Category: Deep political thought

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.

We can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
We have a new champion in the Upperclass Twit of the Year Show, and it ain't Nigel Incubator-Jones.

Meanwhile, from our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Department comes this item about British Petroleum’s Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward pissing off to the southern coast of England to watch his yacht compete in the (wait for it) J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, which circumnavigates the Isle of Wight. It sounds like a Monty Python skit.

On the one hand, it’s almost refreshing to watch a capitalist who really and truly does not give one runny shit about the proles with whom he is condemned to share a planet.

On the other, fuck this guy.

Nothing sucks like a Hoover

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
We have a fine crop of commie-pinko roses coming up in the back yard.
We have a fine crop of commie-pinko roses coming up in the back yard.

Speaking of the brain-dead, the Senate Repuglicants — aided and abetted by Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson — have once again resorted to the filibuster to croak a package of jobless benefits and state aid, ostensibly because its costs are not offset by cuts in other programs. Yeah, right.

Notes Steve Benen at Political Animal: “Because the Senate is ridiculous, 40 votes trumps 56. In real-world terms, this means more than a million unemployed Americans will stop receiving assistance next week, and aid states are counting to prevent massive layoffs won’t arrive.”

Lovely. Where were these self-styled fiscal conservatives when the Daffy-Fudd administration was running two wars off the budget and flushing the Clinton surplus down the gold-plated, diamond-studded loo of tax cuts for the rich? The shameless dingbat Orrin Hatch has stated for the public record that during the previous administration “it was standard practice not to pay for things.”

He added: “We were concerned about it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no question.” Just not concerned enough to actually, y’know, like, do anything about it — like put the brakes on your own “conservative” cabal’s reckless spending and givebacks to the wealthy.

Jim Hightower made an excellent point recently. American politics is not about left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal, red vs. blue — it’s about top vs. bottom. Now cover the kiddies’ ears, ’cause we’re gonna talk a little class warfare here. Notes Hightower:

“As I’ve rambled through life, I’ve observed that the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom. This is how America’s economic and political systems really shake out, with each of us located somewhere up or down that spectrum, mostly down. Right to left is political theory; top to bottom is the reality we actually experience in our lives every day — and the vast majority of Americans know that they’re not even within shouting distance of the moneyed powers that rule from the top of both systems, whether those elites call themselves conservatives or liberals.

Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but true nonetheless. Those durned federales in DeeCee will start giving a shit about the po’ folk when they are po’ themselves, and not before. The question is: How do we junk-shot their money pipeline? The two parties have effectively rigged the game so it’s impossible for an honest player to even get a seat at the table.

Hightower preaches populism, which he describes as “the continuation of America’s democratic revolution.”

“It encompasses and extends the creation of a government that is us,” he continues. “Instead of a ‘trickle down’ approach to public policy, populism is solidly grounded in a ‘percolate up’ philosophy that springs directly from America’s founding principle of the Common Good.”

“The Common Good.” E pluribus unum. Do these concepts find a home in Americans’ hearts and minds anymore? Or should we change the national motto to, “I’ve Got Mine, Get Yours!”?