Category: Deep political thought

Twin sons of different mothers?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

This is weird. Kevin Drum just wrote a post that in spirit mimics a draft column I decided not to send to Bicycle Retailer & Industry News.

Mine had more bicycle crap in it, of course. And hardly any political snark, barring a quick left hook to Caribou Barbie’s spastically winking phiz. So they were practically identical, except for content ’n’ stuff. Plus Kevin says “fuck” less often than I do.

But we both are clearly in need of a vacation. Any ideas? I’m contemplating a hot-springs cycling tour of south-central Colorado on my kinda-sorta “touring bike,” the Soma Double Cross, but I’m absurdly vulnerable to peer pressure. Leave your suggestions in comments.

Incidentally for all you wisenheimers, Thomas McGuane already penned the definitive Hell-as-a-vacation-destination gag in “Nothing But Blue Skies.”

The Mobius turd

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Scott McIsn’t is full of shit. Sharron Angle is full of shit. Jon Kyl is full of shit. John Boehner is full of shit. Sue Myrick is full of shit. I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. … and it looks like a pachyderm’s footprint.

While we’re speaking about shit, Texus Maximus appears to have stepped in some. It’s tough to keep knocking ’em out of the park when the press has finally benched the fat teenager slow-pitching the softballs and brought up the major leaguer with the rocket-propelled arm. Am I an owner? A rider? Christ, ask me something about cancer, can’t you?

Hell, I can’t remember what I was doing 15 minutes ago, much less in 2004, and nobody from The New York Times is asking me about it, something that tends to peg the Fear needle at redline. I immediately channel the late Richard Pryor berating a fanboy snapping pix of him during a standup. “What you taking my picture for? Who you gonna show it to?” he demanded.

Call me cynical, but I expect that RadioShack’s PR flacks will be the ones dodging the beanballs going forward. “Ms. Macur? Hello, I’m Fullo Schidt, Mr. Armstrong’s intern for Media Ax-Grinding and Agendas … how may I be of assistance?”

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.