How I Became A Teabagging Dick Tuck
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 9, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010If you can’t beat ‘em, infiltrate ‘em.
 I don’t care WHERE you bring Glenn Beck, as long as it takes him further from ME. |
To me, voting these days seems more like a choice of execution method than a treasured civil right. Would I rather be shot with the antiquated but lethal and remarkably reliable Kalishnakov (The Republican Party) or with the the Humanitarian Magic Fairy Love Rifle that turns the target into a pretty and confused unicorn and brings peace, love, high speed trains, and broadband to all (The Democratic Party)? Which is why I always delight when an alternative pops up, if only for the variety. Of course, in the case of guys like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, that “variety” can work against the voter’s intention by helping the worse of their two perceived evils to win, as happened in 1992 and 2000, and that’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated with the teabaggers. The first reason is of course their choice of name. Although polls have shown that a lot of Americans aren’t (or won’t admit that they are) familiar with the well-established slang term teabagging, there had to have been quite a few former frat boys amongst the party’s ranks who were well aware of the term. Another reason I’m fascinated with them is their utter ignorance of the fact that they’re really just Libertarians. Somewhere between deciding on their values and choosing someone to represent them, things got really confused though. Which is why it’s fun to mess with them. The other day I visited the web site of the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition to see if there was any sanity embedded in their angst-driven herding behavior. I didn’t find much; they make their confusion clear in the second sentence of their little manifesto by saying “We are non partisan, unabashedly conservative, and drama free“. On the other hand, they show a little cleverness by putting social networking and sharing tools to use with a Ning site, user polls, and and an Eventful.com badge for a Glenn Beck appearance. Which is where I had a little fun, and where I think I finally discovered my place in modern politics. First, the trivial fun, then I’ll explain my new role in politics. I noticed they had a poll that said “Do you think Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool?“, so, after leaving a comment that said “Do I think [the] Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool? No. But I think you all ARE a bunch of tools. And I think you should learn how to SPELL before you try to EDIT the existing tax code. That would be ‘usefull’!“, I noticed the poll had no block on voting twice, so in the time-honoured tradition of “vote early, vote often”, I shifted the numbers a bit by voting “No” 270 times to amuse myself while I was busy on a phone call. Then I noticed they were also trying to get Homosexual Nazi Blood Elf Glenn Beck to come to Tennessee. I’m all for getting Glenn Beck as far away from ME as possible, so I voted a few times for that as well. And this is when it dawned on me. I don’t support either major party across the board, and this has frustrated me for quite a while. So in the interest of sticking to some of my core values but still doing something that has impact, I’m going to become a Bipartisan Dick Tuck, and offer my campaign pranking services to both parties, but based entirely on whether the prank aligns with my values. See you at the reader poll! Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks A Trillion, Frank
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 2, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010How the GOP will stick you with the biggest economic debacle in history and make you think Obama did it.
 This example uses $100 bills |
It’s time once again for people like you and me to have their heads spun by the incomprehensible numbers that are the US Budget. Personally, ever since I learned about fictitious capital, I’ve had a hard time understanding why the government expects us to pay OUR bills, when THEY operate at a deficit almost all the time. Short of a revolution though, not much can be done about that, so let’s just try to understand the numbers. There are two ways to look at numbers like this. One is to just look at them, and say “Wow. Those are some really big numbers.” The New York Times has a great interactive for doing just that. You can also try to visualize the numbers, as in the graphic at left, which was assembled from the larger images here. We explored this in more detail last year. You can also do what politicians do, and talk about the numbers in ways that sound good but make no sense in reality. That’s what the GOP has been doing for a while, largely with the help of Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz is the guy that was largely instrumental in the success of the GOP over the past decade, through their implementation of his GOP Playbook. If you’ve never given it a look, you should, because it was his language – refined through dial groups and other marketing-style research – that allowed the previous administration to rack up the hugest deficits in history, while making you think they were frugal conservatives. Now that the previous administration has trashed the economy, saying goodbye on the way out with Bush nationalizing the banks and essentially destroying American capitalism as we knew it, it’s time to make it look like it’s all Obama’s fault. And Frank is back, with the words to do it. He’s penned the new talking points in a memo called Language of Financial Reform. That’s a link to the full document, which is also embedded and excerpted below. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Democrats Always Lose & Why American Voters Need A Brand
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 21, 2010 by admin in Politics
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Or, If You’re So Smart How Come You’re Losing? Also, help us pick a mascot for the American Voter. Our first pick is a monkey, but would love your input.
I realized recently that it’s a lot easier to think and talk about politics if you don’t take the topic seriously. I came to this conclusion while having dinner with my liberal friends the other evening. They were mostly talking about what they’ve donated to help Haiti, and how shocking it was that Scott Brown had won in Massachusetts. I accidentally started an argument by asking if they had put their donations on credit cards, asked how much personal debt they carried, what they thought about the federal deficit, if they had thought about Haiti much prior to the earthquake, and what they had done about military spending lately. It really was an accident, but the ensuing brouhaha made clear a point a conservative friend of mine had made recently, which is that people in power love it when the liberal intellectuals get engaged in political discourse, because then they get so busy debating the finer points of the issues at hand that they end up not doing anything about them. And that’s why I reckon we’ll have no new health care plan, a couple new wars, a quadrillion dollar deficit, and a Republican president in 2012. Seriously. Sure, America elected its first black president and the first democratic congressional majority in a while last year, but it took two wars, thousands of deaths, a nationalized banking and auto industry, a massive loss of privacy rights, and a thoroughly gutted economy to do it. And what are liberals talking about a year and a half later? Haiti, a health care bill, and a single republican senator in New England. Don’t get me wrong, this works on conservative voters too. Tell a bunch of hillbillies in a bar that Cat Stevens hates Jesus, that Asians and Mexicans are taking all the jobs, and that allowing gay marriage will turn their kids into atheist homos, and the next thing you know you have George W. Bush in the White House. The Lutzian/Rovian strategy of pandering to voter ignorance is now standard operating procedure for campaigning; ironically the Obama campaign is one of their best proofs of concept. So given this profound dopiness on the part of the American populace, it occurred to me that if the GOP has its elephant, and the Dems have their donkey, the American Voter needs a mascot too. I figured a monkey was a good choice. What about you? Any suggestions? Read the rest of this entry »
Mike Prysner – A True War Hero
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 23, 2009 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009The only heroes of war are those who have fought one and abhor it as a result.
I couldn’t possibly express my feelings on war better than Mike Prysner, Iraq War veteran, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. So here’s a video edited to his presentation for an IVAW panel on Dehumanization of the Enemy. In his words: “Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable, the banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away…they are right here in front of us…we were told we were fighting terrorists…the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation”.
Lieberman & Obama Tied For Best Politician Of 2009
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on December 16, 2009 by admin in Best Of 2009, Politics
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009Who would YOU nominate for Best Politician of 2009, and why?
With the end of the year and the decade upon us, it’s time for all those “best of” lists to start assaulting us. But have you ever noticed that there’s not much in the way of “Best Politician” lists? Well, we’re going to do our bit to remedy this. For a “Best Politician of 2009″ award, we have two nominations right off the bat. Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. First, lets talk about Joe Lieberman. He’s been getting a lot of flak recently, but frankly, I don’t understand the fuss. Joe is what any logical-minded person would consider a consummate politician. If, by “consummate politician”, you mean a smug, lying, self-serving, turncoat bastard who will do anything including raping babies to maintain a position of influence. Joe’s interpretation of “bipartisan” is that you have to be in whichever party it takes to keep you in office, regardless of where that party’s values lie. The only thing I don’t understand about Senator Lieberman is why his parents didn’t name him Richard. Not to worry about this too much though, being named Joe didn’t stop him from earning his place in Dickipedia. And Barack Obama? As I’ve said before (in the interest of disclosure): I voted for the guy. For a while I maintained a fantasy that he’s genuinely a good man, but that as soon as he was sworn in, a gang of shadow government thugs dragged him into a dark room and waterboarded him while they told him about all the ways they would torture his loving family if he didn’t dance to the whims of the secret power elite of the military industrial complex. This delusion gasped its last breath recently, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize while increasing troop levels to escalate two massive military conflicts abroad. Any decent normal human being would graciously decline a peace prize under such circumstances; only a politician would accept it. We understand he’s planning to invade Iran in the hopes of winning another. We’ll be pondering the “Best Politician of the Decade” list for a bit, but who would you nominate?