One Year Ago Today

 zoology or anthropology

limbaugh is a carnival barker.  he's the guy on the sidewalk outside of a sexshow featuring a couple of tired crack whores, hustling and selling to increase his share of the door.  small, though not in volume, he craved success and acceptance and would have joined any travelling show that would pay him.  he's found his circus and his marks, so he's going with it, but he's full of shit and an asshole and not much of an ideologue.  had democrats had a taste for failure and bad, bullying comedy, well, he would have joined them given the chance.

hannity is a true believer and an absolute fucking moron.  he couldn't even keep alan colmes in check.  he gets that bug-eyed, vacant look at the slightest deviation from the script and always keeps his guests under his own two-watt limit.  anything above that dimness he dismisses easily because he simply can't follow it.

beck is just fucking insane.  he used to be the most entertaining, but now that he is fading and loosing his ability to read his compass, he's getting a bit tiresome.  yet, this is a man that the teabaggers believe absolutely; his word is second only to gospel.  about now he's so far gone that he probably really believes he's fighting cylons, obama, bin laden and george soros alongside glen larson, starbuck, brigham young, adama, and joe smith outside the gates of heaven.  i'd imagine he ends it all fairly quickly in a tranny's closet wearing a rubber gimp mask with not one but two nooses tugging him home to kobol.  

santorum babies

maddow had some fun a few weeks back highlighting i-like-ike's position on unions and the tax rates under the president general and doing a pretty good job of showing how he'd be to the left of most elected dems today going by his speeches.  funny.  and a little bit useful to those saying that obama and clinton are both center-right politicians, kinda like nixon with blowjobs and weasellyness substituted for extreme paranoia and felonies. 

that being said, is it possible that the conservative movement in this country has in 30 years so polluted the gene pool of the republican party that they will be unable to function in even the most rudimentary governing?  mitch mcconnell, scott walker, chris christie, jim demint, john boehner, clarence thomas, rick scott, paul ryan, michelle bachmann, newt gingrich, these are all seriously disfunctional people, with little understanding of even the basic neccessities of government in general and the offices they hold in particular.  the koch brothers, the mellons, the coors family, the olin family, these are bad bad people, and they created this fundamentalist conservative movement to further their personal goals and feed their personal fortunes.  but have they done too well?  have they bred even the slightest ability or intelligence out of their class of government servants that they will be unable to do anything?  rather than the center-right democratic party withering and blowing away, will it instead be the hard-right, brain-dead republican party when they are unable to keep any branch of the u.s. government operating?  are all of the republicans now conceived in a slurry of leaking shit and bathed in astroturf tea and too stupid to remember to breath?  it looks more like that every day.

santorum babies all!

bradley manning

it's easier to dismiss failures--or downright surrenders or utter from-the-start bullshit--on large, nebulous issues.  the failure to achieve national health care reform, with single payer or a national health service or something, anything, and instead settling for absurd insurance reform can be obfuscated with talk of the senate and big pharma and rationing and the best deal.  it was a failure, but where did it happen, exactly? yes, many people understand that obama was never in favor of anything interrupting the insurance industry violation of the american people, single payer, national health public option, anything--and he lied about it from the start--but that fact is not as obvious to many others as it should be, especially staunch obama supporters and democratic apparatchiki, because the fuck-up is spread all around, and the final failure is shared broadly.  bradley manning is a different story.  it's one man being tortured by the entire united states government through the u.s. military with full knowledge of everyone including the president.  the fact that president obama did not order an end to this crime clearly puts the blame exactly where it belongs.

here's the invaluable counterpunch with ellsberg on the manning situation.