Middle Class Is Un-American

The New Yorker reports on the arrogant, thieving, high-Tory mindset of today's Republican Party, and their Orwellian attempts at corrupting the meaning of plain English - emphasis mine:

On the floor of the Senate this week, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican Minority Whip, criticized President Barack Obama for talking about the middle class. The mere phrase “middle class” — that most anodyne of demographic terms, the category to which half of all Americans polled identify, and into which Mitt Romney is always trying to shoehorn very, very wealthy people like himself — emerged, in Kyl’s evocation, as some kind of crazy-lefty bumper-sticker slogan. By alluding to “what he calls ‘the middle class,’ ” Kyl said, as though Obama had come up with the phrase, the President was “pitting these Americans” against the wealthy, “spreading economic resentment, and weaken[ing] American values and ideals.” Kyl went on: “We don’t need the current American President touring the country and defining every American’s values and status based on a class system that he’s made up. I don’t think there’s anything called middle-class values. I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It’s not what we do in America.”

Increasingly, it isn’t. Not if we’re in office or running for office, and especially not if we’re Republicans. America perpetuates a class system — and an income-inequality gap growing faster than that of most other countries — but American politicians try not to speak of it, because if they do, they get slimed. “What you could do for me,” President Obama told a group of Presidential historians in May, 2011, “is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality without being accused of class warfare.” A year later, it takes even less to attract that particular charge, even as it takes more rhetorical chutzpah to get around the reality.

It’s remarkable how far to the right the acceptable political discourse about the haves and have-nots has shifted — or perhaps it’s just moved into the realm of denial. In the not-so-distant political past, it was considered reasonable for Republicans to allude to inequality and even vow to try to remedy it. In an excellent recent article in Rolling Stone about the contemporary Republican party’s extreme attachment to tax cuts for the rich, Tim Dickinson quotes a 1985 speech by Ronald Reagan, a speech that somebody — maybe Kyl — would surely be calling “class warfare” talk until he heard who’d made it. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” Reagan vowed, adding that they “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10% of his salary—and that’s crazy." . . .

Sex and Starvation in South Carolina

A friend brought this Jon Stewart clip to my attention.  Priceless.  And so true.

You Yankee fellas think it's Alabama and Mississippi that are the center of racism, reactionary thinking, and fundamentalism.  Not so.  It's South Carolina, hands down.  There's a reason they were the first state to secede from the Union.  I know, I've lived there - very briefly, thank God.

Don't Even Let Them Eat Cake

Oh hell no, not in South Carolina - that would be too good for the worthless beggars.

At a town hall meeting on Friday, the Republican - you knew that, right? - lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, delivered himself of these compassionate remarks about why poor kids should be denied school lunches if their parents don't attend parent-teacher conferences:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," Bauer said, according to the Greenville [S. C.] News. "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

Among other South Carolinians who responded with outrage to Bauer's remarks, Democratic candidate Mullins McLeod said: "It amazes me how some Republican politicians claim a monopoly on Christianity and then go out and say and do some of the most un-Christian things imaginable."

Yeah well, no shit buddy.  The Republicans aren't about being Christian.  They're all about power.

And screwing over all the poor bastards who don't have any.

P.S. - Bauer is rumored to be gay, which of course he firmly denies; google it up if you're interested.

Honk to Pam's House Blend

Update:  Rachel has the sound clip, and some trenchant remarks on this pompous ass, too:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ozymandias

From Breach, a collection of photographs by artist Richard Mosse, displaying the ruins of Saddam Hussein's glory:


All that straight-boy megalomania-gone-wild, which the world has seen replayed a million times in every age and every land, reminds me of Shelley's famous poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sullivan on Cheney

It is very rare to get someone with the same stratospheric levels of arrogance and incompetence as you find in Dick Cheney. Let's go to the tape: A war launched on false premises, a trillion dollar debt in a period of growth, a destruction of America's moral standing, the loss of one major city (New Orleans) and the devastation of another (New York City), two horribly bungled military campaigns that have trapped his successors for decades, a political party decimated for a generation, his closest aide in jail for obstruction of justice, his own [lesbian] daughter and grand-child targeted by his own party as second-class citizens in the state they live in. And a war criminal. Did I miss anything?

Why is this man not laughed off every TV set he walks onto?

Sullivan also contrasts two quotes by Peggy Noonan, Republican stalwart and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan - a very smart, very articulate, very respected writer. Whose arrogant callousness and willful disregard for the fundamental decencies of human life are utterly nauseating:

"The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial," - Peggy Noonan, December 21. 1998.

"It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents [the OLC torture memos] and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’ Sometimes in life you want to keep walking . . . Some of life has to be mysterious." - Peggy Noonan, April 19, 2009.

Remember also that the issue with Clinton was perjury in a civil suit. That required impeachment. But war crimes?

Here's a picture of what Noonan wants to keep "mysterious" - in other words, hidden, buried, ignored, and denied: the aftermath of "enhanced interrogation" performed at Abu Ghraib prison, Baghdad, 2004, by American soldiers by and with the approval of the Bush White House.

That was your American government at work, fellas - not Nazis or Communists in some murky old black-and-white movie, but your government and mine.

Disgusting is not a strong enough word for what has been done in the name of the American people; horrifying and revolting are more like it. And yet Noonan and her ilk, in their fancy Prada high heels and their goody-goody act, want to keep walking right on by, eyes closed, pretending everything is just wonderful.

My own mother, a plainspoken Texan who did not suffer fools gladly, had a short, swift way to sum up a woman like that; and it rhymes with witch.

Sullivan:

Torture is the weapon of cowards and bullies and monsters.

How the world works now

From Ron Suskind's famous 2004 New York Times Magazine essay, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," emphasis mine:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

If all the soccer moms and baseball dads of this country, with their devout belief in timeless certainties, truly understood the Orwellian nightmare so cavalierly proclaimed here--the utter, arrogant, cold-blooded contempt for constitutional government, democracy, liberty, justice--well, I think we would have already had a new administration in office long before now.

But of course, the faithful just don't get it. Faith can illuminate, to be sure. It can also blind, and tragically so.