And I Am a Post-Literate Girl.
Political Officer Ivan Putin would like a word with you.
In "The Hunt for Red October"
most people were probably introduced to the idea of the "political officer" for the first time. He was the man from Moscow -- the Kremlin's personal representative -- and acted as...
...the supervisory political officer responsible for the political education (ideology) and organisation, and loyalty to the government of the military
...
The political supervision of the Russian military, was effected by the Political Commissar, who was introduced to every unit and formation, from company- to division-level, including the Navy. Revolutionary Military Councils (RVS) were established at army-, front-, fleet-, and flotilla-level, comprising at least three members — commander and two Political workers.
What a lot of people do not know is that the City of Chicago has an identical office that performs an identical function; quietly and remorselessly enforcing Da Mare's political will, insuring the loyalty of his directors and
Except in Chicago the office is called the IGA: a department with a rich and pungent history of being at or near the center of many of Chicago's most embarrassing scandals, and within which there was a sudden shake-up last week (from the "Sun Times"):
Joan Coogan named city IGA director
December 21, 2009
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
Mayor Daley on Monday abruptly changed horses in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the center of the city hiring scandal.
John Dunn, who has served as IGA director since 2005, resigned his $158,364-a-year job to take an unidentified “position in the private sector.” Dunn will be replaced by Joan Coogan, an 11-year veteran IGA employee who has worked to advance the mayor’s agenda in the City Council.
Dunn was not a City Council favorite. Earlier this year, he unleashed a profanity-laced tirade against Ald. Joe Moore (49th) in front of stunned aldermanic colleagues after Moore dared to aggressively question the mayor’s acting budget director during a City Council hearing.
Although 12 aldermen voted against the mayor’s 2010 budget, Dunn’s close ties to union leaders were credited with helping to deliver furlough days and other cost-cutting concessions that helped Daley reduce 1,600 threatened layoffs to just 431. All but three city unions ultimately agreed to the mayors demand.
“He gets along well with [Chicago Federation of Labor President] Dennis Gannon. He could pick up the phone and talk to these guys,” said a City Hall source, who asked to remain anonymous.
“Joan Coogan doesn’t know labor relations. She’s loyal. She’s been around. She’s hard-nosed. She’s tough. But she can also be a little bit abrasive. She’d be better off as chief of staff. John Dunn and [his predecessor] John Doerrer were smoother.”
...
Coogan is a graduate of St. Mary’s College and Loyola Law School and spent six years working for then-County Board President John Stroger before joining IGA in 1998.
In 2005, IGA was at the center of the city hiring scandal.
Then-IGA director John Doerrer resigned just days after the mayor’s patronage chief Robert Sorich and two other high-ranking city officials with close ties to the mayor’s native 11th Ward were accused of presiding over a “massive fraud” — complete with sham interviews, doctored test scores and color-coded charts to track political sponsors — to rig city hiring in favor of pro-Daley political workers.
Sorich was subsequently convicted. Doerrer’s predecessor, Victor Reyes, was implicated — first as an unidentified “co-schemer” in the alleged conspiracy to reward soldiers in the mayor's political army, then by name — in an explosive federal court filing unsealed in December 2005.
...
Former City Clerk Jim Laski, the highest-ranking official convicted in the Hired truck scandal, has also said that he brokered Hired Trucks through Reyes, Sorich and convicted First Deputy Water Commissioner Donald Tomczak.
Reyes has never been charged.
...
Not exactly steeped in a tradition of "Duty, Honor, Country".
And since nothing in Chicago politics happens in a vacuum, this latest departmental defrag needs to be understood in the light of recent events, so consider how much movement there has been just behind the scenes in City government.
The belly-flop of the Olympics bid means that, instead of running a powerful shadow gummint in Da Mare's name, a lot of Hizzoner's top people got caught out in the cold, and a lot of Hizzoner's top allies got stuck with a fistful of worthless political and financial IOUs. Several departments have been reorganized and centralized for the second or third time in as many years (at least one department has disappeared altogether). Some bosses still carry the title of "acting" long after tradition dictates that those positions be permanently filled. And having shown a perfect willingness to fire city workers and cut hours en masse to balance his budget in the past, Da Mare has suddenly done a major about-face and is about to spend virtually all of the loot he got from frittering away the city's parking meters on a 75-year lease...to balance a one-year budget hole and throw Chicagoans a token
So combine the fact that there simply are no more fiscal gimmicks left to prop up Hizzoner's regime and pay off all his political debts, with the reality of a demoralized government that has way too many of its moving parts in unpredictable motion, and all signs point to the Great Machine heaving itself into frantic action to shake up the city's political Etch-A-Sketch (about which Fran Speilman does a fine job of cataloging here) --
...
The Daley shuffle continued with the appointment of CTA President Ron Huberman to replace Arne Duncan to head the city's schools.
...
The City Hall version of musical chairs also shifted Aviation Commissioner Richard Rodriguez to the CTA. Huberman is an education neophyte. Rodriguez has no background in mass transit. Both moves exposed how thin the mayor's bench of trusted advisers had become.
The mayor later also replaced his chief financial officer, chief procurement officer, budget director, inter-governmental affairs director and inspector general in 2009, along with the CTA Board chairman and commissioners of streets and sanitation, aviation, health, human resources, general services, fleet management and animal care and control.
...
-- once again in a way that will further consolidate and concentrate power into hands of Da Fifth Floor.
There are about to be simultaneously many fewer seats in the lifeboats -- and more demands for them -- than at any other time in Da Mare's long career, and for that scenario, Da Mare does not need someone "smooth" overseeing the execution of his political will down to the level of "every unit and formation".
For that, he needs an Enforcer.
From Yahoo News:
China unveils 'world's fastest train link'Ha!
BEIJING (AFP) – China on Saturday unveiled what it billed as the fastest rail link in the world -- a train connecting the modern cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan at an average speed of 350 kilometres (217 miles) an hour.
The super-high-speed train reduces the 1,069 kilometre journey to a three hour ride and cuts the previous journey time by more than seven and a half hours, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Work on the project began in 2005 as part of plans to expand a high-speed network aimed at eventually linking Guangzhou, a business hub in southern China near Hong Kong, with the capital Beijing, Xinhua added.
"The train can go 394.2 kilometres per hour, it's the fastest train in operation in the world," Zhang Shuguang, head of the transport bureau at the railways ministry, told Xinhua.
...
Everybody knows trains are hobos, mass transit is for sissies and that Real Men take the God Damn Tahoe.
Fucking Commie losers.
It was, admittedly, too cute by half, and has already caused several people to come down with severe cases of Sudden Onset Twisted Panty Disorder over something I wrote which the damned Lemon Nuance font obviously made it impossible for them to read, or -- thanks to its sinister citrateous powers -- made them see (and fly into a rage over) something I had never written at all.
It was reckless and irresponsible of me and it shall not happen again.
Tradition.
The Thin White Duke duetting with the Short White Bing.
Prehistoric Matt Taibbi calling out prehistoric Lloyd Blankfein.
Cylons.
Yuletide hostage-taking.
And, of course, the annual re-telling of the story of
Santa Claus and his old lady.
On Donner, on Blitzen.
On Chuy, on Tavo.
C'mon Beto!
But he's so cute and furry and...
Oh.
Never mind.
From The Atlantic:
Odd Couple Of Norquist, Hamsher Call For Investigation, Rahm's Resignation
Grover Norquist and Jane Hamsher are not often on the same side of anything, beyond both usually being in the Western Hemisphere. Norquist is a leading voice of fiscal conservatism as head of the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform; Hamsher is a leading voice of the digital left, whose blog Firedoglake has taken on influence in speaking up for progressives during the health care debate and in pressuring lawmakers through its activist arm, FDL Action.
...
There are plenty of issues over which Liberals and old-line Conservatives can, should and do find common ground: hell, out in the meat world I do it every week.
But Grover Norquist is not an old-line Conservative. Grover Norquist is the plutocrat's favorite demolitions expert, whose fanatical purpose is to destroy the federal government, and whose fanaticism sometimes leads him to do things like compare the estate tax to the Holocaust.
Because he is a lunatic with the moral sense of a nail gun.
And while nothing can be done about moral imbeciles like Grover Norquist running wild in the streets, somebody really needs to remind Hamsher that this sort of collaborating-with-thugs-for-political-convenience bullshit is exactly how the Southern Strategy started.
I am C3-BOBO, Human-Suburb relations…
File under: “The Lyin’ of the Elders of Protocol”
This will be the briefest assay of a Bobo Brooks column I have ever done, because everything that is Epic Fail about it flows from its first, two sentences.
From the NYT:
No. Stop. Stop right there. Shut it down.
The Protocol Society
By DAVID BROOKS
In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks.
Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions.
...
Because this is simply wrong.
A widely accepted economic platitude? Yes.
One that has sold millions of bad books for fatuous globalists like Tom Friedman? Yes.
And wrong?
Absolutely.
A fairy tale, and a very, very dangerously one, because the epidemic perpetuation of this bourgeois, Frappuccino-slurping Conservative elitist notion that we don't manufacture things in the United States anymore -- that we are (as such pronouncements always either state outright or unmistakably imply) inevitably and irrevocably becoming a two-class economy of white collar persons living in stylish suburbs manipulating bytes in office parks...and peons living in trailer parks manipulating beds in nursing homes and upscale hotels -- has such a powerful and destructive effect on public perception and policy that we are well on our way to making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By, among other means, spreading it as the plainsong, axiomatic truth of the New Century in the nation's newspaper of record.
Just one of those things that everybody knows.
Except, of course, that it just isn't true.
We still make stuff (from a handy aggregation of good data here:)
The chart above shows manufacturing output of selected countries and the BRIC countries, as a share of world manufacturing output in 2007, using United Nations data via the BLS (I haven't been able yet to find comparable data for 2008). It's interesting that U.S. factories produced almost twice as much output in 2007 as China, and the U.S. produced an amount equivalent to the total manufacturing output of the four BRIC countries combined (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
...
Lots of stuff (from the incredibly far-right Cato Institute, with which I disagree about so many other things, but which has this one exactly right):
Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about U.S. Manufacturing and Trade
Reports of the death of U.S. manufacturing have been greatly exaggerated. Since the depth of the manufacturing recession in 2002, the sector as a whole has experienced robust and sustained output, revenue, and profit growth. The year 2006 was a record year for output, revenues, profits, profit rates, and return on investment in the manufacturing sector. And despite all the stories about the erosion of U.S. manufacturing primacy, the United States remains the world's most prolific manufacturer--producing two and a half times more output than those vaunted Chinese factories in 2006.
...
Lots and lots of stuff (from the Alliance for American Manufacturing):
Manufacturing in the U.S. generates about $1.6 trillion, or 12 percent of our gross domestic product, accounting for nearly three quarters of the nation’s industrial research and development (R&D), two-thirds of our nation’s total exports of goods and services, and supports more than 20 million high-paying jobs. Manufacturing also ensures we have a strong industrial base to support our national security objectives.
In fact making stuff holds the potential for helping to solve lots of our other problems (from the Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper "Renewing U.S. Manufacturing by Promoting a High-Road Strategy" [PDF]):
U.S. manufacturing: Why shrinkage is a problem—and is not inevitable
Why manufacturing matters
A stronger manufacturing sector could alleviate a number of problems plaguing the U.S. economy. These problems include:1.Sagging infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE 2005) rates 27% of the nation’s bridges as “structurally deficient,” a danger exemplified by the recent collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis on August.1, 2007. In addition, the ASCE reported large shortfalls on spending for clean water, cleanup of toxic waste sites, and waste-water treatment.
2. Failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. According to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), the world faces potentially disastrous changes in climate.
...
Manufacturing can contribute to this reduction both by adopting energy-efficient production techniques and by making equipment to produce renewable energy.
...
Making stuff also drives innovation (from "Manufacturing a Better Future for America")...
“Contrary to assertions by many that we can jettison manufacturing in favor of focusing on ‘innovation’ and high-wage services sectors to lead growth, the reality is that manufacturing industries account for 70 percent of all U.S. spending on research and development and employs more than 40 percent of all engineers,” Hira continues. “Innovation is inextricably linked to manufacturing and vice versa—lose one and you’ll lose both."
...
And making stuff also not only pays pretty well, but generates other jobs in the economy, effectively propping up the American Middle Class (from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):
...To understand the cost of losing these jobs, you need to understand just how valuable manufacturing jobs are. Manufacturing supports large numbers of upstream suppliers, pours research and development investment into the economy and stimulates innovation.
With their high productivity, manufacturing jobs pay good wages and provide needed benefits. Moreover, 35,000 retirees and their families depend on the tire industry for their retiree health care benefits; when that industry can't compete because of imports from China, it puts those important benefits at risk.
Manufacturing jobs are the backbone of the middle class, supporting entire communities in many areas of the nation. Every job in the tire-and-rubber industry supports an additional 2.4 jobs in supplier industries and through respending of wages earned by those workers.
This is bang for your buck we just cannot get by creating a new job at Wal-Mart, or even on Wall Street.
...
"Protocols" are fine things, Mr, Brooks, and stacking and shuffling bits for a living around keeps geeks off the streets and out of the gangs, but we are still very much a country that makes stuff, and our future (and, indirectly, jobs like yours) depend on us not only remaining a global manufacturing heavyweight, but on getting better and better at it every year.
Which, in turn, depends on convincing a skeptical public and an ignorant ruling class still drunk on the cheap popskull get-rich-easy dreams of a Goldman Sachs/casino economy that it is worth the expensive, long-term investments and radical changes in our cultural and educational institutions needed to secure this future; a task that is made all the harder every time someone like Bobo Brooks opens his yap to regurgitate another bit of commonly accepted yahoo disinformation on a subject about which he knows almost nothing at all.
Still, perhaps we cannot blame C3-BOBO too much this time around.
Need to stay in Chicago.
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations again on your election. Now that you've had the better part of a year to settle into your new position, here are a couple of things about which people who caught a severe case of "The fierce urgency of now" last year and figuratively (and very likely, in some cases, literally) gave up their place in line at the unemployment office just so they could go and work on your behalf would like to remind you.
- As Leader of the Free World, you no longer have to call "dibs" on your parking space and mark it with that shitty lawn furniture you bought at Da Dominicks ten years ago, or the shell of that IBM 5150 from the Carter Administration you found in the basement.
- As Leader of the Free World you no longer have to bend a knee to reeking fucksticks like Joe Lieberman, no matter how much elder political kingpin vibe he's fronting.
- As Leader of the Free World you no longer have to dance to the tune of the malefactors of great wealth -- whether they nest on Wall Street or Insurance Avenue -- no matter what Rahm Emanuel tells you.
- As Leader of the Free World you really, really need to have your own sammich named after you at Manny's. It's become embarrassing.
And speaking of sammiches, half a loaf is not a loaf, Mr. President, and half of a half, isn't even a half, but being Liberals who survived the Rise and Fall of Reaganism on a nettle soup, "The West Wing" and wishful thinking, we can make do.
However, a fistful of raw wheat and an IOU for yeast sometime in the next decade is not any increment of a loaf.
It is, in fact, impossible to swallow.
"A Zappadan Miracle" edition.
What would qualify as a Zappadan miracle?
How about a reporter telling some unhappy truths about the industry for which he works, and then resigning his job -- in the teeth of the Great Recession -- as a matter of principle?
Because everybody knows that is unpossible, right?
Everybody knows that everybody is on the make. Everybody has a price. Everybody has been slammed to the economic curb so fucking hard that they'll eat shit with a smile and ask for seconds to keep from ending up dancing for nickles in front of their Frigidaire box on Lower Wacker Drive.
This, after all, is the subtext of every Smart Money sermonette that smirks out at us from under glossy suits anf bulletproof hair every Sunday at the Mouse Circus: the deck is stacked so cold and tight that we can never win and are fools for even trying.
That the only way up is to sell out.
And every time the American people are sold a little deeper into bondage to corporate interests -- every time another bankster or Pharma lobbyist or health insurance mogul uses a gummint-issued backhoe to pick our pockets from behind after they have shot us in the face from the front -- we are counseled by all the clever dogs to take fucking the deal. To spend the rest of the waning days of the America we knew finding new and maximally-profitable ways of surrendering our futures to the implacable engines of oligarchy.
But I, for one, do not consent.
Will never consent to meekly dig my own grave.
Will never consent to obediently climbing into the lime pit just because the Villagers tell me it's the only open road left to me, which is why I try to spend some time every week opining intelligently bitching about the gassy trolls and skeezy puppeteers who have all but destroyed the honorable profession of journalism in America.
But this time around, rather that banging my sore old head against the same granite wall, I want to instead celebrate a small, local journalistic miracle.
Regular readers know that I am an admirer of the work Steve Rhodes does over at "The Beachwood Reporter". (Almost) every day, Steve emerges from his bunker to talk a little treason about various local sports cartels, link to interesting fellow travelers, and tell us in high style something wormy and compelling about what's happening in the ongoing, malfeasant comic-opera that is Chicago politics.
He is one of the canaries in our municipal mineshaft...if the canary was a mean, old dog...with a lockjaw grip...and a...big bag of adjectives?
OK, admittedly that metaphor toed itself into the wall pretty quick, so let's just let Steve speak for himself.
And so he resigned.I am no longer contributing to NBCChicago.com and I feel obliged to tell readers why. It's also a tale that needs to be told in any case.
...
Around 11:30 a.m. the next morning - more than 24 hours after my piece was posted - I received a note from media maven Jim Romenesko notifying me that the link for the post I had provided in my Beachwood column was broken; he had been looking forward to reading the piece. The broken link was new to me. But it turned out it wasn't a broken link at all; the story had been "taken down."No one had notified me. Perhaps no one would have had I not been alerted to it.
I sent an e-mail to my NBCChicago.com minders asking about it. At the same time, I noticed that a story I had submitted earlier that morning - and which had been approved in the usual morning pitch process - had never been posted. That was about the suicide of Michael Scott, a Daley insider who had most recently been the chairman of the school board.
...
There was not a "comfort level" in Chicago with what happened, I was told, but it happened at "the highest levels" of the company. And that "the highest levels of the company" made the decision "to remove" the [Tribune Company CEO Sam Zell's chief lieutenant Randy] Michaels post.
I was then told that the Michael Scott story had been scotched because he was a friend of a high-ranking station official here in Chicago who had been "ruffled" by the coverage of Scott's death to that point. On the heels of the Tribune controversy, I was told, the folks (or perhaps just one folk) here in Chicago didn't want another battle on their hands.
...
...With 20 years in the business, I know how things work. And yet, with everything I've seen myself and reported on in others, I cannot recall ever being involved in an incident like this. It was truly depressing.
I never set out to be a media critic. All I've ever wanted - well, after it became clear I would never play centerfield for the Twins, shortstop for the Cubs, or lead a rock and roll band - was to be a journalist. Call me corny, but I believe in the calling deeply.
But how can journalists keep quiet about what goes on in their own shops while cajoling - and even moralizing to - others to speak out about what goes on in theirs? We as an industry hail the whistleblower in print while not only keeping secrets ourselves, but expounding on how much the citizenry needs forthright people like us for democracy to survive.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
...
Of course, after you read the whole thing here. (also too, the audio here from his interview on WBEZ) you may ask yourself, "Sure, it's an awesome, inspirational story, but what in the world does it have to do with Zappadan?"
Well, first, I felt really bad about not getting a post up this year in support of the fine cats and kittens who sponsor the celebration, so let's just say that somewhichway whatever I wrote today was probably going to end up being a little, ah, Procrustean-ed into that bed.
But second, during his lifetime, Frank Zappa fought relentlessly against government censorship of words, and the faked-up outrage of "What about the Children?!" campaigns by right-wing groups who tried to use that manufactured fear to drive this country into the suffocating bosom of
fascist theocracy.
But of course, "fascism", is just another word for "corporatism":
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."-- Benito Mussolini.
And when, instead of reporting the news, corporations take it upon themselves to pollute one of the public's few remaining sources of honest information in order to protect the personal interests of the powerful, then the convergence of corrupt government interests and corrupt corporate interests has indeed begun to approach the point where government really has become
"...the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex."So thank you, Steve, for having the integrity to take up arms against that particular sea of troubles.-- Frank Zappa
Happy Zappadan, good people.
And may you all find clever ways to put every hour of darkness of this longest night of the year to naughty good use!
The Shrill One makes some excellent points in today's NYT:
...Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.
Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?
He even locates the source of the dysfunction. Care to take a guess about which Party is primarily responsible for pulling down the temple?
...
The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.
The problem -- the real, terrifying problem -- is that there is no one left on the Right to reason with, and there is almost no one left on the Left who dares to say that out loud.
And all because the money for shutting up, going along and selling us all out to the malefactors of great wealth is just too good.
Since the 80s, the "Government is the problem" GOP has made it perfectly clear that their long-term objective is to:
Destroy.
The.
Evil.
Gummint.
The.
Evil.
Gummint.
By any means necessary.
Win an election, by hook or crook...and Republicans break all land-speed records to loot the place outright and tow the wreck of whatever is left the Impound Lot of History. Lose...and Republicans stand on the Overpass of History lobbing cinder blocks into traffic.
And they can to this because they pay absolutely no penalty for; because their moral imbecile minions actual delight in it and rewards them for it. These millions of jerks -- the Pig People -- who giggle as the world melts. Who smirked as New Orleans drowned. Who reliably whine out the single biggest Big Lie in Modern American political history -- that "Liberals are just as bad" -- when they get cause red-handed gloating over the suffering of the poor and the weak in another fascist circle jerk of orgiastic sadism and misanthropy.
These are the fruits of the 30 years Conservative Base Breeding program designed to produce a crop of berserker wingnuts who regard any Democratic Administration as de facto illegitimate, any Liberal as a dangerous internal enemy to be crushed, and even the most modest attempts to govern responsibly as something (and I am quoting now from a conversation I had recently with an otherwise-pleasant Conservative colleague) straight out "of some Marxist Central Planner's playbook!"
A United State government that has been render so rotted, ineffectual, debt-crippled and idiot-ridden that, outside of occasionally pouring fire on some country on the far side of the Earth, it is incapable of taking any action whatsoever seems like a tragedy and a disaster to people on the Left like Paul Krugman, because they still have a social conscience.
Which is a blessing, but also a terrible blind spot.
Because no matter how many times they say it -- and no matter how many times their actions prove it -- we still seem incapable of comprehending that, for the Right, a government that has been methodically kneecapped to the point of complete dysfunctional -- where a fuckstick like Holy Joe Lieberman is made 30 pieces of silver richer every time he nicks another of democracy's arteries -- smells like Victory.
That no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma.
He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.
As Chris Beam notes here in Slate, the War to End All Wassails is basically over for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that the Reality that there never really was one finally swamped the Fox News propaganda:
...another recent story alleged that a school in Taunton, Mass., suspended a second-grader and required him to undergo psychological evaluation because when the teacher asked the class to draw something that reminded them of Christmas, the boy drew a picture of Jesus on the cross. The child's father cried religious bias. As it turns out, the boy was not suspended and the teacher had referred the child to psychological services because he had identified the person on the cross as himself. The teacher feared it might be a cry for help.
You can still hear a few crack and pops of faraway artillery from the wingnut rear guard itching to gin up fight, but the real War on Christmas mongers -- the Hate Media outlets, who always need some Fresh!Fake!Outrage! to keep the Pig People amped up and watching -- has gotten bored with it. Like many a toy from Mithrasmases gone by, the GWOX's (Global War on Xmas) paint has faded. Its moving parts have worn out. And it goes through batteries like David Vitter goes through hookers.
Not that any of that matters.
Swap "Clinton Impeachment" out for GWOX and you get exactly the same rhetoric. Swap GWOX for Teabagging, ditto. Swap it for ACORNoia, ditto. Swap ACORN for Obama-the-Kenyan-Usurper, ditto. And so on, and on, and on without end.
It is the same poison with different food coloring offered up to those millions of criminally delusional citizens who cling to their belief that Barack Obama (the guy who buddied up to the Conservatives in his class at Harvard, then buddied up to his Republican colleagues in Springfield, and who has again and again sacrificed or cripplingly compromised core Liberal policies and ideals to mollify some nonexistent group of "reasonable" Republicans) is a really secret Commie who has been (as was explained to me at a party last week) " steeped I tell you in the ways of radicals like Saul Alinsky" every bit as fiercely and irrationally as any Evangelical clings to Creationism and The Rapture.
For these people, I have no hope at all. None. For 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they have no capacity for introspection; no ability to recognize that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in Alinsky, but in themselves.
And for 30-years-plus they have proven beyond any doubt that they will always fall for the Internal Enemy bullshit being marketed to them by the very people whose policies are actually fucking them and the country the claim to love into the ground.
And so I bring you another driftglass seasonally appropriate "War on Christmas" repost (stolen from the movie "Patton" and cruelly forced to serve wicked, Liberal ends by me), because, the War Behind the Global War on Xmas is the one that never ends.
Men, all this stuff you've heard about Pig People not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Pig People, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Pig People love the sting of battle.
When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Pig People love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.
And the Jim Crow thing.
And the “Segregation Now” thing.
And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.
But other than that, Pig People play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Pig People have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.
Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Pig People. As is the thought of Tolerance.
And Science.
And Causality.
And Compromise.
And every other religion in the history of the Universe.
Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking gotcha questions of the Sarah Palin” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.
Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh.
We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.
Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.
I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.
That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.
But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred invented by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming the wrong slogans so they never noticed how routinely and ineptly the Cheney Administration lied to them and fucked them over.
The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God.
When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!
Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.
To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!
Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?
You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Cheney Administration a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on the Cheney Administration's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."
Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.
Like, say, Easter.
That's all.
of the Aerie Dwellers.
Sandwiched in among dozens of Daily Dish posts by Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner (whose Friday holiday tune selection was somehow amazingly also too Tom Waits' "Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis"), Andrew Sprung and Conor Friedersdorf, one finds that some sort of kerfuffle has broken out between Ann Althouse and the Andrew Sullivan Collective.
A Daily Dish reader put it this way...
If Newbusters is going to be give The Dish a hard time for openly using underbloggers, they'd better also go after most every op-ed columnist at this country's major papers. For example, the Times illustrious Nick Kristof almost always uses an assistant or two for help with research, editing, and idea formulation. I've only ever seen this acknowledged on his blog; he has perhaps mentioned it in a column, but it is neither acknowledged regularly within or permanently along-side his columns, which is a notable difference in comparison to Andrew, Chris, and you. I say this not to pick on Kristof, but merely to point out a high-profile and Pulitzer Prize-winning example. Andrew is far and away more open about the assistance he receives than are most, if not all, opinion leaders.
"Underblogging"?
"Ghostblogging"?
Assistants who "help with research, editing, and idea formulation"?
Do these strange words have anything to do with
Ghost Dogging?
Or spirit leveling?
Or maybe
The Ghost and Mr. Chickening?
I am just a simple, unfrozen caveman blogger, unfamiliar with the big city ways of Real Bloggers.
I have a fanny pack of Oban, some interstitial moments between units of grocery-paying work and a lovingly-maintained diesel-powered laptop.
My assistant is a driftcat who very often does not try to avenge herself for some imaginary slight by peeing on the exact spot where I was just sitting.
I do not understand one thing these people are saying.
A mug of warm nostalgia from the early days of Chicago children's teevee.
Of course, little did I realize as a wee driftglass that "Hardrock, Coco and Joe" was also being used to propagandize us future Chicago voters to accept the basic template of machine politics -- the benevolent bestower of gifts and his make-work goofs -- as a law of nature :-)
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