Category: Deep political thought

Fear and loathing … but mostly loathing

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Fear and Loathing, Campaign Trail style
The more things change, etc.

Every time I read a story like this I wish someone could reanimate Hunter S. Thompson and send him lurching back out on the campaign trail.

Wouldn’t you like to get the take on Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio from the guy who wrote: “Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ’em like Hubert any more — but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.”

Or of the inevitability of Richard Nixon: “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we really are just a nation of 230 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

Or: “Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

Abbey Road, or Downton Funk

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
You can have any color you like as long as it's red.
You can have any color you like as long as it’s red.

Herself and I settled down before the Eye last night with plates of salad and chicken quesadillas to enjoy the president’s final State of the Union address, only to find that the local PBS affiliate was airing “Masterpiece.”

Commies.

And worse, Limey commies, as the show was “Downton Abbey.”

So we switched to the White House website and caught most of Obama’s act, though the Mini spazzed out at the end, pre-empting him with The Spinning Beach Ball of Doom just as he cranked up the volume, and thus we missed the big denouement.

I enjoyed the departure from traditional practice, which has come to elevate ritual over substance. As the prez took the long view, it was particularly amusing to note the discomfiture of the clappers, who were mostly denied easy applause lines.

But I was surprised that he still seems surprised that the other team won’t play ball with him simply because he’s a Kenyan Mooslim National Socialist sissypants.

Still, I felt his pain. I’ve been preaching a gospel of equal parts socialism and substance abuse for years and not one of yis has opened a free-booze-and-bike-parts outlet.

There goes the sun

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Sunrise ... sunset. ...
Sunrise … sunset. …

It may have come too soon, but yesterday’s sunset was definitely worth a squint. We were walking The Boo through the neighborhood, I had a camera with me, and that was that.

The sun set on Lindsey Graham’s pestilential campaign yesterday, too, boo hoo, boo hoo. Now the silly little hooter has to spend his time like the rest of us, shouting at the TV instead of from it. He bailed out just in time to have his name pulled from the ballot in Petticoat Junction and thus avoid a public flogging in his own back yard.

Oh, yeah. Lindsey also has his day job, which last I looked paid around $174,000 per annum. His estimated net worth after 20 years on Uncle Sammy’s payroll is a piddling $1.02 million. No wonder he’s so bitchy all the time.

Send in the clones

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
It doesn't look that cold out there, but it is. Can't you see the tree shivering?
It doesn’t look that cold out there, but it is. Can’t you see the tree shivering?

All right, which one of you wisenheimers swiped my sun-splashed Southwestern desert?

It never got over freezing today — the average for the day is supposedly in the mid-40s — and I was very much not interested in logging miles on any of the review bikes in the stable.

Instead, I made soup. That’s exercise, right? All that washing, peeling, chopping and stirring?

Sure it is.

The candidates for the GOP pestilential nomination will be making something else entirely in Vegas this evening, something not unlike a shit soufflé, but I will not be watching. Life is already far too short for that sort of cookery, even with the media trying to whip up an MMA steel-cage death match out of what amounts to a clone army of your drunk Uncle Buster carpet-bombing Christmas dinner.

Speaking of bombing, Los Angeles collectively soiled itself today over what is now believed to be a hoax involving attacks on school districts in large cities.

Thank God Al Gore hadn’t invented the Innertubez when I was a malchick. If my droogies and I had had smartphones back in the day, school would have been in session like, never, dude, sir.

“OK, hold the bong for a second and check this out. Hey, how do you spell ‘Klingon bird of prey?'”