The MojoWire

I've got such a long list of things that are pissing me off lately, that I can't even begin to make progress on narrowing down the field of what to rant about. If I covered everything that's currently getting up my nose, I'd be blogging full time until the end of the year. So, screw that. Instead, here, read this fresh horror. That's only the tippy top of a huge pile of steaming crap.

I haven't watched the Oprah/Sarah lovefest, but I wanted to weigh in on this discussion about Sarah Palin being a 2012 Presidential candidate. I was struck by a desperate statement/plea by David Brooks on ABC news on Sunday claiming that GOP primary voters would never nominate Sarah Palin.

You might try whistling louder past that graveyard David...

Brooks is wrong of course. GOP voters would gleefully nominate Sarah Palin. They want to nominate her. They will give her every opportunity to get that nomination, provided she meets a ridiculously low bar they will set for her. I don't think she will be the nominee though. Not because she doesn't have a good chance, but because she wants to run for President more than she wants to be President. She likes the process of being famous and the attention of a candidate way more than the crap job of governing. Sarah Palin has the job she wants right now. Running for President is part of that job. It's GOP celebrity in chief that she wants to be, not POTUS.

What this says about Caribou Barbie is less interesting to me than what is says about the GOP. It must really suck to be a GOP pol that isn't a complete Kool-Aid drinker. It was one thing when these Jesus freaks could be manipulated by Karl Rove and the Mighty Wurlitzer every two years by shouting "fag" at the top of their lungs and having Junior play Commander in Chief the way my four year old plays Jedi, only with less panache. Now these people want to actually run things. Don' they know that no one at the Country Club wants to hear them rattle on about salvation and how great Sarah is? It's one thing for them to grovel to Rush. Rush is on the team. Sure he talks like THOSE people most of the time, but he is one the elite. Being a freak is just his job on the radio.

What the GOP base voter considers a conservative is being redefined, or has been. Back in the day when Mojo was a reporter, I would occasionally accompany him to candidate forums, city council meetings, and all the rest of that ugly stuff that reporters use to do before they became too cool for that sissy wonk stuff. You could find Sarah Palins all over those local political events. It shocked me at first. Who the Frak were these people? I'm not easily weirded out by people of faith. I grew up in a tight Catholic community, I'm okay with people who wear their faith on their sleeves. But this was something different. Mojo then explained it all to me..(cue Kenny Rodgers "The Gambler" here)

"Son" he said, (no he didn't call me that, I'm just working the Rodgers groove), this is part of a larger movement. The Christian Right has been telling their people to get involved at the local level. They want them to run for School Board, City Council, Planning Commission. That is how they plan to get political power in this country. Work their way up from local, to regional, to state, to Washington. Be afraid." Guess what. He was right. That's exactly what they did.

There is nothing wrong with that plan really. They have right to run for things and get their political groove on. And it's not like it hasn't been noticed, or fought against, or that its' been easy for them to operate in a GOP where many of the career pols and money geeks who fund them see the Sarah Palin's of the world as nutjobs. I feel their pain to some degree. I'm a liberal and a progressive in a party that would like me to shut up about a whole range of issues. Just vote for us, fund us, walk precincts for us, but don't rock the boat too much. That's what you get when you are a Dirty Frakkin Hippie.

So when David Brooks claims she won't win the nomination, I have to laugh at that. She could if she really wanted to. Her ignorance and stupidity are not deal killers in today's GOP. They are irrelevant. She is one of the tribe to her potential constituents across the country. She talks their language, believes what they believe. The more heat she gets from the media, the more disapproval she gets from New York RINO's like Brooks, the more they love her. She's a natural at this. The people who picked her out were not wrong that she has potential. What they were wrong about and continue to be is her motivation. I seriously doubt she wants any job in politics that would involve governing. She had that in Alaska and she bolted at the first opportunity. And let's be frank, if you cannot handle governing a state like Alaska, you really aren't going to deal with the Oval Office.

The danger for the GOP here is that Sarah's traveling road show doesn't lead anywhere good in the long run. She's not looking to build their brand, or expand their base. She's wants to build brand SARAH!, or expand her base, not the same thing. The GOP desperately needs to figure out how to broaden their base. Their voters are getting older and whiter, a demographic trend that spells serious trouble. The best outcome for the GOP is for Sarah not to run, but to support the most electable candidate and stump for them among her faithful. If she runs and the GOP primaries get as nasty as they usually do, that is going to piss off her voters in a bad way.

The GOP made this bed by trying to play to the worst instincts of their base without weeding out the worst of it. They have played patty cake with the racists, the cranks, and the ignorant to a degree that would make the most cynical Democrat look like Pericles. This was the Rove strategy. It worked for his client just fine. If it creates a huge electoral problem for the GOP in the future, well, that's not his problem. The talk radio audience they have been gravy training on is slipping its leash. And all the happy talk and dismissive attitude from Brooks and his crowd is not going to change that. So get used to the Sarah Palin GOP Mr. Brooks.

I hope you enjoy your Moose Turd Pie.

Apologies to our sole non-U.S. reader for the parochial cultural reference, but something Atrios posted today needs to be memorialized here. I'm just going to reprint it in whole:

Looting For Profit

Buy companies, leverage them, pay yourself a dividend, and then go bankrupt.

I think we've finally found the secret phase 2 of the underpants gnomes.

Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: Use underpants as collateral for multibillion dollar loan.
Phase 3: Profit

For those who need some context to catch the cultural reference, I'll save you the search:



(Yes, embedding is disabled. Just click through.)

The AP tells us that somebody in Kentucky has lynched murdered a census worker:

AP source: Census worker hanged with 'fed' on body

By DEVLIN BARRETT and JEFFREY McMURRAY (AP) – 46 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.

[...]
Lucindia Scurry-Johnson, assistant director of the Census Bureau's southern office in Charlotte, N.C., said law enforcement officers have told the agency the matter is "an apparent homicide" but nothing else.
[...]

(Emphasis mine.)

Details are still a little sketchy. We don't really know the motive for the killing yet, and the FBI is still investigating.

Marking the body with the word 'fed' is a pretty good clue to me that we're likely looking at a right-wing hate crime. I mean, I suppose we might find out that the guy was also an undercover federal law enforcement agent or something, but... come on... it looks pretty likely that somebody thought it would make a useful display of force to start murdering census workers. Maybe it's just one lone psychopath, but I worry that this might only be the beginning of a series of crimes like this, committed by a group of psychopaths— the sort of psychopaths who're easily spun up by the sorts of crap we saw going on in Washington, D.C. last weekend.

[NOTE: this might have been a lynching, but we don't really know yet. If people in Kentucky start showing around pictures of themselves smiling and standing around in large crowds next to the hanging bodies of federal workers, then there will be no doubt.]

Blogger doesn't seem to be showing me the archives... but I'd like to note for the record, that I was sounding the alarm about Glenn Beck over four years ago, well before he was a television personality. Back when he was only a second-tier talk-radio host.

Seriously, people... when it comes to spotting the potential of second-tier doomful assholes, I have mad skillz. Nevertheless, check out David Neiwert's latest dispatch on him at Crooks And Liars. I will tell you now, if this guy and all his fellow travelers aren't stopped soon, then we're going to be living inside V For Vendetta for the rest of our goddamn lives.

Update: more documentary footage of Glenn Beck's stooges out in force..

Keep an eye open for the telltale signs.

'Know your dopefiend. Your life may depend on it! You will not be able to see his eyes because of tea-shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape-victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your bath.'

'Know your dopefiend. Your life may depend on it!'

'There are 4 states of being in the cannabis society, Cool, groovy, hip and square. In that descending order. The square is seldom, if ever, cool. He is NOT with it. That is: he doesn't know WHAT'S happening, but if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to 'hip'. And if he can bring himself to approve of what's happening he becomes 'groovy'. And after that with much luck and perseverance he can rise to the rank of 'cool'.'

'Ahhrm. We must come to terms with the drug-culture in the country. The reefer butt is called a roach because it resembles a cockroach.'

'About those flashbacks. The patient never knows and think it's all over and then he gets himself straightened out for six months and then DARNIT the whole trip comes back on him.'

It could have been so much worse for you. You could have been overheard saying, "Go fuck yourself," to Senator Leahy.