Honesty is the Lonliest Number...

"So sit right back and you'll hear a tale...a tale of a perhaps fateful slip...it happened in that Southern land...the one with the 2000 voting misslips...the one with the 2000 voting misslips...the man who misspoke that day was a venture capitalist man...his personal assistant who wasn't with him on that fateful day was a running dog lackey Randfan...a running dog lackey Randfan...and so it was in Florida on that awful fateful day...that the skipper of the Republican ship spoke in a blue blood way...spoke in a blue blood way...he told the blue bloods assembled there that all was not yet lost...despite the fact that the 47% were lazy give me government handouts mob dross...lazy give me government handouts mob dross...when the political weather started getting rough...the Blue Blood skipper and his running dog mate thought they had perhaps lost...so the Blue Blood and his running mate claimed that his inelegant tongue had gotten crossed...claimed his inelegant tongue had gotten crossed...if not for the wickedness of the east coast liberal media establishment..."

From the "Tuneful Tale of the Political Adventures of Blue Blood Venture Capitalist and the Randfan Too"

I have to say I found it refreshing to hear and see a politician, in this case Mitt Romney, say what most of us with the powers of empirical observation have long known, politicians like Romney, himself a member of the blue blood class (at least in his own mind), regard themselves as servants of the wealthy "productive" class and, like the Ebenezer Scrooge's of the past, regard themselves as better than the "unproductive" masses who they believe are addicted to handouts and proficient at playing the victim card. Shades of the European assertion that indigenous peoples were unproductive so it was acceptable to steal their land despite the notion common among so many Europeans drugged up on Enlightenment myths that property was the holiest of holies! Of course, what these self-righteous neo-Social Darwinist members of America's blue blood class don't and probably never will get is the irony that those criticising the 47% for taking handouts, having a sense of entitlement to government funds, and for playing the victim, have their hands out as often as they can for government subsidies and handouts and play the victim card everyday by claiming that they are the victims of a socialist welfare plot that is attempting to undermine the very essence of blue blooded American entrepreneurism. Bah humbug

I quote my response to a question on the Rainmakers "Government Cheese" on Youtube: "Yup, direct distribution of government cheese was begun in 1982 when Ronnie himself was president. Apparently Reagan thought it was better to have the masses eat cheese rather than cake. Romney, on the other hand, apparently wants the lazy give me government handout mob to eat tins of dog food and cat food (shades of another era in American history when the media reported that retirees were eating dog fan and cat food because their social security was not keeping up with inflation) purchased at a store in which Bain invested."

News Alert, 5 October 2012
Romney now says that what he said about the 47% was totally wrong. So much for inelegant mispeak. Doubleplusgood

Reference David Corn, "Full Video of Private Romney Fundraiser", 18 September 2012, Mother Jones

Onward Skank Christian Soldiers...

So that good old right wing evangelical Christian activist Ralph Reed says, "There is bigotry against Mormons. It’s on the left". Boy, these scum Christian flim flam men and plagiarists never fade away unlike old generals do they?

Ralph Reed, the man dismissed from the student newspaper at the University of Georgia for plagiarism. Ralph Reed, one of the "three amigos" who emerged from the college Republicans becoming major players in the Republican Party beginning in the Reagan era of the 1980s along with the disgraced and partisan super lobbyist Jack Abramoff and no new taxes uberlobbyist and Republican activist Grover Norquist. Ralph Reed, hired by the conservative charismatic Christian televangelist, media mogul and Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson to run the day to day operations of the Christian Coalition in 1989 until he resigned amidst a financial scandal that shook the organisation. Ralph Reed, the guy who helped Abramoff cynically fleece the Choushatta Indians out of millions of dollars to do something they knew they could not do, get them a casino on their reservation, this at the same time that Reed was hypocritically preaching about the ungodliness of gambling to the conservative Christian flock he was fleecing money from in order to support his lobbying efforts on behalf on no new taxes on Indian casinos and a casino for the Choushatta. Ralph Reed, the man who now appears to have resurrected himself out of this muck, the muck of his, Abramoff's, and Norquist's thuggish lust for mammon and power, the muck of his own creation. Ralph Reed, the man who just like those slimy Elmer Gantry televangelists caught with their fingers in the till or their body parts in the beds of those they probably shouldn't be with, just won't seem to go away with his tail between his legs despite his less than stellar past moral record. But then he is a charismatic Christian a group notorious for its serial born again redemptions and resurrections.

Not only has Reed resurrected himself out of his dark matter past to once again sit at the right hand of mammon and a savage partisanship that almost amounts to war--Reed claims to be fighting a guerrilla war against evil godless Democrats--but he also seems to have recently pulled yet another Sgt Schultz. He knows nothing about good old evangelical and fundamentalist Christian anti-Mormonism. But he does, in what has become a cliché, know something about bad old left ant-Mormonism. But then the skank Reed's mission in life seems to be to demonise the left and liberalism who he and other similarly ahistorical illiterates bizarrely equate with socialism, communism, and nazism in much the same way that Mormons wrongly equate criticism of Mormonism with anti-Mormonism. All of this, of course, is yet another example of good old time orwellian foucauldian categorising "evil".

When you have people, like Reed, who claim to be Christians while simultaneously pursing cynical Machiavellian political strategies, who believe in the distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" rape, who believe contraception is a sin, who believe that the poor are poor because of their sins, who demand abstinence only sex education despite its repeated failures, who think they are the chosen people of god and the nation they live in is the chosen of god, you know we are doomed. Emory you should be ashamed.

On another related issue I always get a laugh when groups like Christian Republicans on Facebook urge a return to good old Christian America and good old American Christian values. I have to laugh the laugh of recognition because such a partial understanding of American history is so common among so many in this country particularly on the Republican Dixiecrat side of the political ledger.

When looking at the history of the US it is clear that officially the US has had since its inception disestablishment, i.e., no state religion, no theocracy. Before that, of course, there were, on the official level, theocracies in New England, and theocracies on the official level in the South. However, on the popular or unofficial level not only in New England and in the South and particularly in the Middle Colonies, Colonial America and later the United States has been religiously diverse at least since the seventeenth century. Jews have been in what became the US since 1654. Santeria has been in what became the US for some time thanks to good old Christians enslaving of Africans who were brought to the Colonies and the US to do the labouring dirty work particularly of America's Southern plantation elite.

Unofficially, of course, some varieties of Christianity did come to dominate America, thanks to the tyranny of the majority (ethnocentric religion does like to foist its morality on everyone else), in the wake of the American Revolution and the American Constitution, the constitution which established disestablishment. And there was religious, read Protestant, establishment in some American states like Massachusetts until 1833. But there have always been Christian countercultures in the American Colonies and the United States, Christian countercultures like the pacifist Quakers, the pacifist Mennonites, and Enlightenment Deists like Thomas Jefferson who famously eliminated anything supernatural from the gospels in his so-called Jefferson Bible including miracles and virgin births.

Eventually, of course, and thanks, in part, to American humanists like Robert Ingersol, the US courts became what they should have been in the first place, legal systems free of majoritarian Protestant religious tyranny. And to that I say, Hallelujah and Amen.

References:
Moyers and Company, "The Resurrection of Ralph Reed", 31 August 2012, PBS
Jim Galloway, "Ralph Reed: There's Bigotry Against Mormons. It's on the Left", 30 August 2012, Political Insider, Atlanta Journal Constitution
Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the Jefferson Bible)

Conservatives Are Doing it For Themselves...Not...

I woke up this morning thinking that we should indeed shrink the federal government. So here's my solution. Let's get rid of all those middle class federal government handouts. We'll keep wealthfare and aid to the poor. Let's cut farm subsidies. Let's get rid of middle class tax loopholes like those for middle class homeowners. Let's get rid of FEMA for the middle class. Let's get rid of federal student aid for the middle class. Let's raise the price of gas/petrol for the middle class to $8 dollars a gallon, hey after all we need to take into account the environmental and health damages petrol and its various and sundry uses cause. Let's get rid of social security for the middle class. Lets get rid of medicare and medicaid for the middle class. Let's make the middle class pay tolls for driving on federal roads. Let's add a $200 dollar tax to those in the middle class who enter federal parks. Let's double federal tax interest and penalties on the middle class. Come on you middle class anti-federalists stop putting your hands out for money from the feds and just say NO. You too can build your own DIY.