I love slogans. Pictures are worth a thousand words but slogans have the last word. So much can be implied and distorted with a simple glib expression, effectively short-circuiting a parade of carefully chosen images. This type of shallow, overbearing and gratuitous editorialising is porn to a dedicated cynic like myself. A slogan outlasts a sound bite and is even cheaper than a bumper sticker. If only they could be used for good instead of evil.
The party conventions are over and the net effects have been tallied. Democrats have seen a measurable rise in the poles after theirs but the campaign has yet to run the Citizen’s United and voter suppression gauntlets. Behold the calm before the storm. It appears that Obama is well on his way to re-election because of Romney’s chronic ineptitude but all the support and prevailing sentiments in the world won’t do an iota of good if the voting booth becomes a restricted, members only club. The Romney machine is not done yet. Don’t count your chicken fillets before the anti-gay rally.
A year ago BP was considered to be the most hated corporation on the planet after months of disastrous press but then after millions of dollars of strategic, feel-good ads they have completely erased that perception and now BP is authorised to give Communion. This is a tactile validation of McLuhan’s assertion that a good hard sell will overcome a bad smell and emphasises that the product is utterly irrelevant if the message is potent enough. Cynical marketing practises recognise distilled perception as News You Can Abuse so the Romney backers are chomping at the bit, waiting to spend a hundred times as much on pro-Romney but much more on anti-Obama propaganda to pollute the air with partisan smog. By the time these GOP hacks are finished with Obama, he’ll be a welfare-cheating, Bible-burning, HIV-Positive, body-snatching, Communist pedophile waiting to sneak into your house TONIGHT to take your guns. It’s not over yet. The contest between two opposing candidates failed so the fight will revert to the referendum push. The empire is about to strike back.
Headings:
99.44% Manure
Chick-Fil-Amen
I'd Rather Switch Than Fight
You Want Lies With That?
Think Under The Rock
We Love To Lie And It Blows
The Most Busted Name In News
We're Looking For A Few Substandard Men
Have A Koch And A Smile
It's Alive!!
Bainspotting
You Didn't Kill That
Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave When We Practise To Conceive
Robots And Clint
Leave The Conniving To Us
It's The Surreal Thing
Got Influence Peddling?
It Keeps Going And Going And Going...
What's In His Wallet?
It's Not Too Late To Become A Mayan
When The Time Is Right, Will You Be Ready?
99.44% Manure
The RNC was a predictable orgy of pompous oration, giddy clichés and exaggerated flamboyant gestures. Burlesque is back. It was a celebration for Koch teasers but I thought that was a bit much when Condoleezza Rice began lap-dancing. There was much tired rhetoric and fairy tale pontification. However, clichés and platitudes make for lousy slogans. Really good ones can be difficult to produce so a new more facile contrivance has come into being recently. We are now entering the era of the spontaneous, fact-free meme as General Issue political ordinance.
The Romney/Ryan campaign has been on a national speed-dating tour, telling each prospective group exactly what they believe that they need to say in order to get a phone number. Unfortunately, Republicans have nothing new to offer, as usual. Stale chocolates and tax cuts and you know that they‘ll probably stand you up for a younger corporation, anyway. Therefore they must rely on familiar paranoias that resurrect reliable old hatreds and fears and re-direct that beneficial insecurity to motivate uncritical and unfocussed knee-jerk revenge, (“Keep America American…..And The Cayman Islands Handy!!”). The deluge of cynical endorsements begins with a spontaneous show of support from an unexpected source, right out of right field:
Chick-Fil-Amen
Chick-Fil-A bothering to take a stand during an election year is not mere organic personal expression, it’s a deliberate opportunistic endorsement of Romney and the idea that homosexuality should be severely punished, by a loving deity, while cashing in on the resulting groundswell of religious egotism and unconsummated moral indignation spiking sales. Same sex marriage was used successfully in the 2004 election as a wedge issue. “There you go again!”. If they wish to ramp up the cynicism even further there’s even a corporate tie-in in the offing, featuring Tim Tebow scarfing down a wedge in each fist while exclaiming, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”.
The company president could have decided just to keep his mouth shut but chose to invoke controversy by taking a cheap applause political stand endorsing religion and condemning homosexuality thus making pious discrimination the affiliated brand of the franchise. Whatever. One man’s freedom is another man’s outrage. Fast food now comes with sanctimony as a condiment. Will “In And Out Burger” now follow suit and come out against contraception, (“Don’t miss a single drop of that secret sauce!”)? Or will Wal-Mart come out for a border fence? Oh right.
Always wanting to be helpful: Possible tag lines for Chick-Fil-A: “Homophobia never tasted soooo good!”, “Come for the wings, stay for the persecution”, “It‘s raining hen!”, “Where’s the grief?”, “I’m heterosexually lovin’ it”, “Fill it to the rim with Seraphim”, “I’d walk a mile for a stoning”, “Don’t leave Sodom without it”. Please, no need to thank me.
I’d Rather Switch Than Fight
Ryan is the perfect annex to the Romney mansion. He has demonstrated exactly the same propensity for lying and abdication of strongly held personal beliefs at the drop of a hat as the master himself. See how quickly he turned on Ayn Rand when the polls told the campaign that her previously unperceived atheism was trending as toxic with The Religious Blight. He didn’t know about that part?? The supposedly serious policy genius hadn’t really divined (you like how I worked that in?) the entirety of her philosophy after a lifetime of doting on her every condescending word? Apparently, for twenty years he had only read the Cliff Notes version while claiming to be an expert on her thoughts, going so far as to require that all of his future staffers read her books and assimilate her doctrine. This was in the days before stalking was recognised as a bad thing.
You Want Lies With That?
Paul Ryan tried to present himself as a common working stiff by recalling his early history of slumming with the riffraff and working at McDonalds. It was then that he learned the PR, sorry, moral value of five minutes of hard work to a future career in politics for a restless rich dilettante, ("Always let ‘em see you sweat!"). His condescending formative experience probably validated his utopian, centrefold perception of the frat boy experience that is the proletarian struggle. Today, he wouldn’t have to slog through that few inconvenient months of petty servitude to create an air of Joe Sixpack mock authenticity. There’s probably an app for that now. As the George Plimpton of lower class ride-alongs, he probably had his first French fry mounted on a plaque on the wall even before he was supposed to serve it.
The Romney/Ryan ticket is fabricating an avatar for each of the two candidates that presents them as wide eyed, sleeves-rolled-up, lean and mean go-getters, starting with less than nothing and struggling to build their empires from scratch, solely by the dint of soul-cleansing, blue-collar hard work, (blue from the ink stains sustained during the frenzy of signing so many of those plant closure orders). Passage from Ryan‘s future biography: “Wandering into the wilderness, first he scoured the land for basic sustenance, bringing down the noble wildebeest (in Wisconsin) with a gruelling filibuster, all the while heroically wrestling the elements into submission and fabricating his own log cabin by felling the soaring, mighty oaks with a butter knife from the family’s guest house tea service”.
Ryan, in particular, seems to be trying to co-opt the identity of a working class, rank and file grunt. Only temporarily, mind you, (“Solidarity, just this once!!”) as bone fide Republicans aren’t actually working class heroes, they only hire them. Meanwhile, even the widespread acceptance of the laughable notion that the Romneys, with their inherited wealth and eternal proximity to a platinum life-preserver, had to use an ironing board as a table, failed to evoke a sympathetic meme, only Central Casting crocodile tears. Even though the media didn’t balk at the pandering image of the family having to eat lobster and truffles with their fingers, in a gated trailer park, the fairy tale immediately fell flat on it‘s face. This sincerity thing is harder than it looks.
Think Under The Rock
Ryan is said to have “guts” for proposing an aggressive, social engineering budget and because he is willing to address issues like cutting healthcare to the poor, a demographic with no resources or lobby to fight back. Since when does taking candy from a baby take courage? What is this Right Wing predilection for beating up on those who cannot fight back, embracing sadism as a virtue. Generations of admiration for ruthlessness in business leaves GOP cheerleaders unable to tell the difference between a hero and a predator. Success “Trumps” sincerity in the grasping netherworld of the super rich and exalts the merciless opportunist as deity. There is a word for someone like that….let’s see, it’s a common word referring to an opportunistic tormentor who cruises the schoolyard looking for smaller kids to pick on and steal their lunch money….oh yes, a “Republican”.
It is clear that the new generic Neo-Conservative 2.0 cannot be shamed. Despite consistent exposure of the reckless lies and self-serving distortions spread by the Romney campaign, and Ryan in particular, for the lies that they are, they continue to plow ahead like a drunk driver hoping to make it home before the police catches them, while sending the truth running for cover. Once safely in the Oval Office, they can hide behind a bevy of lawyers and deflect any attempt at accountability or even transparency. A group of lions is called a “pride” but what is a group of two-faced, manipulative, Republican media lawyers called, anyway? A “bain”?
We Love To Lie And It Blows
Their relentless unabashed disconnection from truth emphasises how Romney and Ryan love to play “Opposite Day”, every day, when making their speeches. The image of Ryan preaching his duplicitous budget calculus and proclaiming how his plan will actually help the middle class, while knowing full well how much of a greater financial burden it will actually impose on those he‘s promising to help, reminds me of a scene from the movie “Mars Attacks”. The Martians are rampaging through the streets spraying every living creature in sight with their death rays, while cheerfully re-assuring the crowd being massacred over a loudspeaker, “Don’t be alarmed, we are your friends!”. Bold-faced lying has been accepted as a mere affectation by morally vacant opportunists on a road trip for power. The surreal air of silicone sincerity mixed with reckless promises that will never be fulfilled stands as testament to the fickle inertia of unbridled political ambitions. I gotta stop watching “Meet The Press”.
Only such accomplished liars could proclaim that their first priority is “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” while simultaneously making wholesale cuts to teacher and first responder jobs in any state where their Republican henchmen are in control and the only successful legislations that they have pushed through are for stopping abortion. Ryan swears on a stack of bibles that he never requested stimulus money, despite numerous emails surfacing to prove otherwise. The level of lies and distortions produced by the Romney/Ryan campaign in defence of their outrageous plundering of lower class benefits to fund tax cuts for the stratospherically rich has reached a level never before seen, deserving of Olympic gold for Synchronised Sodomy.
Is it because Romney is a religious leader that his counterfeit morality consistently remains unchallenged and accepted as legal tender? He gets a pass on the smell test for requisite honesty immediately and automatically, every time, from those too cowardly to question the deciduous integrity of anything with a cross bolted to it. Romney is the single most prolific and consistent liar that I have ever seen. Every single word slithering out of his mouth is used to form a proudly crafted lie, delivered with absolutely mechanical repetition. You’d think that by the virtue of Murphy’s law that he would accidentally tell the truth at some point but somehow he has managed to remain heroically dishonest, the George Washington of Prevarication. "I cannot tell a lie. Obama cut down the 716 Billion from Medicare".
“We will not let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”, (“We don‘t need no stinkin’ truth!”). Uncritical shills like Pox News and Rush Limbaugh run interference for truth-averse memes that pass for facts distilled to focus the existential rage of self-important, congenitally arrogant Teaholes. It makes their predictable fulminations the car chase and gun fight scenes in their latest propaganda blockbuster, “Bain’s World”, a presentation of Tinfoil Studios, from Let Them Die Productions. “I laughed, I cried, I kicked a puppy!”.
The Most Busted Name In News
Thirteenth Century Fox has pioneered the concept of “meme stream news”, where disinformation and bold-faced lies spread writ large despite easily obtained proof to the contrary are obligingly assimilated. Not because of the integrity of the source but in sterile digital electronics parlance, “through a high refresh rate”. Goebbels' quote about repeating a big lie got a technological upgrade. By continually peddling the “You didn’t build that” meme, Republicans create a surrogate truth palpable to Fox viewers, who absorb their information through osmosis. It isn’t actually perceived through the normal senses, (insofar as “the Tea Party” and “sense” can be used in the same sentence), it comes to them through more transcendent “self-evident truths”, that require no evidence, beamed to them directly from the Hale-Bopp Comet.
We’re Looking For A Few Substandard Men
Both Romney and Ryan each have a record as long as their arms of vacillating core values. So what would the comedy team of “Flip and Flop” stand for anyway? Well, what time is it now? What tortured arc must the Romney message have to traverse to make the sale, finally? You’ll need the high speed camera to catch the flash of cynical vicissitudes in the aid of manufacturing marketable sincerity. The effort will probably resemble an episode of “Wipeout”, without the empathy.
Of course, any whiff of atheism clashes with Ryan’s claim of a spiritual imperative to his merciless, bean-counter philosophy. Perhaps he is not actually as profound as is implied by his acolytes, or have they merely mistaken an ethical sinkhole for moral depth?
Ryan’s severely conservative, Rube Goldberg budget, with cripplingly expensive corporate giveaways, huge tax cuts for the rich, first robbing then restoring funding for Medicaid to sanitise the optics and a byzantine but not yet defined mechanism for paying for all of the promises, will ultimately endure the cleansing effect of gravity when it collapses under it’s own weight, (“Jenga!!!”). Unfortunately many will be under it when it does but as the Bain Capital experience teaches, just grab the fiscal benefits and move on. Nothing to see here. It is more important to be a good businessman than a good manager.
Have A Koch And A Smile
Ryan’s conservative philosophy disdains middle class entitlements but adores the idea of a coddled monarchy or his own sequestered privileged class and buys into the Ayn Rand idea of automatic deference to existing wealthy elites, mindlessly co-opting any and all resources for primping, preening and pampering them at all costs, just because. The agenda of Trickle Sideways Economics mandates that ungrateful prols should be made to understand that subservience is it’s own reward, a defining tenet in the service of sadistic hedonism. Don’t expect any help. Just lay back and think of Wisconsin.
It’s Alive!!
In retrospect, I actually believe that Ryan did not know about Rand’s well documented atheism. It goes to his and Romney’s propensity for blindly cherry-picking convenient ideas from larger nuanced philosophies and stitching them together to form a seething Frankenpolicy of ideological body parts and then pass the abomination off as a “bold” new plan. To prevent the villagers from storming the castle, they do as all Republicans do when they want your acquiescence to the idea of voting against your own self-interest…again: They try to buy your vote by promising yet another tax cut that the goal of ultimate debt reduction simply cannot afford. Not to worry, they can blame the carnage from the monster’s imminent rampage on the next Democratic government when they fail to resurrect the dead villagers within the next four years.
Bainspotting
Rule for Republican-watchers: Whatever they accuse the Democrats of doing is exactly what they are doing themselves, every time. In fact, whenever they level any accusation of malfeasance or incompetence at anyone, they should immediately be investigated for that themselves. You hide your liability by claiming that it’s the other guy who owns it. No need to explain to receptive Ditto Heads, (“Acceptance is guaranteed”). This is a parallel philosophy to the Bain model which prescribes foisting any deficit that you have incurred off on the soon-to-be-expendable shell that once was a life-long family business and empty the cash register before hitting the door. How could anybody not admire such a profitable devotion to, ahem, job creation? (Betcha can’t cheat just one!“).
You Didn’t Kill That
Republicans bristle when it is implied that a businessman “didn’t build that himself” but scream “Foul” at twenty decibels above the pain threshold level at the suggestion of Obama being the one who nailed OBL. They stumble over themselves to point out that there was an entire infrastructure, created by Bush (??) that made the operation possible. So, Romney fires before aiming but Bush aimed without firing.
Of course, Rudy Giuliani had no help during 911 which is why he is the magnanimous, supportive hero that he is now, praising Obama for his multiple successes with national security by killing so many high profile Al Qaeda goons. Also, Donald Trump is always quick to praise those who have helped create his wealth. (Note: There is no font for sarcasm).
Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice To Conceive
Personhood makes the unsubstantiated claim that a fertilised egg is a human being and therefore abortion at any time is murder. I wonder if this group of moralists-of-convenience would maintain that position if their own politically inbred, racially pure offspring was raped by an African-American? Would they really move Heaven and Earth to use their own new laws to force that birth to proceed? “Dear, pack your bags. We’re all going on a trip to Mexico to, uh, buy some Hawaiian shirts”. “Hawaiian shirts in Mexico?? Don’t you get those in Peru?
So what is the current Republican stance for outlawing birth control? In an attempt to justify one of Romney’s many “on again/off again” positions on any subject, the apologists proclaim that the party platform is not the position of the candidate. So, the Board of Directors has no control over the CEO? Apparently, the Romney campaign is “Many Nights At The Improv”. Is that consistent with a pro-business party’s pathologic love of an aggrandising and rigid hierarchy? Up until now, I would have assumed that when Romney went rogue, it meant that he is going commando and dispensed with the magic underwear.
Ann Romney refused to answer questions about denying coverage for contraception, claiming that it is not an issue important to the campaign. Really? Why then are Republicans so feverishly trying to ram through legislation banning contraception at every turn? It’s a pretty weird hobby. Have they ever thought of taking up fossil hunting? Since the Earth is only six thousand years old and evolution is a myth, all of the specimens recovered would be identical, so it wouldn’t take up too much of their time.
The party has consistently acceded to the weapons grade stupidity of the Tea Party and are enshrining into their platform the idea that NO abortion should be legal, incredibly, even if the mother‘s life is threatened by inaction. With “Personhood” gratuitously defining a zygote as a job-creator, life then begins at conception. So if the choice is between the fetus and the mother, between action or inaction, who do you murder, you know, to remain morally superior? So, consistent with Libertarian non-sympathies, a women who is in immediate danger of death is on her own here too because freedom’s just another word for entitlements you lose.
When women are seeking help at what must be one of the most distressed times in their lives, Republicans would try to block their options with procedural impediments designed to shame them for even seeking help in the first place. Their answer to a cry for help from women who they disdain for not being the embodiment of their mythical 1950s Stepford housewife is Forced Ultrasound, or F.U.
Bill O’Reilly has said that erectile dysfunction is a condition worthy of healthcare coverage but contraception is not, (“Wrong enough for a man but belayed for a woman”). It is another manifestation of an instinctive deference to the urgency of male-oriented problems that sneers at the healthcare demands of women as petulant froth. Say, why doesn’t he just use the plan to get some of that Viagra (“The Quicker Picker-Upper”) and go fuck himself? It’s already covered and he wouldn’t need to wait for his birthday.
Robots And Clint
It has been reported that Romney’s motherboard lit up like a Christmas tree at the convention when Eastwood performed his put down stand up routine.
Right wing turn, Clyde. So, Clint Eastwood has exchanged an orangutan for a virtual Obama? Well, at least Obama doesn’t shit in the truck.
The last time that I actually spoke with a chair, there was a copious quantity of alcohol and an altercation with gravity involved but I must admit that the chair had some good points, although the cat kept going on about “eminent domain”, which I thought was total bullshit.
Btw, I too had an invisible friend once, when I was young. Kept stealing the money that the tooth fairy left for me…at least that’s what my older sister kept telling me. Come to think of it, when I asked how she knew this, she would tell me to go fuck myself, too.
Leave The Conniving To Us
This is the era of hyper-hypocritical Neo-Conservatives who aren‘t embarrassed when their straw man lies are consistently and definitively debunked by even the most casual fact-checking. None of their foot soldiers will ever know that their cherished talking points are just vapour because that message will never see the light of day inside the Fox News bubble (“Must Flee TV”) or the Tea Party plantation.
Citizen’s United will ensure that Republicans prevail in attack ads and funding of political dirty tricks. Dems have always “brought a knife to a gunfight” but the recent more aggressive posture of the Democratic campaign suggests that they have now finally decided to bring a gun. However, this is the one time that the NRA wants a waiting period strictly enforced. Meanwhile, the Republicans, being the inveterate cheaters and rabbit punchers that their DNA commands, through “Criminals United” money, will again buy whomever is necessary to skew the rules in their favour, (I‘m looking at you SCOTUS). With the vast disparity in funding soon to be available for mocking democracy with saturation level GOP attack ads and dirty tricks, the timid Democrats will now be bringing a hand gun to a tank battle, (Yippy Ki Yay, motherdisparager!!)
It’s The Surreal Thing
There is a brand new GOP talking point emerging about how Saint Reagan actually started with a worse economy than what Obama was saddled with but still managed to turn that around. I have never heard this stunning whopper before this week but is now gaining speed with Republican talking heads. It’s historical Neo-Genesis. Talk about conjuring something from nothing. Did Reagan have to deal with wholesale outsourcing of jobs, the effects of twenty years of Free Trade, China de-valuing it’s currency and flooding the market with cheap goods, two unfunded wars and a gainsaying Congress blocking every single action proposed by the President for the sole purpose of hobbling his Presidency? And btw, Regan’s success only happened in his second term.
So how long did it take to recover from the depression? One election cycle? This insistence on seeing results even beyond what existed before the recent “Republican Depression Lite”, despite that administration’s absolute inability to improve the economy in twice as much time, is not so surprising. It’s the Rove Doctrine all over again. Project your own failure onto your opponent to start a fire in his camp and declare your experience as a fireman, although I’ll pass on the Romney, McConnell, Christie and Akin “Studs Of The Beltway” Mucous Mike calendar.
Got Influence Peddling?
The sole agenda of these GOP lackeys is to make their millionaires into billionaires. There is no other concern. End of story. Every other plank in their platform is a throw-away in the aid of attaining this goal. Witness the willingness to drive the government into default last year if the tax cuts for their rich supporters was not extended. They could have made a budget deal ludicrously simple if they had just abandoned that one niche provision. Instead they proved where their priorities lay by threatening to stop every other act of business if that condition was not accepted, (“We’re taking our bull and going home!”)
It Keeps On Going And Going And Going…
The fight is not merely for the Presidency. Actually, far more important is the ability of that President to appoint Supreme Court judges. This power will decide if new outrageous and irreversible laws, (like CU) that will be foist upon the public in the future. SCOTUS judges are appointed for life and cannot be fired for poor performance like a teacher or a cop or a firefighter, not even by the President. Once appointed they are exempt from “personal responsibility”, something GOP moralists espouse as an inalienable virtue, except when it suits them to dispense with it. These Injustices are not subject to any performance evaluation, unlike as it is with any other profession. They can only be removed by a majority of the other judges on that court agreeing to any censure. Good luck on that one.
Anyone who thinks that voting doesn’t change anything need only look at the damage that the Tea Baggers did in just one term. This carnage will be magnified by an administration that peppers SCOTUS with right wing ideologues that will ensure the fruition of some really obnoxious social re-engineering for the next twenty years. Expect corporations again to be redefined, possibly this time as equal to cattle so they can’t be denied the most fertile grazing patches.
Wholesale voter suppression will be the first order of business when Romney becomes President, to lock the door behind a swaggering GOP administration. It will be followed closely by even more campaign donor-secrecy legislation designed to hide the names of those who are buying off these Supreme Court weasels (that made such complete corruption possible in the first place) and malleable politicians who provide the kinetic energy for really bad ideas. Life will become a constant battle just to maintain what few protections that you have left, which will keep you out of their hair. The only stability that you will get during this relentless assault on your rights is from grabbing your ankles.
What’s In His Wallet?
Romney wants a referendum, not an election. But hey, this is an election, so Mitt, tell us what you would do, not what Obama won’t. By now it should be obvious that the reason Romney will never release his tax returns is because they would instantly end his Presidential run, even without the need for hostile editorialising. Apparently the sight of these papers would cause spontaneous projectile vomiting. These documents are indelible hard copies of his history of lies and no price is too high to pay to keep them hidden, not even extremely bad press during an already visibly insincere campaign. Has he actually paid the taxes that he claims that he has? Also, Mormons are supposed to donate ten per cent of their income so can he afford for his church to know his actual income and therefore know by how much he has been short-changing them for years? The release of those tax records would destroy the carefully crafted image of an honest businessman and moral stalwart that his handlers have so actively contrived for him. You can only shake an Etch-A-Sketch so hard.
It’s Not Too Late To Become A Mayan
If I have to take a giant asteroid up the ass in December, I want my own mega-church first. I’ll need the money for a huge blow-out party. You can really vacuum up a shitload of cash with one of those babies, without having to provide a return on investment and after the impact, the parishioners will never know the fucking difference, anyway. If the asteroid misses, I’ll take what I learned about scamming rubes and hitch a ride to the planet Kolob…What’s that? Defrauding vulnerable believers?….Are you mocking my faith??
When The Time Is Right, Will You Be Ready?
Kidding aside but always ready to pounce, the Tea Party and their antics need to be punished. They really believe that they are untouchable, quite possibly due to some perception of Divine moral inertia. If they really believe in personal responsibility, they will recognise a humiliating rout as God moving in one of those mysterious ways. As well, the Romney billionaires should live to see that their hundreds of millions of dollars used to corrupt the process will be wasted, with no bailout to follow.
This election will determine if the American electorate votes because of a plan for progress or because of well-engineered fear and hatred.