Category: Deep political thought

Lies, damn lies and statistics

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Few people speak out of their asses more frequently than a Repuglican senator. And even among that lot, John Cornyn is renowned for his extended, deafening and incomprehensible solos upon the butt-trumpet.

Steve Benen at Political Animal caught Cornyn farting higher than his ass on CNN today. He was claiming that the deficit had more than tripled since the final year of the Daffy-Fudd administration. Not so, retorts Benen:

“The budget deficit Bush/Cheney left for Democrats to clean up was $1.3 trillion. It’s unclear exactly what this year’s shortfall will be, but it’s likely to be around $1.5 trillion. To suggest that the deficit has ‘more than tripled’ is to suggest that John Cornyn is strikingly bad at arithmetic.”

Meanwhile, the guy who had been in the Senate nearly as long as I’ve been alive, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, has died. He did a lot in that half-century, some good, some bad, but I’ll always remember him for his opposition to the Daffy-Fudd adventurism overseas. Writes Adam Clymer:

He denounced the 2002 Congressional resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to make war on Iraq. It “amounted to a complete evisceration of the Congressional prerogative to declare war,” he wrote in “Losing America,” “and an outrageous abdication of responsibility to hand such unfettered discretion to this callow and reckless president.

Truer words, etc.

Bringing the crazy

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Since the Communists are mostly historical curiosities, maybe it's time to register The Crazy. Especially if they own firearms.
Since the Communists are mostly historical curiosities, maybe it's time to register The Crazy. Especially if they own firearms.

As a resident of Bibleburg, I am most definitely living in a glass house when it comes to throwing my little stones. We are zoned for dingbattery here on a commercial scale, welcoming the likes of Industrial Christianity, Doug Bruce and Michelle Malkin with open arms, both of them on the right side of our sociopolitical body.

But no matter how powerful is the champ, there will always be contenders. Like Rutherford County, Tenn., where District 6 House candidate Lou Ann Zelenik (The Crazy) cites Martin Luther King in her opposition to a Muslim community center. (Full disclosure: I am related by marriage to more than a few residents of Tennessee, and while they are all batshit crazy, at least the majority of them are Democrats.)

Then there’s North Carolina, where Rep. Sue Myrick (The Crazy) says Hezbollah is partnering with Mexican drug cartels and may be planning “Israel-like car bombings of Mexican/USA border personnel or National Guard units.”

Leave us not forget Texas, where The Crazies want to reinstate sodomy laws, end the state lottery and federal sponsorship of pre-kindergarten schools, require that evolution and global warming “be taught as challengeable scientific theory,” and demand that Congress get US out of the UN — an old John Birch Society maxim once seen on billboards in these parts — and evict the global body from our shores.

The Birchers once opposed the fluoridation of the nation’s water supplies as a Communist plot to poison America. Maybe it’s time to start spiking the fluoride with a little lithium.

A long, hot summer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.

Squeezed another nice, hot ride in today, this time out to the Air Force Academy and back.

I was thinking about riding out to Palmer Lake and back, which is a 50-mile U-turn, but man — it was hot, windy, dry and dusty, so I called it quits at the AFA’s North Gate and turned around. Good thing, too, ’cause the wind went nuts shortly after I got home. Now I can smell smoke from either the Royal Gorge fire, the Medano blaze or some other seasonal conflagration, and it looks like tornado weather out there.

Meanwhile, some folks will be riding their bicycles around France starting a week from tomorrow, and that means I’ll be working five days a week just like the rest of y’all, assuming you are fortunate enough to enjoy continued employment in this mess they call an economy.

It’s no time to be on the dole, to be sure — not with Senate Repuglicans smugly flipping a neatly manicured, pudgy middle digit to the unemployed. As Steve Benen noted at Political Animal:

“We’ve gone from one erratic senator flipping off a reporter to an entire party caucus flipping off millions of Americans. We’ve gone from a seemingly unstable lawmaker telling a colleague, “Tough sh*t” to the entire Republican conference telling the whole country, ‘Tough sh*t.’

“In the late winter, Jim Bunning was something of a laughing stock. In the early summer, we have an entire Party of Bunnings.”

So true. And so sad. I don’t know how one deals with a completely unprincipled, mendacious opposition with the compassion of a rabid hyena on a gutpile and the smarts of a bag of hammers.

Dis-miss

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

So, Stan the Man got the heave-ho. Alas, you can’t call the boss a pussy and his staff a bunch of faggots and expect to keep climbing that old career ladder. At least he had his Class A goin’ on when he showed up to take his beating.

Dude’s been in the Green Machine for 34 years now, having graduated from The Point in 1976. What’s next? Some lesser post? Retirement? I’m guessing the latter. Take one for the team — “Fellas, this is what happens when you forget that in the United States, the military is under civilian control. …” — and then join a couple think tanks, pen a memoir, become a talking head on Fox, hit the rubber-chicken circuit, form a militia.

Hey, could be worse. Most of us 50-somethings wouldn’t have unlimited earning potential, a lifetime pension and free medical care if we got sacked for being dicks. I’d have a mortgage, a whole bunch of things that suddenly needed selling and a really pissed-off wife.

Runaway general

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Anybody have any thoughts on Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

On first glance, the dude seems like a gen-yoo-wine ass-kicking samurai cross-bred with the kind of political general who has the shrunken yellow heart of a REMF but likes to dress up as G.I. Joe. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight him, but neither would I care to follow him into anything more dangerous than a briefing room.

A casual Google doesn’t turn up much in the way of a real combat record, and the much-hyped Rolling Stone story sure doesn’t answer many questions. It paints him as some class of Zen archer, if Zen archers also happened to be egomaniacs. Col. Walter E. Kurtz comes to mind, as does Julius Caesar. Maybe George Armstrong Custer.

My shoot-from-the-hip observation is that he’s another one of these ivory-tower dudes who has a theory he’d like to prove if you don’t mind contributing a few of your friends, neighbors and family members to the experiment.

Must be fun to be in the White House right about now, eh? Can him or keep him, it’s gonna be nothing but incoming.

• Late update: The Los Angeles Times has failed to distinguish itself on many occasions in recent years, but this aside in a straight news story about the McChrystal contretemps that should display no bias is particularly appalling:

Obama, who has not served in the military, has sought to solidify his status as commander in chief through frequent appearances with troops. Such appearances have sought to convey that he has the confidence of the American military.

Uh huh. No wonder these cocksuckers declined to hire me as a copy editor back in the Eighties, ’cause I would’ve folded that paragraph into a conical shape and shoved it up someone’s ass.

Well, dipshits, like it or not, he is the CINC, and you don’t have to go back very far to find CINCs who liked to be photographed hanging around with the grunts, feeding them plastic turkeys. Let’s hope that this one is less eager to feed them into the meat grinder.