Category: Deep political thought

Stand and deliver

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“I thought it would never end.”

We’re all three of us pooped here at El Rancho Pendejo.

Up too late and too early; chores neglected or mishandled; dinners largely inadequate, poorly timed, and eaten in front of the TV; all so we could hear what the Democrats had to say for themselves.

Two things, basically: First, “We’re not crazy.” And second, “Let’s kick that guy’s ass.”

Most of the speakers said it with more grace, wit, and style, of course. But that was the long and the short of it.

And that’s really all I care about at the moment. It’s a big country in a bigger world, with a metric shit-ton of things that need doing, at home and abroad.

But none of them will get done if we don’t kick that guy’s ass. Wear out a six-pack of kneecaps each if we have to. Leave him and his bootlickers tasting our shoe leather until 2028.

And have a few laughs while we’re doing it.

This guy and his punks and their paymasters can’t stand it when we laugh at them. It makes ’em crazy. Well, OK, crazier.

Maybe that’s why Glen Bateman’s speech to Randall Flagg in Stephen King’s “The Stand” sprang to mind after the DNC finally wrapped up this week.

Once again the dark man was making promises he had no intention of keeping, and Bateman couldn’t help himself — he started laughing at him.

“Stop laughing.”

Glen laughed harder.

“Stop laughing at me!”

“You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me … it’s just that we were all so frightened … we made such a business out of you … I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance. …”

It was Bateman’s last laugh. Flagg still had followers eager to do his bidding. But Bateman knew Flagg’s dark magic was on the ebb and said so, loud and clear. Heckled the evil sonofabitch, and not from the safety of the cheap seats, either.

If that ain’t a kick in the ass, I don’t know what is.

Now, as you all know, I’m a reasonable fellow. I’ll be happy to hear what an actual Republican candidate has to say, if what remains of the GOP ever manages to resurrect one. Project 2025? Sheeyit. How about some ideas that should’ve been dead and buried years ago, not a lightly reworked Project 1934 from Nuremberg? Or Project 1478 from Spain?

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, f’chrissakes.

Our lot doesn’t have all the answers, Dog knows. It’s a bigger tent, occasionally with an embarrassment of clowns and more tabbies than lions.

But I like to think our clowns are mostly marching forward, honking and h’yuking and tripping over their own oversized shoes. And who doesn’t like kitty-cats? Either you already know the answer to that one or I’m preaching to the wrong choir.

So how about we live in the future? It’s just starting now.

Jason Isbell and The Honorables

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

I wonder whether Jason Isbell ever envisioned himself wearing a tux and singing this song to a bunch of Democrats at their national convention in Chicago.

We didn’t get to hear James Taylor perform — Sweet Baby James got the hook as various The Honorables ran long — but I think Jason pretty much got ’er done.

If I were to give anybody the hook so James could slip in a pertinent lyric or two it would’ve been Dick Durbin, who really phoned it in. Meanwhile, the Hilldebeast reminded us all that she will always be The Smartest Person in the Room, which for my money is one of the reasons why she topped out as secretary of state. But she had the room from jump, so what the hell do I know?

I certainly wouldn’t have cut Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Baptist pastor and reliable Bringer of the Fire. Not even for Sweet Baby James:

“We must choose between the promise of January 5th and the peril of January 6th, a nation that embraces all of us or just some of us.”

And speaking of fire-bringing, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett dropped a few well-placed rounds in you-know-how’s AO while discussing the differences between the two major-party candidates:

“One candidate worked at McDonald’s, while she was in college at an HBCU. The other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and helped his daddy in the family business: housing discrimination. She became a career prosecutor, while he became a career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments, and one porn star to prove it.”

“Kamala Harris has a résumé. Donald Trump has a rap sheet.”

We were up way past our bedtime watching night one of the DNC and we will not be doing that again. I figure to start paying attention again when Kamala Harris and Tim Walz take the stage as the real, sure-’nough nominees.

Joe Biden was up past his bedtime, too. Swear to Dog, at one point I thought he was talking like the top of the ticket again. But then the boisterous crowd knocked him off track a bit, he started to ramble, and we closed the iPad and called it a night.

Cats and flats

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets a bit of sack time.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla and I have been enjoying a respite from wall-to-wall politics, with the Donks seemingly in a joyful state of mind along the old campaign trail and the press, or what remains of it, finally noticing in the absence of Joe Biden that it’s the other candidate who is a psycho, serial fabulist, and senile old fool, with one foot in the grave and the other in the nuthouse.

The shit monsoon will resume eventually, of course, once the Cult remembers where it left its copy of the Necronomicon (Classic Comics edition, with a foreword by Lee Atwater):

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Jesus Hitler Mar-a-Lago wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

In the meantime, the cycling has been excellent, albeit a bit toasty with the occasional deluge and explosive decompression to keep us on our toes.

I had a back-tire blowout at speed yesterday — hit a scattering of roadside debris that was deeper and chunkier than it looked, with heavy traffic in the lane and thus no way to dodge it. In an instant I was riding the rim and thought I might take a tumble, but managed to wobble to a stop without bloodshed.

It has been a month of flats, on both Steelman Eurocrosses, the Nobilette, and finally the DBR Prevail TT. That last was the worst, because it rolls on 26mm rubber, which is as fat as the rear triangle can handle. Not much in the way of a rim to ride, is what. I’m lucky it wasn’t the front that went boom or I’d have done likewise immediately afterward.

Could be worse, though. A couple folks got swept down the arroyos during Friday’s flash flood, and one of them didn’t land on his feet.

And now, from our Good News Department: The Ethan Allen dealer at Montgomery and Tramway has been replaced by (wait for it …) a Goodwill store, right behind the Filiberto’s without a sign. Economic development, Duck! City style.

Weird, huh?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Happy warriors?

OK, remember July? Everybody who thought we’d be here in August, raise your hands.

Herself and I watched Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rally the troops in Philly last night. I can’t say either of them can sing the old chin music Obama-style, but at this point I’m desperate for a ticket that’s younger than me, reasonably healthy, and joyously pugnacious.

Frankly, it was comforting to see a spark of snarky life in the creaky old Donk-O-Tron 9000™. And given the political realities — anyone been paying attention to what’s happened to other party progressives lately, like Cory Bush and Jamaal Bowman? — ol’ Coach looks like a pretty savvy choice.

I’m not even remotely complacent — we have 90 days to go before shit gets real — but they seem to have backfooted the blowhards for the moment, saving their name-calling for the candidates.

Weird? Creepy? You bet your ass they are, that and more. Say it often enough and maybe the Donks can keep a grip on any wobbly centrists, poach a few independents, and maybe even persuade that mythical handful of Republicans who retain some vestigal sense of shame that these creepy weirdos are not their friends.

Mourning in America

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Blue skies, smiling at me. … Or maybe not.

“Joe, the Supremes just said you can stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and can’t nobody do a god-damned thing about it. What are we waiting for?”

“No, they said he could do that. We try that shit and unless you learned how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush at Harvard Law we’ll be getting hourly prostate exams in the Leavenworth shower room. Until we ‘hang ourselves’ in our cells.”

“OK, OK, so maybe that’s getting too far out over our skis, even for the Supremes. Maybe we just Gitmo his fat ass?”

“You keeping up with our W-L record in the courts? I’m not at all sure we could beat a speeding ticket if we were taking a stroked-out Pope to an ER in Boston.”

“I feel ya, Boss. What about a plane crash? He’s still using that old Boeing piece of shit, yeah? Those things go down more often than Lauren Boebert. Accidents happen, amirite?”

“Only works on Democrats and rock stars.”

“Deranged loner?”

“All registered Republicans. We checked in 2016, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right. OK, how’bout we get Stormy to sign a sworn affidavit saying he liked to make the ’shroom angry by licking Mickey D’s ketchup off a 10-year-old kid or boinking a golden retriever, has a library of videos that makes a Scranton fuck-book shop look like a Christian Science reading room. Send the FBI over to ‘check it out,’ they get into a ‘gunfight’ with his SS detail, he goes down in the crossfire. Shit, I bet at least half his SS detail wants to shoot him three times before breakfast.”

“Too many moving parts; too much wobble. But the dog thing. … How about this? We invite him over for lunch and I introduce him to my dog, Commander.”

“Jesus, Joe. We’re talking a dog bite here? Fuck that. Go big or go home.”

“Going home is starting to look awfully good. I could use a nap.”