I have Liddy and Congress on this afternoon in the background, in between writing spurts.
I have to admit, though I may be tarred and feathered for this, that I’m feeling pity for Liddy, after a particularly scathing examination by a Democrat whose name I didn’t catch, but has repeated about 40 times that he is “a contract attorney.”
The amount of posturing by our “public servants” all for the good of the “American people” is really underwhelming and grating at best.
On one level, these hearings are ludicrous . . . the inbreeding between big business and American government has been so deep for so many years now, it’s obscene.
But you wouldn’t think it to listen to these hearings.
The public servants arise anew, reborn for the good of We The People.
<yawn>
I get the public’s anger. I am one of those who understands that the money is one tenth of one percent that weighs in at 50 percent, given our current economic hardship.
The money is symbolic, gets to the heart of what most Americans live in everyday, the most invisible layer of culture, because unlike race and gender, its markers are elusive: class division, in a culture devoted to to denial through acquisition’s narcotic effects.
Making Liddy a scapegoat is just wrong; he jumped on the boat late in the game, and many in Congress are more than happy to crucify this man to make themselves look good. He’s no angel. But he’s no Devil, and Congress members ought not feed the hate for their own good.
And Liddy’s having to stand in for the incompetence, greed, and class entitlement of all the AIG executives, though his term there has been relatively short, a fact that many Congress members choose to ignore.
Very little moral high road here, in this viewer’s opinion.
Just more theater, on both sides of the aisle.
With a few exceptions, a self-serving debacle for our elected officials.
For those of you lucky enough to miss Uncle Dick on John King’s “State of the Union” Sunday, I’m posting links to the YouTube uploads.
One of the prize moments, though you’ll have to suffer through all the segments, because I don’t remember when exactly the praise started, is when Uncle Dick talks about the great and wonderful Uncle Rush.
Enlightening.
This first segment is particularly rich for anyone with half a wit, but each segment offers its own “insights”:
I try to steer clear of the obvious, and I give few of my life minutes to people like Limbaugh and his ilk.
But Timothy Egan’s piece in the Times today warrants this short entry. Mr. Egan makes excellent points that go beyond the usual diatribes against Limbaugh, and his column today is insightful and well written.
Two points which struck me, impressively written by Mr. Egan:
As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.
(bold face added)
We again see why Barack Obama is the man for this job at this time: we need leadership skilled enough to deflate those self-aggrandizing toxic hot air balloons that have floated too long over the land.
And it was this paragraph which I thought brilliantly summarized our current economic state of affairs, and crystallized reality as few have to date:
But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”
There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.
Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.
(bold face added)
Capitalism cannibalizing itself. Perhaps the most succinct summary of the global economic meltdown yet articulated.
The corrective will be a cannibal like swing to government regulation and nationalization, until the equilibrium is restored.
A draft or some such thing of the Federal Budget was released today, and I happened to have the boob tube on (allusion to its mind numbing effects, not the female anatomy, but the way the two are linked is striking, isn’t it?) this afternoon while rushing to get out the door.
CNN showed Ms. Pelosi holding the budget proposal in her hands and saying, “This budget reflects our national priorities and the President’s agenda . . .,” etc., etc., etc., the statement a swipe at what has been going on for the past eight years, and the past administration’s abandonment of American fundamentals.
Just a guess, but literacy and skill might serve We The People well.
Ya think?
Following Ms. Pelosi, John Boehner gets on flapping his lips about the deficit and the woeful and glib way the Democrats and the President are reacting to the budget deficit.
Excuse me?
The Republicans gave Bush a rubber stamp for eight years and basically racked up this mess, for the most part, in Iraq. Mission. Still. Not. Accomplished. Afghanistan is collapsing by the day. Meanwhile Halliburton went skipping off with billions and billions of dollars from its war profits (we love you Uncle Dick), and then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Not to mention the other contractors who made off with uncounted cartloads of American taxpayer money.
Now we have the housing bubble which came to full fruition under these good ol’ boys and their financial buddies, the credit card companies, the investment banks, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, et al, but hey, let’s just blame the new Democratic agenda and its task of trying to clean up the country while getting us back on track for the almost diminished notion of “the greater good.”
I am certain we all know the real solution to this problem:
“Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.”
Education won’t help.
Health care reform won’t help.
Infrastructure repair and creating jobs is a waste of time and money.
No, none of the above. Tax cuts. The cure to our ills.
If it weren’t so pitiful to watch, it would make for great comedy.
I am thinking to send Mr. Boehner my prayer beads from India, so he can count off how many times he chants the mantra during the day.
An ancient and revered custom, mantras and prayer beads.
Before the stimulus bill was agreed on in the Senate, I wrote the following Friday evening, with plans to post it late Saturday.
I hope that the Senate’s agreement is enough, given Mr. Krugman’s comments.
A fact that I thought smacking of more than a little irony (is it too soon after my previous entry to use the term?), was the Republican’s insistence on cutting Federal funding for school construction. In a snippet I saw on CNN last night, the Republicans argued that “building schools isn’t the Federal government’s job,” and some of the biggest cuts in the agreed on package came from this program.
I could be mistaken, but aren’t these usually the same folks who vigorously defend and promote the “Pledge of Allegiance” in the state built public schools?:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
Just a guess . . .
For those who haven’t done so, I recommend reading Krugman, as a stimulus bill hasn’t passed yet, and this week may well be a tedious and exhausting circus for our public servants.
Tonight, Barack Obama sealed the deal in his 30 minute infomercial.
It was a brilliant production, and it captured both the specifics that his administration would implement, and the message of hope which catapulted him to the national stage.
Tonight, he showed who is this campaign’s real political maverick:
maverick |ˈmav(ə)rik| noun
1 an unorthodox or independent-minded person.
By refusing to accept public financing, Obama has run the most stellar and impressive campaign in modern history; not only did he raise a record breaking campaign chest, his community service work invaluably informed the grassroots approach characterizing the ground campaign, the voter registration push, and the get out the vote movement. Most important, it was not a campaign funded and fueled by big business (nod to George Bush), but one driven by committed people on the ground.
America’s politics has changed this election. We’ve reclaimed our character, our hope, and our dedication to our better angels.
Obama’s appeal tonight to vote in six days was extraordinary, emotional, and full of an optimism we haven’t seen in decades. And it conspicuously lacked the arrogance which we’ve come to expect from those running for President.
Just a few minutes after Obama asked America to vote for change, McCain ran an ominous ad, a dark sepia photo of Obama, with foreboding music dancing around the voice over, “Obama’s not ready to be President.” It was the politics of fear mongering, a politics we’ve been living with for eight years.
America has had enough. This country was not founded on fear, nor are we a fearful people.
Obama has outmaneuvered McCain with a rare intelligence and quality of character we’ve not seen in ages, and McCain’s desperate accusations show his disconnect from the American spirit and a sorry reliance on political pablum.
November 4th, cast your vote for the candidate who is this election’s maverick, the one with independent thought, vision, and creative problem solving skills:
Postscript: McCain’s response to the 4-5 million dollar advertisement, which will probably sway at least two percentage points of undecided voters, was “I will never interrupt the World Series for an infomercial” (loose quote). His comments showed how much he has underestimated his opponent, and how he misjudged this watershed moment. (Ross Perot ran such an ad, but not with the production values we saw this evening.)
I’m guessing that we’ll never again see a Presidential election without these thirty minute seal-the-deal productions.
Kudos to her for articulating the obvious. For sometime, among friends, I’ve been referring to Ms. Palin as “Trophy Veep”; some of my male friends have flat out said, “she’s hot.”
His debate performance was perhaps the most patronizing appeal to place a candidate at the nation’s head that we’ve witnessed.
His condescending attitude was seen in his overly familiar, disingenuous, and repeated use of “my friends,” coupled to his smug disregard of his opponent with a rude point and uttering of “that one.” All were “friends” except for the one who was easily dismissed, as though he wasn’t in the room, a non-human.
His label may well have revealed McCain’s unconscious racism, but at the very least it showed that McCain has become a very poor sport. The pressure is getting to him and he’s loosing his cool.
Though the McCain campaign continues trying to “turn the page” by ignoring the most pressing issue and employing Atwater-Rove tactics, it isn’t working. The country has had enough.
It backfired on Hillary. It is backfiring with McCain.
Let’s hope Mr. McCain can regain composure and dignity by November, but it is probably too late.
It is painful to see a man of heroic accomplishments disintegrate in the fires of “race-baiting and xenophobia,” all for fear of personal failure.
As an addendum to the debate, I award the winner’s medal to the displaced peoples of the Sudan and the Congo, and to those who have died. For more on the ongoing humanitarian crises in these regions:
My previous posts on “Sarah Palin and the Great Divide” met with more than polite hostility by many of my friends on the liberal left. One friend summarized my attempt at parsing as “that religious garbage.”
I refrained from saying flat out, “point proved, the intolerance cuts both ways.”
Fish grapples with many of the Constitutional nuances of the debate, and although his specific concern is the tax exempt status of churches, he explicates concerns similar to mine with more insight, experience, and skill. His analysis is worth reading. He writes in his conclusion that “[t]he bottom line is that there is no rational or principled or constitutional resolution to this conflict. The resolution, if there is one, will have to be political. Either the Johnson amendment will be repealed or it won’t be. And when one or the other happens, the boundaries between church and state, at least with respect to this issue, will have been settled — for a while.”
The reader’s comments are lively and diverse, and worth scanning.
Most social activism and change comes from the belief that all humans are “created equal,” and that this truth, often framed in the language of religion, must be politically realized. The morality of equality and the immorality of social oppression has fundamentally shaped human development. Unfortunately, the assorted maps to broader and more inclusive equality are diverse and subject to interpretation. For that reason, I’m sympathetic to Fish’s analysis: the roads to heaven and hell are paved with the best of intentions, and politics reflects the best and worst of our ideas, writ large.
Professor Fish’s bio and his intellectual predispositions can be read here.
As a post-script to my first entry on the V. P. debate, in Sojourners this week, Elizabeth Palmberg writes in her entry “V. P. Debate’s Blind Spots on Darfur” that Biden, Palin, and Ifill all got it in part wrong on Darfur last week. She states that “talk of boots on the ground misses the point: what we need on the ground is the wingtips and sensible pumps of real diplomats, backed up by real economic consequences for Khartoum, including an array of new, substantive economic sanctions on Sudan (which has learned to circumvent the ones we imposed years ago). This would enable the various groups in Darfur –- armed and, most importantly, unarmed –- to come together and negotiate with Kharoum from a position of strength, as their neighbors in southern Sudan did in 2005.”
Her entry is short and worth the minute or two it takes to read.
And the Winner Is . . . Part 2!
October 5, 2008 · 2 Comments
The crew at Saturday Night Live:
(If the YouTube video doesn’t work, click the link below.)
Saturday Night Live V.P. Debate Skit.
Please note: the NBC site has gotten so many hits on the skit, that they’ve added an advert to the beginning, for which I apologize.
Categories: 2008 Election · Barack Obama · Conservative · Creativity · Debates · Democrats · Humor · Joe Biden · John McCain · Liberal · Media · Politics · Republicans · Sarah Palin · Vice Presidential Debate
Tagged: 2008 Election, Joe Biden, Political Commentary, Political Humor, Sarah Palin, Tina Fey, Vice Presidential Debate