Seagal Samsara






It speaks to the emptiness of my evenings of late that I've been cycling through the on-demand movie selections and picking the worst possible diversions. It's a kind of punishment, I think, for my sloth. And it's part necessity, as most of the good movies are behind a pay-per-view wall. This is how I finally saw Catwoman. Like a country uncle, that movie took my innocence, and since then, I've been seeking more depravity, caking on one fresh, gooey coat after another.

I won't go on too much, as I can't hope to compete with the numerous, excellent and antecedent deconstructions of Seagal's body of work. But I'll offer a few thoughts on tonight's offering Out for a Kill. Now, that is a great title for one thing.

"Hey, where you going?"
"Out."
"Out where, asshole?"
"Out for a kill."
"Ah, OK. Can you pick me up some beer and smokes if you pass by the store? I'll pay you back."
"Sure thing."

This is apparently the third Seagal movie beginning with "Out." There was also Out for Justice and also apparently Out of Reach. Other common words you'll find in Seagal movie titles: Kill, Dead, Deadly, Die, Justice.

Anyway, so this film starts out an archaeological dig in China where Seagal is unearthing some ancient thingees in his job as a professor of Chinese art history or some shit. Or maybe it starts out in a shootout in Poland.

Or maybe one of many other locales, as most of this film is comprised of almost endless flashbacks, each introduced with red typey details on the screen, like "New Haven, Connecticut: 9:32 p.m." And its punctuated with return shots to a bunch of Chinese guys who smoke cigars, drink whisky and seemingly never change their clothes over the many days this story progresses. In some scenes, they hiss their lines in English, in others they inexplicably switch to Chinese. In all though, they repeatedly refer to Seagal's character as the "Guilo." They go back to that word so often, you'd think it was the Chinese equivalent of "inshaallah," though it really means "white devil." This is intended as an insult, but it's revealed later in the movie Seagal's preferred nickname was something like "Guiho," which means like "white ghost." Devil, ghost. Same difference. One thing you can't call Seagal anymore though is white.

In the story, Seagal is a professor, but actually he's a master art thief, though in reality he's working with the DEA, and in fact he's just simple family man. That brings up another Seagal chestnut; the most dangerous job in the world is being his wife. He's confronted in a restaurant by some baddies who tell him to lay off the trail of their international crime syndicate, which Seagal kindly assents to. Perhaps the goons were disappointed that they didn't get to front more, so one guys says, "So yeah, if you don't then we'll kill your wife. Concern for his wife's well-being induces Seagal to immediately start a fight with the goons, wherein she is nearly shot to death. Don't worry, she doesn't escape death for long, getting blowed up in their house, prompting this reaction:

Which to me looks more like an overripe pumpkin taking a dump than a grieving husband who's himself narrowly escaped death. A lot has been said about how Seagal has plumped up over the years. That's not nearly so disturbing to me as his skin, which now bears the color and grain of my faux-oak Ikea coffee table. I don't know how, but it's a visage that is both bloated and dessicated at the same time.

Seagal is thrown in a Chinese prison where he's put in a cell with a black dude, whose reason for being there is never explained. I suppose the guards were like, "Hey, we've got two troublesome foreigner prisoners. Let's put them together, so they can better cooperate on an escape plan. Then we can get back to backgammon!" Well, they don't escape; Seagal is just let out, and as he leaves, he and the black dude make their moving goodbyes. The last shot there is of the black dude gripping the bars, looking forlorn and saying "Don't forget about me, man." He is never shown or spoken of again in the film.

Seagal ends up trotting the world dispatching various assassins sent to kill him and solving some "riddle" of tattoos on each of their bodies, which in the end of the movie nets him a safe full of scrolls and envelopes. You know it has to be valuable, if it's written on a scroll. Maybe they were recipes concocted by that poor black man rotting in the Chinese jail.

One final thing, and something to keep in mind if you rise to the top of a ruthless, global crime ring. You may fall victim to...

IRONY!

Settle Down About Arlen Specter






It's no surprise that Republicans are in an uproar about Arlen Specter. That he turned his back on their party after 43 years of membership and 28 years of service in the U.S. Senate has drawn particular ire. Pundits and fellow congressmen have called him everything from Quisling to Benedict Arnold to "that fickle bitch Winnie Cooper." Conversely, Democrats and liberal bloggers have in the main been very excited about it. It's hard to say why, on either side.

If Specter is suddenly a Judas goat, not much has changed. He already voted against restricting abortion and for stem-cell research while criticizing gay marriage amendments. And while his Republican voting record was obviously heterodox, his Reagan Republican credentials warped over time to accommodate Bush II's under-examined Iraq War premises, sanction of torture and invasive wiretapping. In short, like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment, his ass already played both sides; meanwhile, he was obviously willing to follow whichever way the wind was blowing. (In this case, it just so happens that he can no longer win a Republican primary and has seen hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians go Democrat in the last year.) For any Republican, this is one of those surprises of apostasy that should be totally unsurprising once looked at with more than a "Holy Shit" glance.*
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* — Even sadder, the other reason why Republicans shouldn't panic is that the Democrats' response to a decisive liberal mandate and majority from the 2008 elections has been to sheepishly move further to the center to avoid charges that they're too leftist. Basically, even when they're winning, they're convinced they're losing; and, in acting out of fear that they're losing, they move further to the center and thus actively lose by betraying their own principles, policies and mandates. Adding an ex-Republican to a party riddled with Blue Dog Democrats who might as well be Republican and liberal Democrats who are so gutless that they abdicate their own mandates to sound like Republicans is like the police combating graffiti by deputizing the illest taggers in the precinct.
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Much the same unsurprise will probably be the case with Specter's future intractability. Those liberal bloggers and Democrat pundits celebrating his defection should, after their "Holy Shit" moment, ask themselves what they've bought with their assurance that he will be campaigned for and (if their promises hold) unopposed in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary. What they've bought is basically Joe Lieberman Redux. It's like a corseted woman with an asp in her bosom encouraged the poisonous thing to make babies. While his where-the-wind-blows affiliation will aid the Democratic program, the exact same thing that made him a heterodox liability for Republicans will make him the same for Democrats. As said, he uncritically supported all the same invasive and imperial Bush-administration extensions of presidential power that Democrats excoriated. Worse, he's expressed his determination to still vote against the Card Check, a must-win issue for Democrats in the eyes of labor.

The problem with Specter and with people's enthusiasm for his switching teams is that it solves nothing. The Democrats already had difficulty managing a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority not just because they lacked Democrats in the Senate, but because Majority Leader Harry Reid is a milquetoast useless pussy. Even amongst his own party members, the man instills as much reverence for discipline and order as a camp counselor who puts in earplugs, wears a blindfold and takes three sleeping pills before bed, just after telling all the 12-year-old boys in a Meatballs sequel not to swim across the lake to spy on the all-girl bisexual members of Camp Lolita.

The addition of Specter is a temporary and pyrrhic PR victory. For one thing, the Democrats have opened their bosom to someone unafraid to strike it, exacerbating problems of non-existent party discipline and needlessly further muddying an already almost opaque message. For another, now they're stuck with the bastard. 

Sure, Specter almost certainly couldn't have won a Republican primary in Pennsylvania, but that's also because the Republican platform overall has become so virulently ahistorical, anti-science, partisan, hysterical, NewSpeak-fueled and extremist that it admits of no disputation even from within. Couple that with the fact that new voters trend overwhelmingly Democratic, while the dems attracts more women and latinos, and it's hard to see how the Democrats could lose. But instead of letting him run as an independent and possibly split the Republican vote or instead of going straight head-to-head against an ultraconservative Republican and winning with a liberal agenda, they've pledged themselves to the same sort of obstructionist Blue-Doggery that they're trying to get rid of.

While Specter's defection isn't anything to sneeze at, why it should be any cause for celebration remains a mystery.


POST-SCRIPT:
How sad is it that the Republican strategy in 2008 and their populist appeals since Obama's election have mostly been of such a hateful stripe that, when tagging this entry, I reflexively typed in REPUBLICANS followed by RACISM?

The Glenn Danzig Virus






Glenn Danzig has probably always been metal's biggest asshole, at least in mainstream pop-culture consciousness. There might be worse insider or niche personalities, but he ironically looms large for the non-fan who only occasionally gets news from that world. This is no mean feat, considering he comes from a genre of music known for appealing to and being created by alcoholic white people angry at and victimized by things others can't discern and for reasons that remain mysterious. You'd think the world would know about dozens of these guys, but nope. It's just mostly Danzig.

Like most people, my knowledge of Danzig began with the sudden popularity of his song "Mother" in 1993. Over the years my education got filled in by friends who liked the Misfits — and one friend in particular, Tony, who made outstanding compilations of 1970s soul and lovemakin' music and capped them off surprisingly with a single track from either Danzig, Danzig II: Lucifuge or Danzig III: How the Gods Kill. Somehow, over this period, the only things I've learned about Danzig himself have made me think, "What a fuckhead."

He runs a godawful comic book press called "Verotik" (Violence + Erotic!), which combines the subtle comic-book understanding of gore with the even subtler comic-book understanding of fucking naked ladies. He supposedly treats his fellow musicians like garbage. Even without any testimony on that account, one way or another, it'd probably be a safe assumption to make, considering the abundance of "I met Danzig" stories that invariably seem to end with, "and he was a complete penis." Virtually any long interview with him involves his eventually answering questions by disavowing the truth of any previous interviews and implying that all journalists are prevaricating scavengers. And even without all that, there's just his appearance. He snarls and scowls even offstage, wears tight shirts that show off his muscles and generally looks like he's flexing all the time — which is silly as all hell, because he's shorter than the average grandmother.

The best place to see this in effect is in any non-concert Danzig music video. Take "Killer Wolf" for example. He spends the beginning of the video inexplicably walking around with a fucking wolf. Nevermind that the presence of a killer wolf contradicts the implication that Danzig himself is the killer wolf; the fact is that the wolf's about two-thirds his size. Then, about 2:40 in, Danzig gets down on all fours for about five seconds, for no reason. Incidentally, "Killer Wolf" inaugurated the Danzig video tradition of casting a white-trash leading lady who looks like she was "discovered" in a tattoo parlor and too drunk to say no to anything at the time.

All this might make it seem as if I'm being uncharitable to Danzig, but consider this. The day after he got punched out by a fat dude, Youtube had something like two dozen different videos of the incident, all of them netting five-star ratings, thousands of views and comments sections exploding with an orgy of schadenfreude. And that's the thing: even people who like his music (and that's not hard; it's basically classic blues with a ton of distortion and metal posturing that obscures a pretty conventional blues-rock backbone) enjoy making fun of him, because he comes off like a giant dicklord.

Which probably goes a long way to explaining how Danzig's become a minor humorous cottage industry on Youtube. Everything's funnier with Danzig in it because Danzig himself is constantly funny. You can insert Danzig into any video footage or pair him with any other piece of music or video and it will be funny, because the man himself is unintentionally hilarious even when he's doing something he means to do. Double him up with a Hall & Oates song, and it works perfectly, because this is someone who struts and poses as a lethal badass despite probably having to wear platform shoes just to be let into the line for Space Mountain. He fills his songs with "WHA-HO" and "URRRRRR" and "YEAYAH" noises at the weirdest times. A friend of mine once re-wrote "Last Caress" to be about yurts and monkey shit, and it still made about as much sense as the original. Danzig even falls off the stage because he's just singing with too much evil — or gut. (About 4:05 in.)

But enough beating up Danzig. You want to see Youtubes. Glorious Youtubes. The things you can derail a party with by bringing out a laptop, being that guy and making people watch things. The first is a re-recording of his greatest hit, "Mother." If you haven't lost it by the solo, I don't know what's wrong with you.



The second isn't as good, but it is disturbing how well the Danzig video links up with Hall & Oates' "Maneater." I wish whomever made it had spent a little more time trying to edit things together less obviously, but there's probably a whole level of comedy coming from the sloppiness just because the songs parallel each other uncannily with almost zero effort.



Finally, there's probably the best Youtube video of 2007, Shakira (Featuring Danzig) "Hips Don't Lie":


Look for the singing (killer) wolf.

There's nothing to say to any of that, other than, "WHOA HO OHHHH."

Republicans Literally Reduced to Name-Calling






I actually had to verify this, then re-verify this, then — screw it, just to be sure — go back and look at both sources and rub my eyes with my fists like a Warner Brothers cartoon character stranded in a boat with Foghorn Leghorn as he slowly morphed between being a giant feathered chicken and a Kenny Rogers Roaster.

From Greg Sargent's The Plumline blog:

Over a dozen members of the conservative wing of the RNC have submitted a new resolution, to be eventually voted on by the entire RNC, that would call on the Democratic party to rename itself the “Democrat Socialist Party.” If the RNC adopts this resolution, the RNC’s official view would become that Democrats are socialists. From the resolution:

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

This is it. This is how bankrupt they are. This is all they have, all they have been reduced to. This is the Grand Old Strategy of the Grand Old Party:

• I am going to call you names.

• Then I am going to dare you to call yourself these names too.
• If you don't, I'm going to call you the names again.
• In 2012, people will give us back the nuclear codes.

Still, it's hardly a surprise, is it? Their bold plan during the '08 campaign was to reiterate the word socialist until they won that election, and it didn't work, but maybe the word just didn't have time to take hold. Maybe we should hear it lots more and get it registered somewhere. Also, maybe it didn't have enough pizzazz! *

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* — After the election, they looked at Barack Obama, a charismatic black leader, and seemed to say, "A negro! Where can we get one of those?" as if doing so would provide instant charisma for a suddenly moribund political philosophy that had just imploded under the success of its own implementation. Then, presumably, they remembered that Alan Keyes was always sitting on standby next to a fueled jet and ready to fly to any state or district in the country where the Republicans needed to put on a blackface candidacy to win an election; remembered how that's worked out for them in the past and deleted his number from the RNC Rolodex and went with Michael Steele instead. (Of course, after another front-runner turned out to be a racist.) Someone told me that Keyes actually made it out for the tea parties, but I don't believe him. Personally, I think he's sitting inside the hangar of a private airport, secretly wondering if his Blackberry just isn't getting any reception at all, while a guy at the hangar desk who looks like a William Sanderson villain suspects that turning in "this guy what looks like the drug smuggler from LOST" will get him a DEA reward. 
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The funny thing is, it's not working. Michael Steele's RNC Chairmanship has been a joke, making him not only an unfortunate figure of tokenism for the nation but also in his own party as well. He's truculently apologized to Rush Limbaugh for having the audacity to pretend to speak for the Republican party, and has been consistently undercut by party sounding boards whose only qualifications are making it onto FOX News after hosting an afternoon drive-time Zoo Crew on ClearChannel Radio. Putting him in charge of the Republicans has been like watching a teacher leave a classroom full of middle-school pituitary cases under the charge of the kid wearing the scoliosis brace. 

For instance, Steele (as that article points out) lukewarmly criticized the usage of "socialism" in describing the Democrats, something he should have done with far more vigor. Because the more Republicans flog the term socialism, the more it causes people to look it up and say, "Hey, this actually doesn't sound bad." Moreover, since guys like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly, Boehner and McConnell keep using the term — and since their approval numbers are low even for the heart-rate of a hibernating bear pumped full of quaaludes — it inadvertently makes people approve of it because, honestly, anything these assholes hate has to verge on competency even by accident.

Thus, amazingly the GOP leadership wants to take a failed campaign strategy, one that demographically only increases positive awareness of the political system they're condemning and one that only intensifies support for whatever it is ("Because, hey, at least it isn't another idea from these shitheads") and institutionalize it. 

It's as if some lowly wanderer stumbled across a tiny glowing Orb of Failure and marveled at how he could wave it at crops and desiccate them, place it on children's brows to steal the breath from their bodies and plunge it into riverbeds to evaporate them. Then he walked for days until by accident he happened upon a marvelous city with fabulous god-like beings called "computers" that had wired all the billions of people of the world together; and then he looked at his Orb of Failure and said, "I want to plug it into those."

That this isn't even the first iteration of their own failure of aggressive partisan rebranding makes it even funnier. They do all right telling lies about themselves for a while — "compassionate conservatism," "not being riddled with homosexuals and pedophiles," etc. — but they come up short with other people. "Freedom Fries" did nothing to France short of fueling its American Contempt Machine for another decade.*
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* — It even managed to do so with exquisite efficiency. I'm trying to imagine something more blunderingly offensive than creating the side order of Freedom Fries to spite an entire nation that you're busy directly insulting via an echo chamber that keeps referring to them as "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys." I'm not sure that tactlessness on this order can happen without a wild kind of moronic genius. All that comes to mind is apologizing to a hostess for deliberately vomiting at her cocktail party by interrupting her hosting an important dinner, putting a wet turd on a salver and sending it in to her as your calling card. Even that doesn't seem like enough.
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And as for the Democratic Party, this isn't the first namechange attempt by a long shot. Note the first word in the proposed namechange, "Democrat Socialist Party." For years now, the Republicans have attempted to subversively convince Americans that the Democrats aren't a "democratic" party by refusing to call them the Democratic Party and instead shortening it to "Democrat Party." The implication being, of course, that anyone who is a Democrat is implicitly socialist or communist or maybe just some hemp-faced tree-dicked babyraper homo — anything, in short, other than actually democratic. That I felt any obligation to explain that to a reader speaks volumes about the success of the strategy and exactly the kind of sophisticated thinking at work here.  

Naturally, any prolonged thinking about the topic invariably brings up the fact that re-branding and re-naming the Republican Party is infinitely easier than rebranding the Democrats. You can probably come up with five new names off the top of your head. Feel free to share some in the comments section. Here are some starters:

• The Torture Party

• The "We Invaded a Country Armed with Maps of Tons of Explosive Material and Couldn't Find It Even Though WE HAD FUCKING MAPS and There Were TONS of It, Until—Oops, We Realized We Actually Just Made All This Shit Up" Party

• The "I Oppose All Rights for Gays Except for the Right to Take Them Into My Eager, Waiting Mouth Inside a Public Toilet" Party

• The Go Fuck Yourself Party

It's hard to conceive of any group under this much easy firepower opening themselves up to more of it by starting a re-branding debate, but these aren't world-class thinkers, here.

These are the same people who raise their voices in shrieking torment at earmarks, then raise them again at the cutting of the development of the F-22, a plane assembled in over 40 states and very likely just out of earmarks. These are the same people who send the Governor of Louisiana to explain why states absolutely need zero funding for prediction and reduction of the scope of natural disasters. These are the same people whose governors declared their refusal to accept stimulus package monies and then, when that news cycle was over, took all of it anyway. These are the same people who slashed regulations, regulatory budgets and regulatory agencies' oversight while staffing them with laissez-faire freebooters taking an eight-year government holiday and then alleged that the collapse of the market was brought on by aggressive over-regulation.

These are basically children. This explains neatly why they encourage supporters to throw things (tea) to show their displeasure (apparently with bodies of water???). Why they shout so much. Why books apparently suck. Why the best expression of what you believe in should be in 48-point font, less than 12 words and sitting there, like a beacon, over a set of Truck Nutz. (LONG MAY THEY WAVE.)

These people are toddlers who just seriously suggested that the way to reenergize their position in the national discourse was not to re-think their atavistic social policies or the fundamentally flawed economic policies they proffered from 2000-2007 and then proffered again in 2008 as a solution to what they enacted from 2000-2007. No, their solution was to find something better to yell on the playground. 

Why stop there, anyway? Why not THE BUTTHOLE PARTY of the UNITED BUTTHOLES OF BONERLAND? They've already rhetorically seceded from the United States in the first place — apparently Obama, Reid and Pelosi have re-dubbed it the United Socialist States of America — so they might as well call the occupation government whatever they like.

The only problem is, supposedly they speak for 55 million people. Or maybe the problem is that this isn't a problem at all. When you try to infantilize a third of the American electorate by reducing your entire platform to what "axiomatic" hogwash is brief enough to be screamed the loudest and most often, maybe screaming it again is a solution. Why go to the effort anymore of attempting to scare the shit out of your supporters and the mushy middle with tautological descriptions of Democratic poopyheadedness? 

Why not just call them The Poopyheads?

New Site Address






This is just a heads up for those of you who have Et Tu, Mr. Destructo? bookmarked or RSS-fed to you. The new site address is www.MrDestructo.com. All old existing links and feeds should continue to work, as all the pages they're linking to technically still exist at the old ".blogspot.com" address.

However, now if you feel like telling anyone about the site, you don't have to try to explain a cumbersome web address, a difficult name, who the name references or any of that old bullshit. You can just say, "Mr. Destructo dot com." Or, if you can enunciate the distinction between Mr. and Mister, you can also tell them, "Mister Destructo dot com." That address redirects here as well.

Mobutu Sese Seko
Gstaad, 2009

Glenn Beck: Employing Fascism's Linguistic Inversions to Call Liberals 'Fascist'






I'm not a huge fan of the "just go here and read this instead" format of blogging, but in this case there's nothing better than to send you somewhere else for the scoop. If you haven't been reading David Neiwert, the time to start is now.

Neiwert is the principle contributor to Orcinus, the best blog available for commentary on far-right activity in America. He's written books on the militia movement in the U.S. and is a frequent contributor to Crooks and Liars.

Today he again turns his attentions to Glenn Beck's television show and touches on the nightmare of irony that it presents in embracing a definitively fascist tone in order to ahistorically demonize liberals as fascists. I wish he'd gone more into Beck's tendency to step right up to the line of advocacy of violence to reestablish "America" and thus embody the same phenomenon he's busy condemning, but Neiwert covers plenty of worthwhile ground nonetheless. So much ground that no one quote will suffice, but consider this a teaser and please go read:

In its early years, fascism was best understood as an extreme reaction against socialism and communism, as “extremist anti-communism.” This view, predictably, was offered up by communists, who saw everything through their own ideological prisms. In reality, fascism was more complex than that, though the fear of communism was no doubt an essential element that fueled its recruitment and ideological appeal. At the time, there were very few attempts to systematize the ideology of fascism, though some existed (see, for example, Giovanni Gentile’s 1932 text, The Doctrine of Fascism ). Its true spirit was best expressed in an inchoate rant like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Fascism was explicitly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and corporatist, and it endorsed violence as a chief means to its ends. It was “revolutionary” in its fervor, yet sought to defend status-quo institutions, particularly business interests. It was also, obviously, authoritarian; the claim that it was oriented toward "socialism" is crudely ahistorical, if not outrageously revisionist. Lest we forget, socialists were among the first people targeted by Mussolini’s black-shirted thugs, and they were among the first people imprisoned and "liquidated" by the Nazi regime.

Glenn Beck's Liberal Fascism Hour.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part I: A Tea Party Overview






Click here to jump to Part II.

"It's a one-day protest aimed at nothing Barack Obama has actually done. It is aimed at the tax code imposed on this country by a republican congress and a republican president who was previously the champion of exactly these protestors. And so it is a completely wrongheaded approach to what's going on. They've picked April 15 as Rage Day for taxpayers, and there's not a single taxpayer out there who is paying a new Barack Obama tax rate. That doesn't exist."
— Lawrence O'Donnell, former Democratic Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1993-5, HuffPo Contributor

Despite being surrounded and born free yet taxed to death, I had sort of a great tax day because of the tea party protests. Never has there been such a perfect storm of bad current events, bad history, bad English and bad taste. Then I remembered that it exemplified bad citizenship and even worse humanity and fell, unavoidably, into a bad mood.

I'll get to the liveblogging in Part II, but there are so many things wrong here that the most pressing question is which aspect to talk about first. Besides, of course, wondering whether "Finding the Black Person at the Tea Party" manages to shatter the futility scale for racial-equality parlor games.

The quote above neatly handles most of the current events issues. The predatory tax policy to which these people allude is the same nightmare to which they've gladly been subject for the previous eight years, and the increase in the highest marginal tax rate to which they refer with great foreboding is both lower than the highest marginal tax rates under Nixon and Reagan and also the same stygian tax horror Bill Clinton visited on the country in 1993, only to see it plunge into material prosperity for the next seven years. Nevermind that most of the people at the protest will never earn enough to ever be subject to such a tax rate, while Barack Obama is cutting the rates to which they are subject. That doesn't even fully cover it, and to get a better sense of it, you should enjoy an MSNBC video.

The first two minutes not only neatly explicate much of what's going on, they're also a seemingly endless succession of oral sex and teabagging jokes. All deserved. The remaining six minutes, if you want to stick around, feature the above quote and decent analysis:


There are so many other current-events observations one could make, and they all nicely slide into historical issues. First, despite promises of "surrounding" LIBRUL MURKA, perhaps 200,000 people showed up today to make their voices heard. That's 4,000 people per state. FOX News proclaimed this, during their nearly all-day coverage, a powerful evocation of American concerns that could not be ignored. This, remember, was the same network that echoed President Bush when he dismissed over 35 million people worldwide, and hundreds of thousands in Washington alone as part of the largest anti-war protest in human history as a "focus group."

Then just look at the organization. Despite a month of FOX, the #1 cable news network, flogging this as a transformative and historic American event (as well as faux-grassroots online promotion; more on this later), many tea parties never bothered to obtain the permits necessary to protest. Maybe that'd make sense as nose-thumbing at big government if protest permits weren't obtainable at the local-government level and so ridiculously easy to get that even godless, lawless hippies manage to line them up without even breaking a pot-haze degree of effort. Instead, what we saw was the party of Law AND Order ignoring the former and failing to preserve the latter for some feckless display of dumping leaves into local waterways.

Which brings us to the history. In Boston in 1773, tea meant something. Now, it's just inexpensive. This protest means nothing. It's symbolically empty. It's like wearing an ankh to piss off your ex-goth parents or getting a tattoo or listening to loud music. Basically, it's the same sort of useless gesture that only means anything if you're a child.

If any of these people wanted to say something about taxes, they might have thrown something expensive into a river. Like smokes; they're taxed to hell. In some states, you can spend $6.50 on a single pack of Marlboros that probably only cost about $0.15 to make and need only be sold at $0.35 to make a profit. But a carton of those would run $65.00. And throwing a shipping palette of them into the river would probably run about $65,000.00 — which would demonstrate a disgust at $61,500.00 worth of taxation. But none of these symbolically catalyzing populist agitators engaged in that meaningful gesture because, like, that's expensive, maaaaaan.

The obvious response to that, of course, is: "Get a fucking job, hippie."

Either that, or: "Man up, make like the founding fathers and steal the stuff that you dump into the river. Come on, it'll be fun. The best place to get smokes is at a convenience store anyway. You could probably beat the shit out of some immigrant Paki to subdue him while you cart out the stolen wares. Don't worry, if he tries to get up, just yell, 'We Surround You'!"

Then, of course, we again run into historical stumbling blocks because a pack of smokes would still amount to not all that much conceptually. Sure, you're talking about a cheap and overtaxed product, but the taxes were levied by our own government. They represented us and produced a tax. This is taxation by our own representation. Still, this concept is the sort of thing that many teapartiers obviously failed to understand long before the party ever got planned:

In fairness, I've read that this "No Representation Without Taxation" slogan also expresses the view that people who don't pay income tax or own property and pay property taxes shouldn't be able to affect representative government. In short: fuck poor people; they're not allowed to vote. While this at least shows some passing familiarity with the historical principles of ownership and suffrage, it ignores that those ideas were espoused at a time when K-through-12 schooling wasn't universal and free, and it was assumed that the average citizen would never understand his civic obligations.

Naturally, their historical understanding of taxation isn't just out of whack with current conditions: it's also out of whack with the past too. It's probably not worth it to mention to these people that the same colonists who were protesting taxation without representation and melodramatically suggesting they were being strangled to death suffered the least onerous tax burden of any British citizens. The disparity between what colonists owed and what the average Londoner owed neared a livable wage for a single person in the colonies. That this ignorance parallels a group of people screaming bloody murder about paying the same taxes as last year while feeling victimized by the coming marginal rate increase of a tax quintile of which they themselves will never be members probably isn't worth mentioning either.

But the bad history doesn't stop there. Sometimes it comes in the form of smug tautology while someone is being baited for hours by a crowd. For example, CNN reporter Susan Roesgen stood in a crowd of teabaggers who hurled abuse at her, and she eventually got snippy with a person holding a definitively loathsome sign. True to form, FOX News reported on this event in an article with the headline "CNN Accosts Teaparty Protester" and then, in a flawless one-two punch to their own faces, made the body of the article merely an embedded Youtube link prominently labeled: "CNN Reporter Harassed at Chicago 'Tea-Party." (Link goes to image only).

Still the video is worth watching, if only for one exchange:

In case your mind is still reeling, the exchange is basically (paraphrased):

Teabagger: Obama is a fascist.
Roesgen: Why?
Teabagger: Because he is, he's a fascist.
Roesgen: In what way?
Teabagger: They are all pirates, the people in Washington.
Roesgen: How?
Teabagger: They are fascists.

First of all, the reason the guy repeats the same point over and over and resorts to tautology stems from the fact that, despite their billing from FOX, these weren't even remotely grassroots events. They were organized by FreedomWorks, a centralized, top-down right-wing copy of MoveOn.org with all the grassroots elements stripped from it.

FreedomWorks was founded by noted homosexual hater and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. These protests were also extensively promoted on the radio show of noted adulterer and sick-wife divorcer, former republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Meanwhile, FOX personalities like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Neil Cavuto — as well as other members of the network — have aggressively pimped the tea party phenomenon over the last month.

Moreover, even cursory glances at the screen during FOX coverage showed how the televised tea parties had obviously been arranged by television producers. Protestors were cordoned into tighter areas to make their on-the-ground presence appear more dense, while FOX cameras filmed them from crane shots, at a down angle, to make sure that the frame was filled with people instead of appearing as they were: loosely organized and sparsely populated. FOX put up printed banner ads for their own network and strung them across the metal rigging near staging areas or atop the back curtain. They had the time and presence of mind to promote themselves while promoting something they'd generated as a "phenomenon" themselves. Even more importantly, FOX News aired over $500,000 in free ads for tea parties over the month of April. This wasn't grassroots. It was astroturf.

Which, again, explains why the guy interviewed by Roesgen keeps saying "Fascists" "Pirates" "Fascists": because FreedomWorks sent out emails suggesting talking points for signs. If you don't believe me, go to Flickr and pick random photostreams from protests at points across the nation and thousands of miles away from each other. You will see the same signs, down to the exact phrasing, similar sign shape and print layout. And even if that hadn't been enough, the poor devil Roesgen interviewed was probably getting similar content from FOX personalities, like longhaired jackoff Cody Willard, who drops the word fascist/fascism three times in less than ten seconds. (Skip to 1:20 in.)

What would have been a more interesting question for Roesgen to ask the poor bastard with the Hitlerbama sign would have been, "Why do you think you're comfortable using the word 'fascism' to describe Barack Obama when you clearly don't know what the word means?"

It's an interesting question because a proper definition of fascism is of a populist and right-wing movement that is anti-science, anti-reason, anti-socialist and anti-liberal, that defines the nation's life through a vision of glorious palingenesis (basically, "Self-Rebirth"; think of the myth of the phoenix). Traditionally, these groups harness the disaffection of a specific ethnic or economic group and blame their economic suffering on non-native ethnic or "non-patriotic" groups, who they view as being supported by predatory liberal or socialist organizations that have tacitly declared war on the nation and nation's history. Historically, fascist groups do not achieve power on their own. Instead, a bedeviled conservative elite, fearing the erosion of their power at the hands of socialist or leftist elements, appeals to the fascists to take action against them and join in a pact of mutual interest, seeing eye to eye on the need for the elimination of leftist political power and an alliance of government and corporate interests for the regeneration of the state. (Hitler and Mussolini were both invited into government by existing conservative leadership, remember: neither of them ever "won" anything significant.)

The reason this question would have been fantastic to ask is because it might have accidentally led to this definition of fascism being voiced. At which point, Roesgen could have followed up with a far more substantive question, one that should be asked of every tea-party attendee proudly holding up pictures of Obama and Hitler or just Obama and a Hitler mustache:

Given that that is the actual definition of fascism, what do you think about what you're doing in the midst of an all-white crowd — organized by the corporate interests of the FOX news channel and two former republican leaders who have witnessed the erosion of their power at the hands of the left — blaming your suffering on socialists and communists, joining others who are calling for the elimination of "foreign people" from the land, and suggesting the need for armed insurrection and action! action! action! in order to achieve national "rebirth"?

Of course, nothing so good as asking someone about fascism when they're acting just like a fascist will ever happen on national TV. The left's stubborn adherence to objective journalism even while under attack leaves it incapable of response to proto-fascistic aggression and condemnation of "socialist/liberal" elites, because that condemnation invariably includes "the media" (all ratings facts notwithstanding).

Those depressing thoughts aside, once you eliminate the bad current events and the bad sense of history, pretty much all you're left with of any substance is bad English. Easily one in four placards at any of these tea parties was written in such a way that made anyone reading wonder, "If avoiding hearing the Spanish voice-mail greeting requires that I press 1 for English, what number do I have to press to make sure whatever you call this shit doesn't come out?" Words don't do them justice, so here's a gallery of English being butchered in defense of it:







If I didn't hold so much reverence for our gun control laws — which would be completely effective if they were only policed properly! — I'd eat a bullet after looking at that. Or, at least, after hearing Glenn Beck talk, which was the worst part of tax day.

To get to the liveblog of Glenn Beck's show and more pictures, please scroll down or click here for Part II.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part II: An Hour of Glenn Beck, Plus Pictures!






If you haven't read it, please click here for Part I.

This is the worst part. The actual transcription. I tune in early, so I catch the last half hour of Cavuto's show. I'm not sure what it's called. Body-Bag of Freedom, or All 50 States of the Entire World with Neil Cavuto or something. Sounds right. I don't know. The bit I see is revelatory, for three reasons.

One, Neil asks a pre-teen what he thinks about having his future mortgaged by the democratic party, without noticing that his mom's doing a perfectly good job of that already by yanking him out of school to learn lessons in Things That Bear No Resemblance to American History and, of course, How to Fuck Up A Protest. From where I sit, it looks like the kid would be happier scrolling the Facebook feed of all the girls he's in school with who've hit at least B-cups by now.

Two, Neil brings up a theme that Glenn Beck will flog repeatedly during his Hour of Glower: all these tea parties are completely non-partisan. Sure, once you look past the fact that the the audience is 99% conservatives, right-wingnuts, minarchists, libertarians and the few moonbats who never got raptured up out of the Ron Paul blimp, ignore that the Bush TARP program and Obama's bailout bills get mentioned at a rate of about 1:15, and forget that this event was organized by a right-wing "activist" group and heavily promoted and organized by a right-wing network at a deep discount—really, once you get past all that, it's probably pretty non-partisan.*
___________________
* — In fact, Beck goes on to almost beat people with this non-partisanship talking point, which seems perverse, given that most of his audience seems to hate it. It's one of the things I like about Beck. He'll just take something completely untrue and run with it, repeating it ad nauseam, until he's blinking back tears and beaming with a revelation he's given himself. It's what makes him remind me so much of Goebbels. Here he is, spending an hour talking about the federal government (kill it), gun control (none, ever), taxation (illegal), American exceptionalism (a truism), God (is great—allahu akbar—He should be everywhere) and life (sacred, up and until it meets point #2, gun control), etc. Non-partisanship is essentially taking one party's talking points, raving about them for an hour, then announcing that everyone agrees with them. It's brilliant.
___________________
3. Cavuto has Michelle Malkin on. Now, there's nothing I quite like more than seeing a petite asian woman who looks like she could be the pep squad leader outside the crematory in the middle of a genocide, but I just love listening to her talking about seeing all these Americans coming together in a spirit of liberty. As I've said before, Malkin wrote a book not only apologizing for the internment of the Japanese during WWII but also suggesting that it was more necessary than understood at the time — in support of her general contention that George Bush should have started throwing arab-americans into camps after 9/11. The reason this comes to mind is that Malkin is commenting favorably on a woman dressed up like an indian, throwing tea into the Sacramento River. Of course, if Malkin had been alive in 1773, she probably would have been in favor of completing the Amerindian genocide to put a stop to their terrorism of white manifest destiny. I don't even really know what my point is, other than that I suspect Michelle Malkin's body temperature is maintained somehow by burning corpses.

Anyway, I'm thinking all this over as I make myself a glass of iced tea and get out a bottle of pilsner, since I'm not sure whether I'm going to need to fire up my brain or just denude it. Annnnnnd...

We're Live with Glenn Beck at the Alamo!

(all times in EDT — and, remember, pictures to follow!)

5:00

Beck: All the media are talking about or strangely not talking about are the tea parties.
Awesome lie, right out of the gate! Hey, let's go take a look at what the front pages of CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com look like right now!

Whoops! Well, you can't win 'em all.


5:02

Beck: That also goes to the media, you should watch as well.
Glenn here is doing a great job of, again, just lying about shit. Because, of course, Glenn is part of the media. In fact, he invokes the term "mainstream media" during this little speech, which ignores the fact that he is the mainstream media too. His show is on the #1 rated cable channel. It couldn't get more mainstream without being applied intravenously. Still, this is a good tactic for pretending to be the populist rabble-rouser who speaks truth to power, despite the fact that power is exactly what he wields great amounts of every time he's on TV.


5:04

Beck: 12.8 trillion dollars in six months!
Cavuto kept making this point, and it's nice to see Beck running with it, too. $12.8 trillion as a number is scary as hell. I don't blame them for using it. I just blame them for using it dishonestly: as in, omitting that that number is projected for the next ten years and hasn't been spent in the last six months and will be nowhere close to spent in the next six years. The sincerity of invoking this legitimate worry falls away when you remember that this is the same network that describes the annual expenditure for the Iraq war only in terms of specific budgetary allocation for it and omits all the emergency spending numbers for it, as well as never mentioning that it has already cost $3.5 trillion — a scant 1.5 trillion (adjusted) dollars less than the whole of WWII.


5:05

Beck: (angry) We're americans who actually BELIEVE IN SOMETHING!
Beck returns to this well a lot. It could be for any number of reasons. One, "We're the party of Jesus." Two, "Liberals are godless, morally relativist swine." Or, three, "We're just more sincere than you." I actually think it's the latter. Indeed, at 5:41 in the program, Beck literally explains the left's critiques of him by saying, "They're destroying me because they don't actually think anyone could be sincere." He recites belief and values like talismans that ward off fact and argument. Why will our economy fare better if we do absolutely nothing?—because we believe in something. Why will that belief prevail in the face of economic woes?—because it has values. Why do people think I'm a disingenuous ass?—because they don't have beliefs or values because they're not sincere. Apply as needed, to everything, always.


5:06

Beck: It's about standing in front of that building which means something for the republic! Nobody's even standing on the grass of the Alamo because it's still a sacred place!
One, the Alamo means nothing for the American republic. Two, yes, Glenn, nobody's standing on the grass because the grass is cordoned off by chains, and because your producers spent hours setting up on this site and directing the crowd.


TED NUGENT:
I should note here that Ted Nugent, best known for the song "Cat Scratch Fever," shooting every animal possible and becoming the legal guardian of an underage girl so he could fuck her, is at this rally and playing guitar riffs at strangely inappropriate times. On one hand, I hate The Nuge. On the other, it's unintentionally hilarious to watch Beck put his hands in the pockets of his chinos and swing his pelvis forward a little bit with an "ah, whee!" gesture and look like the unhippest non-CPA in human history whenever The Nuge starts rocking out.


5:09

The Nuge: These people are addicted to logic.
Okay, sort of dumb, because these people are also holding up signs that are variations on "Where's the Birth Certificate?" despite it being proved again and again that Obama was born in the United States, but much better considering:


5:13

Random Crowd Dude: Find out the true root of the problem, and that is the Fed. (paraphrase mine to word salad that follows:) RON PAUL, FIAT MONEY.
You can see Beck getting a little uncomfortable during this segment, and for good reason. The Tea Party concept was initially repopularized in the waning days of the Ron Paul '08 campaign as a last-ditch money bomb to push Paul into contention. It failed. But it's important to remember, because Beck and Co. are basically piggybacking on an idea reintegrated into mainstream political discourse by a man who is completely fucking insane. Paul is a Bircherite conspiracist of the most virulent stripe, and his railing against the Federal Reserve and secret cabals of "international financiers" is basically dog-whistle rhetoric for "JEWS!" On the subject of "The New World Order," he doesn't even bother with dog whistles. In fact, he spoke about it on Beck's own show. The problem is, Beck is co-opting the populist format of legitimately crazy and dangerous people and hoping they don't show up. By trying to harness these people's disaffection and join it to a larger and more mainstream movement, he's playing with fire, because so far he's only mainstreamed their hateful ideas without generating enough moderate interests to drown them out. For about 30 seconds, it looks like he's going to get burned, and you can see it all over his face.


5:15

Beck: Everyone wanted change in November, but I think most people didn't want change for big government and socialism.

(Ignores significant progressive electoral mandate, the fact that America has been a capitalist-socialist country for nearly 100 years, all manner of other facts.)


5:22

Beck: No better place for a tea party than the Alamo!
Nina Hendee: (explaining the history of the Alamo) They wanted freedom from tyranny... They were fighting for the same things these people are fighting for!
Nina is sort of right, but probably in ways she didn't intend. White American-born residents/squatters of the Mexican state of Texas certainly opposed Mexican taxes. They didn't pay them. They were tax cheats and outlaws. And they most certainly resented federal control of government. But not out of any noble vision of states' rights but because Mexican federal law prohibited them from owning people. Much like the Confederacy, the Alamo Texans fought for the right of liberty from the federal government and the right of local self-determination... so they could own other human beings. The fact is that Nina's likening of the people at the Alamo today to the defenders of the Alamo (then) uncomfortably points up how the crowd is 100% white and flying Confederate and Texas Republic flags and probably suffers no shortage of racists. It doesn't seem to have occurred to her. Nor does it seem to have occurred to her that the same people in the crowd who unmistakably oppose illegal immigration and support the war on terror are likening themselves to a group of people who exploited Mexico's lax immigration policy, were illegal immigrants, didn't pay taxes, created their own non-native culture and then engaged in acts of terror against the legitimate Mexican government to achieve their own "foreign" aims. So, in a way, Nina and Glenn are both right. The Alamo is the perfect place for a tea party if you're a racist with no familiarity with either history or irony — which much of the crowd undoubtedly is.


PENN JILLETTE and JANINE TURNER
I should also note here that Beck includes both Penn and Janine on his show. Janine (last seen just moments before Northern Exposure went off the air a thousand years ago) fawns over a book that Beck wrote the forward to, while Penn is on via satellite to shill his true libertarian views. Aside from an amusing first season, Penn (and partner Teller's) show Bullshit is basically just a vehicle for libertarian ideology, much like South Park. And, like that other show, it relies almost exclusively on red herrings, false dichotomies, question begging, false equivalencies and ad hominem to demonize anything that isn't, "Gummymint is so dumb! Look at how I smarted them smarter with my leading questions! The truth is in the middle!"

5:33

Penn Jillette: Thomas Jefferson said that government would just keep getting bigger.
Bear in mind that this is the same Jefferson who, as president, controlled congress to such a degree that it moved in obedient lockstep with him until the last year of his term. Who so believed in small government that he orchestrated the Louisiana Purchase in a naked display of federal power. Who so trusted individual citizens that he suspended habeas corpus for Americans and was the first president to put them in internment camps (for defying his federal embargo). Who so believed in checks and balances that he wanted to destroy the Supreme Court when it defied him. And who so loved individual liberty that he owned people and raped them (because property cannot give consent). That Jefferson. Good choice, Penn. Love hearing the recycled pious insipidities about freedom that bear no resemblance to what the man believed about government as soon as he was in charge.


5:40

Janine Turner: What is it about Sarah Palin that [liberals] don't understand?
How she got nominated by a major party in any country in the western world.


5:52

Penn Jillette: I don't think people have caught on to how powerful the internet is.
(Ignores how the Obama campaign mobilized the internet better than any political group in history.)


5:54

Penn Jillette: (after mentioning Atlas Shrugged as a guide for the thinking of Tea Party members) All this can be done through non-violence.
Yes, Penn. I can see how a group of plutocrats deliberately destroying the economy and leading to the deaths of untold numbers of browns and poors all to achieve the selfish gesture of forcing society to accept how much we all "need" them is indeed an act of non-violence. In fact, it's probably altruistic of them.


JOE HORN
The pièce de résistance to all of Beck's populist mummery is dragging Joe Horn onto the stage. You might not know who he is. Joe Horn is a Texas citizen who shot and killed two illegal aliens. He witnessed them breaking into a neighbor's house and called the police. After being told by the 911 dispatcher NOT to go out and interfere (repeatedly; the audio of the call is outrageous), he walked outside and allegedly shot them both in the back. Dead. A plainclothes detective on the scene reported this. Beck has him on as a hero in a flourish of theater so mind-rendingly horrifying that it really deserves being written exactly like theater (you can watch it here; click to 3:00 in):


5:43
Beck: (to Horn) You saw people breaking into your neighbor's house... You shot them.
(FOX NEWS GRAPHIC ON BOTTOM OF SCREEN: SHOT 2 ILLEGALS)
Horn: When your life is on the line, and you take a human life, I wanted to live. I wanted to live. And I was not gonna let those two men kill me. And I can assure you, if they'da got to me, they woulda killed me. So I shot 'em.
(crowd cheers)
The Nuge: (ten seconds later, plays tense tremor-sounding neck-tapping on guitar)
Beck: (red herring about another 911 call, righteous platitudes, guns)

The whole thing should make anyone want to vomit. Also, since I had no idea where else to put this, let me just say that Glenn Beck is such a glutinous wad of overfed white Americana that he looks like 185 pounds of lard and bull semen poured into a 5-foot 8-inch man-shaped condom.

5:59
Beck: (closing out the show) The values that we all have: honesty, integrity, truth and the republic.
Attaboy! Way to close out on something so amorphous as to mean nothing, while implying that those not in the present "we" don't have them. Also, way to invoke the name of the republic in front of a crowd with Confederate flags symbolizing the political entity that attempted to destroy the republic. Also, seriously, can't congratulate you enough on whipping a bunch of people into populist democratic fervor about changing government while also holding up as a value the political system — a republic — which was designed to remove direct democracy from them and vest it in the hands of a group of chosen sober individuals precisely because the moral economy of the undiluted crowd was considered by the founders to be bankrupt, uninformed and socially terrifying. Which this entire hour of your show was, explicitly. Congratulations, you ass.

But, since I realize that was a wearying slog for everyone, not just me, perhaps we can close this out with something like sherbet. A palate cleanser. Yes, good old fashioned pictures of idiots, racists and the religiously intolerant!


PICTURES:

I literally don't know what I'm talking about!

I literally don't know what I'm talking about, but I can do one or two things in MSPaint!

I literally don't know what I'm talking about, and I'm fucking lazy!

Congratulations—neither is the president.

Somehow while using this glory hole in a public restroom stall, I got confused about my message about OUR MUSLIM PRESIDENT.

I HAVE JUST DISCOVERED HOW SOME WORDS CAN LOOK LIKE OTHER WORDS WITH SUPERFICIAL SWITCHEROOS FROM THE ALPHABET AND HAVE UPDATED MY FACEBOOK STATUS ACCORDINGLY.

I don't realize that nearly 80% of Kenyans are christian, but that's really secondary to my point that I come from white people, and your ancestors were all ooga-booga niggers!

The only words of the constitution I read were the first three because I accidentally dropped an Arby's Big Beef and Cheddar on the rest and was forced to eat the paper to get at all the gravy.

Please bring a gun next time and suicide by cop.

Yeah, sure, laugh all you want at his rhetoric, Ivory Tower Liberals. But admit it, when he was carrying a placard outside the MTV Video Music Awards reading, "The Silencing of Rap Rock Is ObaMaoTV's New Cultural Revolution!" you were all thinking the same thing: "Bawitdaba da bang da dang diggy, diggy."

Aaaaahahaha.

I find repeatably verifiable objective evidence unpersuasive! Tell me again! (listens) Ahahaha, you can't fool me: this is just like all those MSM lies like "Climate Change" and "trying to fork-fuck the electrical socket makes you die." I said thanks but no thanks!

I don't know why this guy's complaining. If democrats free terrorists the same way current republicans think they free slaves, that means the democrats are going to spend the next 50 years doing their best to make sure brown people will be disqualified from voting by deceiving them as to the date of the election, kicking them off voter rolls, ensuring their precincts have fewer voting machines than white precincts or just good old fashioned makin' sure their votes get thrown out or never counted by relentless litigation. Come on, we're all on the same white side here, right?

White people are literally the most oppressed group in the United States.

Times this sign has applied to anyone in this picture while at Sonny's Real Pit BBQ: 0.

Yet I still had money to throw away on my faaaaabulous outfit! Time for those fatcats in Washington to rein in their discretionary spending!

*plays woooooooooop note on solid-gold slide-whistle*

For I so love our flag that out of respect for what it signifies, I will wear it like a parka in the rain. (Outlaw burning it, though.)

I love my country, but I fear my government now that all the domestic spying programs and suspensions of civil liberties that I gleefully cheerleaded for the last seven years might negatively impact me in vague ways that aren't covered by my previous "if you're not a criminal, then you have nothing to be afraid of" police-state rationale.

Look! Obviously I understand black people! They still like this joke from one of their "negro humor" shows that went off the air 15 years ago, right?

2001-2008: Look, even if you don't agree with the president or republicans like us, it's our duty as Americans to respect him and the party in the majority. Or, if not him or them, then the office of the president and the congress as a whole — even if they went dem after 2007 — and to do our best as citizens to promote his and their agenda for all of us.

January 2009-April 2009: WE'RE NOT IN CHARGE! KILL 'EM ALL!

I base my understanding of politics off straw-men from genre novels, and I vote!

Hahaha get it? Our president is a monkey nigger. Not racist, though: Party of Lincoln.

Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews JEWS! Arrrrrrgggghhhhh! JEWS!!!!!!

Aaaaaahaha!!!! I LOVE MAKING FUN OF FAGGOTS!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, though: liberty. (For everyone other than faggots.)

MY inability to pay attention to selling America to China while cutting taxes and spending out the ass for the last seven years is BARACK OBAMA'S problem.

So is everyone else in America. Because you are an idiot.

I know, I know, the rhetoric in those captions is strident and unfair, and I twice used the explosive N-word many of these people so dearly wish they could carpet-bomb the public square with. However, in the right's proud law-and-order tradition of seeking, wherever possible, an eye for an eye, I think it's fitting.

Because that's pretty much what the tea parties were about. Not a principled demonstration of American grassroots opposition to federal power and fiscal irresponsibility — just some hateful, amorphous verbal violence aimed in any direction that didn't eventually lead to even vague proximity to a fact. It wasn't even grassroots: it was organized by a powerful right-wing group and endorsed by two major right-wing leaders and promoted by the biggest right-wing (and biggest overall) cable news channel. And the objections to federal power issued by these people never escape fatuity, because the power they excoriate now is the same they demanded for president Bush. Ditto their objection to their taxation: the rates they suffer now were established by Bush; in fact, under Obama, unless they make $250,000 per year or more, their burden will lighten.

These demonstrations had nothing to do with Obama — or nothing to with him rationally, anyway. As the quote atop Part I of this blog post said, this was simply "Rage Day" for the right wing. The things Obama was blamed for on placards, being foreign, being muslim, being Hitler, being Stalin: none of them has the slightest bearing on reality, sense, documentation or even acceptability in reasonable discourse.

It's rage. It's racism, it's religious hate, it's political theater without definitions in any language. Look to their condemnation of Obama as fascist: the only part of that exchange that meets any historical definition of fascism is the person issuing it, in a fit of active hate of the foreign, the liberal, the socialist, the "other" that saps the glorious American rebirth. In the end, it was all a demonstration of a want of compassion, unity, thought and sense.

Which, in a way, can be best summarized by the story and words of this tea-party attendee:

After a lifetime of working, paying taxes and raising three children on her own, Wilder is struggling.

She said she retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries. She lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors.

She said she did not have to pay federal income taxes last year because her income was too low.

"I don't want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state, where we stand in line for groceries, and we're in welfare lines, and in socialized medicine lines," Wilder said.

Words don't matter. Sense doesn't matter. Facts don't matter. Why would any of that matter when it's time to be angry?