Fear is everywhere.
As each new scandal erupts – which is about as often as most people go to the bathroom – our nation’s highest ranking officials muster to distract our fleeting attention. They put on their fright wigs and start shrieking that the sky is falling.
Like most people, I used to be afraid of being sick, and now I’m sick of being afraid. So I read a calm newspaper, the New York Times, where everything is grey.
But what do they dish up today? The Dead Sea is shrinking! The south basin has already dried up. Water in the north basin is receding. Well, they call it water. It’s nine times saltier than the ocean – over 30 percent salt — plus such a load of other alien substances that they set up a chemical factory on the shore of the south basin while it still had a shore. Now they have to pipe in the slurry from the north basin to extract the chemicals.
So Israel’s great salt lake will soon be as dry as our great salt lake, and then they can use it to race Pontiacs or test solar powered school buses.
Frightening, isn’t it? The Dead Sea is dying. Now, back to the crossword puzzle.
Sing to the tune of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze,” and then feel free to add a few lines of your own!
This chirpy little Republican marching song answers to the tune of “Love and Marriage.”
Blame the victim,
Shame the victim,
and, if possible, you
Maim the victimOnce you’ve got their savings,
No-one will listen to their ravings
How it works: First, you select your victims – let’s say old people, who often get sick. Start by bleeding them dry with regressive taxes, and hand out their money to your robber baron chums.
This leaves the government without enough money to finance Medicaid. Whose fault is that? Theirs, obviously. Old people are a burden. So in 2005 the Republican Congress piously perpetrated the “Deficit Reduction Act,” which pushed more of the cost of Medicaid onto the consumer.
That made it virtually mandatory that the states vigorously promote (if not require) the purchase of long-term care insurance by the elderly.
The insurance companies are jubilant. The victims have yet another set of bills to pay.
But what about that “Deficit Reduction Act”? Why was that necessary after Clinton had handed Bush a big budget surplus? Oh, that. Just blame another set of victims – those expensive reservists (or at least the ones who are still alive) burning up billions a month on their second, third, and fourth tours of duty in Iraq. Later, Congress will cut their veterans’ benefits and health care, saving tons of money, as they did at the Roach Motel, AKA Walter Reed Hospital.
Then there are the burdensome victims of Katrina, many of them living ever since that tragedy in 120,000 FEMA trailers.
A year ago, FEMA was notified by field workers that these victims were being poisoned by formaldehyde fumes oozing from the trailers. So what did FEMA do? Nothing. If they were to conduct tests, it would start the clock on legal responsibility for the deaths and illnesses they were causing – a clear violation of Blame-the-Victim guidelines.
Besides, if you wait long enough, the victims are either dead or too sick to sue. Never give a sucker an even break.
That’s a Three-Fer!
Start with victims of a racist, elitist economic system who can’t afford to live above the flood plain. Victimize them again with defective levees that destroy their homes. Then nail them for a three-bagger with toxic trailers that exude carcinogens.
Historically, it took some negligence and corruption by Democrats and Dixiecrats (Republicans) as well as out-of-the-closet Republicans to set the stage for this biblical ordeal.
But it took the morally bankrupt, power-drunk, crony-ridden Bush League (They go together like a horse and carriage) to turn it into a Blame-the-Victim Trifecta.
There is nothing political in this post. It’s purely intellectual.
Cows have two stomachs. Dinosaurs had two brains, the second one a nest of ganglia mostly devoted to keeping the back feet from stepping on the tail.
Human males are also of two minds. The cranium houses one of them, and the penis has a mind of its own. One of these is much studied. The other has yet to be identified under the microscope, though its autonomy and capriciousness have been thoroughly documented down through the centuries. And now half of all such ruminations – the depressing, anxiety-ridden half – have been collected into a book called Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren.
One writer. That’s how many chroniclers were needed to render the definitive history of what penises do on their day off and how people of one age and culture or another have reacted to this state of affairs. All the other writers are frantically busy accounting for what penises do the rest of the time, elegantly distilled in Robin Williams’ succinct summation: the penis has one eye and no conscience.
Those who wish to devote further study to the minds of man can read Stephen Pinker on the cranial mind and brain (he says the mind is what the brain does) or McLaren on the mutinous neurology of the lower lobes.
Our own report concludes with the newly minted Law of Single-Mindedness, which eerily echoes that of quantum entanglement. It is this:
When either mind starts working, the other one shuts down.
Like the deranged administration that created it, the right wing majority on the Supreme Court is losing touch with American ideas and ideals.
Most Americans don’t try to parse the abstractions of constitutional law, but they know they don’t want a king. And they don’t want a pope.
Especially not a pope with taxing power who takes their money under pain of imprisonment, then hands it out to churches and religious proselytizers of whom he approves.
Nor do Americans want an arrogant chief executive who lies to them in his State of the Union address, who encourages the torture of prisoners who have not even been charged, and who shows contempt for Congress and the Supreme Court by adding 750 “signing statements” to laws he doesn’t intend to uphold if he (rather than the courts) regards them as unconstitutional.
Yet we already know from statements on the public record that Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas favor a strong-executive interpretation of the Constitution and tend to deny mere citizens any standing to dispute such high-handed actions. As for Justice Kennedy, he has sided with the bobble-heads 80% of the time on 5-4 decisions, including those favoring prosecutors, federal spending on religious activists, and limitations of free speech.
Why is the following so obvious from the outside and apparently so obscure from inside the hallowed chambers:
One day they will awaken to find that the all-powerful executive they have so heavily armed in the White House is no longer a Republican.
And by that time, Congress may have a mighty majority of new members who actually reflect American convictions – especially those of the rising generations of younger Americans — and who are ready to pass whatever laws are needed to neutralize or nullify the fossilized fascists left over on the Court from the embarrassing days of Bush & Co.
That will be the day the right wing is left with too few feathers to fly.
The rats in our national pantry are proving very hard to eradicate.
We ignorant groundlings keep thinking of obvious solutions, but the Beltway sophisticates (even the friendlies) won’t hear of it. Impeachment, for example, is still “off the table.”
Why? Are rats an endangered species?
And, to be honest about it, corruption, lying, bribing, collusion, and other such perquisites of power are not purely Republican vices. Treason is, but that’s another discussion.
What all the Beltway vices have in common is the lust for money. The Supreme Court is no help; in fact, the five right-wing justices are part of the problem. They just struck down a key pillar of campaign finance reform, and now they’re looking for other pockets of honesty to eliminate as soon as possible.
Here is a non-partisan approach to cleaning house.
What if political contributions were reclassified as illegal drugs? They’re certainly harmful; also addictive. Like most controlled substances, they can be administered in small doses without harmful effects. For political contributions, a reasonable RDA might be $200 or $300 per person, per election.
Anything over that amount is abuse.
The beauty of this idea is that it lends itself to realistic clinical trials to demonstrate its soundness. All the laboratory rats we could possibly need are already in the pantry.
In 2000, what we used to call the Supreme Court found the Republicans’ Partial Birth Abortion Ban unconstitutional. After the addition of Justices Roberts and Alito to the court, the three stooges (Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) became five stooges, and a virtually identical abortion ban became constitutional.
It’s just amazing how fast the constitution is changing.
Price floors just became constitutional – the minimum prices set by manufacturers to prevent discounts at retail. I wonder if that means that senators can now set minimum bribes and minimum campaign contributions that K-Street lobbyists and big corporations will have to pay for earmarks and special favors at taxpayer expense.
Segregation used to be unconstitutional. As of this week, segregation is all but mandatory, since school desegregation programs were just ruled unconstitutional.
Campaign finance limits that the court upheld just two years ago have now become unconstitutional, too. It’s a matter of free speech. But students just lost the freedom of speech if what they say could be interpreted as celebrating the use of drugs. Drug companies, on the other hand, have all the free speech they can buy.
And, oh yes, the constitutional separation of church and state has been overturned, or at least it’s now unconstitutional for taxpayers to sue the federal government to enforce the separation in the case of “faith-based initiatives” that hand out taxpayers’ money to certain churches.
In the new stooge-based constitution, churches remain tax-exempt. Their police and fire protection, garbage pick-up, storm sewers, septic sewers, and street sweepers are all free — paid for by atheists, agnostics, smokers, backsliders, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Shintoists, among others; and on top of that the government gives them our tax money for faith-based initiatives such as advocating abstinence and preventing the use of condoms. Out of gratitude, the churches support Republicans and deny the sacraments to any politician who favors abiding by Roe vs. Wade or supports stem-cell research or same-sex marriages.
What would Jesus do?
He drove the moneychangers from the temple, and now the five stooges have invited them back in.
