rise of Palin as the Führess of the most vicious and bigoted portion of the population, the ones who have been descending on gun shows across the nation since November 5th like so many Black Friday Wal-Mart shoppers is a terrifying thing to behold, especially on the brink of an economic crisis with hyperinflation of the sort unseen in the western world since it took a wheelbarrow full of reichmarks to buy a loaf of bread and the need for scapegoats for the coming suffering. Try as I must to talk myself out of such a wild assed conspiracy theory but the parallels between what is going on in Der Heimat and the rise of Nazi Germany have just too many eerie parallels to be a coincidence, and there is that long history of Nazi-U.S. Corporate and financial collaboration (Prescott Bush was the poster boy) but that is a story for another time. The Republicans are going to go more ideological, become more fanatical and regenerate like the hydra that they are and it’s all going to gestate in the belly of the beast south of the Mason-Dixon line, these people have had their noses bloodied before and in a bit of grudging admiration they don’t forget things like William Tecumseh Sherman’s cutting a bloody swath through Georgia during the Civil War using what could objectively been called terrorist tactics and they are still fighting that goddamned war five or six generations later. The aggrieved psychotics who actually run the party, guys like Georgia based Newt Gingrich are going to be rubbing the sores of discontent raw in the south and given the victory lap and synchronized jacking each other off over the election results by Democrats, progressives and liberals who are now ready to go back to sleep this is a recipe for doom.

But I digress…

The victory of cracker Chambliss in Peckerwood Nation really means nothing in the real scheme of things outside of the extreme right finally getting a tourniquet onto the wound to stop the bleeding and to provide an opportunity to regain momentum for the battle royal against the dark skinned demon Obama and the librul hordes. Not that a 60 seat majority would guarantee jack shit given the history of the jellyfish centrists in the Democratic party, Casper Milquetoast Harry Reid a coward of Neville Chamberlain proportions still runs the place, the receiving line stretched around the rotunda to kiss the ass of Judas Lieberman and the one person who could have provided a backbone and some much needed bellicosity to the ranks, Hillary Rodham-Clinton who should have been installed as majority has slithered like a snake into the Obama cabinet. A win in Minnesota by the unfunny comedian and former Air American personality Al Franken is largely irrelevant and besides, aren’t there already a disproportionate amount of Jews who hold positions of influence within the system? And with the son of a fanatic Zionist terrorist in Rahm Emanuel already acting as the gatekeeper in the Obama White House I just have a very sick feeling that our disgustingly one-sided Middle Eastern policy that contributes to an overwhelming amount of violence is not going to change anytime soon.

These are dark clouds on the horizon, large portions of the liberal base are already chafing at the bit over Obama’s establishment ‘centrist’ appointments and unless there is some serious action to deliver on that promise of change the turnout is going to suffer, support is going to wane and it could be 1994 all over again come November 2010. Our brand spanking new President Elect Obama may have had a crackerjack ground game, a veritable Wehrmacht of local operations and an organized army of online activists that contributed greatly to his near landslide win but in typical establishment fashion the antiwar, pro-Constitution base is already having their backs pissed on and being told that it’s raining. The trickle could become a downpour of biblical proportions that will surely be seized upon by the minions of Limbaugh, LaHaye, Hagee, Robertson, Gingrich and their Alaskan Valkyrie queen. If nothing else, the more overtly fascist elements of the Republican party are experts at destabilizing governments and any perceived betrayal of the left along with the coming depression is going to create opportunity for a resurgence. The most foolish mistake of all would be for jubilant liberals, progressives and their feckless centrist Democratic party champions to ignore what the always profound Chris Hedges refers to as “American fascists” and he isn’t throwing that term around loosely, these people are a huge threat to the republic and as a recent Hedges column over at truthdig describes it we are still in very serious jeopardy of losing it all:

The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.

I watched these competing populisms flicker Thursday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., when I moderated a debate between independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin. The two candidates come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Nader, in essence, is a democratic socialist in the mold of Eugene Debs or Norman Thomas. Baldwin, a founder and minister at the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., is an evangelical, right-wing populist.

Baldwin, like Nader, rails against corporatism and our involvement in foreign wars, wants to repeal NAFTA and denounces the curtailment of civil liberties. But Baldwin goes on to support the abolishment of whole departments of the federal government, such as the Department of Education. He calls for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO, the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration, the outlawing of abortion and removing all restrictions on the purchasing of firearms. One of his catchier campaign slogans is: “To help keep your family safe and your country free, go buy a gun.” He wants to seal our borders, deny amnesty and social services to illegal immigrants and end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He calls for dismantling the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, overturning the 16th Amendment and the personal income tax, and returning the American monetary system to hard assets: gold and silver.

These candidates, while marginal figures in the current election, express the two forms of populism that will soon find a wide political currency. The anger toward our elites will morph into rage. These new populisms may not be articulated by Nader and Baldwin, but they will be articulated by people like Nader and Baldwin.

The ideological foundations of free-market economics and a consumer society have collapsed. This collapse is hard for us to fathom. We are still in shock and denial. We cling to old structures of meaning and outdated words to describe them. We have yet to realize that all our political science and economic textbooks have become junk. We have yet to formulate a vocabulary to describe our altered reality. We grasp, on a subliminal level, that laissez-faire capitalism is gone, but we have not viewed the corpse, scheduled the funeral and read the last rites.

And…

The left, with a few exceptions, like the Progressive Party in Vermont, has largely thrown in its lot with the Democratic Party. Right-wing populists, as is evidenced by the acrimonious split in the McCain campaign, remain clustered around the fiefdoms of large megachurches that stoke hatred and frightening totalitarian visions of a Christian state. The left has no correlating centers of activism, organization or mass support, especially with the decline of labor unions. If left-wing populists do not rapidly build local organizations, as was done in Vermont, to compete with the right-wing populism of the Christian right, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, they will be easily swept aside. There is not much time left. A Democratic victory in November may signal not a reversal of our fading fortunes but the start of a precipitous slide toward the Christian dystopia peddled by people like Baldwin.

Progressives are playing a dangerous game of mass self-congratulation right now and in that comes an inversion of one of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief – DENIAL – and in failing to recognize that the extreme right is not going away, not now, not ever without a very serious (and in measured terms I say dealt with using ‘extreme prejudice) effort to cut out the cancer that is the Republican base, now in apparent remission but in actuality mestasizing to rage anew then we may one day look back on the Bush administration as tempered moderates.

This is the reality of the situation: deep south bible belt whites, mainly poor, increasingly hostile and always Republican have contributed mightily to our current economic and global crisis through their long run of owning a disproportionate amount of political power in America and if they regain it they will be ever more determined to wield it and the next time they will be playing for keeps. They will use it in order to drag the country backwards through time to a dark place in our history that had apparently been buried in the past. They seek to return to the days where the American south was mired in the smothering blackness of a festering, hateful and corrupt parallel universe to the more progressive states above the Mason Dixon Line, trapped like a dinosaur in a tar pit. It was only through the courage of the civil rights movement and federal anti discrimination laws that the roaring beast was able to be semi-tamed to a point where it would be able to interact with decent folk. With the ascendancy of a red state evangelical movement the south is back for blood revenge, thundering a bastardized version of Christianity from pulpits, preaching hatred and bigotry and the end times and drawing the masses of the disenfranchised into ever growing mega churches and mobilizing armies of activists. The southern regressive fervor cunningly infiltrated the United States government itself with their ultimate triumph being the rise of George W. Bush who will now serve as a teaching tool of what NOT to do the next time, say when Sarah Palin is deemed to be ready. This southern fried anti-Americanism will, if not watched very closely once again creep back into power like some malignant strain of alien kudzu.

America is far from out of the swamp of backwoods religion and politics and very soon could be forced to bend over that log, take it up the ass with a double-barreled shotgun pressed to our necks and forced to squeal like a pig like poor old Ned Beatty in that fine cinematic depiction of that paradise of the old south Georgia: Deliverance.

Bush Preaches to the Choir

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.



-H. L. Mencken

I happened to catch the raw spectacle of George W. Bush’s stump speech during his last minute barnstorming tour to shore up support in the red states and it was an incredible thing indeed. This particular stop was in Perry, Georgia which can’t be far from the locale depicted in the movie Deliverance and was absolutely stunning in its completely over the top (even by Rovian standards) level of stridency in attacking Democrats by doing everything but accusing them of assisting the ‘terrorists’ in the coordinated killing of babies in the streets of America. Appropriately it was given on Halloween and Bush and his propagandists took fear mongering to a new level by all but denouncing Americans as traitors and spreading dread amongst the meticulously selected audience of shit kickers assembled at the George State Fairgrounds as though it were manure.

I haven’t seen or heard demagoguery on such a level since the last time that I watched ‘Triumph of the Will’ and the glazed look on the faces of the zombies in the audience was eerily similar to the normal looking Germans in what is widely hailed as the greatest propaganda film of all time. Bush’s speech writers and image masters are now outdoing themselves and are starting to make Leni Riefenstahl and Paul Joseph Goebbels look like rank amateurs by comparison.

I knew that the already tenuous mental state of Le Enfant Terrible was deteriorating daily but this was some radical stuff even for me and signs of a rapid escalation for sneaky and conniving cornered rats like Rove and Junior is not a good sign, I just have this feeling that it is going to be scorched Earth from this point onward. Colonel Kurtz has reached the end of the river and gone totally fucking insane, I mean God help us if the DLC manages to fuck up the election on Tuesday because this lunatic is demented enough to engage in some serious shit and has already proven that he regards the law as something that he can spit on whenever he damned well pleases. I can envision the nightmarish scene of the White House lawn turned into a hideous sort of tableau reminiscent of the jungle compound of Kurtz when the PBR Erebus arrived to find the heads of recently killed enemies lining the banks of the Mekong, mutilated bodies hanging from the trees and the stench of depravity and pure unadulterated evil lingering in the air.

I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil’s official enemies list on Wednesday morning if America awakens to a still standing and pissed off one party Republican fascist government and a demented despot determined to exact revenge on his tormentors. If your name happens to be Rahm ‘ass-eyes’ Emanuel and your strategy of under funding progressive candidates in favor of funneling cash to DLC approved corporate whores and warmongers the GOP may be the least of your worries because every tuned in American who is counting on your ‘leadership’ to halt the Bushist juggernaut is going to want to have your scrawny ass drawn and quartered for fucking up the opportunity of a lifetime due to your own sleazy ambitions and the vainglorious arrogance having to have all suitors line up to come and kiss your ring prior to being granted a seat at the table.

As with all officially sanctioned PR stops and the stage show events in which Bush appears access was strictly controlled and only the worst of the worst of dead enders and die hards were allowed in the doors to begin with. It is tragic that the majority of Americans never get to hear these rambling, demagogic diatribes or they would likely be shaken from their apathetic slumbers and justifiably horrified that a man who is by all signs a certifiably insane megalomaniac ccupies the most powerful position in the entire world and is in possession of the nuclear launch codes.

Here are a few pieces of the Perry, GA stemwinder:

Now I want you to — when you’re out rounding up the vote, and people say, well, there’s no difference between them, or they’re saying, well, maybe I feel comfortable with the Washington Democrats, I want you to remind them about these three votes we just recently had. There’s a clear pattern. When it came time to renew the Patriot Act, more than 75 percent of the members — Democrat members in the House of Representatives voted, no.

When it came time — when it came time to vote on whether to allow the CIA to continue its program to detain and question captured terrorists, almost 80 percent of the House Democrats voted against it.

And when it came time to vote on whether the National Security Agency should continue to monitor terrorist communications, almost 90 percent of the House Democrats voted against it.

On all these vital measures, measures necessary to protect you, the Democrats in Washington follow a simple philosophy: Just say no. When it comes to listening in on the terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer? Just say no. When it comes to detaining terrorists, what’s the Democrats’ answer? (The crowd then roared “JUST SAY NO” in unison)

In this global war against extremists who use murder as a weapon, Iraq is now the central front. Oh, I’ve heard all of the voices in Washington, D.C. They say — a lot of them say, it’s just a distraction in the war on terror. That’s not a part of the war on terror, people in Washington — Democrats say. Well, all I ask if you’re undecided about this important issue is just listen to the words of Osama bin Laden, or Mr. Zawahiri, the number two of al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden calls this fight the third world war. He has said that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America’s defeat and disgrace forever. It’s important to listen to the words of the enemy if you’re in war.

Now I want you to listen to the words of a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives. The reason I bring this up is I want you to understand there is a different mind set in Washington. She said, the President says that fighting them there in Iraq means it’s less likely we will have to fight them here. I did say that, and I strongly believe it. The opposite is true, she went on to say, because we are fighting them there, it may become more likely we will have to fight them here.

Iraq is a central front in the war on terror, but the only thing they want to do is leave before the job is done. I want you to hear some of the voices of leading Democrats. They say we should pull our troops off the battlefield right away. My opponent in 2004 said there should be a fixed date for withdrawal. Others suggest that we ought to move our troops some 5,000 miles away to an island. Nineteen House Democrats introduced legislation that would cut off all the funds for the troops in Iraq.

However they put it, the Democrat approach comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. And that’s what’s at stake in this election. The Democrats want to get us out of Iraq, and the Republican goal is to win in Iraq. I’m not saying these good folks are unpatriotic. I’m just saying they’re wrong. You can’t win a war if you’re not willing to fight it.

I want you to go home and think about what retreat from Iraq would mean before the job is done; it would embolden the enemy. It would enable them to ridicule countries like the United States to folks who are wondering where the balance of power will lay in the world. It will embolden the extremists and radicals. It will enable them to gain a new safe haven from which to launch further attacks on the United States. It would strengthen the hand of the extremists and deny hope to millions and millions of people who simply want to live a peaceful life. It would dishonor the sacrifice of the men and women who have worn our uniform.

I see the impending danger. I will use all assets at my disposal to do the most important job of the government, and that is defend you. We will fight in Iraq, and we will win in Iraq. (Applause.) Oh, I know there are Democrats and independents in a great state like Georgia who do not share the views of the Democrat leadership in Washington. You may not agree with Republicans on every issue, but you should also realize what voting Democrat in this election would mean for the war on terror.

When you vote next Tuesday, your vote will determine more than who is your local congressman. It will also determine which party’s leadership will set the agenda on Capitol Hill. A vote to send a Democrat to Congress is a vote for the liberal Democrat leadership in Washington, D.C. A vote to send a Democrat to Congress is a vote to make the Senate Majority Leader a man who bragged about killing the Patriot Act. A vote to send a Democrat to Congress is a vote to make the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee a man who said the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.

A vote to send a Democrat to Washington is a vote to make the chairman of the House of Ways and Means Committee a man who has suggested cutting off funds for our troops on the battlefield.

A vote to send a Democrat to Congress is a vote to make the Speaker of the House — the third person in line for the presidency — a woman who said that capturing Osama bin Laden would not make America any safer.

That’s about all that I can stomach so go to the official White House website if you want to read the rest (and have the NSA do a courtesy scan of your computer) and of course the sweaty crowd cheered and roared for liberal blood with each invocation of 9/11 and each inference that the Democrats were the enemy.

It is because of idiots like those sweating and dementedly cheering Bush in Perry that the entire south gets lumped in with the worst of the bigots and crazed rabble rousers like the dyed in the wool rabble rousing berserker Zell Miller and any number of high potency fundamentalist preachers who unfortunately happen to be the most vocal and influential spokesmen for morally repugnant Republican party which is always looking for regressive, knuckle dragging, cross burning, bible thumping angry freaks and all normal southerners need not apply. I really feel for the people who are forced to live amongst these hostile morons who have never gotten over the fact that they lost the Civil War or that they were forced by the government to recognize the rights of blacks and women.

James Webb who is running against the silver spoon country club racist George Felix Allen for Virginia’s Senate seat was featured in a recent piece in The New Yorker where he as a southerner offered up some valuable insight which I will take a few passages from it here:

Webb also believes from experience that the Republican hold on the South is not unshakable. His own political remigration began when he was working on “Born Fighting” and realized that his culture’s natural home is the party of Andrew Jackson. His people don’t hate the government; they hate governmental intrusion. It is the government’s job to build dams and highways, not the perfect society.

“It’s a bottom-up culture that has been manipulated,” he told me one day. “Really, that’s one of the big reasons that I decided to go ahead and do this-—test the theory, because I believe it.”

This is, of course, a thought that has occurred to other Democrats. It’s what Howard Dean was trying to get at in 2003, while campaigning for the Presidency, when he said, in a characteristic display of unfortunate phrasing, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” Dean’s point (and Webb’s) is that Democrats cannot succeed in the South until the Party broadens its tent, becoming less insistent on such matters of current Party orthodoxy as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. “You know, it’s been a hard thing to get through the heads of many Democrats,” Webb says. “They have to rethink a piece of something that’s become fundamental to them, which has hurt them in ways they don’t understand.”

Webb’s campaign adviser David (Mud-cat) Saunders recalls a revealing exchange he had last spring at a retreat for Democratic senators in Philadelphia. “I had a very prominent U.S. senator come up to me and say, ‘Mudcat, why are your people so stupid that they would vote against their own economic self-interest?’ And I replied, ‘Listen, we do vote against our own economic self-interest. We do that. But you say it’s stupid. Do you ever consider that there might be a powerful force at work, and that it’s driving these people to vote against their economic self-interest? I’m telling you, it’s there. It’s called culture.’ ”

Webb’s point should be well taken, because the perception that the south is mocked as a whole by all liberals has allowed the Republicans to create a bastion of infallible support by showing up as wolves in the clothing of sheep bearing gifts of bigotry, false religion and an opportunity to essentially re-fight the Civil War through the divisiveness that is the Culture War and this only throws gasoline on the fire and creates a self fulfilling prophecy. We all need to find a way to marginalize the worst elements and work together on the economic issues that are destroying ALL of America.

I myself am admittedly guilty of taking more than my fair share of shots at the red state denizens who happen to be card carrying members of the KKK wing of the GOP while failing to acknowledge differentiate between the many good people south of the Mason-Dixon Line who abhor what the Neanderthals have done to their image to the rest of the civilized world. I have friends in the south, have lived a good many of my years in the south and there are many who are proud of their heritage, we should not disrespect them as a whole but rather seek out their help in exorcising the demons amongst them. Conversely I hold those red staters who insist on goose stepping adherence to the bellicose party line in the utmost of contempt especially those who are responsible for giving this country the stinking, rotten, debased Bush administration as some sort of revenge on liberal society and if they are offended then I only have two words for those ignorant and bigoted yahoos: fuck y’all!

I would like to implore every southerner who is appalled at the Republican party, the white supremacists and the snake handling preachers of the gospel of Armageddon and the military industrial complex to get out there on Tuesday and vote Democrat even if you feel that you must hold your noses to do so. Granted there are many problems with that particular party that need to be ironed out but at least they are reasonable enough to engage in debate and some sort of discourse rather than the anti-Enlightenment tyrants who know control the entire country, demand lockstep unity, have no tolerance for dissent and are dismantling the constitution bit by bit. The constitution incidentally protects the rights of southerners too or it used to before it was gutted by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil.

If you can’t bring yourself to vote for Democrats, libertarians, greens or even a write in candidate instead of a dangerous and deceitful Republican party that has lied to you about matters of importance as God and country as well as exported the industrial capacity of America and our shared economic prosperity along with them for the sole reason of greed then just stay at home….please just stay at home on Tuesday.

And by the way, George W. Bush and his ilk are playing y’all as suckers, he is just another phony dude rancher like George Felix Allen. Bush is a yankee from an eastern elitist family who was born in Connecticut and educated at Andover and Yale. What could be a bigger insult to the intelligence of southerners than a stupendous fraud like he passing himself off to you as some plain spoken populist man of the people and Earthly executor of God’s orders?

As they sometimes say in the south – that dog just don’t hunt!