Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wisconsin and Learning from Our Mistakes
Five hours ahead and one day behind, I went to bed last night, having just watched Rachel Maddow begin her Tuesday broadcast by roundly proclaiming that the people of Wisconsin had won the battle of wills against their governor’s intransigence.
Now I wake up this morning to find that, despite Rachel’s joyous declaration that the people of Wisconsin had won, that the shifty-eyed corporate tool, who happens to be the duly elected Governor of Wisconsin, had budged, the Governor’s party had, in fact, managed to rewrite the odious bill in question, in such a manner that it could be rammed through the legislature and in one fell swoop, a basic right of working people with a fifty-year pedigree had been consigned to the dustbins of history. Dead as a dod. Kaput. No refunds, no returns.
Let’s be brutally honest, people. This was never about fiscal responsibility. It was never about balancing a budget and job creation, two of the major subjects the Republican party whined and groaned about throughout the fall campaign of 2010, two of the major accusations of failure levied at their Democratic opponents.
It was all about, it was ever about busting union power, bringing those organisations formed by working people, of working people and for working people, to their proverbial knees. It was about quashing the little man. It was about keeping the peasants in their place.
We have it on record. Scott Walker said as much – in fact, he bragged about it – in his oleaginous twenty-minute telephone conversation with faux David Koch.
The demise of the union and the quelling of their remaining power is a major objective, not only of the Republican Party, but also of their corporate puppetmasters, primarily the shady woodwork-dwelling Kochroaches. It’s also worth mentioning that part and parcel of Walker’s landmark legislation colludes the sale of public utilities to private corporate entities, and we all know who’ll benefit from that. It’s so not rocket science, that even dummies understand it:-
As amusing as the dummies’ take on this situation may be, the bitter irony is, simply, that it is the people of Wisconsin, and – by extension – the working people and the working poor of our country, who end up being royally rogered up the backside by David Koch and his ilk, via any representative we elect from the Republican party.
I grew up in a union home, in the South. If that sounds like an anomaly today, there actually was a time, in what’s traditionally been known as the Upper South, where unions were visably present and part of everyday working life, and even if they weren’t as strident as they were in the Northern industrial parts of the country, they certainly improved upon the lives of their members and their members’ families.
My dad worked in a textile mill, a huge entity which provided employment for men and women in four predominantly rural counties on the cusp of that monster which grew to become known today as Northern Virginia. Most of the fathers of kids who went to my high school worked there. The mother of Joe Bageant, author of Deer-Hunting with Jesus and one of the most strident practical Progressive voices of the South, worked there.
In the era before clean air technology became a given, on certain days when the wind was right, you could smell the rotten-egg stench from the factory, certainly, where I lived and sometimes thirty miles south to the town where I attended high school. My dad brought it home on his clothes, and it saturated the interior of his car. But that union-backed stench provided him with fully comprehensive health insurance, which made it possible for me to get my teeth straightened. It paid the hospital bill for my younger cousin, whose appendix ruptured and who had to spend six weeks recovering at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. It paid for all my mother’s chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and it topped up my father’s Medicare until the day he died sixteen years ago.
That union-backed stench gave us a living wage, and when I was in college in the mid-Seventies, and the union called its workers out on strike for six weeks, I opened an envelope one day at college, to find a check from the AFL-CIO for the princely sum of $100, as help toward paying for my textbooks, as my dad had been on strike for an overly-long period.
Like the people being targeted inWisconsin, I began my professional life, after taking my degree, in the public sector as a teacher. Virginia, being one of those states who embraced Taft-Hartley and who fervently worshipped at the altar of “right-to-work”, had made it impossible for state employees to unionise. We had to make do with pithy “Education Associations”, professional organisations which were unions in name only, with no collective bargaining allowed. I recall the one time we pushed our weight and even threatened to strike, we were summarily told that, were we to do so, they had enough applications for employment on file, that they’d have the classrooms staffed within two days.
Keith Olbermann, blogging on his new website, FOKNews, reckons the Wisconsin governor and his cronies, by coming out of the thugs’ closet, have effectively signalled the incipient suicide of the Republican Party. Nate Silver reckons this action will do more than anything else to galvanise the base of the Democratic Party.
I wish I could be so hopeful, because we certainly are in need of some adhesive to bind the gaping wounds rent asunder by our own self-destructive tendencies.
Rachel’s all-too-preciptous cry of triumph two nights ago makes me think of the way everyone from the media to the grassroots declared themselves openly Leftist enough in November 2008 to predict that the Republican Party was dead in the water, only to find that by March the following year, the Right had taken a leaf from Saul Alinsky’s book and had organised themselves into a movement that was, at once, strident, vociferous and very ugly. It received its battlecry in the early morning rant of a CNBC business commentator and its backing from the omnipresent Koch machine. It’s field lieutenants were the willfully ignorant Vice Presidential candidate from the losing ticket and an ex-rodeo clown, who was also a recovering alcoholic. They fed their base on fear – fear of a seminal President, like no other we’d had before in our history. Their object was to demonise the Democrats and de-legitimise the first African-American President.
But it was never about race.
Forty years ago, in the wake of the VietNam fiasco, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the violent shambles of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Democratic party reformed itself, removing its base from the rural Midwest of agricultural cooperatives, Southern working poor, Rust Belt industrial workers, and unions. Didn’t you hear? Like the Don McLean song, the Democrats took the last train to the Coast (Left Coast or Northeastern) and developed attitude.
That attitude basically gave a shrug and a disdainful nod to the old base, turning its back on the old union organisers. The Midwestern farmers were rubes, the Southerners all racist and people like George Meany, many of whom barely had grade school academic credentials, didn’t fit into the cosmopolitan, city-centred, elitist mindset of the newly-minted Democrats. They would lead and the old base would follow. After all, what else were they going to do? Vote Republican?
Fast forward ten years to 1980, the year all this shitstorm we’re suffering now started in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan, and that’s exactly what they did. The unions endorsed Reagan and he busted their asses. The Reagan Democrats were formed, and the South and rural Midwest bled red. The Republicans communicated with these people on their level, in language they understood, and with operatives with whom these people were familiar. Like the seasoned conmen they became, they built trust. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the culture war battles began in earnest on the airwaves. With the advent of Karl Rove, heir apparent of that king ratfucker, Donald Segretti, the die was cast.
The aim was an unbroken hegemony of Republican rule, appealing to the basic instincts of their uneducated and undereducated base – play up religion, emphasize family values, and use every occasion to keep them scared and compliant. Walk into any remaining factory or warehouse in certain parts of the country today and you’ll see people at work, their minds being indoctrinated over loudspeakers by Rightwing talk radio stations, screaming Rush, Beck or Michael Savage. It’s mind control by osmosis.
And from 2009, we, ourselves, on the Left, became our own worst enemies. Lulled into a false sense of security and faux wealth since the Gipper’s regime, and fed on a diet of instant gratification, whilst nurturing a total ignorance about the way our government functions, instead of actually listening to the President, we chose to have various and sundry celebrity talking heads, so-called scions of the Left, corporately paid, analyse and interpret every word spoken or unspoken, every action completed or contemplated and every thought assumed by the President, not for the way we saw or heard ourselves, but the way they thought we should respond.
They told us so much they confused people who were already confused.
They endowed the President with so many powers of government that, had he chosen to use a fraction of those which they deemed he had, he’d have been successfully impeached. As much as the Right pushed the big lies of death panels, socialism, soft cell terrorism, and phony birth certificates, the Left heard their own tell them that Obama was weak, he was a pussy, he hated Progressives, he wasn’t enough like Bush, he was too much like Bush, he was a coward, he caved, he just wasn’t into the all-pervading Middle Class (which, somehow, seemed to have pushed the working class and working poor into some limbo located between irrelevance and non-existence). One progressive talking head went so far as to issue a clarion cry for all Progressives to boycott voting in the Midterms in order to teach the President a lesson. And the LGBT community was so convinced of the President’s concealed homophobia because he hadn’t whipped out an Executive Order repealing DADT (he couldn’t), that 30% of LGBTs who voted in the Midterms, voted Republican.
Well, that worked out nicely, didn’t it? Especially since, not two weeks ago, that selfsame talking head was screaming into the cameras that the President had better get his ass to Wisconsin and get on the picket lines or risk being a one-term President.
I’m wondering who voted for Scott Walker, because they were sold a bill of sale. Were they people who’d previously voted for the President in 2008 or who’d kept Russ Feingold in the Senate in previous years? Were they decent people who’d been scared shitless by the Tea Party’s virulent warnings about the plug being pulled on Grandma or the myth that the President was really a Manchurian candidate? Or was Walker elected as much by those so-called Progressive sulkers and pouters who stayed at home to make a point? Because as much as the people who voted for this dangerous dolt, the people who didn’t vote enabled him.
Now, like a cancer, we’re seeing this union busting legislatively spread across the Rust Belt and heartland of the industrial Midwest. We’re seeing a South Carolina governor employ an education advisor who’s openly stated that he hates the idea of public schools. We’re watching a redux of Joseph McCarthy sit in the House of Representatives and target a group of American people for having a particular religious belief that labels them, in his eyes, terrorists, whilst it’s actually the Congressman in question, Peter King, who’s not only palled around with real terrorists, the IRA, he’s danced, sung and contributed to their cause.
Maybe Keith and Nate will be right. Maybe this will be our carpe diem moment, and maybe the Democrats genuinely are having an epiphany and remembering that they were, ever and always, the party for working people and not the intellectual idealogues who ponder what might be in a Utopian future over a skinny latte and some New World merlot, the sorts who, even know, are contemplating a great white Progressive hope who’ll primary the President, thereby insuring that Karl Rove’s vision of one-party Republican rule becomes a reality.
It’s important to remember that all roads now in the Republican party are leading to the Koch brothers, who not only had real Nazi relatives, they actually had real Nazi associations. It’s important to remember that the first thing that nice Adolf Hitler – the one who made the downtrodden and conquered German people feel good about themselves – did upon assuming office as Chancellor, was outlaw all the trades unions.
This is starving the beast that is the Democratic party, considering that a very large proportion of its major contributors are unions.
History repeating itself? Well, those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it, so they say. A culture war has been raging in the United States for the past thirty years, with the Republicans presenting themselves and their operatives as guardians of God and fetuses, whilst leaving the women and children to fester and fend for themselves. The wanton destruction of the unions will be the tinder which starts a conflagration.
And the issues at hand for the 2012 election won’t be the deficit or jobs or healthcare reform or Afghanistan, although they’ll be cleverly disguised as such. The main issue will be cultural. And the deciding factor will determine how we define America.
Caveat emporium.
Now I wake up this morning to find that, despite Rachel’s joyous declaration that the people of Wisconsin had won, that the shifty-eyed corporate tool, who happens to be the duly elected Governor of Wisconsin, had budged, the Governor’s party had, in fact, managed to rewrite the odious bill in question, in such a manner that it could be rammed through the legislature and in one fell swoop, a basic right of working people with a fifty-year pedigree had been consigned to the dustbins of history. Dead as a dod. Kaput. No refunds, no returns.
Let’s be brutally honest, people. This was never about fiscal responsibility. It was never about balancing a budget and job creation, two of the major subjects the Republican party whined and groaned about throughout the fall campaign of 2010, two of the major accusations of failure levied at their Democratic opponents.
It was all about, it was ever about busting union power, bringing those organisations formed by working people, of working people and for working people, to their proverbial knees. It was about quashing the little man. It was about keeping the peasants in their place.
We have it on record. Scott Walker said as much – in fact, he bragged about it – in his oleaginous twenty-minute telephone conversation with faux David Koch.
The demise of the union and the quelling of their remaining power is a major objective, not only of the Republican Party, but also of their corporate puppetmasters, primarily the shady woodwork-dwelling Kochroaches. It’s also worth mentioning that part and parcel of Walker’s landmark legislation colludes the sale of public utilities to private corporate entities, and we all know who’ll benefit from that. It’s so not rocket science, that even dummies understand it:-
As amusing as the dummies’ take on this situation may be, the bitter irony is, simply, that it is the people of Wisconsin, and – by extension – the working people and the working poor of our country, who end up being royally rogered up the backside by David Koch and his ilk, via any representative we elect from the Republican party.
I grew up in a union home, in the South. If that sounds like an anomaly today, there actually was a time, in what’s traditionally been known as the Upper South, where unions were visably present and part of everyday working life, and even if they weren’t as strident as they were in the Northern industrial parts of the country, they certainly improved upon the lives of their members and their members’ families.
My dad worked in a textile mill, a huge entity which provided employment for men and women in four predominantly rural counties on the cusp of that monster which grew to become known today as Northern Virginia. Most of the fathers of kids who went to my high school worked there. The mother of Joe Bageant, author of Deer-Hunting with Jesus and one of the most strident practical Progressive voices of the South, worked there.
In the era before clean air technology became a given, on certain days when the wind was right, you could smell the rotten-egg stench from the factory, certainly, where I lived and sometimes thirty miles south to the town where I attended high school. My dad brought it home on his clothes, and it saturated the interior of his car. But that union-backed stench provided him with fully comprehensive health insurance, which made it possible for me to get my teeth straightened. It paid the hospital bill for my younger cousin, whose appendix ruptured and who had to spend six weeks recovering at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. It paid for all my mother’s chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and it topped up my father’s Medicare until the day he died sixteen years ago.
That union-backed stench gave us a living wage, and when I was in college in the mid-Seventies, and the union called its workers out on strike for six weeks, I opened an envelope one day at college, to find a check from the AFL-CIO for the princely sum of $100, as help toward paying for my textbooks, as my dad had been on strike for an overly-long period.
Like the people being targeted inWisconsin, I began my professional life, after taking my degree, in the public sector as a teacher. Virginia, being one of those states who embraced Taft-Hartley and who fervently worshipped at the altar of “right-to-work”, had made it impossible for state employees to unionise. We had to make do with pithy “Education Associations”, professional organisations which were unions in name only, with no collective bargaining allowed. I recall the one time we pushed our weight and even threatened to strike, we were summarily told that, were we to do so, they had enough applications for employment on file, that they’d have the classrooms staffed within two days.
Keith Olbermann, blogging on his new website, FOKNews, reckons the Wisconsin governor and his cronies, by coming out of the thugs’ closet, have effectively signalled the incipient suicide of the Republican Party. Nate Silver reckons this action will do more than anything else to galvanise the base of the Democratic Party.
I wish I could be so hopeful, because we certainly are in need of some adhesive to bind the gaping wounds rent asunder by our own self-destructive tendencies.
Rachel’s all-too-preciptous cry of triumph two nights ago makes me think of the way everyone from the media to the grassroots declared themselves openly Leftist enough in November 2008 to predict that the Republican Party was dead in the water, only to find that by March the following year, the Right had taken a leaf from Saul Alinsky’s book and had organised themselves into a movement that was, at once, strident, vociferous and very ugly. It received its battlecry in the early morning rant of a CNBC business commentator and its backing from the omnipresent Koch machine. It’s field lieutenants were the willfully ignorant Vice Presidential candidate from the losing ticket and an ex-rodeo clown, who was also a recovering alcoholic. They fed their base on fear – fear of a seminal President, like no other we’d had before in our history. Their object was to demonise the Democrats and de-legitimise the first African-American President.
But it was never about race.
Forty years ago, in the wake of the VietNam fiasco, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the violent shambles of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Democratic party reformed itself, removing its base from the rural Midwest of agricultural cooperatives, Southern working poor, Rust Belt industrial workers, and unions. Didn’t you hear? Like the Don McLean song, the Democrats took the last train to the Coast (Left Coast or Northeastern) and developed attitude.
That attitude basically gave a shrug and a disdainful nod to the old base, turning its back on the old union organisers. The Midwestern farmers were rubes, the Southerners all racist and people like George Meany, many of whom barely had grade school academic credentials, didn’t fit into the cosmopolitan, city-centred, elitist mindset of the newly-minted Democrats. They would lead and the old base would follow. After all, what else were they going to do? Vote Republican?
Fast forward ten years to 1980, the year all this shitstorm we’re suffering now started in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan, and that’s exactly what they did. The unions endorsed Reagan and he busted their asses. The Reagan Democrats were formed, and the South and rural Midwest bled red. The Republicans communicated with these people on their level, in language they understood, and with operatives with whom these people were familiar. Like the seasoned conmen they became, they built trust. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the culture war battles began in earnest on the airwaves. With the advent of Karl Rove, heir apparent of that king ratfucker, Donald Segretti, the die was cast.
The aim was an unbroken hegemony of Republican rule, appealing to the basic instincts of their uneducated and undereducated base – play up religion, emphasize family values, and use every occasion to keep them scared and compliant. Walk into any remaining factory or warehouse in certain parts of the country today and you’ll see people at work, their minds being indoctrinated over loudspeakers by Rightwing talk radio stations, screaming Rush, Beck or Michael Savage. It’s mind control by osmosis.
And from 2009, we, ourselves, on the Left, became our own worst enemies. Lulled into a false sense of security and faux wealth since the Gipper’s regime, and fed on a diet of instant gratification, whilst nurturing a total ignorance about the way our government functions, instead of actually listening to the President, we chose to have various and sundry celebrity talking heads, so-called scions of the Left, corporately paid, analyse and interpret every word spoken or unspoken, every action completed or contemplated and every thought assumed by the President, not for the way we saw or heard ourselves, but the way they thought we should respond.
They told us so much they confused people who were already confused.
They endowed the President with so many powers of government that, had he chosen to use a fraction of those which they deemed he had, he’d have been successfully impeached. As much as the Right pushed the big lies of death panels, socialism, soft cell terrorism, and phony birth certificates, the Left heard their own tell them that Obama was weak, he was a pussy, he hated Progressives, he wasn’t enough like Bush, he was too much like Bush, he was a coward, he caved, he just wasn’t into the all-pervading Middle Class (which, somehow, seemed to have pushed the working class and working poor into some limbo located between irrelevance and non-existence). One progressive talking head went so far as to issue a clarion cry for all Progressives to boycott voting in the Midterms in order to teach the President a lesson. And the LGBT community was so convinced of the President’s concealed homophobia because he hadn’t whipped out an Executive Order repealing DADT (he couldn’t), that 30% of LGBTs who voted in the Midterms, voted Republican.
Well, that worked out nicely, didn’t it? Especially since, not two weeks ago, that selfsame talking head was screaming into the cameras that the President had better get his ass to Wisconsin and get on the picket lines or risk being a one-term President.
I’m wondering who voted for Scott Walker, because they were sold a bill of sale. Were they people who’d previously voted for the President in 2008 or who’d kept Russ Feingold in the Senate in previous years? Were they decent people who’d been scared shitless by the Tea Party’s virulent warnings about the plug being pulled on Grandma or the myth that the President was really a Manchurian candidate? Or was Walker elected as much by those so-called Progressive sulkers and pouters who stayed at home to make a point? Because as much as the people who voted for this dangerous dolt, the people who didn’t vote enabled him.
Now, like a cancer, we’re seeing this union busting legislatively spread across the Rust Belt and heartland of the industrial Midwest. We’re seeing a South Carolina governor employ an education advisor who’s openly stated that he hates the idea of public schools. We’re watching a redux of Joseph McCarthy sit in the House of Representatives and target a group of American people for having a particular religious belief that labels them, in his eyes, terrorists, whilst it’s actually the Congressman in question, Peter King, who’s not only palled around with real terrorists, the IRA, he’s danced, sung and contributed to their cause.
Maybe Keith and Nate will be right. Maybe this will be our carpe diem moment, and maybe the Democrats genuinely are having an epiphany and remembering that they were, ever and always, the party for working people and not the intellectual idealogues who ponder what might be in a Utopian future over a skinny latte and some New World merlot, the sorts who, even know, are contemplating a great white Progressive hope who’ll primary the President, thereby insuring that Karl Rove’s vision of one-party Republican rule becomes a reality.
It’s important to remember that all roads now in the Republican party are leading to the Koch brothers, who not only had real Nazi relatives, they actually had real Nazi associations. It’s important to remember that the first thing that nice Adolf Hitler – the one who made the downtrodden and conquered German people feel good about themselves – did upon assuming office as Chancellor, was outlaw all the trades unions.
This is starving the beast that is the Democratic party, considering that a very large proportion of its major contributors are unions.
History repeating itself? Well, those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it, so they say. A culture war has been raging in the United States for the past thirty years, with the Republicans presenting themselves and their operatives as guardians of God and fetuses, whilst leaving the women and children to fester and fend for themselves. The wanton destruction of the unions will be the tinder which starts a conflagration.
And the issues at hand for the 2012 election won’t be the deficit or jobs or healthcare reform or Afghanistan, although they’ll be cleverly disguised as such. The main issue will be cultural. And the deciding factor will determine how we define America.
Caveat emporium.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Arianna's Marie Antoinette Moment
Boy, do I love it when frauds are exposed. I love it when people are exposed as users of other people in order to gain their own prominence. There's nothing I like better than to see someone jump a shark out of sheer ambition, only to see the shark rear up and take a prime piece of well-deserved ass.
I have long known Arianna Huffington to be the abject phony and opportunist that she is. When I first heard of her, she was a raving Rightwing wannabe political commentator, trying desperately to gain a foothold in the British political media and failing. She'd just written a polemic, challenging Germaine Greer's feminist writings, which would have made Phyllis Schlafly look like Jane Fonda.
Then there was the plagiarism trial, which resulted in further besmirching her name as a dilettante and a political parvenue.
Fast forward to the Nineties when I'm home visiting my folks, only to see a huge article in the Washington Post's Sunday magazine, describing Arianna Huffington (I'd known of her as Stanisopoulos), dutiful Congressional wife, located in Washington and trying to organise weekly soirees resembling the intellectual and poltical salons of the French Empire, fancying herself and her European antecedents as a modern-day Madame de Stael.
The salon idea failed, but it hooked her up with Newt Gingrich, and together, they mounted a virulent campaign intent on impeaching one William Jefferson Clinton, with Arianna manning the online petition for Clinton's political demise.
Well, we all know how that worked out too, and we all know the success story that eventually became The Huffington Post. In one way or another, we were all sucked into the Huffington vortex, reckoning and believing it to be the Left's answer to Drudge.
I don't know if I were born cynical or if I acquired cynicism, having married a Brit and lived abroad for so long, but - suffice it to say - I never bought St Paul's Damascene conversion and I sure as hell didn't buy Arianna's abrupt Left turn from neocon to Progressive, literally overnight. And I knew I was proven right as soon as she started nit-picking and wantonly criticizing, not only the President, but also various high-profile members of his Administration, in particular, Tim Geithner, as she waged a war against the evils of Wall Street and the corporate take-over of America.
As Arianna always has a very vocal opinion about anything which she can use as a stick with which to beat the President, I cocked a suspicious eye at the fact that she chose to remain silent at the height of the Shirley Sherrod controversy - but then I knew Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of HuffPo and a protege of Arianna from donkey's years back.
I cocked an even more suspicious eye as she trolled the country, trolling the more gullible and less emotionally and politically mature sections of the Left, in the run up to the 2010 Mid-terms, driving a wedge deeper than the Grand Canyon in that particular demographic. The message the Greek Media Whoracle preached was simply that Obama didn't give a rat's ass about the middle class, that he'd hung them out to dry, and that - by the way - she had a reasonably priced book she'd written that would explain everything.
So, when she announced that she'd signed a pact with the corporate devil that is AOL and sold her little internet baby for the handsome sum of $315 million, I could just imagine that shark tasting feta cheese.
And now, I'm sure he's had a feast.
Her legion of unpaid bloggers took umbrage that she'd scored such a profit on their backs. It kinda smelled like slavery in the Old South - you know, when Massa would laugh all the way to the cotton bank with his profits whilst his slaves toiled wearily in the fields. But, hey, they should be grateful they were cared for, and so Arianna's dutiful bloggers - the hoi polloi, not the well-oiled and wealthy celebrity types - should be grateful she was affording them exposure.
She even despatched one of her paid lackeys, someone named Marco Ruiz, to the front line to explain why she wasn't about to share her good fortune with her unpaid minions, but how, as well, her good fortune benefitted all the little people, dahhhlinks, because these unfortunates got free exposure. Actually, Marco explained, it was rather like the same situation as when an author appeared on a television program promoting his latest book, or when an eminient authority appeared on such a program to expound upon a subject.
Except, it's not, because those authors and authorities get paid an appearance fee. Even her surrogate son, Bill Maher, pays his Real Time guests $2500 for just sitting at a table. That at least covers their First Class air fares from the East Coast.
The beleagured bloggers have even created a Facebook page, highlighting their concerns, entitled, "Hey Arianna, Can You Spare a Dime?" And Marco the cheerleader has been assigned a presence on that page to fight Arianna's corner. His latest attempt was to inform all the unfortunates how ungrateful they were, and how he'd forever be grateful for what Arianna had done for internet journalism and for hiimself.
"But, Marco," a commentator pointed out, "you are paid."
And now, it seems, various contributors have decided to take a leaf from Wisconsin's book and institute a strike against The Huffington Post, demanding collective bargaining rights. The spectre of various HuffPost bloggers manning a picket line en masse outside Huffington's swish Soho offices in New York, with Madame assuming the Scott Walker role is the stuff of legend - another little man standing up for his own interests against a rich corporation, which is, essentially, what Huffington's become.
Bill Lasarow, publisher and editor of Visual Art Source, which has contributed content for free to HuffPo for a year now, has announced that his organisation is going on strike against Huffington, with two demands, specifically:-
1) that Huffington develop a system whereby bloggers are paid for their efforts and
2) that Huffington differentiates between paid promotional content and writers' work.
They are also proposing that contributors band together to instigate a system of collective bargaining. While it's not illegal that bloggers are unpaid, Lasarow points out, it's unethical and just a wee bit hypocritical.
And so much for the sainted little people for whom Arianna had made herself a self-appointed spokesperson.
If nothing else, this proposed action has shown, indelibly, how far removed and how out-of-touch with ordinary people, the faux and fashionable Progressive intelligentsia has become. Immediately this idea was mooted and put into the public domain, one of Arianna's celebrity bloggers - you know, the ones who have substantial income from another source - jumped to her defense.
Robert Scheer, who blogs occasionally for HuffPo, but whose professional writing efforts are imbursed by Katrina vanden Heuvel's trust fund, AKA The Nation, readily assumed the role of Huffington Knight Errant, saying, “In defense of the use of unpaid bloggers, of which I happen to be one among the many who appear on a regular basis on the Huffington Post, we are not exploited.”
Oh, well ... that's all right then. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and Robert Scheer speaks for a multitude.
The op-eds, Scheer says dismissively, were never a source of serious income anyway. Maybe not for Mr Scheer, but the striking contributors say - and rightly so - for well-known contributors, who aren't concerned about reimbursements for their efforts, to take this sort of dismissive attitude is nothing short of disgraceful.
And, really, doesn't this sort of disdain smack of the Koch-infested Right? It certainly goes a long way in explaining why, at the beginning of last week, when the Wisconsin protests were reaching their heights, that the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post sought to write a lengthy account of hers and Bill Maher's exploits at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, making light of Kirk Douglas's aphasia, rather than lend moral support to those middle class strugglers in Wisconsin, whom she formerly purported to support. She would do well to remember Kirk Douglas, a lifelong liberal and Democrat, was the one man who broke the Hollywood McCarthyite blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo, a writer.
Instead, Madame weighed in on the potential strike situation, whilst at a conference in New York City last week, with these words, ridiculing these people: "Go ahead, go on strike! The idea of going on strike when no one really notices!"
Oh, really, Arianna? I guess you haven't been noticing the thousands of middle class people - you know, the ones you convinced the President disdained - camping out in freezing conditions to fight for their rights against a governor, who's increasingly become megalomaniacal.
With such an attitude, it's mete to ask how one says, "Let them eat cake" in Greek, the moral of this story being: Beware of Greeks causing rifts.
I have long known Arianna Huffington to be the abject phony and opportunist that she is. When I first heard of her, she was a raving Rightwing wannabe political commentator, trying desperately to gain a foothold in the British political media and failing. She'd just written a polemic, challenging Germaine Greer's feminist writings, which would have made Phyllis Schlafly look like Jane Fonda.
Then there was the plagiarism trial, which resulted in further besmirching her name as a dilettante and a political parvenue.
Fast forward to the Nineties when I'm home visiting my folks, only to see a huge article in the Washington Post's Sunday magazine, describing Arianna Huffington (I'd known of her as Stanisopoulos), dutiful Congressional wife, located in Washington and trying to organise weekly soirees resembling the intellectual and poltical salons of the French Empire, fancying herself and her European antecedents as a modern-day Madame de Stael.
The salon idea failed, but it hooked her up with Newt Gingrich, and together, they mounted a virulent campaign intent on impeaching one William Jefferson Clinton, with Arianna manning the online petition for Clinton's political demise.
Well, we all know how that worked out too, and we all know the success story that eventually became The Huffington Post. In one way or another, we were all sucked into the Huffington vortex, reckoning and believing it to be the Left's answer to Drudge.
I don't know if I were born cynical or if I acquired cynicism, having married a Brit and lived abroad for so long, but - suffice it to say - I never bought St Paul's Damascene conversion and I sure as hell didn't buy Arianna's abrupt Left turn from neocon to Progressive, literally overnight. And I knew I was proven right as soon as she started nit-picking and wantonly criticizing, not only the President, but also various high-profile members of his Administration, in particular, Tim Geithner, as she waged a war against the evils of Wall Street and the corporate take-over of America.
As Arianna always has a very vocal opinion about anything which she can use as a stick with which to beat the President, I cocked a suspicious eye at the fact that she chose to remain silent at the height of the Shirley Sherrod controversy - but then I knew Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of HuffPo and a protege of Arianna from donkey's years back.
I cocked an even more suspicious eye as she trolled the country, trolling the more gullible and less emotionally and politically mature sections of the Left, in the run up to the 2010 Mid-terms, driving a wedge deeper than the Grand Canyon in that particular demographic. The message the Greek Media Whoracle preached was simply that Obama didn't give a rat's ass about the middle class, that he'd hung them out to dry, and that - by the way - she had a reasonably priced book she'd written that would explain everything.
So, when she announced that she'd signed a pact with the corporate devil that is AOL and sold her little internet baby for the handsome sum of $315 million, I could just imagine that shark tasting feta cheese.
And now, I'm sure he's had a feast.
Her legion of unpaid bloggers took umbrage that she'd scored such a profit on their backs. It kinda smelled like slavery in the Old South - you know, when Massa would laugh all the way to the cotton bank with his profits whilst his slaves toiled wearily in the fields. But, hey, they should be grateful they were cared for, and so Arianna's dutiful bloggers - the hoi polloi, not the well-oiled and wealthy celebrity types - should be grateful she was affording them exposure.
She even despatched one of her paid lackeys, someone named Marco Ruiz, to the front line to explain why she wasn't about to share her good fortune with her unpaid minions, but how, as well, her good fortune benefitted all the little people, dahhhlinks, because these unfortunates got free exposure. Actually, Marco explained, it was rather like the same situation as when an author appeared on a television program promoting his latest book, or when an eminient authority appeared on such a program to expound upon a subject.
Except, it's not, because those authors and authorities get paid an appearance fee. Even her surrogate son, Bill Maher, pays his Real Time guests $2500 for just sitting at a table. That at least covers their First Class air fares from the East Coast.
The beleagured bloggers have even created a Facebook page, highlighting their concerns, entitled, "Hey Arianna, Can You Spare a Dime?" And Marco the cheerleader has been assigned a presence on that page to fight Arianna's corner. His latest attempt was to inform all the unfortunates how ungrateful they were, and how he'd forever be grateful for what Arianna had done for internet journalism and for hiimself.
"But, Marco," a commentator pointed out, "you are paid."
And now, it seems, various contributors have decided to take a leaf from Wisconsin's book and institute a strike against The Huffington Post, demanding collective bargaining rights. The spectre of various HuffPost bloggers manning a picket line en masse outside Huffington's swish Soho offices in New York, with Madame assuming the Scott Walker role is the stuff of legend - another little man standing up for his own interests against a rich corporation, which is, essentially, what Huffington's become.
Bill Lasarow, publisher and editor of Visual Art Source, which has contributed content for free to HuffPo for a year now, has announced that his organisation is going on strike against Huffington, with two demands, specifically:-
1) that Huffington develop a system whereby bloggers are paid for their efforts and
2) that Huffington differentiates between paid promotional content and writers' work.
They are also proposing that contributors band together to instigate a system of collective bargaining. While it's not illegal that bloggers are unpaid, Lasarow points out, it's unethical and just a wee bit hypocritical.
And so much for the sainted little people for whom Arianna had made herself a self-appointed spokesperson.
If nothing else, this proposed action has shown, indelibly, how far removed and how out-of-touch with ordinary people, the faux and fashionable Progressive intelligentsia has become. Immediately this idea was mooted and put into the public domain, one of Arianna's celebrity bloggers - you know, the ones who have substantial income from another source - jumped to her defense.
Robert Scheer, who blogs occasionally for HuffPo, but whose professional writing efforts are imbursed by Katrina vanden Heuvel's trust fund, AKA The Nation, readily assumed the role of Huffington Knight Errant, saying, “In defense of the use of unpaid bloggers, of which I happen to be one among the many who appear on a regular basis on the Huffington Post, we are not exploited.”
Oh, well ... that's all right then. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and Robert Scheer speaks for a multitude.
The op-eds, Scheer says dismissively, were never a source of serious income anyway. Maybe not for Mr Scheer, but the striking contributors say - and rightly so - for well-known contributors, who aren't concerned about reimbursements for their efforts, to take this sort of dismissive attitude is nothing short of disgraceful.
And, really, doesn't this sort of disdain smack of the Koch-infested Right? It certainly goes a long way in explaining why, at the beginning of last week, when the Wisconsin protests were reaching their heights, that the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post sought to write a lengthy account of hers and Bill Maher's exploits at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, making light of Kirk Douglas's aphasia, rather than lend moral support to those middle class strugglers in Wisconsin, whom she formerly purported to support. She would do well to remember Kirk Douglas, a lifelong liberal and Democrat, was the one man who broke the Hollywood McCarthyite blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo, a writer.
Instead, Madame weighed in on the potential strike situation, whilst at a conference in New York City last week, with these words, ridiculing these people: "Go ahead, go on strike! The idea of going on strike when no one really notices!"
Oh, really, Arianna? I guess you haven't been noticing the thousands of middle class people - you know, the ones you convinced the President disdained - camping out in freezing conditions to fight for their rights against a governor, who's increasingly become megalomaniacal.
With such an attitude, it's mete to ask how one says, "Let them eat cake" in Greek, the moral of this story being: Beware of Greeks causing rifts.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Mike Huckabee: The Craven Christian
Politics and religion don't mix. Really, they shouldn't mix. Actually, they're not meant to mix, especially in the United States, where our Constitution calls for a separation of Church and State.
Now, that doesn't mean that men of the cloth can't dabble in politics. We've had clergymen serve in Congress before, including two Catholic priests. But that doesn't mean political clergymen can bring their faith to the floor of Congress, and conversely, it shouldn't mean that professional clergymen should bring politics to the pulpit.
Religious politicos are no different to the usual corrupt variety in having feet of clay - after all, look at all the sexual shenanigans which occurred in that poor excuse of a "church" on C Street which doubles as a home for wayward Christian congressmen. However, I have to say, until this week, I'd actually thought Mike Huckabee above all that stuff.
Huckabee, to me, actually seemed an anomaly, because he looked and sounded like a nice Republican - a dying breed and a bit of an oxymoron these days, I know; but he did seem, politics apart, to be a genuinely nice man.
Being a genuinely nice man is no real qualifier. He is a Republican, an ordained clergyman who believes that religion and politics are indelibly intertwined, a social and fiscal conservative. He would never get my vote, but he impressed me simply because he wouldn't rise to the vicious and nasty bait others in his party doled out regarding demonisation of the Left.
But like everyone else in the GOP at the moment, it seems Huck's not immune from suffering from their particular and current brand of meanness which just amounts to nothing more than not-so-cleverly disguised racism.
Until recently, Huck's been one of a handful of Republicans whom I thought had balls enough to give the President credit from time to time. When the President made the unannounced visit to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet and salute the returning coffins of servicemen killed in Afghanistan, Huckabee praised this, saying he was proud, at that moment, that Obama was his President. He even made a soft-pedaled criticism of the current Republican mean girls, Palin and Bachmann, and Rush Limbaugh, in their persistent bitchery about the First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity. And I believe in his past as a clergyman, he's encouraged and even opened his own churches up in welcoming African Americans into his Southern Baptist congregations.
Currently, Huckabee's leading in most of the polls regarding potential GOP Presidential candidates for 2012. He's running ahead of Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich; and I guess life at the top of the poll got to him this week. The previous week saw him pasting political rival Romney regarding the prototypical healthcare package he initiated in Massachusetts, which eventually became Obamacare.
However, this week, Huckabee let his political ambitions belie the Christianity he wears on his sleeve, and he succumbed to the temptation of The Big Lie mentality, in order to firm his roots with the teabagging base of the Republican Party. In an interview on a conservative talk radio station, Huckabee sought to smear the President of the United States as rabidly anti-American and sought to explain this perceived "anti-Americanism" as a result of Obama's having been raised in Kenya, with his father and his grandfather, the latter imbuing him with a virulent strain of anti-colonialism acquired as a result of his having been incarcerated during the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s.
The interview was lengthy, in depth and repeated the meme of Obama's "Kenyan" upbringing, which was a base lie. Anyone who's read the President's autobiography Dreams of My Father, knows that Barack Obama Jr didn't meet his old man until he was ten years old. That was the first and last time. He actually didn't visit Kenya until he was a grown man.
A day later, Huckabee tried to walk back the lie as a misspoken irrelevance. He wasn't actually referring to Kenya, you see; he was referring to Indonesia (where the President did, indeed, spend a great deal of his childhood, living with his mother and stepfather). If that were the case, then why didn't Huckabee's interviewer attempt to correct him, rather than letting him vent about the President being anti-American as a result of his Kenyan uppringing?
Oh, it was to promote the lie that's currently found, if not on most Republicans' lips, then most certainly at the backs of their tiny minds. The President's not one of us. He's different. His name is foreign in a way ours have never been foreign before, and he certainly looks different.
The most extreme of the Republican base openly doubt the fact that the President is even American, maintaining the birthers' mantra that he was born in Kenya - something which if John Boehner and Eric Cantor won't correct amongst their voters, then Huckabee has always been at pains to disdain; but in his interview, the foremer Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister merely changed tack and altered the goalposts around the birther theory: Obama may have been born in the United States, but let's get the message out that he was raised in Kenya and absorbed anti-colonial opinions from his father and grandfather, which formed the basis of his political ideals which he hopes to foist on the United States.
As a well-known Republican sage might snark, that's kinda oxymoronic.
It's oxymoronic because, as Americans, we're all supposed to be anti-colonialists. That's why we revolted against the old country. We were second class colonials, and we wanted to be their equals. That's part of our American identity. I don't get it. Is Huckabee coming down on the side of the Brit in the Mau Mau Rebellion, because if it does, it says an awful lot about Mike Huckabee.
Yes, the rebellion was a reaction by native Kenyans against British rule, and it resulted in the British instituting concentration camps and torturing various rebels. Is Huckabee endorsing that sort of behaviour engendered by the white British rulers against their black indigneous subjects? If so, what does that say about Mike Huckabee?
Because, really, that's what this whole Kenyan thing is about - the whole Kenyan, birther, secret Muslim dynamic. It's simply a euphemism for the fact that the Republican base, and many of its elected officials, don't like the fact that the President is black.
In the 21st Century, it's all about race. The President is black. He's not like us. He has African roots, from the country of Kenya, his father was an atheist, he was given a Muslim name and his grandfather opposed a colonial authority. Therefore, he's a Manchurian candidate, dumped in the White House by the subversive Left in order to lead us all down the unrighteous path of socialism, communisim, fascism, whateverism happens to be worrying the Teabaggers on a particular day of a particular month at a particular time of day.
It's racism, and Huckabee, ordained man of God and gentle Christian pastor, is pushing a lie, in order to consolidate his pre-eminence as a viable Presidential candidate amongst the Republican base. This other man from Hope, Arkansas, is dispelling the man who offered us the audacity of hope solely because the colour of his skin is not the type they would hope to be seeing sitting in the White House, unless it were in a servile capacity.
Never mind the fact, as Joan Walsh recently pointed out, that the President was raised by a Caucasian mother from Kansas and his Caucasian, middle-class grandparents in Hawaii. As she reiterated, no one wants to speak of them. Why emphasize Obama's American roots at all, when his Kenyan heritage serves the ulterior purpose of delegitimising him so effectively?
Well, if the Kenyan heritage is all that matters for these people, perhaps they need to address these "Kenyans" who happen to be relatives of our President: Brad Pitt, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis.
If Obama's mother's heritage doesn't count, then that must mean that all of the above are Kenyans, surely, because they are lateral relations of the President, and in the case of Davis, the President is directly descended from him.
Pitt apart, knowing that the President claimed real kinship with any of the others would be a plus factor in the South and parts of the rural Midwest. It would make him a fully paid-up member of the club, eligible to be included as part of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a bubba.
Just imagine how that would play in the Red States.
And, maybe, if Mike Huckabee just scratched the surface enough, he'd find that he might be Kenyan too.
Now, that doesn't mean that men of the cloth can't dabble in politics. We've had clergymen serve in Congress before, including two Catholic priests. But that doesn't mean political clergymen can bring their faith to the floor of Congress, and conversely, it shouldn't mean that professional clergymen should bring politics to the pulpit.
Religious politicos are no different to the usual corrupt variety in having feet of clay - after all, look at all the sexual shenanigans which occurred in that poor excuse of a "church" on C Street which doubles as a home for wayward Christian congressmen. However, I have to say, until this week, I'd actually thought Mike Huckabee above all that stuff.
Huckabee, to me, actually seemed an anomaly, because he looked and sounded like a nice Republican - a dying breed and a bit of an oxymoron these days, I know; but he did seem, politics apart, to be a genuinely nice man.
Being a genuinely nice man is no real qualifier. He is a Republican, an ordained clergyman who believes that religion and politics are indelibly intertwined, a social and fiscal conservative. He would never get my vote, but he impressed me simply because he wouldn't rise to the vicious and nasty bait others in his party doled out regarding demonisation of the Left.
But like everyone else in the GOP at the moment, it seems Huck's not immune from suffering from their particular and current brand of meanness which just amounts to nothing more than not-so-cleverly disguised racism.
Until recently, Huck's been one of a handful of Republicans whom I thought had balls enough to give the President credit from time to time. When the President made the unannounced visit to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet and salute the returning coffins of servicemen killed in Afghanistan, Huckabee praised this, saying he was proud, at that moment, that Obama was his President. He even made a soft-pedaled criticism of the current Republican mean girls, Palin and Bachmann, and Rush Limbaugh, in their persistent bitchery about the First Lady's campaign against childhood obesity. And I believe in his past as a clergyman, he's encouraged and even opened his own churches up in welcoming African Americans into his Southern Baptist congregations.
Currently, Huckabee's leading in most of the polls regarding potential GOP Presidential candidates for 2012. He's running ahead of Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich; and I guess life at the top of the poll got to him this week. The previous week saw him pasting political rival Romney regarding the prototypical healthcare package he initiated in Massachusetts, which eventually became Obamacare.
However, this week, Huckabee let his political ambitions belie the Christianity he wears on his sleeve, and he succumbed to the temptation of The Big Lie mentality, in order to firm his roots with the teabagging base of the Republican Party. In an interview on a conservative talk radio station, Huckabee sought to smear the President of the United States as rabidly anti-American and sought to explain this perceived "anti-Americanism" as a result of Obama's having been raised in Kenya, with his father and his grandfather, the latter imbuing him with a virulent strain of anti-colonialism acquired as a result of his having been incarcerated during the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s.
The interview was lengthy, in depth and repeated the meme of Obama's "Kenyan" upbringing, which was a base lie. Anyone who's read the President's autobiography Dreams of My Father, knows that Barack Obama Jr didn't meet his old man until he was ten years old. That was the first and last time. He actually didn't visit Kenya until he was a grown man.
A day later, Huckabee tried to walk back the lie as a misspoken irrelevance. He wasn't actually referring to Kenya, you see; he was referring to Indonesia (where the President did, indeed, spend a great deal of his childhood, living with his mother and stepfather). If that were the case, then why didn't Huckabee's interviewer attempt to correct him, rather than letting him vent about the President being anti-American as a result of his Kenyan uppringing?
Oh, it was to promote the lie that's currently found, if not on most Republicans' lips, then most certainly at the backs of their tiny minds. The President's not one of us. He's different. His name is foreign in a way ours have never been foreign before, and he certainly looks different.
The most extreme of the Republican base openly doubt the fact that the President is even American, maintaining the birthers' mantra that he was born in Kenya - something which if John Boehner and Eric Cantor won't correct amongst their voters, then Huckabee has always been at pains to disdain; but in his interview, the foremer Arkansas governor and ordained Baptist minister merely changed tack and altered the goalposts around the birther theory: Obama may have been born in the United States, but let's get the message out that he was raised in Kenya and absorbed anti-colonial opinions from his father and grandfather, which formed the basis of his political ideals which he hopes to foist on the United States.
As a well-known Republican sage might snark, that's kinda oxymoronic.
It's oxymoronic because, as Americans, we're all supposed to be anti-colonialists. That's why we revolted against the old country. We were second class colonials, and we wanted to be their equals. That's part of our American identity. I don't get it. Is Huckabee coming down on the side of the Brit in the Mau Mau Rebellion, because if it does, it says an awful lot about Mike Huckabee.
Yes, the rebellion was a reaction by native Kenyans against British rule, and it resulted in the British instituting concentration camps and torturing various rebels. Is Huckabee endorsing that sort of behaviour engendered by the white British rulers against their black indigneous subjects? If so, what does that say about Mike Huckabee?
Because, really, that's what this whole Kenyan thing is about - the whole Kenyan, birther, secret Muslim dynamic. It's simply a euphemism for the fact that the Republican base, and many of its elected officials, don't like the fact that the President is black.
In the 21st Century, it's all about race. The President is black. He's not like us. He has African roots, from the country of Kenya, his father was an atheist, he was given a Muslim name and his grandfather opposed a colonial authority. Therefore, he's a Manchurian candidate, dumped in the White House by the subversive Left in order to lead us all down the unrighteous path of socialism, communisim, fascism, whateverism happens to be worrying the Teabaggers on a particular day of a particular month at a particular time of day.
It's racism, and Huckabee, ordained man of God and gentle Christian pastor, is pushing a lie, in order to consolidate his pre-eminence as a viable Presidential candidate amongst the Republican base. This other man from Hope, Arkansas, is dispelling the man who offered us the audacity of hope solely because the colour of his skin is not the type they would hope to be seeing sitting in the White House, unless it were in a servile capacity.
Never mind the fact, as Joan Walsh recently pointed out, that the President was raised by a Caucasian mother from Kansas and his Caucasian, middle-class grandparents in Hawaii. As she reiterated, no one wants to speak of them. Why emphasize Obama's American roots at all, when his Kenyan heritage serves the ulterior purpose of delegitimising him so effectively?
Well, if the Kenyan heritage is all that matters for these people, perhaps they need to address these "Kenyans" who happen to be relatives of our President: Brad Pitt, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis.
If Obama's mother's heritage doesn't count, then that must mean that all of the above are Kenyans, surely, because they are lateral relations of the President, and in the case of Davis, the President is directly descended from him.
Pitt apart, knowing that the President claimed real kinship with any of the others would be a plus factor in the South and parts of the rural Midwest. It would make him a fully paid-up member of the club, eligible to be included as part of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a bubba.
Just imagine how that would play in the Red States.
And, maybe, if Mike Huckabee just scratched the surface enough, he'd find that he might be Kenyan too.
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